Zoom out. Every fighting game feels like normals cover the entire screen all match
According to the argument being posed, no, because any growth carried from one game to another intentionally is unfair to anyone who didn’t play the previous game and will discourage them from playing.
I’m not specifically “against” any game, I just see room for improvement with the genre. I suppose you could say that the games that I see which are falling short when it comes to accessibility are “all of them, but some are getting closer”. Unlike Xes, I don’t see an issue with execution being important, but I do have an issue with how these concepts are introduced and reinforced.
Unless you call the entire single player game of Starcraft a “tutorial”, then we’re not talking about the same thing.
“Allowed”? Sure, I guess. If the goal is to appeal to the same users who liked the first game, then go for it. The problem with the fighting genre is that often times games are not built off a game that came out earlier in the series, but rather 20 years of iteration, with assumptions that players already have background with very complex dynamics while piling on more.
I’m not arguing about what people are “allowed” to develop or enjoy, just talking about how the genre could be improved from my perspective, which is obviously colored by what I define as a successful game (which does include gasp!, sales).
I hated Starcraft 1 single player, I played like 2 missions after playing a lot of multiplayer, said fuck it, and never touched SP again. If that was the tutorial, that was shitty.
Your experience was not common. 
But wouldn’t it be interesting if a fighting game had a similar single player progression, with introducing moves and techniques slowly in single-player in order to introduce concepts to new players? People like you or me could just ignore that if we wanted to and focus on multiplayer, but the single-player experience could help produce more competitive players.
If it was Starcraft1, hell no. It was too different than the “real” thing.
Brawl, maybe.
I’m still in favor of the, I guess, “dry” way like VF because it was ALL there and clear. I loved being able to select the lesson and do it over.
Unfortunately, I don’t really know anything about Brawl. If you think it has a strong instructional single player I’ll check it out
In a perfect world, there would be a normal instructional story/single player mode and an advanced tutorial that covered things like advantage and complex defensive situations. I also loved the VF4:Evo training mode, and it would be awesome to have something like that in a game for when a player feels comfortable enough with the basics and wants to dig deeper.
Brawl is odd. It’s not really instructional, you eventually play as the entire roster (or nearly) and just hit stuff and move around so you learn movement and which buttons were good and hurt a lot. I normally choose everyone anyway but had to due to locked characters and it was tediously long. I’m sure someone who is more of a novice would like it more than I but I feel it tricks you into learn some basics.
Arbitrary barriers are exactly that, arbitrary. Different people have different ideas on what they think are arbitrarily difficult execution barriers. Here are a couple execution for the sake of execution things that I think could be eliminated.
Fei Long’s chicken wing in SSFIV and Cammy’s Hooligan combination. No reason those moves can’t be dragon motion or quarter circle forward instead of the old tiger knee motion (which even Sagat had changed to dragon motion).
1 frame links where the input to do the move is actually 1 frame. Adding a small buffer for pressing buttons so that the game registers them as you trying to do a link combo is a way to simply remove them, like what Blazblue did. Obviously, you can’t change the frame data for every move to remove the existence of 1 frame links, but you can change the system of inputs so that you can always link the move.
Just frame moves in general. They’re difficult for the sake of being difficult. There’s some just frames moves where the properties are different enough on non just framed versions that there’s an argument for the distinction (Cervantes’s psycho crusher), but on other moves, there’s really no good reason not to go for the just frame version each time (Talim’s BB during wind charmer in SCIV).
Once high execution is discovered in a game, it has to be determined whether or not that executional requirement actually added to the game’s competitiveness or subtracted from it and then to adjust it accordingly for sequels. For example, take a look at fly combos from MvC2 to MvC3. Fly combos were an emergent executional thing that came out, and a lot of people really liked it, so the combos returned in MvC3, but were made slightly easier. Flight in general has pretty much nowhere near the same applications as it did in MvC2, but canceling into flight for combos remains intact and has expanded so that nearly everyone with flight can actually use it in their combos as opposed to just Sentinel and Dhalsim and do so with a lot more relative ease. It’s more forgivable if something crazy hard to do is found as an emergent property, but it’s best if on future developments (or versions of the same game), the ability to just do it is simplified so that the functionality remains the same, but the barrier to entry isn’t as hard.
This is HARD to do. Plenty of people have already talked about the DP motion change for SFIV and how while it lets new players do DPs, there’s a ton of other problems the motion change brought. Often times, versions of the same game are so tightly developed that changing anything to really be easier will have impacts that are going to damage the game. I mean, there’s some exceptions like DeeJay’s dash buffer increasing so he can do EX Machine Gun Upper into Ultra 2 slightly easier, but they can’t change the execution for Viper’s FFF without some weird consequences that are going to show up.
On a related note, it’s because developers can’t figure out which techniques are going to have crazy executional barriers that they probably don’t include good tutorials. And the bigger problem is that fighting games have asymmetrical game design while FPSs or sports games have more or less symmetrical game design.
Basic instructional techniques about footsies and zoning can only go so far in teaching a player how to get competitive at a game. There need to be character specific tutorials. However, for more open ended games, how in the world can developers be expected to know that Morrigan Soul Fist bullet hell would become an amazing strategy or that taunt loop x13 would be one of Taokaka’s most damaging options off of CH 6C in CS1, among other things? And even then, how would the developers know that those emergent strategies are actually good strategies or gimmicks that will fade away? I mean, imagine if MvC2 came with a basic tutorial that detailed the strength of trapping/zoning teams. A person buying that game 8 years later and following the tutorial would be WAY behind what’s actually the dominant strategy. A fighting game would need to have a constantly updated tutorial, and that’s just a commitment I don’t think any company has even attempted.
The flipside of this is that it means only people who really care about playing the game competitively will be the ones looking up the strategies and learning and improving, which is probably the primary reason why many of the users here joined. While players don’t necessarily need to be spoon-fed all the competitive information required to become competitive players, fighting games really can do a lot more to help players who are on the edge about it get there.
Sorry to have temporarily dropped out of the Convo, I had an adventure that ended with one of my car windows getting smashed, and THEN I had to go to work, it saps your will to fight 
Sent from my Radar 4G using Board Express
Here’s a question. Why can’t a game be built from the ground up, completely new, completely original characters, no basis on old characters, and completely remove motions from specials?
This new game’s buttons are as follows:
A B C
X Y Z
ABC are basic normals. XYZ are buttons designed explicitly for specials and supers.
What complexity or competitiveness is lost in this new game? It’s obviously impossible to convert any current game that has motions to one without, but what is stopping a new game from being created without them? There are still lots of players who have trouble with basic motions, as evidenced by the people still posting for help with DP motions in the newbie forums.
And before lack of buttons for normals is brought up, Melty Blood and Arcana Heart are 2D fighters that work just fine with three buttons for normals, although they don’t have the same kind of Street Fighter footsies.
In my opinion, a fighting game that has a strong single-player campaign that is engaging and tricks you into learning the basics for competitive play is a good fighting game.
I’d like to encourage everyone to read the thread I made about my game, Parallel Theory.
I’m open to all suggestions made by the community, and hope we can create a great fighting game together based on your ideas.
While you can’t teach exact strategies (on day 1, in an in game tutorial), what you can teach is the theory behind the character.
Motions are a dice-roll mechanic. They allow for a chance of failure. The main difference from a traditional dice roll is that you can overcome this through practice. It’s basically good arcade game design that encourages the player to spend more time sitting in the cab.
Yup, instead of making scrubs have to practice their execution, let’s just simplify the controls so that scrubs have a false sense of accomplishment.
If you are having trouble executing special moves due to your lack of dexterity, then you should practice it until you can do it consistently. If you feel like you shouldn’t have to practice to execute certain things, then IMO, you don’t deserve to be able to do them.
Blazblue has this kind of extremely simplified input system. It used to be called Simple mode, in Extend it’s called something like “Stylish” mode. I’m not a fan of it. Why ? Because people playing with these kiddy controls aren’t learning the real game.
I’m one of the people that would like to see more comprehensive tutorial modes in games. Again Blazblue has this. However it could be made a lot better. A lot of information is missing or isn’t “hands on”. An example of this are the ways of getting up from the ground (there are important differences in terms of invulnerability frames). It’s OK in terms of explaining things. Some people seem to have trouble with some of the sections in the tutorial though in terms of execution (the fatal counter one and I think the rapid cancel one). I don’t really have trouble with them, but for a newer player, it’s a sudden spike in difficulty to perform the things they are asking you to do. The character sections themselves are a lot of dry text, these sections suffer a bit IMHO.
KOFXIII has a similar tutorial mode, but it’s a lot more stripped down than it’s BB counterpart and simply is not as good.
I downloaded the Skullgirls Demo last night and fiddled around with it’s tutorial mode. The demo only lists 4 tutorials, so I can’t fully judge it, but from what I saw it’s much more “hands on” than the Blazblue one. I’m thinking it may also suffer from the difficulty spike thing mentioned for the BB tutorial. As said: I’m judging from the trial mode here, but it seems to me the 4th or so tutorial is already pretty hard for a fighting game noob. What i liked about the tutorial is for example the explanations of blocking where afterwards you need to block just low 3 times, then block a jump-in with some lows 3 times, then a repetition of jump-ins and lows 3 times.
What I’m hoping for is that the tutorial mode of TTT2 will be good. It looks promising. I’ve never seen the VF4:EVO training mode, but I hope it’s a bit like that (judging from the stories I’ve been hearing about it).
time required to execute the input
are 6 words that much of a waste of time
in this case, yeah
That’s EXACTLY THE POINT!
Top players rarely fuck up because they’ve spent so much more time practicing the game. Because in the high pressure environment of tournament play, they know that even one small screw up can cost them the match. Even the best can suffer a case of nerves and miss a move or drop a combo, it’s moments like these that makes competitive play exciting. It’s why money matches are especially exciting because having to fight with something on the line takes alot of nerves.
And yes, I am using arcade design principles, because the successful arcade games are those that are designed to reward skill. Look at the best arcade games from Japan (a land where the accepted culture is NOT to credit feed), you’ve got games that reward players for doing insane things like single credit runs without ever being hit - take for example the Cave shooter DoDonpachi Dai Fukkatsu Black Label, reaching the game’s true final boss requires beating the game twice, while collecting certain items and not ever dying. The games are designed to reward those who spend time to develop their skills. They’re designed as games to be challenged and mastered, not simple theme park rides to be experienced like most games nowadays. They’re games designed around their gameplay/mechanics and not around some nebulous idea like “immersion.”
What’s the point of practicing my jump shot so I don’t miss?
Why not just make the hoop wider and lower it so it’s harder to miss?
Also loltripping
Hey it could work. Assist are nothing really more than 1 button specials with more start up and cool down. Should just get rid of Z and just have to press X+Y for Supers.
But when people have tried (BB, SSF4 on the DS) it usually didn’t work out but a game designed around this from the get go might (Smash).
You will have to “emulate” the start up time of a person performing it because it’s easier to react with it when it’s just one button instead of a few motions where a person has to learn to react and learn to do it fast enough and then determine if, in that situation, will they go for it. In a single button press, it kills most of that internal decision making, it’ll be easier to react instead of being more anticipatory and emulating human input might make them useless at close range.
People want to do walk up flash kick but no one wants to play against it.