Strider 3 Rumors | My Hopes for Strider 3

My Hopes for Strider 3

Am I the only one who thinks Devil May Cry has the wrong art direction and tone for Strider? Strider is big, bright, epic, and open; DMC is dark, gothic, and somewhat creepy. If anything, only DMC's play mechanics should be used, and only those from the first or third installments.

If, on the off-chance that someone at Capcom is reading this, here's what I'd like to see in a future Strider 3:

  1. Preserve the solid controls and in-game mechanics. Strider 2's gameplay was damn near perfect, as far as the control scheme, hit detection, physics, and other mechanics were concerned. Its predecessor's weren't bad either, by all accounts. Preserve this as much as possible.
  2. Don't misplace the series' energy. Strider is mostly known for its frantic pace and momentum. All-out action is the name of the game. Look to the PS2 Shinobi for how to do this in 3D.
  3. Use more flowing gameplay. One of the things Strider 2 failed to capture was the fluid structure of its predecessor. The level design was noticeably lacking; sections of each level often completely failed to correlate to one another. Compare the Kazakh stage in the first Strider to Neo Hong Kong in Strider 2. How does Hiryu get from the abandoned subway to the highway with the flying cars? How does he get up in the air, to ride and fight the Emperor Dragon? By contrast, Kazakh flowed from one section to another, going from the city streets to the council chamber without cutting away. Strider 2 tried to link everything together with wireframe mission paths at the start of each level, but this completely failed to unify the game's structure.
  4. Design with the home conversion in mind. The biggest complaint people have about Strider 2 is the infinite continues. I understand that the programmers were trying to keep the arcade audience in mind. I do. And in the arcade, the continues that drop you right where you die really worked, because you had to actually pay to continue. It would have taken all of two seconds to write a line of code for the home version that sent you back to the beginning of the scene. Since that line had to be modified to disregard coin insertion anyway, the fact that it wasn't altered further is inexcusable.
  5. Write a story with an ending that makes sense. If you could make sense of the previous two games' endings, that would be great too. That would also be a bit of a tall order. Riding on whales and "2000 years ago", indeed. This is a Strider game, so don't go Metal Gear Solid with the story, but at least tell a decent one.

As you may have noticed, the above ideas don't even really deal with the story itself. I'm leaving those up to Capcom, though I do have some of my own. The quickest way to make sure your ideas won't ever get used is to post them publicly, because nobody wants to get sued. So I'm not even going to go there.

Strider 3 Rumors | My Hopes for Strider 3