mr jones said:
No.
We're at an age of console fighters where you can no longer say "I just need fine tuning/balancing of the characters, and we're all good." That won't work for a 60 dollar game. It needs to have a single player component that gives you reason to play when you don't happen to have other folks around to play. As much as the US version of Soul Calibur III was inbalanced, it DID have one of the most entertaining single player modes of any SC game. Even better than the DC Soul Calibur, that almost made me stop playing every time I had to go into one of those damn mazes. Its amazing that Mortal Kombat Deception (which just edges out over Tekken Tag Tournament) still has a more entertaining single player mode than fighters in 2009.
Additionally, character balance are just tweaks, now. You could download an update that would balance out characters. It would be much harder to add minigames, or a quest mode, than it would to make a character more or less powerful.
I'd say instead we're at an age of console fighters, where the game can be about the fighting itself, and not a bunch of trimming and side dishes. Those things are ok, but not if they get in the way of the core product (they didn't in SC4, they did in SF4)
If you don't have people around to play, it's called online play.
Really, there are two audiences for fighters, the quasi-RPG crowd who doesn't care about whether the game is good MP or not, and the hardcore crowd which doesn't care at all about the SP side.
The way to solve this is to work on the core game first, then add the stuffings and trimmings for the RPG crowd, in a way that doesn't ruin it for the hardcores. To unlock everything in-game that should show in a match, make sure a person can do it by just playing online. SC4 did this right by tying it to acheivements, and making it where it took 30 acheivements to get everything, and 30 acheivements could be acheived either by never going online, or by never playing the SP content.
