Sorry is that post could be understood as if SF2 were mash friendly, I know it’s not.
The point is that then you can safely option select fake blockstrings: if the attack was a true blocksting, you keep blocking; otherwise, the reversal comes in. This is pretty much the kind of OS that people want gone.
AFAIK, thanks to input shortcuts you can pull out a DP from without having to stand in SF4.
Take away autoguard, and you can no longer OS reversals on block even if there are input shortcuts or the reversal window is big (I hope not anyway), so I find it reasonable. If at best, all that can be said about autoguard is that it hasn’t been a problem, why keep bringing it back? What specific benefit is lost if it gets binned in SF5?
The thing is, the guard breaks during the gameplay video were always on the last hit of any hadouken during stance that Ryu did.
The other thing to note is that if there is a guard meter, than that needs to be shown as not showing how much guard you have left is quite unintuitive.
I guess at the most fundamental level it’s the fact that it encourages attacking and gives matches extra intensity. There is a motivation to actually go in on even the most defensive opponents knowing that you actually have a chance to bust their defence wide open once guard crush is triggered. This is a system that rewards you, the attacker, for actually fighting in a fighting game. For applying yourself.
One thing I think that is important to remember is that each character typically has varying ‘weights’ to their guard ability in much the same way health and stun is doled out, i.e. its not a universal stat. It strikes me as quite tricky to balance though. Consider Yun in SFIV who (provided you’re not Peter ‘Yun has a hard time getting in’ Rosas) can smother an opponent with his offence. Such an ability if lifted into a game featuring guard crush would make him a challenge to balance in this respect. This then suggests that not only do variations in defending guard crush meter lengths need to be considered, but also the actual amount of guard ‘damage’ that each of the aggressor’s specials and normals actually do.
Think of it a little like an intense heavyweight boxing match. Dude goes in landing blow after blow on a skilled defender. At some point though his defence will buckle and the attacker’s titanic right hook will find its way home which is met by a cheering audience.
Insofar though SF5 doesn’t appear to have a universal guard crush system. At least from what we have seen. It seems to be a side effect of individual character traits, or the chosen ‘mode’ people have been calling it. If this is a ‘mode’ specific to a select few characters, or perhaps everybody, it stands to reason that variability for EACH character could be pretty high. I find this interesting. It’s possible SF5 has a standard array of characters, but the potential for ability variation after you have chosen your character gives us another level entirely to consider.
Still, this is just speculation though. I think a good reveal will be once we see the character select screen being used, with players actively selecting their load-outs, be it Super/Revenge choices and/or perhaps this ‘mode’ thing we’ve been mulling over. Here’s hoping Daigo and GamerBee don’t get turned loose with a pre-chosen Ryu/Chun offering like we’ve seen so far.
I don’t think a character like sf4 yun should even exist in a guard crush game. Look at cvs2 yun for something more likely to exist with that defensive mechanic in place.
I think Guilty Gear handles guard crush and defense pretty well. If you avoid confrontation long enough you start losing meter that promotes offensive play rather than running away and trying to build meter if you feel you’ve lost the round or already won the round.
Guard crush handled in a way that you can’t actually cause a guard break but the more you block the greater the risk when you DO. Once your guard bar hits 75% full all hits taken are counterhits until it reduces to 50% over time while in neutral. At full guard bar combo scaling is ignored other than moves that forcibly cause damage scaling.
Of course this is also in a game where throws lead to full combos and have zero startup so punishing blockstrings is easier and also the risk of blocking for a long time is higher already without an actual guard crush. Not sure it would translate to SF game play but it’s interesting to think of other ways guard crush type mechanics could be implemented that don’t outright punish you for blocking. It also could open up different ways guard crush could be implemented on a character per character basis in SF5
Autoguard is there for a reason, imagine being crossed-up in the middle of blocking a multi-hit projectile. You’d have a one frame window to switch blocking directions, and it would have to be on the exact frame that he crossed you up.
In regards to guard crush, it’s not given that in-your-face-characters are the ones that will be guard breaking people. Keep in mind what characters actually used to guard crush you in CvS2. With the exception of Sakura, those weren’t the rushdown characters first and foremost.
True though not many characters have this option in SF games, the only one that comes to mind is Akuma doing air EX fireball on a forward jump in SF4 might be possible but I’m not even sure about that. They’d have to do something like a slow moving EX Fireball FADC from full screen then dash - dash - dash - jump.
All of those instances were usually due to other system mechanics though. Specifically Custom Combos and Roll Cancel.
Those things mattered as well, yeah(quite possibly even more important, especially in regards to Sakura), but I was actually thinking about stuff like Sagat c.HP, Guile s.HK and Blanka c.HP, since those characters could get guardbreaks from simply having the attacks in question blocked enough times during the neutral game.
I have, though I admit to my own shortcomings in that CvS2 came out during the period where the arcades were really dying out in my area, and despite me having the game on Dreamcast, I didn’t have a gaming crew to lay fighting games with for some competition except at the arcade, but our arcade never had CvS2.
I think guard crushes are gonna be character specific, and more than likely an added effect of a character activating “V-trigger” as we saw with Ryu. I’m not sure this is gonna be a universal thing just yet. I still have my reservations about guard crush, and I thank @Gamogo for explaining the argument for guard crushes. I mean, I definitely do get it, and am not opposed to it if it can be implemented in a way that doesn’t penalize you as much as Alpha 3 did. To go with the argument Gamogo gave in his explanation, I reiterate that I’m all for the compromise that Capcom seems to have put in for SFV, where the more you block, the more “gray” blockstun health you lose, and if you want it back, you gotta go on offense to recover it. It’s not a guard crush, but if you get hit before you recover your health, then too bad, too sad. I think this is a decent compromise so a turtler can block all he wants to, but would just motivate me to trip him up in some other way so that he’ll lose more health.
But again, I just don’t want it to work in a way to where players like Poonkgo’s Seth, Smug’s Dudley, or Daigo’s AE Yun will be raping people left and right with a guard crush system where you just have to sit back and take it and can’t get them off you so you can counterattack.
Almost every game with a guard crush has an alpha counter system. I can’t think of any that don’t. I’m sure there is one but it’s usually the case they go hand in hand specifically to prevent you “just having to sit back and take it”
But, this is the first SF game where normals do chip damage. I’d welcome a groove system but the presence of Guard Crush does not guarantee an Alpha Counter system.
