Dead Or Alive 5 prides itself on being "entertaining"

We don't know much yet about Dead Or Alive 5, but we do know that it is a "fighting entertainment" game, no matter what you might think. That's the way Team Ninja boss Yosuke Hayashi describes it, and he's got good reason for it.

The developer feels that today's fighting games are all about online competition, pushing the traditionally outrageous graphics into the background. Back in the day, games were packed with fun gameplay and "a lot of stuff", and he's disappointed to see that fading.

Dead Or Alive 5 is Hayashi's personal mission to return "spectacle" to the genre, as he explained. The problem, of course, is that the Dead Or Alive franchise - unlike many other fighters - always has been spectacular.

Joystiq asked just how to make a game which already features fighters throwing each other off of waterfalls any more "entertaining".

Hayashi's response was simple. In previous DOA outings, the dangers and the stage were fixed - like an electric fence or that rickety wooden floor. Now, though, "You can see the entire stage changing and taking a different shape, and all sorts of chaos happening." If you want, you can even trigger changes to the stage's geometry, too.

I don't think anybody's ever accused the Dead Or Alive series of not being "entertaining", but it's great to see Team Ninja going out of their way to make gamers happy - and this has got to be better than volleyball.