When do you think we will see the next big thing in fighting games?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
61

It all has to do with accessibility. Just look at SF2 when it first came out. You had 8 characters and 6 buttons. Each character had 2 to 3 special moves and that was it. Simple to execute and whatnot. The gameplay was simplistic. What started killing the fighter over time was the advancement in the gameplay. And not only that, but the hardcore gamer had a hand in all of that as well.

The casual gamer did a short kick into a fireball. 2 hits. Simple enough. The hardcore gamer went and decided “hey, two hits is not enough to satisfy me.” Now we start going into the whole strats and tactics and development of big combos and big damage direction. The casual gamer who likes his shit simple was scared by these crazy tactics and figured that it would be too much work to even develop a way to get out of it. So they went and played their adventure and RPG titles. Then there are fireball traps which annoy the hell out of all gamers. The casual gamer can’t do NOTHING but jump out of the way of something. The hardcore gamer? He goes for style and finesse and WILL find a way to get out of the corner during a fireball trap. I mean, consider this bullshit as you may see it. But, lets be real here, WE destroyed our own scene(partially).

Then theres the lack of support from the big companies. Ok. Name a time and place where Capcom or ANY other fighting game developer EVER sponsor a tourney in the U.S.? Name one time? Exactly. Everything here is paid for by whomever decided to hold the event. In Japan its completely different. The big game companies sponsor tournaments all the time. Of course its more serious over there because the players are a lot more dedicated to get better. But don’t be fooled, they have their fair share of casual gamers as well, just not as repressed as ours. And then theres Sony’s “well, we don’t want 2D on our consoles” policy. That is the gayest shit to ever come about from ANY company. The Dreamcast was the first of the three next gen systems of this generation to even have the best graphics at the time. Hell, some of the games on that system still look better than some of the PS2 titles. Sega never backed away from the 2D market. Of course the Naomi drive is their hardware. But in all fairness, they supported all 2D titles. They even had network modes in them so you can play online. Of course that didn’t last too long because the DC’s demise was inevitable.

Its a tried and true arguement/debate/whatever. But the “next big thing” you guys were looking for was the Dreamcast. That was the answer to all of fighting game fans dreams right there. Of course the ports of SF3 and SFA3 were screwed up, BUT STILL, it was the only console with EVERY fighter you can imagine. The demise of the DC was obviously Sega’s fault for not marketing the damn thing well enough. And yes, I do realize that it still would have been the beginning of the console tourney, but when you look at it from a positive light, which console of the big three(Xbox, PS2, GC) have the most fighters?

62

I think that capcom thought of every possible way to play as 2D which was great.

Unfortunately with stringer systems like x-box 360, and PS3 I feel that they want to flex their muscle over what their system can do.

Therefore I think 2D fighting only exists on portable systems like PSP and DS.

3D technology is where the fighting category is heading towards.

63

i agree with what youre saying, but namco has nationals for their tourneys every time a new Tekken came out (also i think for soulcalibur as well.) For t5, there was rgionals all across the USA with the winner getting entry into SBO, it was bronson.

Capcom used to sponsor SF tourneys back when SF was uh…big. The last Capcom sponsored tourney was the A3 nationals with Valle and Daigo in the finals.

The problem is noone cares aside from the hardcore community for aforementioned games, among many other things. I think theyve been discussed in detail during the past week, most people here should know wha’s wrong with our scene already.

64

There is no big thing coming. Probably not ever. The fighting game community has become so stagnant and so self absorbed that it is pretty much doomed to die. The ONLY way I can see fighting games staying alive is if we can get new talent into the community. There will be no game that magically gets everyone into fighting games again so that there will be a limitless influx of scrubs for everyone to beat up on and claim superiority over like everyone seems to want to do.

What the OP’s question REALLY says to me is “Will some random game come save us from stagnation and death?” The answer is no. What has to happen is that if you want you want everything to stay alive everyone is going to have to accept and teach the newer players on what the real deal with fighting games is.

But this is really off on a tangent. The answer is still never. Unless things change we are pretty much boned.

65

It seems really there’s a difference between the fighting game’s fan of the “next best thing” and the casul fan’s “next best thing.”

Casual fans have always been attracted to something that appeals to their sense of what a game is supposed to be…entertainment. It’s been pretty easy to see after SF2, that this school of thought had basically divided the fanbase into such groups. Whether it was because of Capcom’s constant revisions that caused this division, i.e. the casual looking for something different; we don’t know. But it goes to show the next “big” thing might not be in our best interests.

Heck DOA could be considered the next big thing, but because we haven’t unanimously tossed in our support for it; that might be what’s holding it back. So I dunno, I imagine the next big thing for fighters is what when a game will equal or adapt to the changes of the culture of the gaming industry. First it was 2D, now it is 3D. Who knows what the future will bring.

OC

66

Orange Cat summed it up best I think…

67

Well said best post so far, I really dont think a relatively new game fighting game developer is going to create a game with the depth of virtua fighter, graphics and fast action of doa, and the interesting acessible characters of tekken,now the would be the next big thing
because it would satisy both the hardcore and mainstream gamers,
either that or a game would have to come along and change the way we play fighting games, but it would have to be one or the other, and yes I agree about doa, but without the support it will continue to suffer, but you cant even mention doa here without getting attacked even by the moderator lol, I could never understand why people here are so sensitive about doa lol

68

My prediction of the next fighting game will invovle 3D envoronments.

Picture a 3D maze where hidden powerups are hidden. Fighters would run around the maze trying to find each other. Once you find each other you can choose to stand your ground or run away.

If your opponent finds a powerup they may be too powerful that you have to run away until their powers wear off or until you find one also.

Obviously the maze will not be too confusing and can be memorized for the expert gamers.

That’s my prediction.

69

Hahahha…PowerStone 3 anyone??? LOL

70

Capcom’s basically dropped the ball when it comes to fighting games. I’m not anticipating anything new from them in that field with the exception of flimsy handheld ports of A3. You shouldn’t be either.

On a side note. Arc Systems is rumored to be working on an entirely new fighting game for the ps3 (called “BB” I believe).

71

Sounds like a 3-D version of MvC2 to me.

72

MVC2 is pretty good but I dont think it has all of those great qualities, come on man

73

dont diss powerstone, well powerstone 1 anyway, if they worked their way around inhancing it it’ll wipe the floor with ALOT of games

i dont know what kinda beat’em up/maze game that guys talking about but all i know is it sounds fucking weird

74

You can’t blame the harcore gamer for exploring a game. It’s like blaming professional atheletes from making the competition stiffer because they find better training/bat swinging/competitive advantage X.

75

i cant believe i missed that post, if it werent for people like us fighting games depth would be…

…fucking hell its actually unimaginable what kind of fighting games would be out now :confused:

all forms of fighting need to improve because people dont like to lose, GAMES are created not to just laugh fuck who plays chess and moves a horse right next to the king, thats what will happen dammit LOL fighting games ANYTHING needs to have something to stimulate our brains man, EVERYTHING needs to stimulate the mind or its just a waste of time

to some people fighting games could be a waste of time but just like any tool if you know how to use it you can get alot out of it, imagination is more important than wisdom

if you want something use your imagination and if your happy rest in your wisdom

but by all means do not debate another souls road, because the man who drives to change somebody who is unchangable will only change himself

76

The thing that led me to 2d fighters was flash. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a super move in street fighter alpha, the screen going dark and the power grow into ryu’s hands. Casual gamers need to watch and be attracted to these games, and I think mvc2 does the best job of it. The technology we have now could drive a 2d engine with millions of sprites at once, and you can do a lot of things graphically with that. The technical side is what made me stick with these games, but I started because they looked so damn cool. There needs to be more of that.

77

VF5 could end up being the next big thing.

78

I agree with you there. Only thing is with some of that flash comes that overwhelming feeling. Some newcomer to fighting games might get scared away from MVC2 when he sees something like Magneto’s infinite and thinks to himself “i can never do that shit.” But then again, its bound to attract more people then drive them away.

If you ask me, I have a feeling that the next big thing in fighters will be 3D fighters, i’m not talking like T5 and SC3, but something like Powerstone. Wasn’t the fighting game Capcom announced that they were revealing something like that? It played similar to Dynasty Warriors? That might actually lead up to the new thing in fighting games. In 2D fighters you’ve got stuff like wake up/mind games, combos, cross overs, cancels. But a 3D fighter where you can interact with the environment will add another level of depth.

Now first off when I say this, you can probably think of a number of games that already does this, but how many add the depth of 2D fighters to it? I don’t see myself performing cross ups and wake up games in Power stone, its always walk up to your enemy and tap 1 of the 2 attack buttons. If you had a fighter with interactive environments and the depth of a 2D fighter, we might have something there.

I like this idea. Not only do you have the extra depth of knowing when to pick your battles, but if you do you have to know how to fight them to the extent of a game like 3S. Powerups may or may not be such a good idea, it depends if they have any negative effects. Perhaps theres a certain power ups that make you light as a feather, your fast and can jump high, but your knocked down easy and susectible(sp?) to juggles. Its stuff like that that makes you think, and thats what I want in my fighting game. But then again, its unrealistic shit like that that drives people away (like smash brothers.)

Talking about this reminds me of Ehrgeiz, not the greatest fighter but I thought it was pretty fun, the environments added slight strategy to it. But when Square did it they added one thing in a fighting game that I have never seen before and haven’t seen since.

Thats right, i’m talkin about the Just frame technique

In a fighter where you can move in 3 dimensions, its hard to perform attacks while hitting the directional pad. With the just frame technique you had to time your button presses right in order to access some of the bigger combos. When I first relearned all this stuff I thought “big deal, so you have to wait a few seconds before you hit another button.” But then I checked out some of the more complex stuff (fucking Prince Doza is nuts, he’s got attack strings that link into other attack strings, most in depth character in the game IMO) it was shit like that in his move list that made me think “this shit looks hard, but it would be awesome to do” and then I got that feeling. The same feeling you get when you watch something crazy on a match/combo video or when you first start playing a fighting game. Now not only do I have to master this shit, but i’ve also have to worry about my opponent throwing a crate in my face, or getting to higher ground to power up his projectile.

When I read the thread about the Gundam fighting games having tourneys over in Japan along with match videos and everything. I thought “they might be on to something here.” Of course its not huge because it doesn’t have that special ingredient other fighters had that drew in such a crowd. But hopefully someday, a fighter will come around with it.

This is just my opinion on things. The fighting game scene is slowly dying, its like it has AIDS, theres nothing we can do about it. Capcom dropped the ball, and SNK is just bringing out more and more of the same thing (new characters and small variations, but nothing inovative.) We can wait for the next ‘Big thing’ in fighting games, but as most of you said, its not going to come. The only other thing we can do to revive it is for each and every one of us to step out of our houses right now and start recruiting people into the fighting game scene. Sure we all have friends who are slowly drawing into it, but thats not enough. We’d have to convert the poppulation like SFII did back then. But not only would we have to draw all these people to these games, we have to KEEP them there. As one of you said, SFII was cool for its time, but casual gamers would only play it for a few weeks then shelve the shit for the next flavor of the month.

So say the next big thing in fighting games did come out. It was like SF2 and everyone was all over it, arcades were once again revived. Do you think this will last forever?

No.

People will be all over it, but then 80% of those people will be bored of it and go on to the next RPG or other game. Don’t get me wrong, this would take a long time as SFII held its fans for a long long time, but my point is that it will happen eventually, people will grow tired of the game unless something as inovative as SFII came out on a regular basis.

I can sum it up in an analogy. Fighting games are like nautral resources. We discovered them and there the shit for many years, but everyone knows that they are going to end somewhere down the line and we’re going to have to come up with some other way to live. Naturally if we don’t do this consistently, we will die. Now say we do come up with a new natural resource, its all good, but we know eventually, somewhere down the line, it might take hundreds, thousands of years, but IT WILL run out.

Phew… Ok i’m done ranting :sweat:

79

I see most of the people here saying that 2D fighters are already dead… for that I just would like those guys to understand that the planet is a little bit larger than just north america and that if the games are not released in the US doesn’t mean that the genre is dead!

in the past 2 years, the below-mentioned fighters released in the arcades in Japan:

  • Rumble Fish2
  • Guilty Gear XX Slash
  • Melty Blood Act Cadenza
  • Samurai Spirits Zero Special
  • KOF 2003 and XI
  • Hokkuto no Ken
  • Neo Geo Battle Coliseum
  • Capcom Fighting Jam (even if this game is “Shaytte”, it’s still a rather new release…)
  • and I am probably forgetting 2 or 3 other ones.

Some of the above games, like Melty Blood or GGXX SLash are more played in the arcades that tekken 5 and Soulcaliber 3 (and waaaaAAAAAaaay more than any other non-fighting game!) in Japan. The Sega center in Akihabara has 18 lined up GG XX Slash machines and they almost always all occupied! (even 5 months after the game released!)

…not to mention that Melty Blood graphs are crap! (possible to port it in a sega saturn and make it better probably!) …but the game just rocks!

In France, the Official fighting game federation has just started its activity, and the most members are playing GG and SF3.3. A good start for NEOGEO Battle Coliseum also!

I think that 2D fighting still has a good fan potential, and as long as there will be demand, the developers will make good 2D games!

Even if in US people prefer to play US-games such as Microsoft’s Halo and stuff doesn’t mean that the 2D genre is dead!

80

I should have mentioned my entire post was aimed at the U.S fighting game scene.

I also forgot to mention this:

The fighting game scene outside the U.S (specifically Japan) is going the way alot of video game shit has gone. Its going to stay alive and well due to popularity. I’m an avid RPG gamer and I have to import alot of these RPGs over here because the companys don’t think they’ll sell so well here, but over in Japan they have fan clubs and partys for them, cosplayers galore (GOOD ones) stuff I could never even imagine over there that I would just kill to have over in the U.S.

Japan in a way is kind of like a filter, if something in the land of the rising sun doesn’t do very hot over there, chances are good that it won’t be seen here in the U.S (there are many exceptions to this rule however.) As long as these games stay popular over there, there will always be new ones. Not to mention arcades are still very popular over there and are a huge factor in it.