'This is looking so good I can't NOT pay you': Fighting game YouTuber commissions modding 'god' to overhaul Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite's artstyle
"Ryn is a god."
Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite (MVCI) is getting a remaster—but not from Capcom. As announced on Twitter, popular fighting game community YouTuber and streamer Maximillian Miles Christensen (Maximilian Dood) is commissioning a modder to create a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of the 2017 fighter's visual style, and hot damn is it an improvement.
"We’re in the early stages, with only a couple days of tinkering, but already the results are absolutely incredible," Christensen writes, linking to a quote tweet of some of Ryn's current WIPs. One screenshot in particular took off among the MVCI community, showing a cel-shaded, gorgeous-looking Ryu giving Spider-Man a Shoryuken what-for.
"Did you change the direction of the lighting? You can do that?" writes one astounded commenter, to which Ryn answers: "Yeah, I can change a f*ckton of things"—presumably while wearing a pair of sunglasses.
It really is an astounding difference, especially when compared side-by-side. Here's a direct comparison shot courtesy of MarrowOchi on Twitter. Gone are the strange Xbox 360-era textures and playdough overcast lighting, making way for cel shading, Ben Day-style dots, and vivid colour contrasts.
took a screencap of vanilla mahvel infinite just to see the side by side difference of @WistfulHopes' glorious new shaders pic.twitter.com/keXmDuiAo4May 2, 2024
Christensen would later upload a rundown of the project to his YouTube channel, which tells us more about how the mod snowballed into the ambitious remaster it's quickly becoming. Initially the two were just trying stuff out, but very rapidly realised that "it got to a point where [I said] this is looking so good I can't not pay you … she's done so much work on the engine that it's flabbergasting."
As for why he's paying out of pocket, "spending thousands of my own dollars to effectively mod games that will never net met a return? I simply do it, number one, because I care, and I think the effort of a lot of people needs to be compensated in some way."
Christensen adds that after the images above went viral, he had a flood of interest from other modders who he'll "not be able to talk about probably ever in the future—but a lot of people showed up and were like 'I wanna help' … 'I wanna do art, I wanna do music'." Speaking to IGN, Ryn herself says that "the most challenging part was figuring out the changes Capcom made to the rendering engine," but that "it feels incredible seeing the hard work pay off."
"Hard work" really is apt, here, if what Christensen's shown so far is anything to go by. While showing off Ryu in the aforementioned YouTube video, he reveals that Ryn actually remodelled the character's face to better catch lighting from her new shaders: "Ryu's dirt-ass face … this dude's face was like, unable to catch light and translate it in a way that makes sense. He's f*cking butt-ugly in the game. But Ryn like, remodelled his face to capture the light better."
It's all he can do to sing her praises: "It's crazy to have someone who knows how Unreal Engine 4 to a tee where I'm just like 'hey, can we change the colour of the rim lighting? How does that look?' And it's done in like 30 minutes." As for future plans, Christensen says he wants "to find an art style that effectively feels good, and then we can start applying it to the rest of the roster
"Ryn is a god. The amount of know-how they have, and the amount of things I was like shooting her direction, and getting immediate responses to? It's absolutely wild how fast things were even coming online … I cannot f*cking wait."