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That’s exactly how I feel about Tech hitting/ adv guard in Vampire Savior. I can do it, but it was a bitch to learn and I still mess up. When I try to show my brother how to do it, he was like “The fuck is all this extra shit? Why isn’t just one button like in Marvel vs Capcom 3?”
You know for someone who supposedly has this philosophy, he sure did a terrible job at listening to his own advice. Mike Z did wonderful stuff in terms of inputting of movement making that less of a pain (bufferable IAD’s, easier standing 360’s), which makes Skullgirls a lot less of a pain, but something Skullgirls doesn’t have, is fucking easy combos. Not only are they a strain on your memory, there’s also a bunch of pretty tight timings (like getting a restand). I’ve never for a second felt that Skullgirls combos felt “easy”.
From my perspective, the combo philosophy in Skullgirls wasn’t about removing long combos. It was about removing the reliance in how often large combo orientated games revolve around reducing each character’s combos into finding the one really good loop that the character has and then ways to set up into that particular loop. Like how almost every combo with Magneto or Ironman in MvC2 boils down to getting people to ground height for the infinite or something like that. Or May dolphin loop for GG, Kohaku broom loop for older versions of Melty Blood, Taokaka taunt loop, etc. The fact that it also prevented infinites was a nice addition to that philosophy, although some Marvel rules still apply to prevent them (one OTG per combo).
But what Skullgirl’s combo system really ended up doing was just making each iteration of a “loop” slightly different and then way more complicated overall because there’s now an additional thing to keep track of during every “loop” in which buttons were used.
You should try the later builds, some of the damaging BnB combos for some of the new characters are actually quite easy.
I’m having a hard time keeping up with this conversation but Some of the stuff im reading are counter intuitive or don’t make plain sense.
Like have one thing easy and the other harder? whats the point in that?
Relying on your opponent to mes up execution doesn’t sound like …piratical strategy.
Need more games like RB2 with easy mode 50% combo’s.
Standing C, A, B, C, Kuasajin.
Congrats, you now know Kim’s BNB.
This is 100% practical. In old games you know that certain block strings are tight enough to leave a small gap. The only way out is to DP or super. You can play towards your opponents tendencies and punish them accordingly for poor execution or you stop the string early because you know they’re on point with their reversals. If you’re not getting your reversals out, you’ll most likely stop attempting them. This is something we will never see again in newer games.
I agree with this, pretty much. These mechanics create a situation where a competitive beginner is incentivized to not play correctly when the correct move is difficult to do. The cost of failing may be losing the match or round, so the player doesn’t even try to do the correct move. This means that he never gets to practice doing it, which means his opponents don’t get practice defending against it, so on and so forth.
Personally I dislike the whole Undizzy bar in Skullgirls. Initially, when the level of undizzy was not visible to the player I hated it so much that it made me want to quit playing the game. With the current paradigm I can accept it, though I still don’t really like it. There is too much overlap between IPS and Undizzy. I find it inelegant.
Mike has a good head on his shoulders, though. Even when we disagree it’s seldom because I think he’s wrong about his assessment of fighting games or how different designs impact the player experience. It’s more that we sometimes value different things and have a slightly different idea of what an “ideal” fighting game would look like. What the basic design goals would be.
I see a lot of talk about Mike Z and skull girls. But are people under the belief that skull girls is more beginner friendly than sf4?
Do you really believe that SF4 is beginner friendly or is just the mainstream game that people feel forced to play and thus become proficient at?
SF4 has always been a game that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. At least in my opinion. Easy inputs? check. Easy reversals? check. Forced execution wall with 1 frame links abound as a requirement for almost all characters? The fuck? Forced execution wall with FADC in combination with 1 frame links and super motions? What the fuck? Different hit and block stun allowing for people to mash easy reversals and punish those who try the 1 frame link combos or block strings? The fuck, make up your mind on what you want to be. If you want to be an execution based game then do away with easy imputs and easy reversals. At least then the game would be consistent. Or take out the 1 frame links (depending on range with different normals), fadc with super motions, and make block and hit stuns the same. So then it’d be consistently beginner friendly.
If I was gonna make it more beginner friendly I’d
Copy stuff from sfv:
Make ultra taunt input (like sfv)
Make super a single motion with all punches/kicks (like sfv)
Remove crouch techs (like sfv)
Add some other helper stuff like :
Make dashing out of a focus a single press left or right
Have some kind of indicator to show when a charge move has enough charge
Make a raw red focus have only 1 bar cost
And if you really wanted to fuck the higher level players for the beginners:
Make it so you have an area a few pixels wide directly on top of you where blocking either way works (basically an anti ambiguous cross up / vortex defense)
And obviously a proper training stage. I swear to God youtube and twitch is where everyone learns their tech
In terms of beginner-friendliness, SF4 is easier to understand but more difficult to play than Skullgirls.
Skullgirls has a complex system at its core, where every design decision was made to make it as easy as possible to pick up without compromising the complex core system. SF4 has a simple system at its core, but the design decisions in terms of learning curve were made almost arbitrarily and the final product has a mix of brain-dead easy and frustratingly difficult aspects.
One analogy I can think of for this case is that Skullgirls is an exam with hard questions where the test takers can use calculators, check their notes, go on the internet, etc. SF4 is a basic arithmetic test where the test takers have their hands tied behind their backs so they have to hold the pen and write with their mouth or feet.
I feel this way (the SG part) about a LOT of games TBH.
I like the idea of links
But i feel that in SF4 they were really poorly realized
Like whats the point when you have to rely on an unintenional glitch just so that you can hit dem links ?
Omega mode does it great and SF5 looks to be learning from that problem too
What? SFV still uses double motion inputs for supers.
Ah maybe I should say sfxt then.
I think with links you can get away with a lot for adding very little. Just the moves and their hit stun, you can figure out the combo’s later.
With target combo’s that’s it. You do them as they were written
I originally likes tekken cause the inputs were left/right hand/foot. But then when each button also has loads of directions and the move list per character is insane it’s just too much to handle. You (I) just end up learning a tiny percentage then move on.
There’s something eloquent about looking at sf2 cast move list, even compared to the other sf characters, let alone other fighting games.
Specifically which links in rising thunder are people complaining about?
There are tough links in Rising Thunder?
There’s maybe one annoying link I can think of, and that’s because you have to shuffle forwards a tiny bit to get it and, at least before this patch, it didn’t work on all characters.
As for double fireball inputs, it’s really only a pain when it has to be buffered fast, often off of lights. It’s a pain in the ass in Yatagarasu at times if you don’t get to do it off a special using a single fireball input for instance. I had zero trouble getting them in the SFV beta even without a large input buffer.
I don’t think anyone is complaining about a specific link in general, more that the game is focused on links at all. For a game that is trying to be accessible and easy to get into, links are a dumb way to do that.
Maybe it’s just the characters I’ve tried out, but nothing in Rising Thunder that I’ve seen is a barrier to getting in to as far as links go. I have yet to see anyone say “I want to play character X, but can’t hit their link for blah”. That’s why I’m curious about specifics.
Certainly not comparable to SF4 “here’s a 2f link you must learn for your BnB”. Or for that matter SG “here’s a 15 hit combo for your BnB, now go memorize that for 2 other characters as well.”