In Dungeon Fighter you can modify inputs if you don’t like commands like half circle or up down up down or even assign a skill to a hotkey on a keyboard and you can even seal the skill so you can’t do it by accident.
A simple example with Male Gunner would be Z for Jack Spike and forward Z for Rising Shot. You use Jack Spike often as a launcher or to super armor through stuff, but lets say you have to move forward a little and execute it, then you would get Rising Shot instead, so in this case I assigned it to a different hotkey and sealed the skill.
Similarly, in fighting games you want to try to avoid moves from being too short or overlapping to prevent them from interfering with game play.
I liked how in Rival Schools a normal was qcf while a super was qcf x 2.
If you have only one button for the super, depending on button used you can produce different results, such as different speeds, for location, etc.
I agree, and as it happens, so does every fighting game designer ever. Every fighting game that exists has an extremely ‘low floor’, by definition. It is in fact about as low as it can possibly get, or else it could no longer be considered to be a fighting game at all.
As for whatever stupid feelings players may experience, the problem lies of course completely with their own self-esteem, not with the game. To suggest that fighting games should be changed to accommodate to that sort of people, seems to me a terrible idea indeed.
Or perhaps we are the ones that do, because the distinction that is being made here between Smash and fighting games is completely artificial. It can be annoying for beginners to get stomped on by experts, in Smash or in any game, and that’s all there is to it.
You made something up, in order to explain in another way the issues arising from one player being far superior to another. But there is no other explanation, that’s all there is.
But you are. By making inputs easier, you are removing some depth. Not all, of course, but the complexity is reduced by a considerable amount.
Every fighting game does this. It is of course possible to, for argument’s sake, imagine a game in which the basics are hard to learn, but actually, no such fighting game exists, and all these problems were solved long before they were ever hallucinated.
I have seen little children play Third Strike. You think they felt ‘overwhelmed’? You think they went all: ‘boo fucking hoo I can’t do Shoryuken’ or ‘How the fuck do I tech throw what is this shit’? No, they had a great time. They picked Twelve, and had no inclinations whatsoever to hallucinate any problems with the game.
@Kwyjibo lol nah not offended at all. Just find it absurd how you think the FPS or MOBA community is more social when here in the FGC we actually meet up in person. Like you talk like going out to a local, and meeting new people who are passionate about the same hobby you like is some type of chore or hassle for the average gamer. I’m like damn are us gamers actually that anti-social that most of us prefer gaming on-line and not in person with others. Getting off topic though but that had to be said.
You’re placing way more value on meeting in person than socializing online. There is more value in it for some, but it also comes with other hassles. You may not see them as hassles, but I do, and I’m sure others do as well.
Also, look into your local MOBA and CS scenes. I would be very surprised if your local FGC is more active than your local LoL, Dota 2, or even CS scene.
@JaceBuilder Yes a noob in Smash can get destroyed by a vet just like in SF. The difference is that with Smash being so easy to learn the average player wont feel hopeless. They feel like they can improve with more play. Where as with SF and other traditional fighters. If you don’t have the basics down which take much more time and practice to learn. You’ll never improve no matter how much you play. And as we stated before. Not every gamer has the time for that, Also reducing the execution does not remove depth, Smash shows us this. Depth comes from the mechanics and gameplay. Not the controls. Although if they’re simplified to extreme levels like Divekick, then I’d agree with ya. As for kids playing 3rd strike. They’re kids. Minus a few exceptions most kids will have fun with a fighter just mashing with their fav character. Older gamers though want to know what they’re doing while playing. With Smash the basics are quickly pidked up. In more traditional fighters, not really.
One more thing I’d like to add to the discussion is that the current fighting game norms are amplifying the problem of input latency over the net. Tekken’s netcode is not especially great, but it is one of the most playable titles online because the game just doesn’t require the kind of split-second timing that SF4-type titles impose on players. I do believe that improvements in netcode are a laudable goal, but designers ought to also consider that most players play online nowadays and devise their control schemes accordingly*.
And no, I do not accept UMVC3’s “lag simulator” as a legitimate way to address online play problems.
I have noticed this also. I remember when MVC2 was considered to be a “combo-crazy” game, but nowadays a UMVC3 BnB combo easily dwarfs all but the longest MVC2 combos (not counting repetitive loops of course). Just look at what happened to the KoF series. Whatever happened to the days when KoF combos were “normal->command normal->special/super”.
As for casual player options, it almost feels like modern fighting games have their priorities backwards when they try to cater to newbies. It’s all about training mode options, combo trials, (gimped) alternative control schemes and whatnot. Instead of trying to design their games to be new-player friendly, game companies are trying to design tools to help new players play their finicky games. This is all well and good for the truly dedicated fan, but fighting games don’t exist in a vacuum. There are other compelling competitive options now.
I agree that this will probably help to grow the fighting game community as a whole, but it worsens the casual/competitive divide. I’m concerned that the competitive community growth has plateaued.
This forum exists because when SF2 came out it was head-and-shoulders ahead of everything else in its time. It took the world by storm, and spearheaded the revival of arcades. During that time fighting games could afford to be esoteric and inaccessible because they dominated the market and competitive players had little choice but to learn them. Nowadays there are shooters and MOBAs to contend with, and even with the recent fighting game resurgence the FG genre is still a niche in the greater video-game ecosystem.
Not to discount the achievement of streams and SF4 to bring fighting games mainstream, of course, but other franchises are not breaking out and generating sizable communities. UMVC3 should have been a wake-up call to the competitive community, as it epitomized the “training mode all day erry day” mentality of game design and was a commercial failure even with the popular Marvel license behind it. Tekken is doing well, but it’s a bit of an outlier since Tekken did well even during the dark ages of fighting games. I also think it’s no coincidence that by and large, Tekken controls are much simpler than 2d fighter controls (ie. df+p vs qcf+p).
My main issue with your list is that you are only comparing fighting games to other fighting games, but fighting games are not just competing with other fighting games for the attention of players. They are competing with all other games. That would be like me saying that Blazblue is an extremely accessible game because I am only comparing it to Guilty Gear and other “anime” combo-fests.
It’s not even about casuals vs hardcores for me. There are plenty of hardcore, competitive players out there that could be playing fighting games but are instead playing RTS, shooter or MOBA games because those games allow you to get better by playing the actual game, not grinding in training mode.
Forget harming your arms. Mashing harms your expensive fight-stick. I died a bit inside when I found out that mashing was grafted onto UMVC3.
There is no “depth” in execution. You have 1/60th of a second to press a button. Now do it over and over until you are good at doing it over and over. If you fail, do it over and over some more.
It’s not like you’re uncovering layer upon layer of yomi with each 1-frame-link in your combo. It’s literally as “deep” as dialing a number on your phone. If you drop your combo you don’t have to dig deeper into your understanding of the game or your opponent. You just have to spend more time doing drills in training mode. Many people don’t want to do this. Some in this thread have called this out as being “lazy”, but it’s sensible to not want to spend your limited leisure time doing repetitive drills. I question whether it makes any sense at all to take the most tedious part of a game that’s supposed to be fun, and elevate it as one of the most important defining characteristics of a genre.
Competitive players will know about just-frames before they ever try a game, because they will read up on the title to see what they have to do to get competitive. If a competitive player wants to play Devil Jin, but does not want to grind out that EWGF, he will simply not play Tekken at all.
“Compete with the big boys” != “control their character”. Good players should be beating new players because they are making better choices, not because new players are unable to make their character follow through on the choices they make.
If a beginner does a reversal ultra, which is baited and punished by a veteran, their instinctive reaction is “that was a mistake, I will not do a careless wake-up ultra in the future. I want to play another game right now, so I can immediately apply this new thing I learned.”
If a beginner does a reversal ultra, which does not come out and instead they eat an attack that the ultra would have beaten, their instinctive reaction is “this game is stupid. I should have beaten that attack but I didn’t. I shut this game down and play a different game where the controls actually work.”
The phenomenon is even evident in these very forums. So many players here decry online play as not legitimate, and some don’t play online at all. It frustrates them when their characters don’t do what they want. Newbies are essentially living in controls-don’t-work-land all the time.
@ukyo_rulz Maybe because my list is only about fighting games. I’m not concern about the issue of the genre longevity or what other genres are doing because its not my priority.
Why are we even comparing MOBA,ROTA, and FPS with FG? Their model hasn’t worked for the FG or atleast I haven’t seen one that has, and probably not for while because fighters is Niche. Remember Xuan Dou Zhi Wang? they did exactly what LoL did and other things people suggest, Different modes. unlock able move set. custom inputs, competent training mode. interactive Tutorial. It does the exact thing Moba does outside of the main game being 1 vs 1. Their team mode with 6 can play)Oh but guys what happen to that game? They fell to obscurity an on life support due to not enough interest and traffic.
Before any body say anything about how difficult it is to get that game in the first place. Importer always had difficulty getting stuff, it is what it is, but their were still people who did their best to bring the game to people attention but was sorely ignored for being a " KoF rip off" … not to mention their was petition to get the game international release but the petition number didn’t justify the the company to bother with it.
The point I’m driving is that the FG is in this state now, not because of developer and their ambitions but because FGC is nit picking community.
This is a problem because this is exactly what everyone involved in the FGC, from players, to TOs, to the developers themselves needs to be concerned with.
@ukyo_rulz has a point. People are too concerned with figuring out how to get beginners over that barrier, that we forget that a better solution would be to just lower the barrier in the first place.
The more people we can get playing and sticking to fighting games in the long run, the better off we’ll be in the long run.
The most important part here is that the Ultra is listed as a fundamental part of a character’s moveset by the game or instruction manual and presented as a basic thing to do. Also, pretty much every single piece of promotional material regarding SFIV promotes the Ultra combo as a flashy thing that players can do. And while important, the Ultra isn’t the be-all and end-all central focus of competitive SFIV. Not even close. Basic fundamentals like zoning or footsies are still way more important, but those things aren’t what pick up the random interest of people watching a trailer.
The reason Smash is brought up as a casual friendly game is because all the presented basics of the game are very easy to do. The only thing even remotely difficult as a basic move is maybe getting an up-tilt without having your character jump. Everything else DOESN’T MATTER to a majority of players picking up the game for the first time. It doesn’t matter that you should L-cancel everything. It doesn’t matter that wavedashing is really important for spacing. It doesn’t matter that you should dashdance back and forth to chase techs. None of those things are presented to the player as basic things they should be able to do to play the game at a casual level.
Likewise, in SFIV, if a casual player wants to play Ryu, it doesn’t matter that c.hp or s.hk are alternatives to SRK, it doesn’t matter that c.mk is a great mid-range poke, it doesn’t matter plinking makes making links more consistent. What matters is being able to do those moves that they see the characters do in the trailers. And if casually, they can’t consistently get SRK or whatever, then what chance do they have of sticking with the game long enough to realize, “Oh, it’s okay if I can’t do xx motion consistently right now, there’s a bunch of other stuff I can work on too.”
And these players just picking up the game? They’re not invested in the game yet. They don’t even know about these advanced techniques yet because there’s no reason for them to go online and ask people how to get better at the game yet because they just picked it up. But then one game has you do a [1]319 charge motion to do that fancy rose petal stabby move that was in the trailer? Why bother with that when the player can just go and do everything they saw the characters do in the promotional material with a direction+button (or point and click)? The latter game is going to get a lot more of an initial player retention. Even if a ton of players don’t decide to go on to learn all the competitive nuances, there’s still a way larger pool of prospective players in the first place because they weren’t stopped at the very first hurdle.
Are they being Sold where sequels are warranted? Yes.
So where is our Cocern at? where is this problem I’m not seeing?
Sound sliek some of us are more concern about fighter becoming e-sport. But this e-sport thing not even big thing yet. You can’t even find people who know about these big gaming competition, society barly appreciate video game as whole yet. We need to come to terms that fighter is a niche thing and not going to developed at the rate as other games. Or when it does it wont be something the FGC won’t recognize and most likely be rejected. ( rise of incarnates?..smash?..)
As said the issue lies with the FGC with their stubborn agenda and dysfunctional divided Community.
Tekken has it’s own executional issues (EWGF among other things) and hasn’t done quite as well commercially as it has in the pastn though part of that could be attributed to the current state of the game industry. Even so, Tag 2 falling short of expectations serves as yet another example.
I don’t like the direction most fighters have taken in compounding their gameplay with subsystems that exist to extend combos. Not exactly a way to draw new blood; it’s flawed logic to believe that a system in which you have to perform an excessive number of techniques to do maximum damage can still be accessible. I do think there’s some depth in execution but there is a point where it becomes artificial and unnecessary. Not being able to perform a Hadoken consistently and not being able to pull off 1-frame links (which are archaic I should add) are two different degrees of executional depth. The former is reasonable, the latter is outdated game design.
And yes, developers need to accommodate their games for online play. In a perfect world, netcode would never be a problem and control schemes would maintain the status quo but as it stands, a game that has controls and commands which conflict with online play is behind the 8 ball.
I don’t know how long you’ve been playing, but I was around when SF2 was huge, until the days when CVS2 was all the rage, during the time when almost nothing was coming out save for Tekken and Guilty Gear updates, and now with the SF4-fueled resurgence.
Personally I prefer having more people to play with and not having to play the same title for another ten years.
The fighting game that has come closest to their model has been the Smash series, and from what I can see it’s doing very well for itself.
Yes. It was a KoF rip-off. I mean, it was other things too but the game could never get over the simple fact that it was blatantly a KoF rip-off.
I’m not saying you don’t have a point here. It’s possible that a good fighting game could implement a great, newbie-friendly control scheme and still fail to catch on. No matter what, a radical departure from the old fighting game formula is risky. But changing nothing will guarantee that fighting games stay niche, always on the brink of another dark age. All it takes is a string of failed releases for game companies to be afraid of releasing fighting games again.
But it could work. Not to sound like a broken record, but titles like Tekken are already so close you can taste it. Take out the just-frames, remove the superfluous moves/strings, simplify the movement and you’re 95% there. I mean, will it really lead to the collapse of Tekken if players could consistently EWGF, back-step at full-speed without weeks of training mode, and not have to memorize 30 canned strings per character to get to baseline competitiveness?
These things are already a non-factor in competitive play. Mishima-players can already EWGF consistently. Competitive players can already back dash cancel. The superfluous moves and strings are already ignored in high-level play. Is it really that big a difference if a new player could skip this arbitrary wall and just get to playing the real game ASAP? I mean, even competitive players have to waste a few weeks after a new update comes out while they memorize the new strings so they don’t get destroyed by unsafe 50/50s. This helps newbies more, but it helps everyone to some extent.
Another thing that gets me every now and then is the stuff we can never quantify. Remember how Capcom talked about Viper’s updates when AE was coming out? They said they didn’t touch her too much because they didn’t want to invalidate all the work Viper mains had already put in to learn her. Who knows what cool stuff we could have gotten from Viper if this wasn’t a concern. We can never tell, because we can’t measure the impact of things that never get made. We can never know what cool tech some random dude could have come up with, if only he’d chosen to play Blazblue instead of CoD.
Most of all, we can never get back the ten or so years of fighting genre evolution that could have been but never was because game companies were afraid of releasing a game to a niche audience. Think about it. The new ideas we’re getting exposed to now, could have been out years ago, if only fighting games had more mainstream appeal.
Completely wrong, and frankly, something you would do you well to reconsider if you should ever hope to have any understanding at all of fighting games or game design in general.
As though the inputs were not an integral part of the mechanics. As though they didn’t fundamentally influence every single aspect of the game.
As though tactical considerations in regards to execution were not present all the time, for every player, at all skill levels.
As though ‘controlling your character’ was not everything there is, as though it was somehow magically separate. Separate how? Separate from what? Think about it for just a moment before you repeat these blatant misconceptions.
The genre cannot survive if we don’t get new blood in.
Look at the shooting game genre and how it’s shrunken due to how focused towards the hardcore it was. Now, companies like Cave are basically giving up and instead focusing on mobile games.
The fighting game genre got a respite due to how SFIV attracted mainstream attention, but that’s already done. We need to start thinking about the future and being able to maintain that momentum, or at least prevent the genre’s presence from shrinking once gain.
The problem with this is that your only thinking for the short term.
For the long term survival and growth of the genre, we need to think further ahead and figure out what can be done to push the genre forward while correcting the mistakes of the past.
As with the STG genre, the problem with fighters is that we’ve focused too much on just the core players and not enough has been done to help new people coming in to the genre.
EDIT:
The funny thing is, back in the 90s, developers actually were trying to do this. Just look at how doing combos became easier in later Capcom games compared to SFII. Even among other series, you get a sense of progression as the devs try to develop and streamline their games based on how the players were playing them.
It’s only during the mid 2000s that, IMO, we see a sort of stagnation as developers seem to just reuse the same old established mechanics and tropes.
It’s funny that you should disagree with me @d3v, when your very first reply in this thread provides an excellent example of one of the many ways in which execution adds depth.
This then, is a tactical consideration that only exists for moves and combos that provide some challenge. The choice to go for it or for something easier is a very interesting one indeed.
I also mentioned that the other purpose of these motions is to provide a way to fit a complex moveset within a limited controller config.
Also, we already know that execution is a shitty means of balancing something. So adding “risk” to a move doesn’t really do much in terms of balance since, at the highest levels of play, execution becomes a non-factor.
In other words, thanks to the ability to mitigate that I described in my post, trying to make things “harder” becomes a moot point, especially at high levels.
This is why I am in agreement with Mike Z’s statement on how certain types of inputs are unnecessary.
Basically anything beyond qcf, dp, sonic boom, flash kick, and 360 are pretty much unnecessary, unless all of those are used up.
All you’re doing is making a character harder to use and discouraging new players from picking that character up.
@ukyo_rulz I’ve been playing fighter since I was introduce to SF2 as kid, I was around when the arcade age was dying. By The time I turn 14, Fighters was just rare to come by let alone me getting games at my leisure. But that’s how I developed the mentality to accept and appreciate every fighter that came my way. I’m going to be honest and say I can’t remember the dark age so well because I already have hard time getting my hands on fighters but then I did find other means…(emulation) That how I came across the great library that SNK has, that how I learned to appreciate the license fighter from Namco/bandai collection. This is where I also got introduce to doujin fighter which was plentiful at the early 2000’s.
I’m for “accessible” fighter being made and promoted,but not shoe honing the genre to be made into that "accessible"standard where fighters main issue is not control’s or how they play but how developer choose to market themselves as well teaching people their games. That is the genre only fault. and I’ll admit smash does the best job in addressing this because they didn’t make the game with competitive play in mind, they accommodate it.
But then lest look at smash…its console game…and unconventional fighter, they have the lexury to do the thing they do because their wasn’t much fighter to be had on the N64, let alone 4 player fighter. (guardian heros??)
Considering that most fighter are made in arcade first then later ported to the console. How much resources can devs do when their game is suppose to accommodate a fast/instant gratification like market?. When you look at it, most console exclusive fighter made sure to have modes to accommodate the long play home experiences which in turn also help people learn the game. Some found ways to do it in interactive tutorial and some just rode on the “training mode can teach people”.
Im not saying we should give a pass to developer for not even trying. but How creative can developer be in making tutorial if the core game is very dynamic. Can you imagine tutorial saying “hey you can do this for that scenario, but be mindful you opponent can do that to counter, but in return you can do this, but the trade off is…” yeah things going to get incomprehensible real quick. It’s one of the reason I prefer game having universal controls and mechanics, it keep thing consistent. But in end we can’t make people feel compel to learn, its something they have to had wanted for them self.
Heres what i think we should do. For starter
Sf not be the Face of fighters…not any more. This can and has happen to number genres. Look at wolf stein and doom. they were face of FPS nows it CoD, Halo. I suppose this happening with Smash but I’m personally not welcoming this. Smash just deviate in to many area’s and to many game play like it to be the face of fighters imo. In fact the several game that tried to be like smash but different got written off like smash clone…(sf2 rip off dejavu)
shift from arcade priority to Console. Simple Fighter is Niche genre catering to niche demo graph. if you want to stop that than you need to shift to where main stream game which is console and home computers. Heck im surprise we haven’t made this shift yet since netplay is usually superior on pc and you can get any controller peripheral to work on pc. The melty fan base is good example of this testament.
@d3v
Sure. But none of that contradicts the point that you disagreed with, that execution adds depth. I’m not talking about balance, ‘necessity’, or preferences. I’m simply talking about the basic fact that the choice between doing a hard combo or move that does good damage with a risk of failure, or an easy one that is basically guaranteed, is an interesting tactical consideration, and the ability to make it is one of the many ways in which good players are differentiated from the bad ones.
Come on, you know as well as everyone here, that even at the highest level, practical combos are always preferred over the ones with the highest damage. Because they are too hard, even for the best of the best, to pull off in the heat of a match. This is basic stuff.
On my phone qoutes are hard… someone mentioned tekken not doing as expected
Ya wanna decrease sales and happy first day buyers reviews that effect sales. Dont ever make a team fighting game that when one char dies the games over . Stick with kof style or marvel one char dies next fighter comes in.
Leave that shit to 2k games wwf
Sfx tekken would still be hot shit if that game was 1vs 1
As to bringing in new players neatherealm learned to make epic story modes. Not trash like blazblue and persona.sf /EVERYONE ELSE. mortalkombat x will sell like hotcakes and some will stay after the story… nietherealm learned from there last mk and injustice how to bring in new players.
-to not thread jack…on executions. Fuck pretzel moves. Fadc. Hd meter. Hd combos.1 frame links. Just frames. Korean backdashes. Roman cancels. Burst cancels. Marvel guitarhero combo game play .
Stick to normals. Ex moves and a supermeter and design some gangster ass chars and a epic story and the masses will come…fill the game with clutter n subsystems n ya might get lucky and have 5 dudes in a sub forum on srk long forgotten. .k.i.s.s keep it simple stupid. Build it and they will come in masses.
Superturbo formula and a epic story. Is the formula and no one not even capcom is making it for the masses
I even think sfv will be less sales then sf x tekken if no grand story mode and fadc weird shit. Closer they stick to superturbo formula and learn to make a grand fucking story they could have all the money they could roll in… i think sfv gonna be a flop sales wise.
they will never build a great story mode or not put in something dumb complicated cancel system thats not needed.