« PS All-Stars: System Changes Being Made to Discourage Overly Defensive Play »

Paul LaCen over at Dualshockers sat down with PlayStation All-Stars Game Director Omar Kendall to talk about a number of different topics, mostly surrounding the latest beta focus and how they are adjusting various gameplay mechanics. Omar mentions they are tweaking the combat system a bit to discourage overly defensive play by implementing "meter chip" and guard crush mechanics. Hit the jump for a small excerpt and read the entire interview here. 

If you had a chance to play the beta, what are your thoughts so far? To everyone else, are you looking forward to the game and why?

P: It was briefly mentioned that the designers were toying with the idea of AP loss due to excessive blocking against assaults, was there any development on that front? Has the design team considered other options to discourage excessively defensive play?

O: I won’t give you a full breakdown of our combat system (I really couldn’t, considering we’re still tweaking it), but I’ll give you two examples of recent additions that discourage overly defensive play. First, we recently added AP “chip damage” to blocking opponents, which means that even against a blocking opponent, the attacker is still able to earn a diminished amount of AP. Second, we added a system called Guard Crushing that allows certain moves to defeat the defense of a blocking opponent. These two additions mean that at any given time, simply blocking all incoming attacks is not enough to nullify the AP accrual of your opponents, which should inherently discourage blocking.