Like when people upload videos of every bnb of every character an hour after the game comes out. Idk if its a pride thing but I hate having to wait to see what kind of strategies someone else came up with until I play online in a fighting game. Maybe I’m not smart enough. Idk.
Anyone else feel the way I do?
By messing around in training mode. Did this for anarchy reigns and jojo, found plenty of stuff by doing random shit. Also calculating once you understand how the scaling works makes finding the best combos much easier.
Because once you get an understanding of the system its quite easy to go into practice mode and look for things. And seasoned players can look at a characters attacks and get a feel for how they should be played.
Generally you find out what moves cancel into special moves, then find out if you can link or chain into a move that can cancel. Then you optimize.
You play by feel. Frame data and hit box viewers are cute and all, but you’ll never replace good old practice and experimentation. People try out different things, test it out in a competitive environment, change what doesn’t work, and keep what does.
Same way we did before the advent of online videos and guides - spending time playing the game and testing out stuff.
Grinding it out in training mode, and by just playing a lot. I think we all get into situations where we stray away from a certain tactic in certain situations, just to see it works. Sometimes trying something out of the ordinary leads to discovering something you didn’t know about your character.
I always made sure to the read the latest issue of GamePro and their Pro Guides to get all the top tier combos and strategies from the Pro Guru’s!
This fukin guy god damn that was some funny shit! I was not expecting gamepro to come up at all. Did your combos have the hair raising emote to tell how great it was?
But seriously training mode, and be glad you have the internet. Imagine doing all that research for combos and such and then apply having to play a quarter each time to just learn the game. and that doesn’t even take into account that you could be ready for a breakthrough and then you have to defend your turf against someone else who may have already figured something out and he is waiting to fuck you up with it! I hate online but god damn “the age of exploration” was not kind to my wallet.
Still despite arcade thunderdome era, looking back on it man it was a hell of a ride.
People have been playing FG’s for 25 years now, and they often hold similarities with one another. Combos usually flow in a few very distinct ways in 2D fighters, so once you know how one game works it becomes easy to figure stuff out in another
Actually, I got a question on damage scaling, or how to find it.
Do you just find the damage for each move, then link two of them, find the total damage and compare the damage from the second hit to your expected value?
Pretty much what the other said. If you have the frame data too, anybody can come up with combos.
You also have to remember that fans of the game and/or people who have been watching it during development will pick things up during demo/gameplay vids etc. Then they try it out in training mode and expand on it.
I remember when the first vids of SFIV came out people were downloading them from YouTube, watching them frame by frame and multiplying by 2 in an attempt to get early frame data.
Most day one tech is actually old tech or at least old tech modified for the new system.
The only people starting a new game as a new game are button mashers and people who didn’t play any other fighting games. The first thing I do if any video game that isn’t the first game in that series is figure out which stuff from previous games in the series still work. Even with a new game, I’ll test out things that worked in SF, Guilty gear, tekken or whatever core game is most similar to it.
Try out every form of cancel that works in any other fighting game and see if it works in this game. Then you can use whatever the new system is giving you to pull more damage out of what previous games gave you.
I usually just find out ways to counter character specific situations but I still manage to get my cheeks mailed to me. I think I just suck at fighting games with or without guides.
I can’t add much to what others have already said. Basically just play the game a lot, test out everything you can think of, try shit that might not work in situations that you have seen (or not), etc.
Exploring fighting games is one of my favourite parts of playing them. Just picked up Battle Fantasia and Phantom Breaker Extra and been playing them with a few friends that aren’t “super hardcore” like I am. I’ve purposely NOT gone online to look anything up about the systems and we are just figuring them out ourselves, it’s nice to be able to do that. I would recommend playing a poverty game or something and trying to figure out the systems and stuff on your own, just to have that experience for analysing other games and it’s also fun.
Like others have said, training mode pretty much, and also, I usually do arcade mode with everyone to get a feel for how they play, which helps you learn them and their specific mechanics at a base level, so you can grasp how they’re used, and how to be fought against. But yeah basically just mess around as others have said
I’m honestly not a fan of looking at shit online that much.
I actually figured out that playing arcade while looking at the opponents frame data helps too so i know what to punish. The only thing I don’t know how to do is deal with grapplers. If someone could link me to a thread that covers this I’d gladly appreciate it.
I’m normally too terrible to figure out damage scaling mechanics if they’re not advertised, but I learned to do my own homework when SFxT came out. Helped me a lot with JoJo ASB cause there’s STILL no frame data for that game, lol. My basic rules for figuring out a game day 1:
Find out what your basic starters are. Character’s fastest move. Character’s fastest low. Character’s most powerful special-cancellable normal or string for power-punish combos on REALLY unsafe moves. Those are gonna determine where your combos come from and what their purpose is going to be. (If I start from a crouching light, I don’t care so much about damage as the ability to hit-confirm at multiple ranges so that I can react to “random” hits. With a big punish combo for whiffed DPs, I don’t need a confirm, I just need as much damage as I can get for the bar I have.
Find out if you can combo off anti-airs. Practice anti-airs versus various jump-ins and jump angles if possible and grind combos till your eyes bleed. To me anti-air is generally God in these games. The first thing I want to do to control the neutral game is make my opponent bleed for jumping at me, which will hopefully make it much easier to predict what people will do on the GROUND at various ranges.
When trying to come up with combos, I usually start by coming up with the easiest thing I can finish and gradually filling it out as more information comes out. I care way more about how a combo ENDS than how much damage it does – I try to get what damage I can, but I focus primarily on combos that end cleanly with knockdown or into really favorable resets (where it’s CLEAR that I’m advantaged on hit and my options are not only hard to react to, but also rewarding…I can live with them being unsafe if guessed as long as there’s reward to accompany the risk).
Find out what moves are plus on block, plus on hit (if it looks questionable, OR if it looks like a link is possible), minus on block, or minus on hit (hopefully this is not the case for anything but an instant overhead, but unpleasant surprises do happen). The basic test I use (stolen from Dandy J, who is much smarter than me) to know if a move is GENERALLY advantaged on hit/block (in Injustice and JoJo) is to do a mirror match with the dummy, set the dummy to empty vertical jump (if there’s jump startup/recovery…kinda hope there’s at least ONE of those in the game, lol), hit the dummy with the attack I want to test, and hold up to vertical jump myself. Whoever jumps first is at frame advantage.
This was important for a long time in KOF XIII before detailed frame data came out, and it was REALLY important in Injustice because a lot of the in-game frame data for that game was flat-out WRONG, lol. (Aquaman Trident Rush was advertised as somewhere in the -100s when it’s really like -8 or something. Doomsday Earthshaker was said to be minus on block when it was actually PLUS, lol. Fuck Earthshaker.) So this is a basic lab skill you can apply to all but the WEIRDEST 2D fighters.
Determine a basic mixup flowchart depending on my character. If they’re a grappler, find out what beats my command throws and see if I can develop options that beat those responses. Learn what my fastest overhead, low, and throw options are.
Experiment with meter-build combos. Find out if there’s any kind of compromise to be made between combos that do damage, combos that end with a favorable situation for oki/resets, and combos that build meter. Know at least rough meter thresholds for when you have enough meter to do a certain bar-dump combo so that you can have a basic flowchart in place.
Those are generally the VERY first steps I take with a new game I know nothing about. A lot of this sounds like common sense, but for many people (including myself) it won’t really sink in until you’ve learned half a dozen games at the basic competitive level, and learn to recognize game elements that become important determinants in match play.