The application of the of five animals theory on balancing issues for fighting games

Theres still a few things you don’t see.
For one the matchups are all wrong in terms of fighting games. in general Tigers don’t beat cranes and Snakes don’t beat leopards in addition to that there are more styles in fighting games that don’t break down into any of those 5 categories. In a real fight if you grappler grabbed a speed based fighter there is no reason to let that person go. In a fighting game there is forced release at the end of the grab which makes it neccessary to catch the other character all over again.

Also let me further explain Sentinel a little bit, briefly since I’m supposed to be working on something right now,

If you look at day one MVC2 and group sentinel with like character you would group him with character like Juggernaut and Hulk. He is big, he hits like a truck, he has armor and he is slow. On your list, although not entirely, he is a tiger.

If you jump a year into the future people have realised how good his one button beam is, and that it can be cancelled into drones, fligh, rocket punch, or his supers to reduce the recovery. The character that was a tiger is now a serious threat to kill you from the complete opposite side of the screen and can choose to never go near most characters if he chooses. If you group him with like characters now he is closer to doom and cable. And on your list he is closest to a crane. The issue is that he didn’t lose any tiger qualities in this transformation to a crane/snake hybrid.

Fast forward 3 more years now and Sentinel is a no longer even a crane, wave dashing and unfly have greatly increased his mobility and decreased the time between him attacks. He is actually has the ability to be a leopard now. His original build was a trade off of speed for power, that was basically negated by discoveries made after the game’s release.
And whenever he went from one “animal” to another he never lost the traits of the previous animal. He attacks like a leopard but hits like a tiger and can stay away completely and still be at the advantage.

Meanwhile the game has characters like Juggernaut who started the game a tiger and ended the game a tiger and is completely outclasses by the Leopard/Dragon/Crane/Tiger/Snake that Sentinel has evolved into from his original Tiger state.

Ask to HNK how well did that work for it :looney:

Not really, you will always have a character that is more retarded.
On HNK everyone has infinites and stupid shit, but Rei and Toki still dominate the game the major part of the time because they are simply more stupid

It worked. Toki was dabes and Jagi was still better than most of the good characters in other games. More retarded is better than balancing everybody until they all suck.

If people are complaining about your character that means they’re good. If they’re not, they’re probably not good anymore.

Debatable
BTW Rei is better than Toki

Lucky for us only capcom balance™ that way
Good balancing means that even when a character has weakness due his archetype(s) he still is capable to function because his strengths compensate for them while not making them negligible.
Please don’t fall for the false notion that balance means making every character boring or taking away the good stuff from the game.
Just because capcom sucks monkey balls at doing a balanced game without making every character mediocre doesn’t mean that the pursue of balance is a bad thing or that it means boring games.

Pretty much this entire thread can be summarized as “Neat formulas cannot balance games.”

Balance is overrated.

balanced fighter games don’t sell as well as deep complex fighters.

Best thing to do is to add some of that virtual balance. Example: Xmen vs Streetfighter.

Everyone is broken and has infinites,0-KO combos,broken lockdown traps, broken stall tactics,hp regeneration loops, etc.
Problem is…its so difficult to execute said brokenness on the fly that only pros can really exploit it(crazy GGXX-like 1-2 frame cancels,SNK pretzel motions, smart meter building, complex setups, sweetspot your attack bounding box at a certain angle within a certain TIGHT frame window etc.).

The game will be broken but at least lazy scrubs can’t take advantage of it.

Balance is overrated.

balanced fighter games don’t sell as well as deep complex fighters.

Best thing to do is to add some of that virtual balance. Example: Xmen vs Streetfighter.

Everyone is broken and has infinites,0-KO combos,broken lockdown traps, broken stall tactics,hp regeneration loops, etc.
Problem is…its so difficult to execute said brokenness on the fly that only pros can really exploit it(crazy GGXX-like 1-2 frame cancels,SNK pretzel motions, smart meter building, complex setups, sweetspot your attack bounding box at a certain angle within a certain TIGHT frame window etc.).

The game will be broken but at least lazy scrubs can’t take advantage of it.

Things like rushdown having advantage versus keep away, tank with advantage versus rushdown and keep away having advantage versus tank plus characters without any specific role (which make 4 devs a hard work to know what to buff or what to nerf when evr1 complain about some characters).

Actually grabs likes Giefs SPD could not be put in a snake archetype, the nearest to that concept would be SF2 Blanka Bite (he hold the opponent for a longer time if the buttons were pressed rapidly), and those chain grabs from Tekken. I guess that it could fit better 4 the role if at the end of the grab the character were left in a position where another grab still been a treat.

There are moves that fits in some styles like:
Crane – Fireball, ranged pokes
Tiger – Super moves, Body attacks (if unsafe and with more dmg)
Dragon – counters (like Geezer Howard AtemiNage), rolls, dodges, parrys

And the list goes on…if the moves were categorized by their utility would it make any difference to know what moves a character should have or not based on his archetype?

In your MvC2 example supposing that you were a leader in that game project and even with all the precautions on the development, something like that happened and messed up with all the previous balance concept…what would you do?

Keep it in.

People need to stop thinking a rock-paper-scissors model will create the perfect balance fighting game. It doesn’t.

Hahaha are you serious?

Yeah, he is slightly better than Toki
Quoting Gwyrgyn Blood since he explained it well why

I almost didn’t care to reply to this bullshit, but I’m pissed off right now so why the fuck not.

  1. Great DP for reversals, but so does fucking Kenshiro and almost every character in the game when they have meter, which isn’t hard to get. Toki’s Saihaken super cannot be blocked in the air at all, it’s invulnerable, takes two stars on CH, is fucking stupid and all this on top of this are his 1f reversals.
  2. So does Toki, again Saihaken is dumb, but Sekkakou is even more dumber; It’s invulnerable, again, takes 2 stars on normal hit, launches them for a wall combo into 100% and gives frame advantage on block.
  3. Extremely strong doesn’t do shit against fucking God strong air game which Toki has. He has his air teleport which immediately takes him to the ground, he has his Tenshou which can be canceled into teleport, he has his 1f air reversal, he has his j.B, he has everything while Rei’s divekick is trash.
  4. Toki’s comboes aren’t that hard either if you’re willing to put the effort into the game, for hard comboes you can go to Raoh. Rei get’s infinites off literaly everything, but so does everybody else in the game with meter, which again isn’t hard to get, especially Toki.

Rei is cool and all, but fuck everyone who says he’s or anyone is better than Toki because they are so full of shit it’s leaking out and have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. GTFO with that shit. The only thing Rei does better than Toki is lows, but Toki doesn’t need lows to mixup you, he’s that broken. No contest, not even a chance.

Whatever dude, is a know fact by now that Rei > Toki by a slightly margin, if you are so blind to see it not my fault :tup:

I don’t know why but it looks like sf rainbow edition to me. I would not be surprised if ppl start to do typewriting course or have piano lessons just to play video games.

If the game is supposed to be broken that’s ok.

no one even plays xvsf or mshvsf anymore.

I thought know rei > toki was metric on whether someone was keeping up with hnk still

Sent from my HTC Amaze 4G

Worst thread in a minute

Can someone explain to me what people mean when they say unfly? Like, is the fact that Sentinel has a great flight speed and continuous aerial pressure meant by “unfly”? Or do people mean the unfly combos which add more hits to his combos? Or, just something else I’m overlooking? As in, why is his unfly just as notorious as he is?<br>

Hmm, very interesting subject.
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I’d never actually considered this before, even though I do a lot of really deep thinking. I have to admit that you’ve really helped me see how much the untapped wisdom of kung fu could impact the field of video game design. I know for a fact that very few game companies practice the martial arts and I think it goes without saying that their inevitable resulting ignorance of duality/flow (of energy) is probably one of the major reasons that in the entire history of video games there have only ever been two perfect games.
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So I do generally agree with you to a large extent.
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Personally, however, I believe that fighting games in particular are better off drawing inspiration and insight from other conceptual sources to achieve their balance and harmony.
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For instance, I think the dynamics and intricacies of the prototypical Western nuclear family are a much better model of a fighting game’s sensitive and nuanced ecosystem. I would like to see more fighting games that feature a “mom” characters and a “dad” character and some number of children.
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Notice that taking this approach right from the beginning of the design process would actually allow for a fighting game to present potential newcomers with an extremely familiar palette of instantly recognizable human roles. Roles that they themselves have personally experienced, or at least witnessed before, and therefore can easily connect with. These kinds of elementary social puzzle pieces are widely-accepted and -understood entities that our culture has wholly adopted as a comfort. I think that, when people can immediately relate to the characters in a game, they can’t help but become emotionally invested in that game. Emotion leads to immersion, and so those people become your players. I think you can create a surrogate family of gamers around a game in this way. See, so by catering to a wider spectrum of human psychological commonalities (the family), you allow more people to become those (emotionally-invested) players that you’re after, by offering them a playstyle that they genuinely feel really fits the way that they think as indivduals.
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Using myself as an example, I would describe my playstyle as kind of an older sister who is sort of grouchy sometimes and wears belly shirts at the park to watch boys play baseball. The boys like baseball but they sometimes look at my belly shirt too. My little brother is annoying. It makes sense, right?
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I also think that the classical romantic image of the independent, management-owned bakery would serve as an absolutely fantastic microcosm for a PROPERLY-balanced fighting game. The complex network of self-contained dependencies that help define it are all direct pockets of its foundational structure as a functioning business. I think it goes without saying that the fighting game analogues that correspond to those elements are essentially self-explanatory. And then on top of that they can keep baking every day. Do you know what I mean?
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I mean, the more I think about it the more it’s just so obvious. Yeast is the key here.

All this Tiger vs Crane nonsense, check your human privilege guys the sooner we smash the species binary the better. Also I saw a tiger fuck a leopard’s shit up on the Discovery Channel once but I don’t see anything about that match-up in the original poster’s listings, what gives?