Reminder that his game directly copies the following move animations for its characters
If you really think pointing out extremely obvious flaws with Capcom and NRS games and addressing them in his own game makes him some sort of genius, well… honestly that’s just more of the same SG fanboy gush I’ve come to expect from you. I think anyone with even a passing interest in competitive fighting game play is able to see these flaws and apply their own solutions. There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING about his observations or ideas that are earth-shattering knowledge. Just because he gloats about it like he’s the first person to make these observations doesn’t mean he actually is. And maybe if I followed his example and let Capcom do the hard part of designing my game for me, I’d have something out by now.
So yeah, don’t break your arm jerking him off, fanboy. Game you like ≠ good game.
I disagree with Mike’s opinion on half circle and greater moves. If competent players can do them, there is no problem. The idea that more complex motions are unnecessary strikes me as someone who doesn’t think about the implications those inputs have for very long. Consider the DP motion, why do anti airs consistently use a DP motion instead of a fireball motion or something easier/faster to input? Because the move is intentionally awkward and affects how fast you can input it which changes how you react to things. You could argue that the original goal was to allow for more inputs in the same button space, but I would argue that at some point in the last 30 or so years of competitive fighting game play that stops being the reason. Game developers wouldn’t KEEP doing DP motions forever just for that reason when there are other decisions you could make to solve that issue, and the community would not be so vehemently opposed to 1 button DP’s because of how they affect the meta and how a character is played. The same is true for half circle and other more complex motions. They have a purpose, you just have to design that purpose, and I think KoF and Guilty Gear do that very well. Mike has a lot of problems with KoF/GG inputs for seemingly no reason other than they “could be” simplified, but that idea is bunk to me, everything could be simplified a great deal, why stop at getting rid of half circles, get rid of DP’s and fireball motions too because those can be simplified and eventually you end up with Fantasy Strike and all of a sudden no one wants to play your game anymore. Instead, consider the implications of the motions and how they affect play.
For instance, KoF command grabs are consistently half circle forward inputs for 1 frame throws (barring a few of course for other reasons) while slower command throws are consistently half circle back or the variant half circle back into forward (barring a few of course for other reasons). This isn’t by accident or tradition, I refuse to believe that SNK over the past 20 years just randomly decided this and never changed it for no reason. Look at the applications of these moves though, with a 1 frame command throw what’s the one thing you would really love to have on the ready whenever you need it? Punishes, making sure people don’t get away with unsafe moves or people who are too cute with their frame trap pressure. Well as it just so happens 99% of the time your 1 frame command throw is a HCF input, which just so happens to start from a blocking position, which means you can easily block and transition into the motion to get your 1 frame punish easy. But, you might say, it doesn’t need to be a half circle to do that, it could be a fireball motion and it would give you the same result. And that’s very true, however that’s only one situation, but that motion affects you in all situations. What’s really awkward to do before buffering a HCF input? Moving forward! What’s a big part of KoF? Running! So these inputs also end up being more difficult to use in offensive situations. Not impossible to use, but because of the input, your 1 frame command throw will never come out in 1 frame or anywhere near that in an offensive situation because of how awkward it is to throw it out while moving forward, defensively it’s a 1 frame move all day every day, but offensively at BEST you’re looking at a 5 frame move, but more realistically 7 to 10 frames. You know what input is really easy to do while moving forward? Half circle back! And because of that, a lot of characters who are more offensively mixup oriented end up with half circle back command throw inputs (or the variant). BUT! What did I say earlier? Slower command throws have this input, and they are slower for the exact reason that they have this input. Because it’s easy to do a HCB while running (from the run input you can just roll a QCB and get the input in 2-4 frames), the throws are made slower so that they are not insane offensively, they become proper mixup tools.
You could probably look at some frame data and do some math and come to the conclusion that offensively, these two throws including the inputs will come out at the same time roughly, so the inputs don’t matter. But that’s also wrong, because those HCB moves are intentionally made slower, so they can NEVER be used in the same way as the 1 frame command throws can be used defensively unless they have invincibility. This creates an even further distancing in abilities between characters who are great at punishing and being a wall (grapplers) and characters who have strong mixup (rushdown characters) and allows you to give rushdown characters like Iori a command throw and it doesn’t break the game because Iori has all the options, because he doesn’t have all the options, he just has a lot of options. It’s very possible to be smart in how you design inputs and more complex inputs can be used effectively, it’s on the designer to make sure they ARE used effectively. I think to write off a game design element as unnecessary entirely is pretty close minded. I understand that it clashed with Mike’s idea for a fighting game and that’s fine and he’s totally right to want to design a game in that way, but I think it should be obvious that all games are not designed equally and what works for one game might not work for another.
No but remix culture tho.
Like how Vanilla Ice “remixed” under pressure or how Stree Overlord remixed Street Fighter.
As long as you have a limp-dicked excuse you can get away with actual theft.
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. The point was that, maybe there is a point of compromise. That maybe, there is a certain point (that may differ between the games) where some inputs become unnecessary. Even KOFXIV did this to some point, specifically with removing the pretzel input for Geese’s Raging Storm. I was using Skullgirls simply as an example of a game doing this.
That said, Mike does acknowledge that the motions do serve a purpose in regards to how a move is used. This is why he still uses traditional DP inputs and was very critical of P4A using 2 buttons for “DP” style moves (and SF’s new DP shortcut), since it takes away the slight awkwardness of the motion, and the fact that the motion in itself requires the player to stand their character, adding extra risk. Also, regarding the half circles, a good number of the things you described can be applied using quarter circles, even the bit with command throws. In fact, Skullgirls does have a characters with runs and command throws. Both Valentines’s Mortuary Drop and Fukua’s Inevitable Snuggle are qcb+p+lk, both have slow start ups (25 frames for Valentines, 30 frame for Fukua, though the latter has 5 hits of armor). However, Fukua also has Tender Embrace which is qcf+lp+lk, and comes out much faster at 8 frames (for comparison, the fastest light normal is 5 frames). Meanwhile, grapplers with dashes instead of runs get faster throws, with Cerebella’s Diamond Drop (qcf+lp+lk) coming out in 4 frames with invulnerable start up.
My point was that some things can’t be compromised. The designs serve a purpose and you can’t retrofit different designs into old games and have them function the same. Fantasy Strike for all intents and purposes is BASICALLY SF2 but easy, and that doesn’t work because the SF2 stuff was not designed to be played this way so a lot of the depth and strategy is gone and things are thrown away and not replaced with anything. You have to design a game from the ground up a certain way, and these games like FS and Rising Thunder didn’t do that. They took the framework of other games and slapped on easymode controls and called it a day.
Also, you can’t possibly think that those SG examples are the same as the things I was talking about. The fact that you’re talking about an 8 frame command throw being “fast” at all immediately disqualifies the comparison. The concept is similar but the actual implications are worlds apart, we’re talking about literal 1 frame command throws, faster than any normal in the game, faster than the majority of supers, and it’s a non-meter option that grapplers have all the time without any cooldowns or required activations. You cannot give that tool a Skullgirls input and expect the rest of the game to work the same because it won’t. You would have to change the frame data to what Skullgirls did, which is why Skullgirls frame data is that way, but by doing that you are neutering the utility of the move as a punish move, because even a 4 frame command grab is too slow to punish a lot of things in KoF. Which, by the way, those things in KoF are designed that way as a balancing tool so that characters can get away with murder against other characters in the roster but not against grapplers, which is another way they force you to play that matchup differently, you can’t run the same mixups and blockstrings and get away with it. So by doing that you’ve either got to live with the fact that grapplers are just inherently worse or change the other moves so that grapplers can punish them, etc etc etc which is a gigantic domino effect that ripples throughout the entire game.
This is what I’m talking about. Geese’s Raging Storm didn’t need to get changed, but they changed it because it is historically one of the most complained about inputs in any fighting game ever. In games post-Fatal Fury, the input interpreters were so lenient that it was never an actual problem doing a Raging Storm, but that was irrelevant because it was notorious. That input too had gameplay implications that could have been designed around and in a way were, for instance Geese could not confirm into Raging Storm from a crouching normal, and only one of his standing normals could be special cancelled and it whiffed on crouching opponents, so if you were crouching Geese could not combo into Raging Storm, he had to make you stand and guess wrong to hit you with a low which altered his offensive strategy. But people complained about it so get rid of it. Compromise only removes the depth the game had originally. If you want to make an easy game you have to make a new game with new depth and a new design. SG was designed to be the way it is, the game works because it had blueprints and a mission statement and was not trying to be anything else outside of references. Compromise does not work.
Except functionally, there isn’t anything much different between a qcf and an hcf after a run. Most of us will naturally perform an hcf, or at least start from down+back, to clear the input buffer and avoid DP motions.
And then there’s stuff outside of command throws. For example, why the hell does King’s tornado kick need an hcb command? Majority of us can pull it off just as fast as if it were a qcb command. From where I stand, all it does is require a bit of extra finger gymnastics when doing BnBs such as cl.HK, df.HK xx tornado kick, which by the way, also shows that the hcb isn’t because they don’t want it to be confirmable from lows.
So hey uh!
Speaking as someone who has actually played this game, and a fair bit at that, and who took it to an event at a fighting game bar in Osaka last weekend, here is what has happened with every single person who actually played it in my experience:
- They laughed at the still-very-much-in-progress appearance with lots of placeholder stuff
- New fighting game players learned the controls in a match or two, while old players “unlearned” command inputs and got used to the special move buttons
- Everyone really, really enjoyed playing the game. New players got to experience the meat of the genre (spacing, baiting out punishable moves, etc.) and old players really liked that it felt very SF2, with high-damage combos and quick rounds
I know the FGC really loves to fall all over itself to see who can shit on everything new the fastest (see: reactions to KOF XIV, which was at a much more complete stage before it was revealed, as well as how the overwhelming attitude toward SF4 being Not As Good As Things Used To Be got transferred immediately to SF5, and now people apparently think SF4 was a good game), but in my own experience actually playing this game and sharing it with others, it is a legitimately really fun game that also happens to still need a lot of polish, because it isn’t even in beta state yet.
You aren’t wrong but don’t act like there’s an objective definition for what a “good” game is lmao
FGC logic = every game I don’t play is a bad game.
I’m glad. I had similar experiences with Divekick. I’m really, really looking forward to this because it’ll be something I can use to play with some friends for whom FGs are a bit too hard but that wanna get their feet wet. Playing Nidhogg with the same group was a lot of fun, hopefully this gets to be just as good.
inversely, if you join a group of a certain game, they tend to praise it and ignore its faults like it is super jesus fighter: godly edition
I don’t think you can really have a good fighting game that’s not fun, as that’s kind of the point. But there are plenty of fun games that aren’t good; lord knows I get a lot of enjoyment from DFCI, but it’s definitely not a good game.
On the remixing, it’s really dumb that he’s defending this in game. It’s okayish on the cards when everyone realizes you’re basically doing knockoffs and that’s part of the fun. For the actual videogame that’s crossing the line into flatout ripoff territory because you’re actively competing with the real thing.
If this game is going to be successful he really has to make it look good. Like, really good; get your artstyle in order and make models beautiful. Because with a game this simply the majority of your costs once you’ve got it up and running are going to come from making the model; you’ve got barely any animations after all. So it shouldn’t be hard to actually have a constant stream of new characters coming out so that everyone has something they like to play. Just make it look good!
Well that and I need Gwen in game. So much fun in the card game.
It’d be really fun to start playing Yomi on here. It’s a fun game but there’s not a ton of people to play it with. I’m debating doing the Print and Play of the 4 free characters but idk yet.
Got a chance to play this for a few hours. Used Geiger. It’s not terrible, though I do wish there was a way to crouch. Not because I’m fiending for high/low, but because I sometimes wanted to be able to block without walking back. I like the damage system (or heavily pared-down equivalent), and the juggles are really screwy and a lot of fun. I once managed to somehow get an anti-air sonic scythe to juggle into another sonic scythe.
On that note, I really hope they overhaul the attacks down the road. The bootlegged animations might be handy as a shorthand, but they reek of laziness. A game this simple can use all the diversity it can, and wholly unique animations would help a lot.
EDIT: Realized that down-to-block would screw up the crossup thing they have going on. Maybe just a raw neutral crouch that reduces profile but doesn’t actually block anything could do the job, I dunno
Way back, a long long time ago, I downloaded the first set of print and play for the yomi card game, and it was just straight up street fighter. I had a guile deck and a zangief deck, and a ryu deck. Of course they just morphed to other character, but the playstyles remained even to this day, which I don’t really see what the big deal of that is
As for the game, I’m excited to play it at the PSX Experience. I think backing it monthly on patreon is a bit steep of a price, but I’m hoping that when it does come out it will be a good stepping stone for fighting games. My family knows I love street fighter, but of course nobody can really play because it gets pretty complicated fast. Divekick was a lot of fun, we had people in my family playing that I would never have thought would have been interested, like my mother in law, who was actually getting into it. This is the perfect game to bridge that gap and teach some of the concepts, without having the controller be the major limiting factor. My 6 year old son, for instance, will love playing this with me
So wherebthe updates at?
Oh yes please. I want to see Capcom’s lawyers burn this shit to the ground.
Please keep those stolen animations in the final release, I beg you.
Aren’t most of them placeholder anyway? Don’t think the game is gonna ship with SF4 animations.