Episode 498 - Cado Was Wrong About MultiVersus, Apparently

Special guest Trone L. Dowd from the Vice News team joins the Waypoint crew today to talk about balancing news writing with games writing, wrestling, and the games he’s been playing! As of this recording Cado is still out, which means the crew is gonna take a chance to totally blow up their opinion of a game (MultiVersus)  without letting them defend themselves! But that’s ok, because they have control of the podcast description and can say that maybe they had come off a little bit strong in their original assessment but hey, at least Ren admits that Cado’s read of the floaty nature of the game is sound! (Thanks Ren!). Back in the non-Cado land, Trone talks about Diablo Immortal’s monetization in relation to the industry’s ability to self regulate, Ren checks in with Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and Patrick is back to his Neon White grind.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://shows.acast.com/vicegamingsnewpodcast/episodes/episode-498-cado-was-wrong-about-multiversus
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Ren’s critique of free to play mechanics (and battlepasses, etc…) is spot on and really good to hear on the podcasts. As She said: these are ploys to train your brain to accept gambling mechanics, and normalize the idea of paying for things, or participating in gambling schemes. If more of our regulators were drawn from video game playing generations they’d have no trouble calling this stuff what it is.

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Meanwhile there’s still no game out there like Melee. Neither Nick All Star Brawl nor Multiversus seem to be trying to capture the precision and speed of Melee. They’re both in the Smash Ultimate lineage of platform fighters. It’s really a shame and missed opportunity.

I watched some competitive Nick All-Stars when it came out and it did seem to be reaching for Melee imo. At a high level the movement is based on wavedashing and the combo strings are similarly long. APM is certainly higher than Ultimate and I thought Melee. Shows in some of the stage designs, too.

I’m not a competitive Melee player, so I can’t speak to how similar the feel is, but conceptually it definitely seemed like they were shooting for Melee much more than Ultimate.

I agree that Nick is closer to Melee than Multiversus is. It’s hard to say if a game like Melee would even be appealing in the current landscape. It is unfortunate that Nick seems to have dropped off the face of the planet in terms of player counts.