Shoo. At least I’m trying to contribute something other than hate.
I did realize you guys have that style of post down to a nice efficiency. You hit your required talking points every single time. My advice to you is that you would be advised to get over me already. I’m not that cool
(I checked the rules, I get one!)
~~
You missed an important turning point in my part of the conversation, not surprising considering the volume.
So here’s the quote:
So the first quote you have is about execution barriers and accessibility, which as I said is already won. The second quote is about the necessity of practicemode, which definitely isn’t won.
You can easily learn and do all the specials and supers in MvC2 or Blazblue, but if you can’t do your combos you might as well be playing an entirely different game.
On the others, I’m honestly shocked you don’t believe that physical practice hits a point of* diminishing r*eturns (me using the wrong term for the whole thread probably didn’t help :p). It’s one of those things that has always struck me as just common sense… it’s linked to the learning curve, with the addition that you’re reaching the limits of your own body and the game.
(What I believe but can’t prove is that the shapes of the curves are different, I tend to think that execution has a very marked S-curve, as compared to other aspects of play, which have a bit more linear progression)
About the last bit, I know you’re an ST guy… so tell me, what are the unreached executional barriers in ST? Hell I’m not terribly good at that game and I can do all the moves and a majority of the combos. What are the bits that the top players of the game still haven’t mastered with their characters?
Also we learned through this thread that since some people get into games such as tennis and rugby and basketball just for the health benefits, that the necessity of execution in those games is immune from criticism. Fuck you if you enjoy the strategy of those games but were born short or just plain aren’t fit enough.
Videogames on the other hand are not allowed to have a physical dexterity requirement because you do not gain anything extraneous to the game itself from utilizing that physical dexterity.
it’s not that they haven’t “mastered” stuff in ST so much as the game is very demanding on reaction times and parsing situations very quickly, both of which could be construed as execution by a normal person
obviously there are some people out there who understand high-level ST but just do not have the mental agility or the physical dexterity to keep up at the highest level, should the game be changed so that they can? after all, they understand the decision trees
I liked this post solely because he mentioned Rugby. Also because my execution is shaky at best, my reactions go from godlike to questionable and it sometimes I get bored in the middle of a match and start doing random shit. For the love of all that is beautiful about fighting games do not change shit to help me.
Edit: It should be explained that if you entered training mode in GG, you could set it up to practice FRCs. The game would show you where to input the command. I wish SCV had this because some of the just frames don’t feel all that natural.
Yeah their are weird things going on with SCV Just Frames. Can’t remeber who talked about it but the timing needed hit things like Nihgtmares agA changes depending on if you’re playing on pad or stick and bindings can also influence it. Shit is weird.
Wow you assigned a specific character to that statement and just went from there didn’t you. This might be the best ‘wow I totally didn’t say that’ moment in a thread chock full of them!
I get what you’re saying, although I’d think that’s less practice mode stuff and more ‘forced to learn in the game’ stuff up till you reach your physical and mental limits. Once you’re at the limit though, practice is gonna quit helping you very much.
And seriously, who said anything about changing any existing games? People love them as they are (and if nobody loves them, why bother?) It’s more talking about what we should be expecting and wanting on an ongoing basis.
ST has some things that are weird and make no sense in ways far beyond this discussion, like say the various random elements. Nevertheless, its a great game as it is and nobody’s asking to change it.
In the same way, Marvel 2 and marvel 3 are realliy dependent on training mode time in a way I think is a serious problem. Nevertheless, they’re still fun games and it would be absurd to say ‘we should go back and change these!’ Hell, if there’s ever a marvel 4, they still arguably shouldn’t or maybe couldn’t change that emphasis, it’s kind of what makes the games what they are. (although it would be fun to see the riots if they made MvC4 not a combo-centered game at all, it’d be like the Raiders lost the Superbowl in here)
This entire discussion is by necessity abstract and about values, and about that dreaded word ‘should’. What should the games value/focus on?
The games we already have will exist no matter what y’know? It’s a question of where we need to go from here.
Stupid Alpha Patroklos. What’s funny about him is that he is a lot like Viper: if you can’t do the all the execution stuff with her you get a shell of a character. At least the Mishimas are like 90% functional without EWGF. I mean the fist is a really important tool but the still have a bunch of other shit.
Back to grinding them Just Frames.
Btw Viper is bad and Alpha Patroklos should also feel bad. These are two characters that require a real grind to get the beginning of it. This part is bad. Complicated to play and complicated to do moves are two different things. For example, Dhalsim is complicated to play and so are some of the cast in GG. But just doing the regular moves in an obtuse manner for Shits and Giggles (S&Gs) is generally bad. I mean, we’ll come up with hard shit to do as players. What we do as communities is push the games to their limits (hopefully we maintain this as a goal). So we honestly should not get mad at how difficult we make a game at high levels.
I can see good points from both sides of this but when it comes down to it, I think its more about what you prefer. In my opinion, you can’t make the game’s execution level too low because the game will get boring too quickly and there won’t be much to do in training mode. You also cannot make it too high because that will frustrate new players and it’ll make doing some things less practical in tournaments (even for those that grind) imo a game that gets it right is one that makes the high execution stuff more of an optional thing, the damage shouldn’t stray too far from an average execution combo but it should still high enough to be worth it. That is one thing I like about most fighters nowadays, they usually get it right.
No game is perfect and you really can’t satisfy everyone but you can at least try.
Yeah this is probably why I like 3S a lot more than SSFIV… I haven’t really put in the time to get good at either of them, but 3S I can play with a friend that’s a good amount better than me and after learning a few basics and moves with good priority and some pokes and stuff, I can still have a great time playing and actually learn something every game I lose, and I actually feel like I can use some sort of strategy when playing. And I can practice parrying with fireballs and anti air every now and then in real games without having to do it all in practice mode.With SSFIV it’s more tilted towards just thinking “dammit I really need to put in a bunch of hours in training mode to even begin to play this game” when I lose a match, and Marvel seems like a game that’s supposed to be played 90% of the time practicing alone in training mode.
Characters that are hard just to be hard, yes I feel comfortable saying that’s bad design.
I’m going to go out of a limb here and say ‘hey lets make Akira really hard to use. That’ll be fun!’ (which would totally be why they made SPoD so much easier to do after VF1 and 2, amirite?)
You’re misunderstanding the basic concept here. The question is whether or not that difficulty is necessary to get the desired result (and to paraphrase myself from before ‘hard is not a result!’)
So, I’ll try to put the point in bold for nice clarity.
**A character being hard to use isn’t bad design. A character being hard to use for the sake of being hardto use is.
If people get anything out of this whole rambling discussion, I hope that’s what it is. High execution requirements and difficulty need to serve a purpose beyond themselves, and in fact need to be carefully balanced against the benefits they provide.
Edit: Seriously, this kind of thing is kind of the core of all the argument in here. Jumping from ‘difficulty for its own sake is bad’ to ‘all difficulty is bad’ is the exact same kind of misunderstanding/misstatement as going from ‘we think execution should be less important than strategy’ or ‘we think some execution is an arbitrary barrier’ to ‘you think all execution should be removed from the games!’
I never said anything about “beginners”. I was always talking about my own personal preference. A game should not compromise for beginners if it leads to a worse game. But execution should be easy period.
I wonder if this is deliberate hyperbole or that you really are this naive.
Probably the latter, because you can’t even grasp that some players look at joystick wiggling as the means to execute your decisions, not the goal in itself, and don’t put it on a pedestal and worship it like you do.
SF4 is actually the exact opposite of what people like me want. The huge emphasis on links, OS and tight safe jump setups just to avoid defensive maneuvers and starting to play the actual game is needlessly demanding in execution, and they also change how the game plays.(For the worse IMO) Same thing with the shortcuts. The new shortcuts are done WRONG and change how the game plays, giving you options you should not have.
Using SF4 as an example of an “accessible game” that should somehow please us just shows that you have no idea what the opposite side is telling you.
The nature of the game makes it possible to make more mistakes with tags, whiffed tag crashes and such that’s not in a regular Tekken game. So in a sense he’s right but the most of people I’ve talked to about the game say that its actually harder for newer players.
he’s saying that for some techniques, they are simply too difficult. For example, DP doesn’t need to be a zig zag input. It can just be dwn x2 then p. By making it zig zag like that, it has no place other than to be hard or challenging.
and when you think about games by his logic, they’re all too hard because even the most simplest of fighters all have “artificial barriers” on execution. Thing is “artificial barriers” is highly qualitative. It can almost be anything like a fucking fireball being “too hard” to execute from a pure first timers POV. Even c.lk x2 in ST can be considered an “artificial barrier” because why should you hit the button twice? why not just remove the barrier and make holding c.lk rapid fire automatically?
what 1 person defines as an “artificial barrier” can actually not be an artificial barrier. Take 3s yun for example. He’s really technical in 3s, there is a shit ton of combos, meter building strategy and just matchup strategy in general to be god like. You also need to have really good execution to pull that shit off but when you start analyzing yun as technical then go play mvc2 sentinel, yun doesn’t look so technical anymore. By comparison, 3s yun is a babies toy compared to mvc2 sentinel and now 3s yun doesn’t look like an “artificial barrier” anymore. For some players its a barrier, for other players shit just got really simple. Its all perspective and if you have no perspective, you have a shit opinion.
players have to EARN rewards, games are better that way. I don’t know how xes and brigade can say there are executional barriers but never address how there are strategical barriers too. XF is a prime example of a strategical barrier. One of the biggest complaints about mvc2 for new players is how unbalanced the game was since they couldn’t understand team concepts. What XF does is always allow 95% of the cast a god like comeback character. You can play shit character\shit character\god like XF character and still do exceptionally well. The #1 complaint about mvc3 is guess what, XF. The thing that was there to remove some of the “strategical barriers” actually makes the game worse. In all honesty, this game would be completely fine with no XF. It has no reason to be there other than to help bad players make the game close so in its own way, its an “artificial barrier” itself too…
you could probably still buffer it if was like that, hold dwn, roll to dwnbck, roll back to dwn+p and you would never stand to DP
dwn x2+p still sounds too hard though
dwn+PPP removes the artificial barrier but then you can say that the dwn is making it too difficult so might as well make PPP the new DP motion. And now PPP is the barrier so lets make it PP…
there are no artificial barriers. As far as I’m concerned there are only 2 barriers. The human barrier and the machine barrier and their are only a few games that cater to the machine barrier like mvc2. Mvc2 had layers no human could ever input, no human is that fast so we could only go as far as the human barrier could take us which people still push to this day.
