Improvements or changes you would like to see in SFV

Ummm. How did I “forget” it when I specifically stated it?

Also the ability to dash under fireballs is pretty situational for her. A 4F faster dash is WAY better. A 15F dash makes Chun’s Level 1 Focus - Dash +1F on block/hit and level 2 is +7F on block while Juri’s is -3F on block for L1 and +3F on block for L2.

Juri’s forward dash is hardly the 2nd best. It’s good but there are a number of better dashes. Chun’s is one of them.

Being faster frame data wise almost always trumps low profile. Low profile is situationally useful while being faster affects the move ALL the time and in multiple ways. I’d trade Cody’s low profile dash for Abel’s dash in a heartbeat and that is only a 2F difference.

I think I know a little something about characters dashes since I did exhaustive research on every characters forward and backward dash as well as jump arcs back in 2012:

This is a little old now (was recorded just before Ultra’s release) though it’s a panel delivered by MikeZ talking about various aspects of fighting game design, namely common errors and questionable design decisions from button mapping methods, handling cross-ups, combo counters, guard and stun meters, all the way through to overly complex inputs for specials, supers, etc.

It’s delivered from the perspective of a gent properly qualified to share his opinion on what he feels works and what doesn’t and makes for a great watch. A lot of commonly understood aspects are raised, though there’s some seldom discussed points that are really interesting. It’s also a great watch if you’re in any way interested in some of the design hurdles developers find themselves considering when putting a fighting game together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpXganAM_qA

I figure it’s relevant to this thread and I’d like to think a lot of what Mike raises in this panel has been considered or at least acknowledged by Capcom in some form for SF5.

As Mike Z said, a lot of the UI stuff doesn’t really need to be said. It should just be common sense. However, there are a few things I’d like to add and/or comment on. I’ve mentioned a lot of this stuff already so apologies if I sound like a broken record.

  • Tap-to-set is really good, but it can also be implemented poorly, eg. USFIV and 3SOE, which don’t allow you to unset buttons. To implement tap-to-set correctly can be fairly tricky. For example, if you make a button like SELECT/BACK to be your default “unset” button, how do you implement that in games that use these buttons for play/replay/reset in Training Mode? GG Xrd handles this requiring you to hold right to unset a button. But this forces you to have a different implementation on PC, where you’d have to configure directional buttons on keyboard. So maybe a better option to do it is make the players hold a button for 1 second if they want to unset it.

  • Games should also include two different Button Config screens - a slimmed down version for VS mode, and a full featured version for training mode. There’s no need to have button config options for Save state/Replay etc in VS mode.

  • I think it would be a good idea to have the selected character (or a default one) to appear on the button config screen and perform the move as you press the button. This helps a lot when players are more familiar than the visual appearance with the moves than their technical names, and or the layout of the button-config screen (think foreigners who only play in the arcades who have no idea of how the console layouts work).

  • Having win stats in VS mode is nice, but also have an option to reset the stats.

  • Allow players to switch sides from the pause menu or char select screen. Some games get this half right as they allow you to choose a controller at the start of VS mode. But it should also allow you to switch sides from the pause menu. This is important because when playing offline during VS mode, you don’t really go back to the main menu when a new player comes along. The previous players disconnect their controllers, the new players connect theirs, and then they spend the next minute trying to figure out if they should swap ports, chairs or just play like that. Unnecessary.

  • Only allow inputs from Player 1 and Player 2 during matches. This should eliminate that wireless controller Pause issue. This is tricky because sometimes it’s an underlying OS thing, but if you can do it, then do it, or at least have an option for it.

  • Permanent Random Select for stages (and players) is nice, but sometimes loading times and memory constraints limit this as an option. DON’T implement this if the random stages/characters take long to load. Provide it as an option. (It should be an option anyway because even if you choose Random Select for characters, some tournaments prevent you from switching characters during a set).

  • Just use Smash Bros options for VS settings and build on it. Seriously. Allow the players to select from a pool of stages. eg. If noone likes Volcano stage in SFIV, allow the player to deselect it so that it won’t show up even in Random Select. For music, the options should be Random/Player 1/Player 2/Stage or a random selection of P1/P2/Stage. A lot of stage designers and music producers don’t particularly like this as an option because they design music for a particular stage, but IMO for offline VS mode the player should be able to choose what they want. You should have an option for Random Select to include different colour palettes and costumes as well, and it should be as configurable as the stages (eg. Disallow Blanka Alt. 3 in SFIV)

  • Different Stages and costumes should not cause the game to run at different speeds

  • There are business reasons that some companies don’t include frame data/hitbox information in training mode. eg. Selling guidebooks themselves or through a 3rd party. Unfortunately players don’t have much of a say here. Interestingly enough, there are also things like having training modes where combos are demonstrated through certain sound and visual cues that aren’t easy to implement because of patents by other companies.

  • Use the best netcode as determined through thorough play testing and feedback. Not always possible because of budget/time/technological constraints. But choosing XYZ netcode just because it’s XYZ is almost universally a bad idea.

  • You should be able to select any stage/BGM for training mode

  • You should be able to switch characters with the dummy without going back to char select. The same in games with multiple supers. Just allow the player to select from the training mode option screen.

  • If memory and load times permit, allow the player to select stages and characters without going back to Char/Stage select. Think of the command list in 3SOE. It brings up a list of all the characters and you pick one. Char select should work the same if possible.

  • Allow the player to select the default training mode characters. In USFIV, the default chars are always Juri and Hakan (I think). I don’t play these chars so I rarely pick them in training mode.

  • “Use as reversal” is a necessary option in training mode, but also allow the player different slots for recording and then give them an option to play it back randomly. eg. Record a DP, Backdash, crouch tech, jump etc. Then set the dummy to do these randomly on the first frame possible. If possible, allow them to set a bit of delay after the first possible frame (eg. “wait 3f then do cr.lp”). All these options can be overwhelming for newbies, so they should be tucked away under “advanced” settings.

  • Allow for different training configurations that can be saved and reloaded

  • You should be able to watch a replay, select a time frame, and then be able to recreate the exact situation (characters, stage, position, inputs) in training mode, giving you the option to select which player should be the training dummy and which one you want to control. This is very useful for training against setups and strategies that you don’t know 100% how to recreate.

  • Some very useful training mode options take a lot of time to implement, and realistically will only be used by a handful of people who buy the game. If you can’t implement everything you want, consider adding it as DLC. This goes for tutorial modes as well. I’d rather pay $10 for a decent Training Mode than a furry costume…

  • Training dummy auto-block should not apply on wake-up. At least have an option to disable it.

  • Damage in training mode should be displayed in 2 ways: Damage output at current life scaling, and Damage output at max health

  • It’s nice to see where certain combos failed like in GG and BB, but I personally consider this visual clutter and would be prefer to only have it in training mode, or in replays.

  • This should go without saying, but the command history list should be available for P1 and P2 in training mode. It’s amazing how many games neglect this simple feature.

  • Consider using a different hit-spark or visual indicator for punishment. TTT2 does this now I believe, but only in training mode. This gives you and spectators an indication of whether or not a player’s move was punished, or if they just did not block correctly.

  • X-up implementation is really a design choice around playability (and visuals). There’s no “right” and “wrong” way to do them, and in fact they can even be set per character (as Mike Z explained about Carl Clover) and even per-move, although it takes more work. I don’t agree with him that they aren’t handled “properly” in Arc Sys games.

  • His examples about unblockables are a good demonstration of what I was talking about earlier, which is roughly “good” design choices do not equal “good” game. 3rd Strike is a great example of this (*and a not-so-great one). Capcom actually removed Urien and Oro’s unblockables from the game. What happened? Players refused to play the new revision and arcade owners were forced to revert back to the previous version. Kuroda himself recently said that without these unblockables Urien and Oro would not be very good. What does this mean? 3S is a better game because of a “bad” design choice! At the end of the day, no matter what YOU think is good for the game, more often that not its success will depend on the players. (*If I’m not mistaken, you can parry your way out of these unblockables)

  • 3 Button inputs DO have an impact on playability outside of simply making execution harder/easier. eg. Boxer’s TAP prevents him from teching or using throws and using focus attacks while he is charging.

It’s also important to realise that a lot of the arguments he and other people make for an against certain things can also be applied to other things that they do like, or don’t necessarily have a problem with. For example, if you argue that “no supers should ever have to be harder that QCF + 2 buttons because XYZ does it and it’s just fine”, you should be able to argue that no game should ever need more than 1*/2/3/4 attack buttons because ABC does it and it’s also fine (*Evil Zone on the PSX only uses 1 button + directional inputs). This is not about a certain aspect of fighting games per se, but it’s just something to be aware of when considering arguments.

On his opinion against Stun/Dizzy: “Getting hit again because you got hit before is bad design” is not a good argument against dizzies in my opinion. Combos rely on this aspect of fighting games. If you cannot get hit again immediately after getting hit, then combos wouldn’t be possible. Dizzies also allow you to use combos that aren’t really seen much outside punishment opportunities. Furthermore, they allow for interesting (IMO) metagame battles (“Do I play more cautiously now that stun is coming up, or do I take advantage of his aggression and bait him into punishable offense?”). That said, you certainly don’t NEED a dizzy mechanic in a fighting game.

On guard crush: He neglects to mention that many games that have a guard crush mechanic also include Alpha Counters.

The problem here is that is that it blames the removal of one thing as the reason why people didn’t like Revision B when that’s only part of it. Rev B being rejected is just a symptom of the horrible job Capcom did balancing 3rd Strike. As much as we like to say that “the balance is fine” and that “parry helps negate tiers”, there’s still the fact that Chun and Yun (and to an extent, Ken and Makoto) do dominate the game. At that point, it was a choice of a game with unblockables taken out, but with worse balance, or one with them in but with slightly better balance.

If you think about it, that 3rd Strike is as good as it was and that enough characters are viable is an accident. The thing is, thanks to hindsight (and some really smart people), we can look at these accidents and figure out what it is that made them work. For 3rd Strike, it isn’t that “Urien/Oro had unblockables”, but rather that “The top tiers were tempered by the fact that there were mid/high tier characters that could win”.

If you think 4-5 characters in a game being viable in a singles tournament is good balance, then more power to you. Parry does not offset tiers, otherwise there would be no tiers in 3s. If anything parry makes already strong characters much stronger. If 3s had tournaments the scale of SF4, I do not believe anyone would like what they see. With regards to characters in top 16-32.

I gotta agree here, I feel similarly about CvS2 update to a lesser extent (RCs created an interesting tool and in many ways improved the game). The issue with removing roll cancels and unblockables making a bunch of character no longer viable is ultimately a problem with the balance of the characters not the removal of specific traits that likely were unintended (Judging by their later removal). Had the characters been balanced better to make up for the removal of such traits then there might have been more adopters to the later revisions. If the games allowed just as many or more varieties of play styles and characters being viable while removing those aspects of the game.

The big issue is that it created a further disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots” making the game less interesting.

That is at least my view on it.

That’s not true as far as 3rd Strike goes. The game was too young for tiers to have been established. Remember, revision B came out less than 2 months after the first version, and less than 1 month after revision A. IIRC, Ryu was considered top tier at the time (probably not this early, but after a few months).

The fact that 3S had crappy balance was only established years afterwards. Players wanted the unblockables because it made the game more fun to play.

3S:OE allows for unsetting buttons. You just hit select on the button you want to unset.
It doesn’t interfere with the save/replay feature because those are 2 completely separate things. I don’t even know how those ever could overlap. I mean either you’re setting up buttons in the pause menu or during character select OR you’re playing the game.

I really dont understand what you mean with the bolded part.

They added that through an update. It wasn’t available from the start. 3SOE had lots of poor GUI choices, like putting Ready/Not Ready on the same button, so double-tapping would cause you to lose your place.

In some games you can assign the Select button to perform a function. So it’s impossible to use it to unassign buttons.

Save state/Replay is a training mode feature.

The thing is, thanks to all the years of play, we do have data available to us that can help us figure out how certain “bad” mechanics became manageable.

To take another example, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is a game that is full of busted stuff, yet at the same time, we know that the game also has a number of mechanics and design decisions that ended up keeping the game from being totally busted. Going back to unblockables, switching from standing to crouching or vice versa while push blocking in that game actually allowed you to block both high and low at the same time, allowing players to deal with high-low unblockables. Then you have stuff like push block guard cancel that keeps stuff like Spiral/Sentinel from dominating the game.

Now back to the 3S unblockable example, we do know that the unblockables can be dealt with via parrying. In other words, a mechanic existed that did help deal with something that is technically “bad”.

I would like to see the movement after KO back, tbagging is so fucking fun when I get all that delicious salt in the form of ragemail <3

My bad for not being clear.

What I am trying to say is I think capcom mad bad call when they choose certain practical mechanics to be character exclusive. (air throws, chains, Addtional normals, normals with cancel properties) I think these in particularly need to be available across the board as the mechanics help certain character fundamentally. Of course if any of these is implement certain other things would need to be modify such as Jump and throw start up to accommodate air throw, Frames advantages and push block for chains.

Which is why I said it’s a “great and not-so-great example”.

But still, players were smart enough to figure out that there were no need to nerf things without real evidence that they were broken. Unblockables in 3S are situation-specific, only apply to two characters (not counting Seiei Enbu unblockables), and require a fair amount of skill to setup and capitalize on. Contrast that to unblockables in SFIV which are technically easier to block/avoid, but nearly the entire cast has access to and usually lead to high damage.

It’s the same in any competitive game in any genre. Bunny hopping, rocket and strafe-jumping in FPS, fire-hopping in Mario Kart 8, wave dashing in many FGs… all these techniques exploit the game in ways the designer did not intend. Sure, more often than not exploits break the game. But there are also tons of examples where they don’t, and instead allow the game to be played in more fun and interesting ways. And if the game breaks in ways the players don’t like, they’ll be the first to tell you.

Post Quake 1 every single Quake game was built to have rocket, bunny hopping and strafe jumping in it intentionally. It started out as a bug and was specifically recreated in later games. Quakeworld, Quake 2, Quake 3, and Quake 4 all have those features intentionally. Some spots in quake 3 arena are almost specifically designed for strafe jumping. Bridge to Railgun on q3dm6 was setup so that you could make the jump from a standstill if you performed a near perfect strafe jump circle jump starter meaning you didn’t need to gain any momentum before hand. Sections of dm6 have very specific curves to benefit strafe jumping while other areas have stairs and pillars in the way to make it more difficult or impossible to strafe jump and slow you down.

Rocket Jumping has always been intentional in quake and unreal tournament and team fortress.

Your point may stand to some extent but I wanted to point out that particular example is pretty dead in the water.

Please cut back on the shortcuts. I hate how intrusive they can be at times.

Please no unnecessary double half circle motions

Yes we all know that for all intents and purposes this is true, but that’s exactly the point. As I said, wave dashing was also intentionally added as a feature to FGs.

Again, the point is that these were tactics that exploited the game in ways the designer didn’t intend for. Usually because they were seen as bad for the game, or because it was not part of the developer’s vision. Yeah, applying friction or acceleration incorrectly if you travel in directions other than forward or off the ground is probably an unintentional and unwanted bug in the physics engine. But no developer in their right mind going to remove a glitch if the majority of players want it there unless it’s deemed bad for business (like bugs in console games that enable buffer overflow exploits).

GunZ the duel is the best example of a game that thrived off of unintentional glitches. For those unfamiliar, it was a third person multiplayer action game which had you battle it out with guns and swords, you could do basic parkour moves and dive and dash around. But once people found out how to get around pumping a shot gun in between shots by quickly scrolling through your weapons back and forth, that if you had a sword out and jumped then dashed while slashing the sword at the same time, the sword slash animation would cancel you from being in a dashed state (while traveling and getting the full speed boost of the dash) thus allowing you to dash again from 1 jump, now if you got the rhythm of this, if you let your sword slash hit a wall you would recoil off the wall and get a little bit of a bounce again mid air allowing you to scale any building or maintain a very high level of mobility by repeating the dash+slash. So a game which was intended to be played with the built in cover objects and the basic parkour and matrix style moves that were designed ended up being loved and played with an entirely different style based on canceling animations and scrolling through weapons quickly and exploiting glitches

Don’t be so sure. Carmack removed bunny hopping in an early patch of Q3A only to put it back in after an overwhelming majority of people called him a complete and total retard.

The thing is, Carmack has humility. Capcom doesn’t. Not a shred.

How that pans out in the long run is anyone’s guess.

Rocket jumping was always intentional though. And you said that these techniques exploit the game in ways not intended by the developer but many competitive games were created from the ground up with these aspects in mind while your examples of unblockables and such were not intended (as you pointed out) That was my only point, it made it sound like were saying that those aspects (fire jumping, rocket jumping strafe jumping, ect) are not intended by the developers in their competitive games but as you noted they ARE in fact intended in many of them.