From what I can tell he’s basically mimicked charge motions pretty well; the character has a meter that charges when holding either back or neutral. You can only use your specials when it is full and it uses the whole meter.
That said, I think Sirlin misses the fundamental aspect that makes fighting games hard to get into. It’s not so much the controls as it is the movement. Moving around in fighting games is weird as hell compared to anything else. Compare it to platformers, which Smash takes after. That’s a genre people have been playing for decades, and thus the controls move over. You hold down a direction and you start running, you can adjust your arc mid jump, there’s momentum, so on and so forth. Even in platformers you generally don’t get double tap to dash, you have either hold or a button press.
That’s a hard chasm to cross, because fighting game movement is integral to the genre.
As Kecka said, developers learn to compensate for changes like this. Some game don’t even make timing into factor but decision making. Sure you opponent can react to you jumping but what if that game has options to compensate by allowing additional movement like double jump, Air dash, or dodge to make the DP/AA whiff, or additional defensive technique to counter them like Reinforce guarding( Faultless guard/Shielding) that uses resource or time sensitive input mechanics like Just defend or parry.
Other games sometimes make your option be unconventional ones (which yomi is doing) like using your normal, for example in PB your universal AA where crouching normals, Ex and super moves that are AUB, outside of the character designated AUB special. Jpwever instead of AA player could also lock down the opponent in air block string which drastically lower the guard gauge, use an untechable air throw. In personal 4 arena players could opt to use their C+D special which beat grabs attempts instead of grab teching into neutral.
We shouldn’t limit fighter by the practice of “traditional fighter” because we wouldn’t have Fighters like MK, KI, Smash, Virtua fighter. Bloody roar, Powerstone, Pokken,ect.
ALL Fighters, even non-Traditional ones, all require timing and execution based on timing. Games like Smash and KI are some of the most timing based games out there.
On top of that, this game doesn’t add mechanics to compensate for the easier AAs or anything, it just strips mechanics away. It can’t even add mechanics if it wanted to BECAUSE of its commitment to being the “Simplest FG in history”. If you can’t trust players to understand the concept of high/low blocking then how are you going to get them to understand concepts like movement in order to avoid punishment, or things like Just Defend?
That’s the issue, and ironically you help add to my point. You’re right in the sense that when you make big sweeping changes to avoid being beholden to “Traditional FGs” you have to compensate for it somewhere to make it work. The problem is, due to this game’s design philosophy they can’t actually add much of anything for compensation without betraying the very concept they strive to be. This is why I say Yomi will teach casuals how to play FGs better than Fantasy Strike will. Because at least that game is allowed to compensate.
In Yomi, let’s look at Grave aka Ryu Clone. He has an absurd DP. 0 frames which means it can’t be beat by anything in the entire game short of a Gold Burst. If it’s blocked you get some chip and the opponent gets a card but you aren’t hard punished like you would be in a normal fighter. So what’s the compensation? You only get 4 DPs in an entire game so you MUST use them wisely. The second Grave is without the threat of DP it’s open season as his normals and moves aren’t particularly fast otherwise unless he wants to go for the hail mary raw True Power of Storms. In a way, this teaches you somewhat about the proper timing of using a DP. Use it when you really need to get out of a situation but don’t abuse it.
Yomi actually does teach players also about the importance of pokes, using throws to break open a guard, how to best make use of health, crossups, 2 in 1s, making and spending bar, combo trees, hell even how to use a Burst and Bursts are actually somewhat rare in FGs. If someone is having problems grasping FG concepts and they’re afraid of execution I’m much more likely to send them to playing Yomi than have them play Fantasy Strike because Yomi is much more likely to teach people concepts that they can use in multiple FGs whether traditional or not.
When you take execution away completely and leave only decision making you end up with a turn based strategy game. No fighting game can exist without timing; even something as simple as punishing a whiff, AAing or staying out of sweep range demands timing and execution.
input execution can be replaced by adding startup frames roughly equal to the execution time… theres absolutely zero reason why we need the complex inputs we have, but we have them because 1.) it is the traditional approach and it works, and is fun/adds charm etc. and 2.) it adds longevity by way of needing to train and what not.
MKX has supers with L+R and specials with down forward punch etc. (insert childish whining of how mkx sucks here because reasons)
there are no rules to game design… there are tested and tried and true ways, but there is no right or wrong way. there are only good and bad games. it is nothing but foolish to dismiss this as a bad game in its current state
Did I say it was a bad game? It can very well be a good game on its own merits.
But adding startup time does NOT replace input execution and it’s completely asinine to suggest. In theory it does “Oh, well if you can respond to a jump quicker, then make the move take longer to come out, it all balances out”. But you’re still taking away the minigame of being in the right position to execute quicker, or needing to move correctly to make a AA auto correct if necessary. Even if you can do 100 times out of 100 you’re taking away the fun of everything surrounding it.
Fantasy Strike can potentially be a fun game in its own rights, and it has every right to prove itself on that front. But it’s entire intention is to serve as a gateway into other FGs, which it will not do well in. What the game SHOULD focus on is being nothing more than itself and focusing on how the game mechanics revolve around its own world and focus on being the best game it can be ignoring how other games do things. But that’s kind of hard to do when so many of its characters are throwbacks or homages to notable and infamous FG characters.
No, because if a move that was 3 frames with a harder input is now 6 frames, you can’t punish -3 moves with it or frametrap there. You also can’t be buffering in case you see something you want to use the move against.
You can design around having simple moves, as MKX did by making you want to use meter on breakers instead of supers, but if you don’t understand why inputs exist you should go back and examine that instead of making idiotic comments.
Increasing startup is a pretty terrible solution for various reasons. For example with a DP motion I can buffer the directionals and delay the button press to be able to respond quicker if I want to. With delayed startup I will have a slower attack no matter what. Of course this alters its usefulness as a reversal since longer startup makes it easier to safejump, make it harder to combo from normals and overall affect how good it is for zoning. You will have to reduce projectile recovery to allow classic shoto zoning, but of course that also carries its own set of consequences.
Again, changes like these have chain reactions that affect multiple aspects of the game. Changing how inputs work doesn’t just affect inputs.
The reason why developers have stuck with Street Fighter II input system for so long is not out of tradition, it’s because it was genius. It puts limitations to moves without sacrificing responsiveness, it’s loose enough to allow flexibility but not so much as to make reactions braindead. It also lets you have many special attacks whereas with single button presses you are much more limited. And it adds an incredible amount of depth and variety to characters that is lost in a game with single presses for everything.
Now, maybe if the input simplicity was there because it had a novel system designed around it and gave you extra tools to make it up for it, it could work. But as this seems to be Street Fighter Redux, I don’t see how it can compensate.
No it’s not. The mechanics are not going to drastically change between now and release. This is the summarized version of the final game. The problems with the game are already quite apparent and they go beyond being simply “bugs” or “oversights”, it has more to do with the flawed design of the game itself.
MK1 pretty much took me away from SF back in 1992. I thought that Capcom was shit when they tried to get back the old SF players that went to MK by releasing Super and Super Turbo. The game that got me back into SF was CVS2. The game that got me away from the MK franchise was MK4 and the lack of MK competition when MK4 came out. MK5, MK6, and MK7 kinda got me back into MK, but that was short lived because there were no serious tournaments or competition for those games.
Fast forward to now. I haven’t played MKX or SF5 yet, but I have played MK9 and SF4 once each. I didn’t like it SF4 or MK9. Although, SF5 kinda reminds me of that old school SF2 feel while MKX kinda reminds me of that oldschool MK2/UMK3 feel based on the streams I’ve seen. I’ll have to play MKX and SF5 one of these days.
The thing is, if you read the writings of both Seth and Sirlin (especially Sirlin), you can kinda tell that they do value decision making and making the right reads/decisions over the mechanical execution behind it. I’d say that to them, that aspect of fighting games is more interesting and engaging over reaction, mechanical execution, etc. This is something that shows in both the games they enjoy, as well as those that they design. In other words, they’re simply making games that emphasize that part of fighting games that they enjoy the most. It’s less about “I’m going to do so and so really fast, and see if you can react to that” and more “here’s what I’m going to do, what’s your answer to it”.
I think that Fantasy Strike is focusing on being it’s own thing for the right crowd more than being a “gateway game” - some of us might “graduate” to other fighting games, but certainly not all. It attempts to highlight and show off a part of fighting games that’s usually beyond a lot of gamers (for various reasons). This is useful for introducing more people, but will also stand perfectly fine on its own.
As for how these characters come close to being a “rip-off” of Street Fighter, that’s more down to Sirlin Games’ history than this specific game - Yomi (the card game) was designed to be an SF2 card game (there are rumours that they tried for the license, but I got no clue if those are true). So the Yomi “setting” is based on SF2 to various degrees, but Sirlin has continued to use it for all his games and has built on it. So when he does make a fighting game, using the Yomi characters is the obvious choice.
Exactly this. Fantasy Strike is an attempt to boil a fighting game down to what Sirlin thinks is the essence, or more correctly, to what he thinks are the best parts of fighting games. Everybody has the right to their own opinion on what makes a game great, and this is his.
The timing aspect is still present, and important (otherwise I’d just play Yomi!). But flipping a card after getting to think about the right play isn’t the same as frantically pushing the right button at the right time. Thinking fast is different from thinking deeply, but it’s still a mental task.
Having your own opinion on what makes a great game is fine as long as you dont get the hump when others do not agree especially if you are trying to push it as a specific genre and to its main group which despite everyone having varying interests in fighters they can all collectively say no and you are ok with that then all is bless. Like I said bringing in new people or even a different type of game for new people is all bless but there is generally no real appeal in here for fighter players. Thinking deeply can go into almost any game, thinking fast only features in a few genres generally side scrollers, Mobas and fighters. Thinking fast is a part of fighters not just mechanically but in its appeal.
Basically make the game however you want but I believe it would be a huge mistake to push this game out to the fighting game players and believe they will get favourable acceptence of it how it is right now especially with the almost unaimous feelings about the game from this chat. Most of the people who are on the side of “giving it a chance” are mostly just hopefuls hence you have people saying things as about being wrong to judge the game in its current state.
The main problem here is not what they are trying to achieve which they have made clear, it is the decision they have made to go about it. People are only being helpful here by saying about the natural flaws that they can see or will occur in the game that have come from the developers collection of choices, it is mostly the fact that they are not doing or trying anything new what so ever they are just removing vast amounts of a pre-existing creation essentially crippling it, whether they choose to take that onboard is entirely upto them. Wish the game all the best anyway when it is about I will give it a go and hey I might even enjoy it but even if I do if it remains similar to as is I know that I will enjoy it for other reasons rather then enjoying it as a fighter.
I mean yeah this is their goal, it’s just curious that both of them value decision making, but every game they make reduces the number of options drastically making decision making process much easier and in a way less important than what ends up dominating the game which you can bank on being reactions and matchups since less options = less ways to deal with situations = matchups become more rigid and for instance the decision to jump a fireball is less important to your reactions to the fireball to not get punished for jumping too late.
Basically long story short their design concepts IMO are not conducive to what they consider the best parts of fighting games. I mean, I highly value decision making myself but turning the “rock-paper-scissors” of fighting games into ACTUAL rock-paper-scissors makes me uninterested by a great deal. The complexity is what makes that decision making interesting, that’s the real reason why Divekick was a fun party game that didn’t have legs and died a week after launch. You can scream from the mountaintops about how easy your game is or how it’s about footsies and fundamental play, but fact of the matter is a game needs more than just spacing and RPS to be enjoyable for a long period of time.
On the topic of MK, I think that 1) those inputs aren’t easier aside from maybe DPs since I find rolling the stick easier than jerking it in directions (and in the MK games where you can just do fireball motions it makes no difference), and 2) in games using traditional SF inputs there’s generally a sort of “standardized” motion-to-move protocol that just doesn’t exist in MK. For example, if I were to throw a fireball in a Street Fighter game, or KI, or KoF, or whatever, I’d probably try quarter circle forward with a punch button. Likewise, with a DP I’d try DP motions, and a command grab I’d try 360s. I can probably guess like 75% of all moves in any given Street Fighter game after I’ve figured out whether a character is charge or motions, even the ones like EX, where I don’t know more than half the roster. In MK or Injustice, that’s not a thing, because everyone just seems to have random motions and buttons for even very similar moves. And I know that’s an extremely surface level problem that will disappear within days of picking up the game, but if the idea is to make it easier on new players, breaking conventions for the sake of breaking them adds an artificial learning curve for anyone used to any other 2d fighter.
Also, like I said, motions do serve purposes outside of their original ones (which was basically either “hidden moves” or cabinets not having enough buttons). Charge characters play very differently because of their need to hold down back and therefore can have moves that would be overpowered for motion characters. This also means that crossing them up can remove part of their arsenal or forcing them to block an overhead or walk forward/backward will fuck with their down charges, meaning that on the offense they either need to jump or charge their specials during normals. A Guile who can walk forward and boom/flash kick is suddenly a ridiculous rushdown character. Stuff like charge partitioning, input buffering, option selects and auto-corrects largely came as a direct consequence of the inputs of various moves. Getting rid of motions isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not as easy as “it’s artificial difficulty”, because it has evolved to the point where it is part of the genre and you kind of need to make a system that still allows that level of advanced gameplay and undiscovered tech.
Look at Melee. I know, I know, people will probably shit all over me now. But it’s the perfect example of a game with simple inputs that still has some extremely high-level (if unintended) techniques. A lot of players prefer that game to Brawl, where Nintendo essentially looked at it and went “well, fuck you for having fun in a way we didn’t intend, have random tripping”. Sure, it’s a bit different since the advanced techniques in Smash only come into play at high levels, whereas motions in Street Fighter are required at the most casual level, but the idea is that if you’re going to simplify the control scheme, you need to make sure that the game itself doesn’t lose complexity at a high level, or you’re just going to end up with a product that isn’t as popular once the casuals get tired of it after a few months. You want to make it easier to get to the complex stuff, you don’t want to remove the complex stuff altogether. Which is why I liked Rising Thunder, because even though I wasn’t the biggest fan of cooldown specials and the aesthetics, that game was basically all footsies.
Well it’s highly likely that they think otherwise. I mean, just look at the games they enjoy the most - games like ST and Alpha 2. There’s a simplicity in those games (remember Sirlin and low strong) and the way they play them that informs their ideas and decisions on making their own games.