My point was why it shouldn’t be necessarily ‘easy’ to get a throw because of what can happen to you for getting thrown. You can still adapt your block strings to account for how late they tech though, committing to pressing a button on defense is never 100% risk free. I play KOF too and it’s just a much more differently structured game in general to compare to SF4 (in a lot of ways I think it’s better than sf4 but there are questionable elements to it with specific characters and with how HD mode effects the match) Good shit on top 32 tho, sorry for disrespecting your skill, this thread is just a prime example of people using time to bitch about how hard it is to get good instead of using that time to get good.
don’t worry everyone, the 5th char will be petshop
petshop will fix everything that’s wrong with this game
I plink on pad all the time. It’s harder than doing it on stick, but it’s far from the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in a fighting game.
I don’t think the throw system in SF4 was built around people doing unblockable loops until the other character is dead, and with that stuff being removed looking at how the throw game will work post patch is really really relevant.
See, I see it from a different perspective. I would argue (though I can’t say for sure, since I wasn’t there) that the engine for SFIV was built along very specific lines, adding some new mechanics, tweaking older mechanics etc. The difficulty would have been in terms of what to exclude (alienate old school players) or what to change (again, risk alienation of the old in order to attract new customers).
What would have been a nightmare in the testing phase would have been balancing the old ideas and the new not simply in terms of do they work together but what would they allow at a meta or macro level. In other words, the interaction between these developments can only be tested to a certain level before release. It is likely that there remain artifacts in the code which under highly specific conditions can produce highly specific results. It is not possible to test for ***all ***of these occurrences no matter how long the testing phase.
SFIV came out in 2008, this means the game has been played for five years in homes and arcades around the world. I think in a sense, what you and (perhaps D3v) are saying is that the implications of certain programming choices/techniques have taken a long time to be fully explored.
In my personal opinion: I don’t think think that SFIV is an overly difficult game. As other posters have said, many advanced techniques are not required to put up a good fight. And in many cases, these advanced techniques are just that - advanced. Your casual player does not have enough time or motivation to progress to these levels of execution.
That said, I do believe that it is difficult to become an advanced player of SFIV. But is that such a bad thing? If advanced techniques require advanced execution the also carry risks. On the flip side, I have seen some amazing tech when playing online but the players’ overall game, fundamentals etc were sorely lacking. As long as I stayed out of their “setup window” they were basically free wins. Ditto for the arcade.
Finally, I suppose it could be argued that there is an incidental “random” factor in the game in terms of interpolation of mechanics. Giving some characters one frame links is a way of encouraging certain types of playstyles. What happens when people break the execution barrier for these links is that they also break the play style barrier and are interfacing with the game code/engine on a very deep almost theoretical level. This fascinates me and a discussion of it can be found in the Perfect Game article from Harpers magazine (dodge the paywall here - that said, great magazine, good price):
TL;DR version:
Implications of certain coding choices take a long time and very specific conditions to discover. Once discovered they are quickly normalised and the borders of the game (program) expanded. The question is “to what extent can these be called bugs, random errors or humans exceeding the parameters of the original program”?
The thing is though that’s the same for almost every game. Getting thrown in general can put you in a bad spot and really it should be. SF4 isn’t really unique in that regard. Throws are serviceable, but man sometimes playing offense in this game feels like a chore.
After the patch when unblockable set ups (And actually I am predicting some anti-reversal set ups might get affected by it as well) are removed that won’t be an issue any more. Then the set ups won’t be quite what they are now which actually I can see being a problem if the other game mechanics don’t adjust with it.
You’re getting a little out of scope here; I believe the original point that d3v was making was in regard to 1F links/SJCs in particular. If they wanted to fix this, they wouldn’t need to change the base gameplay at all. They could add a small (say 2-3F) input buffer to make these links easier to perform, and it wouldn’t affect the balance of the game whatsoever. Or at the very least, add a 1F buffer and remove plinking. Right now it’s just unnecessary complexity.
didn’t one of the vanilla loc test builds allow you to combo like 6 shorts together and confirm into bigger damage or something silly like that? and it only changed once players pointed it out IIRC. I remember Mike Z telling a story about this though I may have the specifics wrong.
in any case I don’t think you can attribute SF4 to some grand and well thought out design where every piece was considered. I think they just tried to make it feel like a slow SF2 and hoped for the best. the ground oki game wouldn’t look like it does if they understood what they were building. at least I hope not.
I’d have to give this game up if I couldn’t get my DP mash or cabinet shaking ex command throw between my opponents dropped 1F links. It’s all I have!
If you want to be competitive at SF and you are still playing on a pad… well… I think thats just going down the road of ignorance.
If you’re a casual player, then you wouldn’t be trying to plink anyway.
Wolfkrone, Vangief, both are playing high execution characters on pad at a high level, so it is definitely possible. One of the best player in my local scene plays on a xbox controller, he has better execution than most people who play on stick.
Snake Eyez also plays on pad. And so does other top players. I know tournament Honda players that play on pad.
So many great walls of China in here
There is a very simple tl;dr answer
The game has a lot of issues, but the people who like it are going to keep playing it anyway, and the people who don’t like it are going to play another game. Naturally, due to the street fighter/capcum title, more people are going to play it than other fighting games.
The real perpetual issue that I don’t see being solved:
WHEN IS CAPCOM GOING TO STOP USING UGLY 2.5d SF MODELS
I DON’T WANT TO PLAY A GAME MADE OUT OF MEAT
Seriously, sf4 and sfxt are some of the ugliest games I’ve ever looked at aesthetically wise. I can’t even fathom how anyone defends that shit by claiming that it is done so in an interest of stylistic purpose. . . well they need a new stylist
Isn’t the modern sf4 art supposed to be based on okami? Wtf happened because Okami is a beautiful game, sf4 looks like my turd after I got food poisoned from a sketchy Asian restaurant with no English menus.
I plink on pad as easy as I do on stick. Difficulty is all in your head
I never said some people don’t use a pad, or you can’t be skilled on a pad, or there aren’t any top players using a pad.
I think with the ease of access to a stick, and the price of decent sticks not being that high, there is no reason to stick to a pad which is obviously inferior to an arcade stick.
That being said, I guess I also just realized that SRK is a bunch of 12 year olds sitting around waiting for a comment they can disagree with… funny because when you see tournaments they appear to be made of older, with the possibility of some maturity, people.
Don’t worry I’ll wait for you to disagree with a list of examples and premises to prove that I’m wrong. (rolls eyes)
I would damn well hope so. The game more than 20 years old, with fewer characters and a simpler system. At this point should be better than even Wikipedia.
HaruhiFTW says:
Alextheking says:
HaruhiFTW cries:
Man, you can’t make sh*t like this up. Thanks for the laugh.
Wow, claps. You were able to selectively quote what I said and miss my point entirely while proving mine. Thanks bro!
Anything else I’ll assume is a bad attempt and trolling.
So, what was your point, anyway ?
Btw, if you go to the tech threads, you will see that most people think there’s no clear advantage for sticks over pads. Most people say it’s up to preference.