HyperViperBeam:
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?
Sentinel can use the fly and unfly commands to cancel the recovery of some of his moves, leading to totally bitching combos.
Please don’t use MvC2 as an example of balance. That game was a prototype for MUGEN. I would be amazed if any balancing attempt was made by Capcom for that game.
RoGE9
March 15, 2013, 2:00am
43
I love messy games over games where everyone is balanced to crap. If HF and Vsav are messy games then by all means… Make the games messy.
deadfrog:
Hmm, very interesting subject.
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.
So I do generally agree with you to a large extent.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
I mean, the more I think about it the more it’s just so obvious. Yeast is the key here.
Thx man, nice suggestions. In FG peopple tend to choose characters, with cool moves, nice fighting stance and appearence. So another alternative could be if its impossible to make an efective balance, despite possible bugs and glitches, that these characters stay at least at B tier.
Example: in UMVC3 Ghost Rider is a cool character but he’s at botton tier while characters like Zero are at the top (i doubt that people would pick him if he wasnt OP). There are things that dont make any sense, like why should the developers do bad disigned characters OP? This kind of thing occur in other games too…