I didn’t think that it did reset after stun in 3s?
A fighting game should make it easier for new players to learn the mechanics and basics to play. But designed in a way so that a noob can fight on par with a vet? Wut? A noob should simply play people on his/her skill level till he/she improves and feels like he/she can hang wigh the big boys and girls. If you want that go play Smash or PS Allstars with items on, and leave fighters designed for competition as is.
the irony is that due to SFIV slow gameplay, it is very unlikely that you’ll be dizzied…
that game has blockstun though…
I don’t think that a game should be designed around newcomers, but there can be little bits of help for a newcomer, like a stun gauge or even a little tutorial to acclimate newcomers to the mechanics better when they get the game.
I’ll be damned if this topic and the ones defending the OP aren’t the scrubbiest thing of the year thus far.
This is scrub quotes gold.
potential for dizzy is dramatic and full of tension, therefore it is cool.
getting dizzied is supposed to suck. getting command thrown is supposed to suck. jumping and landing on a fireball or a dp is supposed to suck. losing is supposed to suck.
also: no stun gauge is interesting because it rewards the player who is counting stun, which is usually the attacker more than the defender. it creates an additional little mental mini game that rewards offense, and distinguishes good players. imo it’s cool.
I can’t really agree that a lack of a stun gauge rewards anyone, but stun in itself does reward offense.
You serious?
The OP was pretty scrubby, obviously, but what’s more painful to read is the number of people acting like stun in fighting games is a black-and-white deal.
Sure it isn’t, that’s why some games implement it and others don’t.
The same can be said about Super gauges, Revenge gauges or desperation moves when you health is low enough, recoverable/red life, and so on.
I guess mike Z is a scrub
thread was poorly made but its otherwise a decent concept for a discussion
it all depends on how much benefit the designers want to arbitrarily allocate to “landing a move.” one extreme is that damage alone is the sole benefit. theres probably no fighting game that does this besides yie ar and other super old games. then hit properties like knockdown/frame advantage are factored in, and stun, and the fact that landing a move builds more meter than being hit by that same move (arbitrary benefit for the attacker). in other words, artificial “depth” is added to most fighting games by assigning additional benefits to the person landing moves without changing how those moves are landed. aka inflating the difference between the players’ skill levels by adding a bonus to what the better player is already doing more often. but then, complaints were made that the defending player gets too much meter in kof xiii and tons of players were mounting comebacks with hd combos after being hit by one. but the reason people defined that as a comeback in the first place was because we’re all used to seeing the defending player build negligible meter from taking hits
i think stun is an interesting mechanic because some moves deal more than others, with many dealing none. the dynamic between the players changes because the defender may prioritize not being stunned above taking damage or sacrificing a state/position. it also adds diversity because some characters who would otherwise not be that dangerous can use momentum as a legitimate threat in itself.
im not aware of an objective way to determine which approach is the “best” from a game design standpoint. but maybe there is one.
Tell that to the Scrubquotes crowd.
^Pretty much this
Dizzy doesn’t add anything good to a game, in fact it sometimes makes games worse.
Stun bar should always be visible. Hiding important information from the players is really whack.
In 3s Yang and Makoto can actually revolve their game around dealing stun, which I think is really neat. Adds a different dimension to the game. I’ve definitely had games of Chun vs Yang where Chun has the life lead but is almost stunned. Can lead to some cool/tense situations.
It changes decision making too. For instance as Makoto you might make meter use decisions based on whether it will stun. Post hayate, will sa1 stun or kill? The answer matters for what you do next. And if both players are paying attention to that there’s a cool layer of the mixup game there that wouldn’t otherwise be present.
I think ‘stun just rewards damage with more damage’ is a really simplistic way to look at it.
Everyone in this thread is terrible.
I think Stun is just one of those case-by-case mechanics. It’s all about how this particular mechanic interacts with the other elements of the game.
Generally, stun is pretty polarizing because of how easy it is to make look good or bad. The OP, for example, is looking at stun from the “getting stunned” point of view, where it seems brutal and unnecessary. “I’m already losing…why make me lose more?” A reasonable opinion for sure, his punishment for losing is that he’s losing…except for the fact that he’s building Revenge meter for doing it, also (maybe more on that later). Most posters who disagree are looking at stun from the “stunning the opponent” point of view, where it seems intriguing and attractive. “I may or may not have a huge life lead, but this string of attacks can either get me back in the game or pull me super far ahead if I can tip my opponent over the edge and into stun.” This opinion is also fine, using the appeal of stun to incentivise offensive play while also enforcing a balanced style of play from defenders (as opposed to just blocking).
The major issue with stun as a general mechanic is that it’s a pretty brute force way of getting ideas across. Defensively, especially in a franchise like Street Fighter that is known for having a pretty barebones system, stun can be pretty overwhelming despite how “fair” it actually is (all other mechanics in SF4 considered). Using an arbitrary damage buildup threshold as an impetus for offensive play is a pretty silly way of saying, “Hey, you don’t have to resort to timeouts…you can be offensive and get rewarded for it!” Similarly, the “learn to defend better” mantra should be a general (and primary) skill for players without this particular mechanic trying to shove it in peoples’ faces, considering the straightforwardness of the defensive system in SF4.
@Ramrod mentioned earlier that Guard Crush is a better mechanic than stun. Overall, it is. At the very least, it’s a much more elegant mechanic, but you can’t really implement Guard Crush in SF4 because of the way the other mechanics fit into the game. Guard Crushing is best suited, I feel, for games that have a much broader and deeper space for types of defense and defensive play. Imagine Guard Crush in SF4…no thanks! Sometimes you just have to block it out (even Focus can’t save you all the time) and for a game where jumping is not always a great idea ON TOP of the fact that mobility isn’t exactly a strong suit of characters in this game, you can see that Guard Crush would be a pretty ineffective mechanic overall. On the other hand, trying to use stun as an incentive to attack is, in my mind, a red flag that is telling me maybe there aren’t enough ways to conduct an effective offense already such that the game has to resort to carrots on sticks. Is stun simply present as an incentive to increase pressure? Surely, it isn’t, but the reasoning that it is there for such a purpose is pretty weak and speaks very poorly of the minds putting these mechanics together.
The thing that takes all the super silly things that SF4 does together and makes them seem fair (or at least playable) is the Revenge gauge. Ironically, this mechanic is probably one of the silliest, but it’s the glue that really holds the rest of the game together. Without stun, the game definitely looks much more defensive (not on the merits of stun alone) since nothing else is really going to make someone want to go in and risk getting blasted by all that “life lost” meter (or “reverse rage”, as I call it). Similarly, stun plays into the “comeback” theme of SF4. Most people look at stun from a steamroller perspective, but comebacks can happen largely because of a good string of attacks into a setup or mixup into stun. The comeback factor is curbed (thankfully) by the sharp damage scaling equation and the fact that damage doesn’t reset in stun (thank everything holy for this). SF4 is just really good at taking many silly and possibly not very smart things and putting them together in a very attractive and playable way.
TL;DR – It could be worse. Don’t read too much into it.
Stun is not something that is set in stone a good mechanic that deserves to be in every game. The arguments for it have been mostly ridiculous.
It’s to reward multiple correct guesses. You know what else does that? The damage you get from those multiple correct guesses. Getting free damage because you earned damage is kind of a ridiculous design. Why shouldn’t you have to earn ALL the damage you get?
Then the argument that it encourages offensive play. If you need more encouragement than getting damage for the sake of getting damage, I’m not sure I understand how your brain works. You are encouraged to win, and you win by doing damage, whether to KO or to time out. Stun is a redundant incentive to encourage offensive play because you already have all the reason you need to hit someone. Additionally, there are other mechanics that give similar incentive that aren’t as crazy as stun is, like guard crush.
I don’t think stun is a bad mechanic, but I don’t think it’s a mechanic that has been used properly either. To me, stun should be something that shouldn’t be achieved through basic rushdown mixup, resets, or combos. Those things should contribute to stun, but stun as a mechanic should incentivise using certain moves, like Gief headbutt, that score a lot of stun that would otherwise be less useful than the typical footsies and pressure tools to reward you for situational awareness.
I think it’s horses for courses. I like Guard break in KOF, due to the rushiness of the game all round, but likewise wouldn’t expect it in a SF title.
From the outside looking in, Fighting Games are largely condemned for not being built with the beginner in mind, but think about the alternative.
I recently watched a vid about a dropped SF sequel from Backbone called Flashback that was going to simplify input motions, provide players the ability to rewind mistakes in-game and all-round compress the skill gap. If that proposal made it off the table, rather than SF4, I’d argue that most FG fans would still be playing Third Strike at tourneys, or even have dropped the SF franchise for something like Marvel or shudder Injustice. You sure as hell wouldn’t have a scene as widespread as the one you have now. Catering for beginners is for Triple-A titles that are grinding out a game a year, and that people play through once and then throw back on the pile.
I think FG devs, despite the shit we give them for DLC etc, are taking a pretty big hit for keeping the games technical for the sake of a comparatively small market. It’d be so easy for them to make a chain-only, chargeless, throwless, stunless, minimal input game that reaps cash and lasts 3 months, but they don’t.
So no, removing something because it’s scary to newcomers isn’t a gray area; it’s a slippery slope that we’re lucky we don’t have to deal with…so keep it out haha.
Dizzy is a mechanic that reinforces momentum, and increases the uh “explosiveness” of matches. Whether that’s good or bad depends on the game, and whether or not the game needs more momentum/explosiveness.
In KoFXIII, it’s pretty much just a tool to make non-HD, higher execution, high meter combos more useful. I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen somebody stunned from pressure, or even from a reset instead of just from one combo. I don’t see how it could hurt the game, it doesn’t really effect momentum or the neutral game, and most characters I’m aware of who can use it for big damage (usually 100% combos) have 85%/90% HD combos.
In SFIV at low, and even mid levels it’s how the OP describes it, when one player is absolutely owning another person the player losing gets stunned. This is often irrelevant, and the person who got stunned generally wasn’t going to win anyway. At higher levels people have actual stun setups, especially in Ultra, and their both players are often aware of the stun level, so it actively increases pressure, and certain characters have the ability to use it in a way that burns their meter to turn one opening and one reset into a round changing event. Personally at this point of the game I’d say it’s good for Ultra, since the game’s momentum/explosiveness is kind of low without red focus/stun setups. I do agree that making it visible via a bar would make it a much better implementation, allowing mid level players to be aware of what’s going on, so that it feels less random to them when they get stunned, and when they see it happen on stream.
Putting it into SkullGirls would obviously be stupid, most of what I’ve seen of that game is too much momentum and non enough neutral game. Mid level players seem to spend entire matches with less than three seconds without one player either being currently in a combo or in a reset situation, you don’t need to add stun to that, and since that’s the type of game Mike Z wanted to make, obviously he’s going to not be interested in stun as a mechanic.