Fine. Persona 4 Arena (and P4A2). Nothing but quarter circles and charge motions.
So, whatever is shown in promotional videos must be easy enough so anyone who just picked the game (and never played anything like it before) must be able to do consistently?
That’s crazy…
Back when Guitar Hero / Rock Band were a big thing, a lot of trailers displayed people playing drums in hard or expert, I’ve been playing those games for years and I still can’t play drums on Expert, so they lied to me?
If the trailer show someone playing World 4 or 5 in Super Mario Bros, that game should be easy enough so a kid can reach those levels without much effort?
No more 600 damage and 0f startup on Zangief’s U1 because that move should be easy enough so little Jimmy can do it as soon as he puts the disc on his console
I must say you are very patient. I can’t be bothered to engage in these discussions anymore with people who have barely played or understand the older games.
Also, David Sirlin is a sanctimonious loudmouth who gives OG’s a bad name.
TL;DR:
Consider three aspects of execution requirements, player retention (flashiness), progression, and balance. For some moves (the 720), they’re all tied directly to execution. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Is it hard to physically hit the drums or strum the lever? Not at all. It’s difficult to hit drums and strum the lever quickly and accurately at the pace of the expert level songs though.
Is it hard to get Mario to jump or throw a fireball? Not at all. It’s difficult to platform in the later stages of the Mario games when there starts to be a lot more enemies and trickier jumps.
There are multiple ways to curb the execution expectation that players get when they pop in the game even if they didn’t get the right idea from the trailer. Guitar Hero and Mario do it by having easier difficulty stuff first, then gradually ramping the players up into the hard stuff. RPGs start off with limited options and mechanics and then slowly expand the number of subsystems as the game progresses. RTS games limit the number of units you can use in the campaign and slowly unlock them as you get farther. These emphasize progression through their gameplay thoroughly. Fighting games don’t do this.
Promotional materials for most fighting games don’t show competitive level play. Or even necessarily competent play. They purport to show people doing very very basic things. The promos for fighters that don’t involve competitive level stuff aren’t like “Hey, this is stuff you can do only after you’ve put x amount of practice into the game,” they’re more “this is the awesome stuff you can do in the game!” The competitive trailers are more on the level of: “And if you practice this much, you can be like Daigo and do this awesome parry!”
Which trailer is going to attract new people to the game? Which one creates execution expectations and which one doesn’t?
This one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqYVWtEVQWw
Or this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Xu9hE3-RU
Reasons for why fighters don’t have the same kind of gradual curve that the other games mentioned above have would obviously be that fighters are primarily multiplayer focused, locking stuff out from multiplayer is terrible for numerous competitive reasons, and single player campaigns aren’t usually super fleshed out. But even League of Legends has in built “recommended” characters tagged for beginners. DoTA has a “beginner” mode where only a select number of characters are allowed to be picked from. And they both have single player tutorials explaining system mechanics. These are all things that help ease the player into the game by limiting some of their execution expectations on what they’ll need to know and do when they’re starting to play the game. Fighting games need to do this better.
Regarding the balance aspect:
The fact that you have to work on the 720 to get it consistently is a sense of PROGRESSION. That is a perfectly fine reason to have an execution requirement. The fact that the 720 motion itself heavily restricts the situations in which the move is applicable is a BALANCE issue that is invariably tied to the input. The idea here is to separate those two. It probably can’t be done in SFIV. But why can’t it be done in a future fighting game?
So, as a thought experiment, how would all three of these problems be solved with regards to the current archetype of the Zangief 720 super throw?
Here’s a design though for a replacement for the Ultimate Atomic Buster with regards to the points I’ve talked about.
[list]
[] It needs to be a flashy move that can be shown off in a trailer.
[] It needs to be balanced.
[] It needs to have a sense of progression
[] It needs to be easy to execute.
[/list]
The 720 motion is flat out not a choice for being easy to execute. Other options include simpler motions, all the way down to single button press. Looking at other games, Kanji in P4A2 has a super throw that’s a double quarter circle, so let’s use that for simplicity. That solves the execution problem.
Double quarter circle is a lot easier than standing 720, so this new move currently lacks the same sense of progression or achievement when you finally pull it off. So what if instead of the throw being the entirety of the damage, what if it’s more like Makoto’s command throw? A throw that sets up a bigger combo? With a flexible enough combo system, there could be an easy combo that you could do off this throw that deals ~40% health damage, and a much more difficult one that does the full 60%. That way, there’s still a goal for players to work for to really optimize their gameplay. Playtesting can balance out the move and the followups available to tweak damage.
Of course, this new version of the 720 would change the move from “I’ve grabbed you, you’re dead” into “I’ve grabbed you, I need to do a combo now, you’re dead” which destroys some of the appeal of a grappler in the first place, but I think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff to make.
So how would this be advertised to players who are yet to develop a competitive interest in the game and only care about the flashy stuff? Give the throw a fancy animation. In the trailers that include the move, hide the lifebars, show the combo. In fact, this is exactly what I remember a ton of the trailers for characters in SFIV and even MvC3 doing. They showed off the flashy stuff, but deliberately held back information about what their expected competitive uses and payoffs might be. The Ultra 2 in SSFIV was showcased in most situations where the opponent was near dead already so you couldn’t really tell how much damage it did. No one really blocked in the UMvC3 trailers, letting characters like Phoenix Wright show off the cool looking stuff.
As a note, I would be more accepting of difficult motions if fighting games were able to correctly portray that they’re accessible only after practice through their promotional material and expectations that the game builds in the player in single player stuff. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it’d still be better than what we have now.
Is it hard to physically press forward, down, back or up in the directional pad or stick or press the button? Not at all. It’s difficult to press those directions almost twice each (it doesn’t really requires 720º) quickly and accurately at the “pace” of less than 6 frames (pre-jump frames) tough
Same difference
And that’s why the 720 motion would be perfectly fine for a single player game like Mario (more appropriate for something like Ninja Gaiden probably) for a special move that you can do if the game eases you into it. If it were properly presented as a hard thing to do in the promo materials, or if the single player mode of a fighting game worked hard to teach the player how to do it in a constructive manner, I wouldn’t have this particular complaint with regards to execution barrier (balance is a whole different issue). As it is, people don’t see the crazy input necessary to get a standing 720 in trailers, they just see the screen flash and then the opponent gets picked up and tossed like crazy.
This is a great example and I would like to add to add my own thoughts using it as a baseline.
I never had trouble with Peacock’s bomb-cancels. It was always effortless for me. In a tournament environment, or even online, I would expect almost no dropped bomb-cancels to be the norm. The people who can’t bomb-cancel with Peacock are simply playing other characters or passing on SG altogether.
With the updated, easier input, more people can do perfect bomb-cancels every time. From my perspective, the bomb-cancels are just as consistent as they have ever been but the number of people available to play against has increased. Literally no-downside-all-upside.
It even makes match-up practice easier for competitive players. Basic Peacock is pretty easy to pick up, so you can have a friend who doesn’t main her still play the character well enough to give you valuable match-up experience. Compare this to the “Carl Problem” in Blazblue. Some players have almost no experience against the puppet user simply because they literally have no one available in their community who mains Carl, and it’s unreasonable to expect say a Ragna or Taokaka main to “take one for the team” and learn Carl for the sole purpose of becoming the practice dummy for everyone else.
The original designers never imagined players would perform most special moves consistently or even consciously go for combos. The original vision for SF was that players would use normal moves most of the time and special moves would come out every now and again. Even in SF2 there was a 1-in-512 chance that a special move would come out from any button press even with no motions. That was what SF was designed to be, and we have been using the same motions ever since largely because of inertia.
The fact that fighting games have execution requirements is a given. It’s right there in the title. This is not the “do fighting games have execution requirements” thread. This is the “why do fighting games have such high execution requirements” thread.
If my opponent does not have executional proficiency as a baseline, I am really not interested in wasting my time with him. I expect, at the very least, for special moves and supers to have near-100% perfect execution and combos to be consistent. Dropping every now and then is fine, and I’ll spar with someone picking a new character up to help him out, but that’s not the real game. That’s training mode. In MVC2 if your Ironman hits my Storm and you don’t convert into a ToD, everything that comes after is invalid. Might as well restart the match. In a tournament I can’t count on my opponent dropping that conversion.
All this does is insert a speed-gap in the development of the game. Maybe when I first picked up Cable I did DHC instead of AHVBx3 because it was easier, but even back then I knew it was nonsense. Now I do AHVBx3 every time, and all I got from those weeks of doing DHC was wasted time that I could have been using to play MVC2 for real.
I don’t really play SF4 competitively anymore, but I remember when the current Cammy BnB was called the “Sako Combo” because only Sako could do it consistently. Now everyone does it as a matter of course. As a result, Cammy tech is somewhat delayed by several months because when the players could have been developing tech, they were instead drilling that BnB in training mode. This might sound like an exaggeration, but I actually see it as a conservative estimate because some people that might have used Cammy never played her because they didn’t want to bother with that combo. Now we are forever deprived of any output those players might have developed.
Look at all the random characters Mike Ross plays on stream. He’s joking around on purpose, but Mike Ross is a competent player. Even clowning around, he’s come up with some setups and strategies for casual play. Someone of Mike’s level might have come up with much more by now if he wasn’t hampered by his lack of time (or will) to drill training mode for the pocket-characters that he plays on stream.
That’s what I’m going to do eventually, anyway, difficult inputs or not. The version of me who lives in a parallel world where Spike FRC is easy does the same Dizzy combos as the version of me who exists in our universe. Except he started doing them earlier and maybe had more people to play against. I envy that guy.
I can already do Korean Back Dash. I just want to maximize the number of potential opponents that can do it too.
I’d say that it isn’t, because all you’re doing is slowing down the meta and the development of the players playing that character. Just read ukyo’s examples.
Honestly though, this is why a growing number of folks are starting to see traditional “Capcom style” grapplers as a flawed archetype.
These characters tend to be “front loaded,” all their big damage options (powerful command grab) are already available at the start of the meta and therefore tend to be strong early on. With a traditional “Capcom style” grappler, the ff. is what the devs usually do.
-Limit the characters potential for growth, so that they don’t grow even stronger as the game develops.
-Hide the strong moves behind an execution barrier, delaying their development and potential dominance.
Both of these are problematic and are part of the reason why this archetype usually ends up low tier at the end, or starts low tier and then suddenly jumps up to high tier.
I’d argue that there’s room for progression in execution in a well designed system, especially since it helps gives players a visible goal to work towards that’s much more apparent than something like footsies, but less basic than something like a SRK.
I will admit that the design space for this is incredibly tight and potentially not worth keeping if it can’t be done effectively for a competitive game. But I think that giving a player a taste of what their character can do, even if slightly off optimal by 10% or something helps give them a visible goal to work toward and an incentive to mess around with the game in the times where a training partner isn’t available. As an example, F-Riesbyfe gets really good damage in Melty Blood off of ABCxx236A. In the corner, there are various other combos that she can do that net her slightly more damage, but ABCxx236A is still comparable in damage. It doesn’t completely break her character if a player is unable to do those more damaging combos, but it’s a nice little benefit for people that do.
As stated, stuff like that in combos is fine, especially since that’s emergent. However, putting stuff like that in something like a move input (regardless of whether or not it’s a super) is not.
Hey have you guys seen Egoraptor’s sequelitis episode about Megaman X and how it teaches you how to play through gameplay during the intro stage? http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D8FpigqfcvlM&sa=U&ei=KTUBVfeSIISWgwT3iICoAQ&ved=0CBYQuAIwAFAB&sig2=XEOmztvC6LZ2xHh3e1tZwg&usg=AFQjCNHo7RCX66iQGn780CtfbxnSXmf-ig What if fighter’s did that with like an adventure mode or something? Like I.E you play as Ryu and while playing you come across an enemy that keeps jumping at you. Eventually the player will look for a option that allows him to knock enemies out the air. Then he stumbles upon crouching fierce as an effective anti air. Now he knows how to anti air and it’ll stick with him because he learned it on his own through playing at his own pace. Not told to do drills in training.
Would be a better mode than combo trials, that’s for sure.
Oh god don’t get me started on combo trials. That has got to be the biggest waste of time for a player who wants to learn the game and the devs who designed them. I remember playing UMVC3. It was the first fighter I ever tried to “git gud” in. I wanted to learn how to play Felicia, Domamaru, and Taskmaster. I go to mission mode expecting to learn character specific strategies and stuff. All I get is a fucking “to do list” that doesn’t explain why or if these combos are effective, how to set them up, how the character plays. NOTHING! It’s was so infurating. I had the desire to “git gud” so I looked up info and practiced. But as a player who was once a casual not too long ago. I can see why shit like that would make a noob quit. Like why don’t devs use that mode as a teaching tool. Or a game mode that gives the game more content like the aforementioned adventure mode or something?
[/quote]
I think something along the lines of skullgirls tutorial would work, where you dont just have a few combo strings to complete, but the game sets up scenarios for you to overcome.
Like say, the game tells you to do a jump in attack, only to have you get anti-air’d by the cpu, and then go “see that? thats a called an anti-air. jumping in can be used to start a combo, but it’s also risky, as your opponent can easily knock you out of the air. likewise, if your opponent jumps in, you can knock them out of the air if you’re quick enough. try to jump in only when you think you think it’s safe, and practice your anti-air move against the training dummy over and over. doing so will make it that much easier to react to a jump in attack.”
And just like that, you’re learning about jumping in being unsafe and anti-airing.
Isn’t simply winning the match a visible enough goal? I think it is. I play Hearthstone a lot and I tell ya that game has zero execution but all I ever do is mess around with the game trying various strategies to improve my win rate. To the contrary, if each variant would have required me to invest tons of time and effort before I could legitimately make use of them, I probably would just stick to perfecting my “Main” gameplay (as evidenced by the fact that I can only play five characters in Tekken even though I played that series since Tekken 2, but I am reasonably proficient with every character in the roster of KOF2K).
Isn’t there a common pattern in these forums where veteran players complain about newbies who can perform long, damaging combos but have no real coherent strategy? Maybe if they didn’t feel so pressured to master those combos (or meet with such success performing them in matches) they would have been developing strategy instead.
Combo trials tend to get really tedious and frustrating. I think the right balance is to set things up so that players constantly feel like tangible improvement is only a few steps away. This can work in terms of strategy. A newbie thinks “if I hadn’t jumped, I wouldn’t have eaten that dp”. That’s an immediately applicable revelation. Contrast that to “if I had only trained myself to hit that link hundreds of times, I wouldn’t have dropped it”. From the perspective of the player improvement can seem like it’s miles away.
It’s a problem that alot of us have noticed. New players tend to focus on just combos and forget about the fundamental aspect of fighting games.
You think that competitions are about who can do the longest, most damaging combo instead of who’s standing at the end of the round.
Doesn’t help that a good number of trial combos aren’t really viable and merely serve as some kind of styling challenge.
Maybe that’s why they always jump in the 7th time. You think, damn, I’ve anti aired him 6 times in a row but nope, they go for it. That damage though.
The USFIV trials are ok though. At least you get some useful bread n butter combos presented there, instead of the stupid shit that was in AE.
So this topic has been pushed towards the same old “better tutorials” bullshit… I’m done