Actually the reason there are so many good players now is because people share tech, are less abrasive and try to help each other.
I didn’t say “there are good players because of come back mechanics” I said “there are SO MANY good players because of come back mechanics” come back mechanics maintains equality throughout the whole match, so its never just a steamroll and then the weaker player having to steamroll back to catch up, it allows hope throughout the whole match, in older games when you have half your life left even equal players get slightly discouraged, imagine how bad weaker players feel.
please think about this thoroughly
I agree completely with you, OP. I’ve found this first-hand when trying to show friends the ropes of SF4, which, TBH, I still don’t really understand the mechanics of myself (I dont really play). SF2 series was really the pinnacle of the classic ‘Street Fighter’ fighting concept and it seems to me that Capcom just kinda ruined it all going forward.
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ST has some of the simplest, easiest to learn game mechanics aside from learning the controls (undoubtedly difficult for any newcomers to fighters). From the very onset of learning ST, you’re learning core mechanics that you will utilize throughout your entire ST career, and can immediately put those to use.
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the overall high damage of the game means that everything you do matters, your normals are very important and you don’t NEED to convert into combos to actually defeat your opponent.
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playing ST makes me realize how pointless comeback mechanics are. there is not a single game where I see more pixel comebacks in than ST. High damage, ridiculous stun, momentum change and putting your opponent on tilt are such key elements to the game that practically any comeback is possible with one or two good reads.
ST’s not a faultless game by any means, but it’s fast, fun and easy to learn. Why is Capcom not able to break down the mechanics of their OWN game and distill it to help newcomers get into a ‘new’ game? I honestly question every design decision that went into SF4 with either the purpose of ‘enticing newcomers’ or ‘satisfying the hardcore’ because every mechanic designed for either of those two demographics turned into a fairly sizable design flaw. I get that SF4 is overall considered a success, but the numbers are very sad compared to the success SF2 had and you can’t blame everything on the death of arcades in North America.
I have also yet to find this mythical person that found ultras hype/enticing/making anyone want to play the game. Even people who don’t play fighters find the idea of rewarding the losing player stupid.
Oh really now… This guy says, “What’s up?”
FUCK LUCARIO.
I think he meant melee lol
x-factor gets a bad rep for obvious reasons, but honestly it was probably the best thing that could have happened for marvel 3 IMO
Getting hit by some cheese and then having to block 2 impossibly difficult incoming mixups and not getting to play the game naturally needs some sort of counter mechanic, and x-factor is that mechanic. Obviously, it’s not an ideal model but honestly most of the people complaining about x-factor don’t play the game. People have adapted at this point and snapback problem characters and what have you. X-factor is also needed as a defensive mechanic so people can’t abuse cheesy meaty setups and mindless offense.
If I had to change x-factor, whilst keeping all the other game mechanics the same, I’d simply make it not have a multiplicative effect with state change supers such as devil trigger, since that is honestly the biggest problem. You can look at the idea of a comeback mechanic as a blanket term in a vacuum all you want, but it honestly has a place in a game where it’s so easy to OCV 3 characters (cough, zero, firebrand, viper, etc). You really can’t feel that guilty coming back with x-factor and winning in 15 seconds when your opponent turns the game into a 1 player game anyway. It’s just a model that uses extremes on both ends in order to create somewhat of a logical and competitive system. Again, it’s not perfect, but in 2015 x-factor honestly gets more hate than it deserves.
my 2 cents
Pretty sure every Capcom fighting game ever for the past 20 years has given super meter for taking damage. Not to the same degree and manner as the revenge meter sure, but I can never understand why people try and make this argument/point like it hasn’t always been a thing that happens.
sigh, since im wrong im expecting there to be no scent of come back mechanics in street fighter 5 and tekken x street fighter. I would say tekken 7 but
So is this theead some kind of conspiracy? Its doing too great job of making me wanna play more sf2
If only there was a game like that but with airdashes
Every newcomer should at least try any version of Virtua Fighter. No comebacks mechanics there.
Instead of worrying about building up meter, you try to overcome any obstacles by your own abilities.
This and ST remain my favourite fighters.
SF4 is beginner friendly and helps with the basics as well to a certain level, provided it is not the only fighting game a beginner plays.
This is not so much the case with other SF iterations, which more or less had something in common both with each other and other fighters as well.
Eg Garou borrows elements both from SFIII and RBFF.
SF2, Fatal Fury and Samurai Spirits 1 share some similarities.
But SF4 has no equivalent because no other company could produce a 2.5d fighter of such scale.
Capcom fighters have now an even bigger share of the 2D FG pie compared to the pre-SF4 era
How come nobody is mentioning 3rd Strike. In that game, there is aspects of comeback mechanics for sure but for the most part the comeback is achieved through skills that might not be primary to the game itself (Althought critical ie. Parry)
Third strike is a very high damage game so no comeback mechanics needed.
Daigo full parry into 50% combo is a great illustration of this. Chun cr.mk xx sa2 doing 40% or more against the entire cast being another illustration, yun shitting out huge damage via genei jin for the smallest amount of meter ever is another example.
The “skill” used to comeback there is the developers making the game super high damage so that cr.mk xx super does all the work for you etc etc
if your goal is to train people to be good at fighters, sure, comeback mechanics are bad. If your goal is to convince people they’re good long enough for them to buy the game and maybe some DLC, then comeback mechanics are very good.
Didn’t know about that, I never went passed melee… Can I say that its not a smash mechanic, its a character unique mechanic? Or is that statement just bullshit?
he deals more damage as he takes on damage so it would be a character mechanic.
This isn’t really such a cut-and-dried topic as it seems. It’s not so much the idea of a comeback mechanic that’s troubling for most people, but the actual implementation.
Sirlin did a reasonable job of explaining the basic ideas behind comeback mechanics here:
There are things he doesn’t cover though. eg. Some fighting games getting knocked would result in a sharp slippery slope without a compensating factor. For example, in SFIV suppose Akuma knocks you down and goes for vortex oki. Before you got knocked down, you didn’t have to guess. Now you do, and that’s the first disadvantage outside of limited options. Secondly, each time you guess wrong, your stun meter increases. Thirdly, your opponent’s Super meter grows with each incorrect guess, potentially giving him more options. This is bad in SFIV, but it’s not as bad as it could be for several reasons:
- Getting hit increases your Ultra meter AND your Super meter
- As your health bar decreases, you take less damage.
The first part is important because some characters’ vortex escape options require meter. If they can’t get meter by getting hit, then the situation is pretty dire. You end up with a slippery slope which in most cases is undesirable. Life scaling is pretty much a tool to aid the losing player. It is also a comeback mechanic but most people don’t have a problem with some form of scaling. Now you have to ask yourself: In a situation where for the most part your defense options are based on complete guesswork, is having these types of mechanics really hurting beginners? One could argue that it might teach them not to get knocked down in the first place, but as everyone knows, even top players lose to BS oki, in every game.
Regarding Combofiend’s comments that expert players know how to evade comeback mechanics, this isn’t really universally true. In SFII, comeback mechanics work such that the person who is losing (by rounds) does more damage on average. His point doesn’t really apply to this type of system. It also has a very strange implementation of life scaling, in that sometimes moves that would otherwise kill you actually don’t, and moves do less damage, do. Now this is potentially much less obvious and more confusing to a player than figuring out that over a round his opponent did on average 6% more damage than he did.
As for the OPs points about comeback mechanics obsuring strategy. You can have this effect in games that have no visible comeback mechanic themselves simply by hiding high damage behind combos that require execution beyond the reach of beginners. This has absolutely nothing to do with comebacks. If you change to argument to simply refer to voluntary comeback mechanics that require execution (like Ultra combos), it’s very simple to just point out involuntary systems (ie. not accessible to the player) like life scaling. Again, it’s got nothing to do with the concept of comebacks itself.
best player will win…end of story…scrubs either gonna quit or level up
Um Vampire Hunter/Night Warriors?
As anyone lost to a lesser player due to the Ultra system?
Haha, fucking SF4. If you play Vega, then Ultra isn’t a fucking comeback mechanic, it’s you finally having a god damned reversal. Fuck the developers of that game, lol. “What? You got your ass kicked? You lack a tool? Well, here is a 1 use tool that you should have, but don’t, because someone beat me in a tournament using ST Vega, you scumbag claw player!”