Having watched through a video of No Mercies, Ultimates, etc recently... yeah, I don't care at all if they don't make it back in. I'd rather they spend the animation budget on making, say, different win poses for Normal / Special Move / Ultra KOs.
Orchid can keep to her tradition by making her have an Ultra that ends in a conveniently-obscured-from-the-player Wardrobe Malfunction.
The only 2 memorable fatalities for me in KI were Orchid's flashing, and Fulgore's Machinegun head. The rest are SO CHEAP LOOKING that I don't think anyone should really miss them.
Now I WOULDN'T mind seeing Stage-fatalities come back, in a campy way. Such as being able to knock someone into the already-destroying stage, out a window, through the wall, etc. The stage destruction that's already there actually looks really cool.
How does everyone feel about the character design? Also the smoothness of the old games seems to have been lost. Dont know how i feel about the look of saberwolf, one of my favorite characters. BETTER HAVE THUNDER.
I like them enough, actually. Jago looks better designed than the Plastic-action-figure look had in the old days, and I like how Inhuman Saberwulf looks. They could have been a lot safer with the designs, but they actually went in and tried at it, and I appreciate that.
I love my Japanese-bred designs, so I'm normally very offput by western design studios characters, but these didn't rub me the wrong way at all. They've got much of the style of SFIV's characters, but they're not ripping them off exactly, and they don't look just like Mortal Kombat's awkwardly dead-ish style.
I really like the animations they have, though. The KI "Ramping it up!" speed up combo loops, the over-done particles, the taunts and key-framing of the moves, the random little details in the idle animations... they've don't a LOT better than I'd expect a game that "came out of nowhere" to be able to achieve.
I'm surprised that Orchid hasn't been announced already but we can all expect to see Orchid in the game. Hopefully Kim Wu is in this one, she was awesome.
Orchid is probably the E3 reveal. I really wanna see how she'd turn out, because female character design is a place where many art styles completely crash and burn.
On returning characters... Eh, the confirmed are actually enough to return for the start, plus Orchid. Chief Thunder is one of my old favorites, but heck, I wouldn't mind seeing him replaced by something more original, now.
Or all the next gen game reveals... this is actually my favorite. The Dev team has done a FANTASTIC job at showing it off, hyping it, and proving that they REALLY know how to respect the depth in what they're doing.
It's all so unexpected. The team, so far, has taken an admittedly middling fighting game series, and turned it into something that actually looks like it has a chance to be something unique and special.