Both are extremely important, and none more important than the other.
You need a solid strategy in order to dissect and defeat your opponent, especially if the player or character you’re facing is of superior skill or has better a tool set. You can’t just go into a match by trying to do a fancy combo, or doing any random motions in order to hopefully catch your opponent off guard, you need to have a game plan for how to keep your character in an advantageous positioning while keeping your opponent in bad situations and ranges. However, none of this matters if you’re unable to execute your strategy due to your own mistakes of performing poor inputs or mis-timed counters or links.
Execution is extremely important across any game. You won’t get very far if you’re unable to properly control your character, apply perfect counters to beat your opponent’s actions, and perform basic combos, links, and setups. It cannot be understated how important it is to learn how to perfectly execute all of your character’s special moves, combos, as well as how to utilize their basic normals to win a match. But if you don’t know how to use your character’s tool sets to win a match by having a strategy in mind before the match even begins, you’re going to end up in situations where you’ll have limited control over the match, simply because you don’t have an idea of what you should be doing.
I was going to make a remark about the title of this thread being completely stupid, but judging by the examples from responses I’ve seen, framing the two facets of game design as opposing forces seems all too apt.
There is perhaps no better example of the strategy and execution being at odds than the RTS. “But Cack, there are early rushes and unit composition blah blah blah,” you say then turn around and practically worship APM ratings. Real-time strategies require such efficiency with hotkeys, macros, economy micromanaging, and memorizing/navigating tech trees that strategy only comes into play at the earliest/lowest levels of play or the very highest. They are a race to see who completes busywork the fastest.
Treat 1F as an example, more than a hard and fast rule, at least when I’m talking. I just need to say something specific, or nobody will know what I’m talking about. Everybody knows about 1frame links, y’know? The pretzel is a good example too though.
On point 2, I’d have to disagree with you, companies (read: Capcoms) attempts to reproduce emergent properties like that have in general been disasters. Part of the reason that MvC3 is such a mess is that they were trying in a way to reproduce MvC2, or at least an acceptable version thereof.
I actually meant to quote the question from Sol: “why is it relative, not absolute”. I was agreeing with your point and expanding in response to that question.
Also, there is a big difference between 1 and 2 frame links, because plinking adds a frame, which makes a 2 frame link into a 3 frame window. Many tests on human reaction time and perception prove that .03 secs is much more reasonable than .01. There is a calculable threshold specific to 1 frame links there, especially considering that there are some 1 frame links in question that can’t be plinked, meaning either you have it, or you don’t. A character with gameplay that relies upon an unplinkable 1 frame link is much harder than a character that relies upon plinkable 2 frame links.
Even as an example, the 1f link discussion is more about debating whether or not it’s an intentional part of the design of the character’s central gameplay principles.
wow. you managed to say a bunch of words that meant absolutely nothing.
chess has no execution. oh, other than the strength to lift a piece and move it. it’s all about strategy. strategy does not come from execution.
I value strategy the most in any type of competitive game I play (videogame, sports, boardgames…etc.). still, the community is definitely always gonna like a high execution game because it has those moments of inconsistency and surprise. those 1-frame links, perfect hitting stuff; that’s a lot of what the community loves and gets hype about. I’ll admit, one of my favorite fighting games is JoJo’s, which has pretty crazy high execution barriers for high level play.
still, I’d really like to see more games tone down the execution and go for more strategy. I feel like you should always be able to do what you want when you want it. the game should be about what the players do when they’re able to accomplish that. even at the highest level of play, players aren’t DPing every jumpin they get.
I think Divekick has already shown us that a game centered around 2 buttons (1 of which is the “win” button) is not stupid or dumb or not fun or not hype. it’s all about the mindgames, and I think we can all appreciate that.
Sirlin touches upon this in the comments section of his article. Also mentioning how Blizzard chose to make SC2 a game where high APM mattered when they really didn’t have to or something to that effect.
No one defined what they are trying to *execute? *Did the article specifically talk about combos/moves, or executing strategies? You must be specific in what you are trying to execute because it has a broad meaning. And you people are generally arguing about the samething.
Can you ever say a damn thing that you actually fucking think instead of constantly quoting someone else or doing some dumb bullshit appeal to authority? Goddamn.
It’s not fallacious to .point to someone else’s opinion as lining up with your own. It’s also not appeal to authority to say “Sirlin addressed this.” Because, um, he addressed it. If you’ve an issue with his reasoning, by all means point it out.
Here’s an example of appeal to authority: “Sirlin has played and won tournaments, so what he says about fighting games MUST be true.” Sirlin cannot – and doesn’t – just say “these are my credentials” as his argument, he backs it up. He could have won zero tournaments and still be making sound arguments.
I don’t have a problem when you do it, because you at least back things up with your won opinions and use quotes as evidence to your arguments. D3v just does to look cool and every fuckign post is someone said this someone said that.
Finally, someone gets it! This was the point I was trying to make in the Scrubquotes thread and Chen’s execution article.
I wish I could like this 1000x.
Strategy is purely mental, which means that you have to put it in motion (execute it). And this is exactly why I think Execution > Strategy, but ONLY when a player is good at both.
I have to admit, when I first played SF2 when way back, I had a really hard time doing a shoryuken, on the snes pad. So my brother and I actually went about doing “mexican uppercuts”. Our shitty execution made us use something else for AA, so I can relate to this from personal experience.
This is something funny from personal experience, but I knew this one guy who I played some fighting games with and he could do stuff only on p1. So I would try to get on the other side so he couldn’t land shit .
Depending somewhat on the game, you can reasonably reach the point where you can pull off all your combos and reversals and whatnot, but that’s a lot less true for the ability to read/predict your opponents moves or make the proper decisions for any particular circumstance. Execution simply hits a point of limited returns much sooner.
As another point, execution barriers can *retard* developing good judgement and decision making. If you're playing (as an example) Zero or Vergil in UMvC3, and you have your combos down, you can get shockingly far just on that execution. Of course eventually you're going to hit that barrier eventually, but you can coast a lot farther.
Execution is absolutely necessary in every fighting game, its the thing that puts your thought into action. Nevertheless, decision making (I like that term better than strategy) should become relatively more important and execution relatively *less *important once you're truly at the top levels. At the point where its about getting that first hit or setting up that advantageous situation, *that's* where fighting games shine.
That’s an excellent point. That’s why no one looks at the top 8 matches of Evo and comments about how execution will decide who wins out in the end. Everyone is already good enough to do what they do. In fact, once you get out of pools everyone will be good enough to do what they do. Past that point execution counts for nothing. Marlinpie has much better execution than Viscant, but it doesn’t matter because Viscant can execute his easy Wesker combos and resets just as consistently as Marlinpie executes his difficult Viper combos. When they face off the winner is decided by who has the better strategy.
Head back to Domination 101. S-Kill basically says that execution is the single most important skill in playing a fighting game. Not entirely in the sense that you can consistently do that unnecessarily flashy and equally impractical combo (that’s pretty cool, though, and does present a possible intimidation factor for your opponent), but more so in the sense that if you can consistently do something like cr.MK xx fireball with Ryu, keep hitting your opponent with it and never miss it once, then that makes your execution a real threat.
Note: I probably haven’t done S-Kill’s statement justice here, but damn it, I tried my best! (Which is probably redundant because I could have just linked to the post >>)
execution is not the most important skill and neither is strategy. The most important skill you can have is utilizing both @ the same time effectively. Execution with 0 strategy is awful, I’ve played people like that before and I would beat the dog shit out of msp hrax players in mvc2 with fucking spiderman or ruby heart. If you can’t use strategy to get a hit, wtf is the point of having all that execution? Also, we have player in our area who plays with nothing but strategy but whenever the guy lands a hit, he can’t execute a good combo to do any life so what is the point of having better strategy?
saying 1 is stronger than the other is poop. If you’ve been in the scene long enough, you’ve ran into those guys who can literally do every hard combo but when you play them for real and they just don’t know jack shit about playing.
eventually, there is that top player middle ground where everyone has strategy and execution. One of the two starts to take precedence sooner or later and it all depends on the game you’re playing. For mvc2 @ high level, execution>strategy but say for high level ST its more strategy than execution because ST isn’t super complicated to execute compared to mvc2. If you don’t think in ST you’re going to get blown the fuck up pure and simple but you can actually get away with being a dumbass sometimes in mvc2 especially in the opener. The closer your game is to a 1 hit kill game, the more the execution:strategy ratio favors execution and vice versa. The less execution a game has, the more it favors strategy.
good design is based on what your target group wants and needs, not a set of arbitrary rules. There is an audience for those type of characters so if the character is designed for those people it’s good design.
So what f I was just pointing it out to the guy and declining to give an opinion, specifically because, at this point in time, I don’t have an opinion on that specific bit he was talking about seeing as I barely know jack shit about RTS/strategy games?
The question then is, moving forward, where should the genre lean towards?
As I see it, with the way the genre sought to specifically engage and challenge the core arcade crowd during the turn of the century, it started to lean more towards the execution side of things. At the same time though, this trend can be said to have contributed to the decline of the genre (or at least it’s presence in the mainstream) during the mid 2000s.
Strategy all day!! mike ross has bad execution and who needs all that hard work…the bigger the character and the harder they hit…the less work on my end,grappler >3
The pretzel is a good example too though.
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