Rising Thunder - FIGHTING ROBOTS

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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Execution difficulty of a motion is a terrible way of balancing things, but execution time is not.

This is why, for instance, you generally see people anti-airing hops with stand jabs or far stand C in KoF games, or why you see people anti-airing IADs with 2H or 6P in Guilty Gear; in games where there’s faster jump-in options than a SF-style full jump, you don’t have time to input a DP motion on reaction, because of the roughly 10 frames of additional input time.

Having a 6-second cool-down on a DP doesn’t really change this. All it really does is make offense kinda bad until someone has done their DP, and then gives a 6 second window where offense is incredibly powerful.

EDIT: Also, giving DPs an additional 6 frames of invincible startup wouldn’t even work, because it would make every knockdown a safe-jump setup.

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It took me a month to learn inputs and combos for SSF4:AE. It took me over a year to be able to fight people who were good at the game.
I just believe that if “the average gamer” is too lazy to learn a fireball motion, they’re not gonna spend the time in training mode practicing punishes, learning to anti-air, learning matchups, etc. That shit takes longer to develop competency at and is much more ambiguous in terms of your progression.

I’ve made my point pretty clear that I don’t hate the concept of the game, I just hate how the advertisement for the game portrays other fighting games like there is something wrong with them. Well, at least when the game gets released, we won’t be wanting for material on the scrubquotes thread.

On a different note, I’m really digging the design of Chel and Crow. I’ve wanted more fighting games that have Crow’s softball throw fireball like Johnny Cage. I also like Vlad because he reminds me of those old 80s toy robots that were actually made of metal instead of shitty plastic.

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Crow’s projectiles remind me of Parasoul, minus the manual detonation.

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I’m kind of excited about this game and thought it might be helpful if I I contribute an outsider’s perspective to this discussion.

Every now and then I’ve very casually played this or that fighting game going all the way back to the original Street Fighter 2, but I’ve never been better than “beat all my friends, who also don’t really know what they’re doing.” As a kid, I didn’t have a clue what high level play would be like.

Later, as someone who loves games, programs games and designs games, I would sometimes spend time thinking about fighting games and realized how interesting high level play must be. From time to time I would give one a shot, spend a few hours over a couple days in whatever training/challenge/trial modes it might have, try some online matches when available, and more or less brute force my way through story modes. Every time, I would eventually realize that there was nothing left I could do that was any fun at all. Failing the same challenge for an hour straight or fighting multiplayer matches where I’d get absolutely destroyed in ways that didn’t even allow me to understand what was really going wrong just offered no clear progression path and I’d go play something else that was more fun, even if I was just as bad at it, because I could at least tell what was going on in the game.

Then I played Divekick. I know there’s a subgroup of traditional fighting game players that start frothing at the mouth when the game is so much as mentioned, but please hear me out.

I was bad at Divekick at first, of course, just like any other game. But when I lost a round of Divekick, I could see what had happened. With each match I got a little better at understanding the timing and spacing requirements of the moves available to me, and before long at all I could think of the game in terms of the individual matchups. Without ever hitting any kind of roadblock or having to do anything that wasn’t fun, I progressed to the point where I’m one of the top online players (in terms of online tournament results, not just “grind against weaker players” matchmaking points or something, though I’ve been at the top there too).

The reason I bring this up is that over the weekend someone gave me a copy of USFIV on Steam and I’ve been playing it, and the difference between the last time I tried a traditional fighting game and now is staggering. The game put me in class C and I’ve never had more than around 700 player points or whatever, so I’m not good, not by a longshot, but the way it feels to play is completely different. Although I’m still messing up special move inputs several times per round, and can almost never link two attacks together to save my life, the parts of my brain that were developed for Divekick are working at full capacity. While I’m over in the corner flailing at the air trying to make a special come out, I’m also watching the way my opponent moves, making mental notes of the time/distance covered by attacks I hadn’t seen before, recalling what I can from previous matches against the same character, and trying to imagine what options my character might have against theirs. Sometimes I come up with a plan that works, assuming I don’t fail my inputs too hard.

I don’t even know how to fully express how much better this makes the game for me.

Rising Thunder will not be as accessible as Divekick, but it is trying to remove one of the mental barriers between new players and actually paying attention to what’s going on in the match, and it’s doing it without the parody skin and “not taking ourselves seriously” first impression that Divekick has which turns some players off or stops them from realizing how deep and amazing the game actually is.

Even if Rising Thunder ends up ultimately not being as good of a game for you high level players as the ones you already have, it may very well be a way for other players to get a chance to start thinking about fighting games at a higher level than “these are what special moves my character has and this is how I make them happen”, which is probably as far as the vast majority of people typically get in something like Street Fighter. And for some fraction of those people, being able to glimpse the higher level game in a reasonable amount of time might just be the motivation they needed to put in the work to learn other fighting games.

So my cautiously optimistic opinion is that even if the game ends up being somehow sub-optimal at the highest levels of play, it is still almost certainly something that should exist, assuming it is implemented well.

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You know how you add “execution time” to a single button move that doesn’t have a motion? You give the move more startup time in the first place. Basic example is that T. Hawk’s U2 is faster startup than Sakura’s c.HP as an anti-air frame data wise, but the motion involved in Hawk’s U2 is a lot bigger so it’s a lot more difficult to use it the entire thing on reaction. You can add startup frames to any such conceptualized move that would have been gated by a big motion to prevent people from being able to do it at neutral on reaction and would have to do it on prediction. Now, in this particular example, it’s not a perfect solution because you can hide the U2 input in a ton of things and eliminate the execution time startup and simply adding startup frames to something can also greatly interfere with combos (although not with Hawk’s U2 in all likelihood).

Because this game is being designed from the ground up with this in mind, the developers should be able to easily make the reaction versus prediction distinction for moves from the get go and make sure they work in their intended scenarios. In other words, something that is a 1frame super that was traditionally gated by a double half circle motion won’t exist in this game as simply a 1 frame super. If it exists at all, it’d be more like a 10 frame super and the game would be designed with that in mind.

The buffering interaction is something that is admittedly lost in this transition, which is notable. I personally find it really fun to buffer moves like mad. But if the tradeoff is more players, I’d gladly play this game.

On a completely different note, something really bugs me about how much screen space the characters take up. It just seems like all the characters are just really tall and fat and makes the screen look tiny. This might be because only the bigger characters have been shown off so far though.

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I want to see a Dhalsim-type and trap-type character.

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I like the idea of the gameplay and am optimistic about the online system, but the game itself looks so visually unappealing. How one manages to make a game with ROBOTS, which do not have to conform to human proportions or standards or limbs, with bland-looking character designs is a skill in itself. I have a number of friends who like the premise of fighting games but had trouble with execution or weren’t interested in using an arcade stick, so this could definitely appeal to those types of players and I’d be happy to play with them!

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They have a ton of good reasons for it. Mainly that they have experience with SF normals, so they’ll do a better job designing nuance around copying the SF normals and working with them. Also give players that home SF feel. Maybe some of the extra characters don’t have to be humanoid but for now they are playing it safe with what they can work best with.

129

Yes.

In any case, I feel some are missing what I think is the most important point of this input scheme. You can learn the game by playing it. I can’t stress enough how much of a barrier training mode is to some people. Those of you who have played games like Infamous or Tomb Raider know that they start out with a tutorial level of sorts where the game exposes you to the basic controls. To a lot of the people I’ve tried teaching fighting games to, training mode is that tutorial level and it’s boring as fuck. It demoralizes them to think that you could sink weeks or months of time into a game, and still have to go back to “tutorial level” regularly.

There is a not-insignificant number of people with a healthy competitive drive who do not touch fighting games because training mode is oh so necessary but oh so boring. Instead they play RTS, MOBA or other games that are also competitive but without the whole training mode thing. People with the hand-eye coordination to average roughly 130-150 APM and thousands of hours clocked in to other competitive games who are unwilling to spend even a couple of hours in training mode. If Rising Thunder can capture some of those people, I see that as a good thing.

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Don’t start this argument all over again. Pagaes upon pages have already been written on why execution as a means of balancing is dumb.
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It’s not just about execution. If the game already has simplified inputs and huge input leniency then it’s already simple enough as it is. If people who don’t even game can learn how to uppercut and fb in a couple minutes time I don’t really see why there would be a need for a fighter with 1 button supers and specials.

Also the point Seth made about execution being the main barrier was funny, because it ain’t. The main barrier in fighters is learning a character and learning the matchups, so also learning all the other characters to a degree. 1 button specials and supers is not gonna change that. In simple words, there is no fast way to learn fighting game. If you want to be good in a fighter you have to invest time in it. Or play something shitty like divekick.

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Can’t wait to try it out and do muscle memory srk inputs instead of pushing the special buttons and getting punished for it.

Also, lets wait until the Alpha is out to see if we like the control scheme or not. Might be awesome, might be terrible. We’ll see.

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They can’t. Go to Gamefaqs. Go to Newbie Saikyo Dojo. Watch a couple of lets play videos. Forget a couple of minutes. There are people who can’t dp after playing for weeks (or sometimes they can only do it on one side).

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errr so is my toaster gonna blow up?

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The graphics don’t look too intense so unless its poorly optimized it should run well on most mid-range PCs.

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I already answered this in my post, but “add more startup frames” isn’t the same as “put it on a harder motion” for more reasons than just combos or the ability to buffer the motion. If you add 8 vulnerable start-up frames to a DP, it can no longer be used as a reversal. If you add 8 invulnerable frames of start-up to a DP, it gets to a point where even meaties are safe (they’ll recover before the DP actually goes active), so reversals might as well not be a part of the game.

Motion time and startup frames aren’t analogous. I can do an input during blockstun or on my wakeup, when I can’t actually perform a move.

Disagreed strongly.

Anyways, your claim that other competitive genres don’t require putting in time in training mode is completely wrong. I can’t speak for MOBAs, but playing RTS games at a competent level requires spending loads of time grinding out build orders in things like YABOT, both to develop mechanics, and to have the build order thoroughly enough ingrained in memory to be able to get your units and tech out at the optimal timings every time.

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So you mean to tell me people who can’t even learn to do a fb in sf4 are potential fg players (I’d understand if you were saying doing super combos in St or doing super in ffs/3)?

If they can’t even fb forget about moving in and out of poking range and punishing, cointerpoking, reacting to dash ins etc. Someone who can not even learn to do a fb in sf4 has no business playing fighters seriously.

What this game basically means is that people can finally do flashy supers and potentially nicer combos, not become a better fighting game player. It’s basically a trampoline for people who can’t dunk, it doesn’t make them a better player.

The whole idea of the game is flawed IMO.

Exit: how the fuck can I teach people who don’t game and never touch a gamepad/stick specials and supers and there’s supposedly “gamers” out there that can’t even fucking fb. Especially fb and dps are easily thought, the people who I’ve thought generally have a harder time with fb,x2 +3 buttons, and one of the main troubles is hitting the L1 or 2 button and doing it during a match. But they never game and still learned it in minutes. Half circles x2 are a different matter though, as are spd’s especially in older more precise games.

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In my experience: fireballs are easy to learn for most people. DPs, on the other hand, can usually take time to learn to do reliably, and even more time to actually apply on reaction in matches. Which, if you read his post, is specifically what ukyo_rulz is talking about.

Also, some people really just want to do flashy combos. I know way too many people who started out not understanding neutral game or mixups, but damn if they would do complicated and well-timed sequences of button presses whenever they got a hit. A lot of them really only started learning to play against other players after spending an idiotic amount of time in training mode just to find that their fancy double 1-frame link FADC combo into ultra wasn’t all that easy to land in practice. They’re still more interested in doing combos than anything else, but they do branch out and learn the other things as well. Mostly because guys with understanding of the game will destroy them and force them to change their approach if they actually want to improve.
For the record, I don’t share their interest in doing flashy combos (at all), but I think it’s still completely legitimate to enjoy that part of fighting games more than one enjoys the player interactions.

I disagree. I got to the Platinum League (the highest league at the time) in SC2:Wings of Liberty without ever spending time in the lab. My only RTS experience prior to that was Company of Heroes, which I was fairly strong at (top 100 at the ladder), but CoH had extremely lax requirements for macromanagement and thus didn’t require any build order practice.
Now, the claim that you need to spend time in training mode for SC2 build orders at higher levels of play is completely true, and getting to Platinum League isn’t exactly an astounding accomplishment either, but the point is that I could still spend 30-40 hours of playtime and have an above 50% win percentage before the lab was even necessary. In contrast, you will get terribly murdered by anyone if you try to jump into a fighting game without at least a couple of hours of training mode before you start playing. That training mode wall you’ll find in some RTSes is far, far away when you start playing, and you’ll usually have a lot of motivation to do it if you feel you need it. Having that wall from minute 1 in fighters is daunting, to say the least.

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Time to execute is a legitimate way of balancing a move; the idea is that you keep the reaction to throw out a move and it’s frame data separate so that you still have a move open as a punish or link but can’t be thrown out instantly. Just consider how much easier to is to DP someone in P4AU with its two button DPs than it is to anti-air someone with an ultra in USFIV. Or assume that Zangief’s SPD was a single button; it would be far easier to grab the moment you were in range with it than having to do the full 360, and even current buffers make you walk back a little bit or crouch so that it’s more obvious what you’re doing, creating a mind game.

I mean, there’s a massive difference between this and balancing via execution requirements which is dumb as hell, but there is a purpose behind inputs.

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You’ll also note that DPing in P4A hurts you for grey/blue health, so there’s a legitimate reason not to mash it at any opportunity.

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Winrate is irrelevant on the Blizzard ladder; you can be basically arbitrarily bad and still have a 50% winrate (plus or minus 5% or so) just because of how the game’s matchmaking works. The majority of bronze-level players have 50% winrates.

There was a time when you could play SF2 without getting smashed, even if you didn’t have any prior FG experience; hell, you couldn’t spend time in training mode, since training mode didn’t exist yet. If SFV was released today and had a Blizzard-size pool of players and ranked matchmaking, you could probably relive you Starcraft 2 experience. The reason you were able to get to the top 20% of the player-base at that point in time in SC2 is because it was early beta (Diamond league was added half-way through beta) and there were tons of players who were new to the game and had never played Brood War seriously, so they had no idea what they were doing; having a basic idea of how to play RTSs would easily let you beat that crowd, while still leaving you a novice at SC2 in particular. I mean, hell, for most of WoL, you could just pick Zerg and 6-pool every game, and make it to Diamond league quickly – the player base was that bad. Likewise, if SFV was released today with a few million people playing it online, you could probably win most of your matches by just picking Chun-Li and using her c.mk at good ranges, without even knowing any of her special move inputs.

Shit, there was a time early in SF4’s lifespan when you could pick Ken, close your eyes, do nothing but fierce Shoryu, and win a surprising number of games. Tataki’s Zangitroll apparently worked at low levels at least a few weeks into Ultra. The fact that training mode and learning combos is necessary to win now says less about the inherent difficulty of fighting games and more to the fact that games that have been around for a while will have a more-skilled player base, both because the more casual players leave (which works to raise the level at the bottom), and because everyone else gets better (which works to raise the middle and the top).