In the past, 1st-person melee combat has been the most horrible idea ever.
So, now that the Oculus Rift is a thing, we have a platform for feasible, 3D VR. This means depth perception.
Now that we have a means of depth-perception, the footsies/neutral game from the first person is actually possible. I find this super exciting because I’m a big fucking nerd. If this VR headset thing finally takes off (The software support is amazing), you’re going to have a lot of developers trying to implement first person melee combat.
The problem is that it’s not going beyond mere hack-and-slash Skyrim garbage. Most developers aren’t fighting game players. This is a travesty.
So, while I’m attending a game dev school that’s going to have access to some Rift dev kits (They’re on order), over the next couple of years, I’ll be running experiments on building a first-person 1v1 or brawler experience that doesn’t break under the stresses of competitive play.
So I’m sitting here working out game systems. One of the big problems is the High/Low/Mid system of 3D fighters is slightly flawed from a 1st person perspective when implemented as-is, and requires a dramatic retooling… or will have to be omitted in favour for a different form of guard system (I feel that HML systems will bar any game engine from allowing more than two players to play at once).
Any armchair designers in here have any input? The reason why I’m doing this is because we have a few new concepts to work with, namely Depth Perception, Blind Spots and general first-person tomfoolery.
How did you make that huge leap of logic that “this means depth perception”?
Some genres simply don’t work well in 3D POV because of its very nature of 3D POV. This includes everything where accurate spacing matters, such as fighting games shmups, platformers etc.
Yeah technically you can do them in 3D but you’ll have to neuter the core rules of the game. This is why 3D platformers are lacking in actual platforming challenges and moved on to 100% exploring and collecting crap and more crap.
tl;dr Forget about fighting games. If they have any brains they’ll focus games that are suitable for it like first person shooters.
FP fighting games = wack.
Why? Because in a real fucking fight, you fight NOTHING like you do in Street Fighter or Tekken. I’m not even talking about simple reaction time either. I’m talking about the way you interact with a fighting game is completely different than having a first person perspective. @Tataki got it dead on when talking about accurate spacing. Even if you could simulate depth perception, the first person view prevents you from truly seeing exactly where your opponent is in a jump, or if they’re within footsie range and such. You could create “another type of fighting game” based off of the 3D POV, but it will lack depth, guaranteed, at least for years until it’s refined. And by years, I’m talking at least a decade, and you’d have something on par with the depth of Fatal Fury 1 or something.
I think a First Person Fighter could be done. A really good example of this is Alien vs Predator 2010. The multiplayer is garbage but the melee combat between the Alien and Predator is very good for the most part. I would want to see a fighter more closely emulate that and improve on that model.
Sorry, I suppose I should have detailed the Oculus. It uses two lenses, so you the issue of depth perception from the first person is solved. This means fine spacing in melee range can be done with little trouble.
Again, the Oculus allows you to look around (FOV is a realistic 110 degrees). It’s fitted with a gyroscope and the head latency is near-lagless. This isn’t an “even if you could” situation. It’s a thing now.
The gameplay engine is being designed exclusively for stereoscopic play with the ability to look around using the headset.
First person fighting games that come to my mind are Zeno Clash (which doesn’t have multiplayer that I know of and isn’t that particulary amazing… but still interesting and pretty fun at at times) and the “touch” mode in Dead or Alive 5 Plus for Vita… and this is probably due to the touch controls, but it’s pretty much good for casual/mindless play but pretty much a mess for anybody who wants to try and be serious about it.
As other people mentioned before though, maybe it’s just because we haven’t found the right combo of hardware/ideas yet. I think it’s possible that we might see a new genre pop up if a game gets executed/received really well, but at this point it’s sort of difficult to imagine how a game like that would turn out to be…
Of course, then again, although it looks obvious in retrospect, I’m sure people thought the same way about first person shooters before they were developed into the genre that’s so popular now.
Why is there a “jump in” in the first place? Try to answer this question and you begin to unravel certain conceits about fighting on a 2D plane that may not be as necessary on a 3D plane.
Ever wonder why you don’t see more side-scroller racing games? Same reason nobody would seriously attempt to make a first person fighting game. Some concepts just don’t mesh together very well, unless you have a great vision that forces them to work together.
It would be fun to riff such a thing, though. Post some ideas; show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Everybody join in!
In this Final Fight, “You are the goon” game… I think I’m out like the Bare Knuckle Bartender.
& I definitely wouldn’t know what the hell to do when Skullomania is Spin headbutt flying at me, or slide breakdancing taking out my legs.
Sega’s Yakuza series had the Arcade mini-game with the Tron outfits but a sword and pistol in a 1st person perspective. Quick combo slashes. Longer lunging/spinning slashes. Sidestep and forward or back dashes. Guard keeps you in one spot and facing one direction and they can dash around you, but you turn to face and guard in time from what I remember.
Gunshot breaks guard (unblockable) and knocks down. Its slower (to startup with a raise of the gun) & doesn’t do much damage but at least can be exploited on the CPU (there’s no human versus) to be cheap on wakeup with the right timing. They don’t really try it on you to figure out if there’s an escape maybe with the sidesteps/dashes.
Simple enough. No jumps. Spacing and whiff punishing the moves that leave your opponent vulnerable. Probably not a lot of counter hit stuffing and block counter punish.
3D fighter jokes of being juggled facing the sky would be something else.
OP should just explain how this game would work. That’s it really. You can’t just say ‘first-person VR fighting game’. That’s too vague. You gotta help people understand why you think it’s cool and could work. And reciting specs isn’t the answer.
As far as your brain is concerned with the Rift, it’s not fake. The Rift contains two screens, one for each eye, and these project through a lense that bubbles the projected image around your eyes, giving you a realistic field of view (110 degrees, to be precise). This means, if you move your eyes, you will see image, not the edge of your VR goggles. This gives you something near enough to proper 3D vision, alongside a means of proper depth perception.
The big problem with first-person perspective in current games is that you have no depth perception, and have to look for visual cues in the ground and surrounding environment to make distance estimates. This means any melee combat games with a finite spacing component fail out of the gate. It’s like fencing with one eye. The Vita version of DoA above is a good example of this.
The only reasonable example of something similar to what I’m proposing is the 1st Person mode of SFIV3DS, but even that has issues, due to the shittiness of the screen, the poor FOV and the blindspots resulting from it.
So, the first order of business is recreating a variation of Señor Footsies from the first-person, and going from there. I think it’ll work. Actually, now that I think about it, Esquivel could implement Rift support in an afternoon, since it looks like he’s ported it to Unity already (One of the benefits of the Rift is the full Unity and UnrealDK support).
