Your analogy was wrong. That’s really all there is to it. MtG players cannot practice casting Wrath of God to the point where they can do it at instant speed. They cannot cast Emrakul over and over again until it costs just 5 mana instead of 15. It does not work as an analogue to execution. Frankly I find this whole tangent on “attention cost” to be indicative of intermediate-level play. Lightning Loops used to be a “demanding input”. Now they are a baseline requirement. Soon they will be a foregone conclusion. Real balancing stands the test of time. It doesn’t erode as the years pass.
There were very few players willing to put in the training time to match those execution requirements. Everybody has a different definition of what’s worth doing. Obviously a lot of people think it’s worth putting in the time to learn Vergil. Everyone in the FGC can spare an hour to learn basic UMVC3 wolverine. Less people think it’s worth learning Viper or Jill or whatever. Apparently almost no one cares to learn Zabel. I don’t really care about any of the people discussed above. They are already in the FGC, so they don’t matter when thinking of how to grow the FGC unless an idea would cause them to leave the FGC.
What I do care about are the people who don’t think fighting games are worth playing at all. What is the FGC even good for if it’s not generating the largest possible pool of opponents for me to play against? If an idea can bring more people up to my competitive level or higher, with less people leaving the fold (or no one leaving at all) then I am in favor of that idea. At least until a fully human-like AI could be created for me to play against. When that day comes I couldn’t care less about execution, or the FGC or just-frames or whatever.
You realize this is a cop out, right? I mean if execution was a good way to balance things, and harder execution makes games better, why not just make the moves harder?
Well, I believe it’s because certain moves were intuitively designed (Fireball, DP, Tatsu, Sonic Boom, Flash Kick, etc.)
They just feel so natural.
I mean, Akuma’s demon flip in A3 was
Most people would find Akuma’s A3 demon flip unnecessarily difficult, so changing it to a DP seems like a fair compromise. I think a DP motion for demon flip seems fitting.
If Vanilla Akuma’s demon flip is too good, change the motion from a DP to his A3 motion. However, I think SF4’s lenient input system will present quite the problem with the motion of QCFU/F.
The problem with the TK motion is that it interferes with one of the ways that games allow players to select between fireball and DP after walking forward. In certain games, such as the King of Fighters games and I believe SFIV, you’re allowed one extra direction past to be able to do the move. This means that in these games, you can walk forward, and then do a QCF for a DP, or do a TK to get the fireball.
Tekken’s AI can easily be cheesed. I never tried VF. The fighting system itself looks fine but I don’t particularly care for any of the characters. Soul Calibur and SSF2T had challenging AI, but those were based around reading player input. Frustrating when you start out against it, and then later you figure out how to cheese it as well.
If special move motions were intuitive there wouldn’t be such an outcry when movelists are omitted. Those motions just follow conventions established by prior games. Without background on those games, no one could ever guess that a dp is f, d, df+p just by looking at it.
Look you fucking schmuck, you can’t say this shit with a straight face and then go on about how more executionally stringent games are best. Seems fitting is just crap. Demon Flip was easily one of the best specials in vanilla SF4. What kind of motion should that have?
That’s the part that some of you fuckers just can’t seem to get. There’s a lot of motions that can be simplified without sacrificing the integrity of the game. Making those motions easy doesn’t even lead to characters being all that easier to play. Some characters are just complicated. Eddie, Zabel, Dhalsim, shit, even Zangief’s gameplan wouldn’t change if you switched piledriver from 360 motion to HCBF (and it didn’t, the buffs to greenhand and other things had more to do with how good he was in HDR). For some reason you dudes seem to think that lowering some of the execution stuff is going to ruin the game.
Let’s take MvC3 since you mentioned it. The bigger issues in MvC3 are: 1) they made it really easy to hit confirm and 2) characters are well designed so they can maximize their damage. Those are the things that are really different from MvC2. Even with that in mind, MvC3 is still really demanding of a player’s execution. Magneto, Morrigan and Zero all move differently and all come with random nonsense that you have to get really good at. The actual motions aren’t hard but the playing part is.
If you want a bunch of horseshit execution for everything, then play SF4. Anything worth doing is some kind of asshole link you have to plink. Yeah yeah yeah HnK but man, damn Daigo drops combos at a high level.
Still though, if execution was the mark of a truly great fighting game, why aren’t there more dudes on the Fate/Stay fighting game? That think required jump cancels and tiger knee motions just to do BnBs. Guess how many people are still about that hype? Yeah…HnK survives more because of the license than it being an amazing game to play. I mean, we love it because its ridiculous but dudes aren’t jumping on it because its da bes.
DP or TK are the only motions that I would choose. TK because that’s how it used to be and DP because that’s how it is now. That’s my honest answer.
Since TK seems to present a problem, then I would just leave it the way it is. If it didn’t present a problem, I would change it to TK immediately.
If you can think of a better motion that matches how good Akuma’s demon flip is in Vanilla, I’d love to hear your suggestion. To be honest, I’ve never really cared about balancing motions with how good a move is. The way they are now is fine with me.
**The motions themselves have never bothered me, it’s the lenient input system and scrub mechanics that bothers me. **
Both CvS2 and SF4 have DP Demon Flip. Vanilla Demon Flip is much better but to me, that doesn’t warrant changing the command for the move.
If Demon Flip just happens to be better in Vanilla, then that’s great for Akuma players and tough shit for everybody else. Rather than change motions to balance shit out, I’ll just deal with it and figure a way around it.
To some people, that is exactly the case:
I feel the exact same way as Damdai. Particularly about making difficult things easy and achieving an exclusive level of play.
GMC: What are your thoughts on the release of HD remix? Damdai: I was excited about the release as I felt it was my second chance, having missed ST at it’s most popular. I was still relatively new to ST when HDR came out, so I wasn’t against it as a lot of people were and supported it for a long time. Eventually though, I began to see how the removal of certain high level techniques and the overall lowering of the execution requirements negatively affected the game.I love overcoming difficult challenges to the point that they become easy, reaching an exclusive level of play through practice and dedication. Some call it competitive edge. The designers of HDR called them needless barriers and removed them. That may be fine for a casual game, but I don’t agree with that philosophy when it comes to competitive gaming, so I stopped playing HDR. Fortunately there seems to have been an ST revival of sorts, with arcade ST being present at almost every major so far this year.
Well I believe the reason people aren’t playing executionally taxing games like Fate is because it’s niche (the player base for Fate is primarily located in Japan) and the execution requirements are simply too high or intimidating for most people.
Besides, we know the majority of the FGC wouldn’t go back to playing old games since they already have newer, more current fighting games. That’s what the FGC does, they hop on that new shit.
I’ve always wondered… will the community still be playing Ultra when SF5 comes out?
I am firmly in Sirlin’s camp on this one, but I respect Damdai’s honest assertion that he likes execution for the exclusivity and competitive advantage it affords him. I mean, if your goal is to keep the FGC as small as possible then his comments make perfect sense.
I wonder if he campaigned to have plinking removed from the SF4. We can’t be letting the plebs hit their links ya know.
Definitely not. Very few people “love” SF4 because it is intentionally void of personality and design. Don’t get me wrong, it had to be that way because the game HAD to revive the FGC, and they couldn’t afford to let 3s happen again. They had to attract the lowest common denominator as much as a fighting game can.
Unless they keep putting up $ for Ultra after SF5 comes out, that is.
Damdai is a pretty damn great ST player. Damdai is also pretty wrong when it comes to this. During all the nonsense that happened with HDR (which admitted I liked because its SF2 and I’ll play any version of that over any other game) none of the issues really involved execution. The part he is referring to is changing the motion of piledrivers to HCBF. Sure it made the motion easier, but it also took away T.Hawk’s option select with dragon punch. A bit of the execution became less stringent just to resolve some of the random input timings. You have to be on a special kind of high to say that you made the game shittier by taking away the random shit. Even with all the “simplified stuff” it isn’t like we had a bunch of people get at those with experience. Matter of fact the one break out player from HDR was Snake Eyez. He got called a fraud and a bunch of shit then switched to SF4 and is bopping people.
Even then, Damdai needs to explain why is it that there have been all these top tier characters who didn’t have a single hard to do motion in them. As much as you guys want to harp about execution (and as much as we tell you that making special moves easier to do won’t affect the other things to do with the game) you guys keep on this. Never mind the fact that O.Sagat’s real execution came from throwing fireballs properly, N.Ryu had 2 combos you had to learn and one was jumping strong into super. Let’s be real for a minute here: ST isn’t a hard game to play. Its a hard game to get good at, but it isn’t mechanically hard to play. It is nowhere near as demanding as any of the current fighting games. Bitching about execution being made simple when the real issue for players will be using moves properly is just laughable.
Most of the proponents of harder execution still haven’t addressed the fact that a lot of these top tier characters throughout the years haven’t had complicated move sets. Sagat and Blanka are still top tier in CvS2 regardless of A Groove combos or roll cancelling. ST Sim is top tier and just legit hard to play because of his command normals more than yoga fire being hard to do.
I’ll give you something, there’s only so much you can make easy before things unravel. MvC3 is kind of shitty in that it made players more dangerous than they had any right to be. When I say that, I’ll even include myself. Characters were really well made which meant that lower level people played with a lot more power a lot easier. The combination of loose inputs and a 3 frame reversal window has definitely been terrible in SF4 too. So we have an idea of what won’t work (or what just feels uggo when playing).
Those previous design decisions have nothing to do with cleaning up inputs so they make more sense. Switching Akuma’s demonflip from a tiger knee to a backwards DP wasn’t the thing that broke Akuma. There are things that we’d have to look like to see if they seriously ruin games. For sure 720s are the one motion we know actually limit when the move can be used; I mean, freaking Raging Demon has a short cut. Everything is pretty fair game. Besides, if we can make a special move easier without compromising the integrity of the game (something which ultimately helps newer players get through that total scrub level faster) why shouldn’t devs do it?
True on the demon flip though. It wasn’t you per say but just making shit harder for the sake of being harder doesn’t do much of anything. Rest of the thread gotta explain themselves though.
He meant that SFIV tried to cater not just to old SF fans but players outside FG as well.
While previous SF franchises, excluding SF2, did target more the SF playerbase.
MK9 did not have that issue at all, since the game’s other aspects (storyline, gore, slapstick humor, violence and tits) were advertised as much as the FG mechanics. Just like the previous MK games.
On the contrary, games like KOFXIII and GGXrd target mainly their own faithfull playerbase.
Another point I’m not seeing anyone touch on is that Street Fighter makes a pretty good effort to have a variety of difficulties through character selection. Have trouble with tiger knee inputs? Play Guile.
Are fighting games too difficult even considering that? maybe, but I think at least some of it has to be attributed to beginner players just being butthurt that a portion of the game isn’t pandering directly to them. There are tons of people that play the perennial grappler in every game because they are not great at execution. You can cry that there are other characters in the game, or you can just get good with the tools you have.
There is also a big demographic of player that is more satisfied by doing flashy shit than winning, and they should be included too. especially when talking about what is easily one of the most hardcore genres in gaming.
What if those people don’t like how charge characters play? We’re gonna relegate their character choices by making the execution hard for the sake of it.
Grapplers are nowhere near beginner friendly. If somebody told me “Hey, I wanna learn street fighter who should I play?” the answer is hardly ever Zangief. If anything its the easiest way to frustrate people out of fighting games since a lot of the toolset from grapplers only matters at certain times and you need to understand the psychology of those situations to properly exploit it.
People who can do flashy shit still do flashy shit regardless of how hard or easy the moves are to do. As I’ve mentioned before, Eddie is full of hard execution but his moves aren’t hard to do. Just making things harder for the lol factor doesn’t really do much than go the extra mile to satisfy that niche. They can have their characters while still making specials accessible. These don’t aren’t mutually exclusive.
That is a problem with SF4s (and i guess kofxiii) crappy input system and not with TK inputs. They tried to make inputs easier and just made them harder for everyone.
Regarding #1: it’s inevitable that players can’t have the exact move set they want matched up with their favorite character personality all the time. This is not even related to input difficulty. The only resolution to your argument is completely customized characters or completely homogenized characters. I’m not sure which is worse.
#2: Zangief is difficult to play without relying on mechanical issues (aka hard for the sake of it). That was my point. You can already fully take part in the meat of the game without being able to do a fireball motion. Read #1 before you type what you’re about to.
#3. when I said there are players that like to do flashy shit more than winning, I meant difficulty, not activating cutscenes or whatever you meant. So let’s clarify, there is a large demographic of players that loves doing difficult inputs/combos. You really think people would make combo videos like “hey this is a normal bread and butter but the character dances!”?!
Usually you could say “they can play something else” but fighters are pretty much the end of the line. You’re basically saying that execution should be cut from all video games. It would be way more efficient for the opposing side to just accept they are moba players.
It’s very unlikely you’ll have a worthwhile reply, so you can have the last word as to avoid janking up the thread.
GGXrd tried to expand their playerbase, because even the makers of that series realize that they can’t keep relying on the same group of people for sales forever. They didn’t do such a good job of it because, much like many of the denizens of this forum, they have been encased in their own little bubble for so long that they have lost all perspective in terms of what is “easy” and “hard” execution.
This doesn’t actually work perfectly in practice. It’s great for people who like fighting games in general, but a lot of people outside of the FGC don’t generally think like that. They don’t want to play Tekken. They want to play Devil Jin. It’s not just a matter of switching over to a different character. If I go to an Japanese restaurant because I want to eat sushi, and the sushi turns out to be horribly overpriced, it wouldn’t matter to me if the Tempura was available and affordable.
Admittedly, Tekken is the worst case scenario where the flagship characters have the most asinine execution barriers. Capcom at least had the sense to make Viper the execution monster, not Ryu. Still, this didn’t help my friend who was a huge fan of Vanessa from KoF. He tried Viper for two weeks, then quit SF4 completely. Went right back to playing KoF 2002 on GGPO.
