There’s a gradient of people who play fighting games, from the most casual that mash buttons all the time to the people who compete and win at the tourney level. No matter how you design a game, there will always be people that refuse to learn the game all.
The goal of accessibility is that there’s probably a significant number of people that are willing to learn the game at a tourney level, but won’t because the game has some sort of barrier preventing them from realizing what the game is about. There must be a solution that lets a game be more accessible to draw that crowd in without damaging the integrity of the game. Here’s a little chart I drew up in paint.
Any mechanics that attempt to bring the two left categories of gamers will damage the integrity of the game. The people on the two right categories will tackle any challenges that a game has in accessibility and overcome it. The ideal goal is to create a game that solves the problem of drive without damaging integrity and help get those people in the middle category who have problems understanding the game to the point where they want to learn more about the game. The problem of drive comes from not being able to understand or see the real depth of a game, and part of the reason why it’s hidden is accessibility.
The reason I’ve been harping about motions is that that’s the most easily identifiable mechanic that is a barrier to entry that has solutions already partially implemented. Other things like reversal windows, comeback mechanics, length of combos, relative strength/weakness of offensive/defensive play are much much harder to theorize about.
You might not be able to force everyone to become the man that learns how to fish, but you can certainly ease the process and make them more likely to be the man that learns how to fish by providing them with a fishing rod.
there is not a single fg out on the market that its difficult to learn because the inputs
so far the real concern on this subject has been always been that new players want to compete on the same level with the pro players, something that is simply stupid
Do you mean accessability to the game (controls) or accessbility to the community? Because if its the former then i don’t agree. Making motions simipler does not give any insight into the player in why we would continue playing a single game for 10-20 years. All it does is makes moves easier to do. If someone plays a fighting game and has a bit of fun just mashing out random moves, simiplier inputs won’t help him get that drive; he’ll just mash out moves more consistantly and then he’ll finally get bored and drop the game, because he is not being helped in understanding why he should use those moves to compete against other players.
Ilthuain talked about this in depth a few pages back, you have to separate yourself from the XXX years you’ve been playing fighting games (in my case >20 years, for instance).
People say that the real concern is that new players want to be automatically competitive with ‘top players’ a lot, but I think that’s only true for a vanishing minority, if at all. It’s one of those truisms that just isn’t that true.
You’ve been playing for over 20 years and you’re still making the argument that it’s good to add more randomness and remove higher level techniques?
A vote would go something like this:
Agree: Cap-GET MONEY-com, scrubs who never played the games and want to think they have a chance at winning tournaments without experience.
Disagree: The rest of the world that actually gives a **** and is legit about stepping their game up and doesn’t want to get random’d out by someone with far less experience.
I’m way to tired to try writing this up tonight, I’ll end up misstating something that will get torn apart by someone so I’ll just take two points and pose them as questions for now.
Special strengths: Does this game have special with different strength, or does each special have only one strength? If specials do have more than one strength what is the button setup for a character with 4 or 5 different special moves at each strength?
How does this game handle fast moving horizontal specials/supers? Dragon punch moves have been mentioned, but what happens to moves that cover horizontal space at the speed of a disruptor or Head crush or Phoenix wright’s level 3? What keeps moves like these from being one button high damage half/full screen whiff punishes, that can trample other moves on reaction?
well where in the name of all that’s holy did you get ‘add more randomness’ from? If anything I’m a proponent of hyper-simple games, and they’re probably the least random of all
Let me give you a little pro tip from my long experience with all kinds of games. If you’re complaining about getting ‘randomed out’, you’re not as good as you think you are. Back in the day, people always used to complain about being beaten by Eddie mashers (Tekken 3). Those people were inevitably the types who thought they were good but really weren’t. (edit: General ‘you’ not specific ‘you’. I don’t know if you complain about being randomed out or not)
I don’t know about Xes, but that is totally the point I am making. I think ToD combos should be 1-button, and there shouldn’t even be a stick. The game should just say “U R MAD AWESOME D00D” and then you press the button to do a billion hits and good players never win because the game automagically detects scrubbiness and gives the scrubbiest scrub the win.
&^^$#@% <---- This is the sound me rolling my eyes over the internet.
Except Skill Progression has nothing to do with why harder moves are better. If anything, harder moves being better has more to do with damage output and nothing to do with skill progression.
I really have this feeling y’all are hammering the wrong point.
IMO accessibility doesn’t have anything to do with being able to do a shoryu vs doing a lightning loop. Any person given enough time can DO a shoryu. Any person given enough practice can DO a shoryu at the right time. This doesn’t make people want to play the game with any particular enthusiasm.
The issue is getting people into a genre that is by default unforgiving. I used to say this to my friend who just played FGs all the time, a FG is a terrible place to put your esteem. The ebbs and flows are ridiculous. The things that you’ll find unenticing and just plain unfun don’t end at the scrub level. [OMG throws are unfair, OMG invincible moves are unfair, OMG safe Frame traps are unfair, OMG 4 way mix ups are unfair, OMG Safe 24 way unseeable mixups into ToD combos are unfair! + Morrigan D: ] It is a naturally competitive thing that isn’t particularly well viewed by society that doesn’t noticably improve anything about you except one: Mindset. There’s no way to singular way to give that to a person in the same that telling someone to ‘buck up’ has basically null effect on a person who doesn’t feel that way. Which is why I advocated the next best thing: community. In shorthand: its not the single player that makes people play - FGs are small time MMOs. FOCUS ON THIS
I think the definition of ‘better’ has shifted some, that’s a whole different issue, although one I hit on when Reno first brought up just frames.
Go back to what I said, which was that games (not moves) aren’t better because they’re harder, they’re better because they have a good skill progression. your post here doesn’t hit on that subject at all.
Not directed at shin, but in general, I think I've hit on something. There seems to be an ongoing concern that you can't allow people to win who don't deserve to or haven't earned that right (through practice).
If in some game you can't win, don't blame the game. Look to improve yourself.
Some examples of the kind of complaint I'm talking about from the past.
[LIST]
[*]Jump Kick>Trip is so cheap! You wouldn't be able to win if you didn't keep doing that! (WW)
[*]Quit doing Psycho Crusher, fight for Real! (CE)
[*]You're just mashing dragon punch (and/or fireball!) You couldn't win if you played for real! (any SF2, really)
[*]jab, step forward, throw is garbage, play the game for real! (any SF2, again)
[*]People that play Eddie just mash, it doesn't take any skill (T3/tag, noting that I wasn't an eddie player, but I could also *beat* people who mashed with Eddie)
[*]You're just mashing 66B over and over again, play for real! (Any Soul game)
[*]You're playing Flowchart ken, you couldn't play if you played for real! (SF4, most notably)
[/LIST]
There are more I could think of for sure, but I have to go to work and so don't have time.
It's an attitude that was dime-a-dozen back in the arcade though.
Every single one of those examples, if people were truly relying on just that, you learned to beat. It's not about deserving to win, its about actually learning to beat something and winning. If it's something nobody can reasonably learn to beat through skill (Ivan Ooze for instance, or Zankuro or Fernandeath), then it's literally broken and often a playerized boss fight.
Sure. But inputs don’t help make the game easier to learn either and removing them would help get people get to the point where they start learning the actual game. If a player can do a move consistently, they’ll more easily see the actual applications of it since they’re no longer focusing on trying to do the move mechanically, but rather more focused on what the move actually does.
Like imagine Guile’s Sonic Boom vs. Ryu’s Hadoken. Say there’s two players just starting to play SFII, one of whom is particularly good at motion execution and one who isn’t. At an arcade, the person who’s good at execution will be able to throw both Hadoken and Sonic Boom reliably and will soon realize: “Hey, it’s a lot harder for a person to jump in and punish Sonic Boom compared to a Hadoken.” The person who’s bad at Hadokens and Sonic Booms won’t be able to get that knowledge because he’ll be focused on just trying to do them for X amount of time, and the fact that he has to grind out execution for a small (maybe large) amount of time before he even gets to that level of distinction is a period of time where a lot of players can potentially lose interest in playing the game competitively.
Note once again that I am not advocating for SFII characters to be reduced to single button specials, because that’s simply not possible to do.
5X, 6X, 2X, and 4X. Four different specials on one button that can be transferred to Y and Z for varying strengths. If necessary, you can also add 8X, 1X, and 3X, but those are probably a bit much. If you want something slightly different like Hawk Dive, you could do A+X, B+Y, C+Z.
For move archetypes that would traditionally be strong at whiff punishing, it’s the same general idea as a dragon punch, give them extra start up time to emulate the fact that you’re not actually inputting a motion to do the move anymore so that the window for reacting and actually getting the whiff punish is still more or less the same size as if had a motion.
Now, once again, there are some moves where the functionality can’t be emulated like this. It’s possible, but very very clunky to capture the idea of charge moves with this system, and I have no idea how a 720 would be implemented.
to me it sound more about people having a really shitty hand cordination than anything else tbh, if my nephew was able to learn how to do the motions that so many hadicaped people cant, at the age of 5 it shows how mute is all this nonsense of motions being a problem to get into fgs
also as i have established many times im not against making morre accesible the games, but a lot of the people who brings motions and execution barriers as one of the problems, usually have a very vague understanding n how motion works, what arethe benefits of having inputs for specials, etc
your scenary of having only directions + a button for doing the specials has the inherent flaw of beng very limited when it comes to options
by doing that you cant have command normals, they also overlap with simple stuff like walk/jump/crouch and throw a normal for example
also, by adding more startup to simulate the time that takes to make the input you are changing the move, now a srk like move cant be used on reaction
im not saying that it cant be done, look at the upcoming p4u fg, there arent 623 moves, instead you do 9ab (not sure about the input) but now they cost health, the thing is that you need to take in account a lot of stuff related to the risk reward ratio when designing the moves that its not as simple as just adding more startup or more recovery, you have to put a lot of thought on that
That’s sorta my point. When we talk about nebulous concepts like “arbitrary execution barriers,” everyone is operating on their own personal ideas of what that means.
Now, if we’re talking about “hard for the sake of being hard,” I don’t think any of these qualify.
Given the SF4 command interpreter, those inputs may prevent command overlap. (Hell, Fei can do his flame kick with b, f, b, K.) Starting the motion from down-back means you can’t jump through a projectile while walking in on someone. The longer motion means you have to react earlier to make it through. Ending on an ‘up’ direction can actually ease the execution burden–if you screw it up, you might still jump a projectile instead of walking into it. And on a square gate stick, you can mash the stick into the corner to make sure you get that last direction right. The motion of the stick resembles the motion of the move, which makes it easier to remember.
1f links are intended to reward mechanical skill, like a 3-point shot in basketball. Combos that involve 1f links tend to be better because the idea is to reward you for doing something difficult.
JFs can actually be a way to soften 1f links a bit. Setsuka’s JF umbrella is strictly better than the non-JF version, but generally you can still do your combo if you miss the JF, rather than dropping your combo all together. Admittedly, Setsuka as a character is not the best example of this. Other JFs, like Nightmare’s iagA, are not strictly better. The JF does more damage and leaves Nightmare at better frame advantage, but it also starts up 1f slower.
So there is a reason for all of that. You might disagree with some of the choices or have different preferences, but nobody made any of those moves difficult just to make them difficult. (With the possible exception of Setsuka, but I’m pretty sure Namco made her to appeal to players who find that kind of thing fun.)
None of that is to say any of those mechanics is always good, but that you can’t look at them in a vacuum. You could probably design a great character with a 360, hooligan, and a tiger knee. If you just took Ryu, made his uppercut a 360, made him TK his tatsu, and changed fireball to the hooligan input, it would probably be pretty stupid. Likewise, I think tight links + absolute guard + mashable reversals is kind of a dumb combination in SF4, but that doesn’t make any of those bad on their own.
That goes back to my previous point; you can’t look at those things in a vacuum. You have to analyze them as they exist in each game. MVC2 and MVC3 are different games, so of course things work differently. But if triple-JF fly/unfly combos existed and were awesome in MVC2, there is clearly nothing fundamentally wrong with them. The same goes for JFs, desperation moves, 3S parry, or whatever. Whether the mechanic, or strategy, or combo was designed or emerged on its own is irrelevant. Arguing that these things should always be designed around if possible, and are only acceptable as emergent properties, just sounds like you’re telling me developers aren’t allowed to learn from their old games.
Back to 1f links, hard stuff in general, and appealing to a broader userbase, I want to point out that people hate losing to easy shit. I still hear people bitch about losing to Wesker because his combos are easy. Those same people are usually fine with eating some ridiculous 100% MarlinPie combo into incoming mixups into losing their entire team because the combos were hard. So I think there’s a good reason to design hard things from that point of view (let’s get more players involved) as well.
Your entire argument is that fighting games should reward anal execution…because…you want people to feel good for reliably pulling off 100% combos that are hard? Wouldn’t a better solution be to get rid of those execution-heavy ToD combos and other such bullshit?
