The death of fighting games… A personal journey that hopefully can help MvC:I?

Current Fighting Games Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite
181

idk I’m convinced the only reasons people even tried it in the first place were because it had Seth Killian at the helm and GGPO. When I showed gameplay footage to my friends who played fighters and knew nothing about RT, they typically said they didn’t want to play a fighter with cooldown mechanics(and that the aesthetic was bad, which I have to agree with).

But it’s really not fair to judge the population of a game that never even made it out of alpha. I mean, the only ones who knew about it were people in the FGC, and we weren’t even the intended audience.

182

I stopped playing it because it was essentially SF4 with robots.

183

Funny it’s the opposite to me, fighting games being dumbed down to cater to Jimmies is what’s killing them for me.

184

I refrain from using the “N” word in my speech but; Nigga you cold as ice.

185

I always wondered what “lit” meant. Now I know it means “shit”.

186

Relevant quotes from Daigo (from a recent ESPN article).

187

All I can say is…

Is this a real thread?

188

there def isnt enough new blood coming in and making a splash. there isnt a new justin wong, no new kid phenoms fucking up the OGs :frowning:

189

I want to thank you for this comedy gold mine that you call a thread, i am bookmarking it to see what kind of nonsense you and the other motherfucker can provide to entertain me for when i am at my office.

190

LOL how did I miss this thread? I love these discussions.

I personally have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get people into fighting games, with mixed success. One thing I have learned is that it is extremely difficult to turn casual players into competitive ones, no matter how much you simplify the execution or gameplay. It’s just not what they want to get out of the experience.

Wall of Text:

[details=Spoiler]For attracting casuals, I think Tekken and DoA have the right idea. These games are ridiculously popular with my casual friends because they are more “mashable”. Mindlessly pressing buttons in SF5 gets you jerky movements and repetitive normals. Mindlessly pressing buttons in Tekken and DoA produces cool-looking strings. Most of these strings are useless for competitive play, but this is what casuals want. They want to press buttons and watch their character do cool shit. They want to pick Capos or Lili and do flips all over the place.

Some percentage of these casuals may eventually grow tired of this and decide to go to the next level, but this proportion is so low that it’s basically pointless to make any effort specifically to cultivate them. It’s a better bet to just ensure that the game is as mash-friendly as possible so as to catch the widest net of casuals. Maybe 0.1% decides to level up, but if we start with a big enough player base 0.1% can be a large number of people.

So does this mean nothing can be done to directly help grow the competitive community? I say no. I think that instead of aiming for casuals, we should be aiming for competitive players of other genres. There are millions of competitive FPS players, CCG players, RTS players, etc. By my experience if we can get these people to try fighting games for a bit they will stick around. The problem is that these are also the people that drop fighting games the fastest.

Precisely because they are competitive, they quickly realize how much time they have to sink into the games to get to the point where they can actually play competently. For most of them, this is the dealbreaker. They are willing to lose games before getting better. They are not willing to spend 2-3 weeks in training mode “doing homework” just to get to the point where they can get something useful from the experience of getting bodied online.

Time and time again the “homework aspect” of fighting games has turned off people I have introduced to one game or another. It’s not just execution, though execution is a big part of it. Every time something happens in the game and they have to go to training mode (or watch a video on youtube, or read a thread on a forum) just to get an idea of what happened, there’s a chance that they just drop the game altogether.

What I feel could really help is if there was a way to convey information within the game itself. Like, if somehow there were visual cues that told players they were vulnerable during recovery frames, or that certain moves are unblockable or invincible or whatever. If only the counter hit message actually conveyed a meaning to someone who did not already know what a counter hit was!

Of course there are some things that are difficult if not impossible to make visually apparent. The most glaring one is frame data, I think. But what if frame data was somewhat standardised so that instead of learning the frames for every normal of every character you could just learn that “jabs are x frames” and “sweeps are y frames and do hard knockdowns”?

What if you didn’t even need to know exact frames? I know DoA has a kind of RPS-style attack system and I’ve seen fairly casual players apply strategy and tactics based around this when they play. Maybe it’s not Daigo vs Valle level but it’s a huge jump from mindless button-mashing (thinking button-mashing?).[/details]

TLDR:
Casuals are important to the future of the FGC, but the key is to attract a huge number of casuals via bells, whistles and button-mash-friendly movesets. Not worth spending time on individual casuals hoping to find diamonds in the rough. The real potential is in players who are already competitive, but not playing fighting games for some reason or another. I believe Fighting games can benefit hugely from removing the barriers that keep these people from trying this genre.

191

Interesting thread.
I wish they gave third person shooters like mgs5 a cqc system that could hold up to the likes of virtua fighter even if the inputs for phantom pain stayed the same.

192

We need the MvC2 layout. Mashing light punch gets you jab > strong.

193

LMAo, only idiots and ignorants think that 1 frame links add “depth” or are something that fighting game players want and demand on every fighting game.

194

Watch how MvCI will have an autocombo feature like P4A, UNIEL and Dengeki

195

One-frame-links provide depth to fighting games in both offence and defence. Players must always be ready to take advantage of situations where the opponent randomly drops their combo, while the also weighing all of their own decisions against the chance of randomly dropping their own combos.

They basically do for SF what tripping does for Smash.

I’m sure everyone in this forum remembers the day plinking was discovered, causing the depth of SF4 gameplay to drop precipitously. This technique effectively turned 1-frame-links into 2-frame-links, which is a 100% increase in the input window which translated to a 50% decrease in the game’s depth. Can’t argue with the math.

196

Wut?

197

Both gameplay mechanics add an exploitable chance of failure to what would otherwise be straightforward actions.

Just in case it wasn’t clear, though, I was being facetious in that post.

198

So he is xesaie aka xes?

199

TLDR:

Lost interest in this after like 4 posts. To the OP, The mechanics of a fighting game are the hard part. No matter how easy you make a games inputs, the actual game is still there waiting for you. No matter how well you perform your 1 button fireball, you will lose to somebody who has better footsies. And there is no 1 button footsie magic.

Fighting games aren’t for casual players, in general. There are easier fighting games for casual players. But trying to make all of them easier and easier will kill the genre. It died in the late 90s. And SF4 somewhat revived it. And there was nothing easy about SF4. Other than the fact that any input command can be learned. The game was baloney until you could 1 frame link. Something a casual player would not pick up unless they practiced. Practice of course being the devil in any fighting game. New players don’t want to learn. they don’t want to practice. and they don’t want to put in effort. And the mentality that fighting games are so hard to get into is making it worse. They aren’t. It is all just practice.

Take Dive Kick. The game literally has two buttons. Jump. Kick. And the point of the game is to jump. And kick. It cant be easier. But at the end of the day it isn’t a game of chance. Its a game of thought and timing. I don’t lose when I play that game against any of my friends. Simply because I understand that there is actually more to it than jumping. And kicking. I enjoy it. But it doesn’t have stickyness whatever to it. I play so that my friends have a chance to win. And they continue to challenge me. But get nowhere. The game is no longer a challenge for me. So I don’t willingly get up and play it.

If all fighting games got easier I would drop more and more of them. As would most real players. And that means EVO and the like will die. And the genre will die again. Game devs are so stupid to think that a game needs to be more and more accessible. The genre isn’t being pushed by casuals. They are just the gravy on the side. It’s being pushed by people who take it seriously. Just to explain, I say take it seriously to mean anybody who reads online to find something to help improve their game. Regardless of if they compete or not.

Great now I have a wall of text. To the OP. You say you want to help the community grow. But your suggestions are what will ultimately kill it.

200

This basically boils down to 2 things IMO.

  1. People are lazy. It’s by nature. You see it every day in ever aspect of life. It takes time and effort to become good at a fighting game and to learn the ins and outs, and the majority of gamers (casuals are the majority) are simply lazy and don’t want to be bothered to put effort into learning how to be good.

  2. Instant gratification. Todays ADD generation needs to instantly be rewarded. That just isn’t the case in fighting games. You don’t see the rewards until you put a lot of time and effort into them and start to become good.

#2 kind of goes hand in hand with #1. People who are learning suck so they lose a lot and there is no instant gratification because they are losing.

EDIT:

I also want to add a 3rd thing. It also has to do with today’s generation are a buncha pussies who get participation trophies in all aspects of life. In fighting games, there is no participation trophies. You either win or you lose. And todays generation doesn’t know how to handle losing or failure since they are always rewarded for participating. That’s why you see so many rage quitters now a days. Hell even in the FPS games when you lose, you still get to see all the “medals” you earned for getting 3 kills in a row, double kills, etc.

IE, you get participation trophies.