After experiencing the Closed Beta Test this weekend, some faults were just too glaring to ignore, but there was some light at the end of the tunnel

This weekend saw many players get their first hands-on experience with Arc System Works upcoming Guilty Gear Strive via the first official Closed Beta Test on PlayStation 4. I myself was included in these many players, and tried to get as many matches as possible in while the servers were still up to get as much experience with the game as I could in order to report on my experiences here on EventHubs.

There'll be several pieces discussing my thoughts on the current state of Guilty Gear Strive and how the beta test felt, but I wanted to get the most important one out of the way first — this piece will be talking about the game's lobby system. And the reason why this is so important is because it was an unmitigated catastrophe in so many ways that I feel like I just have to talk about it. As the headline suggests, I think there was one idea that was actually very good in the current lobby system. Unfortunately, it was surrounded by about 20 bad ones.

The Good I have a lot of negative things to say about the lobby system, so let's start off with the positives. There's one idea put in with this lobby system which I actually think is fantastic and hope that they maintain in whatever form the main game's lobby system ends up being. When you pick your lobbies, you first get to pick your region from a set few alternatives, mostly divided up by parts of continents so you can find people in your same general area, which is pretty standard fare for any fighting game. Once you've done that, though, you're introduced to a series of floors from 1 to 10 in which players can gather, and these are meant to represent your skill level. This in itself isn't particularly impressive, but the way they've gone about letting you pick your floors is actually a great idea. See, the lower a floor is, the more beginner-friendly it's meant to be. And the more you win, the more the game will push you upwards to higher floors, eventually barring you from entering the lower ones, meaning they'll be something of a safe space for beginners to try and practice without risking steamrolling by experienced pros. This may sound like a bad thing at first since it could make it so that friends can't find each other in lobbies, but that's not the case at all — because lower ranked players are allowed to go to higher ranked floors if they wish to do so. You'll get a brief warning telling you that the floor is probably beyond your skill level and it'd be good for you to stay out, but you're still allowed to go in. In other words, if you get a new account because of a broken PlayStation 4 or a PC version (not officially announced yet but given Arc System Works' track record, highly likely) you won't have to arbitrarily beat weaker players to go to the higher floors. At the same time, new players can stay at lower floors and learn at their own pace. Granted, this is all just for lobby systems. Presumably, the game will have a ranked match function and regular player matches as well, but having something like this in place for lobbies is a great step for letting players try to adapt at their own pace. If you want to fight the best right off the bat, you can, but if you want to make sure you can learn at a steady pace against players at your own level, you can do that too. This system made me think "Hey, that's pretty clever" and I instantly warmed up to the idea. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there...

The Bad When it comes to the bad aspects of Guilty Gear Strive's lobby, it's hard to even know where to begin. One of the most glaring faults is that you challenge your opponents by drawing your weapon and approaching them, but it's all in a 2D space and people get bunched up on each other, meaning that challenging opponents is difficult, lags down the system because they don't know who you're challenging, and getting the person you actually want is more luck than anything unless you pre-plan exactly where to stand and hide from the other players so you can time your challenges with each other. On top of this, even if you select the region and floor you know your friend is waiting in, there's no guarantee at all you'll actually end up in the same one, since there are an unknown number of different lobbies and it'll just send you to one at random, so arranging meetups between players is even more luck-based than starting the actual matches. As if that isn't enough, there are popups all the time from player avatars saying messages — some entirely automated, so they pop up from your character even if you didn't ask for it — and these block player names so it becomes even more difficult to search for who you're looking for. There's a menu you can access which lists all the players in the room and shows where they are, but having to go here to even try to find someone is not a good look to start with. Even when you managed to luck out in each of these areas, matches would rarely start at all and the most common occurrence was simply being told "Failed to match with opponent" after waiting for sometimes a few seconds, sometimes over a minute. This part I'm not as judgmental about since this is the point of a beta test — making sure that they can handle how to make the network matches work — but the way to even get to this stage is deeply flawed by design already. On top of this, after a few matches you'll be forced out of the room for the NPC avatars to tell you that your grade has been increased or decreased because of your win-loss record and recommending a new room for you (which means forcing you into said new room, by the way) and now you're back to the arduous task of desperately hoping you'll be able to enter the same room as your friends instead of, as one of my buddies put it, having been banished to the Shadow Realm. Given that Arc System Works pioneered the best lobby system we've seen in fighting games in the past in a 3D space with arcade machines where people can match up against each other, none of this Strive system makes any sense at all and it's honestly shocking to see not just how poorly implemented it is, but how incredibly bad it is even at the concept level. The Closed Beta Test for Guilty Gear Strive was heavily marred not just for myself but for basically everyone I spoke to by having to constantly try and fight the nonsensical system to maybe get a match once in a blue moon. Again, matchmaking and network issues is something I expect from a beta test since it's there to make sure developers can gather all information they need to make sure it'll be smooth by the actual launch, so having some laggy matches and disconnects was something I expected going in. What I did not expect and can only implore Arc System Works to rework from the ground up into something completely different is this nightmare of a lobby system which only served to make their in reality highly polished and beautiful product look like an underdeveloped and incompetently designed mess.

The Ugly Some people may see this as a nitpick, but I think it's a gigantic flaw — especially if you're trying to get new players interested in your game. What I'm referring to is the aesthetics of the lobby itself. It's not that the pixel art used for the lobbies is necessarily ugly, but it fits into an aesthetic that has absolutely nothing to do with Guilty Gear. Even the clothes and items you can attach to your avatar seem deeply divorced from the stylish and flashy source material we all know the series for. You aren't using avatars of in-game characters, and the graphics in the lobbies aren't throwbacks to a retro era of Guilty Gear since it never looked anything like this. It's just wildly out of place and for apparently no reason, being completely out of left field when compared to the actual game itself. Arc System Works have made an incredibly beautiful game from a graphical standpoint and while we wouldn't expect the lobbies to be rendered in the same engine or anything crazy like that, it's a massive culture clash when you have a lobby that looks ripped straight from one of the hundreds of games that are part of the latest indie showcase on Steam. The visuals just aren't remotely Guilty Gear and do not fit at all with the beautiful aesthetics the gameplay offers. It's probably the most strange and unfitting mashup of conflicting styles I've ever seen in a fighting game.

In the end, as harsh as it may sound, I honestly think the entire lobby system they have right now just needs to be scrapped wholesale. It's poor in concept and even poorer in execution which makes it a very bad look for the game, especially when this was the first real taste most players (including many who had never played Guilty Gear before) got of it.

It's not just that the lobby system is bad (and it is), but it's that Arc System Works have made by far the best lobbies in the genre for their last few titles which makes it such an unfathomably massive downgrade from the standard we've come to expect from them.

It should tell the whole story that tons of people, myself included, believed the lobby system reveal to be an April Fools' joke, and were shocked to see it still being shown by Arc System Works on April 2nd and beyond.

Given the extraordinarily negative feedback they've received about it, I really hope they listen and have it in their budget and man hours to make something entirely different than what's there now. How this even made it past the concept phase baffles me, and the response we've seen online these last few days shows that I'm clearly not alone.

We will be posting articles focusing on gameplay impressions and other things we learned from the Closed Beta Test in the near future, so please look forward to more Guilty Gear Strive coverage (which will be nowhere near as negative as this piece, I promise you) coming up.