How Could Fighting Games Change for the Better?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
621

I almost finished that post without writing the words “without leaving the game”, which is really important to that post.

I think people overlook the gap that I was talking about in that post, people who want to learn are going to put in that effort to get better, they will have a natural drive to do so; but among the people who won’t put in that effort there are still several different groups of players, and the goal of this method would be to affect certain subgroups of this subgroup. In this group you have people who will absolutely never put in any more effort than mashing in a fighting game, but you also have people who feel, incorrectly as it may be, that they are already very good at the game and do not need to get any better. There are also people who don’t know that a higher level of play exists, in the case of the last two groups showing these people, clips from majors, combo videos, videos tutorials and interviews with top players would help them take that first step of wanting to improve.

Also the same people win at every game because they have far less to learn than everyone else, a lot of advanced fighting game knowledge transferable and for those players it just a matters of learning game specifics and a short amount of practice and they can jump into a new game. As a new player you’re always going to be behind on your first game because you don’t have any other games to pull from.

622

But your not wrong.

623

Yes he is.

People that go that extra mile deserve to be rewarded. Not many people want to play a game, video or not, where the time they put in playing, practicing or researching doesn’t get rewarded with improvement.

The problem is how to improve is not as clear cut or easy available apparently. There’s no program at the YMCA to learn to play fighting games.

624

There was in Japan for Virtua Fighter. Well of course not at a YMCA, but Sega did have schools on how to improve in Virtua Fighter.

625

Amazing. SEGA Japan is godlike.

626

The new Mortal Kombat is the most accessible and marketable fighting game I’ve ever seen. Part of the reason is all of the features that come with it, while the other is the play style.

For mass appeal, a game has to have more options for the new player than Practice, Arcade, and Versus/Online. SF4’s challenges are great for learning the game, but MK’s challenges are more of a game in themselves. Players expect more from the single player experience than an Arcade mode with a few cutscenes, and why shouldn’t they? The current hardware allows for more modes to appeal to the casual gamer, whether it’s MK story mode or a Tekken Force meta game. Any game requires practice mode. Aside from bare bones practice mode, or assuming the player knows to play VS with a character he has trouble with, MK forces you to learn the basics of the whole cast to make story progress and earn unlockables.
All of these ideas were well thought out and could have been done in any fighter.

As for MK specific gameplay, it has wide appeal for obvious reasons. A beginner can jump right in and pull off the basic moves, basic combos, and special moves. Anyone who plays the game for any length of time is going to master these, and most likely start to form combos or strategies around them. An expert at the game plays using the same fundamentals, but knows how to use them a lot better. Another plus is that MK is a lot more visual and has less to do with getting the rhythm of combos down.
This isn’t to say that every fighting game should be that way - I like the contrast to stay the way it is. What I’m saying is that there are ways to teach the basic strategies without simplifying the way the game itself plays or turning half the game into a tutorial right before it dumps you in the ring against someone who already has the feel of the game down.

627

While the sentiment is nice, I wouldn’t direct impressionable new players to this site. They might get the wrong idea and actually post.

That would be cool. Integrating match play and commentary into a replay feature would be most excellent. I believe Valve has a similar plan for Dota 2.

Guild Wars (1) had an interesting spectating feature where players could watch high level matches after they concluded (or with a significant delay), so spectating didn’t cause more stress on the instance and you could enjoy a steady feed of high level play.

But yeah, helping players get out of the vacuum of single player would be a very welcome.

628

you can’t create a hardcore\casual game, it can’t exist. When a game is like that, it gets reduced to its lowest common denominator and hardcore players end up taking advantage of the casual mechanics. Look @ ultras in sf4 and umvc3 xf comebacks. God forbid if gems were allowed in SFxT and now god like players could take advantage of the auto tech throw, auto block and no chip damage gems.

besides like shwaffles said, anyone can have fun when playing a game. If you want to be serious, you have to put in work. Fighting games are 2 parts execution and strategy. When you don’t implement both, you get games that are pretty imbalanced mechanically. If your game doesn’t have enough execution, you get simple ass death combos or combos that do insane damage with relatively no work. Execution can help balance out a lot of things like damage output for example. You can have either 5 hits do 100% or 40 hits do 100%. With 40 hits, your ensuring that someone spent some time to learn a kill combo and earned a reward. Anyone can do 5 hits and now everyone is a killer with 0 practice, like xf3 in umvc3. I’m not saying make the game 1f for every combo but definitely a lot more than a “casual” player could handle. That way, there is room to grow for everyone.

I think if the tournament scene information tied into the game so players can access it on a console, there is 0 reason for casual mechanics @ that point. You are being fed the top tier information, so go practice. Players need to earn rewards through practice and playing opponents, not through purposely implemented engine mechanics to help them play because better players would abuse those mechanics.

you could make an alternative site but now Capcom would run it and have you seen Capcomunity.com? that place is scrub fucking central.

@ least this website has great players that post and if Capcom games were tied into this website directly, I bet you see more top players come around to help out. Besides, all the information is here anyway. You can’t find this much information about Capcom games on other sites. When it comes to a games information, this website is updated by the fucking minute. There is no other website for Capcom fighters imo

there is nothing wrong with new people posting, its only when their shit ideas start to get a snowball affect that it becomes bad. I’m not against new players, I want these games to last forever. What I am against is catering to new players which creates inferior games.

some of the problems with tutorials is that a game is so new that there is no time to create tutorials for the game. They don’t know how the characters will end up. With a tournament website tied into it, all the tutorials and teachings can be handled by the community rather than the developers. Even the basic things like how to play can be handled through the console.

629

So is Tag2 stepping in the right direction with fight-lab? it’s a tutorial with mini games built into it. If it teaches fundamentals like Back Dash Cancels and the Crush system in enjoyable mini games then it can shape the way we learn fighters then has it’s been before. If the tutorial is fun then that can change the who dynamic of learning fighting games all together…well it can be, it depends on how you look at it. to be honest there it’s never really fun researching frame data…but if Tag2 can make learning even the fundamentals fun…then maybe there are ways to disguise learning frame data.

630

Oh, don’t be silly. Of course you can. I play the boardgame “Hive” with my wife and her parents, but I can also play it at a (low) tournament level. I play pinball at a purely casual level, but there are certainly hardcore players that understand the game much more than I do.

Mortal Kombat has very lenient execution, and I don’t see too many dudes off the street beating Reo with touch of death combos.

You can make the execution simple and limit the damage potential of combos. Easy peasy.

631

What Ilthuain said. and if players and developers alike are gonna be so black-and-white with appealing to these two demographics, then the fighting genre is never going to evolve.

632

sigh…

ANY game can have a low and high level, that doesn’t mean it was designed to do that. I can play mvc2 @ a low scrub level, that doesn’t mean it was designed for it. Now umvc3 on the other hand, is DESIGNED to allow level to have a shot like xf3 mechanics.

pinball is not purposely catering to scrubs and making the game easier for them, the game is the game. Its all about the design. I guess a better example would be pinball and the size of the flippers. Scrubbing it by design would mean you make the flippers fucking massive so scrubs can hang around the pinball machine longer. Well, the bigger flippers remove the skill from the game because you don’t have to try as hard now to make sure your shots count. Its there for a bad players because it makes it more fun but for the more experience player, there is no more challenge.

and yes, I can play some mother fucking pinball

633

You played MvC2 man, that game turned into easily one of the most demanding games ever at a competitive level but you know single motion 2 button supers, 4 attacks instead of 6 and the recognizable cast made the game “casual friendly”. You guys found the depth in that game and made it hardcore.

634

anyone who knows mvc2 will tell you that game is the best accident of all time. What they intended to do for that game did not work. 95% of that game is an accident.

its not a very good example because of how glitchy the game was. I could write 200 pages about mvc2, lets not get into that please lol

635

This is true.

636

when you purposely cater to the casual market, @ that point your game can no longer evolve.

sf4 has 0 new mechanics in it, it has not evolved the fighting game genre. Every mechanic in that game has been done in several other games prior to it. Catering to the casual market creates stagnation for all games. The only way to evolve the genre is cater towards pro’s because now developers are FREE to do what they want. They are no longer bound by trying to help joe schmo get damage an easy way or w\e the current casual problem is

637

As a professional designer who is currently focused on “Casual Hardcore” (a very popular term now in the industry), games are designed for exactly what you are saying is impossible. What you’re railing against are games that attempted to level the playing field with comeback mechanics that ultimately failed to solve the problem and exacerbated others.

Concerning pinball, almost all solid state pinball machines have a ball relaunch mechanic. If a ball drains before a certain amount of time, the player is given a free ball. That was a conscious decision to make pinball easier for lower skill-level players. This design does not prohibit high level play.

638

no, that’s when you ONLY cater to the casuals and leave the hardcore in the cold. With some clever game design, you can indeed cater to both demographics.

639

sure it can

if the relaunch is 30 seconds, I can just get big points till 30 seconds and lose the ball that costs me nothing and it will relaunch it and repeat. Might as well be an infinite but I’m sure there is a relaunch limit and you could only do it a certain amount of times but you’re still allowing someone multiple attempts @ high score when in previous years it was like 3-5 balls per game.

I can pretty much break any system like that. Its not hard. Till this day, I haven’t seen any system that caters to both and it doesn’t fuck up the higher level.

640

point to 1 fighting game where casual mechanics didn’t fuck up the pro mechanics.

name 1

sf4, umvc3, sfxt all cater to a casual market but they haven’t progressed the genre 1 bit. Everything in those games can be found in other games to some degree, even gems which I consider to be like RPG powerups where you can get 10% strength increase or w\e. I can point to every single mechanic in those games and tell you what fighting games they came from.

where is the progression in the genre by catering to casuals? because I sure as fuck don’t see it. All I see are awful mechanics and a bunch of reused ones stolen from other games