When you thought the past 2 EA UFC series couldn't make the mma gaming experience any more frustrating & soul crushing, EA UFC 3 comes into play to prove you wrong...
Let me tell you, I've been playing EA UFC 1 & EA UFC 2, been one of the top players in the past 2 EA UFC titles, playing at DIV 8 with ease and no fear of getting demoted to a lower rank or losing a fight due to lack of knowledge for the game's mechanics. My W/L ratio on those games, was pretty consistent of around 20 wins for every loss. So this opinion is coming from a player comfortable with the series and no issue understanding their core mechanics. The same person also hasn't played more than 10 ranked fights in EA UFC 3, due to a fundamental issue i am about to present here:
Yeah, the past games have frustrated me, when I come up against avoidable problems that the devs/publishers didn't think were worth taking care of, such as laggy unplayable RANKED multiplayer games, horrible to navigate & time-consuming menu design, lack of content both in game modes and in-game gameplay mechanics/animations and straight up broken/unbalanced mechanics that are not fun for anyone to experience, whose sole purpose of existance is for a handful of toxic players with masochistic mental issues, to abuse em and exclusively overuse them, to get pleasure out of knowingly frustrating their opponents in an attempt to transfer their "my life sucks" mentality for a brief momment into the players that are exposed and forced onto them through the matchmaking system in place (I am looking at you Mr "Werdum 50 clinches per minute" spammers of EA UFC 2)
All of those issues aside, one issue that those games had and EA UFC 3 still shares, only at a much greater scale due to it's newly/unnescessary added complexity, is that the game's mechanics are not properly explained.
While the other games had a bunch of under-the-hood mechanics, they were relatively easy to understand and followed a logic (such as the grappling momentum mechanics or faster combos based on the side the strike came out of) and the more you played the game, even if you lost due to some unknown tactic that you weren't aware of it's existance, you still got to learn it as time went on and you felt as if you were honing your skills.
I feel strongly about this not being the case with EA UFC 3's under the hood mechanics.The more I play this game, the more I feel I don't understand why certain things are happening. Usually you can find an explanation if you search at the depths of the internet and go through a huge list of patches' changelogs etc. but for the majority of the time while playing EA UFC 3, I can't seem to figure out a huge chunk of both the stand-up's and the new ground game's under the hood mechanics.
Due to the game's poor design, the game is riddled with issues of frustration such as that, where you don't feel as if you are learning the more you go on playing and introducing new tactics to your arsenal gets overshadowed by other's knowledge of certain under-the-hood mechanics... You don't feel as if you got outplayed, but rather lost due to your opponent's knowledge of some mechanic, that they were using the whole fight and you just stood there, being 100% ineffective at any strategy you attempt, because that 1 mechanic, was causing your strike inputs to drop/miss/come out slower and your defense not to register...
So due to the game's complex design, with no apparent logic behind most of it's hidden mechanics, there can only be 2 solutions to this problem.
1. Scrap the whole game and remake it from the beginning, with no artificial restricting elements this time around, to balance certain playstyles.
Or
2. Add an advanced Replay System, that allows people to save fights and study with various replay tools, that showcase/teach you those invisible things that are part of the game, such as what inputs each player has at any given time, explanations of why some inputs got dropped/ignored/ explanations of why a strike came out faster/stronger and overshadowed another/ explanations of why a transition is faster etc.
The end.
Let me tell you, I've been playing EA UFC 1 & EA UFC 2, been one of the top players in the past 2 EA UFC titles, playing at DIV 8 with ease and no fear of getting demoted to a lower rank or losing a fight due to lack of knowledge for the game's mechanics. My W/L ratio on those games, was pretty consistent of around 20 wins for every loss. So this opinion is coming from a player comfortable with the series and no issue understanding their core mechanics. The same person also hasn't played more than 10 ranked fights in EA UFC 3, due to a fundamental issue i am about to present here:
Yeah, the past games have frustrated me, when I come up against avoidable problems that the devs/publishers didn't think were worth taking care of, such as laggy unplayable RANKED multiplayer games, horrible to navigate & time-consuming menu design, lack of content both in game modes and in-game gameplay mechanics/animations and straight up broken/unbalanced mechanics that are not fun for anyone to experience, whose sole purpose of existance is for a handful of toxic players with masochistic mental issues, to abuse em and exclusively overuse them, to get pleasure out of knowingly frustrating their opponents in an attempt to transfer their "my life sucks" mentality for a brief momment into the players that are exposed and forced onto them through the matchmaking system in place (I am looking at you Mr "Werdum 50 clinches per minute" spammers of EA UFC 2)
All of those issues aside, one issue that those games had and EA UFC 3 still shares, only at a much greater scale due to it's newly/unnescessary added complexity, is that the game's mechanics are not properly explained.
While the other games had a bunch of under-the-hood mechanics, they were relatively easy to understand and followed a logic (such as the grappling momentum mechanics or faster combos based on the side the strike came out of) and the more you played the game, even if you lost due to some unknown tactic that you weren't aware of it's existance, you still got to learn it as time went on and you felt as if you were honing your skills.
I feel strongly about this not being the case with EA UFC 3's under the hood mechanics.The more I play this game, the more I feel I don't understand why certain things are happening. Usually you can find an explanation if you search at the depths of the internet and go through a huge list of patches' changelogs etc. but for the majority of the time while playing EA UFC 3, I can't seem to figure out a huge chunk of both the stand-up's and the new ground game's under the hood mechanics.
Due to the game's poor design, the game is riddled with issues of frustration such as that, where you don't feel as if you are learning the more you go on playing and introducing new tactics to your arsenal gets overshadowed by other's knowledge of certain under-the-hood mechanics... You don't feel as if you got outplayed, but rather lost due to your opponent's knowledge of some mechanic, that they were using the whole fight and you just stood there, being 100% ineffective at any strategy you attempt, because that 1 mechanic, was causing your strike inputs to drop/miss/come out slower and your defense not to register...
So due to the game's complex design, with no apparent logic behind most of it's hidden mechanics, there can only be 2 solutions to this problem.
1. Scrap the whole game and remake it from the beginning, with no artificial restricting elements this time around, to balance certain playstyles.
Or
2. Add an advanced Replay System, that allows people to save fights and study with various replay tools, that showcase/teach you those invisible things that are part of the game, such as what inputs each player has at any given time, explanations of why some inputs got dropped/ignored/ explanations of why a strike came out faster/stronger and overshadowed another/ explanations of why a transition is faster etc.
The end.
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