This weird recent fixation on condemning DMC4's style switching across the board is weird, because it was never a vocal issue when the game came out.
If you were coming in fresh from DMC3, you were sticking to Swordmaster or Trickster for most of your playthrough and changing it on a fight-to-fight basis to deal with whatever priority target you were worried about. It was a new system that you knew would completely up-end the high-end gameplay scene a lot, but for the time being it was just a massive quality-of-life change that was generally appreciated outside of individual style move nerfs. Higher end players that insisted on using all those tools like we see nowadays had a new system they were pretty excited to master, and it kept them busy across multiple playthroughs as they worked out the muscle memory to make it work.
The real bane of everyone's existence was the mandatory triple-weapon switch paired with the presence of Pandora and Lucifer. Pandora was disruptive as shit because you would inevitably forget what weapon you had equipped when you wanted to Gunslinger something, so you'd get a ton of unwanted Arguments which killed the combat flow. Lucifer meanwhile was so misunderstood and existed in a game that never took advantage of its crowd control utility, that it ended up being used solely for pin-up spam, splash JCs, and Launcher->Ecstasy->Air Trick set-ups for a long time.
People hated that they kept having to work around these things even months later into the game's lifespan that when the PC version came out, people were using trainers to make saves where Dante never picks them up. That's what I'm curious to see Capcom address. I've adjusted since then to the point where I can't play DMC3 unless I have Rebellion/Cerberus/Beowulf rolling, but it should've always been a player toggle.
Also:
They were never going to move away from that. Not even DmC for all of its attempts to streamline Dante could avoid using the D-Pad for weapon toggles.
See, this guy gets it. Bravo.
If you were coming in fresh from DMC3, you were sticking to Swordmaster or Trickster for most of your playthrough and changing it on a fight-to-fight basis to deal with whatever priority target you were worried about. It was a new system that you knew would completely up-end the high-end gameplay scene a lot, but for the time being it was just a massive quality-of-life change that was generally appreciated outside of individual style move nerfs. Higher end players that insisted on using all those tools like we see nowadays had a new system they were pretty excited to master, and it kept them busy across multiple playthroughs as they worked out the muscle memory to make it work.
The real bane of everyone's existence was the mandatory triple-weapon switch paired with the presence of Pandora and Lucifer. Pandora was disruptive as shit because you would inevitably forget what weapon you had equipped when you wanted to Gunslinger something, so you'd get a ton of unwanted Arguments which killed the combat flow. Lucifer meanwhile was so misunderstood and existed in a game that never took advantage of its crowd control utility, that it ended up being used solely for pin-up spam, splash JCs, and Launcher->Ecstasy->Air Trick set-ups for a long time.
People hated that they kept having to work around these things even months later into the game's lifespan that when the PC version came out, people were using trainers to make saves where Dante never picks them up. That's what I'm curious to see Capcom address. I've adjusted since then to the point where I can't play DMC3 unless I have Rebellion/Cerberus/Beowulf rolling, but it should've always been a player toggle.
Also:
They were never going to move away from that. Not even DmC for all of its attempts to streamline Dante could avoid using the D-Pad for weapon toggles.
See, this guy gets it. Bravo.
