While a lot of hype is coming for the next generation of consoles and games, there are still some games coming out for this current-generation of consoles. Indeed, some future titles are looking to straddle both generations of consoles. Regardless, a topic of interest has been the new addition to the Dead Or Alive franchise, Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate. Fighters are on a renaissance nowadays and you can see this with the constant releases of expansions and updated versions of a fighting game. Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate is looking to be another fighter following in that vein. The question is, is this milking of fighters, or is it good fanservice?
Dead Or Alive 5 came out around September last year and has had a few updates and DLCs that have kind of extended the life of the game. Granted, if you didn’t care for the DLCs, you’ll have a bigger upgrade with Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate than if you had bought the DLCs, but there seems to be a good deal of extra additions to the game that you otherwise might not have expected. There are the basic additions, like new costumes and new stages, but Team Ninja have seemingly gone above that and added in 5 new characters and have also tweek the core gameplay a bit too. That’s quite a lot of changes even for an expansion.
Most of these additions have been stuff that fans have asked or. The new characters include the returning Ein and Leon, the Ninja Gaiden duo of Momiji and Rachel and Virtua Fighter’s Jacky. All (aside from Jacky) have been characters that Team Ninja fans have wanted to play as in the Dead Or Alive series. Mostly so that those characters can gain more exposure. Of course, there were also people who wanted more VF characters, so having Jacky there is a boost too. The main point though, is that these additions have been fan additions. The fans wanted more, and Team Ninja are giving them more. It would have been hard to provide all this in the form of a DLC as some core mechanics of the game are being changed. There would be too much imbalance if this went the DLC route.
Which is why this isn’t just pure milking. Even before the fighting game genre went through this revival, Dead Or Alive games tended to have expansions that released at a later date. Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate is the latest makeover for the series, and it looks to be a solid buy. Of course, those who don’t care for fighters or the series in itself, there’s nothing there, but in a world of yearly Call Of Duty games and Assassin’s Creed games, Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate isn’t the biggest milkage. That’s even forgetting that Dead Or Alive hadn’t made an appearance on consoles in well over 7 years before Dead Or Alive 5 came out last year.
The main thing though, is that hopefully the price point for Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate won’t be akin to a new game. It has to be cheaper, because for all intense and purposes, it is an expansion. New characters, new gameplay mechanics, new online structure and a few other additions are great, but I doubt Team Ninja would be able to get away with selling the game at ‘new’ game retail price. At the end of the day, this could be good for both parties. Fans get more out of Dead Or Alive, while developers get a profit for a less intensive development process.
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