For Smash Bros, I for one think all fighting games don’t need to have similar aspects, as long as there’s a interactive / physical battle and a winner at that end Its a " Fight ". Thats just me.
Off Topic : Lol, yea that fucking game was godlike. Not many people knew about it. Yea its was like a somewhat 3rd person Power Stone with just powers. There were Orbs in the Arena and different orbs give your different powers for your Hotkey IIRC. Miss that game
The issue is that those are using mechanics from other genres and simply having characters fight each other. At best they’re merely hybrids and not proper fighters.
And if anything, stuff like Anarchy Reigns are more like fighters than Smash, seeing as you actually have to beat your opponent and knock them out.
Except many games use mechanics from other genres, it doesn’t make them any less whatever games they are. Unreal Championship had melee combat in addition to all the guns, that didn’t make it any less a shooter. Devil May Cry has mechanics and timings akin to a deep fighting game, yet that doesn’t make it a fighting game and not a hack n slash. Tera Online and Blade and Soul use real time combat which is a part of the fighting game genre(one could try to argue pvp in those games is a fighting game within the game), yet it’s still a MMORPG, not a fighting game. If a fighting game takes mechanics from other genres that doesn’t make it not a real fighting game anymore than letting you do melee combos in Call of Duty would somehow make it not a shooter anymore. If we’re going that route, anyone can argue Touhou games aren’t fighters since the focus is on projectile attacks like a shmup. Don’t even get me started on Virtual On or those Gundam games where you fly around shooting the opponent. I consider them fighters, but I’m sure a lot of people would try to claim they aren’t.
Also to play Devil’s Advocate, in Anarchy Reigns you win via points like a shooter, ie. killing as many opponents as possible until the time limit is up. Whoever has the most kills wins. Smash is more like a traditional fighter due to the fact you have to simply beat the opponents once in a normal match, not “whoever scores the most kills wins”.
But by calling Smash a fighter, then you open the door for other games to be called fighters. Since you’re basically saying that a game with mechanics from “x” genre but give a greater emphasis on physical combat against another player is now a fighting game. From an abstract perspective, you could simply say that any game from any genre is a fighting game as long at it has primary emphasis on physical combat against another player.
This is why I prefer Japan’s classification of it. Street Fighter and other fighting games are classified as “V.S. Fighting” while Smash is classified separately as V.S. Platform." Smash by design emphasizes skills utilized more in a platform fighter than in a traditional fighter… at least before all the 'tards come in and take out everything fun to try to turn it into a fighting game.
P.S. Here’s a thought, if you apply the same rules used to call Smash a fighting game, then you might as well call Dynasty Warriors an action-RTS/MoBA like DoTA, LoL, HoN, etc. Just like those games, gameplay primarily revolves around controlling a hero in an army, fighting against another army’s heroes.
Is Sumo wrestling a fighting sport? Yea o.o but you push and throw people out the ring
Is Smash a fighting game? Yea o.o but you push and throw people out the ring
It’s not about the fact that you win by ring-outs (hello VF and SC… and most mid nineties 3D fighters). It’s the fact that Smash is mechanically, a platform game.
Yes. And why exactly is that a problem? This is precisely what this thread is talking about:: theoretically borrowing elements from other kinds of games and applying them to the concept of a fighter.
People have no problem calling Persona 4 an RPG. People don’t have a problem calling Deus Ex, Wizardry, Y’s, Final Fantasy Tactics, or System Shock II RPGs either. And yet all of these games play radically, in fact, drastically differently. They borrow elements from action games, strategy games, visual novels, rougelikes, dungeon crawlers, first person shooters, and dating sims. But they are all at their core RPGs, which we have all come to accept to mean “a game where numbers go up.”
If a game involves physical combat between two players, then you have to figure out if it’s a fighting game in more ways than it’s not a fighting game. Are the rules “fair?” Does one player begin at a disadvantage to the other player? Football is a competitive sport and is considered mostly fair, however one team begins the game offensively and the other defensively; the initial offense can determine the course of the entire game, and that team is determined randomly via coin toss. Does the sport have physical combat? In a sense, the game is based around big dudes tackling each other, with actual football plays not so far removed from battlefield strategy. It’s worth noting that many football players have gone on to careers in either pro wrestling or actual martial arts. Yet football is not a combat sport as movement, zoning if you will, is what the game places a far greater emphasis on, the “combat” of the sport being merely a means to an end.
This is a discussion about semantics, and how we’re applying labels to certain games but are unwilling to apply those same labels to others which share more in common with that label than not. Super Smash Bros. has more in common with Street Fighter than it does with Super Mario Bros, the Legend of Zelda, or Pokemon. I’m not saying that Smash Bros. would be a fun game if you tried to pigeonhole it as a “martial arts style fair competitive sport fighter.” We’ve seen what happens when a community of players do that. It’s a fun game as the randomized fighter that it is. But it’s still a fighter, from a vastly different mindset from those who usually create fighters… which is what this genre sorely still needs.
boxing games arent fighting games despite the obvious similarities
the same goes for smash
accepting that is not a fighting game doesnt made it less a good/bad game neither more/less competitive
smash is a plataform game with elements of fighting, only because its players strip like 90% of what makes the game what it is to turn into a “fighting” game doesnt made it one
if i customize a FPS for example in a tiny map, one vs one, only meele attacks/ weapons only and maybe grenades claymores, etc to simulate zoning, and it lets me customize some options to simulate a life bar, it wouldnt make it a FP fighting game
Hate to break it to you but… boxing games are fighting games. So are sumo wrestling games. And UFC games. And WWE games. They aren’t the kind of fighting games most of SRK prefers, but they still are.
And in that example, what else would you have to do to make the FPS a fighting game? That… that just about nails it to me. Just create a small map with no obstructions and somehow create a dynamic melee combo system, toss in a couple lolis and there’s no complaints from the peanut gallery here, right?
I’d like to see a company like Valve release a fighter. It’d be interesting if the SDK is released, custom skins and stages, servers with crazy Koryu-styled mods, constant updates (like what NRS has done), and etc.
But this isn’t about simple semantics. This is about defining what exactly constitutes fighting games as a genre.
Physical combat itself is a pretty simplistic and limiting criteria, especially when you consider that stuff like Senko no Ronde.
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Which, while technically a shmup/fighter hybrid, is still considered more of a fighter than Smash. Mostly because the game still has the same 2D space control elements emphasized by SF. But more importantly, it’s a better marriage of 2D fighter and shoot 'em up design then Smash is of 2D platformer and 2D fighter design.
No, they’re not. They are games that simulate real-life sports, thus making them sport simulation games.
Marvel ain’t a sport.
Why do we even care whether certain games are called fighting games or fighting platformers or fighting sport simulation or whatever.
And maybe we could try NOT completely derailing a thread every time smash brothers gets mentioned
No offense but both you and hecatom’s arguments sound an awful lot like posts I saw on 4chan about this same topic. There was some guy there claiming a game isn’t a “true” fighting game unless all the stages were perfectly flat even floors, with no interactive stage elements outside of a possible wall and no mechanics borrowed from other genres. I understand what you mean by vs fighters, but I admit a lot of the arguments I seen for why certain games aren’t fighters tends to end up turning into “It’s not like SF”.
As for Dynasty Warriors, if DW let you play against other people, you could each upgrade your items based on some kind of currency system ingame, and the end goal was to reach some enemy base on the other side that must be destroyed to win, yeah it technically would be a Dota style game.
What’s funny is Team Ninja must have been thinking the some thing I have, because if you notice they just made up some new genre for DOA5 “Fighting Entertainment”. They prolly figured with all the crazy shit going on in the stages now it was best to just make up some new genre to stick it in, lest the game come out and people go “OMFG it’s not a real fighting game, in Tekken you don’t have the stage falling apart and you can’t knock people into exploding cars!”
Oh and Return of Shiki, Boxing is a fighter, I hate to break it to you. It just isn’t the same kind, but it is a style of fighter. UFC games are as well. What would you class Supremacy MMA as, that game is basically UFC style characters and arena and moves, with “arcade” style fighting game stuff(ie. you have to win by depleting a lifebar, there are no flash sudden KOs, uses a “super meter” of some kind, etc.). I’ve seen people arguing over whether that game is even a fighter or a UFC style game, usually with the person arguing claiming it isn’t a “fighter/UFC” game with "It sucks, it’s not a REAL insert genre here game. That’s sorta the thing, what exactly defines a fighting game? Is Dissidia a fighter? I’ve seen people claiming it isn’t a fighter, it’s an “action rpg”, yet gamefaqs has the game listed under 3d fighters, and SRK even had a thread for it in the fighting game section that never got moved/deleted/warned. How do the Naruto games get classified as fighters when most people consider them absolutely horrible, and they pretty much play so differently from any known fighter, especially if with lots of people a game simply not playing like SF makes it “not a real fighter”?
I’ve played Senko no Ronde. I also consider it a fighter. It does have space considerations, objective lifebars, a time limit, and is a “competition of physical prowess between two (or more) fighters.” It’s just a fighter in mecha, floating in midair. But why, exactly, is it a “better marriage of 2D fighter and shoot 'em up design” than Smash is of “2D platformer and 2D fighter design?” The much lauded space considerations of 2D fighters like Street Fighter is still present in Smash Bros, only with platforms, which means you must now seriously mind vertical space and different layers of horizontal space. Why is that so far removed from a traditional fighting game?
I know people aren’t playing Marvel in real life, but why is MvC NOT a sport? It has a timer, it has two evenly matched competitors, it has a fair neutral environment… and while as a video game it plays much differently than a combat sport,* what is MvC OTHER than a highly exaggerated mixed martial arts tournament? *
I differentiate “sport” from “game” in this way, although I do acknowledge that sports are in fact just a different type of game:
Sports have:
-evenly matched players (usually teams have an equal number of players on their sides)
-have a ruleset that is neutral and do not implicitly favor one player over another (issues of offense/defense balance not withstanding)
-usually have an environment that is neutral and do not favor one player over another (baseball doesn’t have spikes that kill you if you touch them at homebase; the home side of a football field isn’t lit on fire)
Games can have:
-mismatched players (in Pac-Man, if any of the four ghosts touches Pac-Man he dies; Pac-Man can only kill the ghosts when he touches them in limited, special circumstances, thus he is at an objective disadvantage)
-have a ruleset that favors one “player” over another (when playing Mega Man, you have multiple lives. Bosses cannot continue after you beat them like the player can…the Dr. Wily stage boss gauntlet at the end of the game notwithstanding)
-usually have environments/stages that do favor one player over another (Mario doesn’t have stages for Bowser to overcome before he can kidnap Princess Peach at the beginning of the game)
Like I said earlier, fighting games are derived from martial arts tournaments, which are sports. While MvC or BlazBlue do not resemble real sports by any means, nor are the characters in the games’ storylines actually participating in a sport, the rules in these games are similar to sports rules of integrity and fairness. It’s irrelevant that some characters are overpowered over others. For MvC3 to be less of a sport, it would have to have a team of 3 vs a team of 18, Galactus and several other characters similar to him would be playable, one player’s team of 3 would have to overcome a dungeon first, etc.
Well, I do not see a reason why they would bother to dumb down SF as they did to Quake 3 when Capcom has already done it themselves, several times. Quake did not have characters players would be fond of as SF did, it was just the gameplay. So they could get lots of players as most could not grasp high level Q3PM anyway. In SF, it is different: everyone knew Ryu and co. 20 years ago, so that alone gave Capcom a great advantage when marketing a new fighting game due to using artwork that resembled those characters. The gameplay is totally different, but 99% of the people who bought the game did not notice. If Valve released a SF clone (if one knows what a SF clone is, after so many different versions of characters, engines, attacks and universal mechanics), no-one would buy it, and it would certainly have no competitive scene.
SNK could set up and release some great version of SamSho or Fatal Fury, upgrading what SamSho2 and FFS had, but odds are they would rather try an easy route and either not release anything at all, or make another combo-heavy game.
True, nostalgia is what really got SF4 in the door honestly. Could you imagine what SF4’s sales would have been if it was an all new cast?
Shame no company will do a Bushido Blade type game. Again that was a rather nontraditional fighter, seeing as how attacks could instant kill, there were no health bars, the stages allowed lots of roaming, and the game had slippery slope(ie., you get crippled you’ll have a harder time winning).
I feel like even if interesting mechanics/tricks are sometimes removed and other stuff is made easier, there are almost always little steps forward with most decentish new fighters. A lot of this comes through the gameplay of new characters. Even if a specific game isnt great overall, future developers could look back at a game and see how specific things worked, draw inspiration and make analysis.
I’m pretty sure the Deadliest Warrior games are like that, except they do have health bars.