I really enjoy the sporadic Developer's Backyard posts the folks at ArcSys make. The Q&A sections in particular.
But the latest one is obviously very exciting for the obvious reason that it discusses what to expect from Season 3. Sounds like Season 3 is gonna be a hell of a banger. Fingers crossed we might find out about who's being added next this weekend. My money is almost certainly on it being Slayer who I have no motivation to play but I do want to see him in the game just because it means he'll be getting a vocal track and Jack-a-Dandy is such a fucking banger so if it's anything like that it's gonna be GOOD.
Also praying we'll see some Bedman? buffs and tweaks in the next patch because god I love everything about this character but it feels like such an uphill battle 80% of the time and literally every time I go into the Bedman? Discord I immediately just see everyone lamenting how shit he is and that's demotivating.
ANYWAY, the backyard post. I am concerned about the "new battle mechanics". I kinda hope that doesn't meant instant kills because I don't really think they have a lot of reason to exist in -Strive- at this point. If I recall correctly, they were cut for time? And at this point I think the game's just fine without them. I suppose we'll see. I've seen someone suggest that they instead rework them into a system where finishing with an overdrive gives a special animation which would be fun but also I wouldn't count that as a "new battle mechanic".
...although, if not instant kills, I wonder if they might be considering on adding a tag-team system? That seems kind of an out of the blue thing to suggest but every character in the game has actually had lines that almost certainly seem to be for being tagged in and out since launch.
Even all of the DLC characters have continued to have these lines recorded. Baiken, Sin, Bedman?, even Asuka. Hell, even Testament has such lines despite also being the only character in the line to lack a whole chunk of other unused voice lines that everyone else has (the purpose of which are unknown - the game organises all lines by a nondescriptive 3-digit ID. The first digit usually helps group lines together and the same ID generally corresponds to the same type of line across most characters. All the tag team lines have IDs of 500 and 501 for example. The mystery lines seem to be for varying purposes and have IDs formatted as 8xx.) Who knows though, perhaps they just keep recording these because... they can, I guess? Just in case?
Anyway, here's some examples:
Bedman?
You called?
Let's go.
Testament
Leave it to me.
Time to end this.
An interesting quirk is that the lines with ID 501b seem to almost always imply that the battle is nearing its end, favouring the character being tagged in. Either they just happened to record them that way, or there'd be unique lines for characters tagging in when the opponent is at low health. The 501a lines may serve the same purpose but with some exceptions they seem to tend to be a bit more vague so I don't want to make a conclusive judgment.
Anyway, all this (including those mysterious other lines I mentioned before) should really probably be on TCRF but it's honestly such a pain in the ass to correctly name, upload and create tables for large amounts of audio on TCRF. Plus who knows, some of this stuff might end up not being unused in the near future? Maybe??