Pretty much this. They’re only as hard as your competition, and if your competetition isn’t stomping you on the ground, you aren’t going to have any reason nor motivation to get better past the “mash buttons and hope for the best” stage, thus they won’t be very hard. For casuals it’s enough to slap the game in the console, gather some mates and have a couple of beers and see who can break the controller first every now and then, they will be blissfully ignorant of the real stuff the game can offer with dedication and practice, which is there to appeal to the more serious-minded player.
Dam near every game could be played by the casual market. If the game is too demanding, well that’s what the difficulty settings are for. Can’t get to Seth because your rival is throwing you to the kitchen and demanding you to make him/her a sandwich? Well, lucky for you that there’s a setting for fighting games too. Want to school little Timmy from across the street? Well good luck with that. Difficulty varies between who you’re up against, and there is no setting for that.
I can say FGs are more inviting than others mostly because the core game play is just too much fun. That fun doubles when there’s friends involved. Sure getting any good is hard, but where would the depth be if it were easy?
SRK makes me think fighting games are too hard for the hardcore player
Not even remotely. The problem with gamers today is that games are made easier and easier and then you come across even a super easy game to play like SF4 or MvC3 and you think it’s hard.
Games these days have check points every 10 steps, save points mid levels, come back mechanics in fighters and EASY execution.
You don’t know hard until you played a game like ST/3S/MvC2. Those games required on point execution. There was no short cut for SRKs or Supers like SF4 had. Timing was tighter and required you to be on the ball to get your damage in or avoid taking it.
The problem is most newer gamers suck at gaming. Gaming companies have helped produce this. Go play Super Mario Bros 3 and get back to me when you beat it from start to finish without continues or save states that most emulators have. Go play ST and tell me how many Supers you can throw out of 10 without gimping it. LOL, try a short short super in 3S.
Fighting games require a fair amount of work, yes. People want to instantly be as good as Daigo at fighters without putting any work in. I mean, shit, even FPS games have snap to or auto aim online. Are you kidding me?! New generation gamers… shit attitude towards gaming, life and have no persistence to see anything through unless there is a save point 2 steps out of the gate.
Execution is the easiest part of any fighting game any way. If execution was all it took people would play them more. It’s the amount of things you have to think about and be aware of in the spacing battle and meter management that has average people choking the most. They don’t know when or where to do things so they blame the game instead of their lack of knowledge of what to actually do.
Execution matters and it is a HUGE part of fighters. Doing a combo in training mode is not the same when on your next hit you’re going to die and you see your shot to land a super combo with 1/4 a second to react to the opening and drop the combo. It’s not small potatoes.
You’re right though, fighters require an intimate knowledge of your normals moves, specials, supers, combos and that of your opponent’s. You have to learn spacing, footsies, zoning, mix ups, how to bait people etc etc. It transfers from one game to the next though. It’s not like that process is entirely lost from one game to another. Safe spacing might alter from one game to another but fireball zoning is fireball zoning.
John Grimm you are an intelligent man. You’ve single handedly gave the best answer that could have been given on this thread.
Ok folks move on thread is over.
So which is it? Because in the mind of most sane people, “super easy games” do NOT require a “fair amount of work”. Maybe SF4 or MvC3 are “super easy” on the scale of fighting games, but measured against games as a whole, they are far from it.
There’s an attitude in this community that since they’ve been doing them since 1993, fireball motions and the like are super easy. It’s rather nearsighted.
There are basically no other games out there that have a learning curve that looks like the learning curve on fighting games. Are the games “too hard”? No, probably not, but they have a lot of “arcade leftover” design that was intended to suck quarters out of people, and they still do a terrible job of teaching people how to play them.
This whole “Oh, casual players suck because they want to be Daigo in ten minutes” argument is, frankly, blatantly false, and I think even the people who use it know that, or would if they examined the statement objectively. Nobody picks up StarCraft or League of Legends or Call of Duty or checkers, or any other competitive game and expects to be the most bestest world class player ever in those games right off the bat, and no one expects to be Daigo in 10 minutes either. The difficulty arises in that, in most modern games, the skills that have to be learned are entirely how to utilize your character/units/whatever. You don’t have to go to training mode and spend thirty minutes there to learn how build marines under pressure. You don’t have to master a special mouse motion to make the rocket fire. But you have to learn how to perform special moves reliably before you can even really think about playing your character in a fighting game. And that’s even setting aside all the stuff the game never actually tells you, and that you’re expected to figure out for yourself. In most other games, they don’t HAVE to teach stuff because it’s mostly logical - flying units go over terrain. Grenades explode and hit stuff around them. In fighting games we have stuff like “You can’t be thrown during your jump startup even though you’re still on the ground, oh, and we didn’t tell you that jumps have startup either.”
Make no mistake - the execution that is “easy” for people who have been playing these games for years is a serious obstacle to people who’ve never played one before, and they need to go through a lot of “busywork” that isn’t any fun before they can even really PLAY the game. No other genre has this. Most other genres, in fact, will handhold the player through learning the basic skillset. Fighting games have tried to do a little of this, but unfortunately, while learning how to build a barracks is something that you REALLY only need to be shown once, being able to perform an uppercut motion on wakeup is something you really need to PRACTICE, even before you can get into the interesting parts of the game like “Should I do an uppercut on wakeup?”
So no, Fighting Games are not “too hard” for the average player, but they are DISCOURAGING in a way few other games are, so only people who really like the particular breed of one vs one combat and have an above average tolerance for practice are going to stick with them. This isn’t necessarily a problem that needs to or even CAN be fixed, but people need to stop pretending that this is all super easy and that the people who don’t get into it are lazy.
Work and hard are two different things. I didn’t read your post, you fail at logic.
I would argue that that are, in fact, not different.
Definition #1 for “work” in my dictionary is “Physical or mental effort exerted to do or make something”
Definition #4 for “hard” is “demanding great physical or mental effort”
I don’t think it’s any sort of semantic stretch to go from “a fair amount of work” to “hard” in this context. All it takes is the understanding that “a fair amount” and “great” occupy the same general scale - that of “effort”.
In the spirit of having an honest discussion, I suggest you read my post, rather than attempt to avoid the issue by pointing out semantic issues, but if you wish to concede the point, I accept.
I would argue that games like LoL, Starcraft, and Chess all require as much memorization and learning as most fighting games. In Starcraft, if you didn’t memorize build orders you probably weren’t going to make it very far. Hotkeys, how to build building walls (not all of them are airtight!), the various counters to units, tech trees, etcetera.
I don’t see how learning how to throw a Sonic Boom is any different than learning to zoom in a sniper rifle and shoot. I think you’re actually discrediting non-fighting games because you don’t realize how much execution and memorization goes into them.
Turning a corner with a 2 joystick layout on a 360 controller requires significantly more complex hand motions than throwing a Hadouken.
I think the difference between fighting games and some other genres is that mashing buttons is fun for 30 minutes at most, and without actually seeking out a website like this and learning, that’s all a fighting game will ever be.
In contrast, I remember having a blast playing Warcraft 2 and Starcraft with my brother when I was little without knowing any technical details about the game. We just had fun building up forces and throwing them at each other. I also had a great time playing early shooters without any serious understanding of them.
I got my 8 year old cousin to play UMvC3 and he had extreme difficulty doing QCFs. I wouldn’t say that he’s anywhere close to “the average gamer” but not everyone has the finger dexterity required. Whether or not they could potentially develop that dexterity is another story.
I don’t really agree with you when it comes to SC2. Although macro can be learned organically, most players that actually want to be good have spent some time in “training mode” working on their macro, build optimization, etc. Tapping/queen injects are absolutely skills that need to be practiced on some level.
LoL has a much lower skill ceiling than a lot of other MoBAs. I wouldn’t put Call of Duty even in the same ballpark of competitive merit as most tournament fighting games/SC2. It’s a fratboy/couch shooter.
This really isn’t anything unique to fighting games. There are tons of SC2 players that get anxiety about hitting the “find match” button. Getting raped in RTS doesn’t feel any better than a fighting game.
On another note, unless someone can convince me this thread has something to do with getting better at fighting games, it’s getting moved to FGD soon.
Right, but I think you’re comparing apples to oranges a little here. Basically, the stuff you’re citing is what I’d consider “intermediate” play in those games - particularly a lot of the StarCraft stuff, outside of maybe build orders, is definitely TACTICS and not “how to manipulate the game” - i.e. it’s about what to do WHEN, not just how to do it anytime.
Most people, I think, consider throwing a Hadouken to be “beginner” fighting game stuff. It’s how to make a specific thing happen, regardless of whether it’s a good thing to do at a given time or not.
I think more people are okay with practicing “intermediate” tactics than “beginner” ones, and are more okay with practicing tactics than basic game mechanics. This is in keeping with my idea that it’s not the “difficulty” of fighting games so much as the shape of the learning curve and the lack of initial instruction in how to play that discourages people.
Also, a final thought on “hard” vs “work” - I think I figured out what the attempted distinction is here. I think Kuma Oni is trying to go for “things that require ‘work’ just require you to practice them” whereas things that are “hard” are difficult no matter how much you practice. The problem is that that’s a meaningless distinction in games - very, VERY few games would qualify as “hard” under that metric, even games which are legendarily difficult (“I wanna be the guy” or maybe like, Bayonetta on really high difficulties, or whatever) because all those games can still be beaten by someone who puts in enough practice. It’s generally regarded as bad design to build a game in which practice DOESN’T help. So if you try to differentiate “hard” vs “work” in that regard, you end up with “no games are hard” which is a little silly. Hard games are games that require a lot of practice to be good at.
It’s not meaningless, if you can’t find the distinction between the two that’s on you, pal.
All FG’s require effort. Every single one, some more than others. Games like Marvel are a lot more “Pick up and play” than games such as Blazblue and especially Guilty Gear, However, there are too many variables, you could be here ages on this question.
Becoming good in fighting games requires lots of time in training mode, repeatedly practicing the same things over and over again until you succeed consistently. I think most casual gamers would lose interest at the repetitiveness.
I accept your concession. 
Yes, and I don’t think that’s a problem. Fighting games reward investing a large amount of time in them, and that depth I would not take away.