Execution Barrier: Why is this still here?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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Warning: many replies below.

I would just like to take this opportunity to say that I personally have no respect for this concept. Hiding powerful moves and combos behind an execution barrier is the FG equivalent of sweeping dust under the rug.

It doesn’t even effectively hide the broken stuff from beginners. Maybe this worked ten years ago when people just played locally, but nowadays your average semi-competitive player will take a few minutes to practice his favorite character in training mode and spend a couple of days learning to beat the CPU, then go online and get absolutely destroyed by someone who spent a couple hundred hours in training mode endlessly doing reps of some one-touch-kill combo.

I don’t think those are even remotely comparable. I don’t even like FPS games that much but I can quick-scope and bunny-hop just fine. I don’t even think it took measurable time to pick up. I watched a video on youtube, tried it, got it the first time. With quick-scoping in particular, the dexterity needed to do it is naturally learned from just playing the game normally.

Practical example: I am fairly ambivalent about FPS games but I love fighting games. Yet I play more FPS franchises than I do fighting games. When a new FPS game comes out and it looks good I pick it up because it’s generally fun and my basic FPS skills can get me through the gameplay just fine. I can develop my competitive skills as I play. When a new fighting game comes out, even when it looks extremely interesting, I do a ton of research about how long it takes to get competitive before I buy it. I have skipped out on tons of titles for this reason.

I have a job now. I don’t have the time to be futzing around in training mode anymore. Not when I could actually be playing a game instead. I’ll do it for a game that I really love, like Skullgirls, but I’m not going to sink hours and hours into learning drive cancel combos in KoF. This is particularly sad because I have played every title from KoF '95 to 2003. It used to be this franchise that I could just pick up and play, but now it’s turned into yet another massive training mode grind.

I hear this a lot and it’s such a load of BS. I remember being a child when SF2 first came out and dominating at the local arcade because I had mastered the art of doing DP and QCF motions on both sides. For newbies, a DP motion might as well be a pretzel and focus-cancel into Ultra might as well be a lightning loop (you are free to think of “lightning loop” as either the one used by Zero or the one used by Chun Li).

Look at that reality show where JWong breezed through Tekken’s survival mode while the other contestants struggled. Look at those videos of Skullgirls voice actresses trying to play the game. Some SRK members have been playing fighting games so long they’ve completely lost touch of how hard it really is to do basic stuff in this genre.

When my ship explodes in a bullet-hell game, it’s not because I dropped my bomb input. Those games are hard to beat, but easy to play.

Mike worked really hard to make Skullgirls as easy as it could be, while staying true to his vision of a complex, hardcore game. No double-qcf motions, fairly generous buffer windows, and many other “helper” features abound. It was the easiest version of a game that was designed to have complex systems and conform to established norms in the genre. It’s the opposite of SF4, which was a game designed to be simple but saddled with an asinine combo system with arbitrary execution barriers. The fact that gatling jabs and shorts cannot be canceled but linked ones can disgusts me to this day.

For a true revolution in FG controls, we need something like what Pocket Rumble is trying. I’m not saying that Pocket Rumble has the holy grail of controls (maybe it does but I dunno for sure), but they have the right idea of trying to come up with fundamentally new ways of doing moves.

They’re not wrong per se. In some games (UMVC3 for example) you can win so much more by practicing canned combos and setups than you could by working on fundamentals. Having both is better, but depending on the game overloading on execution can get you pretty far.

Depends on whether I’m spending it playing against people or practicing combos on a dummy.

… who have tons of free time to dick around in training mode, and don’t mind doing so instead of actually playing some other competitive game like LoL or DotA.

One of those skills is developed by performing repetitive drills in a separate mode designed for practicing repetitive drills. The other is developed by playing the game.

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@Ukyo_rulz You make some very valid points. Especially about how us vets forgot how hard it can be to do these moved when you’re a noob. But how simple should they really be? Should they be like Smash in terms of execution? Also yes you can learn the gameplay by playing. However noobs get discouraged when stomped repeatedly by vets or by what they consider "try hard/cheap/dishonorable tactics. For those types I say add a more noob/casualoy friendly mode that eases them into the game.

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Incorrect. Kano’s ball moves had diagonal inputs. As well as some other moves.

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There is an important distinction here, I think, between “simple” and “easy”. If we took your average Tekken character and mapped every move to a separate button, it would be “easy” but not “simple”. On the other hand it’s perfectly possible to take a “simple” move like EWGF and turn it into a just-frame so it’s nowhere near what we would call “easy”.

I think games should strive to be as “easy” as possible, while still being “simple”. The Tekken franchise does a lot of things right in this regard*. Movelists have upwards of 80 distinct moves without requiring much more than a direction + a button. Personally I don’t see a compelling reason that all motions couldn’t just be like command normals.

Like, what if a fireball was df + p. Simple and easy. You lose a ton of dexterity requirements. You emphasize strategy and decision-making over reflexes and muscle memory. You even discourage mashing because when you mash you get accidental fireballs.

You also get instant sonic booms and flash kicks, but those are easily fixable design problems. Add a cooldown to Sonic Booms. Stop making overpowered anti-airs (Sakura has a one-motion anti-air in c.hp that no one complains about, why not Guile?). That kinda thing.

  • Yes I know that Tekken has just-frames.
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Just frames are probably THE stupidest thing to get added to fighting games.

Kind of funny in retrospect that NRS added just frame moves to MkvsDC because they thought that’s what “pro players” wanted.

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@Ukyo-rulz I looked up pocket rumble. And I gotta say I agree with this. I see no reason why fighter’s can’t work like this. And a cooldown period would balance moves like sonic boom or flash kick. Hell charge characters would be “cool” characters lol. So that handles the execution requirement for specials. But what about other aspects like chains and links? I wouldn’t want to see combos limited for accessibility sake. And what about moves like SPDs or Darkness Illusions (Raging Demons)? Moves like those would be pretty broken if they’re so easily performed. Or would you remove such moves all together?

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oh look its this thread again

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When game is desighn around that. their has to be other changes to compensate and compliment.

PBE combo get limited in tradition means but PBE addresses this by providing a lot combo filler moves and variety of cancel.

Command grabs are scarce in PBE
Kuirsu: Zangiefe’ SPD
Mei: Cammy’s Hooligan Combination
Yuzuha: Vega’s Rolling Inzuna Drop

majority of other character have attack with catch properties like El fuerte and Able.

In most fighter grab is use to deal with opponent who strong at blocking since most game make overheads react able. This is not the case Phantom breaker since Pressure have alot of 50/50s

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If you change the inputs of a move you have to also change its properties.
A single button SRK would have to lose a good deal of its speed, coverage and invincibility. A single button fireball would have lose speed, recovery and chip damage. Once you’ve made enough changes like this you will have changed how the character plays significantly. Because of this, if you want to have a game with only inputs like that, it’s best to just make a new game. For example, Ideas like that are what led to the smash bros series and Pocket Rumble.

As for just frame moves, I personally don’t mind it if it is only a few characters game that actually need them and the characters that need them are also usually made specifically for people that want to show that kind of skill.

Also QCF is not a difficult input.

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Can you explain why these changes have to be made?

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Bullshit. QCFx2 is not fucking hard, it takes an AFTERNOON to get consistent at. Stop making excuses for lazyness.

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For beginners? Yeah, those are actually pretty clunky. The thing about execution discussion is that people confuse what is meant by making it easier. Should you have to practice just to do a move? That’s bad execution. Spending all day to learn a ToD, on the other hand, is execution at the right place. When people wanna make the game easier to play, a lot of the times it means cleaning up convoluted motions.

Seriously though, SCV with QFCx2 motions meant that I had access to super and my friend didn’t. Even dragon punches are kind of clunky but hey, they work. Charge motions are the worst because you don’t get a good sense of when you have charge unless you play a lot.

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Double QCF motions are only hard because SF4’s input shortcut often makes an EX DP come out instead.

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You know what’s the funny part? Same shit happens to me trying to super in 3rd Strike.

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Commitment and time mainly. In SF the reward for executing a shoryuken at the right moment can be really high. In a pressure situation at the very least you get to stop an opponent who successfully got in range and started applying pressure and you get a knockdown. Sometimes you can even cancel into a super for high damage. The srk motion makes this reasonable, because you have to stop blocking for a while and stop crouching in order to do your reversal shoryuken(although as I understand it in sf4 the input buffer + the shortcuts make it so that neither of these conditions are really true in that particular game).
So with that in mind, if you change the input for a shoryuken to just DF+P, it require less commitment and precision to use it in tight spots. So you should change the properties of the move to reflect that.

The difference in inputs for projectiles can be observed in SF games. The hado and the sonic boom are both just fireballs, but since Guile was decided to be a charge character (and charges take nearly 1 full second) his fireball starts and recovers faster to make up for it. A one button projectile would require its own tweaks.

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Execution shouldn’t be used as a means to balance a move. People will eventually be able to master pulling the move off anyway which negates the balancing act.

You can see this in action in Skullgirls (since Mike Z was someone who expressed the sentiment above) where all of Cerebella’s command grabs are just quarter circle motions, yet she’s not exactly broken. At the same time, the game follows the older Marvel games where Darkness Illusion/Raging Demon type catch supers are also just quarter circle or dragon punch two attack buttons.

You get a sense that the old Capcom developers actually understood this somewhat when they made the Marvel (and to an extend the Vampire) games. Since these were more combo heavy, the first thing to go were SF style double motions.

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I think the execution barrier is less important than just how the move gets used. Grab supers usually require some kind of setup (hide the jabs, buffer the first circle) and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. You can make the move more powerful at the cost of making walk up super grab impossible. I can’t imagine adding that limitation with a single motion + 2 button press input.

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If you’re getting EXDPs instead of Ultras it means youre likely

  1. inputing 23623+PPP instead of 236236+PPP
    or
  2. missed your PPP simultaneous button hit.
    It’s not a cause of SF4’s input leniency.

That is pretty funny because supers in 3s only require a single P or K button. That shouldn’t even happen.

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This doesn’t hold up if the game is nothing like sf. Every fighting game series handle its self differently. This type of thinking would never let any other fighter stand on its own footing because it’ll be judge by on bias stand point that favors one type design. Its like how people treat the First Person Shooter and Third person shooter games. Both game operate fundamentally different.

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English please. i dont speak arcade stick.

I’m pretty sure it’s the shortcuts.