okay, back from evo where i played like probably over 200+ games of infinite since i basically spent most of my free time on friday and sat. before pools playing it and the lines were practically nonexistent quite often to the point of where me and whoever else was on the station would sit there and just keep playing for like 20 minutes until someone wandered over
anyhow, longform dead tired impressions typed from a keyboard rather than a phone:
from what i can tell tags are freeform as hell in terms of when you can do them but not really flexible in terms of actual practical application of game states. it's extremely likely a day -60~ thing but even with folks who were also exploring the game there wasn't really a lot of creative usage of tags- it was just used to set up mixups or just throw projectiles out in a really linear fashion rather than having the nuance of assists not requiring commitment from the point char. combofiend was on the main winners stays setup for awhile on friday and even his play didn't really suggest anything otherwise.
like i said in my previous post (in the fg community thread), projectiles are really strong in terms of space control due to how shitty the movement is in the game- despite every char besides x (whose buster is pretty crazy recovery wise) having significantly slower projectile startup it's still really hard to actually navigate around them due to not having fine control of movement to punish shit- chars that outright don't have airdashes or air mobility of any sort seem to really struggle there, especially when you start adding in the reality stone shenanigans to zoning.
i really have to emphasize how shitty movement feels right now though- the folks who were saying that the story demo and the vs. demo felt different are definitely wrong b/c they're the exact same in all the basic gameplay departments. you still can't do real wavedashes b/c of the startup on acceleration, you still can't cancel forward dash into backdash and vice versa, you still can't zigzag airdash, air plinking is still this awkward slow mess and overall ground movement still feels like doing SF style dashes with a higher commitment and travel distance/lower control rather than marvel style low/no commitment and high speed/control due to fine execution.
every 8way character seems to have the same airdash except thor whose is faster. the speed on their airdashes is about the same as c.viper's in 3's- pretty slow comparatively but still smooth vs. the stiff sf-feeling dashes of ground movement. to note, thor's is about the same as dr. doom's speed but with a higher distance so he hauls ass.
there is an extremely high height restriction on air normals off 8way airdashes that makes it so you can't actually do real trijumps in the game- they're all reactable and fuzzy-guardable based on reaction so doin' shit like magneto actually just outright doesn't really exist. doing up/down high/lows instead of ADDF in the same vein as nova might work because i never tested it but you definitely can't do it off ADDF. it feels really bad to try and trijump, both as a mixup and for fast poking purposes as you have to commit so early to really do shit.
funny enough regular airdashes don't have this height requirement so chun li and zero get to do some real fucked up stuff w/ impunity by doing really low airdashes into buttons.
speaking of which, zero still has fuzzy guard j.L/LK that combos for some insane reason and it's extremely easy to set up with sogenmu, which is also even better in infinite than it was in 3 thanks to the different system. the inability to chickenblock, even midair (you can't block at all until about 50-60% of the way to the peak of a regular jump). he still has teleport buster which has no scaling and is near unblockable when he's doing teleport+normal strings with sogenmu on thanks to the additional delay from sogenmu.
to note on the scaling thing, it's actually a massive deal and one of the big things that is going to stratify tiering b/c any light normal including command normals that use light immediately scale your combo to shit to the point of where it's actually actively inefficient to burn more than 1 meter on them due to how little damage the supers do. i personally think it's outright better to just do a canned reset off them b/c you'll most likely kill off the reset depending on the type of hit you get from it once shit gets optimized.
however, if you hit someone with a heavy kick, special or super then that heavy scaling doesn't kick in and you outright do 60-70% with 1 super doing basic shit- see the thanos combo with all the palms that does like 80%. so the chars that have higher chances of hitting you with HP/HK as part of their regular gameplan will get way more out of that system than chars that don't.
my guess is that 8way airdashers and some more ridiculous regular airdashers/air mobility type chars are gonna be the main "playable" tier of the cast due to the overall package of system mechanics but that's just built from ultimately minuscule experience w/ the game so who knows. jumping is REALLY good because of the lack of anti-air space control and anti-airing is nearly impossible vs many chars, with airthrows not leading to shit besides a setup and raw launches/stand jabs just not having the hitboxes or active frames to beat the real good air buttons from them, especially thanks to the autocorrecting aspect.
keepaway as an actual gameplan outright does not exist anymore btw, the meter building mechanics, miniscule chip damage (it looks like 5-10% pre-pushblock) and projectile reflecting mechanics make actively killing someone with runaway not viable. it's really hard for folks to get in on day -60 so they get clipped a lot trying to attack but if you just sit still and be patient like when you're doom fighting from 2nd/3rd in mvc3 you're never really at any risk from the projectiles themselves. the biggest scare factor is the tagged in char doing some form of mixup while you're locked down, which isn't really keepaway at that point. there's a vid of morrigan just going ham with time stone and astral and probably one of zero in sogenmu doing something similar but those things aren't really threatening in the slightest due to just how little fbs do chipwise and how you can negate so many of them with projectile reflect (which is easy to do). zero's is probably the more threatening one in this case because reflecting them into him once he teleports over is vaguely random and if you don't do that and he starts doing sogenmu normal+teleport strings w/ a giant string of fireballs behind him it becomes visually incoherent.
another random visually incoherent clone thing is that morrigan's astral clone is nearly impossible to discern from her main point, with really faint sparkles showing which one is which. in split second scenarios where she throws a FB, then dashes in with jHP and the FB hits crossup/noncrossup shortly after she lands because it's impossible to see which one is the actual morrigan as your char doesn't turn before the FB hits
anyways, graphically it's the same as the story demo. it's just the stages that aren't drab gray have significantly better lighting and color direction which then makes chars stick out more. nobody's face got updated nor did any effects or anything like that. the game still looks like ass but it's really easy to ignore on a showroom floor when you're trying to beat live opponents. when you pick xgard highway then you could see that there's no real significant difference from the story demo and the vs. demo.
as a final note my initial impression of infinite was negative and the negative impressions that i had originally thought of are all still real valid concerns from the vs. demo. the game really does not give off the same vibe as being 'marvel' in the slightest due to many basic system mechanic changes leading to massive differences in how the game is played. that said, what is actually there definitely grew on me as i played, but it's really hard for me to tell whether that's because i was just beating folks up in a new game or if the game was actually satisfying to play at a base mechanical level. i already know i can't pick characters that don't have 8way in this game because of how the ground movement feels so there's that much at least.
also iron man's face is fucking horrifying to look at and i really wish they just used his mvc3 winpose
there's probably more i'm forgetting but i've been awake for way too long thanks to waking up for marvel finals while also playing until 4am and not sleeping since then
