MK9 has had almost constant sponsorship money since its landing and its still not nearly as popular as any of the Capcom games… .the USA is just a heavily Capcom-enthused country.
Going to read them in a bit.
Meanwhile, I’m seeing that VF5FS in your sig. I’m nodding. D’aw yeah~
People not jumping to a game they don’t like because there’s lots of cash to win? Some faith is restored in this new era FGC.
I agree, but not necessarily when the implication is blind faith to nostalgia, but that’s life.
Capcom doesn’t teach bad players to play. What they do is lessen the quality of the games to allow their beginner level to become a factor. This is the reason for bigger input windows, mashable throw scenarios, countless attempts @ broken comeback mechanics like XF\ultras and all the other problems that plague fighters this generation
the whole thing about game design is that you can’t make a fighting game for everyone to play. You either have to make it all casual or all pro, this half\half shit is resulting in fucked ass mechanics like xf3 or gems. Where its supposed to help bad players and it does but when 2 pro’s start using it, its fucking ugly to deal with. When you make a game for everyone, you reduce it to its lowest common denominator, which is the scrub level because pro’s already know that level. Well, what you get is a game that is equivalent to the book, see spot run. New players who just began playing will understand see spot run but what about the people who’ve been playing for 20 years already and were reading Shakespeare? now you’ve just reduced them to see spot run? why? good players have been forced into a regression of the genre for the simple sake of letting new players play?
When you get a game that is like see spot run, you get something that is very basic and no real substance. Its just bland. There is no depth so when the game reaches a certain point, it becomes shit. When your game has massive depth like a Shakespeare book, the depth is there forever. I know its a business and they have to make money but why are we regressing? is it not possible to progress with the genre AND make money? I believe it is
IMO, I don’t think the casual market should be catered to what so ever. Its that logic that makes fighters bad. If you create a good game pro’s like but teach casual players how to play, that will result in the best game possible. You think Shakespeare was worried about making sure retards could read his shit? no, because it would remove the depth of what he was doing.
if we want better games, we have to teach new players to be better players and that can only be done through some type of online mechanic like Reno was saying. Its the only way to get pro level games w\o alienating new players and that is what game developers should aim for.
It’s the same problem again, if you think ‘catering to the casuals’ means you can’t cater to ‘pros’, then you need to re-examine the whole thing. They’re no more contradictory than good graphics and good gameplay are.
You win that straw man argument.
I for one will note that there is a marked difference in:
- Sometimes when people cater to the casuals they don’t effectively cater to pros
vs: - If you cater to the casuals you cannot cater to pros.
Nobody is arguing the latter except for you. If you think they are, you’re reading too far into it.
Dude, it’s not a strawman.
The guy’s been throwing it around like a truism this entire discussion
TO QUOTE
how is that supposed to be interpreted otherwise? ‘Either’ has a pretty specific meaning.
Upthread we’ve talked some about how Capcom hasn’t done a terribly good job at threading that needle, but Shoultz position is explicitly that you have to pick one croup or the other.
And I disagree with that quote, strongly. You can absolutely make a fighting game for everyone to play, it’s just not very easy.
[media=youtube]SuodslcRVyU[/media]
LOL thanks for the reply you answered my question. LMAO you remind of The AngryVideo Game Nerd! The way you answered couldn’t help but laugh.
That would be “reading too far into it”. If you don’t get that, take several steps back and think about who he is and what he advocates for in terms of game design. If someone is evidently avowing some crazed position, you can let it go.
He’s been talking about the same thing for days in this thread, and in general, for years.
And honestly I think the way to do it is the opposite of that, unless somebody has some really stellar credentials, I think who they are doesn’t matter. I’m going to judge people on their arguments.
And it consistently comes down to the same thing. Shoultzula thinks that the interests of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ are mutually exclusive. It’s something he’s iterated again and again. Even taking silly absolutism out of it, that’s just an incorrect position… if anything its condescending, the casuals in the end want exactly the same thing the hardcore do, they want a game they can play and enjoy, while being able to make progress and improve.
And he does have a point in that Capcom has done a terrible job getting some of these design ideas into their titles, but it seems to be more an issue of how their general approach works rather than aiming too much at pleasing ‘casuals’.
But lets break it down into a yes/no game. I'm going to post a quote, and you can agree, disagree, or try to explain what he really meant..
[quote]
*You either have to make it all casual or all pro,*
[/quote]
PS: I just realized I've let this be transformed into being about personalities. Lets go back to it being being about how to move the genre forward.Not everything that appeals to a casual gamer will necessarily make a game worse competitively. I still think there’s a decent number of accessibility options out there that games haven’t tried that will let more casual players into the scene while at the same time not damaging the integrity of a game. Obviously at some point the only way to improve playerbase while not damaging the integrity of the game will be to have extremely in-depth tutorials, but I don’t think fighting games have quite reached that point yet.
I think it’s helpful to work out what exactly players want from a game (both casual and tournament level) and then work out exactly what conflicts between the two.
Casual players like comeback mechanics. Tournament players don’t. How do you resolve this?
Let’s take a look at Ultras in SFIV? The primary beef that a lot of people have with ultras is that you get them as you lose life, thus giving one player access to a powerful game changing tool while the player that’s winning doesn’t get it. That’s obviously something that people don’t like in a competitive game, being rewarded for losing. Imagine for a moment what the other goals of the ultra is for casual players besides comeback potential. It’s to guarantee the chance to give them the ability to pull off this super flashy move once per round in addition to comeback potential. Is there a way to do those goals without actually making it a comeback mechanic? Easily. Do what Alpha 3 does. Give both players ultra at the start of the round. It’s no longer a comeback mechanic in the sense that one player gets it and another doesn’t, but it does let a casual player hope that he can swing the match in his favor. Obviously, you can’t just change SFIV as it is right now to this imaginary situation to make it a better game, but it could easily have been built with this in mind.
Casual players like being able to pick up a game and playing it instantly. Tournament players like to be rewarded for the time they’ve put into the game (execution, combo knowledge, gimmicks, character matchup knowledge, etc.).
This conflict is a gigantic mess. There’s a whole slew of mechanics in fighting games that are trying to resolve this problem. I’m going to look at just one in particular that seems to be on its way to being solved.
Inputs shouldn’t be hard for the sake of being hard. Nothing turns a casual player away from a game more than the inability to do the basic specials/supers of a character or a basic 4-5 hit combo into a super. Even beyond that, I believe that 1-frame link combos are unnecessarily difficult. There’s been a couple attempts at solving these problems in modern games. HDR increased the input window from the random number between 8-15 to a straight 15 frames. Blazblue has a 5-frame buffer to allow players to do links easier. What does this do for casual players? It lets them do what they want to do easier, whether that be getting a simple dragon punch or doing a link that would ordinarily require frame precise timing. How does this damage the tournament worthiness of a game? It diminishes the amount of execution required to play at a tournament level. However, even with simpler inputs there’s still plenty of execution required in Blazblue.
The main point I’m trying to make is that there’s still some wiggle room left for mechanically based solutions to getting casual players involved in fighting games without damaging how good a game is at high levels. Now uh, most companies certainly have a bad track record in this area. That isn’t to say it isn’t impossible for an indie developer to take steps in the right direction (Skullgirls).
Any newly released fighter always provides insight into the conflicts between casuals/pros. They get an explosion of players at the very beginning and then people stop playing it. Right now, that game is Skullgirls. Look around at game forums (not just SRK) and stuff and you’ll have a good sample size of people talking about the game and what they like or dislike. Guilty Gear in the summer will provide another look into the conflict and it should be interesting to see just what things that we’ve been taking granted for years are actually hated by the more casual players.
You’re heartily allowed to do that privately, too. See also http://xkcd.com/386/ .
So yes, we both agree that he’s terrible at expressing himself and we both (hopefully, here) are intelligent to read between the lines and let go the absolutist positions he’s not actually taking.
I don’t care what he “meant”. I bet he means along the lines of “JFC this overemphasis on comeback and skill-nerf mechanics is a abonimation for god’s sakes stop letting it get in the way of gameplay”. It’d be hard to argue that point given the games he plays, many of which do have casual-friendly features. But that’s a stupid discussion. Shoultz is generally top tier on-point but can’t explain his way out of a paper bag most days. Deal with it. If you can’t deal with people not being able to explain themselves well, you shouldn’t be on the internet. You will annoy others. But I’m sure you have no history with a multitude of people telling you that. At some point it stops being them. Learn to let shit go sometimes.
so seriously man, what was the point of this little aside?
It’s like… I dunno, neither he nor I were mad here, nobody’s throwing insults, we’re politely disagreeing and discussing.
It absolutely did not need you to to come in and add a personal element.
You should be grateful someone like shoutz is willing to share his knowledge with you. You should try to figure out what he’s trying to say instead of being spoon-fed everything and then attacking him.
Throughout this thread shoutz discussed specific game design mechanics and when you reply you ignore all the technical aspects of his posts, which just makes you look like you’re trolling.
Preppy came in here giving you a heads up. You should thank him for him taking the time out to break it down to you. If this was my forum you would have been banned a long time ago.
how?
by making cvs2 for xbla and psn. thats how.
PROBLEM SOLVED.
so has anyone read the second part of gamespot’s Fighting Game Symposium? I actually really enjoyed James Chen’s and Harada’s input on the genre.
lol srk personality politics.
Obviously I can’t speak for Preppy, but every single thread I see you post in ends up exactly the same, and it gets old. I don’t know if you have a hard time understanding people non-literally or if you just really like arguing about this stuff, but damn, dude.
Why were there multiple pages here about graphics? From a certain perspective, sure, improving the graphics improves a game. But that’s like giving my car a new paint job. If my brown car can do Nurburgring in 12 minutes, and then I paint my car black, I can still do Nurburgring in. . . 12 minutes. So depending on what your goals are, the paint doesn’t matter. And I’m pretty sure nobody here actually thinks making a game’s graphics better also make it mechanically worse.
What really baffles me about this thread in particular is that you argue good graphics make the game better because it draws people in. Which I think is somewhat misguided, but whatever, I’ll concede the point. Then you read that VersusCity article and you don’t see how pushing educational and content-creation tools does exactly that?
I personally think the entire graphics disscussion should stop until someone on the opposite side can retort my post made a few pages ago.
If you can’t, then can we move on, because this shit is gonna stagnate.