Beat 'em ups: Where will the genre go?

There’s been a lot of back and forth about what it means to be “next-gen” in terms of console hardware. Perhaps a more pressing question is whether or not games stack up to the next-gen label. No genre has undergone quite so many fundamental changes in so short a time as beat ‘em ups have; once an exclusively 2D, arcade play only affair, they’ve evolved alongside console hardware into something far more. The question for many of us now is whether or not this kind of change is sustainable, and what are the features we’re most likely to see in our next-gen beat ‘em ups.

The problem for the genre now is that it’s becoming difficult for many gamers to justify a full price purchase, given that there’s no way to guage play in terms of “x hours to finish”. As far as play experiences go, fighters are necessarily short lived.

Entirely independent of this, beat ‘em ups have slowly grown to incorporate elements of other genres. Those fighters that experiment with adding new elements purely for the sake of adding something tend towards the negative, and those that pick and choose their innovations from other genres are often the more successful.

Downloadable Content:

One of the most interesting developments in the console market recently has been the advent of beat ‘em ups as downloadable content on both Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStationNetwork. The fact that beat ‘em ups are so rare on the PC (Melty Blood effectively operates in a vacuum) means that it’s only with this console generation that digital distribution has been a real option.

The Xbox Live offering, Street Fighter II is admittedly a retro title, but it’s also a robust and well-respected 2D fighter. More importantly, it’s priced in line with other Xbox Live Arcade titles, which means you’re not paying through the nose for the privilege of a bit of online play.

This is one of the most realistic directions we’re likely to see the genre develop; with compact, downloadable titles, reasonably priced there’s no onus on the developer to add content that might otherwise detract from gameplay (more on that later). In that respect alone it’s good to see Street Fighter II succeed on the 360.

The contrasting example is Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection, which launched on the PS3 via PSN. Unlike Street Fighter, DR is far from a retro title; it includes the bulk of the original PS2 Tekken 5 content, which makes the price easy to swallow. It’s essentially an updated version of Tekken 5; including additional playable characters and some carefully tweaked balances.

This changing of the careful balance of a game is at the same time the single most and least attractive prospect for many hardcore players. The idea that a game can be updated on the fly to address character balance issues is immediately attractive to competitive players; at the same time though, it opens the genre up to MMO style character “nerfing”. It’s not too hard to imagine that characters might see revisions that weaken combos or lower the priority of certain moves.

Until now we’ve seen updates like this released fairly quietly, or not at all, for consoles. There was an update to Tekken 5 before Dark Resurrection that addressed some character balance issues and only really made it to arcades, which meant awkward decisions had to be made with regard to tournament play and practice. In that light at least, it’s easy to see why downloadable content is attractive for seriously competitive players.