I dont’t recall seeing anyone say Windjammers and Nidhogg would be fine at EVO. You are clinging to the fact that they were part of the fundraiser as some sort of proof that the FGC isn’t consistent. I never asked for those games to be part of it. Take that up with Mr. Wizard.
TL;DR We should change fighting games into something else which results in fighting game players hating the game. They spread negativity everywhere. Dad’s who used to play SF2 on the arcades see the new SF game for sale and wants to experience nostalgia. Then they realize SF is nothing like the SF that they played and instead it is a third person hadoken shooter so he doesn’t buy it. Casuals see an SF game and expect and SF game but they get this weird game. Who would be happy if we change what we have into something it is not?
Fighting games aren’t dying. The notion that a genre is dying if it doesn’t have a steady stream of newbies coming in is stupid. Sure, fighting games are less popular than they once were, but that doesn’t mean they’re dying. It just means that they’re less popular than they once were. The hardcore FG community isn’t going anywhere, and as long as it exists, developers will be making games that cater to that crowd. Maybe not big AAA developers, but barring stuff made by the arcade giants Capcom and Namco, have fighting games ever been AAA? More importantly, do fighting games now and did fighting games ever suffer because of a lack of AAA attention?
People who say fighting games are dying don’t know what it’s like to play a dead genre. Take a look at roguelikes – traditional ones, not any of this Rogue Legacy, FTL, indie fadmeme bullshit.
http://i.imgur.com/3Dml6Qp.png
Playing roguelikes in 2017 is something of a lonely experience. Usenet, once the biggest hub for roguelike players (and remaining so after other game communities had moved to the web) is long dead. The differences in philosophy between modern mainstream games and classical roguelikes are far starker than the differences in design between modern mainstream games and fighting games, in part due to their differing origin: both fighting games and modern action games trace their lineage to arcades, while roguelikes originated on mainframe networks on university campuses. New things from the roguelike scene come out and get attention occasionally (DoomRL, Cogmind, etc) but are usually a very different experience from the classics, in much more significant ways than the difference between SFII and SFV. The immensely complicated and esoteric design and the unique depth emergent from it is largely gone, boiled away to leave only the simplest core elements of the roguelike, which are then built upon with console, arcade, and PC sensibilities.
With all that in mind, can you really say that fighting games are dying? I sure can’t.
Nigga go play Pokemon super mystery dungeon and tell me rouge likes are dying. That shit dank AF.
REEE wheres muh permadeath
You’re not wrong though, PMSD is pretty neat. But it, along with most other Mystery Dungeon games, are also a significant step away from the traditional roguelike formula, although it’s a step away from the formula in a different direction from western indie rogue-like-like-likes, adding elements from non-roguelike JPRGs rather than action games or platformers. The state of modern roguelikes would be like if the majority of modern fighting game developers decided to turn their games into sidescrolling brawlers with fighting game controls plus a manual turnaround buttons a la Guilty Gear Isuka, or if they decided to remove all (superficial) execution barriers the way Chinga proposes the OP, replacing special motions with hotkeys and cooldowns a la Rising Thunder, or if they decided to try to turn them into RPGs a la Revengers of Vengeance.
EDIT: Also, the roguelike community now is several times more smaller than it was twenty years ago than the fighting game community is smaller now that it was twenty years ago.
FPS and MOBA games are just as unforgiving and brutal to new players; in both skill and execution. Try playing quake or counter strike against someone who can do weapon combos and shoot with perfect aim; you wont be able to push buttons without dying to put it in street fighter terms. The same grind of getting owned until you just learn to overcome it occurs. Any thing (game or otherwise) that has a high level of competitive play will have a learning curve. Competitive play; the ability to better than someone; is reliant on a learning curve to exist.
Quake is dead and Counter Strike happens to be the modern day mother of esports and happened to strike gold and build a consistent flow of a playerbase over 20 years. Newer games like Halo, Gears, COD have things like co op campaign and horde mode, zombies somewhat easy/ user friendly mechanics Overwatch especially has the easy mechanics in spades.
Your right on a competitive front nothing will ever circumvent hard work. The issue is that there really isn’t a curve in fighting games its a plateau, there’s nothing to ease you into it other than getting your ass beat. Repeatedly. There hasn’t even been a decent laddering system or anykind of ingame recognition online of different playstyles or skillsets except for tekken tag 2 and tekken net died after like a year. Once you start hitting walls there’s no other option but to take the L’s which is great for guys like me and you but its bad customer service.
Games are a product good customer service is all about making it easy.
The fact those kinds of systems continue to die for fighting games tells me they don’t make much of an impact with the casual audience. VF4 had an amazing training mode and laddering system and that games still dead as fuck anywhere but Japan and you just said yourself Tekken Net died after only a year.
Your absolutely right which is why my primary point when it comes to increasing fighting game playerbase is more alternative game modes and easier controls idk how many hours ive spent watching someone fail at the qcf motion trying to learn and say fuck the game altogether
Rising Thunder got rid of all the classic motions and the online was dead few weeks after its launch, despite being a free game, and the amout of scrubquotes that came from that game was tremendous. What most casual players, begginers and scrubs fail to understand is that motions and combos are the easy part of the fighting games. Fundamentals, but more specifically, spacing are the real reson they lose so much. You can facilitate the controls all you want, but in the end the result will be the same (the guy will say fuck the game altogether).
Facilitating the controls can be more harmful than good, but adding a “stylish mode” can help new players without harming the playerbase (but for some reason that’s not enough for the OP).
But I completely agree on the alternative game modes part.
Rising thunder had a multitude of issues that weren’t control related that killed that game. It had all the worst parts of SF4 mixed with really dumb balancing decisions it animated like doo doo and really shouldn’t have went into beta as early as it did, it was definitely alpha, not to mention Riot bought it out to kill it pretty much. It was a bad game.
A good example of a game with simple controls would be smash never more than 2 simultaneous button presses to do anything that isn’t considered an AT even if you put something like a spaceship emissary in Marvel it wouldn’t be as fun to play having to play it with traditional SF controls.
Yep, but a lot of people also left because they couldn’t win matches online because they lacked fundamentals to do so. There is a famous video of someone quitting the game after losing to zoning (I believe someone posted in this very thread). I don’t think that the controls killed the game, my point is that you can facilitate motions all you want, people will get frustated and quit regardless.
Melee is actually a very execution heavy game. You literally die in few seconds if you don’t know how to move properly. Smash 4 is much simpler and the game resets to neutral way too often IMO, but the game still manages to be fun. Smash deepness lies in other areas. The games somewhat compensates for the simpler controls by having a completely different neutral game. I don’t see smash control scheme being sucessfuly being incorporated in a tradicional fighter, but maybe that’s just me.
Smash has easy controls?
doesn’t matter how how simplistic you make a game,if people don’t learn the fundamentals there almost always gonna lose to the people that do.adding a bunch of modes to distract them from that won’t change anything.unless they have a comprehensive tutorial and the individual is ready and willing to learn
Smash and pokken are not popular because of simple controls, it’s because it has Pokémon and other known Nintendo characters in them lol.
Melee is probably one of the most execution heavy games out there.
yeah even when you are getting hit you have to execute the proper di
This conversation is so difficult to have here because the community just plain refuses to see it through any other lens.
Let me fix this for you
We aren’t talking about the skill ceiling here no one wants a lower skill ceiling we are talking about the barrier of entry and intuitiveness.
You want to throw a fireball in Street Fighter with Ryu press 236+P in that order within an 8frame window 2 frame leniency on how far apart each button press is (I might not be exact but its something like this) its a very specific timing and rhythm for something that is a marquee technique.
You want to throw a fireball with Mario in Smash you press B
I think part of the reason people here don’t like the idea of simplifying execution too much is because difficult execution can be satisfying. Think of the thumbfeel of the wall jump in Mario 64 vs in later Mario games. In Galaxy they made it like Mega Man X’s wall jump, but with single-wall jumping removed, and made generally less fun. Or how good it feels to use the more advanced traversal techniques in Super Metroid. There’s nothing quite like doing your first speed-boosted machball.
I dunno, I don’t think that’s true. In blazblue nu can cover the screen in projectiles at the press of a button. Pa4u even went further with not only some specials being button presses, but also having auto combos that even lead into a super. Yet, guilty gear is still the most popular Arcsys game out there even with persona having its name behind it.
Most people that want fighting games extremely simplified are people that will end up quitting the game in a week anyway.
Easier inputs simply do not give a fighting game mass appeal. SC and Tekken have easy inputs and are button masher friendly, and yet they don’t have great mass appeal. I doubt T7 will even sell as well as MKX.
Smash doesn’t sell more because it’s easier to pick up and play. That is a part of it, but not even the biggest factor. It has lots of recognizable characters, 4 player modes, incredibly flashy and dynamic stages, and random item drops. Now Capcom could try to add that stuff to a fighting game like MvC:I. but that would just be shoe horned in for the sake of casual appeal. Smash was made from the ground up for that, and the competitive modes came after. And while it’s great that the Smash community was able to make the game competitive, it’s not some rule that every fighter can have both.