MutliVersus game director Tony Huyn has made it a habit to tease or openly announce future changes to the game through social media. This practice has frankly established a strong bond between the development team and the community over the past few months since the game's launch. However, recent tweet left the community confused. Some seemed overjoyed! Others are very worried.
This change is a hard cap on the number of times you can use the same move in a combo, an attempt to limit the "infinite". We're talking about combos that can theoretically go on indefinitely unless the opponent dodges the hits or the attacking player makes an input error. While there is currently an infinity guard system that greatly reduces damage from repeated moves in the same combo, a hard combo limiter will dramatically impact the ability to perform long attacks.
So first, who will this impact the most? Well, some characters have long had long combos that involve repeated moves - yes, even endless ones. Harley Quinn and Superman are the most common characters, capable of comboing players from spawns to ridiculously high percentages and even outright kills.
Strictly limiting the number of attacks they can perform in a single combo will deprive them of one of the most powerful tools in the hands of experienced players. While in 2 vs 2 it won't have much of an impact, in 1 vs 1 it will greatly affect the overall strength of those characters.
Some, the ones we can assume fell victim to these combos, are happy. One Twitter user HiddenHypno wrote in response: "Finally fixed the spam lol about time," while Reddit user Thaiuz thought it was an exciting mix for the meta: "This could be a good thing, this will definitely shake up the tier lists."
However, others, including myself, think this is a terrible idea. It's worth noting that the combo posted on Twitter that triggered Tony's tweet was avoidable thanks to a mechanic called Directional Influence (or better known as DI). Basically, if you get hit by a combo, moving the movement stick allows you to fall in that direction, allowing you to essentially fall out of the combo. Getting caught in a Harley Quinn or Morty combo is more of a failed knowledge check than an inevitable 10-second hit.
“If we're stuck with 3-5 hit combos, then to me it's just not a game worth playing,” states DudleyGrim on the MultiVersus Reddit. They continue to express their dissatisfaction with the past series of tediousness, which took away many of the powerful hits in the game. “The constant bores make this game completely uninteresting for me. It's gotten to the point where I no longer see the point in playing, every character I pick up gets gutted and is no longer fun to play. Hell, they still haven't even fixed Shaggy's downhill, making it a pretty useless button. Aryas' top ringout combo is 50/50 on whether it will work. In just a few short months, the developers had completely gutted everything I loved about the game."
Ultimately, it looks like this is a change that will at first glance solve the problem of endless combos and gaudy line repetitions, but may depower some characters. Hopefully the Player First Games team will take the time to finalize this change behind the scenes before it goes live, before some characters take a huge hit.
