Even with its move to "fighting entertainment," Team Ninja wants to make Dead or Alive 5 a more competitive fighter than previous installments in the series. One of the biggest changes has been to DoA's signature Hold (counter) system, which has been a source of controversy in the hardcore fighting community for being incredibly low-risk/high-reward. Due to its large input window and high damage output, if you guessed a counter correctly four or five times it was almost guaranteed you would win a match.

Chris Harris from Dead or Alive competitive player HQ FreeStepDodge recently talked about the changes made to Holds, and how it will affect high-level gameplay.

"So the main way they nerfed the hold was by adding more recovery to it. Now while you can legit react to the hold you would still have to be waiting for it in some form. Now that the recovery is nerfed it actually opens a few more options for the attacker that wasn’t present before because of how quick the recovery was."

Now, Holds can be baited and punished accordingly. In previous games, starting a Hold and missing would still put that player back into a neutral/safe position before the attacking player, so playing defensively and spamming Holds for high damage was safer than attacking aggressively. Now with Hold recovery time increased, players will have to actually fight it out and use Holds strategically.

Dead or Alive 5 director Yohei Shimbori also explained the decision to keep Dead or Alive 4's four-point Hold system (high, mid P, mid K, low) instead of the three-point (high, mid, low) system used in DoA3 and the DoA5 Alpha demo.

"4-point holds work really well for game balance, but I was worried that beginners couldn’t pull off mid kick holds. But all of the feedback we got from players with the Alpha demo gave me the final nudge to go with 4-point. Of course, we will make it so new players can still have fun with 4-point holds."

It looks like I'm going to have to take back my jokes about Dead or Alive being the fighting-game equivalent of amateur-league clown midget Jell-O wrestling. I think this is pretty good news, but what about you? Will changing the Hold system for DoA5 make it a better game, or take away another important part of the series' individual style?

via Shoryuken, Siliconera