Has everybody already forgot Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Revival?
It had an easy mode where Ryu’s movelist was something like this:
Hadou - f+P
Shoryu - df+P
Spin Kick - b+K
Super - AB
It pretty much demonstrates what happens when you dumb down street fighter controls.
-There’s only so many simple motion can make. Doing Ryu’s overhead punch is a bitch with easy mode.
-One of the reasons the motions are the way they are to limit the context in which they’re used. In STR, you can easily dp through fireballs, double flash kick the moment you see your opponent in range and FAB to counter anything.
Fighting game moves have a balance of priority, damage, range, recovery, in some cases meter cost/reward, and execution. Making everything easy to execute dilutes the game because you wouldn’t be able to have FAB, Raging Demon traps, Raging Storm counters because they’d be to easy. Even so called button mashers have hard to execute moves with high reward.
-All games require some form physical coordination. The people that can’t pull off a fireball are the same type of people that can’t beat Guitar Hero on easy. Street Fighter doesn’t need a shoryu button anymore than Halo needs a headshot button.
Well put. Your second point in particular is perhaps the best argument against simplifying the SF controls. And I’m sure many of us know people who can’t beat Guitar Hero on easy and we don’t understand it, because no matter how easy something is, there are people who can’t do it. Eventually, for the sake of people who DO want to play the game more than once, you have to draw a line at simplicity and say “you’ve just gotta man up”.
sorry but that is wrong. like i said before people get sticks for a variety of reasons (getting that “arcade feel”, cool kids play on stick, people on an internet forum told them to get one…etc). even if people felt the need to get a stick because a pad is unsatisfactory, that only means fighting games were designed to be played on stick, not that the inputs are somehow too complicated. its like playing baseball using a length of pipe instead of a bat. you can hit the ball with it, and get pretty good at doing so, but its pretty clear that the game plays better if you use a bat.
and we get a new “sticks are hard, no homo” thread every few weeks.
The only thing that is necessarily more difficult on pad is things that require multiple button presses at nearly the same time (kara throws, roll cancel). Directional inputs are just as easy on pad as they are on stick.
If you said it before perhaps it was in some other thread? I will just have to take your word for it. You are certainly right that these games were designed with a stick in mind… but with the state of arcades nowadays I have to wonder if that’s such a good design decision.
One of the neatest things about the SF2 series is that joystick motions and corresponding button presses were generally assigned to resemble the special move.
For general controls, you have buttons for punches and kicks in three strengths each, and you push the joystick in the direction you’d like to move. Blocking is simply pressing away from your opponent. It’s about as simple and intuitive as you can get given the original type of input device for which the game was originally intended; a normal arcade cabinet’s control panel.
Having to practice and memorize shit for increased precision in your choices and its corresponding translation into in-game execution is, to a large degree, an unavoidable result of having more possible commands at your fingertips.
Every (successful) fighting game has its own sense of logic to its controls and movelists. Excellent examples of very different setups from Capcom games are Tekken, VF, and SC.
Someone said earlier about SF4 being less stricter on execution and controls.
Now you say this. I fully agree with both of you. I think when they made SF4 they made some of the tight commands a lot less painstaking so it will be more comfortable for people who don’t have the time ( yeah right, scrub) to learn stick, or the bread to buy a good stick, or just lazy. But somehow kept the depth we loved in OG games. And they did a good job blending it.
I’m not gonna lie when I played SF4 the combos are much easier to apply even if you haven’t played it much imo than ST. Every so often I still miss big damage punish attempts on ST. I never missed a punish attempt on SFIV so far. ITS FREE I TELL YA!! LOL!:lovin::lovin:
Ya know most casual gamers are not gonna spend extra money for an arcade stick anyhow especially when casual peeps are more like “one-night stands” towards well done fighters. So I think it’s a good route the dev team is taking with SFIV making it simpler upon it’s return to console. Otherwise I’d say leave it in the arcade.
Conclusion, meh, ST execution is pretty heavy depending how you approach it. If you already experienced in previous or other fighters it’s actually not hard. If ST is your first fighter:rolleyes:however–your gonna get your ass handed to you. Fact.
this was probably repeated already in the thread previously, but inputs contribute more to balance than simply “make X require arbitrary special motion to execute”
in fact, the dp example has already been mentioned - no human is going to dp every jump 100% (unless you’re playing turbo 0 or something lawl). it forces you to commit - you leave blocking position to perform the dp. if you do it too late or you accidentally get cr.jab or something you eat the jumpin. a lot of this shit is psychological; someone might get psyched to keep blocking jump attacks even if he has adequate time to anti-air simply because he’s scared.
by contrast, if you jump right into a charged and alert guile, you will always eat the flash kick. in terms of move execution, it really is easy mode - all it takes is one directional input (from a charge). there is no margin of error involved; if you can’t do a flash kick you might as well quit street fighter. the obvious check is charging time, but that mechanic shows up in more subtle ways.
let’s say you get swept by gief and you weren’t already down-charged. he then jumps in at you. when you get up you aren’t charged for flash kick so you can’t reversal out. if you block high, you basically have no chance of fk’ing out, which pretty much guarantees tick spd. but if you keep down-charging, you eat some really nasty combo. of course tick spd is hard as fuck to get out of one way or another, but clearly ryu, who is able to dp at will, has a relatively much easier time than, say, guile or boxer. the entire concept of forcing your opponent to lose their charge is something special to fighting games - losing it would really suck.
specials should be intuitive to perform - not randomly hard as fuck to do (hello snk) but to get the player to commit to the special. not only do motions make the game fun, they separate the pros from the amateurs who crack under pressure and mess up that 360 when both players have a pixel of life.
The motions are difficult for scrubs and people who don’t play fighting games. They’re only used to up, down, left or right. And SNK uses far more complex motions. Capcom motions are beyond basic in comparison.
There’s one flaw in the “you can’t argue that it’s the way it’s always been” argument and that is that at a certain point in time, the game actually was new and people liked it.
SF came out in a time when games were way more simplistic than they are now and people still picked it up.
I played Guilty Gear Dust Strikers on DS, with its one button specials and it sucked. Doing a Potemkin Buster with one button is about as fulfilling as pulling of a jump straight up in Super Mario. Maybe even less.
In action platformers nowadays you often get all of these Simon Says combos where you’re supposed to just input a series of button presses. Of course the overall gameplay is different so this method actually fits in, but imagine implementing it into a Street Fighter game. It would be so boring.
Sure, the moves look cool, but you’ll get completely distanced from the gameplay. If you do that, you might as well go all the way and have lush, cinematic style animation and Dragon’s Lair gameplay in future fighting games.
DOA is also a good example. Counters usually look really sweet and they give you kind of a rush the first time because you can’t believe what you’re seeing. But then you realize you’re at the mercy of just a single button press that just happens to be timed perfectly and the fun’s over.
If you make a Street Fighter game that actually uses extremely simplistic controls then the only thing that’ll decide wether you win or lose will probably be whoever presses their button first. It’ll be fun mashing away the first couple of matches, but it’ll get old really quick.
Anyway, that’s my opinion.
I get where you’re coming from, but my counter argument would be that footsies can be a lot of fun. And yet, that usually revolves around just one or two buttons. It’s the spacing and timing and baiting your opponent’s poke first, so that you can punish them with yours that makes it fun. So, I’m not so sure that easy-to-do moves lead to boring matches or mashing FTW.
The other thing that gets brought up in threads like this a lot is examples of games with simplified input modes(CvS2:EO, etc). The problem with these examples is that they changed the motion, but not the moves properties. Imagine that doing an SRK was only one button. Now imagine that you have to hold that button for a second to charge it up, or imagine that you simply hit the button but that the move takes a few frames to wind up. The reason those easy modes are broken is because they retain the original properties of the move with instant execution. It’s a timing issue much more than a input issue.
That’s not to say that inputs don’t matter at all though. There are certainly subtleties. Inputs affect things when make it difficult in certain situations. Moves that are harder to do while walking forward, or from crouching block are a good example. Moves invalidating other moves are another case. For example, most of the time you can’t combo a sonic boom and a flash kick together.
What doesn’t matter is making arbitrarily difficult motions. Guile’s flashkick super, Raging Demon, and a bunch of SNK motions are just needlessly complex. There’s no point in that. That just forces you to spend time in training mode for no real reason.
The thing I really despise though is overlapping motions. Going to do an SRK and getting a fireball by accident is dumb. Going to do SPD and getting the green hand is dumb. Each motion should be different enough so that when you perform it, you get the move you were going for instead of some other move. To me, that’s even worse than making the motions too complex.
If anyone trying to go with the argument that easier execution allows more mind games; in theory it does, but then you take away one important aspect of the game. If you take an analogy of a sports game or even real life sports, like the NBA.
You pit the LA Lakers and OKC Thunder against each other. Coaches and players will obviously try to play mind games, run plays and try certain things. But, regardless, the gap in execution and talent is too big for any mind game to overcome. The same should go for fighters. I’m not saying that fighters should be exclusive to those with talent, but dumming execution to its simplest form is not the right idea. STHD seems to be on the right track with simplifying inputs a bit and even people who play online (who really have next to no strategy) are doing SPDs and Chicken Kicks on point.
Is the input for Street Fighter games too complex or unintuitive?
overall? sort of… the inputs are not too hard in and of themselves, but the game doesn’t tend to lend itself well to new players, especially if things aren’t explained well. I bought Super Turbo HD when it came out, and i thought for the longest time that a shoryuken was back, forward, down, forward. that extra motion in there made it insanely difficult for me to do.
for a game that’s been out for … what, 15 years? They really need to have a type of matchmaking and try and segregate the people who have been playing since it came out, with those just now getting the game. for those with a more casual attitude, joining a game where someone racks up 50 wins easily without you being able to land a punch doesn’t make it very fun for a new person, and will quickly drive many of them away.
As far a pick-up and play arcade game, it doesnt seem to work out too well, although i think its better than most. For a console game, they need to make some REAL tutorials within the game that will show you the motion you need to make so you can easily see exactly what to do. Overall though, i think most fighting games dont lend themselves well to just picking up and playing, esp tekkin (i fucking hate that game)
So, are they TOO complicated? to be honest, not really. but new players need to have a good system that can explain things to them so they can actually get into the game and not have to rely on blind luck to do anything useful.
ps: i hope this is a relevant post, i sort of lost track of my thoughts partly though it.
I guess they are a little too unintuitive to attract most new players. I’ve tried to show SF to all of my friends like 20 times each, and each time they mostly just want to mash buttons to win.
That’s just the problem. If you simplify the motions, it probably would end up becoming too mindless masher friendly. Most people just don’t want to take the time to learn this game with its “impossible” QCF motions or whatever, when they can just play smash, and get the same moves with B or up B.
Smash is a great example of this. The motions for the special moves are simple, so the game is masher friendly, but at the same time, it’s obvious that it’s a game that takes skill to win at (especially Melee). Maybe in the future Capcom could release a new Street Fighter (or some other fighting game, even better) that has Smash-style controls and see how it does. I actually think it’d work out.
As for people who say that motions are not just to make the game harder, they’re to balance the moves themselves: You’re right. But that problem could be fixed just by adding three frames of startup to the moves themselves.
I think an even better way of doing this (even better than smash controls) would just be to have a Street Fighter game with a TUTORIAL in it. That’s one part of HD Remix that just disappoints me. Where’s the updated version of Sirlin’s CCC2 tutorials? Those were great, they taught noobs EVERYTHING they needed to know about the game. They even taught them that throws are ok. That’s what Street Fighter needs. TUTORIALS. An in-game window that sits them down and tells them each motion, and how to fireball trap.
Oh my goodness yes this. It would be a lot harder to claim something was “cheap” when there’s a tutorial mode dedicated to learning to execute it/defend against it.
today’s games are more complex but more easy, that require more reading and knowledge of things than simple, more technical and effort of games of the past
and SF is a bad example
SFII has to be the simplest a 2D fighter can get, if you feel sf2 is too complex/technical for you, just forget it, you’re not made for this games.
yeah right, scrub) to learn stick, or the bread to buy a good stick, or just lazy. But somehow kept the depth we loved in OG games. And they did a good job blending it.