Here’s an idea, since dizzy/stun is in and they won’t give us the dizzy meter, how about copying what many of the older Marvel games with dizzy did and make it so that the character portraits change when the characters are near dizzy.
Heavily played for how long? Look at SFxT. That game sucked for numerous reasons, including the fact that almost noone outside of the dev team touched it during development, except when it was about to get released.
No, I said at the end of the day, the game must be fun to play, regardless of what design principles it breaks. Look at ST and MvC2. These games are full of stupid shit, some unavoidable because of hardwared constraints, but people are still playing these games today.
But are you really okay with leaving things up to chance? I mean, MvC2 is basically a happy accident and, for all its brokenness, actually works because of some good mechanics such as push block guard cancel, push block allowing you to block high and low at the same time, jump guard cancel, etc. People spent time analyzing these and we know how they made the games work (e.g. how resetting air options only upon jumping again made resets stronger in MvC2, compared to 3 where coming out of hitstun gives you back your air options), so we might as well push for these things to be applied in future games, instead of hoping that whatever the devs make turns out into yet another happy accident.
No, that’s why I said they should have noobs and pros testing the game.
And no, you don’t forego good design for no reason. But in the same breath you can’t just throw a bunch of design principles at a game and expect that people will play it.
Case in point: Skull Girls
Except SkullGirls not being played has nothing to do with good or bad design or whether it’s fun or not, and more with the usual thing where anything that isn’t a big name or isn’t Capcom doesn’t really get played.
And yet Smash has a massive following…
Get rid of linking and make the combo system more like 3rd Strike :3
Because Smash is a big name, which just proves my point.
And competitive Melee and Project M show that the versions with good mechanics get played.
Lol, so you truly believe that Smash gets played because it has a big name, and Skull Girls gets played because it doesn’t?
Hold one, I’ll come back to this discussion after I challenge the 1000s of players online now playing SFxT right now… -_-
There are many reasons people don’t play Skull Girls…
Why the fuck are we even straw manning over SkullGirls when we’re supposed to be talking about Street Fighter.
The main issue I have with your position is that what you can define as fun is very subjective. You can take something that one group considers “fun” and put in in another group and there’s a chance that they wont find it “fun.”
Good mechanics however aren’t. We’ve played enough fighting games at high levels to know what’s good and what’s bad, what fighting game developers should be doing and what some of them have forgotten.
Alot of the things the smarter folks here are mentioning are in reaction to stuff we found bad in Street Fighter IV - a game that, based on its sales and the number of people still following it competitively, is one that people found “fun”.
While yes, SFIV may have been “fun”, we know the things that are wrong with it, the decisions that caused problems with the game. Stuff like reeling hitboxes (which cause both seemingly random character specific combos and, more importantly are a key to why we have cross up unblockables), the large reversal window, the wonky input buffer that leads to alot of option selects, plinking, delay based netcode, etc.
You’re almost as bad as the idiots saying that SFV shouldn’t use GGPO/rollback based netcode because SFIV’s netcode was workable for them.
You tell me. I was talking about design. You brought up branding.
“Good” mechanics are by definition, subjective. Notice the debates regarding parries/no parries? Auto vs free guard? Chains vs Links? All subjective. How is your position any different to mine?
Thanks. I’ll rather be known as someone like that than someone who talks about game design yet doesn’t know the first thing about it.
And unblockables were supposedly removed in Ultra yet are still there… And don’t forget character specific non-combos where something “should work” but reeling hitboxes cause a drop. It’s why I can’t play Fuerte seriously because hitting RSF after focus isn’t consistent with the whole cast.
If something is possible to do in a fighting game, it should be possible to do without extreme difficulty. The only thing that should be hard and complex in a fighting game is the strategy, the overall fight. Executions should always be easy to moderate.
If it’s possible to reversal between blocks of a non-true block string, then it should be no worse than medium difficulty to execute. If that affects the game negatively, then properties about reversals should be changed, not the ease of performing them. Making a game more difficult to execute is never the right solution for fixing issues with it.
Man, ilitirit where to begin, besides the contradictions…
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Uh…Smash has mario, link, samus, donkey kong and a bunch of other characters that have each selled millions in their own series. Characters that everyone under 40 knows regardless of what games they prefer or play. I’m sure that had no effect on why smash is popular though.
This made me laugh. So what are you trying to say? SFxT sucked…but is built on good mechanics?
- Sure there are great fun games with flaws. However those games are the past, can’t be changed. We are talking about SF5…the future. They should try to make it has mechanically solid as possible, cause regardless of how hard they try, perfection never happens. Sure there is personal preference, however if they indeed decide to implement a mechanic (like parries, guard crush, whatever) it should be implemented as well as possible.
Only reason for me not playing Skullgirls is because the characters don’t click with me.
Seriously the game is great system-wise and I really want to like it, but it doesn’t have a single fucking character I can identify with.
I need a dude/dudess in the game I look at and can say: "I wanna beat the shit out of these other faggots with him/her. I wanna be that guy!"
Skullgirls has no one like that, and since most fighting game players are male people between 16 and 35 years, I bet there’s tons of other people that just dislike the overall character design from an aesthetic standpoint.
If the game had a Ken/Ryu/Scorpion/Wolverine/Punisher or any kind of character that would fit into the 80’s/90’s action hero movies that I loved so much growing up with, or even Nintendo characters, I’d find myself playing that game all day.
Imo the only thing that kept Skullgirls from being a mainstream success would’ve been a popular ip to build it around.
I wish SFV is going to be as sound in terms of mechanics as Skullgirls is though. I really adore the game for the smart gameplay mechanics it uses.
What about Beowulf? Dude has a bionic arm and hits like a grown ass man! Honestly though, I’d go around practicing combos/setups/gimmicks, that’s what I enjoy most about the game tbh. I feel like if people REALLY got into learning the characters, they’d have a lot more fun with them.
Back on topic: I strongly disagree with having high damage combos. Lol @ it encouraging players to play honest, I’ve played some really solid ST players that would whoop me most of the time but every once in a while I would fraud out a victory with either a high damage super or got a lucky hit in for a good chunk of their life. It just feels like it’s luck based sometimes.
If the damage is too high, you won’t have as much time to read your opponent and it’ll also increase the comeback factor tremendously.
Lower-medium damage (18-30%?) is just something I prefer, I will say though that there’s some pleasure in landing that 100% damage combo on someone.
I think it is more about high damage in general than the combos. Increasing the importance of individual hits and pokes, and in a way making it less about combos.
Yeah. That’s exactly why the Smash community loves the game -_-
Wait, you got that from me saying “That game sucked for numerous reasons”. Lol, try harder.
Sure, make the game as mechanically solid as possible. But that’s not what I’m talking about. This is definitely beyond your level of reasoning, because you would not have even quoted me if you understood it. The bottom line is that good games go beyond “combos should be easy and reversals hard”. If you think stuff like that is what makes fighting games good, you know nothing about fighting games.
No matter how “solid” a game is, if the majority of people don’t like/play it, it’s not going to succeed. Tough pill to swallow but fucking deal with it.
On the flip side: is it really THAT important a fighting game “succeeds”? I mean as long as the developer makes back their money and you got a game you enjoy even if other people don’t, well more power to you. I’m sure SOMEWHERE there is a community of like minded people for that title.
I suppose that is a different discussion entirely though than this one. Though it does tie in to the skullgirls side track we had.
- No parries unless they are soul calibur 1 and 2 style, which is the only good parry mechanic that has ever been.
- Faster walk speeds across the board, make dashes cover more space or become quicker on average in order to not make dashes redundant.
- Keep focus.
- No crouch tech.
- Divekicks get better ways to balance them. Either via greater height restrictions or huge hurtboxes compared to the hitboxes (like adons jaguar)
- GGPO (or GOOD rollback netcode) for christs sake.
- No delayed wakeup.
- Shorter stages
- Keep invincible backdashes (shorter stages helps to balance invincible backdashes
- try to eliminate as many option selects as possible.
- No seth/viper/fuerte style (dont have to play streetfighter before the knockdown) types of characters.
- Keep plinking. Nothing wrong with making execution easier. And along with that, take some advice from mike z: no half circles, no input overlaps on the same button.
Dont design characters to only be functional combowise via 1 frame links, unless the 1 frame link is into a safe on block move (and even then, just dont do it)
It isnt possible to eliminate 1 frame link combos or link combos in general, but it is possible to not design for them specifically, and make a character viable without needing to use them.
-edit
About guard crush… Pls god no and heres why:
- there is already a GREAT way to discourage overblocking aka turtling. It is called throwing the opponent. unfortunately it is horribly implemented in streetfighter 4. Sf4 weakens throws in many ways, the biggest ones being that players are throw invincible on wakeup, that one can tech throws while crouching, and that crouching throw tech gives a cr.lk instead of a standing throw attempt, and that characters cant be thrown immediately after exiting blockstun.
ALL of those things are what make sitting there blocking, so strong in sf4.
Also, if one wants other ways to encourage active offense from the opponent, then the unblockable focus attacks could be drastically sped up (while allowing only one attack from the opponent to be able to land before the opponent gets put into an invincible state of some sort)
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Guard crush in games means that players DONT have to land throws or mixups in order for their offense to succeed. It means that simple things like making contact with your opponent get disproportionally rewarded via guard break
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In games that have guard break in them, the games tend to shift away from blocking mixups and frame traps, and toward blockstrings and “endless” blockstring pressure style of gameplay. Endless blockstrings wont be viable of course, but the games will go from looking like in ryu v ryu:
Cr.lk>throw or cr.lk>frame trap
To looking like in ryu v ryu with guard breaks:
Cr.lpx2,cr.lk,cr.mk xx fireball x infinity. Until blockstring becomes enough to guard break at which point it will end in cr.hk not fireball.
In other words, in guard crush games it becomes all about guard crush and nothing else.
Me personally i like the dynamic presence of mixup based offensive games, more.