err I lost track of the thread of this conversation somewhere.
Are you saying there should be a more robust tutorial mode? You can’t blame the game for people not wanting to bother to learn. Same would apply to a tutorial mode anyways.
My point at the start was that Ultimate is doing whatever you call the opposite of dumbing down MvC3, and that's a good thing... and that most definitely includes the airdash changes.This is a good post.
As far as BB goes, depending on your opponent, the best thing you can do is normal jump xx barrier block. As a Hakumen main, this was one of the first things I learned back when all you fought online was robo-bitch. Airdashing would have definitely covered the ground faster, but it put me at risk of those few frames of being unable to do anything after the airdash and being completely vulnerable.
Airdashing in this game has the potential to still work. It’s not worthless just because everything is now unblockable. You just have to learn when to do it and when not to. Dormammu throw out a vortex behind you accidentally? AIRDASH IN AND RAPE HIM. Dormammu standing there doing nothing? PLEASE DON’T AIRDASH.
ITT: Forcing you to think before you airdash is dumbing down the game.
Yeah I already agreed to UMVC3 being a less stupid game…still doesn’t change the fact that it’s still going to be way more stupid than it should be and that there’s no real in game tutorials and spar sessions that teach you how to play less stupid and make less excuses.
What I blame the games for is not making learning how to play the game a part of the game. Basically every other genre of game does this and it would make learning to play fighting games much more intuitive. This trial mode shit has to go. The amount of people who play fighting games competitively online and offline would definitely jump if the basics of SFIV/MVC3/SG/KOF13 etc. were actually taught. Not just something you read and then have to record in training mode by yourself. No…like a dummy that actually forces you to respond and react to real fighting game situations and utilize the mechanics of the game in real time. If people see that these things are in the game…they will be WAY MORE inclined to get better at the game.
The thing is the tutorials will help teach the veterans help teach the newer players how to play. These in game tutorials will give people a grasp of the basics so it’s easier to relate what they need to learn as they are sparring with better players. It will be a lot more about refinement and less about “well people keep jumping and air dashing on me with stuff and i dunno what to do, im bad”.
If learning to play the game is intuitive and more like you being Rocky and your coach training you and pushing you on the basics…that makes it better for everybody. Makes it so newer players will have far less trouble with the basics of the game and makes it easier for them to get towards higher level play and spar with confidence. Feel that they are learning and not just getting beasted against better players. It will also make it easier for veteran players to brush them up on their mistakes when they’re not like “what’s hit confirm? what’s the timing for it? how do i aa?” The game should make it interesting to learn these things and should introduce it like a way to level up in an RPG to better your character.
Basically…this. http://skullgirls.com/2011/10/tutorials-teaching-the-untechable/
I run Team Darkstalkers, so this is both a nerf and potential buff to different aspects of my team.
Morrigan’s airdash is pretty slow, but at least has the luxury of being more controllable than most of the cast. Her upward and downward airdashes also granted her unique trajectories that can be tricky, so I feel that I’ll still get a lot of use out of her dashes. Also, as long as she has 3 bars, she can whip out an invincible level 3 super in case it looks like she’s about to eat shit air to air. As far as her grounded “dash” is concerned… I hope that she can still block out of it, otherwise that’ll put a serious hurt on her game.
Hsien-Ko’s forward and backward airdashes were already ridiculously slow, and as a Hsien-Ko player I mostly used them to control space and they were almost immediately cancelled to set up near-instant overheads, so this won’t really affect my style of play. Also, this makes her zoning game even stronger, as I predict her gong walls will now be much harder to deal with. Senpu-Bu will also be a much stronger ability for the purpose of both screen travel and space control.
Felicia could never airdash, so it’s all good to Ms. Kitty. With this change, more people will likely be staying on the ground, where she reigns supreme.
I agree
Can I blame them for catering to those people for shit like XF and Ultras?
And yes, ever since VF4 Evo released, all fighting games forward should’ve had a training mode half as good as that. Instead they just copied the combo challenges section. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEgO9VG1XRw&feature=player_detailpage
I have to refrain from skullgirls discussion. Its offtopic here, and in any dedicated place, the fans would flame me back to 1993.
Needless to say, I agree in concept with the idea of an ingame tutorial, but its not a remarkably new/fascinating/important thing. It can help you understand the basics/fundamentals but that’s not even at issue in the context of this forum and this game.
The only good definition of ‘scrubs’ I ever heard was ‘people who have no desire to improve their play or learn the game’. Nothing is going to help these people, not vids, not the best ingame tutorial in the world.
Anyways, the problem you're kind of talking about in Marvel 3 is that its too easy to get simple wins with your bad habits 100% intact. Tutorials wouldn't help that one bit, you'd just go through them and then learn to be lazy.Also, DJ, what you’re not realizing is that everyone who plays online isn’t trying to “walk the path of the warrior”. Everyone doesn’t want to be competitive. I understand you may want more competition, but that’s what you have sites like this for.
I disagree with the latter. It should be rather important. There’s a lot of esoterics in fighting games, and the idea that you need to go hunting for third party websites and dig through long forum posts or articles to even learn that some of these mechanics ( or specific implementations of basic mechanics ) even exist is a huge problem. I’d go as far to say that in a modern fighter, an effective way to get concepts and ideas off to new players is the third most important thing behind a robust training mode and good netplay.
No, but there’s probably some people who would be if the game was less arcane.
Sorry can’t resist, wouldn’t you say good play/engine in general is the most important thing? 
And again, I’m all for a good training mode, I also think MK9 permanently raised the bar as far as game storymodes went.
To part 2, this game actually has an extremely straightforward game system. Something like an Arcysys game with all kind of weird special rules and commands suddenly finds a good tutorial even more essential.
I think the reason I don't get too worked up about ingame tutorial stuff is because if the game's made right most of the engine elements should be self-explanatory, or clear in a 5 second explanation. That should be the goal, not finding the best way to explain all this bizarre/arcane crap that you have to know about the engine.The reason people don’t want to be competitive has a lot to do with they don’t see the point when there’s nothing intuitive that really teaches them how to be competitive or at least get on the right foot towards that. If all you see is mash on buttons then turn on XF on the stream…that’s all you’re gonna care about doing. You’ll be more inclined to go on SRK and learn things when you spar and train and learn from the game itself like you would against another player teaching you the game.
It’s a big big hole missing in fighting games for far too long that would help bridge the gap a lot. Learning to play competitively should be part of the game so more people will want to be competitive and come on SRK and play online and even go offline to brush up and refine things. You have the people like myself who just fall into it but for those that are instantly thinking “lemme go read and watch a bunch of posts and vids” this is really what is needed to get things rolling and get the average player understanding that fighting games aren’t just hard presses of buttons.
That’s why people ask all the time “what’s a good assist? how do you deal with advance guards? how do you beat wolverine dive kicking? why is it that i get hit by low attacks when i try to jump on wake up? how do i deal with wesker spamming gun? how do i deal with armor moves so an 8 year old kid doesn’t place better than a bunch of older men? what are different ways to anti air? what’s the timing for dash up OTG gun with wesker? what’s the blah blah”
The game is actually pretty deep even within its basics but the learning curve is marred by getting similar results by tapping somebody with c.L’s and turning on XF. Or making these moves that have a bunch of armor and leaving average players in the dust about how to deal with them. MVC3 messes up by making things that are easy that nearly make up for knowing how to play and swing random matches in your favor. Which gives you way less incentive to learn to play when all you see is “the flashy shit where you turn red and then kill people”. As opposed to a tutorial mode that really fleshes out the game and not just rainbows and wesker porting around.
The game could just teach them that shit and everyone could be on a better page. Instead you just sell the game on hype and just have more players playing with the same players. The average player just gets too used to the instant gratification of XF turn on into “hah hah ur people are getting blown up naaaooo” instead of learning how to actually play and understand the creative aspects of the game. Then they go on SRK and they’re like “man there’s all this stuff to read”. Or watch tutorials and go “ah man now I gotta figure out away to replicate this in training mode and then I’ll have to record the dummy and…”.
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Basically Devil Jin is saying that there are people who learn by playing the game and not wanting to look up on a forum. Either because they don’t want to, feel no one will know (which can happen) or simply just want to learn through trial and error.
you don’t really get that by reading. You’ll get it, but it’s not really put into action by reading. you’re only getting a vague understanding of whatever you’re trying to learn/figure out.
you can read up on all this stuff online easily. Doesn’t mean it translate well to your hands during actual play.
There’s absolutely no way to deal with a number of those things in a tutorial. It presumes that the developer knows ahead of time what’s going to be hard to deal with/effective/etc.
If the game is made right, you shouldn’t need an extended strategy tutorial to deal with basic things, and unless the game has a 15 year tradition like VF, you shouldn’t have the necessary knowledge and spaghetti rules to make a super-indepth tutorial like they have work.
A number of things that DO need teaching are hard to put into the game without being just a wall of text (assist selection is what I"m thinking here)
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The more I think of it the more I come to the same conclusion. For a new game an extended strategy tutorial is a waste of time and effort that could be spent on other things.
Edit: Shin Oni, the trick is most of the stuff isn’t so hard that you can’t just learn by playing the game. For instance, playing against zoners and asking questions is a million times better a way to learn to fight zoning than doing Lesson 6.4: How to fight zoning*.*
That’s why Skullgirls is going to be a real innovation. It’s already being made by a fighting gamer who’s already going to know a lot of the basics that people need to understand and put those in. Then as more is figured out he can patch the game so people can understand further how to deal with more specific situations.
Basically…Capcom just loves selling smoke and mirrors. Stop selling people ONLY the smoke and mirrors so the community doesn’t always have to sell people fighting games.
Most of the problem here is that most of the people interested in learning aren’t going to really stick with it outside of that game. Which is why I kinda don’t care if they learn or not. I get both sides of the argument but how many people are really going to go back and play an old game that’s new to fighters competitively or at least trying to break into the scene and learn? If others aren’t playing or helping them out, they generally don’t bother.
Yes, I just supposed that went without saying.
Story mode is nice (and I still think Capcom royally screwed up by announcing a real plot for MvC3 and then discarding it without a word ), but again, I consider it secondary to these other features given the nature of the fighting game engine.
And you’re right that Marvel 3 has a fairly basic system to begin with, but there’s still lots of minor things behind the scenes ( plus you have to realize that while a lot of the basics are covered in the instructional manual. People don’t read those ) that aren’t out in the open, things that likely cause a lot of new players to get incredibly pissy and give up before they’ve even really started. Granted, no matter how well you explain things, there will be people who end up that way anyways, but I still think there’s a savlagable group of people there.
I’ll take myself for an example. I used to be pretty fucking scrubby, and I used to whine about a lot of the stuff I laugh at people for whining about now ( not actually true, I’ve had a deep and intuitive understanding of video game subsystems since the day I was born and am a true grandmaster when it comes to understanding the inner workings of fighting games, but humor me for a moment ).
Because of this, I actually gave up on fighting games for a long time, and I’m still suffering to it to this day ( by having a five or six year deficit of experience over most of my colleagues ) and will always suffer because of it.
Why? Because I didn’t understand things. I thought games were horribly unbalanced with lots of stupid, easy tactics ( The first time I played MSHvSF I wasted a buck trying to fight a guy who did nothing but optic blasts from one side of the screen, I was stumped ) and the only thing that really mattered was memorizing patterns and combos ( pretty sure the one time he wasn’t using cyclops I ate a wolverine infinite or some shit. Don’t remember ). Explanations aren’t provided, so as a new player with no real knowledge of a fighter ( Keep in mind the level of player we’re talking about here, people who generally won’t be able to even fire off multiple fireballs in succession without messing up an input ), everything is over my head at this point.
So naturally I just say “fuck it, I’m going to go play something that actually feels intuitive” and ended up playing mostly FPSes and RTSes until like, 2008.
They won’t be able to plan for everything, but there are some basic things that you can tell way ahead of time will be difficult to manage, and some things that are generally always a problem for newer players to deal with and you can try to explain the basics around those without forcing them to go out and hunt for the information.
Yeah in the end people want to play games and if the first thing they see is “oh there’s an XF thing now when I press 4 buttenzzz…let’s see…WHOAMG!!! WOLVERINE IS SUPER DUPAH FAST LOL ALL UR PPLZ ARE DED ROFLFOL…wait wait lemme see what happenz if i turn on both XF and berserker charge ZOMGGGG!! HE’S LIKE I CAN"T EVEN CONTROL IT SSJ4 FAST EVEN BEETTTERR!!” then that’s the best thing they’ll ever see in the game and won’t care to learn anything more creative. What’s cooler than Wolverine acting like an idiot and getting free random wins off that shit? Maybe he won’t beat ComboFiend with that shit but he sure is gonna get hate mail or just general “WTF why do I play this shit?” from anyone under his level.
That’s all Capcom cares about…“Did u like the FADC Ultra and XF mash we gave you? Yes you did because that’s why you play fighting games now ok Johnny? Actually learning how to play fighting games isn’t interesting. Nope. We gave you book that’s got pro tipz from pro players but it’ll be over your head cuz when Wolverine goes CHING you can almost win ANY WAY YAYY! Besides you’ll need people that live near you and have to try shit in training mode all day because of our shitty netcode and no game modes that actually trains you on that stuff by yourself.”
If the game doesn’t make it interesting to see that there are things past that…nobody wants to learn anything past that and then we’re stuck with the few people that found a way to “get it”.
that… well damn I don’t know what to say, except ‘lets see if he’s writing checks his ass can cash’. It’s easy to promise stuff, and we should reconvene a while after the game comes out. The bigger problem is that nobody that could benefit from that kind of tutorial will actually buy Skullgirls.
the ‘rah rah!’ stuff aside, I do have to agree that capcom is pretty brutal at skimping on anything they possibly can as far as game modes go.