Again, it’s not that the links are stopping you from doing things, it’s that the game is designed around links at all. And let’s be real here, a 5 frame link is easy to people who play fighting games, but there’s probably still someone out there that has a hard time with 5 frame links. It’s just questioning the design in general and not any character specifically.
Been wondering, how would you design a non-link (chain?) based game that doesn’t encourage confirms from lights? I mean, it’s probably moot for Rising Thunder, considering that you can still do confirms of lights. But what if one of your design goals was to eliminate these (e.g. SFV, where each new build does more to take them out - the Gamescom build no longer allows them for all of the cast). Reverse chains from heavies (to lights)? Or will people be fine with a game purely based on special canceled hit confirms?
You use combo proration rather than damage scaling, so that combos started with riskier hits do big damage, while those started with lights do considerably less. It also helps if your lights are almost universally mid-hitting attacks.
But that alone doesn’t really stop them. Look at SFIV, even with scaling, stuff from lights is still prevalent (and even the latest builds of SFV are making it so that light->light->medium does not link anymore, despite already having harsher scaling).
You didn’t read; I said use proration, BB/GG style, not just regular old damage scaling like in SFIV. In the former two games, due to proration, starting combos with light attacks severely reduces the damage and length of the combo, encouraging people to start combos with stronger and riskier attacks for optimal damage.
What exactly are you asking for here? If you just wanted to encourage people to confirm off of stronger normals then proration would solve that handily, but it sounds like you want to eliminate starting combos from lights altogether, to which I just say…why would you want that?
Why do you need to remove light normal confirms to do that? I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t design a game to be that way and also not remove such things from the player. KoF has a massive emphasis on the midrange game and light normal confirms are like the most important way to get damage. I go back to a comment I made earlier in this thread, either you want me to do it or you don’t, and if you don’t just remove it from the game. If you don’t want the game to have light normal confirms or poke with light normals or really use light normals for anything, why are light normals even in the game? Why not just make a game where all you have is strong pokes you can confirm off of.
Utility. In some games, lights are used more to bait out pokes to try to fish for counter pokes. Then there’s using them to stuff out certain throws, as well as using them for safe blockstun to set up things like tick throws, frame traps and mixups. Not everything around lights is for confirming combos.
But with adjusted frame data you wouldn’t need lights to do that. The mediums and heavies could do that as well, it would just be more MK/Tekken/VF style frame data, which would be fine.
I’m just curious, is the term of “link” just the new term for a combo?
I ask because it’s different from a Target/Natural Combo. So, is it only a link if it’s a 1 frame timing to connect the next attack in a combo? Was all of Super Turbo’s combos links? What about 3S? I never heard the “link” term until SF4’s debut.
A link is a specific type of combo where a move has enough frame advantage to hit that allows you to press a button after the move has completely recovered and still extend the combo. It doesn’t have to be a 1 frame link to be a link, as long as you are waiting for a move to fully recover it could be a 15 frame link if that’s how much frame advantage the move has. ST has a lot of links, but for example crouch jab stand jab fireball is not a link because you don’t have to wait for the jab to fully recover, you can cancel the jab with another jab and cancel into fireball. In 3S, something like UOH into super is a link, but short short super is not a link.
I’m not sure when the term link started being used was, but it was long before SF4. I would imagine it had to have been using it around the CvS2 days at the latest, because by the time I got into the FGC around 2006, it was definitely being used.
Ah okay, so if moves are cancelled into other moves then it’s not a link, and a link is just landing an attack that is faster than the hit advantage provided?
It seems links have this negative connotation with them after SF4, am I seeing that because SF4 has a too much of it’s combos being links?
SF4 goes off the deep end with links. Multiple characters have 1 frame link BnB combos, so you have to do them, and they have a high risk of dropping from being such a hard link. Plinking makes it somewhat easier, but there are some links, specifically anything that needs to be linked into light punch, that can’t be plinked, so unless you do some wiring bullshit to your stick to have your select button next to your jab button, you can’t plink those links at all and they are real 1 frame links.
Links have been in street fighter since SF2WW. Normally though you’d only be able to get 1 link in a combo before you’d have to cancel to a special due to push back. Maybe 2 if you got a cross up and the opponent reeled towards you instead of away. And generally those games were more about footies and mid-range game so links never really came up unless you made a big mistake and got punished hard for it.
I would discourage all forms of hit-confirming by making it so that all blocked hits are easily punishable. You can chain lights, or chain into heavy hits, cancel into special, etc but at the end you will always be at massive frame disadvantage (maybe so something similar to the “blocked sweep” animation for Tekken, but for all non-canceled hits). At the same time I would discourage defensive play by giving all hits respectable chip damage. Even normals. If you block you are rewarded with a punish, but punished with chip.
Basically make everything dangerous except successfully landed hits. In fact I might even throw in a system where players who don’t attack for some time gradually lose super meter. When they have zero super meter they start losing life. My design document would look like this:
Plenty of anime games have characters or even full systems that make it so that your chains either end up being negative or with big honking gaps you can get poked out of.
Take Guilty Gear Xrd. Two characters I play, Axl and Slayer. The former is going to be negative after any button he pretty much puts out which doesn’t have a 20+ frame startup to get whacked out of. The latter really can’t reliably combo out of jabs and only uses them to interrupt, doing all his hit confirming off medium speed buttons