The developers should learn to love and embrace the PC platform just for input latency and high refresh alone.
To quote Thoreau,
At their very core, fighting games need to be about competing with the other player. Anything that gets in the way of that only makes the game worse.
*Of course that’s hopelessly idealistic, simplicity doesn’t sell copies like a 157 hit Touch of death combo that uses three different resources and ends with a flashy super animation, and preferably, a throne.
If we are discussing 2d fighters, then it is ultimately a waste. Almost everything within the core values of a 2d fighter has been attempted. All we see at this point from that type of fighter is gimmicks. It can continue those gimmicks that get sales, but such a style has reached a dead-end. 3d fighters are the future and when the players finally accept and support that, then fighting games can make greater strides to change for the better.
Any continued support to simplify the genre is going to lead into WiiWare territory. In which a game may reach out to the masses, but it’s audience will fade away more hastily. I believe I am not alone in wanting more citizens than tourists in our community.
Part of the reason I think control schemes and move commands have remained the same is because you can’t just change everything and sever all ties to previous iterations of a game. If you were to put out Street Fighter 5 and completely change the commands, everyone would be lost for awhile, except the newest of players who don’t really have anything to compare it to in the first place. There are always new characters and/or new properties to older characters, but the reliability of being able to pick Ryu in ANY fighting game he appears in, and know that qcf+p will throw a fireball is something of a reward for those who have been playing awhile.
OP, your answers are in this article
while the writer isn’t a known member among the FGC, he at least knows what he’s talking about
wow, I really like that quote, holy crap, haha
Ex FCKING ACTLY
So what I extrapolated from this huge wall of text is that fighting games leave people out with their steep learning curves and over-complicated controls, so we should over-complicate them further by adding the control scheme from a skateboard game. What?
Depending on what you are looking for out of a fighting game, there’s something out there to accommodate you. We already have games like Blazblue that offer simplified inputs to get casual players into the game. SF4 has input shortcuts. Even Marvel has a simple mode. Inputs is not the issue.
You also have to consider that people need to react to what happens on screen in 60ths of a second. Adding custom controls would just make things worse and do nothing to change a game for the better. And if someone can’t use the simple control scheme in a game like BB, then maybe fighting games is not for them.
What fighting games could do a better job and evolve in is how they teach someone new to the game to actually play, but we do have games out there that have evolved and changed for the better. Unfortunately, people rather play SFxT.
I think the fighting game community has millions of greater ideas than the companies that make them themselves, they’re the problem…please… hire newer, better talent please…
No it wouldnt. The actual matchups would be the same. The only difference is you would have people spamming the “DP” button in SF IV instead of the shortcut for it. You have a shortcut for the DP in SF IV, a revenge gauge that rewards you for losing, and a super meter, and it’s still not good enough? Maybe if you complained about links in SF IV, you’d have a point, but if somebody had a FB/DP button and they spam FB’s/DP’s, does that really give them a “deeper” play style? Of course not. I’m still going to cross them up over and over and win because the only time they invested in the game is “ok, FB throws FBs, DP does DP, and Oni is broken.” This doesn’t teach them footsies, it doesn’t teach them matchups, and it certainly doesn’t deepen their play style. It just makes them feel more entitled to a victory they did nothing to earn. If I safe jump them, they will think I am cheating because “I pressed DP!! WTFBBQ1!” If I cross them up they will think I am cheating. If I option select, they will think I am cheating. If anything, this idea of easy inputs gives a player a more shallow play style: “play to win” is replaced by “press to win”
But why stop there? Why not give them a combo button too? I can’t wait for gameplay to go like this
P1: FB button
P2: Combo Button (which consists of jumping Fierce (thereby jumping over the fb) into combo cancelled into dizzy/ultra combo), Took off 35% life.
or how about
P1: FB
P2: Ultra Button through FB, 45% unscaled damage.
or even better
P1: Option Select button
P2: screwed
Or even better still
P1: infinite combo button
P2: screwed
This is your idea of deeper gameplay?
Stop listening to week one nerf complaints.
I have not worked on a fighting game yet, but my design principles would probably look something like this:
-
Remove dexterity barriers that limit the number of essential meaningful decisions a player can make. Execution will be a factor in competitive play even if the control scheme is simplified to the point that your average Facebook game player can play it without too much trouble, so there is no benefit to creating an artificial entry barrier.
-
Innovate! Stop being so limited by genre conventions. Give new, radical ideas a try, and see how far you can take them. Don’t be afraid to cut “tried-and-true” ideas from the game (blocking, hit-stun, life bars, etc.) if you can make an interesting game without them. Look at Guild Wars 2 and and they solved the Mana/Energy problem in MMOs… they removed it, even though that’s something you supposedly had to have.
-
Don’t half-ass it. Adding new subsystems that have very little impact on the game and merely shift the dynamics of play slightly is an essentially meaningless exercise. New mechanics should be bold, not just another method for boosting damage or meter gain by 4%.
-
Game circumstances should limit available decisions, but should rarely completely remove them. MK9’s meter management/breaker system is brilliant in this regard. When a player’s decisions have been removed, say, in a juggle, they are either gaining a resource that will enable a decision or they are in a position where they can decide to sacrifice that resource to reset the circumstance. This satisfies both the needs for constant engagement and adds a critical decision point.
This accessibility thing have already been tired in old and recent fighting games. What evidence supports that these easy inputs have changed things for the better?
The only thing I would like to see that would improve fighting games, is an alternate method of DLC. The fighting game genre is one where constant patches are necessary for balancing (and removing infinites and bugs), as well as DLC characters can cause serious issues to matchmaking and load times. This is something that obviously needs to be looked at, considering the anger, confusion, and rage, that was created by the SFxT debacle.
More people are playing.
Can you prove it’s due to easy inputs and no other facotrs?
Nope, I’m not privy to A/B testing data that was done for these games. I extrapolated that what holds true for the A/B testing data that I do have access to probably holds true for their data as well, and “ease of use” has always existed in a positive proportion to “user retention”. SF4 has proven to have excellent retention, so I’m willing to bet that ease of use contributed to it.
Also, I presume that the easier inputs were settled on through user testing, and not arbitrary fiat. Game development isn’t done in a closed container and you are constantly putting your decisions to the test, especially for a product like SF4 that had so much riding on it. Exact input windows were probably being tweaked and tuned from first-playable build all the way to late beta, and the version that shipped probably had the most positives in testing. It can be difficult to accept that decisions made in development that you don’t really like were the best ones given their data and goals, but it is generally true.
Heh, ‘prove’ is a pretty damn tough word, especually when talking about ‘whys’.
Nevertheless, anecdotally there are more people playing now than there have been since the arcade days really.
As far as I can tell, the scene was slowly yet surely shrinking over the years (people getting jobs, serious families, and almost no new blood) before the new generation of games started coming out.
In the same time period games were tending to get less accessible and more ‘niche’, and then (post SF4 with the new boom) it turned around and accessibility started getting stressed.
Correlation isn’t causation, I know, but there does seem to be a pattern.
I think 3D, ease of access, online and Street Fighter brand each separately matter more than how easy inputs are. And there’s nothing easy about heavy dependence on links so it was all a bunch of lip service in the end regardless.
And easy inputs doesn’t stop a game from being hard. ex. MvC2
SF4 was successful due to being old enough to induce nostalgia
I just realized that an ‘only’ slipped in there that shouldn’t be there.
I don’t wanna speak for Ilthuain, but absolutely nowhere does he say that ONLY making inputs simpler and no other factors is the key.
Seems like a small thing, but it substantially changes the framing of the discussion.