Some people will say that unbalanced fighting games are just “more fun” or “more hype”. Those people are wrong. It’s true that MVC2 was an unbalanced game that remained popular for 10 years, but Tekken 4 was an unbalanced game that remained popular for two minutes. CVS2 was a severely unbalanced game that became popular only after the advent of roll-cancelling, which increased the balance in that game by leaps and bounds. In general, games with more variety of play styles are more fun to play and games that have a large community playing them are more hype. Look at MVC2. Even though it had four playable characters out of 56, those four characters had a zoner, a rusher, a big bruiser and a hit & run pixie character. By contrast, Tekken 4 only has “JF laser scraper character” and old-school CVS2 had only “poking character”.
The real reason people like fighting games to be unbalanced is revealed in what T37 Rampage said. A really balanced fighting game is hard to win at. Like Sun Tzu, hardcore fighting game players want to “win without fighting”. With a balanced game you need to learn all the match-ups, figure out how to play against all the characters, and earn victory in every game. In MVC3 if I play Magneto/Wesker/Sentinel and you play Hsien Ko/Viewtiful Joe/Arthur I’ve pretty much won before the fight even began. Most hardcore players want to take the path of least resistance, and like games where that path is clear and well-defined. Even among the top tier characters, most people prefer to play the easier characters to use. Sim and Chun can counter any air attack but you have to know which anti-air to use. They are less popular than Shotos, who counter everything with a DP. Almost every character in SSF4 has safe jump-in options, but they are less popular than dive-kick characters who don’t need to time their safe jumps exactly. Just look around at the forums here. Everyone is dedicated to finding strategies that make the game unbalanced in their favor. Of course they’re going to love a game that does half the work for them.
Harder to win in a balanced fighting game? You know not everyone plays top tiers, even in unbalanced games. Really I’d say its just harder to win in a game with more characters assuming they aren’t throwaway garbage.
It sounds like you disagree with me in your first sentence, but your second sentence is a rephrasing of my basic idea. I mean, if it’s “harder to win in a game with more characters assuming they aren’t throwaway garbage” then winning in a game where everyone is actually good should be even tougher than that.
I agree with that matchup thing. Also, I don’t think it’s really about balance. Let’s say today AE is still unbalanced except that defensive zoning characters like Dhalsim & Guile are top tiers. Is it going to make the game better? It’s really about what kind of playstyle is favored by the community & more capable of generating exciting matches. The bottom line is most people don’t like seeing half of the match full of fireball dodging & keepaway game. If you make every single character in the game tournament viable, you greatly increase the chance of that happening. So, in the case of AE, they tilted things in the rushdown chars favor to ensure there will be fists flying & combos that ensue.
I dunno about the matchup thing. That seems like the kinda thing that would keep a game like SUPER TURBO alive forever. The more to learn the more to do essentially. You people are now essentially suggesting that learning the game is somehow a bad idea. It is a PROHIBITIVE idea, but that’s outside the vein of FG theory. Also I think this is a misuse of the word balance. I don’t think people kept playing MvC2 because it was unbalanced, but because the balance that formed was fun to play. I can’t imagine there’s anyone that wouldn’t like to see every possible character being viable so you could use whoever you wanted and still have a chance of coming up. The real problem lies in the impossibility of transposing that over any existing game that’s not more or less War2. and even then orcs were better. WTH.
People spent 10 years with a crappy game as the (at the time) last game in the series, and they have developed a form of Stockholm syndrome*. If there was no Snes version of Turtles Tournament Fighters, people would have latched onto the genesis version the same way, and talked shit about the snes version if it were released in the last 3 years, saying it sucks compared to the genesis version.
*Spend enough time with anything, and you start to like it, even prefer it. The tournament mentality of latching onto the latest game (even if it’s basically MUGEN), contributed to this.
Not really, a balanced game doesn’t mean a boring game nor does an unbalanced game mean a fun game. But people’s idea of balance is frequently ridiculous, just like the idea that MvC2 has only 4 characters when you can see a Megaman player getting top 8 at EVO. MvC2 isn’t a balanced game but the extent of its balance issues is exaggerated. Balance only becomes an issue when you have games like SvC and the ridiculous things that Geese and Zero can do.
Go to roughly 0:50~
This guy explains most of this fairly well, aside from the fact that he uses League Of Legends as an example for a perfectly imbalanced game with an evolving meta when it never changes unless Riot decides to nerf the heroes and buff other ones.
Balance is just one of many factors that determine fun, and it often comes at the price of true variety in the character designs. Some people just get too caught up in having 50 “balanced” skins to choose from even if the characters underneath are practically copy and pasted.
People always cite this as an argument against balance, but I think it’s a strawman argument - has this oft-cited “balanced but all the characters are the same” game ever actually been made in the post-karate-champ era? Even games like the early entries in the Mortal Kombat series where everybody kinda looked the same and had a projectile, a rushing attack, blahblah weren’t examples of this.
It sounds to me like people are afraid of something that’s never happened, probably never will happen, and can be prevented by an ounce of good design.
I think people do have a point about the number of potential matchups getting stupid in a game with a lot of balanced characters, but I consider that just an argument against having fighting games with 25+ characters in them, moreso than an argument against balanced games.
Depending on your priorities, it has happened. You mentioned Mortal Kombat giving most characters every tool needed to succeed which detracts from fun. Beyond that, they’re still sharing animations between characters and giving them too similar of frame data. If that’s the price of balance, I’d rather have them make a second sweep animation instead of a character or even risk imbalance to have it all.
I think we just have different ideas of what a new character entails.
I feel there is sooooooooo much more to do in a broken unbalanced game than a balanced one, Like sf4 is pretty limited compared to maybe mvc,or even the alpha games but ae2012 is really balanced while the others are not,its just way more fun to watch an play imo
But MK isn’t even BALANCED, so how can it be an example of a game where everyone is the same because of balance? -_-
But you don’t know if it is or not. It could just be, for example, that it’s hard to have nearly 40 characters in a game and have the frame data on a lot of things be radically different without being stupid. (Say what you want, there are plenty of ways to make something unbalanced AND bad). I mean seriously - how slow or fast can you actually make a sweep before it becomes dumb?
Because re-using animation is TOTALLY caused by balance and not by the animation budget…
Maybe, but it me it just sounds like you’re trying to make balance a scapegoat for things that have clear other causes.
I totally agree. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike tons of characters or the idea of perfect balance between them, it’s just that, for me, having as many unique and powerful characters as possible is the priority before total character count or balance.
Maybe people should start there and instead of saying “only one third of mvc2 characters can compete while ninety percent can in sf4”, they could say “MvC2 has 5-6 unique characters that push the limits of human execution,speed, and creativity, while SF4 has zero”.
The trouble with this measure is that it leaves out stuff like how the underlying engine works. Because I don’t think you’ll find a lot of people arguing that Vanilla SF4 was particularly balanced, but it still didn’t really have any characters that met your criteria.
Again, it’s really hard to blame balance for this kind of thing.
