Actually excited for this one. I really want to play a quality fighting game without paying $60 + DLC before the community starts dying or being too elitist.
Most of the fighting games really. I got Tekken 7 on discount and got bodied online, I also picked up a guilty gear game a few years ago and got destroyed. It’s less that they’re elitist and more that after a few months of a fighting game launching, most of the people still playing would’ve gotten good at the game and there are no beginners anymore.
That will tend to happen, but there are always ways to find beginners. Guilty Gear's floor system is pretty good at it; it's the higher ranks that have matchmaking issues. Tekken's ranking system is really good, but the netcode is really bad, so you'll have to wait for Tekken 8 to expand your pool of players that you can feasibly have a good match with. Anything that's on Game Pass, like Guilty Gear is now, will have a regular stream of low-level players. It made it really enjoyable to pick up Killer Instinct all these years later, even though I'm on the Steam version, because it's got cross play with Game Pass (note that KI is weird in this case, because only the casual queue is cross play). For a lot of other fighting games, you can usually just ping a beginner role on the game's Discord, which isn't tedious like it sounds, because you only need one other person to play with to enjoy a fighting game.
I also understand that $60-$70 can be steep, but I'd highly recommend you try playing at launch with one fighting game that interests you. Street Fighter 6 is still enjoying a larger online population (meaning more low-level players) than most fighting games, historically, have ever seen even at their peaks. Mortal Kombat 1 is launching in September and Tekken 8 will likely launch within a year, and both seem to be focused on making single player modes to make that launch price more worth it. Or you can hold out for Project L, but that might be more than a year or two away, and you've got several big opportunities to experience that launch day period between now and then.
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