I don’t like the terms “hardcore” and “casual” because not only are they vague, they’ve taken on mildly derogatory meanings. Or, in the case of “hardcore,” a celebratory meaning when used by people proclaiming themselves to fit the bill. To “casual” players the hardcore are nerds who waste their time. To “hardcore” players the casual are morons who lack the capacity to understand basic shit.
You can even see it outside of fighting games with the whole “X company needs more hardcore games!” or “Jeez, what’s with all this casual garbage?” I could rant about all the problems with these sentiments but suffice to say I think this faction oriented way of thinking is pretty foolish.
I feel like this is a relatively new phenomenon. I don’t recall so many arguments based on the hardcore/casual line prior to 2000 or so. Certainly not prior to the PSX era.
You were eight. I bet you would’ve been enraptured by a slinky on an escalator. Unless you have this grand plan of marketing SF to 8 year olds and bundling it with action figures, you should ask yourself why people’s willingness to learn how to play fighters sharply drops the older they get.
Did anyone in this thread ever mention picking up fighters when they were older? I didn’t see anyone. I mean, when you’re young, you’re a lot more willing to fuck around. Button-mashing’s great, because you’re doing punches!, and kicks!, and someone’s getting beat up. It’s just like a movie. And every so often, you luck into a move, and you’re so awesome.
But when older people try a fighter for the first time, they’re not so willing to put up with that. They actually know there’s a whole game in there, and they know enough to realize that they’re not playing it. They can button-mash the basic 6 buttons, ok. Then they get beat up by someone (person or AI, doesn’t matter) that knows how to do a move. Then they spend a few minutes learning how to do one or two moves, probably the hadoken… and congrats. Now they can mash out seven things instead of 6, and one of them only works half the time. What a vast improvement! What do they do now?
It’s not that fighters are hard, which they are. Contrary to popular belief, people do still play hard games. It’s that they’re incomprehensible. They provide no feedback on how to play. You have to put in an extraordinary amount of time to even begin to learn how to play the game. If someone learned how to do moves, then they still wouldn’t have a clue when to do those moves or what gets priority over what, or how to do combos, or how any of the crazy subsystems work. Learning all this is a hell of a thing to ask of someone who isn’t even sure if he likes the game yet.
And so he won’t play. He won’t put that time in for something he might very well end up hating at the end, and that’s ignoring how the game is just making him feel stupid in the present. To everyone who says these people are “god damn stupid” or lazy, ignorant, casual, whatever… you’re wrong. It’s a fucking cost-benefit analysis. Will this game be fun if I learn how to play it? Uhhh, maybe. Is it fun now? Hell no, let’s play something else.
Fighters are hard to get into. Really, really hard. I know this, because I didn’t start playing them until later in life, and I still barely understand a thing about them. There’s a reason this is my first post. If you started playing as a kid, you lucked out. I guess what I’m trying to say is, do not generalize your experience out to people who didn’t have your opportunities. You just look like an idiot in the process.
i saw it when you posted it. thought it was great and the guy askin questions looked like a jackass
ctfd
the bold insist that you have no idea what it’s like to learn a game in which you do not have intuitive ability. I’ll explain.
beginners boot up these games because they have the desire to get in and kick some ass on their mind. they aren’t going to practice mode; they’re playing comps and/or other people. that’s what EVERYONE does. it’s during this phase that they reach the level of frustration that makes them want to quit and go off to a different game. it’s one thing to lose because you suck, but you start to feel disgusted with a game if you suck AND the character isn’t doing what you want it to. as a beginner, you’re unaware of the execution in FGs and instead start to think “maybe this just isn’t that great of a game”. most likely, instead of going to training mode learning how to do a move or some combo or whatever, people experienced and inexperienced just head off into a match and hope it comes out right. if it doesn’t do that the majority of the time, then they might focus on performing a specific move, stop using it completely, pick a new char, etc.
to add to this whole ordeal, what you mean to say is that they need to practice 10-15 minutes trying new moves, and browse youtube/srk/what the fuck ever/etc. for information on their character, their moves, & info on other chars. being able to perform a special move doesn’t mean a damn thing if you lack familiarity with it & the knowledge behind them. in fact, a beginner is far more likely to be successful just using only normals than they would trying to include specials that they can barely do (yes, BARELY; 10-15 minutes will not give you years of familiarity & experience in multiple situations).
the underlined shows that you aren’t trying to (and probably never will) look at this from a beginner’s perspective.
If the execution level is lowered, that doesn’t make one difference to high level players. All it does is help low level players reach that higher level of play where real strategy comes into play.
Let’s compare Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. The general consensus is that GG takes incredibly high execution skills to master, while BlazBlue’s execution level is much lower thanks to some systems that help inputs, and less reliance on strict timing to get anything done like in GG.
Assuming you are a high level player in both games, if you can consistently beat people in Guilty Gear, but can not consistently beat people in BlazBlue, then you are not as good at either fighting game as you think you are. If the only difference between you and your opponent is that you can FRC and your opponent can’t, then you are probably going to win more often in Guilty Gear. In BlazBlue, where things are much easier and you and your opponent are usually on equal ground in execution, if you lose, it’s because you weren’t good enough (or fighting against Nu)
To get better in GG, you have to go into training mode and practice Gunflame FRC 100 times a day before you can get into the real meat of the game. To get better in BB, you simply learn your character’s moves, combos, and matchups and learn how to fight. Then you play.
It sounds like I’m saying practicing is dumb and you shouldn’t have to practice to get good at a fighting game. That may or may not be true (I’m not sure yet,) but one thing that is true is that practicing one frame links or FRC’s is not fun. You don’t learn anything from practicing it. Practice itself, however, should be part of fighting games, as practice is what usually separates the best from the scrubs. Practice is dedication, it means you really try, but it shouldn’t have to be something that isn’t fun and doesn’t truly produce anything.
It’s a riddle I’ve been thinking about for a while now. What can make everyone skilled while still having a high level of play where there is ‘more skill.’ But I’ll save that for later. Point is, having easier execution changes nothing for high level players since they would master them anyway, and only helps lower level players get to the true game faster. Now back to the sirlin forums for me.
It’s like I said earlier, all this shit boils down to is total laziness on the part of “casuals”. They don’t want to learn how to play a game, they want the game to be easy as shit so they can jump in, and do “cool shit” without even trying, and feel like they did something. Same reason why kids sports teams can get trophies for LOSING, because god forbid people have to learn to actually do shit right, they’d rather be rewarded for doing jack shit. It boggles my mind how there are people who exist who will actually act like it takes too long and they don’t have the time to sit down and go in training mode and practice moves in a video game. It really doesn’t take that long, you don’t need to become a pro, just go in, try out the hadoken and whatever motions til ya get it right, and chances are once ya figured out one character’s moves, any others with the same motions you can get that shit out too.
Yet people nowadays are too fucking lazy to even do that shit. Imagine trying to play basketball with someone, and they say they don’t want to learn how to dribble the ball and learn to run and walk while dribbling cuz “it takes too long”, so instead they want you to let them run with the ball because it’s easier. Oh and lower the basket too, cuz who the fuck has time to learn how to shoot and aim at that height, it’s much easier to get a basket when it’s lower.
Honestly, I get the whole casuals are more important than the hardcore crowd, but what about people in the middle who aren’t hardcore, but aren’t fucking retards too lazy to spend 15 to 30 minutes learning how to roll your fingers/thumb across a d pad? It’s one thing to make shit easier to a degree and not needlessly complicated, it’s another to flat out ruin shit because some dumbass manchild has the attention span of a fly and thinks 15 minutes to learn something “takes too long”. God, how the fuck do people like this manage to get through life? I bet they must hate taking a shit, especially if it takes too long, I mean who the fuck wants to sit on the toilet for longer than 5 minutes?
I must be a fucking exception then, because when I first started playing Warcraft 3 and DOTA I sucked ass, and got owned all the damn time, even while learning the controls. Thing is the game was fun, so I kept playing and didn’t care. Did I get frustrated as hell? Sure, even thought “yeah fuck this I should quit”. But I didn’t, cuz I did like the game, so I kept playing anyway and pushed myself to get better. I’m no pro but I can actually beat people in the game now and I have even more fun now that I actually have an idea of what I’m doing. Had I quit because it was too hard or whatever or because I was losing, I’d not have had nearly the fun I do now.
I’m just sick of people acting like shit needs to be dumbed down completely because they or their friends don’t have the patience or the will to keep going when something is hard. Video games are a HOBBY, like many other things, such as sports, cars, all sorts of things. I’m sure a person who loves hockey as his hobby would be annoyed as shit if some guys showed up asking to play, then said “Can’t I use my feet to just kick the puck, using the stick is too hard, can we have different rules, I don’t have time to learn this shit”. Yet with videogames people act like you’re supposed to just be cool with people acting that way.
Shit, why even have more than one button in fighting games then, why not just have one button and anytime you press it your characters fires lasers everywhere, now you can do cool shit and not have to take any time to learn a damn thing.
There’s a big difference between making SF easier and basketball easier. Making SF easier by making inputs me lenient does not change the game at all. The same moves are still there for everyone. The only thing it changes is how quickly new players can get into the game which is a good thing. Letting you carry the ball in basketball or lowing the basket changes the game entirely.
I also want to point out that SF4 is needlessly complicated. Link combos, massive inputs for ultras, FADC’s, etc.
GREAT post! I was fortunate enough to start playing SF2 when WW was still in arcades and had just come out on the SNES, so there were all sorts of resources to go to for info. But you can be damn sure I practiced till my fingers were sore.
I see both sides of this argument and I think the only solution is what Snaek said on the first page:
Soul Calibur 3 is probably the best example I can think of of this. It has plenty of engaging one player modes (Chronicles of The Sword, Story Mode, etc) but then the game engine is there for more hardcore folks. It’s too bad it’s a glitch-fest, but again I think that format is the best of all possible worlds for a fighting game meant for consumption by the general public. And what’s funny is that people (even people who PLAY SC!) complained that the AI was too hard!
Dude, quit your complaining. You are unironically posting on SRK, a website made to help beginners learn how to play their favorite fighters, faster. I mean, holy shit man, did you ever care to look at strategy section, sf4 character forums or other games forum. All of those forums together cover most fighting games from which you can ask people questions and learn how to play the game 10, 20 or even 100 times faster than you could without that information. In addition to this there are hundreds of high level matches on youtube and nicovideo of most fighting games. Through youtube, I have learned things for my favorite fighting games that I might have never figured out on my own.
tl;dr veep get a clue. your using srk for god’s sake.
I pulled this out because I think it’s one of the most important elements of not just any fighting game but any game period. Even to somebody who’s new to games, there’s a kind of intuition we have. When we see that first goomba running at us we may run into him at first and die because we didn’t know any better. Well, what is the next instinct? There are two instinctual reactions to that. “I either have to avoid the goomba or find a way to kill it.” And since one of those buttons makes Mario jump, the problem solving comes naturally.
Now imagine some of the worst fighting games of all time. We can analyze these games from a “fighting game mindset” and say, “Well, it’s bad because there are too many easy infinites.” Or we can say, “It’s bad because nothing is safe.” Or we can say, “It’s bad because everything is 50/50.”
We have an intuition as to what we expect to be able to do. We expect to be able to get out of a series of attacks. We expect to be able to throw out a jab and not get severely punished for it. We expect to be able to see what’s coming and not be punished for guessing wrong on every single attack.
All of this adds up to one thing. We have certain expectations as to what we should be able to do. When we can’t do something we believe we should be able to do then we get frustrated. We use words like “clunky” or “sluggish” but it doesn’t take a fighting game wiz to see these problems. A fighting game expert’s list of the worst fighting games is probably not going to be too different from an average person’s list, assuming they’ve both played the same games. That tells me the desires of both groups really aren’t too different. People want to fight with the opponent, be it a person or the CPU. They don’t want to fight with the game itself.
YuuVega, Choi, Ohnuki, Chibita, Fuudo, Valle, ProfessorJones, Taira, Kuroda, MOV, K, Watson, GigaMSX (before he retired that is). The best fighting games should be designed for the players who will play the games ten years down the road competitively. They should not be designed for scrubs who want instant gratification and will abandon the games in the future once they move on to another fad. I don’t care if Smash Brothers is designed for instant gratification, it’s not meant to be a competitive fighter, it’s meant for mass appeal. But Virtua Fighter? The Versus series? Something with the Street Fighter brand? I certainly expect the focus of the gameplay to be on the competitive side, and not the casual appeal side, because those series have a reputation for being competitive fighting games.
But I guess that has changed, for the worse, look at TvC, HDR, SFIV, SSFIV, MvC3, and compare them with HF, ST, CvS2, MvC2, 3S, Zero 2/3, and see what a joke the latest Capcom games are. Oh…in my opinion. And it’s just not just Capcom either. Watch employees of [media=youtube]NVoDue2PR-c&playnext_from=TL&videos=0ENMvSlPHdQ"[/media] talk about how Guilty Gear is too hard and how they want BlazBlue to be ‘playable for players who mash on the buttons’. And let’s not even talk about how Tekken 6BR is nothing but a bad VF clone with Rage mode.
Does anyone think that SSFIV will be played like ST and 3S are in the future? Or that HDR will be played like ST still is ten years from now? Or that MvC3 won’t turn into a bad TvC2 game?
Fighting games are becoming a pathetic genre. Everything is for quick buck. Just give me VF5: Final Showdown already and let me play a real fighter. :crybaby:
so you took upon yourself to learn how to play the games, like he says people should, gj. you are agreeing with him. if you dont believe you are agreeing with him then you missed his point.
he is not arguing for learning a game by yourself INSTEAD of looking up stuff, learning from match videos.
he is arguing for learning a game AT ALL instead of…not learning a game and mashing buttons, ie the ‘casual’ market.
First of all, I said SF4 is not BEGINNER FRIENDLY, I clearly stated it is casual friendly for casual players who have experience with fighting games. It is NOT accessible to people who have never played or who rarely play fighting games.
Like the guy below you said, it is not something easy to pick up for somebody who has never or has rarely played fighting games. In 10-15 minutes you might be able to learn how to get the move out 1/5 of the time, but let’s be honest that’s almost useless when it comes to this game. It WILL take hours for a complete noob to get the motions down pat, and that’s not something everyone wants to do.
And as I said, even if it was only 10-15 minutes, why would somebody who has never played fighting games, and therefore has no love for them, want to practice the same thing over and over for 15 minutes just to be able to have a slim chance of winning a single round against somebody more experienced? It is not in any way casual friendly for a complete fighting noob. I am not saying it isn’t casual friendly to a person who has been playing fighting games for awhile, but for the complete noob it is not.
And as you can see in a ton of posts following yours, just about everyone agrees it is not friendly to the complete FG noob.
And honestly who gives a flying fuck if the execution barrier is lowered? How does that effect high level play at all? Just because people can now DP more easily and link a couple combos together doesn’t magically make them a pro does it? This doesn’t magically make a bad player amazing. If you’re good, then you are going to beat the scrubs who are mashing out DPs online because the execution barrier was lowered. If you’re losing to those kids, then you’re more of a scrub than they are and have no right to complain.
Oh I’m sorry, did I miss the part in SSF4 where they tell complete noobs to go to SRK if they want to learn to play the game at all? Oh, it’s not there? That’s right…
Another example of ignorance. As was said in the interview YOU POSTED, tailoring a game only to the hardcore is a surefire way for a company to either go bankrupt or to give up on that particular type of game. If a game is tailored purely to hardcore players then the company will not be making any money to make more of the games you love to play.
Also, I don’t know what gave you the impression that SF, VF and the VS series were designed to be competitive games. Just another ignorant remark by a disillusioned player I guess. They are considered to be competitive games because they were made well, that doesn’t mean that Capcom/Sega designed them with competitive gamers in mind. Shit, ST, one of the games you cited as being great competitively, was made when competitive gaming was essentially unheard of outside of playing to beat your friends. I really doubt Capcom said “Hey, let’s make a game completely tailored for competitive gaming, that’s never been done before!”. No, they said “Let’s make a damn good game that will sell well and make us money!”.
That’s what it’s all about for these companies, making a game that will be popular and make them as much money as possible, so they can continue to make those games that we all enjoy. To do so, some sacrifices had to be made, but fortunately for us competitive players, these sacrifices didn’t alter high level play, it didn’t allow scrubs to win tournaments, so why the fuck are you bitching?
So take your pick, play GG and ST 10 years from now when new shit looks like real life and nobody is even making arcade sticks and parts for the console you use any more, or tolerate the fact that noobs can actually enjoy the game now and your genre of choice is able to grow. As I said earlier in this post, a lower execution barrier does NOT IN ANY WAY EFFECT HIGH LEVEL PLAY!
Making inputs easier is fine, that’s not really the problem. It’s more the attitude of new players, not just in fighting games, but games period. I do think inputs shouldn’t be too hard, if only because I feel making absurd inputs doesn’t really add that much to the game. My problem is more with the fact that some inputs are quite honestly easy as hell, yet people still want them simplified. Hadoken is pretty simple, why does that need to be made even easier? 360s and 720s, sure, but a simple quarter circle forward motion? VF has rather simple controls if you take into account it’s 2 attack buttons and guard, but since the motions aren’t all pppppkk shit, people say “it’s too hard, fuck it”, and won’t even practice to get better, instead demanding the game be made easier for them. I mentioned dota earlier, cuz some shit was real hard for me when I first started playing, but I just kept at it til I got better. Basketball is the same thing, you may suck at first but if you keep practicing you’ll get better. Basketball is a pretty simple game, you can’t simplify it anymore than it is without fucking it up. Last thing we need is a SF game where you simply press “forward, punch” or “hold punch for two seconds then release” to do a hadoken, that would be fucked up.
This all boils down to money, Capcom isnt making games for tourney prestige, no matter how much we all wish they were.
They are making games for money, easy and flashy makes money in the games market.
SF4 and SSF4 has sold more copies then pretty much any other SF game in recent history, THATS the “excuse” for making games more casual friendly.
This is not rocket science guys.
Actually, even with the “dumbing down” of the new titles, guess whats getting top billing at ALOT of tourneys?
Same game, SSF4.
So lets see here, top game at a great deal of tourneys, selling like hotcakes, etc.
What exactly do you all think is going to dissuade Capcom from continuing to do the exact same thing over and over? A few thousand OG fans bitching? They will take the million + new fans money and ignore every single thing we say.
Why?
Because all they have to do is point you guys in the direction of all the tourney players playing…you guessed it, SSF4.
Get over it guys, I dont like it for many of the exact same reasons you guys dont, but guess what?
We have exactly 0 good reasons backing us up, none of our “issues” with SSF4 outweigh the positives for Capcom, not even close.
Sure to you (and me) fireball motions are very simple and you almost never miss one. But look at it from the perspective of a new player. How many Ken scrubs have you fought online that kept wiffing down fierce punches from fullscreen? They’re trying to do fireballs and, for whatever reason, they can’t. If fireball was mapped to one button, or forward and one button, no one would ever have a problem with it. It wouldn’t change one bit for high level players because they can do a fireball any time they want easy. Except with this it would also be easy for anyone else.
I am not advocating “press button to combo” or anything along those lines, but if a special move could be made simpler, is there really any reason for it not to be?
That’s a good way to kill the genre. Fix it so that a handful of people are the focus and the influx of fresh blood shrinks to nil.
Do you honestly think MvC2 was anything but a cash in? Capcom got lucky with that one. And depending on who you ask they made a lot of mistakes with SFA2 and 3. Developers don’t make competitive games. They make good games. If a game is good then the community makes it competitive. Some backwater development team could give us the deepest, most gratifying game ever made but if nobody cares to host tournaments and keep it alive it’s going to go the way of Eternal Champions.
not everyone feels that way about every game. sometimes you play a game & don’t take an immediate interest in it. you don’t take interest, that means you’ll never learn that game, even intuitively.
