What is the justification on making games more "casual friendly?"

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
101

I think the issue over “casual friendly” vs. “hardcore intensity” is less about general difficulty/complexity as it is the relative difficulty/complexity to the player’s level at the time. In other words, the learning curve. The “splitting down the middle” Street Fighter IV did I think was an example of Capcom attempting to craft something like a gradually rising bar. How successful they were is up for debate but I think what they were going for was something like:

Step 1: Easy to access. New players can get the feel of the game with extreme ease.
Step 2: The process becomes more intense as they play, learning how to properly apply what they picked up so easily.
Step 3: Eventually getting more intense with 1-frame links and the like. The game is back loaded with all the hard stuff as the last few things to learn.

I’m going to use VF as an example because I think it works for what I’m getting at. VF is pretty front loaded. It’s not very newbie friendly because right away a new player realizes that just moving around the arena properly requires some effort. There’s a couple of hurdles placed right at the beginning. And what do you know? It’s less successful than other games. I don’t think it’s because it’s hard. I think it’s because people run into the “hard” earlier than they’d like.

When people complain about things being “too hard” or “too complex” I think they’re imagining it like a track with a series of hurdles. They don’t want to get hit with a hurdle too high right at the beginning. If they do they call that “too complex.” If the game is back loaded, though, those “too complex” things don’t look so bad because by the time players realize they’re there they’ve already become pretty proficient.

What they want (and what I suppose Capcom was going for) was something like a track with hurdles of gradually increasing height. I actually think that’s the ideal. The game is accessible but has enough meat to sustain a long life. The problem is that not too many games get it right. Either they oversimplify it and inadvertently peel off a lot of the extra layers that would have made the game more interesting in the long term, or they end up doing something wonky like SFIV and have super lenient inputs mixed with 1-frame links. I think Tekken is one of the more successful at it. Super Turbo, too. Maybe the Alphas.

102

Wow tonythetiger. That post makes a lot of sense and I never thought about it that way.

103

Agreed, and the explanation for VF was spot on.

104

I think Capcom fails to understand the needs/wants of both casual and hardcore players. Casual players don’t need the inputs to be as ridiculously lax as they are in SF4, and hardcore players don’t want 1 frame links all over the place. I do wonder if Capcom is even aware of the effect their concessions to casual play have on the game. I know when SSF4 was being tested someone showed them autocorrect and they had no idea it even existed.

105

That’s probably not unusual. A lot of mechanics that become standard at higher level play are there by accident. I highly doubt somebody at Capcom decided that piano reversals would be a great “high level” technique. I don’t necessarily hold it against a developer for not knowing every little detail about their game. I do hold it against them when they mess something up that worked before in an attempt to fix a problem that never existed. SFIV’s inputs are one of those things.

Same with forced 1-frame links. The 1-frame link thing bothers me even more because it’s like forced difficulty. Like somebody said “We need to throw in something for the hardcore crowd…so let’s give them this hard shit.” It feels oddly tacked on and there for no reason at all beyond “we want to appease the hardcore.” That’s a pretty simple minded interpretation of the hardcore crowd, I think.

106

Yeah Tony, I agree with your post. That makes sense indeed…
Still:

But why?
What has changed over the years?

What happened to the “Damn, I suck! …but I love the game, …I must get better!” way of thinking?

[cool story bro]
I picked up Modern Warfare 2 not so long ago. I’ve never played any FPS before… the first week, I sucked ass huge time!
I wasn’t able to coordinate my thumbs to control both my character AND the camera…
Damn, it was driving me nutz!

Even with the aim assist, I was shooting 90% of my mags in the sky not killing anyone.
I was getting killed in campaign mode on recruit every fucking 2 minutes, just because I wasn’t able to control the damn character!

I got to a point were my controller was about to fly out of the windows, and I felt like strangling puppies with my teeth just to cool down the rage!

I didn’t spam COD forums saying “your fucking game is too hard! it’s Horseshit! fuck your game, and fuck you! Infinity Wards should make is easier! …like enemies should just die on sight or something!”.

Especially knowing that other members of these boards were playing FPS since Half life, had FPS controls figured out for ages, and probably went through MW2 campaign mode in a few hours!

Instead… I kept playing, and getting killed until I got used to the controls, and figured shit out!
Now, I am having a fantastic time playing it! (I still freak out when I get killed, but I get killed a LOT less!)
[/cool story bro]

Basically, you can replace “modern warfare 2” by “SF”: World warrior" and Infinity Wards by “Capcom”, and the exact same thing happened back in the 90s when the first SF came out.

Damn, me and my friends were almost giving up on the following:

  • f, d, df+p?!? …that’s what I am fucking doing! why there is no “Ayuken” comming out?! kicks the cab
  • Pffff! you’re cheating! how can you do a “shonik boom” if your character is not moving backwards?!? kicks the asian kid at the local arcade who could actually play the game
  • Zangief is soooo weak! he’s too slow, and he can’t even jump over fireballs!

People making fun of us because we sucked were just motivating us to train and get better to kick their asses and make them shut the fuck up next time we play!

Not a single second did we think about complaining to Capcom about anything!

When you start something you’ve never done before, you ARE GOING to be lame in your first steps!
This is what is supposed to motivate us to get better!
(This statement is valid for absolutely everything! not only gaming!)

107

and to add the “kryptonite” to the 1-frame link hardcore crowd, they gave us wide open reversal windows for the casual crowd to get away with. Along with no blockstrings for said easy reversal windows.

108

Easy. Fighting games damn near fell off the map. Think about it. Between MvC2 and SFIV what did the fighting game landscape look like? Certainly nothing like it did back in the 90s, that’s for sure. Tekken and Soul Calibur were still chugging along, as was DOA. VF kept to its tiny corner. Guilty Gear was gaining steam, too, but some versions weren’t even coming out in the U.S. Other than that we were getting on and off KOF games and really terrible 3D MKs. Intermixed were one off games that barely anybody noticed like Tao Feng, Kakuto Chojin, Capcom Fighting Evolution, etc. Then, of course, you couldn’t even PLAY the games with anybody because arcades were shutting down left and right and online either didn’t exist or sucked ass.

You can’t really use other genres as a measuring stick because fighting games weren’t exactly healthy at the time. First Person Shooters were. People were flocking to the newest Halo. Meanwhile, Third Strike and CvS2 were the best people had for years.

Capcom did what it thought needed to be done. Give people a reason to not only come back to the genre (by using the SFII cast and flashy supers as the draw) but actually stick around for the long haul (by making the game as accessible as possible). I don’t think they were wrong with their reasoning. It worked. And, really, the game isn’t bad. It’s not perfect but it’s far from bad.

109

Artyu, your arguement would have probably been better of you used a game other than MW2, which is probably the biggest easy-mode shooter I’ve played. In fact, Capcom tried to dumb down SF4 because it works really well with other games, like MW2.

Also, tony, I totally agree with everything you post, good shit.

110

hmmmm… fair enough.
(I still think controls shouldn’t be made “easier” though. ;o)

Sure! …and that’s ok.
I am not actually criticizing SF4.
I just feel that the game has been made “accessible” enough for (almost) everyone to enjoy.
I just don’t want to see a possible SF5 with dumbed down controls just because people suck and prefer the game to be made easier instead of practicing their execution.

EDIT:
@ Hace:

Well… Sorry for being a total noob at FPS. I have never played the genre before… I am and old fart from the arcade stick generation, and analog tits on the PS3/Xbox controllers never really felt easy to use in the first place.

MW2 is the only FPS I have ever tried, so I have no idea how it is hard/easy compared to other ones… It was “hard” enough for me to learn how to play it.

But your post just proves that MW2’s controls were not “hard”-> I just sucked.
The issue was with me lacking practice, and not Infinity wards making games for “Hardcore gamers” or something.

I am sure that if I would have started my FPS “career” with a harder shooter, the result would have been the same.

Atryu’s gaming rule:

I can’t get shit down -> I suck -> do I love the game? -> yes -> learn and get better.
… -> No -> fuck it.

111

Oh, I agree. I wish there was a “hardcore” mode you could turn on for controls, it’s not like it would hurt anything.

For the record though, I think MW2 has an aiming assist ;D

112

“Dumbed down” is actually circular. At some point, if the controls get too lenient it ends up wrapping right back around into hard again. Once it gets so lenient that you get the wrong move whenever you try to do something it ends up forcing the player to be so perfect with their execution in order to combat the leniency that we’re right back to hard. Finding the balance is the key.

At the same time, moves have to be intuitive. I’ll be damned if anybody seriously tells me that Geese’s pretzel is a good motion. Now there’s one “hard” move I’d love to never see again.

Point is, I subscribe to Albert Einstein’s theory: “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But no simpler.” If something is hard there better be a damn good reason for it to be. Hard for hard’s sake isn’t a good reason.

113

I like that! :china:

I has… and I was USING it… still… :crybaby:

114

this is another thing that kills me about the casual FPS crowd playing fighters. They’ll come over, play lets say SF4. They then bitch and moan about how hard it is to learn the controls and remember what is what. Then they’ll run back to playing a FPS be it on console or PC and clearly don’t see they’re pushing the same amount of buttons just differently.

115

Fuck TonyTheTiger, laying down some words of wisdom.

Agree with everything you said.

116

Walk up low forward fireballs turning into dp is very common, and personally have trouble getting a crouching dp move in a combo without supering, for what it’s worth. Also, I happen to negative edge moves at random, since it is so lenient with certain moves.

117

FPS control is more intuitive though. Point and shoot. It takes skill to be able to do well but what you’re doing has an intuitive connection to what’s happening on screen. Not so in fighting games where the inputs to do moves are essentially arbitrary.

118

I read that first and got sad. :sad:

I still have problems with Bison’s teleport coming out when I try doing his ultra once in a while. It happens much less now that I know what the deal is but its enough to piss me off. And whenever I try playing pad that just compounds the problem.

119

I think mvc2 actually was very noob friendly(not at high level), but even then the casual crowd still complain about it. So I agree its not the execution thats the problem, its the fact that new players end up losing terribly when ever they play a hardcore player. And lets face it kids these days just dont know how to take a loss.

I understand that making an online matchmaking system that prevents casual players from play against hardcore players is never gonna be 100% but its definitly needed.

Maybe what can be done is like CVS2 on xbox for example with its EO mode, a matchmaking system could seperate players using EO(casuals) from non-EO players(hardcore).

When I was first getting started one of the biggest problems were how little info Fighting games come with, they never have a tutorial even on the basic things.

Fighting games today should have built in tutorial modes for atleast the basics, although if I had it my way I would have character specific tutorails with Frame data, hitboxes, invincible frames and other properties.

120

yea I guess you’re right. camping isn’t the same as turtling.