With the strong eSports focus that DreamHack has, Elemensional Rift was certain to make an appearance to continue growing and sharing all the growth it has gone through since the previous DreamHack showing. There was quite a lot to show and many returning players eager to check out how progress continued to grow. While it was a lot of work, the rebuilding of the camera got a lot of positive reception and comments on how much better gameplay feels. The expansion of the arcade also gained a lot of focus from attendees as well.
One of the great pieces of excitement for a new show is looking through the stats and seeing how stats grow. To give a run down of the stats that were tracked, some of the details of note are:
- The fighter to get the fastest arcade run time and highest score: Selphieroth
- 135 freeplay matches (125 of which are standard stock matches)
- In small part of the tournament, Nekuen was pushed to dominate the usage charts.
- Amongst the others of the top 5 (in alphabetical order): Crispy B., Neon, Otagaz, and Zanipher
- Only 2 characters ended up with less than 10 usages for the weekend: Drake and Miroi
- Those same 2 characters achieved the second and third highest win percentage
- The character with the most wins: Nekuen
- The character with the highest win percentage: Hina
- The character with the fewest wins and lowest win percentage: ‘Zieque
- Nekuen had the greatest number of uses in a single day.
While the stats can be interesting for those checking on the growth of the meta patterns, many come to read about the tournament results. The DreamHack tournament was quite a stand out experience. Not only did two former tournament champions show up to participate (one of which is the previous DreamHack champion), but we had several other major surprises along the way. The first big surprise was the former DreamHack champion losing the very first round. All was not lost as the tournament was double elimination. At the end of the first bracket, the other former champion won a close match against Jesper. With it being a double elimination tournament, this is where things began to get quite interesting. The one who beat the former DreamHack champion was the next to get taken down while on the other side of winner’s bracket, former champion DrKrazy continued climbing the ranks to reach winner’s bracket champion. Meanwhile, in loser’s bracket, Jesper was forced to take on match after match running through the entire gauntlet of loser’s bracket all the way back into the grand finals and taking on every tough challenge in the loser’s bracket along the way. Then came the grand finals. DrKrazy started strong and began a lead with 2 wins in a best 3 out of 5. The pressure was on Jesper as they had to work out a full run back against a champion with no rounds to lose. Jesper had to focus closely while DrKrazy had victory within reach. The next round came down to the final life. Jesper was trying to catch DrKrazy with Nekuen’s tsunami while DrKrazy was fighting to get closer to get in for the kill. Then Jesper made a delay in Nekuen’s attacks to recover some energy and caught DrKrazy with the beginning of the tsunami to reset the bracket. Both players were sweating bullets as the grand champion match received a bracket reset. Jesper was also feeling the exhaustion building up from crawling all the way through the loser’s bracket. DrKrazy was feeling the pressure of coming so closer and now in a bracket reset situation. DrKrazy started to take on unexpected characters to make his approach harder to predict while Jesper clung to Nekuen as the tried and true that brought them back from the brink of absolute defeat. Onlookers gathered to see if Jesper could pull on the unprecedented and pulled a revenge 3-0 against DrKrazy for victory!
