Yes, there’s things that motions let people do to fake out other people. But who says button presses can’t be used to fake out people either? I mean, if a person has trained themselves to a very specific timing of button presses during a double snapback, have you ever tried screwing up their timing by pressing your own buttons at weird times? Or what about conditioning a person by yelling TIGER SHOT every time you do a Tiger Shot, and then just keep yelling it while not throwing one or not yell it when you do throw one?
Plus, if you’re playing on a cab where you can’t see your opponent, you’re not going to hear that stick anyway.
What are you so hell bent on motions anyway? Motions are hardly a barrier except maybe if the person has never played a video game before. If i can do a Hadouken when i was 5 years old, then you should be able to now.
Taking away motions means you need more buttons. More buttons leads to more button combinations and the more moves the more combinations you need. So you just take away motions in favour of making people remember what combination does what. I also call bullshit on your earlier post where you say your friends prefer Tekken more because they can just pick up a character. You cannot do that in Tekken at all. You HAVE to go into training a learn a characters strings normals and button combinations, which takes FAR longer than where buttons and (for the most part) motions are standardized across the board. You know what a heavy punch is going to be like roughly, you know that a character is probably going to have a qcf, qcb, DP or charge more than likely.
You’re also wrong about competitive video games. There is some barrier of entry at least in terms of executional difficulty, because that is the whole point of fighting games. Fighting games are a simplified chess game with the added dexterity aspect. If you take away motions because you want to remove executional aspects and keep the strategy, then what about combos? Should we have just 1 button auto combos or no combos at all? Multiplayer Alex Kidd for EVO?
They do both. I’m sure that my experience isn’t universal, but I have a much harder time playing against somebody who isn’t standing next to me. Years of playing in the arcade has made sound and subtle motion cues a vital part of how I read a player’s intentions.
For this reason, I can’t part with my Mortal Kombat 9 arcade machine. If I do, my “skill” will take a huge downturn and I’ll actually have to practice to beat my friends.
Fighting games would change for the better if there were more of them and they were more experimental. Attempts at innovation have been so incredibly half-assed (gems ) in the latest cycle that I’m concerned that the next generation will play it completely safe. Take risks, go crazy, and do something new… even if it’s crazy.
so because capcom games have been half assed, the games of other companies are included on the group?
gotcha
btw its nice to see that all the innovations done by the other companies are still ignored
Dude, I never said anything of the sort. I’m a (non-ironic) vocal fan of Primal Rage and One Must Fall, so please stop with the “hurr durr everyone only talks about Crapcom” shtick.
Reading your constant stream of negativity is becoming very tiresome.
Here is another issue with making specials easier.
One of the biggest issues in people teaching themselves fighting games games is that when given the choice 99% of new players flock to specials and supers over normals, Why are so many mashers spinning the joystick in circles when they play, even though it also controls their movement? because in their mind doing random motions gives them access to special moves. Making the specials easier, might reduce the joystick spinning, it might not even do that, but its not going to help them learn the fundamental because they will still overlook the things they should be learning first.
What would really help new players isn’t making specials easier it would be taking them away; at least for a period of time when they are trying to learn. Giving new players to access to both normal and specials/supers when they are first trying to learn is like sitting a plate of Broccoli and another plate of chocolate cake in front of a kid each night and asking them which one they want for dinner. If players had to work their way to the flashy stuff by learning how to win using just normals then by the time they got access to specials they could use them to supplement the game they have already developed and not making specials and supers their entire game which is currently the case and has been for 20 years. Btw I’m not talking about one or two rounds of playing without specials, i’m talking about 20-50 matches or at least and hour.
Actually I remember soul calibur having a few things along the lines of what I’m think of.
Example match conditions that could help teach someone things they need to know about fighting games.
no access to specials/supers
full move access but only normals do any damage
no specials or supers and no damage on any hit before the 3rd or 5th hit of a combo
damage taken from throws is now 50%/75%/100% (not of their normal damage, of your life bar)
Short timed survival matches where the opponent has infinite health and you die in one or two hits, and win but staying alive until the timer hits zero. (make a wall they can’t possibly punch through and maybe they’ll start considering blocking and running legit strategies)
Make specials drain you life in an amount that spamming them will kill you
Make this a mode (a long mode) and make the prize for completing it something really good.
The last thing new players need is easier access to the thing that distracting them from learning the actual things they need to know in order not to lose.
I actually think making a tutorial is kinda a waste of time because most people who buy the game think they are good at it or can beat up there friends and what not but they wont go look at a tutorial because they think they are good I think maybe a story mode is a good way of explaining things and maybe a really good training mode also a good netcode really helps
Yeah, VF4:EVO had similar things was well such as Block *X number of * Hits, Break number of hits Throws, Win X number of Matches Without Backdashing, Break 10 Walls, Throw Opponent 10 Times AfterTheir Guaranteed Throw Move etc. etc.
Hopefully License Mode in FS does this as well. It was a fun way of testing the things you learned in it’s tutorial, and I wondered “WTF?!” when Vanilla VF5 didn’t have it…
So why does eliminating motions eliminate fake outs like that? What’s stopping a player from inputting a very loud qcf motion for f+X every single time to capture the exact same kind of fake out?
A lot of stuff you’re talking about here was already discussed in my long post that you happened to skip, but I’ll address them again. Your writing isn’t the clearest thing in the world to read, so I’ll write how I’m interpreting what you mean so you can correct me if I’m wrong.
Your first and third paragraphs are linked. They’re both about designing a move with an input while using the input as a balancing tool itself on the move (which I will cover later), but your first part talks about the risk/reward ratio in failure to do the move. From what I understand, your argument is something like:
“A 360’s difficulty in execution and the greater chance of failure of doing a 360 compared to a qcf necessitates that the 360 give a greater reward.The difficulty difference in certain motions allows more design space to balance moves with regards to risk/reward which makes games more competitive.”
My counterargument is that at a competitive level, the chance of failing a 360 or a qcf is so small that there’s no point in having this distinction unless you solely want to reward time for grinding out a motion (which is covered at the bottom of the post). Note I am talking strictly about the chance of failing a motion when the situation to use the motion presents itself. I am not talking about how the motion itself may or may not be possible because the situation doesn’t allow for it because that application belongs to your third paragraph’s point.
I’m not entirely sure, but isn’t your entire second point supporting no motions (with the system I described no less)? Your argument in the 2nd paragraph seems to be:
“If there existed a fighter that was locked to three buttons for normals, it’d be impossible to create an intuitive design using those buttons for no-motion specials. This reduces design space, and thus reduces competitiveness.”
Every single problem you bring up with your second point is solved by using the three bottom buttons as the dedicated ‘special’ buttons. You seem to acknowledge that three button fighters have plenty of depth in their normals. The problem you describe with overlap in command normals and specials would be true with no-motions specials, if the entire game was limited to 3 buttons. But the system I described is not. There is no command overlap for no-motion specials because they have entire buttons dedicated to them.
For your gameplay design point, I assume your argument goes something along the lines of this:
“If specials, say Sonic Boom and Flash Kick, were able to be performed by a single button, they’d be way too powerful. Heck they’d be way too powerful if there were able to be done with QCF or DP. Furthermore, being a charge move adds a layer of complexity that allows for more design space, which makes games more competitive.”
Once again, the problem here is that you’re thinking from the constraints of other fighting games. You’re trying to convert current moves into no-motions, which just doesn’t work. But if you designed a game from the ground up with the knowledge that no-motions were how specials were going to be performed, why can’t a designer realize this and adjust the strength/weaknesses of the specials accordingly? Yes, I will concede that this system of no-motions doesn’t allow for the functionality of charge moves without some clunking arond. But there are still plenty of games that are competitive without charge moves playing a big deal.
I am ‘hellbent’ on motions because they are the one aspect of fighting games that has a solution already partially implemented to ease access in certain games. My friends prefer Tekken (or at least the characters in Tekken that don’t require motions) because if there’s move or string they can’t do, it’s because they don’t know what the string is, it’s not because they can’t do the string.
Yes it takes training mode time to learn Lili’s normal strings and button combinations. Probably more so to learn all of her good tools than any SF character.
It takes training mode time to learn all of Guile’s proper anti-airs for the different jump-in angles. It also takes training mode time to learn simply how to do Guile’s sonic boom, flash kick, super and ultras. But the time spent learning how to do those four moves isn’t time spent learning how to apply those moves.
That right there is what turns my friends off. The fact that some fighting games still make it necessary for them to spend time training how to simply do a move rather than jumping straight into how to apply the move. Even if they have to learn more moves overall because of the nature of Tekken’s complexity and button combinations compared to SF, the fact that each individual move (for certain characters) is a combination of button presses or sequences means that they can get to applying the action in a competitive environment faster.
Motions are the ONE thing that I’ve identified that can be simplified without reducing complexity because we have case examples (Tekken, Soul Calibur). I’m not saying remove execution required for combos, I’m not saying remove execution required for reversals, I’m not saying remove execution for zoning, I’m not saying remove execution required for punishes because changing these things compared to changing motions have far more consequences.
Summary of pretty much ALL my arguments about motions so far:
Motions create an execution barrier to play fighting games. This barrier can be mitigated through practice. A no motion game would remove this particular execution barrier, thus removing what some people consider a fundamental tenant of a (2D) fighting game.
Motions also happen to add interesting design space in the ways the motions are designed with what the move actually does. You can’t walk forward and Sonic Boom, you can’t do a 720 without hiding the buffer in something else. A no-motion game would lose some of this complexity because of its inability to do some of the things that only motions would let developers design around.
All of you know my position on motions as an execution barrier and think I’m crazy for it. Then what does that mean for the characters who don’t have, or don’t rely on motions in Tekken or Soul Calibur? If you want to bite the bullet and say that those can’t be compared to 2D fighters because they’re 3D games, fine. Then what does that make Phantom Breaker? http://phantombreaker.7sixty.com/info/ Will this game be bad SOLELY because it doesn’t reward people practicing motions?
A no-motion game will invariable sacrifice some of the design space that motions force as limitations on the execution of moves. I accept that. But I also want to point out that motions as a design limitation for characters are becoming fewer and fewer in games that are considered good competitive games by a significant amount of people. Melty Blood for example has no charge moves or 360s. As far as I know, Blazblue only has two charge moves, both of which have fairly limited application (Taokaka has a Gen-esque wall dive, and her Astral Finish requires a charge) and aren’t exactly fundamental to the character (I haven’t played since CS1, so I could be wrong now). Whether or not these games are good competitive games won’t hinge on the fact that they don’t have charge moves or 360s, and neither would a no-motion game.
It may distract them, but giving them the specials from the get go will lessen the amount of time they’re distracted. In the example you’re giving, where a person is forced to go 50 matches without being allowed to use a special move, why can’t the special move unlocked at the 51st match be a single button special to supplement their game?
Nice review written by a noob. I’m sure no one will read it and keep arguing in circles about making fighting games “newb” friendly yet still pleasing the “hardcore”, all the while it’s already been done more than once, by one series.
I guess if more reviews were out there about other IPs, this thread wouldn’t exist.
Every time some one says anything about no motions being in Tekken. Don’t play Tekken cause those who say that are forgetting a basic skill that is needed in Tekken.
and that sizable vocal group is you and your retard brigade. Watering down the mechanics is giving way to shitty games that no one wants to play. Regression is not progression and everything you have said in this thread has been regression.
I WANT fighters to have a future, but not @ the expense of diluting the fighting mechanics so more players can compete. Nothing else that is competitive does that. Can I bring a dictionary with me to a scrabble tournament? what about plugging in moves into a chess computer during a chess tournament so I can get the most optimal moves without even trying? allowing those things lowers the quality of the game but allows more beginners to compete and instead of it being challenging for everyone, its only challenging for beginners. That’s what happens when you introduce elements that make the game easier.
They don’t do those things because it would lower the quality of the game. Part of the problem with this era of fighters is that they’ve listened to people who don’t know how to play fighters and what you get are shit mechanics off that process. You can’t make a fighter and ask for ideas from people who can’t even play, they have no fucking clue what they’re doing. That’s why you can’t listen to the casual audience not because they’re casual but because they don’t know WTF thy’re talking about.
Can I walk up to the white house and with my casual knowledge about the stock market, offer them a plan to prevent recessions and have them implement it? if it failed, the whole country would say why the fuck did you listen to someone who doesn’t even know wtf they’re talking about to begin with over someone that did? but my casual voice demands respect, listen to me!!!
The only way to make fighters better is to make a game that doesn’t cater to casuals. You make a good game and teach brand new players how to play while giving them access to all the god like information by implementing websites through xbl\psn as part of the game. Doing it this way ensures you get a quality product and no new players are left in the rain, they simply you know, have to try… and there is nothing wrong with that. We need more “trying” in fighting games and less easy mode. We’ve gone from ultras in sf4 to just hold forward in sfxt.
I think you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree. I don’t see “catering to casuals” and “progression of the genre” as a mutually exclusive dichotomy. Well-documented and sloppy efforts to bring in new blood have been made in recent titles, but I’m not convinced that the correlation between shallow gameplay and aiming to broad audiences has been proven.
In my perspective, one of the most successful fighting games of the last generation, Mortal Kombat 9, did a fantastic job of bringing in new players and creating a game with considerable depth and discovery. We’re more than a year out with that one, and still the metagame shifts on a monthly basis, even while maintaining the perception that the game is easy to learn.
Luckily for both of us, there’s room for games that appeal to the niche market, as well as games that aim wide. Developers that made titles that appeal to the hardcore fanbase will likely continue to do so, and other developers will try to capture new players. You can play Skullgirls, and I can play Mortal Kombat, and all will be well. Nobody needs to feel threatened or insulted in a conversation about what we would like to see in the next phase of video game development.
Game development is not zero-sum. MK is obviously designed to be very accessible and appealing to casual users.
“
[LEFT]I think that people will relate to the characters a little bit more, and also, like I mentioned before, I believe that it’s accessible to more people than some of the other fighting games are. I believe that more people can sit down and enjoy it, and some of the more casual players can just have a lot of fun playing the game.”[/LEFT]
[LEFT]-Ed Boon, Interview with Gamasutra, August 4, 2010[/LEFT]
[LEFT] [/LEFT]
the thing is that you dont understand the position of not catering to casuals in order to make a good game
casuals, dont know how fg works, therefore outside one or two ideas, many things that they can suggest wouldnt help the game being better
where do you think that it comes all the stuff of nerfing throws, walk speed, floatty jumps, weak zoning game, etc, etc
accesibility goes beyond making easier inputs, its about having coherent ways to teach how and why the game works the way it does
) in the latest cycle that I’m concerned that the next generation will play it completely safe. Take risks, go crazy, and do something new… even if it’s crazy.