Performance, Polish and Compatibility#895

Dear developers,

I have been a Rivals 2 player from day one, I am a game developer myself, and I host a small local tournament in my hometown. After more than a year, I would now like to give you some concrete feedback and ask questions about the game’s mid-term future.

Up front: with Rivals 2, you have created an outstanding platform fighting game—one that I will likely defend to the very end and for whose competitive scene I will always proselytize. I also want to deliberately leave content out of my criticism. I am convinced that the game would benefit greatly from an extensive single-player mode, casual options, and so on. Nevertheless, I would gladly forgo all of that and more if it meant bringing the game into a more presentable state. As things stand, I lose potential players every single week who, after a poor first impression, immediately return to Smash Bros. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Performance and compatibility:
For cost reasons, we rely on affordable hardware such as the Steam Deck to run our weekly events. But at the latest since your major controller overhaul—and subjectively even before that, with almost every second update—there have been more problems than before, or existing problems are replaced by new ones. At our last weekly, two people spent 30 minutes trying to get a new controller to work—without success. During that time, the setup was obviously unavailable. We no longer play doubles at all, because every single time it becomes a dreadful ordeal to get four controllers running simultaneously, and even when it does work, performance on the Steam Deck leaves much to be desired.

2. Polish:
Outside the arena, the game is in a poor state. With every popup that appears, I once again hope that the focus remains stable and that I don’t suddenly end up navigating menus in a blurred background. From time to time, the audio also likes to fail, or phantom input is detected and renders the current menu so unusable that a restart becomes necessary.

I’ll be completely honest: this is how you lose players. Not me, and not all the others posting on your Nolt board here—but those who would enjoy Rivals 2, yet are put off by a bad first impression.

Not least because you have demonstrated excellent community communication in the past, I would ask you to be a bit more transparent at this point: when can we expect things to improve? When will annoying interruptions due to “technical difficulties” at large and small tournaments become a thing of the past? Do we have to wait for a Switch release first? I know that, in the end, everything comes down to budget. But to be honest: I would rather give up an entire year of DLC fighters and instead see the technical issues resolved.

I hope your journey will be a successful one.

I second this. While I’d love to see continued content expansion and the roster grow, I would give all of it up to see Rivals 2 made to run consistently on low-mid end hardware with little to no technical issues.

I love this game so much and I will continue to sing its praises. But even as someone who has put hundreds of hours into this gsme, this stuff is really getting to me.

I don’t think the game can see a healthy console release in the next couple years without major functional fixes to its structure, and i fear that trying to do so would damn this game to slowly rot into obsucurity if people get put-off by a poor first-impression. Not to mention that releasing on consoles significantly expands the amount of work it takes to release any patch- let alone major overhauls.

I don’t want this to turn into an excuse to shit on the game or its devs. I just hope that the devs are able to weigh their options and choose to priotitize making this game into one that can be enjoyed by tons of people for a long time.

I second everything in this post.

Stability and performance has already turned a few of my friends away who want to “wait til the game is done”. Not really sure if they intend to come back at this point, but there is definitely a matter of bad first impressions from things as basic as UI issues that needs to be addressed.