a FG’s quality is not determined by how hard it is to do a move
That has nothing to do with my point. But yes, flowcharters can spam a move by wiggling their analog stick back and forth… That’s irrelevant though to the line you’re responding too.
Conversely, if your timing is utterly perfect but you have absolutely no idea what you’re fighting against or how to adapt to it, you won’t do very well either.
No, you have to make hard things easier to do to make it easier for new players to play.
For curiousities sake… are competitive games that have low execution barriers innately garbage?
I don’t know if your trolling or your actually believe this shit.
Its hard to tell.
Ok… the fact that a company corrects mistakes they’ve made with a game in order to make a better, more balanced game does not mean they are designing the game around competitive players, it means they’re trying to make a better game to make more money. The reason they listen to the competitive players’ input is because those players unarguably know the most about the game the company is trying to improve on. I don’t understand how you can interpret that to be them designing the game purely for competitive players.
As for all the Sega shit, again, the changes being made are being made to improve the game and hopefully improve sales. And they sponsor players to give the game more publicity and, again, hopefully improve sales. And the tutorial modes were, put in to make the game more noob friendly so that more people could pick it up to, A-FUCKING-GAIN, improve sales.
Money makes the world go round, even with game developers who make the games we love who we would like to believe are making the games purely for us to play competitively.
I’m speechless.
That is completely untrue.
facepalm
Yes, I’m speechless too.
Its obvious you don’t know about VF. And Sega for that matter. Hell, the first few sentences of your post had me fooled into thinking you don’t even play fighting games. I made sure to bold the parts of your post that were dumb as hell so everyone could see that fail first hand.
Stay free.
Yeah bro, keep telling yourself these companies are designing the games for the 1% of players that play competitively. What a fucking joke. You’re honestly a complete idiot if you believe that, and it’s obvious a good 50%+ of the community here understands that as well as I do.
These companies make games to MAKE MONEY! What do you and your disillusioned self believe they’re making these games for? Do you think they’re making them to lose money so that the few thousand “competitive gamers” can enjoy it a little more? What a joke. The companies making these games need to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to make their money back and make a worthwhile profit, and they won’t do that catering to the probably under 10000 competitive FG players.
And I won’t deny I don’t know a lot about VF, never really played it seriously, but again I’ll make the point that these companies have made the game in order to make money, not to make the EXTREMELY SMALL FRACTION OF COMPETITIVE GAMERS HAPPY! That’s just common sense, I don’t need to understand the game to know that.
Actually he’s right…Sega doesn’t give two shits about casual players.
I mean anyone who knows anything about VF knows that Sega is allergic to money.
Fucking this. Sega makes some quality, hardcore shit and they keep up on it.
But as a business, they are some crazy motherfuckers. Again, if the idiot that posted above you actually was a part of the VF community, played the game and knew what he was talking about he’d already know this. Hell, even a lot of people that don’t play VF know this.
Yeah Sega is not exactly doing anything to get themselves major bank with VF & the game actually strives because of that.
Case closed there bro, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There are still games that developers listen to the hardcore players, see SC2, Civ 5, KOF. I probably don’t know anything about VF just like you but I could reckon VF is more of a niche market and therefore depends on its hardcore scene to keep it a float, while SF is one of the more popularized fighting games and therefore can depend less on hardcore gamer support. Same with Smash Bros, where the casual scene is predominately more important (sales and foundation wise).
Well sorry I’m not up to par on one game I don’t play from the one company that according to you doesn’t really give two shits about making money from one of their games. Then again I suppose they can do that with one game when they’ve got a franchise like Sonic to make money off of.
My points are still valid in regards to just about every other mainstream fighter out there though. I may have been wrong as far as Virtua Fighter goes, but as you already admitted in your original post, other companies ARE in fact out to make money and are not catering only to the hardcore. My posts following yours were not directed only towards VF, but towards fighting games as a whole and games in general, although by your responses of calling me an idiot I’m assuming you didn’t understand that and you thought I was addressing only VF.
“a company corrects mistakes they’ve made with a game in order to make a better, more balanced game does not mean they are designing the game around competitive players, it means they’re trying to make a better game to make more money.” and other such lines were referring to fighters in general, not only VF. Sorry for the confusion no need to get all pissy about it, I freely admit I don’t know much about VF, but I hold to my points in regards to other games whether or not I was wrong about VF.
And again, my comments were directed towards fighters in general. I wrongly included VF in that category and for that I apologize. However, your other examples don’t hold up. Starcraft and Civilization are two of the most well known series in the world, so whether or not the company listened to hardcore players really wouldn’t have hurt the games. The reason the companies DID listen to the hardcore though was because the hardcore unarguably understand the game best and can help to balance it. As for KOF, I won’t touch on it as I’m not very familiar with the series.
The reason many (not all, DON’T BE MAD) companies consult with hardcore players is to improve balance and get their comments on new things being implemented in the game, because they understand how the games function so well. This does not in any way mean the game is being catered towards the competitive scene, it simply means the company wants to make a better game.
SFIV isn’t boring because of easy execution. God damn, play Viper, knock yourself the fuck out, or do stupid shit like EX Tiger Uppercut to Ultra. It’s boring because the speed, strategy, and pacing is shit. Super free mashed DPs and supers wouldn’t do a damned thing in a KoF game, and they wouldn’t make tournaments scrubby without FADCs or shit awful block stun.
tl;dr, SFIV doesn’t suck because you’re too hardcore, it sucks because it sucks.
Dude above me. Understand that designing the game to actually be better is catering to the hardcore players, as you can just make it flashy, full of bullshit, pander to pop culture, and then market the balls off of it to sell to the general shitty casual video game market. As it happens, Street Fighter II was lucky enough to come out during a time when America was tripping balls at Japanese martial arts stuff, while the current trend is influenced by that Iraq War thing.
I don’t get why there necessarily has to even be a divide. People seem to be under the impression that making a good game for “casuals” necessarily requires taking a different direction than making a game for the “hardcore.” It clearly doesn’t work that way. You know why? Street Fighter II. Who the hell would have guessed back in the early 90s that events like EVO and SBO would exist? I’m sure the people at Capcom were the last ones to expect something like that. All they did was create a game and refine it in each revision until Super Turbo. That game still gets play.
They weren’t trying to make a game for EVO. They were trying to make a good game. And because it was so good, it was a game everybody played. The people who played more became the “hardcore” we keep hearing about.
No it’s not, but there’s something that should be said about hard fighting games.
Look at 3S / MvC2 / ST. All those games are ones that are considered to be hard to learn/play. Despite their huge learning curves and heavy execution requirements, they have lasted for over a decade (each), and they are still going strong today.
But why do you have to make things easier for new players to play? It’s not like it’s necessary.
If S/SF4 had ST execution, do you think casual players would still be playing it?
No, they are not innately garbage. However, if you compare fighting games made before SF4 and fighting games made during/after SF4, you’d see that there is a big difference in quality.
“If [your objective] is to make the best possible SF game, then catering to novices is obviously going to get in your way.” ? Seth Killian, 1998
If by “going strong” you mean “played by a few thousand people, at best, competitively who refuse to move on”, then sure, they’re still “going strong”.
No, absolutely not. And therein lies the reason why you have to make things easier for new players to play. Sure, there’ll be the casuals that turn hardcore who stick around, but if SSF4 had ST execution it would not have the player base it currently does. Whether we like it or not, people nowadays are far lazier than they used to be, and that is why games are made easier.
Actually a neat quote, kind of a positive and a negative that they abandoned this attitude (positive in that obviously many more people are now playing the game, you all have stated the negatives).
I seriously don’t think either of those statements is true. Street Fighter IV wowed people with the “hey, I remember that!” factor that Capcom’s been on a roll with lately. Mega Man 9 was a straight up phenomenon and that game is bitch hard, even compared to the NES entries.
And for all the times I hear that gamers are lazier today than they were 20 years ago, nobody has ever provided a lick of proof. Believe it or not, most NES games were easy, too. And lots are easier than subsequent entries. Super Mario Sunshine is probably the hardest game in the series. And Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox is far more difficult than the NES trilogy. Castlevania: COTM on the GBA was more difficult than earlier entries because the enemies all took 15+ hits to kill. Anybody who says modern games are too easy isn’t looking hard enough.
And many of the most popular games from the 8 and 16 bit days were not exactly impossible. The Sonic games were overall pretty easy with the exception of one or two zones. Zelda (with the exception of II) and Metroid have always been easy. The NES entries were just a little more annoying to navigate because you could walk around for hours not knowing what the hell to do. Not all the Mega Man games are hard, either. Mega Man 5 and 6 are cakewalks. Arguably Mega Man 1 is, too, if you know a couple of tricks. Contra is tough but it also gives the option for 30 lives which pretty much makes the game a joke. Blaster Master isn’t that tough. You just get lost a lot and don’t have a password or save feature. That actually makes the game more annoying than hard.
But even the hardest NES games could be beaten within an hour or two if you know what you’re doing. That’s why they were hard to begin with. Developers needed to extend the life of a game they knew was short. So they often enforced continue limits and placed enemies in ways that would lead to inconvenient deaths that could only be avoided if you knew of the enemy beforehand. We all lived through it and had a hell of a lot of fun but it wasn’t exactly brilliant design to put a bird in just the right spot so that when you walked forward it swooped in and knocked you into a hole. All that does is punish you for not knowing it was there and make you memorize the enemy placement on the next attempt.
Since games today tend to be longer developers don’t need to do that kind of stuff anymore. So instead of spending time playing the same level over and over again to memorize where all the goddamn bats are, you spend that time playing through more content.
And if you want to talk about fighting games, what was really so hard about Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat? Maybe actually getting good was “hard” in the sense that it required a lot of work but the simple act of playing the game wasn’t exactly a challenge. That’s why the games were so popular. They were both accessible and intuitive even if they are broken by today’s standards. Nobody really cared back then so long as they felt comfortable with the controls.
Nothing whatsoever shows gamers today are lazier. In fact, the best argument against SFIV’s input system is that it was completely unnecessary. It makes the game more annoying to play but doesn’t really attract anybody who wouldn’t have already been attracted if it had ST or Alpha execution requirements. And, like most people have said, what good is it to have a lenient input system when it leads to new players wondering why the fuck they keep getting a teleport when attempting Bison’s ultra? How does that help bring in novices when what they’re going to think is “WTF the game is too hard to play because I can’t get the right move to come out.” When you don’t get the moves that you swear you’re doing right that leads to frustration. That chases people away from the game, particularly newbies.
I understand what Capcom was going for but their implementation was counterproductive. They made it easier to mash out shoryukens but made it harder to do the moves you actually want to do.
SF4 doesn’t just have an incredibly low execution barrier, it’s also just flat out stupid. Execution is an important part of fighting games, it ties in to the strategy and mind games.
What happens when you have massive reversal windows and retarded input shortcuts? You now have to very cautious of someone who is mashing buttons. That is just pathetic when it comes to game design.
It totally hinders the game. It doesn’t matter if it brings new players in if the game itself is stupid.
The hilarity is you really don’t need to dumb down a fighting game for casuals to love it. Let me show you a winning formula that would be guaranteed to sell a fighting game(in America, can’t speak for Japan):
- Add shitloads of unlockables. Like different costumes/palettes, unlockable characters, stages, music, anything.
- Add some indepth story mode thing(just look at Tekken’s Scenario Campaign, seen a lot of casual people saying they LOVED it)
- Add cool cg cutscenes or anime style cutscenes, but make sure you add them. Don’t go the VF route and have no endings.
- Make the characters all have either nostalgic or “coolness” value. With SF it was the old SF2 cast, hence why casuals jumped on board, since damn near everyone recognizes them, even people who don’t play games. If no nostalgia, make the characters stereotypically “cool and badass”, ie. guys and girls in leather, characters with crazy hairstyles, over the top fighting styles/attacks. Just look at Tekken, most of the cast looks fucking nuts, look at Hwoarang, Devil Jin, and Bryan Fury for god sakes.
- Optional, but make the game grimdark as hell and add tons of blood and gore and brutal moves. Japanese don’t seem to care for it and prefer crazy rainbow hitsparks(so if you wanna market a game for casuals in japan, do all of the above and just replace the gore with fancy hi res hitsparks that take up most of the screen), Americans do, the 3d MK games sold well despite being ass. MvC3 got an ok reception at E3, the new MK stirred casuals up into a frenzy because of all the crazy gore(the more hardcore players didn’t care as much til they saw the gameplay looking similar to an actual good MK game, since the blood doesn’t wow them so much).
- Make the game accessible. No, this doesn’t mean dumb down the entire game, at most you can either ensure characters all have somewhat easy move motions(ie. quarter circle forward, as that is pretty damn simple), or give an option where you can choose to play the character “easier” or harder, so if this was done with SF4, you can either choose Gief and use normal 360/720 inputs, or get the easier to do versions of his moveset. Perhaps make it so the moves do slightly more damage if you choose the harder moveset to balance it out. Make sure the system in the game is deep, as casuals won’t care about the system being deep so long as they can do moves, pros will actually enjoy the depth without being hampered by shit controls.
There ya go. As an example, some company makes a game targetting Americans, take the movie 300, make characters all crazy badass Spartans and Persian weirdos(of course Leonidas and Xerxes are playable, maybe Xerxes as a playable boss), fill the game up with unnlockable characters, costumes, and music and stages; add cg cutscenes/endings in some fancy story mode separate from “arcade” mode, add tons of blood and gore, simple inputs that don’t fuck up controls, and a gameplay system that is deep. Bam, instant hit, the casuals are all happy unlocking outfits and seeing blood splatter eevrywhere anytime they hit someone and can do moves without too much trouble(granted they still will need to practice, don’t dumb shit down to one button specials or some stupid shit like that); the pros are happy because they get all of the above in a game that is actually deep and chock full of shit they can have a blast with, and without crappy controls hampering their gaming experience.
I commented on execution earlier but why is everyone fixating on it like that is the only thing these new games do wrong? The entire game, including strategy is dumbed down. SSF4 gives you so many ways to escape pressure, a ridiculous comeback system, and the ability to make your get-off-me move completely safe, throws do shit for dmg and you can defend against them crouching, etc etc etc.
Best example to illustrate is Akumas vortex. Shit like that is staple in so many other fighting games. If your opp is on the floor you run shit till he dies. But in SSF4 that is so unheard of it needs a special name lol.
You obviously don’t know shit about VF lol. SEGA/AM2 caters to their small hardcore fanbase so exclusively almost to a fault. The game is great because of it but they have a stupid ranking system, refuse to sell their game even to arcade operators (only for rent) and no support of their foreign fanbase.
SEGA not wanting to make any money is a common joke.