Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja’s latest installment of the 3D fighting game franchise, DEAD OR ALIVE 6, had a particularly rough start. From its absurdly priced Season Pass 1 containing over sixty character costumes and two King of Fighter additional characters as well as it’s unbalanced to an almost broken costume acquisition system. The Season Pass aside, its rather unique costume acquisition takes DOA6 players to an immense amount of grinding through almost every game mode possible. The costume acquisition involves completing a bar for every specific costume that goes from a hundred up to a thousand costume pattern parts before being able to unlock them for purchase with player points or the so-called in-game currency.
And the players who wish to “dress to impress” will be tasked with over a hundred DOA Quests with three conditions each from the simple clear to the godly fighter of clearing without taking damage. While most can be done in a single try or two, the problem lies with its random generation. Costume Patterns the materials required in order to unlock a costume for purchase is obtained through clearing all the three conditions for each quest and cannot be obtained again once it has been distributed to a random costume. But while that wasn’t exactly a terrible idea, its broken state lies with how it’s received. Simply put, a quest that would normally grant 500 patterns on a random costume will more often than not be placed to a costume of lower quantity required with the excess of the patterns being lost forever into the void. With no way of obtaining the excess patterns, it provided a hell of a grind to the point that most quests are done and not even a quarter of my costumes unlocked.
Come update 1.01, the team added Nyotengu and Phase 4 to be playable, the deluxe costumes, as well as the character episodes for Nyotengu. They also released a campaign in order to obtain 10 times more costume patterns through ranked matches and while it provides around 20 to 30 patterns for each match, it was never enough to please the fans due to the amount of costumes that can be obtained and the random nature of how it’s being distributed. Soon after, the campaign multiplier was further increased making it a total of a hundred times than what you’d normally get. And that’s where it really got crazy.
The updated campaign also implemented it through arcade, time attack and survival modes making a run through LEGEND difficulty net you almost a thousand patterns each clear while ranked matches would then give you over a hundred but less than three hundred patterns for each match. But even then, a single run through the offline game modes will at best only unlock a single costume should it be awarded to a costume costing less than a thousand patterns with all the excess no matter how small or how many be thrown into the endless void. As broken as it is, it was a campaign that was supposedly to end one way or another. Before the new update, 1.02, can be implemented mid-March that would replace the random acquisition in order to obtain patterns for the character currently in use.
But as the grind-freak that I am, I did not intend to wait for an update just so I could get a costume for my main characters. Thus the 112-hour journey to unlocking every costume was commenced. Spending my late nights and entire weekend in the course of six days after the update. On its entirety, the hundred and twelve hours I’ve spent and the over two thousand and three hundred fights I’ve achieved both ranked and offline was a hell of an experience. With the casual back and forth towards ranked matches and controller “rubberbanding” on my Hori FPS Plus with Turbo Mode activated on the kick button with NiCO. It eased the stress of the endless fights I would’ve tried to endure. Yet even then, it wasn’t enough… it was simply half the journey. I may have obtained every costume pattern available now, but it was nowhere near enough to obtain the player points required to buy the entire list of costumes that I’ve just unlocked. Roughly speaking, I’ve only purchased the female side of costumes with a hundred thousand more points required to obtain each costume type of a single color variation. With costumes costing as little as a thousand points to as much as thirty thousand each.
Now update 1.02 is finally out, some of the Season Pass wedding costumes are now available and enhancements towards the Wardrobe in DOA Central is also implemented namely character model rotation to obtain a better view of each character and their costume that wasn’t available at launch. A total of twenty six new DOA Quests were also added in which I am very pleased to see that it rewards a feck load of player points for its completion. As well as the update to fix the costume acquisition from random to the character used and the excess of costume patterns obtained finally being awarded towards a second piece of costume. The campaign for obtaining 100 times more patterns will also be extended until the 28th of March.
Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja might have ruined the release of their game but their quick action towards the situation at hand saved a handful of hours I would’ve still be doing at this point in time. However it begs the question what will happen to the players that were late to the party? Players that only happened to obtain the game starting next month? Would they be screwed with a 10 to 20 pattern drop per LEGEND arcade mode? Will they release a paid DLC ticket or unlock key for the costumes in question? Or will DOA Quest implement a daily or weekly quest that could potentially reward players a ticket to unlock a costume of their own choice?
OPINION: The Daily or Weekly Quest is something I personally would love to see in the future rather than a return of a “x100 campaign” should the need arises. As it ends up being an unnecessary grindy game that would only burn out players for its time constraints instead of providing a fun experience with freedom towards their time.
