Cause every Capcom fighting game after CvS2 was shit.
Slow, braindead shit.
It’s a crappy 2D game. If characters moved faster players would simply cross up constantly all the time but for the most part most players are too chicken shit to do anything besides spamming when the other guy is blocking or simply walk back and use a projectile, that’s how fucking stupid they are.
Jumping is the new walking.
I hate the way this game makes me jump around like an idiot thanks to slow walk speed, quick jumps and crap AAs. “Don’t jump” is *not *good advice anymore.
Scrub.
exactly this. look at how slow the throw tech and launch animations are… they’re super long and obnoxious for the sake of “accessibility”. yet theres so many unneeded game design choices that would really make the game more accessible if they were changed or removed (changing the number of inputs for mash moves, for example).
If you look at how Capcom designed SFxT, it’s clear they have no idea how accessibility works. I doubt that’s why they did it.
For example, the UI is the complete opposite of good accessibility. Game clarity is super important to newer players and they put in the gem system/UI on top of like system mechanics that have no apparent use.
I’m pretty sure that SFxT was either retooled from something else, a guy higher than them tried to shoehorn shitloads of stuff into the game for money, or that their designers are fairly incompetent.
That ST vs SSFIV walkspeed comparison is dumb. ST’s stages don’t zoom out as characters move apart, and the game runs maybe 60% faster.
Great post.
How can you judge the relative speed of two games detached from factors like walkspeed? Aren’t such things what make up how fast a game is?
If you’re just talking about frameskipping, that’s not really a good metric for how much faster a game plays in practice… it ultimately still comes down to how fast various things are in gameplay.
edit: I guess the point you are making is that what matters is how fast walking is relative to all the other stuff in the game, not its absolute speed. I think this is wrong for some purposes, since a player’s reaction time remains constant across games. And also IMO it just feels shitty to move around so slowly. But yeah the difference in the relative speed of walking to other stuff in each game is probably not as pronounced as the difference shown in that video, though there is still a significant difference I think.
well the answer to the original question the op posed:
“why are walk speeds so slow”
is an easy answer:
- to force players to more have to commit to offense and defense via dashing… dashing is not safe unlike simple walking. and having slow walkspeeds means more dashing which means the programmers are artificially trying to force commitment… good players dont like to commit, bad players commit to everything, its scrub friendly gameplay.
- footsies as oldschoolers knew them are gone. in the oldschool a good player could walk all over a less skilled one simply by making the other player wiff everything and punishing those wiffs and jumpins. in the new school games its MUCH harder to force people to wiff unsafe things at ranges where they could be punished. this also makes the games more accessible. more accessibility is what capcom has been striving for while also trying to retain certain key elements that keep better players entertained… for the most part, at least with sf4, they’ve done a good job at it. however in this game they seemed to REALLY want to ease that accessibility in there so they slowed down walkspeeds even more (much better for bad players) and this forces more jumping simply to move around and less footsies oriented offense. to be completely honest i think capom is slowly but surely trying to kill footsies and make the game more and more mixup heavy ala tekken. and im not saying that because of sfxt, im saying it because of sf4’s vortex characters and all of the sf4 exclusive characters being mixup characters not fundamental ones. fuerte/viper/seth/rufus/abel are all mixup characters. add to that that when console came out they added in even more mixup characters like divekicking cammy and kunai vortexing ibuki, while putting in only 1 fundamental character (deejay) whos fundamentals were actually bad and had his own mini vortex.
in a nutshell capcom wants pros to stop trouncing newbs so bad so they made mixup characters that dont have to rely on footsies to do damage.
slowing walkspeed is something that hurts the fundamental characters more than the mixup characers as the mixup charactrs arent about controlling certain spaces on the screen more so than just straight up being close to the opponent and running blocking mixups.
anywho, thats what i think. its all one big capcom conspiracy to dethrone the beast and JW and all the other pros… and when you see characters like ae yun and yang as well as seth and viper and rufus style divekicks… its hard to argue against it.
-dime
When it comes to Capcom I tend to assume incompetence rather than malice.
Main reason I can’t play this game and ignore anyone that tries to tell me this game has zero resemblance to SF4. If simply moving my character on screen isn’t a joy, I can’t play the game.
I also use movement as a key indicator of whether a fighting game is fun or not.
This makes me so sad.
Why the hell wouldn’t you?
Some people don’t mind moving like snails in fighting games, I do.
you can walk just as fast and cover just as much ground instead of dashing in sf4 and this game for most characters which makes zero sense. why put in dashes? barely any characters can take advantage of them. i don’t see a problem speeding up dashes or walk speeds since the hitboxes are ass and you need to get as close as possible anyways.
I already explained. The reason why dashes are slow is because of the pseudo-FADC system with special move charge cancels. If dashes were faster you would actually get awesome frame advantage from canceling normals making the mixup guessing in this game bonkers.
I really don’t like how slow some characters move though. Walking backwards out of certain ranges is so important in other fighting games, it feels like I can’t adjust to the range of my opponent’s attacks or jumps (this is especially bad since the state of anti-airs in this game are poor).
I already called it quits on this game for KOF and Marvel but I thought it would still be good to explain why some parts of the engine work the way they do.
thats a great hypothesis, but incorrect, imho. heres why:
if the dash speeds were causing frame advantage problems then there were PLENTY of ways to solve that problem besides making dashes overall slower which would have been one of the dumbest work arounds ever… even for capcom. ways they could have solved this “problem” without slowing the dashes down many of which have already been used to solve certain pesky move cancelability issues like them taking away kens ability to cancel into his roll on A3:
- make it so that characters cant cancel there fierces into specials (kinda big workaround, obviously not the best answer but better than just making dashes slow.
- make it so that characters are charged a penalty in startup from canceling there specials into dashes (you know, like making specials only dash cancelable from the 5th frame or 10 frame of startup…
- make it so that “charged” moves cant be charged when canceled into from any normal (this is an easy workaround and would still allow charged moves into dashes at close range and to make up for the fact that charged moves have to be “linked” in that fashion they could simply give cadc a buff of 3-5 frames of less recovery on the dashes from cadc… win win.
and those are just off the top of my head, but many if not all have been used by capcom in some degree or capacity before, so theres nothing stoppong them doing it in this game as well.
-dime
I like the second one. Get a job at Capcom? 