I think if 3s was made in this era it would’ve been a first month patch that removed unblockables and no one would ever think about it again. maybe there’d be a balance patch a year in that nerfed the shit out of Chun and Ken. I’m pretty grateful 3s came out in the era that it did. it strikes me as just the kind of game that would get ruined in today’s fighting game standard of nerfing characters into oblivion.
someone can correct me if I’m wrong but my perception is that something similar happened to MK9 and a lot of cool stuff that players liked was taken out through patching.
You sure you’re thinking of Q3? I thought that was Q1 where strafe jumping originated that they removed it than put it back almost right away. They have a lot of stuff obviously catered to strafe jumping in Q3A from the get go. I happen to know one of the lead designers from Q3A’s CTF mode and he planned around it for some maps spacings.
It still doesn’t change my point. Even during testing people figure out stuff that’s not supposed to happen but they leave it if they feel it makes the game better. eg. Counter-hit on the first hit after a reversal CADC was a bug in SFxT but they left it in because they felt it lead to interesting strategies.
Going back to my original point - sticking to good design principles isn’t going to ensure a good game. At the end of the end it’s still the players who determine the success of the game (along with how devs support it). That’s why I advocate having the game tested by people from different experience levels and backgrounds during development. You’re more likely to see emergent gameplay earlier in the development process.
Besides all that, ideologically clinging to any principle during development is almost a sure-fire way to failure. One of Daigo’s biggest problems with SFIV has always been that the developers didn’t take enough risk because they were too afraid of making a bad game.
Yes, there’s always risk in crazy ideas, but that’s how you make progress. Who thought that infinite super meter building could ever be a good thing? No pausing between rounds? Life bars that go “the wrong” way? Recoverable normal health? The VS team did. And that game is great, and remains one of the most influential titles in the FG scene.
You could balance it smartly and simply remove the ability to late cancel. If chun has her meter she’s still the best but at least it’s harder to hitconfirm, you don’t have a year and a half to do so.
About the unblockables ; you talk about 3s (sfv forum after all) but I think mike was thinking primarily about arcsystem work games with all the characters able to do high and low at the same time. This is a design, not a bug and I see nothing wrong with this if it’s done correctly.
For example if you have an unblockable but the proration is shit (Relius in bb for example) it’s not game breaking and you can’t be frustrated if get caught by this - the counter example would be kokonoe and her stupid black hole, that is a terrible design.
Some character have tons of mix up, others don’t have so many mix ups but can rely on an unblockable to get 10%-20% of your life, it’s a design in itself like a command throw or a massive cheap damage set up. If it’s just another low risk/low reward moment there’s nothing wrong with unblockable IMO ; if however the unblockables lead to a very big combo then it’s a big problem (sf4 has terrible unblockable).
I like MikeZ but you can’t say : a game should do this and that. Nah man, you can design whatever you want as long as it’s done correctly, even infinites or TOD don’t bother me.
Fair points but this one part irked me. SFxT has a lot of bugs that were found but left in, as does SF4. How can you be sure that the reasoning that was left in was because they felt it improved the game? It could have simply been considered unimportant or too much work to fix.
we should be able to import scripts from replays into training mode dummy’s playback for a real verbatim approach to training against someones shit. want to beat em ? take their setups from their replays and put em in training mode to find exploits or better defenses against shit. e.g. unblockables etc etc
Well Combofiend also said that there wasn’t any unlisted changes in Ultra which turned out to be untrue. Could simply be a misunderstanding or misled by someone. Seth said a lot of things during SFxT he was obviously uncomfortable with or didn’t seem to fully believe.
Anyways, I never heard that. You got the source, I’d be interested in reading the rest of whatever else he said.
Q3A. It was a massive point of contention between Carmack and those on the team balancing gameplay. The game was released with bunny hopping obviously, but Carmack himself later weighed in saying that he didn’t like the idea of guys with big guns bounding around maps like rabbits, so he put a limit on how quickly you could jump on landing, effectively killing bunny hopping entirely. It stifled the feel of the game a lot and as I mentioned, was reverted quickly with a subsequent patch.
Fun fact: Rocket jumping (or more accurately, rocket assisted acceleration) was a part of the original Doom. It was actually required to access the secret level exit on E3M6. I recall you could wall strafe to access it, but the intentional design was to blast the opposing wall with a rocket point blank to accelerate you into the walled chamber to punch the (optional secret level) exit. I remember stumbling across it playing coop and couldn’t figure out how I did it for a long time, haha. Rocket jumping could in a sense be attributed to Sandy Petersen if you wanted to split hairs.
This derail is brought to you by the letters i and d.
He said it on a stream, probably while commentating a match. AFAIK CADC was introduced at the TGS 2011 build, but there aren’t many vids of people using it before it was officially announced as a gameplay mechanic simply because noone really knew about it. It was only at NYCC 2011 that the final mechanics were announced.
Counter-hits in SFxT underwent a few changes. In the early builds throws and grabs (even air throws) could counter-hit. These were removed. We can’t say that whether the original mechanic was put in intentionally or not, but it’s not hard to imagine that other techniques relating to counter-hits came about unintentionally.
Yeah S-Kill did say a lot of things that he didn’t feel comfortable with (especially gems and Pandora) but I don’t see why he would bring CADC CH up out of nowhere.
Mentioned this a couple of times, but I realized there are also other uses for this.
For example, the game could analyse your replay and then point out areas where your game might need work.
So if it notices you lost most of your health when the opponent jumped at you, it might prompt you with a tip saying:
“You lost a lot of health due to not defending correctly against your opponent’s jumping attacks. Try using Dragon Punch, cr.HP, standing HK or even blocking. Would you like to practice these moves in training mode?”
Then the game loads up the scenarios where the opponent jumped at you (taken from the replay) and you practice anti-airing and blocking.
If you lose to tick throws, it could display tips to defend against throws (eg. jump, reversal, tech etc) and prompt if you want to practice against the setups you lost to.
This kinda stuff would be really useful for noobs.
You said it was a counterhit on the first hit after a reversal. NOT CADC CH which is totally different. CADC simply involves charging up to level 2 and dash canceling it and then the next attack causes a counterhit. That has nothing to do with reversals. I was pretty confused because I didn’t recall that being a mechanic/bug at first and I simply wrote it off as inexperience with SFxT and there being some bug I didn’t know about.
Unless I’m mistaken and there is something like counterhit on the first hit after a reversal then I’m sorry but it sounds like you’re mixing up two different things.
Throws causing counterhits would have been interesting but horribly balanced due to how some throws are 1 big hit and others are bunch of little hits and likely would only cause the first hit to do bonus damage. Plus I’m not even sure how they’d implement it since throws in SFxT use the same mechanics of starting with a zero damage hit, they’d have to have the CH get stored up and ignore the zero damage hit somehow. Not saying it couldn’t be done, they have the source code of course, just that the way the game is setup currently to my knowledge it wouldn’t be possible without a rewrite to how counterhits work.
I would love to see a universal low crush move like the launcher in SFxT. Yes it is an extreme high/risk high reward mechanic but I think it could drastically impact the pressure and frame trap aspect of the game and will definitely reduce auto-pilot pressure.
More inputs/commands and combo link buffering. It shouldn’t be hard to do any of that, the gamplay shpuld provide the challenge, the skill of your foe should. Wrestling with controls, input and links is archaic and unfun and unnecessary. We could see more good players push the upper limits of the game’s meta if we remove our comfortable shackles.
No light attacks quicker than 4 frames. Medium attacks around 5-6 frames in general. Light attacks already have the advantage of being rapid fire, they don’t also need to be 2x faster than mediums.
Strong throws. Whether this is from damage, frame advantage, chip/white damage on throw techs, range etc or a combination of them all, strong throws help a strong fundamental game.
No 1 frame links. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them, it’s just that I’d rather, at least in terms of execution, that the general pool of players I face are more able to play their characters to a higher standard of efficiency. This in turn forces me to play better sooner.
If there absolutely HAS to be a revenge system, don’t allow the strongest of these revenge supers/ultras to do anything more than 45% on a 1000 health character (or the SF5 equivalent). Easily comboable revenge moves should do no more than 25% in a combo, preferably even less on average.
Extended combos: Keep these to a minumum. Shoot for fewer but more highly damaging moves instead of combos that last forever.
Invulnerable backdashes: These are okay as long as there are none on the level of SF4 Chun-Li/Rose/Poison. There’s no excuse for anything like these to exist. Invulnerable backdashes should still be in place as a universal system to prevent situations where characters with poor defence have no out, but this should be balanced against a game with strong offense and high damage.
At the Taipei showcase Ryu’s Shinku Hadouken did about 30%-35% with 5 hits from blowing through one of Chun’s fireballs with 80% of the metre stocked and looks to be close to the same damage as 2 normal throws from Ryu; no idea if Denjin variant deals more damage. Chun’s Super in the same match looks to do somewhere around 25% at 100% full revenge metre but has a follow up launch for 35%-40%. Looks like Ultra damage has been reduced and normal damage has been increased.
If the most dmging supers are not comboable (aka gief’s super which will obviously be a grab) it should deal no more then 40% at max. Comboable supers should deal at max 30% when done raw. Then I think that’s fine. Super when done raw, should be the most powerful attack a character can do without comboing. A super should never deal less dmg then a special or ex move. And if they stick to the rule of 25-40% for supers then I think that scaling should be normal then. Like "using a super in a combo scales it down by 20% instead of the usual 10%).
The revenge this time around doesn’t seem to be dumb like it was before. Since everything now causes chip dmg and the revenge only (seems to from the capcom cup demo) to fill up to max when you’re I think it’s…5-10% health left? Add to the fact that there is the absence of FA’s and the only way (so far seen) to get regen health is by blocking normals. So really the only way to get a max revenge is to basically more or less be 1/2 hits away from dying. So I think without something else that causes regen and fills the revenge at the same time I think it will work much better then ultra’s did in 4. Because now you can’t simply block and take little dmg (or no no dmg from normals) anymore since every hit fills up the gauge, blocked or not. And by the time you’re max you have barely any health left unlike in 4 where you can focus to easily build ultra and still have tons of health left over.
I’m liking this more and more now that I look into it. Because now if someone is curbstomping someone and they get max revenge and land it against a fairly healthy opponent it won’t matter to much since from there they still don’t get a huge advantage, and it also depends on the super.
Also, does this mean there won’t be a mechanic like FADC’s or tag cancels to make moves safe? So in other words, someone wants to DP it gets blocked they have no way of saving themselves even if they had meter to cancel. That sounds excellent. It could help stop mashing a little for the fact that launching a DP and it gets blocked you’re open to mad punishment without a safe option. This could make certain reversals (and DP’s in general) riskier to do since they can’t fall back on FADC’s or tag cancels to be safe if they mess up.That’s good…that’s really good.
Though element mode might change that (I doubt it but who knows right now). Of course noones knows how it’s activated or when it can be activated.