You'll have to forgive me if there's already a duplicate topic somewhere, but I didn't see one. You'll also have to forgive me if I think replacing the highly-detailed sprites of KOF XIII with these ugly-ass polygons that look like they came out of an early PS3 game is the wrong choice. Obviously not final product, obviously based on a handful of screenshots and this teaser trailer but man. I didn't really need to see Kyo Kusanagi looking like he fell out of a bad Tekken knockoff.

Well, I've still got KoF13, so it's all good.

FUCK. KOF sprites were some of the fucking best. This sucks.

They should have just stolen GGXrd's "2D that's actually 3D" tech.

Ya got me once with Maximum Impact. Never again.

Ok, good, a thread for my outrage! Nobody said really said anything about this in the TGS thread.

Yeah, it's just a teaser, still in development, blah blah blah, but compare this to how impressive the reveals of stuff like Xrd, SFV etc were...

This hurts me! It looks bad from a technical standpoint, but I think I'm most bummed out by how little of KOF's soul it actually seems to have. KOFXIII was just dripping with styyyyyyle and this looks so, so lifeless. That's barely even identifiable as Kyo, it just looks like some KOEI promotional render borrowed his jacket.

I'm going to try and be optimistic, but maaaan.

You really underscored the ugliness of the ugliness of the polygons... I was disgusted by the clip when I watched the TGS stream. So so so so god damn ugly.

Is this cheaper than sprites or something like Xrd? I played and loved XIII, but I still know little about the overall series. It's obviously well-respected in the fgc, but it always just struck me as not being a huge seller. Point is, because I don't know any better, I'm curious as to whether this change in art is for budgetary reasons or they're trying something different just for the heck of it and, apparently, not doing a good job so far?

I thought we all learned back in the 90s that not everything needs to be 3D...

Well Xrd certainly seems like it would cost more than a standard looking 3D game, if not just because how time consuming some of the stuff they did to replicate that sprited look must have been. For example, things like the dust clouds in Xrd are basically a 3D version of handdrawn animation, where they found that they couldn't replicate the 2D look in a satisfactory way with particle effects, animated maps or any sort animation controller that would morph the geometry, so they ended up manually modelling the shape of the dust cloud in each unique frame of the animation. They did stuff like having the stage lighting not affect the character models, which then have their own seperate light sources that are attached to the characters and are keyframed to move around with the characters animations in such a way that they can always be lit the way they want and also flip when the character is facing left, like a sprite. There's stuff like each character having two different face models that the game switches between, depending on how close they are to the camera, so the normal game angle faces have bigger eyes etc than the ones you see in the fancy camera angles in order to be emotive from further away. They did tons of work to get the game to look the way it does, all really impressive and really clever. So I have to imagine that made it more expensive.

A more standard 3D presentation like this, on the other hand, would be cheaper, especially considering the way they did the sprites in XII and XIII, where they actually modelled and animated everything in 3D, THEN drew over it to create the sprites.

So I dunno if it's a budgetary thing or what, but if they needed to really make it on-the-cheap, they could just re-use the XII/XIII sprites again and just add a handful of characters. While I'm sure that would annoy people as well, those games are still gorgeous.

Man, watching KoF13's sprites in motion was really something amazing, its a shame they moved on to 3d =( Hopefully the actual fighting game around it is okay, though.

New trailer from the SCEK conference:

With people like Yasuyuki Oda behind it I think the game will play just fine but it still looks so low budget and downright ugly.

Just no... I'd rather they let KoF go than release this.

Yeah...that's what so unfortunate about all this. It looks ugly as heeeeeeeeeeeeeell. I mean sticking with the animated "not-really-sprites" 2D look could have saved them a lot more money right?

Man, I wished these guys just worked with the Arc Sys guys who worked on Xrd's art. :(

Xrd's style was expensive and time taking. KoF needs a sufficiency large cast to work and I really hope that as they clearly don't have quality they went for quantity.

@gaspower: I updated the video with the official, high quality one but nothing can negate the fact that the game just does not look good.

Chang and Leona, everyone's favorite third and fourth characters.

@hassun: Like you said, if the gameplay remains solid and people enjoy playing it, it'll probably be okay... I hope.

Congratulations on being 20 years late.

Look at that shit.

Hey, it's that topic I posted when the first teaser came out! Second teaser still looks ugly as sin! Hopefully it will at least play well.

Man I've never been a KoF fan, but that.... just doesn't look right.

http://shoryuken.com/2015/11/04/king-of-fighters-xivs-roster-may-have-leaked-months-ago/

Might not even have Yamazaki, definitely not getting that!

Serious question: Does anyone actually like Choi?

I don't really have any insight into the KoF community, but that character always seemed annoying at best. If they really need a claw hand character I'd even take Gen-An over Choi. I mean, I'm sure they could come up with an excuse as to why a weird green monster man from feudal japan is still alive in modern times.

You know, I really just don't understand how this happened. The game isn't just OK or bad it's hideous. Like an actual monster.

Who knows though.. maybe they're just focusing on the combat now and will come back and really do the looks later...