Not possible to make fighting games “change for the better”. It is too subjective. Better for whom?
There will always be complaints in the FG genre. Even if they made a game “perfectly” balanced by only having 1 character, i.e. Ryu vs Ryu, people would still complain.
So your entire argument comes down to you claiming I don’t think execution matters at all (lol) and saying that since I don’t agree with you I’ve obviously never played at a high level.
In essence you have a lie and an assumption that shows an absolute lack of self-awareness or abiilty to consider other peoples positions.
I guess that’s why these discussions always break down though, you don’t have reasoned positions, you have beliefs you take as inviolate facts. There’s knowledge there, but no critical thinking, no reason… just a series of received positions repeatedly stated with more and more venom and rage.
Also, lol@‘proved’.
Also also, wtf is up with ‘liking’ an obvious shift to personal attack? Is ‘you must suck at games’ a really telling point of argument all of a sudden?
Edit: To restate the position, games should be as easy as possible to get into without compromising the basic gameplay, and should have a continual skill/challenge curve to get people to improve, and to reward improvement. This idea is such basic common sense, I can’t figure out why anyone would even argue against it.
Okay design question here Let’s apply Miyamoto’s saying “Easy to use hard to master” to a fighting mechanics. What mechanics you can think of that are easy to use hard to master? I already know a few.
Thats simply untrue. Unless you want to count spectators and fans as part of the active community.
Correct! Perception of a steep learning curve, however, does.
Players like to know that there is a lot to explore in a game, but it’s generally a good idea for that exploration to come through actual play and not hours in practice mode. Systems, use of systems, and game flow should be explained through engagement, not study, if you want high levels of player retention.
Chess has a very gradual learning curve, and you don’t need to spend time in a practice mode in order to increase your skill. The benefits of study only become evident once the player is fully engaged.
Then that’s what fighting games need, a singleplayer mode that helps teach new players basic fighting game fundamentals along the way. Imagine if a SF game had a challenge where you played as Ryu and must whiff punish Dhalsim’s stand fierce X amount of times with Ryu’s sweep, and think about all of the fighting game concepts that this could potentially teach the player without explicitly telling the player what those concepts are. The game could reward players for completing each challenge with points used to unlock character costumes, artwork, etc., so that casual players who are only interested in unlocking the extra content could end up learning these basic concepts without realizing it and they won’t feel totally lost when the decide to play matches online.
No need to make the gameplay more accessible than it already is. I mean there’s already the widespread misconception that fighting games are nothing but pressing buttons faster than your opponent which gives the games the illusion that the entry barrier is low, just like someone might think SC is easy because you’re just clicking a mouse or chess and go are easy because you just move pieces on a board.
New players are too hung up on execution because they have the misconception that execution and combos are the most important skills to have in a fighter, but execution becomes easy over time while learning how to block, react, and adapt takes infinitely more time and work to develop the skills for.
The difference between Starcraft or chess and fighting games as far as growth goes is the importance of a local scene.
You can learn chess online and play people online only and be just as skilled, due to practice and access to competition, as any other chess player, hell you can play chess by mail, I used to do it over the phone.
Stracraft is online, that IS your option.
Even though every new fighting game has online capability now, top players, are still concentrated in certain geographical areas. Online is clearly inferior to Local play and the skill level you get to levels out after a certain point, even Wolfkrone said that and he used to be the public face of online warriors.
In all honesty, if you live in north america and you want to be a top KOF player you need to move to California or Mexico, or spend every waking hour building a local scene in your area.
Staying in your home and getting to high levels is only possible in a few locations in the country, EX. Bum’s house. Staying home is not an option if you want to be the best at a fighting game and the player base will be smaller as long as that is the case.
Sweep comes to mind. Also, standing hard punch.
lol omgad, what fucking bullshit
I’ve seen chess players sit for uncountable hours dissecting specific patterns and the best ways to stop the pattern. Bobby Fisher was notorious for playing out moves like this by himself. Many serious chess players take that approach where they will dissect a specific pattern.
you can sit @ your house and get god like if games have GGPO net code or better. Its happen several times in fighting game history. Snakeyes and afrolegends all attribute playing online to helping them win titles or placing really fucking high and I’ve seen other players take advantage of this like roy bisel who got 2nd place one year @ SB and played relentlessly online forever.
since the casual market doesn’t give 2 shits about the stability of the net-code, we’re still sort of in the era that you need to be in a scene to be great and its not like this for rts\fps @ all where their scene can be accessed through the internet.
now if your game has GGPO net code but no one is in a playable range, you’re probably going to be fucked. However, this shouldn’t be a problem for modern games anymore as a new games usually have bigger followings.
This is where you can compare traditional arcade fighters with sports. Athletes will spend immeasurably more time in training than they do actually competing to make sure that their skills are always in tip top shape and that they don’t fail that 3-pointer when it counts most. Just look at MMA where most of the injuries come from training and not the actual fights that last only 15-25 minutes.
Are you suggesting that Bobby Fischer wasn’t fully engaged?
Uhhh, sure they do. What makes you think that casual players don’t play online?
Do you just see everything that doens’t work right and go “grrrr! CASUALS!”?
“Why does this game has such shitty data management?”
“Fucking CASUALS think that BAD DATA MANAGEMENT is cool, that’s why!”
Traditional arcade fighters aren’t sports. They also aren’t politics, scientific research, pure academia, expressionist painting, or shoe design.
They are games.
every good player on srk: Online sound is buggy but the quality of the net code is important
casual players: fucking capcom releasing shitty products, fix the god damn sound
capcom rep: fixing the sound glitch would introduce more input lag
so yea, the casual players care about online by making it more laggy? great stuff… they care about online so much that it needs to be worse so the sound can be accurate lol. Fuck out of my face with your shit garbage approach
It amazes me that you continue to so feverishly defend shitty engineering.
Again, there should be no connection between sound performance and network performance.
Just about everything, but that’s not a very good answer.
Zoning and Antizoning is a good one though, ‘throw fireballs from across the screen’ is pretty easy for anyone to do, but there can be much more skill involved, understanding the variations of timing and spacing.
Of course they aren’t. I never said they were. Video game players sure don’t need to spend any time in the gym to stay in shape.
But I like to make comparisons to MMA where the fighters spend a lot of time practicing their striking and grappling (practicing their execution and setups) as well as have sparring matches with training partners (casual matches and ft50 sessions with your friends).
I kind of think its a matter of focus though. In all but the simplest of games lab time will almost always help you improve your skills, because there’s a definite physical aspect to the games (which is where the chess comparison breaks down some, admittedly). At issue is how necessary it should be, and how central it should be to skill improvement.
It’s to everyone’s benefit if the primary way to build skill is via actual play… although like Blackshinobi said above, that does massively favor people that have actual strong local scenes once you get into the higher levels of skill.
not defending it @ all but for it to be tweaked over the net code is a casual complaint that got fixed. Every single good player to post in that thread preferred the sound bug because of the better quality in the net code.
Listening to the casual community made that game slightly worse. This thread is about how fighting game could be better and that isn’t done by listening to morons about what makes a fighter good online. GGPO has that sound problem sometimes too and no one on there bitches about it like people bitched about it for sfxt. The reason being is that a majority of the people on there are old school and they are getting god like games in even though the sound is slightly off which is something any experienced vet could live with. The internet already adds a standard amount of input delay and any unnecessary input delay especially for the sake of sound isn’t helping the the game or the community.
The sound was a mistake but the net-code being better was something that I and many other tournament players could live with. No player in their right mind would want MORE input lag, even if it meant the sound was better…thats something that the casual market cares about and it resulted in WORSE performance.
there shouldn’t be but fucking lol if you think any programmer at a developer where money matters (all of them) is able to say “hey, let’s do this thing that’s [from a design or engineering perspective] good even though it’s going to delay the money from the game into the next quarter and someone might not get their bonus” and also lol at anyone who’s ever tried to do the mental gymnastics required to brainstorm “how to sneak good design into a modern commercial game”
Fighting games is like a mental game, how mentally focused can you stay in a large audience.