MutliVersus Game Director Tony Huynh has made a habit of teasing or directly announcing future changes to the game via social media, and frankly, in the past few months since launch, the practice has created a strong bond between the development team and the community . However, recent tweets Throwing the community into an upward spiral. Some, seem overjoyed! Others, very worried.
This change is a hard limit to the number of times you can use the same action in a combo to suppress “infinity”. These refer to combinations that can – in theory – go on forever, unless the opposing player falls from the blow or the attacking player suffers a mistyping moment. While the current anti-infinite system is in place, which greatly reduces the damage of repeated moves in the same combo, the hard combo breaker greatly affects the ability to execute extended attack strings.
So, first of all, who does this affect the most? Well, some characters have been using lengthy combinations of repetitive actions – yes, even infinite – for a while now. Harley Quinn and Superman are the most popular, capable of taking players from respawns to ridiculously high percentages, or even outright kills.
Strictly limiting the number of attacks they can make in a single combo will make one of their most powerful tools disappear in the hands of skilled players. While this won’t make much of a difference in 2v2 mode, in 1v1 matches, it can greatly affect the overall strength of these characters.
Some, we can assume, have fallen victim to these combinations, happy. One Twitter user, HiddenHypno, responded by saying “Finally fixed the spam, lol”, while Reddit user Thaiuz thought it was an exciting mix of metadata: “It’s probably good, it’s definitely affecting the rating list.”
However, others, myself included, thought it was a bad idea. It’s worth noting that the combination of tweets that sparked Tony’s tweet was escaped thanks to a mechanism called Directed Influence (or DI as it’s better known). Basically, if you’re hit by a combo, moving the move bar will drop you in that direction, taking you out of the combo basically. Getting caught in a Harley Quinn or Morty combo is a failed lore check, not an inevitable 10-second beat.
“If we’re going to get stuck with a 3-5 combo, then it’s not worth playing for me,” DudleyGrim said on MultiVersus Reddit. They continue to express their disappointment with the past series of nerfs that have removed much of the impact of many of the game’s strong choices. “The constant nerfs made this game totally unfun to me. To the point where I couldn’t see the point of playing and every character I picked was ruined and it didn’t feel good to play. Man, they even Didn’t fix Shaggy’s dip, making it a worthless button. Aryas top ring combo is 50/50 will it work. In just a few months, the devs completely destroyed me in this game everything you enjoy.”
Ultimately, it feels as though this is a change that will ostensibly solve the problem of infinite combinations and tedious repetition in strings, but may undercut some characters. Hopefully the team at Player First Games will spend time tweaking it behind the scenes before it goes live, before some characters take a huge hit.
For more MultiVersus content, check out our report on the recent MultiVersus data-mining that suggested Mark Hamill’s Joker could be in the game, and MultiVersus patch 1.03, which makes it take twice as long for your character to level up.