You should define hard. If “hard” is a 720 super, then I don’t care if someone out there likes is, it has got to go.
Actually it doesn’t even matter. Even if you decide to use a half circle instead of a quarter circle for a move, you should have a better reason than that. I can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to do a half circle over a quarter circle though.
And I can’t believe people are still arguing for balancing moves with the execution at this point.
When you start with a premise that vilifies it, it’s strange. But it works, and it works in a way that tweaking with data just can’t do.
And that’s removing execution from an entire game? No it’s not. That’s just removing execution from the basics of the game. Things seen at higher levels like more technical combos to max out on damage are just fine because that by default should be more difficult.
There would be no high level combos with big difficult
High level combos would be just pressing buttons, like press st.HP and quickly press “fireball button” for cancel > press FA button > forward dash button (double tap forward is too complicated for beginners) > press st.HP xx Teleport button xx U2 button, there you just did a good combo with Akuma…
The game will become some sort of Amplitude or Guitar Hero with a controller, just pressing buttons rhythmically (but no 1f links, that’s too hard for newbies)… too bad the sticks would need 20 buttons to cover all options
Then somebody will say that it’s too hard to remember all those buttons in sequence, so how about a “Combo into Ultra 2” button? That way you can just focus on the mind game, because that’s what chess… ops, I mean, fighting games are all about, amirite?
So which one of you scrubs wrote this?
In the immortal words of MIke “Slap the Hype” Ross: There are no cross ups in spelling bees.
You can make a board game that feels like a fighting game but it isn’t the same shit. The physicality of the games is just as important as the strategic element. Oh well, on to more productive things.
You know questioning the status quo is how society progresses. Yes men never accomplish anything. Don’t be afraid of change, many here seem so fearful that they aren’t even reading properly. Please read, and then respond, or don’t post. People were saying to lower the floor, not the ceiling. So execution will still play a big part in the game.
Lowering the floor is to make it more welcoming to newcomers, to grow the genre. Fighting games are very very niche, and the biggest reason is barrier of entry particularly for those not experienced in FGs. Entry people…not mastery. You are not winning tournaments with one button or whatever people think, the precious tournament scene will be intact and fine. Just that with the low floor there will be more competitors, bigger prizes, and more fighting games developed in general (cause of their growth). There will be more people that stick around beyond a few days, cause they feel like they can do something and learn the game.
There are PLENTY of hard things to do executionally that don’t require special move inputs at all. MvC2 Magneto ROM and all it’s variations. MvC2 Storm tri-jump infinite, UMvC3 TAC infinites (depending on character). There are also plenty of executionally demanding combos that don’t require a mid combo 720 or double half circle motion or any number of complicated inputs. Sentinel fly combos, Taokaka taunt combo, F-Ciel 236A link combo, May 6P dolphin loop. Difficult inputs don’t need to exist for basic moves in order for difficult combos to exist.
Execution is a valuable thing to have at the competitive fighting game level. It is NOT a good thing to require new players to be able to do such things to get basic enjoyment out of the game.
If you don’t believe that having a one button fireball would increase the draw of players to a fighting game, fine. I don’t have the hard data or evidence to tell you otherwise. But I have just as much anecdotal evidence as everyone else to say that easier games lead to more players playing them in the first place.
@atirador This guy…it’s like you just hear what you want to hear. Who said EVERY move had to be a single button press with a cooldown? And even so the cooldown period will add difficulty to the combo. I.E after you fire a projectile and try to extend the combo with another, you must time it right. Perform the first part of it too fast and by the time you’re ready to fire the next projectile, it hasn’t cooled down yet so you drop the combo. Or hey maybe there’s other ways to make it work. But you’re not even trying to. You just dismiss everything. Also I said that we could just leave traditional fighters as is and just make new IP’s with this mindset. But you just ignore that and just went all “DON’T CHANGE MUH STREET FIGHTA, YA NOOBS JUST NEED TO GIT GUD HURR HURR HURR”
There is nothing keeping designers from adding flash to moves for hitting tight links, without having those aesthetics affect gameplay. It’s like MMOs. Some people have money to burn and like to flaunt it. For those people, they can buy flashy mounts or hats or whatever. Fighting games can follow the same formula. It’s exactly the same except instead of flaunting how much money you have to spend, you’re flaunting how much free time you have to grind.
I can’t agree with this. Not after seeing the T.Hawk SSF2T loop performed flawlessly in actual matches.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. If it’s even half as good as Yomi was, that game is going straight into my collection.
You can get vortexed in Yomi if you get knocked down.
Uh, that execution is a viable balancing tool does not mean it can balance everything, that hard = automatically balanced, and so on. I am not, and never was making an absolute claim in the vein of “making stuff hard to do can always balance it”. It can’t, some stuff is just stupid period.
Your argument is like me saying that it’s useful to enable players to break combos and you say no that’s a horrible idea because Ivan Ooze is broken.
But making moves require more than a minimum, simplistic input can add a real attention tax to using them for things (so if you’re looking to hit the opponent with a strong punish, for example, you’ll be more susceptible to jumpins or baits, for example), and can differentiate between a move used as an AA, as a reversal, and in that footsies situation. All completely organically. The attention drain ends up balancing the punish, but simplifying the input means you have to remove the punish or the move will become broken.
You’d just say good riddance, it was broken anyway, when in fact it was actually balanced well enough in actual gameplay.
Except you know, it kinda isn’t.
The problem with this is that you’re using a method of “balancing” that gets less and less effective the higher the level of play becomes and the better the players get. If a move is broken if not for the execution requirement, it eventually comes to the point where the move, regardless of its execution requirement becomes broken anyway.
A games balance is always judged at the highest levels of play. Saying that a game’s balance is fine because all the overpowered stuff is hidden behind execution barriers is just flat our lazy balancing.
Hence them being better players. What you’re saying is a good thing…a consequence of becoming a better player is being able to use “hard to use” moves in difficult situations.
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If you’re dealing with absolutes, it’s hard to argue against it. The move is “completely broken” or the game “has all OP moves hidden behind execution”… there’s some gray areas here.
How about a DP in SFIV, like Ryu’s? It has great use as an AA and reversal, but it’s not broken or OP. But having to do the SRK motion (or the shortcut) takes time and concentration, especially in tight situations. The move would be way better or borderline broken as an AA if it was a single button press. It would make fighting a Ryu player way harder, because he could totally concentrate in the ground/footsie game knowing that any jump in could be easily countered in 1f, with just a button press.
Having the DP motion as a “barrier” makes it impossible, even for a high level player like Daigo, to AA or use it in any given situation 100% of the time.
Not to mention one of the beauties of FGs or sports in general, human error as factor. Just watch the replays from SXSW last weekend and see how many times Daigo (and other players) got hit because he missed the DP motion or tried to do it too late.
The error as a random element is a very important factor in any competitive sport, including “real” sports like soccer or basketball, it gives the sport more emotion, even the best team/player can lose because of a few errors: K-Brad had that match against Momochi and lost it because of a dropped combo, how many times have we seen Justin or Ricky miss Rufus U1, etc.
So, would you say Ryu’s DP is a broken or OP move hidden behind an execution barrier, so it should be nerfed anyway, or that the move would be completely fine if it was a single button press?
It’s extremely fucking clear that a number of people don’t agree with you on this, so repeatedly saying it over and over doesn’t make it true, nor does it convince anyone. Personally I think all this shit is a case by case basis. In SFII a DP is hard to do because it’s a HUGLY powerful move. In MVC2 a DP is easy as fuck to do because a DP by itself isn’t going to get you shit, the damage is way too fucking low, you have to do a bunch of other shit after the DP lands in order for it to be worth your while and those follow ups tend to be hard to do combos. It’s the same thing I was talking about with SG, you guys keep saying the game is easy to get into, but just because the moves themselves are easy to do doesn’t mean the games easy to get into, because those moves do dick for damage by themselves, you have to know how to do the long ass combos for those moves to be worth shit, and the combos a hard to do, much harder then learning to DP or standing 360 in SFII or whatever imo.
Threads pointless it’s just people repeating themselves over and over.
The problem with this is that we have actual evidence to show that this doesn’t really work. We’ve seen people able to do things that were supposedly “hard to do”, e.g. Daigo with his “psychic DPs”.
Once someone shows that something can be done in a manner defying any executional means to “balance” it out, and other players start to use that as a baseline, then that balancing has failed.
I mean, does anyone worth their salt actually do an unsafe jump in hoping that the other player misses it. When looking at the match-up, you don’t say that a character has an easier time against Ryu because the DP doesn’t come out. No, you acknowledge it as a tool and take note of how it shuts down certain options of certain characters.
Yet it’s pretty clear that if Mike made a game that was less combo intensive (say, more 3rd Strike than Skullgirls), he’d still keep the entry level execution as low as it is in Skullgirls. Everything he’s said about not having anything more complex than a DP or a 360 motion, etc. are meant to be for any and all fighting games, not just stuff that’s combo-centric.
In any case, all this does is make it so that people start playing closer to competitive level play, since they’re less worried about pulling basic stuff off, and more concerned about dealing with the match and figuring advanced stuff out.
Yes, they do it all the time because no player can react 100% of the time with a DP, and it’s worth the risk, since a DP is usually 120 to 160 damage and an unchallenged jump in can lead to so much more damage. Even if the opponent doesn’t miss the DP but chooses to block (wich happens more often than not) you still at frame advantage.
If it was a single button press, the story would be completely different. Why would you choose to block, something that can be done instantly, if you can do a DP also instantly?
So, my question to you remains, since it pretty much resumes your position about this thread (unless you don’t think DP motion is an execution barrier for a new player):
Would you say Ryu’s DP is a broken or OP move hidden behind an execution barrier, so it should be nerfed anyway, or that the move would be completely fine if it was a single button press?
Then we’re watching very different matches, because most top players in this side of the world all tend to have very specific reasons for jumping in that don’t involve “hopefully, he’ll miss his input”.
The only time you see someone jump in in a way that seems reckless is when multiple levels of yomi are involved, and said player thinks that his opponent thinks that they won’t jump in. But that’s a kind of gamble that isn’t rooted in execution at all.
Already mentioned that DPs aren’t in the list of unnecessary motions, which Mike described when he made his statement declaring anything more than a quarter circle, dp, sonic boom, flash kick, and 360 as unnecessary (and the last one comes with the caveat that it should have jump protection).
In any case, the current thinking on DPs is that they’re basically just forward plus a quarter circle motion, meaning that all they bring to the table is that they required the player to stand to do the motion. In other words, sloppy DPs, those ending in forward, are fine. We already have methods of letting players chose between a DP and a qcf motion (SG/BB style doing a hcf after a forward negates the DP, or KoF style where you’re allowed one extra direction, so hitting uf nets you a qcf).
Back to execution as balacning tool. Let’s all recall my previous explanation of what special move inputs bring. I stated that they give a move a chance to fail - which is what all of you have been pointing at when it comes to balance. However, I also stated that this is used in place of an RNG so that the players can mitigate that chance to fail (as a true RNG would never work in Japan’s arcade culture). The mitigate part is important - since players can eventually mitigate the execution barrier, as multiple examples throughout the genre’s history have shown.
In other words, by their very nature, special move inputs do give the players the ability to overcome the barrier that they present. Players can get good enough that they can hit a move 90 to 100% of the time. And I’m not just talking about DPs, we’ve seen examples of more complex motions being hit with that kind of consistency. Even with only a 90% success rate (or even 80 or 70%), are you really willing to risk the balance of a move on the off percent chance that a player will miss it - especially when as the game ages, the players chances of missing it grow smaller and smaller?
It’s that last bit you have to consider. If you don’t think that’s worth considering, then we might as well just change special moves into one button with a set percent chance to fail - something I’m sure none of us want.
Wait a minute, if all this motions are fine, what is this “execution barrier” we keep hearing about on this thread, then?
720s? If a 360 is not a barrier, jumping and doing it 2x like 99% of Zangief players have been doing since ST also isn’t.
Half circles? 2xQCF? Guile’s Super? Those are the big barriers that’s keeping FGs from being huge successes (sp?) like GTA or CoD?
It’s worth mention that SFxT got rid of all “double” motions for supers (Zangief players could do standing supers all day), and that didn’t make that game any more newbie friendly or succesful. Also, BlazBlue (at least the only one I’ve played, Calamity Trigger) had the option to bind special moves to the right analog stick and that didn’t make the game a hit among non-FG players either.
And let’s not talk again about the huge success that Skullgirls was for being so easy to jump into. That game was even a Free Game one month on PS Plus and people kept avoiding it.
I think we can all agree that SFxT’s success, or unfortunate lack thereof, was due to several other circumstances. SFxT was an easier game to press buttons in overall, but still retained some technical aspects due to moderately long combos, bind states and team tags. Gems and the three bar meter management kinda cluttered up the brain space that new and low level players could have used to focus on what were surprisingly easy commands for most characters.
BlazBlue, for what it’s worth, is probably in the top five fighting franchises with real name recognition among non-FGC gamers in the US. The franchise has real fans behind it because of its emphasis on the modes of the game(s) that don’t necessarily pertain to versus mode. The best part is that many non-FGC BB players never “quit” the game because they never ended up heading to ranked mode like the casual members of many other franchises; many BB players I’ve known or talked to have always had enough friends who also played the game to keep the game interesting and playable either in person or online. Regarding the simplicity of the controls, I think BB was one of the first franchises of the past generation with a real push for an accessibility control scheme, but I will agree (if this is the point that you’re alluding to) that it was a pretty pre-historic implementation; I cannot comment on the success or failure of the implementation outside of my own opinion because everyone I know who plays/played BB never ended up using the simple mode scheme (even the non-FGC players)–maybe that tells me all I need to know about it.
While I personally don’t have any stake in your particular point, I wanted to bring up these ideas because I think your point would probably stand on more solid ground if you didn’t try to link the success (or perceived success) of the games you’re talking about directly with their approach to simple controls because there are so many other factors that get in the way.