control wise is really simple, every move is 236,214, or 236236, 214214, the complexity comes on learning how to use your character and persona in conjunction, wich i guess could be difficult for some people
Ok, thanks.
One thing I don’t really understand though :
Perhaps I missed something here, but a game like Tekken who is played competitively got many characters with little or no half/quarter circle-Dp motions whatsoever…
If the game engine, characters and movelist are designed around nearly no motion, how can this be a problem if that can appeal to the very casual and still be viable tournament wise ?
there is no problem with that
the problem is thinking that motions ARE a problem
if you can design a game with little to no input motions in mind, then great, but dont assume that having motions is unnecessary barrier added just because, there are good reasons of why they are there and why are designed that way
90% of people who play tekken have no idea how to even move in tekken. Tekken when compared to street fighter has alot more basic things that you need to wrap your head around before you get from beginner level to okay. And even without motions the gap in skill in Tekkens is IMO larger than capcom games you just don’t notice it because the crazy things people are using on you take the form of normal moves and not flashy supers and 80 hit combos.
The best thing 3D fighting games can do is figure out what makes female gamers gravitate toward Soul Calibur and bottle it.
One issue with the “make inputs simpler” thing is how moves function. Like yeah, you could change Sonic Boom to activate with a button press + a direction. That would be easier and more accessible. But the charge time is important. You could probably simulate that charge time by giving an input delay after button press and before activation. But this changes how much time you have to react to things, and also removes a layer of potential skill acquisition.
That is to say, it’s a lot different playing a low level Guile in ST or a low level Urien in 3s, than it is playing high level players of those characters. The high level Guile player has acquired a skill that lets him throw sonic booms more quickly than a low level player. He’s got the timing stuff down pat. Similar with Urien - he’s got all that charge partitioning stuff figured out, and he’s putting you in unblockables and ruining your shit off a knockdown.
I don’t think it’s easy to simulate the tiered level of skill present in those situations. If you make those 1 button presses, it becomes a different game. In those cases the player is rewarded for execution by being able to do stuff that changes his matchups and is pretty cool. Simplification of that removes something that is interesting about both those characters.
Same goes for other motions too, and their how they activate too. “Making DP inputs more lenient lets people play the real game faster” sounds good, but there’s a big difference between DP motions that are always 15 frames and those that are sometimes less. If you’re expecting to use that as your anti-air, your execution has to be on point, your reactions have to be on point, and the risk-reward of a jump in is pretty high. The larger you make that input window or the easier you make the input, the more that risk-reward changes. Make the DP window big enough and no way anyone is ever risking a jump because anyone can anti air that in any situation. Once you’ve designed the game that way, you’re like “anti airs are too good, we better nerf them.” And somewhere along the way you end up with the games that Capcom has made this generation.
Then those people must prove though their arguments that they actually have those credentials for a reason. Without those people actively showing that they have the ability to validate their credentials, the credentials themselves are mere fluff and might as well be baseless gloating material.
I cannot assume that just because they got a prefix to their name, a certificate on their wall, and a nice position at a job that they know what they’re doing or talking about (and vice versa). If they can show that they are capable of validating their credentials then I wouldn’t even need to know about them, as their actions and arguments would speak for themselves.
It is not credentials that you need to accurately judge arguments. Rather you’ll need the abilities of reasoning and of constructing, analyzing, and critiquing arguments. Knowledge of the subject matter isn’t even strictly necessary, as some of the most innovative ideas often come from those who have little to no history or knowledge in the subject area.
Often those with knowledge and credentials in something become blinded in seeing what is or has been and end up construing from that that because it is a certain way that it ought to be and stay that way. It then usually takes an outsider or novice to then ask questions like “Why is it/should it be this way?” “Why not another way?” to break out of this cycle and begin to consider and debate new ideas.
This is what I believe some in this thread are trying to get at; that some are too bogged down by the “fact” that certain aspects of fighting games are and have been a certain way, because of that then mistakenly believe they should stay a certain way, and that alternate ideas for how it could be are therefore unnecessary or detrimental to the FG genre and community. This attitude in itself is what will stagnate the genre and community. If alternate ideas and takes on what could be a “competitive” fighter are automatically rejected from the greater discussion, you’ll only be left with a shallow pool of “safe” options do nothing but create the same thing over and over again, boring those from within the community to death and deterring those from outside from wanting to coming in.
“Credentials” isn’t precisely the right word, I was just kind of rolling with it. Point is that sometimes reason alone isn’t enough, and you need to actually know what the fuck you’re talking about. “Critical thinking” isn’t really a thing. Those skills are useless without knowledge with which to apply them.
Yeah–no they didn’t. Non-traditional education, sure. Cross-disciplinary (pure mathematician solving a physics problem) solutions, sure.
That would be fine if that was the actual dynamic in these threads. I didn’t say non-experts weren’t allowed to talk about things or have opinions. But if I go asking questions on a physics forum (I have a political science degree), I am generally going to accept the explanations of those better educated on the subject. Likewise, if Justin Wong dropped in here and told me “this is how it is” in Marvel 2 (or hell, pretty much any fighting game), there isn’t a whole lot I can say otherwise. I’m not saying you need a degree from Stanford to post in this thread. We’re talking about fighting games, not fluid dynamics. But experience still counts for a lot.
The basic disagreement that has been driving this thread for the past several-hundred posts is whether or not (or at least, to what degree) fighting games should reward physical execution. I’ve seen a lot of people say they should not, or they should, but to some arbitrarily lesser degree. I haven’t seen much, if anything, in the way of why that should be. As an example, I don’t think anyone would actually have a problem with playing something like HyperInferno’s hypothetical game. The problem people have is with his contention that it would be fundamentally superior as a competitive game.
omgad, I forgot all about brolly legs. Kind of shows how hard work and dedication pays off for anyone and people want to complain fighters are too hard when they’re really not. Put some work in for fucks sake, respect to brolly legs. He took the cards he was dealt and made the most of it rather than posting on forums and asking for developers for more easy mode tactics.
you have to remember that Capcom was notorious for not knowing wtf they were doing until the sf4 era. Whatever they tried to help scrubs always backfired because they couldn’t program the games well enough.
lets make easy mode supers and an easier button scheme for mvc2. Accidently created the hardest fighting game of all time through terrible programming
Their whole success and their design for their fighters UP to sf4 has been a glitchy lucky mess. Anyone who has played those games realizes that. Its why its so hard to argue about philosophy for old capcom games because while they did try those things, they didn’t implement them very well among the trashy gltiches that always snuck in. MvC2 was NOT supposed to be like that so how could argue that their design philosophy was still good anyway?
only until recently have those changes affected the game negatively because they can program the games better. So the things that help new players can’t be circumvented by top players exploiting the glitches.
note Posting from this because my account is apparently supposed to be unbanned but isn’t, probably sloppy forum code; I’ll sign everything so nothing underhanded.
The idea is that if you get a less demanding (not entirely happy with that way of putting it, but oh well) game that still has very high quality gameplay, you’ll draw in more new players. Some of these new players that got in because the game is more accessible will develop into skilled/hardcore/whatever players, and there will both be more people to play with/against and also more growth of the game itself from the larger work/talent pool feeding into it.
Or to put it another way, accessible but still good games lead to a healthier/more competitive community, which then feeds/improves skill levels and gameplay.
A rising tide lifts all boats
~xes
Some of the posts in this thread make me genuinely sad for the future of fighting games. It seems like developers (mostly Capcom) has gradually made their FGs increasingly incoherent as time progresses, and the root cause of that trend actually has a large crowd backing it.
accessibility, pfft what a fucking joke
Some ridiculously hard things are already accessible. Quantum physics is accessible to anyone that isn’t mentally retarded, literally. You just have to fucking **try. **Now if quantum physics is accessible, how the fuck couldn’t mvc2 be accessible or any other hard game for that matter?
accessibility is the shield you guys put up for w\e fucking reason that is. Game is too hard, not accessible. Well, how the fuck did other people learn it? ohhhhhhh, they spent more time than you and you don’t like that. Makes sense now.
If quantum physics is accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a literal brain defect or deformation, then mvc2 is accessible to anyone which is arguably the hardest tournament game of all time. It just takes time, patience and most of all practice to learn those games.
its like you’re putting a barrier on yourself automatically by saying that crap. I can teach anyone to play mvc2 or vsav and those are pretty tricky games to learn. As long as the person was up to practicing what I was teaching, then they could learn the game and actually be pretty good regardless of the difficulty of the game.
for any regular human being, there is that 10,000 hour master rule where if you practice anything for 10,000 hours you will become a master @ it. Now probably not much of a master compared to someone who put in 20,000 hours but a lower master none the less. This has been proven time and time again across the genders and certain age groups. As long as the activity can be accomplished within reasonable circumstances. Its not like a 6 yr old girl is going to lift a car over her head if she lifted weights for 10,000 hours. **@ that point, science has said any normal person can learn anything, you just have to put in hard-work to learn. These games aren’t too hard nor were the older ones, you just have to put in that amount of work so it becomes easy. **
Every fighter ever made has been accessible and that is the fucking truth. I’ve never ran into a fighter and said this game is just toooo fucking hard to play. The only thing stopping someone from learning something is themselves.
I’ll throw an example your way. MvsSF. They tried to make the game constrained and fair and balanced. What did we get? A restricted game that felt nerfed as hell. To top it all off all that work adding restrictions for scrubs completely backfired when almost all the characters were nerfed as hell and we had Wolverine with the brain dead 100%. Presentation/music/announcer were godlike but the gameplay sucked.
MvC2 wasn’t a pure accident. The dizzy/undizzy combo breaker, DHC, and snapbacks were intentional mechanics. The combo breaker in MvC2 was great and it was designed with the state of mind that “lets keep this system free but infinites will be found so lets have something to keep them in check” and it ended up that only a few characters could 100% from it solo like Iron Man. This mechanic paved the way for resets. If this mechanic wouldn’t exist, Magneto wouldn’t need to reset or use meter for super/DHC because he would just ROM to death. DHCs presented an easily accessible mechanic for players of all skill levels to be able to do additional damage and switch characters at the same time, as long as they had built sufficient meter (THC was also added for accessibility for casuals, remember those Ironman, Cable, BBHood teams). Snapbacks were added to bring out assists or to force the opponent’s main character out. What has changed though is that player skill has progressed to a point where after the main is snapped out, many different options have been discovered to completely kill the assist before it leaves the screen and not only that but patterns have been analyzed for situations where you can predict or even bait the opponent into a double snap set up. I think it’s wrong to say that MvC2 was a pure accident. The mechanics provide the structure for the game and the players over time just maximize the utility of already existing mechanics. Yes, not everything is expected, like guard breaks due to state change for example (although I expected them cause I analyzed the game from a computer security point of view and you had guard breaks in previous games like KoF), but mechanics were also added to deal with a set of certain aspects where certain exploits may just be a subset of this set that can inherit an answer from the main set. An example of a potential resolution mechanic is push blocking for example. Furthermore, many other good mechanics existed such as counters. Providing the ability to switch characters in the air via DHC also added to the game. MvC2 isn’t really that random if you break it down and if you give it a chance you’ll realize that it’s an amazing game. I still can’t find a game where you can have so many diverse playstyles such as rushdown and mixups like Magneto (vortex), runaway like Storm, zoning like Cable, offensive trapping like Strider/Doom, defensive trapping like Spiral/Sent, a strong air game like Sentinel, and the list goes on. The characters are also unique and diverse in their move set (ex: Storm and Magneto can fly and dash in the game because the character can, and Dhalsim/Strider/Spiral can teleport because their characters can, etc, not dumb stuff like give everyone an air dash, like to Ryu in a game I won’t mention).
If ElderGOD made a fighting game it would probably be the best fighting game of all time for both hardcore fans and casuals. Real talk. Act like you know.
There are different levels of accessibility. Accessibility should be a factor, but it shouldn’t be the only factor. You shouldn’t greatly sacrifice quality for the sake of accessibility and innovation.
It has the brand name to get all the JRPG scrubs to pay but I don’t know if I’m going to like the instant DPs and other stuff in the system… Will have to try it 1st.
You should be posting about that in the bugs and glitches section instead of some random part of the SRK.
I’ve said it before, but whether it was intentional or not MvC2 is a good model in some ways.
All the basic things are intensely, absurdly even, easy to do.
Even with those exceptionally easy pieces, high level MvC2 is one of, if not the hardest games out there.
On basic level that’s what you want. All the tools are on hand almost immediately, but you can use them in increasingly involved and complex ways.
edit: Jed, its gonna wear off anyways seems like its easier for everyone to just let it run off and take part in the discussion. I put in that note so a bunch of people didn’t report me for evading a ban, which is not what I’m trying to do 
~Xes
Actually there is nothing wrong with fighting games, so why is this thread still open?
thing is though if you are talking “improving” a fighting game in the hope of getting more players involved that will bascially rule out making the controls or mechanics any more complex than they are now. more like dumbing them down.
the problems imo arent that the controls/mechanics are too hard. but rather that playing single player teaches you nothing other than what a cheating cunt the CPU is.
and im pretty sure everybody here is against the removal of execution/mechanics in fighting games.
Actually I don’t think SF4’s throws are strong enough. First of all you can break them. Throws exist (or used to, anyway) as essentially an anti-blocking attack. If you know they’re going to block at a given moment the best choice is of course to throw them for some damage. What kind of reward do you get if your opponent eliminates that damage? Throw softening a la Super Turbo works better for a game like Street Fighter where both defense and offense are important. If you know you’re going to get thrown you can soften, and if you throw someone you get at least something for it. Another problem is the range, it’s kind of pitiful compared to other SF entries. Kara-throws help in that sense, but not every character benefits from them. The damage is also small considering how much damage you get for most combos.
Skullgirls handles throws differently. Since pretty much everyone can combo off their throws, you get a fairly sizeable reward for landing one, even airthrows. I’m sort of okay with this given the offense-heavy nature of the game, magic series strings, and the two-button throw command. Tick throws are oddly good in the game largely due to the nature of some of the multi-hit moves and some of the weird windows on push blocking, perhaps a little too strong. Airthrows I’m a little more on the fence regarding. Guilty Gear used to have option-select airthrows with one-button commands, and it worked given the nature of strings in the air and all the shit on the screen at a given time. Things got a little lopsided when some characters could combo off of airthrows though, especially considering the already strong characters got most of them.
For starters? Eliminate one-frame links, either by just getting rid of them entirely or putting in small buffer windows similar to Virtua Fighter. You still need a sense of timing, but you don’t have to be anal about it. Your offense and combos can still function as they do currently within gameplay it doesn’t require nearly as much time in training mode.
Second, no more strings of links into whatever you want for combos. Jabs just got ridiculously strong in SF4 because of this, and basically made people who could convert into ultras off of jabs some of the strongest characters. It also put a lot of easily fuck-up-able parts into your b’n’b, particularly against Geif players stirring the pot or anyone mashing down-forward until you drop it. You can still keep some of the attack strings, but either put in a small buffer window or make them target combos like in 3s.
There seems to be a pervasive misunderstanding of what many players are suggesting, especially what I’m suggesting. I am not saying we should eliminate every and all form of execution with fighting games. What I am suggesting is that we stop stratifying the player base to such an extent. The competitive element will remain as strong as ever, but it will lessen the learning curve slightly, allowing players to focus less on combo practice and more setups and how to deal with certain situations.
Another suggestion is to make combos much shorter everyone boos and throws garbage
The argument is that one piece gets too much emphasis.
This isn’t about throwing fireballs or getting uppers out. It’s about strings of links, the roman cancel’s autistic cousin (fadc), and excessively long combos necessary to get anywhere (hd combos).
You can’t just “eliminate one-frame links”: I don’t know how you would do that, as the game engine isn’t built to “recognise” 1FL’s, it just interpets the button inputs. Furthermore, if you were to say make an attack have less recovery frames so that a specific combo is now easier, more 1FL’s would become possible.
That’s completely in contrast with what you just said. Make combos easier, but now they have to be harder?
To get anywhere? You don’t need HD combos in KoF13 when you’re starting out, as far as I know. HD combos seem to me about piling all of your resources into one combo to royally fuck your opponent.
About throws, that’s the reason why I’m so much in favor of ST (or if you prefer SC5)-style throws.
Essentially if throws are fully breakable, it weakens them and makes it so they’re not a predictable source of damage.
Some games (MvC3, SkG) compensate for that by making it possible to fully combo out throws. To me this makes throws a bit too strong, especially with OS’able 1 button throws. The throw system is honestly the most broken part of MvC3, specifically. HP/throw air option select into combo is just terrible.
Softening has a few advantages compared to this…
[LIST]
[]Throws are guaranteed damage, which I think makes them a more interesting choice to go for.
[]Unteched throws can be made really meaty, which adds initial impact and makes people feel they can do something about getting thrown (while you leave the ‘teched’ damage as your intended throw damage).
[*]You also generally get the positioning change of the throw then (not so much in soul 5), depending on the throw recovery animation. Under ‘normal’ throw breaks, a successful break just about resets the players to neutral.
[/LIST]
As a separate subject, 1 button throws, that time is seriously over. Shoultz talked about it in a huge post at some point, but in essence throw OS’s are a bit too useful, especially if you can combo afterwards.
~Xes