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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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|  "Fighting Game Thread 2021" , posted Thu 14 Jan 12:13:  
The all-purpose fighting game thread---always in a precarious relationship with the SNK thread and the SFV thread---needs a new look for 2021! What better way to start than a new oral history article of the Cafe's early sort-of-mascot-game Capcom vs. SNK? It segues into the sad tale of the collapse of Capcom fighting games for seven years, but at least things are better now!
These Polygon articles for some reason keep focusing on the unimportant first series entries (SFIII: NG, SFZero1, CvS1), but there's fun stuff in here:
-Making the game thawed relationships between Capcom and SNK. Beyond drinking parties, they had Capcom vs. SNK Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments.
-MMCafe's Favorite (??) Handheld System, the Neo Geo Pocket Color, might have provided some basis for early talks as SNK was looking for other companies to develop for it.
-The programmer had never played an SNK game (that's even more extreme than me!), so he had to do a lot of research on the feel.
-When Aruze screwed over SNK after it bought it, about 20 SNK staff moved to Capcom and were this mystery team who needed to prove themselves...with Capcom Fighting All-Stars. Oops.
-CvS2 director Itsuno wasn't particularly sad as the fighting game scene was collapsing...he was pretty done with it, and was busy making Dragon's Dogma. Interesting but unsurprising when creators of our favorite things aren't that sentimental about the past.
-Capcom Fighting Jam was just as crappy and irrelevant as you remember saying it was here on the Cafe about twenty years ago.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Fri 15 Jan 05:28] |
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| | "Re(3):Fighting Game Thread 2021" , posted Sat 16 Jan 03:54
quote:
-Capcom Fighting Jam was just as crappy and irrelevant as you remember saying it was here on the Cafe about twenty years ago.
Crappy with a capital C.
I still was a sucker for the game, since at that point in time Capcom hadn't put out a new fighting game since CvS2, and I was desperate to play something. This game made MUGEN look like gold.
True. The idea was interesting, having each represented game in the crossover keeping their own mechanics, but they could at least give everyone new sprites that didn't clash visually with each other; having a SFIII character next to a DarkStalkers one without new sprites made the game look horrible. And the "team" system was weird, too; if you can use the same character in both rounds even if they lost the first one, the only incentive to pick a second character is for people who care about specific match-ups, and I don't think most of the fighting game players at the time cared a lot about that.
The artwork in the portraits and endings looked good, I'll give CFJ that. Just that.
Yes, agreed. The sprites were just archaic at that point. I wonder if Capcom could've afforded to redraw and reanimate them all. At least they gave new sprites to Demitri's Midnight Bliss transformations.
Shinkiro did an excellent job with the illustrations. I'd like to see what he can do with a whole Darkstalkers art.
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| | "Re(3):Fighting Game Thread 2021" , posted Sat 16 Jan 04:48
quote:
the "team" system was weird, too; if you can use the same character in both rounds even if they lost the first one, the only incentive to pick a second character is for people who care about specific match-ups, and I don't think most of the fighting game players at the time cared a lot about that.
That was the dumbest thing of the whole game. The idea was that if you had hyper-polarizing matchup like Guile/Zangief, you'd have a backup. But anyone thinking more than 5 minutes about it would see how bad the idea was: if you have Gief and someone else that's good against Guile, and you see the other one has Guile and someone that's good against your 2nd character, each round is basically a round of "rock-paper-scissor" with only two options, and whoever comes out on top with the character matchup wins the round. And on the other hand, if you have two average-rounded characters, there is never any reason to change characters.
That was the moment, so many years before SF4 and SFxT, that I knew Ono was a hack.
I remember being disappointed the game didn't have double the amount of characters (if you're going to do a hack job at copy and pasting characters without any regard for esthetics or balance, at least be generous with the selection!), but after a few matches, it was obvious the game was so bad that even a Mugen cast wouldn't save it. Copying the super simple KOF rule, making the game CvS2 without the S, or even plugging all that into MvC2 without the Marvel characters for totaly silliness would have been so much better.
To think that this failure of a game is the reason Capcom (well, Ono) never greenlit another Capcom vs Capcom game "because people don't want that" drives me mad. People don't want bad games regardless of the characters in it. The latest SQEX GAAS Avengers is the proof of that.
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| | "Re(4):Fighting Game Thread 2021" , posted Sat 16 Jan 07:54:
quote:
That was the dumbest thing of the whole game. The idea was that if you had hyper-polarizing matchup like Guile/Zangief, you'd have a backup. But anyone thinking more than 5 minutes about it would see how bad the idea was: if you have Gief and someone else that's good against Guile, and you see the other one has Guile and someone that's good against your 2nd character, each round is basically a round of "rock-paper-scissor" with only two options, and whoever comes out on top with the character matchup wins the round. And on the other hand, if you have two average-rounded characters, there is never any reason to change characters.
That was the moment, so many years before SF4 and SFxT, that I knew Ono was a hack.
I remember being disappointed the game didn't have double the amount of characters (if you're going to do a hack job at copy and pasting characters without any regard for esthetics or balance, at least be generous with the selection!), but after a few matches, it was obvious the game was so bad that even a Mugen cast wouldn't save it. Copying the super simple KOF rule, making the game CvS2 without the S, or even plugging all that into MvC2 without the Marvel characters for totaly silliness would have been so much better.
To think that this failure of a game is the reason Capcom (well, Ono) never greenlit another Capcom vs Capcom game "because people don't want that" drives me mad. People don't want bad games regardless of the characters in it. The latest SQEX GAAS Avengers is the proof of that.
Capcom definitely should make a MvC2-style game without the "M", just a "Capcom vs Capcom" game with the MvCI gameplay (without the Infinity Gems) or the UMVC3 gameplay. I mean, it's not like Marvel and Disney did a lot for them in the last crossover, and at least Capcom wouldn't have to deal with Disney forbidding any character (*cough*X-Men*cough*).
Come on, even SNK already had their own MvC game with Neo Geo Battle Coliseum (granted, it wasn't great, but then again, it was made during a tough period for SNK). Capcom has all the tools to make a CvC game - I mean, a GOOD CvC game, not another CFE...
(and yes, if the CFE developers were going to be that lazy, at least they could have added more characters - I'd have liked to see Mei-Ling and Tessa, for example, plus CFAS' D.D., Rook and Death as the CFAS planned newcomers alongside Ingrid. And it's shocking that even some fan-favorites like Ken and Morrigan were left out of it)
Maybe I'm this person right in front of you... nah probably not though.
[this message was edited by Just a Person on Sat 16 Jan 07:57] |
| | "Re(1):Street Fighter V-11" , posted Fri 12 Feb 04:17
quote:
Moving on from SFII to SFV, Capcom unveiled Eleven today. Yup, like 3rd Strike's Twelve, but not quite. Apparently it may work as some sort of random roulette rather than an actual character.
This could be a disappointing choice, but I guess we learned to lower our expectations after Decapre (plus, I think SFV's roster is already good enough as it is). However, the end of the video shows that Eleven surprisingly isn't the fifth fighter from Season 5, but a bonus DLC - which means the identity of the final SFV newcomer is still unknown (and that Season 5 actually has six characters rather than five).
---
EDIT: oh, there are also gameplay videos for Dan and Rose.
When I read earlier this morning the leak about Eleven I was already thinking about the Decapre disappointment, but at least being a bonus DLC no one should complain.
But that Rose 3D model looks too plastic even for SFV standards.
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Platinum Carpet V.I.P - THE FOOL  | "Re(2):Street Fighter V-11" , posted Fri 12 Feb 04:36
I thought Eleven would be Shadow or Marionette, but actually he's Mokujin. Oh, well. He's free and they really weren't obliged to do anything, so, thanks I guess? Unfortunately, while his VS and VT will be randomized, he will be using the default costume of the characters and thus will be a terrible fashion faux-pas on the MMC stage.
As for Dan, he shouts "使わざるを得ねぇ" during his VT1, which is the biggest Kyokugenryű meme, so I guess that absolves his existence? Rose looks a bit more like her Zero2 self than her SF4 self. I've never been a fan of the character, but less SF4 is always a plus. Also her stage looks nice!
I'm very intrigued by the backdash. That's quite the hefty change, and I wonder if the price of 1 VT gauge will be enough for get-out-of-jail card. On the other hand, if they rebalance the most powerful VT to cost 3 gauges, maybe the trade-off will make sense? Characters that weren't so much dependent on their VT will have a big boost for sure (Claw?). Not sure I'd ever consider this against an Aegis Reflector, on the other hand.
Generally pretty satisfied!
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(7):Street Fighter V-11" , posted Sun 14 Feb 15:17
quote:
I saw someone call the update Street Fighter striVe.
Amazing. While I’d prefer the Guiltyification of SF to mean using its magnificent visuals rather than its incomprehensible battle systems, I’m sure someone here can explain to me what the new SFV system is, right? ...right? A better Zero Counter? SFIII’s finicky blocking/parrying?
While it’s nice to get minor updates for free or very little rather than paying full price like the old days, it’s kind of a drag that the older versions of SFV are basically obliterated whether you like the increasing bloat or not. What if season (fill in the blank) was the best, but we can never see it again?! I enjoy SFV a lot, but that sure is a lot to explain to a newcomer when you try to get them into the game!
One thing’s for sure: quote:
Such an improvement aesthetically from SFIV in every way
Whether this is about Rose or even the weakest parts of SFV, it’s still true! Except Necalli. But then, he’s a good counter argument to what I wrote above, and we can be happy that five seasons in, it’s like he never existed.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| PSN: Ishmael26b
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| "Re(8):Street Fighter V-11" , posted Mon 15 Feb 03:21
quote:
I saw someone call the update Street Fighter striVe. Amazing. While I’d prefer the Guiltyification of SF to mean using its magnificent visuals rather than its incomprehensible battle systems, I’m sure someone here can explain to me what the new SFV system is, right? ...right? A better Zero Counter? SFIII’s finicky blocking/parrying?
This video did a good job of breaking down what limited information we have of the system. It looks strong at the moment but since Capcom is trying to sell us a used car they are going to make V-Shift look as cool as possible and not show us how it could be countered or what drawbacks it might have. For example, how does V-Shift handle cross-ups? There will be much to explore in the next MMCafe Danfest.
quote:
While it’s nice to get minor updates for free or very little rather than paying full price like the old days, it’s kind of a drag that the older versions of SFV are basically obliterated whether you like the increasing bloat or not. What if season (fill in the blank) was the best, but we can never see it again?! I enjoy SFV a lot, but that sure is a lot to explain to a newcomer when you try to get them into the game!
I do find it frustrating that current fighting games rarely have the ability to rewind the dial. If I don't like V-Shift I'm going to be out of luck when it comes to SF5 next month. Doesn't everyone want the opportunity to go back to the version of SF4 where Yun was stupidly overpowered or the version of Tekken 7 where Leroy was stupidly overpowered or the version of DBFZ where Bardock was stupidly overpowered or...
Er, I lost my train of thought. Anyway, it would be nice to have a wayback machine built into constantly updated games just for the sake of historical research.
quote:
One thing’s for sure: Such an improvement aesthetically from SFIV in every way Whether this is about Rose or even the weakest parts of SFV, it’s still true! Except Necalli. But then, he’s a good counter argument to what I wrote above, and we can be happy that five seasons in, it’s like he never existed.
If SF was a television show or other type of serialized story Necalli would have been written out ages ago. Instead, both the players and producers have agreed to shun Necalli, leaving him to loiter aimlessly on the select screen until SF6 gives him the boot. Perhaps he could be redeemed in a future game? Here's an idea: Blanka could understand his plight and help bring him into civilization. Instead of muttering about eating warriors, Necalli could become fixated on VTubers or some other niche of modern life. On second thought, they should just bring back Rufus; his win quotes were terrific.
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(9):Street Fighter V-11" , posted Mon 15 Feb 11:42
Thanks! Rather than the dreary, technical SFIII Blocking/Parrying, it sounds a bit more like Soul Calibur's Guard Impact, or even that moment of slow-motion invincibility you get in the SF Zero series when you start an Original Combo/Custom Combo. Whatever it is, as someone who's successfully used the V-Reversal approximately once in his life, I'm interested in another defense move!
I am looking forward to Danfest and can probably host in early March.
ALSO, is that a Mr. Karate outfit I see for him in the season pass advertisements?! Dan lost his way in the years where SNK was in too pathetic a situation to make fun of it, but now that they seem (??) to be doing slightly better, maybe it's time for Dan to go all-in.
quote:
Blanka could understand his plight and help bring him into civilization.
they should just bring back Rufus; his win quotes were terrific.
Remarkably, Blanka manages to become an expressive, thoughtful character in comparison to Necalli.
Rufus is the final Season 5 character we all deserve, but even he would be more interesting than another SFIII character like Twelve, or Eleven I guess.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| | "Re(2):Gimme Rose!" , posted Wed 17 Feb 10:15
quote:
I really don't like some of the things with Rose right now, but I presume it's still early and will be improved.
Her idle pose is bizarrely stiff, and doesn't express either her sense of elegant dignity or the supple power she expressed in SFA. The animation of the shawl returning to her makes the shawl appear tiny in a way that looks ugly. Her drill attack has a really weak pose to it that again doesn't express a sense of terrific power or poise.
What bugs me about Rose's shawl is that it so very obviously has no physical volume. You'd normally have to go back to the PS2 or even the PS1 era to find something so unapologetically blatant about just being a completely 2D rectangle.
As for Rose's own animations, I blame the motion capture. Capcom included footage from the mo-cap session. I'm sure the mo-cap actress was skilled. I don't know if she was told to perform the moves slowly to aid in the capture process or if the devs just intended for the kick to be a slow move, but the result is that her Soul Piede looked slow, awkward, and weak. It probably didn't help that the person holding the target mitt had to support her weight and even helped push her back for the recovery.
After seeing that mo-cap footage, the rest of the in-game footage looked similar. Nothing had "punch". There is no oversell or snap. Angles and animation speed don't look like they were chosen for what looks best, but rather what the mo-cap crew felt they could deliver. Rose's in-game animation honestly made me think of early Mortal Kombat (though obviously more fluid), where the actors had to move slowly and hold poses.
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| | "Re(3):Gimme Rose!" , posted Wed 17 Feb 21:05
I agree with most of the criticisms on Rose (especially her horrible hair, urgh), but then again, not only is it still WIP (the gap between some overanimated moves and the underanimated ones is huge) but also I've always found her one of the worst characters of Zero in that aspect. Yes, I know the Lisalisa reference, but I've never found the shawl particularly well done, and half of her moves didn't seem convincing to me. There's only so much you can do on such a canvas... Maybe they could have tried to redesign her toolset and design, but I guess that's what Menat did already...
Oh, well. I'm mostly intrigued to see what they'll do to Oro, who seems to have the most interesting premise (on top of being a much better designed character initially).
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| | "Re(4):Gimme Rose!" , posted Fri 19 Feb 08:56
quote:
After seeing that mo-cap footage, the rest of the in-game footage looked similar. Nothing had "punch". There is no oversell or snap. Angles and animation speed don't look like they were chosen for what looks best, but rather what the mo-cap crew felt they could deliver. Rose's
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Yup, I saw the footage and I immediately knew why I always felt weirded out by the animation on the modern SF games. I assumed the mo-cap was to guide animators who would manually end up animating the characters but I doubt that's the case since full mo-cap to game engine is usually cheaper than having staff manually animating something.
See, one team of animators I knew (among which one of whom is a martial arts master, one of whom was a competitive boxer) would take the approach of doing mocap to get all the motions done quickly, but with the understanding that they would all require cleanup and retiming: this ranges from the simple cleanup of removing little bits of undesired movements/jittering, to adjusting the gross duration for the game, and for adjusting the timing of the parts of the motion so that the right parts are emphasized.
This is really important because certain moments representing things like the area where it will actually hit things you want emphasized, while the little motions in and out of that you don't want emphasized. If the little motions that don't seem like they should deal damage or effects do, players always feel that "the game is janky", even if the durations are ok. On top of that, a lot of the snappy look of attacks in video games and animations are not the way people move in real life, and this has further style implications if your game is like a more than 2 player multiplayer game that doesn't have a lot of hitstop going on.
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| | "Re(7):Strive to Log In" , posted Sat 20 Feb 17:18:
quote:
I'm still downloading but I'm impatient for impressions. Anyone have any thought on what they have played? Is it any good? How does it compare to other GG games?
The general consensus which I'd agree on is that it feels like Granblue Fantasy Versus with an air-dash and roman cancel system (if you don't know Granblue Fantasy, just think of it as a SFZ2 where everyone bonks each other with a medival weapon). It feels very friendly to Street Fighter players since much of the fat that gave Guilty Gear its yummy taste has been trimmed off. There's very little vertical screen movement. I recall how Maou couldn't comprehend Guilty Gear Xrd since everything was so different, but that shouldn't be as much a problem now.
1/Aerial combos are almost non-existant and there's no aerial recovery system. You don't really see characters flying all over the screen and flashing like in previous iterations.
2/Wakeup games are at a bare minimal since it's very hard to knock down the opponent. In previous games, players new to Guilty Gear would get utterly pulverized once they got knocked down because offense is extremely strong in the Guilty Gear series. With the walls also becoming breakable, now it's mostly about the neutral game. The developers reportedly wanted to get rid of 50/50 mixups.
3/Roman Cancels are certainly in the game but I think it's too early to tell how useful they are. They universally cost the same amount of meter as a super now (50%). Given that supers are pretty good in this game, players might end up with different feelings on how good they are depending on their character. Generally speaking though, it seems a lot easier to gain meter in Strive compared to older titles.
4/Crossups seem to be weak in general. The jump attacks don't have much hitbox on their back, and even if they hit/blocked, the opponent gets 'knocked away' (rather than knocked towards) and there's enough distance that you can't land a close-up combo.
5/Attacks do a lot of damage; you simply do not want to get hit in this game. A meterless combo can do 50% damage. Normal throws do a lot of damage too.
6/The graphics and other details are just awesome. There's many things in this game that are probably going to be missed out by hardcore fighting game players that aren't appreciating the smaller details placed in by the development staff. For example, Millia's normal/weak kick alone has probably about 10 frames of animation, which is quite something when considering most games have 3-5 frames. About half of the frames are used in pullback motion, which can be canceled with any motion (including blocking). As usual for Guilty Gear the characters have multiple taunts; some of them include very long conversations or monologues, which also comes in various patterns. I think the developers just stepped into a new league of character creation after coming up with Answer (the businessman ninja) in Rev2.
--
Now, about this beta test overall--- thus far, it hasn't been a great experience. I played very little, maybe an hour max. I haven't had time to commit playing it, but within what I could, it felt like a LOG-IN GAME from the good ol' mmorpg days. Apparently the server overload was beyond what Arc System Works had expected since it's a free beta that anyone can play without even paying for PSPlus. Past midnight, the servers just died and didn't kick back until noon.
I tried playing a little again during late lunch break but the servers still continue to go on and off. The awful thing is that the game keeps surveillance even during offline modes and kicks back to the title screen if there's no connection. This is probably just for the beta client as it's apparently how Arc System Works is making sure it's not playable outside of the testing period.
[this message was edited by Professor on Sat 20 Feb 17:32] |
New Customer  | "Re(8):Strive to Log In" , posted Sat 20 Feb 22:26
quote:
1/Aerial combos are almost non-existant and there's no aerial recovery system. You don't really see characters flying all over the screen and flashing like in previous iterations.
2/Wakeup games are at a bare minimal since it's very hard to knock down the opponent. In previous games, players new to Guilty Gear would get utterly pulverized once they got knocked down because offense is extremely strong in the Guilty Gear series. With the walls also becoming breakable, now it's mostly about the neutral game. The developers reportedly wanted to get rid of 50/50 mixups.
3/Roman Cancels are certainly in the game but I think it's too early to tell how useful they are. They universally cost the same amount of meter as a super now (50%). Given that s
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Those seem like contradicting experiences compared to what I have seen Prof. I may have watched around 20 or more hours from all kind of players (Jiyuna, JustinW, Max, Valle, Sonic, Go1, Sajam, T5M7, etc) and their gameplay shown isn't quite as that.
There are aerial combos, Chipp specially have some pretty flashy ones. They aren't as long as before (as they should be because of the damage) but they are around. I expect seeing spectacular stuff coming from characters with double/triple jump and dash. They mostly have been replaced by wall combos though. Man, those Chipp combos are so sweet, even if they aren't optimal.
There are going to be a lot of mix ups and okizeme, that's the way fighting games are. Sure they got rid of several situations where it was tough, but players will break the game sooner or later. It's just a matter of time.
Practically every single player I see burn all their meter only on roman cancels, Justin may play 20 matches and just use a super once. Literally. It's so useful to guarantee damage (on such a damaging game) and bait bursts. On top, it just feels so GOOD to use them. And the slowdown purple defensive variation it's so cool to master. The meter filling so fast gives people so much freedom. Even if people aren't using many supers at high level, the option is always there.
The crossup game I saw of Gio and Leo was looking nice. Millia was made to abuse them; though, I wish more people were playing her. People are still discovering stuff.
Poor Chipp is the posterboy of 100% combo videos going around. He even dies on a single super on counter hit (Ram with 2 swords.)
I saw SonicFox playing Go1 on crappy Wi-fi (intentionally) and they said it felt really good. What a holy blessing netcode is. It'll cement a precedent for the future of all fighting games. I'm dying to play with people all over the world. Not being a console peasant have never hurt me as much. Take a look at these really fun matches played by T5M7 and Sajam; both are delighted by the experience of being able to play from so far away (you can hunt T5M7 POV on his channel.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kdWknykuBk
One thing I have seen thrown around is that the build players are testing is an old one from months ago. How much can they polish this game if this is true? What a beautiful videogame.
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| | "Re(9):Strive to Log In" , posted Sun 21 Feb 01:51:
quote:
Those seem like contradicting experiences compared to what I have seen Prof. I may have watched around 20 or more hours from all kind of players (Jiyuna, JustinW, Max, Valle, Sonic, Go1, Sajam, T5M7, etc) and their gameplay shown isn't quite as that.
There are aerial combos, Chipp specially have some pretty flashy ones. They aren't as long as before (as they should be because of the damage) but they are around. I expect seeing spectacular stuff coming from characters with double/triple jump and dash. They mostly have been replaced by wall combos though. Man, those Chipp combos are so sweet, even if they aren't optimal.
Thanks for the input Sasha!
On a related note, I need to fix myself about crossups! They're extremely dependent on the opponent character's hurtbox.
1/ I've over-emphasized by saying aerial combos are non-existant, thank you for correcting me. I also realized that I should've said aerial rave style of aerial combos; as you said, the game has a lot of aerial combos, just that they're relatively short compared to before.
2/ At the current time, okis seem a lot less prevelant compared to previous iterations of Guilty Gear. Yes this can change through the course of the game's lifespan as players find more and more ways to break the game. But that's beyond gameplay impressions that I can make from the current open beta period. On a semi-related note, the input window for wakeup reversals feel extremely lenient compared to Xrd.
Oh instant kills... they may not be missed, but at least if the game had certain moves that transitioned to their flashy a cutscenes if done as a finisher.
[this message was edited by Professor on Sun 21 Feb 04:21] |
| | "Re(1):MK codes" , posted Tue 13 Apr 06:11:
quote:
An interesting anecdote from John Tobias about how roster choices were made on the early Mortal Kombat games. The idea that they were going to the local pizza parlors and typing in secret codes in order to decide the future of the franchise is a reminder of how indie garage band the whole arcade scene of the early 1990's was.
So they intentionally left Scorpion, Reptile and Kitana out of MK3 not because they didn't have time to add them to it, but because they already intended to release UMK3 some months later, before vanilla MK3 was even released?
That's... well, in short term, this is kinda clever, as they could sell the same game twice (not so different from Capcom's (in)famous SFII upgrades). In long term, however, this hurt considerably MK3's reputation, with most of the fanbase considering vanilla MK3 as a very underwhelming sequel and UMK3 as a sequel that actually brought several problems that the original version didn't have, like removing the ending illustrations or forcing the players to revisit twice the four/five new stages before all the other stages even begin to appear (meaning you would likely not get to see some of the coolest stages like The Soul Chamber, The Temple and The Bell Tower, while having to visit the boring Waterfront twice).
Not cool.
EDIT: As for Tobias's explanation for roster changes, it makes sense. There was a lot of speculation ever since the 1990s that Johnny Cage was killed off before MK3 because Daniel Pesina quit, but when we think about it, this doesn't make sense; at least four characters present in vanilla MK3 (Liu Kang, Sub-Zero, Shang Tsung and Sonya) were also played by different actors in the first two games, yet these characters were all brought back to MK3, while Baraka (who was played by Richard Divizio, who is in MK3 as the digital actor for Kano and Kabal) was left out.
It also makes us wonder: had they checked the arcade machines in different locations than the ones they checked, MKII and MK3 could have had quite different rosters... Sonya and Kano could have been playable in MKII while Johnny Cage would be the one chained in Shao Kahn's arena, or Baraka and Cage (with a different actor) could have been in MK3 while Kung Lao's name would have been in the grave in the Graveyard stage rather than Cage's name.
I guess only MK11's Kronika would know these possibilities.
Maybe I'm this person right in front of you... nah probably not though.
[this message was edited by Just a Person on Tue 20 Apr 00:01] |
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| "SVC Chaos Appreciation Month - As ever?" , posted Tue 18 May 09:25
With the NGPC game Snk vs Capcom MOTM, I still can't help but wonder why I love SVC Chaos based on what it gave us outside of your usual fighting game.
Yes we can all agree it was broken, didn't have enough groove systems, one on one, missing fan favorites, the graphics, etc. A time where presentation mattered and a next generation fighting systems.
I just want to point out that the pre battle dialogues, after watching nearly every single one, is a beautiful ride to behold as to the interaction of each player in this unknown storyline, timeline, and background that we didn't get much detail of.
There was no story line whatsoever provided by SNK. Street Fighter wiki quotes,
quote:
The backgrounds that are in the game seem to suggest that the setting takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth, with most stages appearing to be abandoned, decrepit, and mostly devoid of life. The background material to explain the events of this game seem to point to it, but is not made clear through any character dialogue. Oddly, some of the endings (such as Chun-Li's and Kim's) show normal, undamaged cities full of people, and Zero's ending has him sent back to his universe, where Ciel contacts him almost immediately after Zero contemplates all the other characters he met.
Was doing so much digging into the story, I saw one site list that they all are dead or so, and sent over to this dimensional to figure a way out. Which would make the endings mentioned in the quote make sense that once they beat Athena/Red Arremer, they go back to there original dimensions. Which was made clear with the samurai spirit characters.
So enough of the story, no we know what the deal. The pre battle dialogues are nostalgic, a trip down memory lane, funny, and make one hell of a highlight reel or even a movie in itself. My favorites interaction are ones with Demtri, Tessa, Dhalsim, and Geonitz. Most comedic, falls under Dan as every character some how roast him for a joke of the fighter he is. Tessa want to examine every character scientifically in the name of sorcerology(if that is even a word), Dhalsim enlighten his opponents by persuading a positive path, and Demtri , well, everyone seems to be shocked in seeing a vampire who are then asked to become his servent.
My only gripe is why Zero was not as talkative. I would love to see some more interaction from him.
In any case, I still love the character selection to this day. Regardless of what anyone says this is the greatest character selection. I wish they would patch this band boy up and give it a nice little update. It could be more.
If you want to see all pre battle dialogues check this VIDEO
Let it run at half speed because they talk real fast.
Long Live I AM!
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| | "Re(1):SVC Chaos Appreciation Month - As ever?" , posted Tue 18 May 21:57:
SVC Chaos did have its merits. Some character choices were pretty cool, like Hugo instead of Zangief as Capcom's big guy, Tessa, Shiki and Earthquake. Plus Demitri, with special Midnight Bliss transformations for each opponent. Then again, I must confess I don't think Red Arremer and Mars People fit in this game at all - they'd be great in a hyperactive fighting game like the Marvel vs Capcom series, but not in a standard fighting game like SVC Chaos - meanwhile, the roster has some notable omissions, like Haohmaru, Nakoruru, Morrigan and Cammy. And Mr. Karate as Gouki's counterpart was also a weird choice (and as much as I love Kasumi, choosing her over Yuri was quite odd as well, although at least she brings a different playstyle).
The dialogues were cool, and often pretty funny, like the "conversation" between Iori and Genjuro. It's also nice that there were proper endings (MOTM had generic conversations and CvS2's endings were only text with no illustrations). Oh, and SNK did a pretty good job with the sprites for Capcom's characters (Capcom also did a great job with SNK's in CvS1&2, but it was noticeable there how they had a different quality from the sprites taken from SFA3, while in Chaos everyone looks like they really belong in the same game).
That said, it just feels too uninspired to me in terms of gameplay, system, stages and soundtrack. It would already feel uninspired if it was a new fighting game with a completely original roster, but when it's meant as a crossover between characters from two of the biggest fighting game companies, I can't help but feel the developers failed big time. It's not a bad game, but it's definitely not the epic game it should have been.
...Well, now that SNK managed to make a huge comeback with KOF XIV and SS (and the upcoming KOF XV) and Capcom managed to turn SFV's initial disaster into the amazing successful game it should have been from the beginning, maybe both companies could start discussing the possibility of a new crossover (or two, in case each decides to release their own CvS/SvC game)? It probably won't happen, but we're allowed to dream, are we not?
Maybe I'm this person right in front of you... nah probably not though.
[this message was edited by Just a Person on Tue 18 May 22:01] |
New Customer | "Re(5):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Tue 25 May 14:36
quote:
Counter hit into double post!
To round out my time with the Strive beta I tried out the online. Holy incomprehensibility Batman! I had heard the complaints about the way Strive handles setting up matches but it didn't prepare me for the absurdity of the actual experience. This must have been a pet idea of someone at the top because I can't imagine a group of people all agreed that this was a good idea. The matches were actually quite good the few times I managed to make my little pixel man find an opponent.
Sorry, not a direct reply.
Just a spring board into thoughts on the last Strive beta, and larger thoughts about the accessibility of fighting games as a genre I have loved since 1992.
I dropped the ball and missed my feedback window for the last beta. Day job and maintaining pandemic protocols still taking a toll.
Playing the last beta, and the last decade's crop of fighting games, I got to thinking - for all of the effort to make fighting games more accessible to newcomers.
What really chapped my behind playing against Anji, Sol, and to a lesser extent Giovanna is even with more defense options available. Offense is relentless.
Are fighting game developers overlooking the obvious? And I admit to looking to Fire Pro Wrestling for this "fix", but a stamina / aggression meter for offense?
The greatest deterrent to fighting games since Capcom dropped the Versus kusoge series in arcades, were infinites or plain abusive combos. This is fine if you're an execution machine, but when you're on the receiving end - it's no fun.
Am I crazy for thinking this up, or is it time for fighting game developers to serious consider offense stamina meters as an option. Not for every game, obviously; but when focusing on developing mechanics to make a title more new player friendly - would it really hurt?
This is why I still enjoy my old SF2 matches and a solid game of Virtua Fighter. These games were well paced, and "felt honest". Rather than the lopsided mauling one could receive in a BlazBlue match.
Just throwing it out there.
Hello all, I've been lurking here off and on since the old days of checking Teh Kao Yang's Sega Saturn page and other fan sites. Finally decided to register since I prefer old school BBS/Forums to modern options.
I'll add steam profile once I get this new PC up and running. A lot has changed since the olden days, the big one for me is now many of the games I enjoyed in arcades and on consoles are now available on the PC, rather than simulators and FPS games. Neat stuff, but I'm sure there's some old part of me that will miss the clunky Metal & Lace (Megatech Software) era of niche PC gaming.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| PSN: ShikyohMukuro
XBL: IAMDC1
Wii: n/a
STM: N/A
CFN: n/a
| "Re(7):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Tue 25 May 23:33
quote:
Hello all, I've been lurking here off and on since the old days of checking Teh Kao Yang's Sega Saturn page and other fan sites. Finally decided to register since I prefer old school BBS/Forums to modern options.
I'll add steam profile once I get this new PC up and running. A lot has changed since the olden days, the big one for me is now many of the games I enjoyed in arcades and on consoles are now available on the PC, rather than simulators and FPS games. Neat stuff, but I'm sure there's some old part of me that will miss the clunky Metal & Lace (Megatech Software) era of niche PC gaming.
Welcome!
And wow, you brought some very good questions! I look forward to the answers from the other people in this board. I'm afraid I'm not well-versed in balance issues to answer them myself, so I'll just say that yes, SFII and VF2 have both aged surprisingly well (even if SFII also had balance issues; thus the many upgrades it got over the years - but it's still surprisingly good to play).
I always thought of other things similar to a stamina meter. Like the effectiveness of parts of the body after hitting and getting hit on those parts. If the left arm gets hit the most(if hit box detection were ever so sweet), then that player would loose the ability to use that arm. Or something similar.
If a player utilizes the legs the most, should have higher hit rate but less if using arms or vice versa.
It may be a technical disaster if implemented lol.
Long Live I AM!
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| | "Re(8):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Wed 26 May 00:48
quote:
Hello all, I've been lurking here off and on since the old days of checking Teh Kao Yang's Sega Saturn page and other fan sites. Finally decided to register since I prefer old school BBS/Forums to modern options.
I'll add steam profile once I get this new PC up and running. A lot has changed since the olden days, the big one for me is now many of the games I enjoyed in arcades and on consoles are now available on the PC, rather than simulators and FPS games. Neat stuff, but I'm sure there's some old part of me that will miss the clunky Metal & Lace (Megatech Software) era of niche PC gaming.
Welcome!
And wow, you brought some very good questions! I look forward to the answers from the other people in this board. I'm afraid I'm not well-versed in balance issues to answer them myself, so I'll just say that yes, SFII and VF2 have both aged surprisingly well (even if SFII also had balance issues; thus the many upgrades it got over the years - but it's still surprisingly good to play).
I always thought of other things similar to a stamina meter. Like the effectiveness of parts of the body after hitting and getting hit on those parts. If the left arm gets hit the most(if hit box detection were ever so sweet), then that player would loose the ability to use that arm. Or something similar.
If a player utilizes the legs the most, should have higher hit rate but less if using arms or vice versa.
It may be a technical disaster if implemented lol.
Didn't Tao Feng (that game John Tobias did for the Xbox in the early 2000s) use a system like that?
Then again, the Xbox fighting games are barely remembered... I never got to play Tao Feng, but Kakuto Chojin, despite the controversy that killed the game, was quite good (not great, but good).
Maybe I'm this person right in front of you... nah probably not though.
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| | "Re(10):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Wed 26 May 02:15
quote:
Didn't SamSho V had a stamina bar or something like that?
If you mash the attack buttons you get low damage, you get higher damage with full bar.
Yeah, I was going to say: SSS and SS0 are probably the best answer to this conundrum on top of being excellent games.
I still haven't played the latest game, but from the look of it, it seems to allow different play-styles, with fast combo-oriented characters and other traditional characters that can take half a bar with one button press, so it should work?
Another problem is obviously the terrible online. Lag won't make you drop your combo if there's no combo, but also even a small lag spike can lead to 75% of the bar vanishing, so, eh.
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New Customer | "Re(2):Re(10):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Wed 26 May 02:58
Thanks! I suspected some games have experimented with the concept, but as with most experimentation - if it's not a massive commercial success, it's not prone to imitation/adoption by other developers. I'll have to fire up SS5 in the near future and experiment, I admit I was initially put off by the changes made to SS5 buttons.
My primary concern is that fighting games become one sided, and I want to be cautious here in that I'm not arguing against player skill; rather the more skilled players currently always dominate - and matches feel less like attempting to out think your opponent in a back and forth exchange, and more find opening > load combo.exe, until opponent health reaches 0.
While it's not fun getting pureed by Anji/Sol in the Strive Beta - I appreciate that the matches are fast, damage is high, and the suffering - not eternal. :b
Rather than leaving my opponent to perform their combo kata and going to make a sandwich, or pour another beverage while I'm immobilized.
Proper implementation of stamina, rather than damage scaling during combos would force a reset to the players mindset. I'm certainly no SF5 expert, I still play it, it seems the ability in that game for pokes to negate aggressive play frustrated players that want to fall into the execution groove, and not worry about out thinking the opponent.
I had this over the weekend with an aggressive G that continued to walk forward on me to mog me, or use G's dashing low to catch me off guard when blocking high. They won that set.
Then randomly we met in another casual match. Knowing the routine this time, I made sure to poke early and often to interrupt the approach > run combo.exe > dominate flowchart.
My opponent was committed to their execution / combo set ups, and wasn't prepared to deal with effective normals used on the fly. This is why those old fighting games are still the standard bearer for the genre, and the ones players remember fondly. The pacing and exchanges during the matches.
This comes from a place of love, because fighting games are possibly my favorite genre ever, and I want to see it continue to thrive. Try as I may to experiment with Battle Royal games, for me it's like taking a vegan to an all you can eat steak house. Just not interested.
Oh, and I suspect Gundam Maxiboost Vs, the one that released last summer, had some similar offense defense meters as I'm thinking of; but it's been nearly a year since I played in the beta.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| | "Re(3):Re(10):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Wed 26 May 15:01:
quote:
What really chapped my behind playing against Anji, Sol, and to a lesser extent Giovanna is even with more defense options available. Offense is relentless.
Are fighting game developers overlooking the obvious? And I admit to looking to Fire Pro Wrestling for this "fix", but a stamina / aggression meter for offense?
The greatest deterrent to fighting games since Capcom dropped the Versus kusoge series in arcades, were infinites or plain abusive combos. This is fine if you're an execution machine, but when you're on the receiving end - it's no fun.
Am I crazy for thinking this up, or is it time for fighting game developers to serious consider offense stamina meters as an option. Not for every game, obviously; but when focusing on developing mechanics to make a title more new player friendly - would it really hurt?
This is why I still enjoy my old SF2 matches and a solid game of Virtua Fighter. These games were well paced, and "felt honest". Rather than the lopsided mauling one could receive in a BlazBlue match.
I think there's rather a few pieces to think about in this:
1 - why are ArcSys games the way they are?
2 - what is the kind of game that you desire?
3 - what is the nature of "honesty" that most players think of?
4 - what are the challenges players face at different levels of play?
1 and 4 are intimately tied together, and come about kind of as a response to the defense-heavy SF games and high-flying Capcom Marvel games. Overall one of the desires was for OFFENSE to be easier, and for it to be the primary means to winning. You'll note that across the history of the Capcom Versus games, in spite of how often runaway tactics have been very strong, none of them have Guilty Gear's "Negative Penalty". Guilty Gear's tension pulse and the fact that in older games you'd get meter just for moving towards the opponent are all there to make a game where even beginners can run at their opponent and bang out a chain combo by just tapping buttons. It specifically wants to NOT be the staid game of walking forward and poking that SF2/SFA/AOF/etc. were.
3 and 4 are remarkably different at different levels of play. The hadoken/DP trap can seem cheap and dishonest at one level of play, and incredibly honest if not outright weak at another level of play. The French Bread game designers have remarked in the past that the historically great player GO1 poses problems to game design because his ability to block things on reaction that are intended to require guesses to block means that if they make a game that is ok for like 75% of the players then it becomes a mockery when he plays, but if they make a game that is ok for him then it can feel overwhelming and dishonest for the other 75%.
Generally speaking, some of the things that come across as "dishonest" are:
- extended pressure that cannot be escaped without great difficulty or at least some specific usage of the game systems
- strong okizeme
- very high combo damage
- combo starters that are difficult to block
- copius projectiles
- things that are hard to react to
And it's worth seeing what the impact of these have. If you made a much slower-moving game where players have a realistic chance of making a conscious reaction to every opponent action, the game generally becomes very slow and very turtle-y: it becomes incredibly difficult to deal with somebody who decides to just sit there because you don't have a means of establishing an advantage on them. Having very weak okizeme means that when you do score a knockdown, it can feel unrewarding because your opponent "gets away for free". Having very weak combo damage makes comebacks feel impossible: consider how even with the very high damage DBFZ had from the outset, only until system changes in recent versions did comebacks feel like something that could regularly occur!
Some of these general notions of "honesty" also start constricting the game design, because certain types of characters can no longer be made, for better or for worse. Urien's Aegis Reflector in 3S is a perfect combination of dishonest and honest: it's frankly CHEAP AS HELL at times, but he doesn't get it quickly and it requires tremendous skill to bring it to the level at which it starts feeling "unfair"... and at that level of play, Urien is far from the most unfair character!
I don't think these ideals are at all unrealistic, though, and I think plenty of games people really love to feature them. The Dark Souls games are all about fighting things that possess deadly but reactable attacks. The Gundam Vs. games have extremely weak okizeme compared to 2D fighting games because blocking is something only a few characters can do. The game features copius projectiles (literally 4 players might be shooting at any given time!), too!
Some projectile-heavy games actually have stamina systems: the extremely forward-thinking Touhou fighting games made by tasofro have a multitude of defensive options and having a stamina system that is also tied to defense is central to the games.
A recent major tournament of one of these games
Battle K-Road was one very early approach the idea of minimizing okizeme, with knockdowns always resulting in the two players being reset to starting positions.
If you wind all the way to some of the games which embody ideals of limited offensive pressure/extension, no okizeme, limited damage, you wind up at.... fencing and kendo! Unlike boxing where KOs are ever-present and trump points, or judo where point judging is BS and ippon is match-ending, fencing is a low damage game (each touch is worth one point) and each successful touch results in a reset to neutral. Being cornered is still bad, and defensive options are myriad. However, if any sport features unreactable offense... it's fencing! The tip of the fencing foil or the epee whips about at a speed faster than the eye can follow, and there are many things that require a read of your opponent rather than a reaction. In kendo, lightweight fiberglass swords allow successive strikes at incredible speed, and damage is "high" because matches are often played only to a low single digit number of points!
Most interestingly, though, is that in the Japanese fighting game community, a lot of the theory of the neutral game is built off of kendo terminology. Specifically, these are: oki-waza, ate-waza and sashi-kaeshi.
(1) Oki-waza means that you pre-emptively make a move,
(2) Ate-waza means doing a move that will hit waiting opponents,
(3) Sashi-kaeshi means waiting for the opponent to make a move and reacting to it
Oki-waza is pressing d.HP with Dee Jay from the other side of the screen where it won't hit anybody, but so that Dhalsim will be hit when he tries to do a slide or do a long d.MP.
Ate-waza is Dhalsim pressing a long d.MP the moment he sees he is in range for it to connect, because it is too fast for a standing opponent to react to.
Sashi-kaeshi is Dhalsim waiting for you to jump so that he can press standing roundhouse and kick you.
When everything is reactable, sashi-kaeshi dominates the game, and the game becomes very turtle-heavy. When offense is overwhelming, sashi-kaeshi may well be impossible and oki-waza or ate-waza dominate the game via furious rushdown. All of these lead to experiences that don't feel good in the neutral part of the game, and it feels like there is no thoughtful exchange between the opponents.
However, just what is right for a given game can vary HUGELY!
Tekken is a literally a game of unreactable combo starters in which characters seldom separate much when attacks are blocked, but all three of the above principles are still at work, and an unheralded player from Pakistan can conquer all that Asia, Europe, and North America has to throw at him.
All that said:
KOF should stay away from custom combos because custom combos have never done anything to bring more people into playing KOF.
quote:
I always thought of other things similar to a stamina meter. Like the effectiveness of parts of the body after hitting and getting hit on those parts. If the left arm gets hit the most(if hit box detection were ever so sweet), then that player would loose the ability to use that arm. Or something similar.
If a player utilizes the legs the most, should have higher hit rate but less if using arms or vice versa.
It may be a technical disaster if implemented lol.
It's kinda worth pointing out how much attacks tend to not actually hit where you think they do, because the earliest point of contact is in fact at a much different spot that what it would seem. This applies to both 3D and 2D games, too! In one game I was working on that has shut down, the characters were realistically proportioned and did attacks that had their foundation animation done via motion capture. When you are playing the game and duelling with your opponent, many of your strikes that would seem to connect with your opponent's head or upper body... actually first connect with their wrist or knee, depending on their animation. The practical significance of this is that we had to make the hit effects emerge from different locations on the body than precisely the spot that connected, because otherwise you'd have a lot of blood coming out from below the waist and it's visually confusing.
THAT SAID, it is not impossible to make a game which fully embraces this idea, but it often winds up playing rather differently.
One recent example is CYBORG by Goshow
[this message was edited by Spoon on Wed 26 May 15:05] |
New Customer | "Re(4):Re(10):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Fri 28 May 16:05
My apologies for the following post, I attempted to keep it on target; but my thoughts tend to derail like the train in Unbreakable. . .
Well, in full disclosure; from what little I know of the Ishiwatari / Mori school of ASW fighting games "mischief" seems to be their consistent design philosophy. With perhaps Guilty Gear skewing a bit more toward "aggressive mischief". Thus the emphasis on design mechanics motivating players to move forward and throw caution to the wind. If I'm speaking out of turn, feel free to correct me. I only played pre-Xrd Guilty Gear games casually because of friends who were into them; but I tended to play them more like Street Fighter - so I was "doing it wrong" (not grasping the depth of mechanics and said friends were not capable of expressing or explaining the mechanics as a fan should), but still having some fun in the process.
With that in mind, I don't find Strive to be particularly disagreeable. I wasn't an expert, but do somewhat miss the chain mechanic in past games; which I liken to the. . . what was the zig-zag input called that Capcom created for Darkstalkers/Vampire combos? It was an obvious and useful tool for a low skill player like myself. If you're in trouble, just fall back on a gatling to re-calibrate.
I also do not want to look only at the top of the mountain (GO1, Fuudo, Infiltration, Daigo, etc.) and remove tools these players enjoy. To quote esteemed Western philosopher Randall Mario Poffo - "Nothing means nothing! Nothing, means nothing. I'm talking about all the way to the top. Yeah~ unjustifiably in a position that I'd rather not be in; but the cream rise to the top. Oh yea~!" Top level players will always exist, and this is where analytics and careful design come into play for matchmaking online. Even something as simple as displaying an MS Office style Clippy for fighting games when you log-in, e.g. "Greetings warrior! Just an FYI - players of your rank are more abundant at (insert metrics for time of day in local time zone) - would you like to seek a match against a higher rank player? Y/N"
When not playing random matches, then good lobby systems come into play - options to filter connection settings (I decried the foolishness of abandoning ping times in favor of common cell phone bar visualization back in 2008 when online fighting games on consoles became common), rank filtering for public rooms, auto-kick options to boot idle players when the lobby admin isn't paying attention, etc. Noobs, neophytes, novices, and other low rank players should not find themselves thrust into the Ninja Blender of combat against higher ranking players in casual lobbies.
I run into this in SF5 as a casual player. I hate that more experienced players will see my profile, and immediately "counter pick" the character displayed in my profile to "show me how to use them". Thanks, but my game ranking tells it all; all your unsportsmanlike conduct is showing me is that you're an insufferable ass looking to discourage lower ranking players. Just kick me out of the lobby, thank you very much. That's my hypothetical online opponent, nobody here - sorry for any confusion. This is also why I'd like any game that makes you select a "main" character in a profile to allow players to choose the most powerful fighting game character of all - Random Select.
Sorry, I wandered off topic. :p
Having stated that - this is where incorporating a stamina meter / mechanic for offense would be useful. Top tier players will not regulate offense when the game does not require it, however baking it into the game would require the players to adopt new methods of maintaining their advantage in matches. While moving both players to a neutral state. The most odious aspect to fighting games is unregulated pressure, and I admit this as someone who years ago forced another player in our group out of playing Dead or Alive 2 through vicious reads. Granted, my opponent could have stopped performing the same action resulting in the same result; but I don't know why I was so merciless, and that lack of mercy put them off of playing the game ever again and the community was worse for having less players as a result of my lack of mercy.
This was someone I knew for years, and I did this to them and feel terrible over it to this day. I don't believe this level of introspection is something online players and lab monsters engage in, or consider when playing online against opponents at lower skill levels. Again, this is where the game developer needs to design intelligent matchmaking tools and encourage players of all skill levels to find their like-skilled player pool.
This could also be addressed by developers acknowledging and rewarding "good play", in this example "good play" would be measured by points (ranking, in game currency, etc.) that are commensurate with the players depth of tactical application of the game mechanics. This harebrained concept would work something like this:
- Match victory with normal is worth 25 points
- Match victory with EX move is worth 50 points
- Match victory with Super Move is worth 75 points
- Match victory with Critical Art / V-Skill / Intant Kill 100 points
- Using X colored Roman Cancel / Focus Attack during a match is worth Y points
- Throw X Reverals / Cancels during a match is worth Y points
- Winning a ranked match against a higher ranking player earns a bonus of Y points
So on, and so forth, this would not only fuel a sense of accomplishment - it would encourage players to learn and utilize advanced mechanics in the game. It boggles my mind that in a decade of fighting game creation, no developer (to my knowledge) has implemented such a system. It's exacerbated by the absolute disaster of Fight Money in Street Fighter V, where you're just disrespected in your effort to survive with the pittance of Fight Money regardless of how well you fared in a game.
That's not a hard system, just a rough sketch of something I believe could be implemented to the benefit of both genre and community. Goodness knows, I spitefully fire up Duty Fighter 5 to do my Fight Money homework to earn the paltry pittance of virtual currency to subsidize my roster expansion. Which will probably not be complete before Street Fighter 6 appears, due mainly to my apathy toward the game. It's not terrible, but it's not my favorite entry in the franchise; and I'd much rather be playing Strive or VF5:US.
I may be an odd bird as well, because my enjoyment of fighting games is not derived purely from winning. If I enjoy the aesthetics of a game, I will continue to play; and this is why I'm such a massive fan of Arc Sytems Works fighters. When 2D sprite based games lay bleeding, and in danger of falling to killing blow, they defiantly arose with BlazBlue. Sure that era of sprite based fighters made sensible use of rotoscoping from polygon based models (similar to how those few heroes at SNK crafted the dot pixel art of KoF12/13 in a glorious dying gesture), but the end results were glorious new sprite based games for this nostalgia addled geezer who wanted to see the pixel art of my era carry on into the future and evolve.
Then the mad bastards at Arc System Works did me one better. I was a BlazBlue fan, relatively indifferent to the Guilty Gear franchise; but I will never forget the day in 2013 when I watched that Guilty Gear Xrd trailer for the first time. I thought to myself, "Oh, here's Guilty Gear using the updated sprite technology they used to make BlazBlue - neat..."
Then I get to one minute and two seconds into the trailer - Sol and Ky's swords clash.
The camera freezes.
AND IT ROTATES AROUND THE CHARACTERS!
I had to stop the trailer and start it over again to confirm I was not seeing things. I then proceeded to watch that trailer on repeat for I don't recall how long that afternoon. I emailed my friends. I could barely contain my enthusiasm.
Some how. Some way. Arc System Works and Team Red managed to create a polygon based fighting game with the aesthetics and visual integrity of a sprite based fighting game, but incorporating dynamic camera moves and stunning visuals. I was throttled. I had no expectation of Arc System Works accomplishing anything of this sort, not when more prestigious companies like Capcom, Sega, and Namco were unable to, or incapable of doing such a thing! These scrappy little bastards went from Underdog to Alpha Dog in my book. Years before I had dreamed of a Street Fighter game that used a stunning visual style to replicate the gorgeous artwork of the Legendary Capcom artists of the 90's - and that dream is still unrealized. Could you imagine if we ever got a Street Fighter game using polygons that replicated the legendary artwork of Bengus for Street Fighter Alpha, the iconic character sketches Kinu Nishimura provided for Street Fighter 3, or the lush paintings Akiman provided for Street Fighter 2?!
It is a shame we'll never see that Street Fighter game. The fighting game genre is poorer for that lack of ambition. I would like to believe it could happen if Capcom would throw money at the talent to make it happen. Take the risk. Rise to legendary status. Make me love Street Fighter in the way I loved it back until 2008. This is why the present state of Capcom fighters turns me off. The games could be fun to play, but I outright hate to look at them. They are visual abominations not befitting a standard bearer of the genre; but I also speculate this is due in large part to the IP being handed over to Capcom USA years ago and all of the brilliant artists who made me fall in love with the game's visuals leaving the company.
Oh sure, they call Gouda Cheese (Bengus) for a good time these days; but clearly he's just cashing paychecks for nostalgic twits. I get that artists change and evolve over time, but his work on Street Fighter 5 really just speaks to a lack of interest, or care, for the series. Who can blame him - what he produces no longer has any bearing on the finished product. Everything is assembled piece meal by various hands. There is no visual cohesion in SF5.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I'm having difficulty replying because I generally agree with the response, and want to add that I feel it is important for fighting games to remain true to their origin. The ethos of the franchise should remain consistent.
Samurai Shodown 2019 is a great example of this. The game feels so much like what I remember playing back in the arcades in the 90's, with a lot of the fat from SamSho 3 onward trimmed, or more elegantly incorporated. Although I do wish SNK attempted a sumi-e art style, like early Samurai Spirits concept art, and Samurai Shodown 64 made use of. That could be stunning.
An overarching theme here is were I not a lowly laborer, my dream job would be art directing / creating a visual masterpiece of a fighting game to inspire a new generation, the way the games I grew up with inspired me.
Strive is a fun title so far, and I suspect the conflict most people feel is due to the team actively changing mechanics to appeal to a wider audience; but it's also being done with the cooperation of the man who created the franchise. This is an amazing process to behold as Guilty Gear is unlike other fighting games which have become orphaned IP's, long since removed from their original creators; and subject to volatile decisions (e.g. the Ono era of Street Fighter). I also appreciate that you can look at the history of the series and watch character age and change. This is incredibly unique to Guilty Gear, even if Fatal Fury and Street Fighter experimented with showing us aged characters in Mark of the Wolves and Street Fighter 3 - the commercial failure of Street Fighter 3 seems to have doomed Street Fighter to exist in the amber of Street Fighter 2 memory. Ryu will always be the eternal karate hobo.
This speaks to a larger issue I have with how fighting games justify their existence through rather atrocious stories. Stories in fighting games have never been worth the trouble of cutting characters that players like. A perfect fighting game would be like an NFL or NBA game, this is a sport. These are the players. Combat is what these characters do - and here is this years edition with the characters you enjoyed from the previous game, and a new line-up of combatants entering the fray. Every character is somebody's favorite character, so it's an act of respect to honor them and keep them around, rather than cast them off in favor of some atrocious narrative - and possibly replace them with another character with the same move set, but no affection from the player.
This is also another case where Guilty Gear is somewhat unique in that Arc System Works has reached an amazing height of visual fidelity and production that they can utilize their game engine to also create their own animated films using the game assets. Sure the Guilty Gear story is utterly preposterous and wildly convoluted; but looking back on it's evolution - it's pretty funny to behold. This is also better than farming out production of story and animation to a third party, e.g. many a fighting game anime of the 90's.
quote:
Generally speaking, some of the things that come across as "dishonest" are:
- extended pressure that cannot be escaped without great difficulty or at least some specific usage of the game systems
This is why I would like to see a developer attempt to reign in the unchained aggression of top tier players with a stamina meter. I do not believe it would render a game unplayable, or hated by players, if incorporated sensibly.
quote:
- strong okizeme
This is a fine line. I am still of the archaic mind that the player on defense should have some mercy conferred to them by design. The Tekken franchise is the worst offender in my opinion, not helped by the first three entries being essentially 2D games using polygons and eliminating the beauty of Virtua Fighter - being a polygon based "3D" fighter that took place in an arena, which required a new degree of spatial awareness. In general, I find both Tekken and Soul Calibur still tend to coddle the players. A 3D fighter ought to be a 3D fighter which spatial awareness and intuitive 3D movement being core game mechanics.
quote:
- very high combo damage
I do not mind high damage, however I abhor low damage time consuming high count combos. This is why I argue for an attack stamina meter. Forcing the aggressor to be deliberate in attack, and forcing a reset to a neutral leaning state for attacker and defender. Too much of one, you end up with Gracie Jiu Jitsu turning combat sport into a snooze fest for spectators; too much of the other and you end up with complaints that Mayweather runs from hits every round.
quote:
- combo starters that are difficult to block
Speaking to your discussion of ambiguous hit/hurt boxes I strongly feel that fighting game developers ought to make heights obvious. Even as a player that has been with the genre since 1992 - ambiguous hit boxes are just a baffling choice for no reason, it's not being clever - it's simply annoying.
quote:
- copius projectiles
This generally isn't an issue in well designed fighters. Yes the classic fireball trap can be annoying; but the classic remedy was patience and resolve. Since then we've had a variety of mechanics introduced to counter this, although with the schizophrenic nature of franchises, this can vary wildly between entries in a single franchise which is unfortunate.
quote:
- things that are hard to react to
Could you please provide an example? I'm unclear.
I'd also like to close with there may also be some cultural factors we could be overlooking, a big one I can recall from classic American arcade days was the cries of "cheap" when normal throws were used in Street Fighter 2 matches. It's not cheap. If you're sitting still crouching like a potato, then I'm going to throw you. :b
Please don't take that as a point by point rebuttal; I just wanted to attempt to coax out more discussion if you're willing. Once more, I appreciate the thoughtful response and opportunity to ramble on.
Thanks for the conversation.
Finally, glad to see VF5US is going to be free on PSN+. I had planned to purchase it, but if I can obtain it while my subscription lasts - all the better!
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Spoon's Dojo" , posted Sat 29 May 04:59:
Let me second Rugal in saying Spoon's post is one for the ages, like Toxico's Art of Fighting or Nobi's Vampire post!
quote:
fine if you're an execution machine, but when you're on the receiving end - it's no fun.
I prefer old school BBS/Forums to modern options.
A man of wealth and taste! Welcome!
You'll find no argument from me that Street Fighter would benefit from Guilty Gear's visual design and consistency, though I'll still take SFV's weird hodgepodge over SFIV's consistent ugliness, I suppose.
As someone who's mediocre at fighting games but loves them, I can't add much to everyone's advanced analysis but can get back to Pencilero's basic proposition: lots of figthing games are no fun when you're getting pounded by high-level technical players, making them unappealing to novices...but this isn't always the case. Why? I think button vs. motion inputs mean everything, and this ties into 2D vs. 3D. I've managed to teach a number of friends and housemates over the years to play Soul Calibur 1-2 and/or Street Fighter, and the ability to do cool things in 3D (button inputs) even when you don't know every input lowers the barrier to entry so much.
Just punching the air or failing to produce a single special move in 2D just isn't any fun at all for people, whereas button input games seem to offer some ability to stumble along and occasionally do something even when getting beat up. I'm not even talking about button-mashing in a poorly designed 3D game, just the thrill of moving about in three dimensions, perhaps, the sense of action. The only other solutions I've seen to make fighting games truly approachable to the uninitiated are things like Justice Gakuen's simplified inputs option (tying specials to buttons, making super combos come out with standard special attacks). None of this really speaks to how to make it more fun to lose to advanced, aggressive players, of course, but that's probably true in any sport.
Edit: oh, except Soul Calibur’s guard impact. No fiddly irritating frame-specific Parry/Blocking from SFIII, no meter-eating Zero Counters or V-reversals from SFZero or SFV, just a simple button to repel the over-aggressive, which can later be taken to higher levels with the guard impacts of guard impacts of guard impacts we used to chain together
in the halcyon days of Soul Calibur II. Even if you lose the guessing/reflex game, it’s still more fun than getting pounded by infinite combos.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Sat 29 May 08:02] |
| | "Re(1):Spoon's Dojo" , posted Sat 29 May 11:56:
quote:
- things that are hard to react to
Could you please provide an example? I'm unclear.
There's a lot of things like this in a variety of different ways!
As I started writing, I just turned it into a "things that are hard to block"!
But things where the "reaction" part is specifically challenged:
- things which are hard to block because they demand a quick reaction
(e.g. in the Guilty Gear Xrd games, all the Dust attacks have a common bright spark in their startup, but all of the Dust attacks must be blocked high and some of them are very fast)
- things which are hard to block because their sheer speed makes them hard to react to
(e.g. Millia's 6K overhead is notoriously hard to block at 17F startup since you are also busy thinking about whether or not she will throw you. Sol just running at pressing S at you is incredibly quick even though you can block it high OR low!)
- things which are hard to block because they are hard to visually distinguish
(e.g. Jam's 5D is famous for its subtle animation, so even though in terms of raw frame count it should be blockable, it is much much harder to block than its speed suggests. Bryan's Hatchet Kick has a lot of startup which just looks like a forward dash, which makes it hard to see and switch to low block)
And things which are hard in some different ways, as well as similar ways:
- things that are hard to block even if you have committed to blocking and know which height to block
(e.g. a crossup jump-in where you can see that the guy is in the air doing a jump attack that you want to block high, but it's hard to tell whether you should be blocking left or right)
- things which are hard to block even when you know the sequence of what is coming
(e.g. when a character is jumping with a light normal and then landing into a low normal, such that the jumping attack might intentionally whiff and so you must switch between high and low blocking very quickly in order to be able to block the low)
- things which are hard to block because you can only block them with specific timing and mechanics
(e.g. it is OBVIOUS that Ryu is charging up a Denjin Hadoken and you might know that you have to parry it to stop it, but the Denjin travels with great speed, flickers weirdly flying at you, and can be released with a variety of timings)
There's plenty more, but these are some of the prevalent ones!
Samurai Shodown is kinda cool in how it realizes those kendo-inspired neutral ideas: jumps are huge and easy to see coming, so outside of okizeme it's hard to jump at someone in a way that's hard to block; there's few overheads of any kind that are fast so basically everything can be blocked low; almost everything is minus on block; the defender can guard cancel into specials moves almost universally. So just sitting there in crouch is actually quite strong, since you'll block almost everything automatically and anything slow you can guard cancel and hit. This makes dashing in and throwing a key guard breaking options, and run speeds in the game are generally quite fast. This incentivizes you to flick out pokes to check opponents who are attempting to just dash in on you, but since it's unusual for an attack to be positive on block in the game, if they just walk in and block, now they are at a slight advantage and can try to press in a bit further.
The all-girls fighting game Koihime Musou is similar to Samurai Shodown in that almost everything is minus on block, but it goes even further in some ways in that combos are relatively weak UNLESS you score a counter hit. In Samurai Shodown, landing a combo can be huge regardless of counter hit, and landing a counter hit heavy slash is HUUUUUUUGE all on its own. In Koihime Musou, each character has a number of moves that on successful counter hit will put the opponent into a special combo state where the attack gains juggling and canceling powers they don't normally have, and this enables combos.
----
Stamina Gauges!
I think some games do a GREAT job with stamina gauges, and what role the stamina gauge plays is quite different in some of these games. In SSV, lower stamina doesn't prevent you from doing attacks, but your attacks do much less damage. In Dark Souls, you literally cannot dodge or attack without stamina.
One of the first and best 3D games to make use of 3D gauges and emphasize the "3D-ness" is... Virtual On!
In Virtual On, there's a big variety of moves and playstyles across the cast, and all of the different attacks each have their own cool down! So the cooldowns inherently limit how much each character can attack, and these cooldowns are different across the different moves. It's honestly amazing how much they executed so well in such an early competitive 3D game!
The Gundam Vs. games have a combination of ammo which only reloads when fully emptied, energy gauges which gradually refill even when partially emptied, etc. An opponent's ability to continuously rush at you is limited, their ability to continually attack is limited, etc.
Smash Bros. decided that they were happy with the frequency at which people attacked, but they devised a mechanic to encourage more variety in the attacks: there's a queue of the last several moves you've used, and the more often one move occurs in that list, the weaker it gets in terms of both its damage value and in terms of its blasting-people-out-of-the-ring power.
If we want to be more stereotypically-Cafe, we've also got the Art of Fighting games which had a gauge limiting the use of special moves, specifically to prevent extended fireball battles/traps.
I think there are many possible approaches to this question, many of which are simple, but many of which diverge quite radically in what their effect is. The super meter is a sort of stamina gauge, and it particularly is in Guilty Gear because the freeform Roman Cancel mechanic enables arbitrary continuation in offense. Once the gauge empties, suddenly their options radically diminish and they might even have to back off.
---
Balancing Across the Levels of Players
This is probably one of the hardest problems any fighting game has after "making the game look appealing" and "making the game interesting".
A pretty humorous complaint in fighting-adjacent games like DOTA or League of Legends is that there are some characters which absolutely devour lower skilled players but struggle to make an impact at higher level play, and some characters which are ubiquitous presences in higher level play but struggle to be at all useful in lower level play. Once some characters which had the "strong with weak players" problem modified to be relevant at higher level play... they became obnoxious at BOTH levels of play!
Sakurai who heads the Smash Bros. game has it right when he says "casual players cannot be ignored" because casual players represent the overwhelming majority of the people who will buy/play your game. Even for games which are ancient and only kept alive by the power of modern internet and Discord, there's a gradation of how "serious" and "competitive" the players are.
---
Special Move Motions Stop People from Having Fun
Smash has special moves universally done by holding a direction and pressing a single button, and it was deeply amusing to me when Sakurai had to explain the different command motions for Terry and Ryu. One of their great ideas is that the moves can be done either way, but you get a slightly faster/more powerful version if you do the motion. I think that's great!
You know another game which does that and is also a game with cooldown mechanics and highly realized 3D gameplay?
Virtual On.
The absolute brilliance of Virtual On was most certainly underappreciated decades ago.
---
Tekken Sucks at Teaching Players Anything
Tekken is absolutely horrible at teaching players anything and only recently became remotely good at it with the most recent patch to Tekken 7 which added cool new training mode features. HOWEVER, the single most important thing Tekken continuously fails to teach new players well is "how to get up from knockdowns".
None of the benefits/drawbacks of the different methods of getting up are explained well, and some of them barely make sense anyway. How do you get up quickly, with a direction, or a punch, or a kick? How do you get up quickly in another direction, given that the buttons are named "Left Punch" and "Left Kick"?
The cost of not getting up are incredibly severe, and it absolutely leads to beginning players having a bad experience because this critical element of the game is poorly surfaced and unintuitive. It has tremendous depth once you know what the options are and how they work, but when you don't it's just a source of frustration.
TEKKEN WOULD BE A BETTER GAME FOR EVERYONE IF IT LITERALLY FLASHED "PRESS <button> TO LANDING ROLL!!!" WHENEVER SOMEONE GETS LAUNCHED!
Seriously the quick landing tech is the only way to not get soccer kicked to death once you are knocked down. HOLDING BACKWARDS WILL NOT SAVE YOU FROM THIS EVEN THOUGH IT IS THE DIRECTION YOU ARE TAUGHT TO BLOCK WITH!!!!!
ARGH!!!!!
[this message was edited by Spoon on Sat 29 May 12:32] |
New Customer | "Re(3):Spoon's Dojo" , posted Sun 6 Jun 10:07
Sorry, been busy working. Will reply in time, but relaxing and trying to play some fighting games with a full two day weekend to myself (the biggest thing for me during the height of the pandemic is time allowed for my skin to rest from the constant hand washing during the work week, general dry skin and during the winter dry skin and my finger prints splitting open - rather painful). . .
I missed Virtua Fighter; but honestly - I'm not feeling this remake. Inability to skip replays during matches = bore city. I could swear that was possible on the PS3 version. Am I misremembering?
Input lag on the match screen even. . .
Training mode is still inferior to VF4e, how?
Japanese developers continue to throw baby and bath water out. Shameful. This constant reinvention of the wheel is a waste of everybody's time.
And don't let this goon do interviews:
“Nothing has been decided yet regarding Virtua Fighter 6, so I cannot make any statement. But if you ask me whether I want to create it or not, I do want to create it.”
Yes, perhaps there is some subtext or nuance in that response as in - "Come back Yu Suzuki!" But at face value, it's lazy and I just read it as insulting to the fanbase.
I admit I'm also a bit irked by higher skill players entering low rank rooms. It's already 85∘ F in my house, and these jerks are elevating my blood pressure - raising the temperature higher with their shenanigans. PICK ON SOMEBODY YOUR OWN RANK!
Well, time to fold some laundry.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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New Customer | "Re(5):Spoon's Dojo" , posted Mon 14 Jun 14:52
quote:
After spending a little time with the latest version of VF5 I'm inclined to agree. The core game is still fun to play, but I already knew that VF5 was pretty good when it first came out. When it comes to this port, however, I get the feeling that the decision to distribute it via PS Plus was the motivation for its release and the game was budgeted accordingly.
Majin Obama recently posted a pretty good summary of the reasoning behind the release, and the "rushed" launch. It's a bummer that fighting games suffer from these events, e.g. Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, then six months later Ultimate MvC3 because we now have time to finish what the tsunami interrupted.
Perhaps fighting game developers need to pay closer attention to the Shigeru Miyamoto quote, "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
First impressions matter, and the margin for error with fighting games is extremely low. While I don't want to disparage casual players, I also realize casual players aren't going to stick around for what is essentially video game homework if you don't include content (SF5 at launch) for them to explore and learn the ropes. As pointless as an "arcade" mode in a home release may seem to genre veterans, for a casual player it is an interactive learning tool. It's probing and exploration, not "labbing" which is a chore, and I say this as someone that loves the genre despite my limited free time as a working adult.
Japanese developers really ought to look at classic choose your own adventure fiction as the basis for a fighting game story mode in the current game development context. Pass/Fail is an antiquated game design mechanic. Perhaps a loss in story/arcade mode should't default to the non-existent "insert quarter" continue screen; but move to a less challenging, or different CPU opponent.
Honestly, we've had full length single player games with multiple endings for at least two decades now. There's absolutely no reason fighting games could not incorporate branching story paths into the game design.
I do appreciate that Arc System Works is essentially doing their own in game anime at this point; but when I pop in a game - no matter how stunning it looks visually, I don't just want to sit back and watch a movie.
Fighting games are near and dear to my heart, and I do believe that they are one of the last bastions of pure game play in the current market; but I also recognize the potential the have to appeal to people that aren't myself. There has to be a way to expand and invigorate the genre beyond blatant nostalgia cash grabs with gross 3D visuals like vanilla SF4.
Which I didn't fall for, and in my own head canon SF4 was the spiritual sequel to the Street Fighter EX series. In reality, most casual players my age were unaware of the EX series, because they drifted away from video games while in college, or raising families; so Street Fighter with polygon visuals was new to them in 2009.
I finally got my gaming PC up and running yesterday, over a month since purchasing it. Strive is on the list of things to throw money at as I feel it's imperative to vote with my wallet in support of developers who are doing things I enjoy. Just need to budget for it.
In the meantime I installed KoF2002UM, KoF13, GGXX, Xrd, BDZF, and BB:CF (which I didn't get to play a ton of as the series never took off with my local friends and by the time this one released they had long since lost interest) from my Steam library. Need to download SC6 and SF5 tonight.
Memory upgrade should be arriving tomorrow, and hopefully with that - barring planned cooling enhancements - this will last me a good few years.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| PSN: KTallguy
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| "Re(2):Re(10):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Thu 17 Jun 20:50
Wow, I drop by after a bit and find all this great talk about VF! :)
As a person who played VF seriously for years, I'm enjoying messing around with this "Remaster/Remake" with friends. But for all the things I love, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that holds it back (same with Tekken). And unlike Tekken, the game is still visually bland. The characters are more like tools than people, and in the end an emotional connection is very important to draw new folks in.
Still, I was actually surprised at the amount of effort that was made to update the game. Apparently they planned on more modes but the pandemic hurt development, and the 40th anniversary date was their hard cutoff. Let's see how much content they can add, and how the player numbers hold up.
I agree with Pencilero that I'd much rather play a game than watch it. Strive's long cutscene story rubs me the wrong way for that reason (and tbh I'm not that interested in Guilty Gear's lore). But as an "in" to get emotionally connected to the characters it might be effective enough.
I think that we'll be seeing more single player content in fighting games moving forward, though. We saw the outcry at Street Fighter V's launch at the lack of a basic arcade mode... not all players play fighting games to jump into hypercompetitive online play. Some people just want to set up epic battles between fighters they love, or see the journey of each character and how they face their rival. I don't believe those cries are falling on deaf ears.
quote:
...where is Fighter's Megamix HD?!
That's what I'm talking about!
quote:
Aaaaand the funniest thing of all is that Nintendo managed to make Tekken X SF before Namco did!
Namco probably lost interest after experiencing how hard it was to put Akuma in Tekken 7.
Kazuya in Smash is a juicy get. That game is really just a big red nostalgia button now. If they could get Sub Zero in the game that would complete the circle (I wonder if Nintendo could somehow implement fatalities in a family friendly way).
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| PSN: Ishmael26b
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| "Re(3):Re(10):Re(10):Strive to Log In" , posted Fri 18 Jun 09:43
quote:
Majin Obama recently posted a pretty good summary of the reasoning behind the release, and the "rushed" launch. It's a bummer that fighting games suffer from these events, e.g. Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, then six months later Ultimate MvC3 because we now have time to finish what the tsunami interrupted.
That's interesting. It does make me wonder why they decided they needed to stick to the anniversary date for their release. I can't imagine anyone outside of Sega's PR staff honestly care about the dates that much.
quote:
Still, I was actually surprised at the amount of effort that was made to update the game. Apparently they planned on more modes but the pandemic hurt development, and the 40th anniversary date was their hard cutoff. Let's see how much content they can add, and how the player numbers hold up.
I wonder if at some point they will re-record the voices. It's amazing that for years now the fine folks at Sega have listened to Lion and El Blaze and thought those line readings were fine.
quote:
I think that we'll be seeing more single player content in fighting games moving forward, though. We saw the outcry at Street Fighter V's launch at the lack of a basic arcade mode... not all players play fighting games to jump into hypercompetitive online play. Some people just want to set up epic battles between fighters they love, or see the journey of each character and how they face their rival. I don't believe those cries are falling on deaf ears.
The fact that the arcade series Street Fighter was released without an arcade mode will never cease to amaze me.
Speaking as someone who quite enjoys single player stuff in fighting games I do wonder if the producers sometimes get confused as to what people want from their games. Story mode in titles like GG and MK are usually far too passive and dumb so I never finish them. Besides, playing through the arcade mode is a "story" mode since you fight everybody and prove you're the strongest. Fighting Krauser at the end of FF2 still feels more epic than any cinematic cutscene because I'm in the middle of it. Instead of movie-mode give me new and interesting ways to fight like VF4's quest mode or SFA3's World Tour mode and I'll be happy.
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(2):Fighting Game Thread 2021" , posted Sat 4 Sep 05:05
quote:
I regret to inform you that fighting games have peaked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wxfo1-CE3U
Hahaha, all of this and the replies are perfect.
“I come to bury fighting games, not to praise them.” After fighting games peaked in 1998 with SF Zero 3 and the home version of Justice Gakuen in the same year, most certainly did not peak in 1999 with detestable Third Strike, peaked again in whatever year your favorite KOF was, and then peaked once more in 2002 with Soul Calibur II, it’s been a while but now we are at the end. Thanks for the good times, everyone!
The question now is when we will have our first Boss, Blind, Brandy lagfest.
Is…is the bartender at the end of the video modeled after Professor but without his glasses?!
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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Rare Customer  | "Re(2):Fighting Game Thread 2021" , posted Mon 6 Sep 23:26
quote:
Dear all,
I regret to inform you that fighting games have peaked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wxfo1-CE3U
Henceforth, the entire genre is obsolete, and this thread is now closed. There will not be a 2022 thread.
I advise you all to start looking into getting different hobbies, such as burglary, time travel, or the biwa.
Sorry for your loss.
This reminds me of that time I went full Drunken Master 2 in that deplorable entry, Street Fighter 4 on the hoi polloi. Room spinning intoxicated off of vodka, and double perfecting one of the proselytizing sycophants of that entry.
Even dangerously drunk I would never appreciate or enjoy that entry, but it allowed me to couch my reservations of falling back on the tried and true ways of old.
Spirits and virtual fisticuffs should be more commonplace, temperament and age permitting.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| PSN: Ishmael26b
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| "Re(1):Write n Fight" , posted Sat 9 Oct 00:30
quote:
Straight on the heels of Kyanta 2 and other kusoge, and in the spirit of the Cafe's literary-minded pugilists, we have Write 'n' Fight, a brawler full of legendary writers. Apparently by "the greatest writers of all time" they meant "the greatest Western male writers we are aware of," which is too bad since they are totally missing a golden opportunity to feature "hot female fighters Murasaki Shikibu/Sappho of Lesbos/Jane Austen/Mary Shelly," etc. Still, I'd probably main Hemingway against a bunch of scrub Shakespeares.
This reminds me of Epic Battles of Rap History, where the premise sounds like it has potential but the end product ends up being an embarrassing waste of time for everyone involved, including the audience. As you noted, it's also a bigger sausagefest than a Hokuto no Ken game but that may say more about the literary canon of public domain authors than it does about the roster.
In other news, someone tried to sell people on a 10,000 character fighting game that somehow magically generates money while being played. Unsurprisingly, it was a scam.
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| | "Re(1):Write n Fight" , posted Sun 17 Oct 14:48
quote:
Straight on the heels of Kyanta 2 and other kusoge, and in the spirit of the Cafe's literary-minded pugilists, we have Write 'n' Fight, a brawler full of legendary writers. Apparently by "the greatest writers of all time" they meant "the greatest Western male writers we are aware of," which is too bad since they are totally missing a golden opportunity to feature "hot female fighters Murasaki Shikibu/Sappho of Lesbos/Jane Austen/Mary Shelly," etc. Still, I'd probably main Hemingway against a bunch of scrub Shakespeares.
They know the cash lay in Gals Write 'n Fight! :p
On one hand, kudos for making a game.
On the other, can we just ban the West from making fighting games please? The only halfway decent Western fighting games are all Marvel Vs. Capcom fanfic anyhow, and well - I'd rather not go there. I view that as the more venal aspect of Capcom, which I do realize is a business after all; but I had so many good memories prior to that.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(2):Does the soul still burn" , posted Thu 11 Nov 04:39
I will play SC6 with you! If you’re playing the PC version at least, which may be part of the problem: no cross play.
I doubt the character design opinions of the small but vocal sliver of the anti-sex American left that dominates the so-called English “discourse” at Kotaku and resetera etc. really matter much for the sales, so I think you’re down to gameplay in terms of competing with Tekken and SF. It’s certainly better than the manifestly awful 3 and 4, and 5 didn’t endear itself with anyone by pulling a SFIII with the cast, so if anyone’s playing SC at all, it’s likely to be this one or the godly SC2 on a souped up Dolphin emulator that allows network play of the GameCube version (which I would love to do with you all if only I could make it work). Maybe that’s the issue: 6 is at its best when it’s like 2, but the moves are still based on the awful 3, so we all keep trying to play it like 2 but it’s just not. The red glowing rock paper scissors mechanic is so infuriatingly dumb that I assume they must ban it in tournaments?
I think it’s been hard promoting the game as “better than the last three bad entries” rather than “one of the better playing entries in the whole series,” which you can fairly do for SFV, Tekken 7, or Smash Bros. regardless of individual preference.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
XBL: n/a
Wii: n/a
STM: n/a
CFN: zonepharaoh
| "Lagcalibur - the Edge of Soul" , posted Tue 16 Nov 09:40:
quote:
Be certain and let us know how the fights went and if anyone wore anything interesting!
Lagcalibur shall be the most gorgeous occasion, per MMC fashion show tradition! Our theme song shall be the finest of all game songs, transcending history and the world. "To love! To shine!"
But meanwhile: if you want to play the perfect SC2 and have a halfway working computer, you can plug your PS4 controller right into the Dolphin emulator, which the edge masters at 8-way Run have been kind enough to pre-configure for online play, theirs or ours! If anyone is up for it, I have the forbidden missing piece of the, ah, Soul Edge required to complete this technical alchemy so we can play, just let me know and I'll get it to you.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Tue 16 Nov 13:21] |
| PSN: Ishmael26b
XBL: n/a
Wii: n/a
STM: n/a
CFN: Ishmael26b
| "Re(1):Here comes a new challenger!" , posted Wed 24 Nov 00:11
quote:
Wow, I'm impressed by the visual overhaul Project L has received. I'm rooting for the Cannon Brothers, they've been part of my life ever since alt.games.sf2 and I'd like to see Western developers finally make a legit fighting game that isn't trash with shock value and shallow gameplay (MK) or MvC fanfic (Skullgirls). Although I admit, I have no familiarity with League of Legends, and outside of Dead or Alive 2 Hardcore - have little appreciation for tag fighters.
Meanwhile, the current steward and guardian of the Japanese FGC released a trailer for the Dungeon Fighter fighting game. Eighting is involved, so I hope it's fun - been a fan of their since Bloody Roar; but not so much of their recent output (see also, my weakness against tag fighters) If they can make a solid 1v1 with stable online play - bring it on!
Fighting adjacent (at least I believe this is a former Team Red staffer's project) Varvarion looks potentially fun. I'm not sure if this is still a mad passion project by a lone genius, but if it is - kudos! Impressive effort.
So far Project L does look promising. Still, I do think there are a number of people who are overly optimistic about how successful this game is going to be. As Granblue Fantasy has shown, just because something has an established fanbase elsewhere doesn't mean it's going to bring that audience into fighting games. Still, Project L already looks like it has a lot of Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid in it, so I'm certain it will find some sort of audience.
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| | "Re(2):Here comes a new challenger!" , posted Wed 24 Nov 03:18
quote:
So far Project L does look promising. Still, I do think there are a number of people who are overly optimistic about how successful this game is going to be. As Granblue Fantasy has shown, just because something has an established fanbase elsewhere doesn't mean it's going to bring that audience into fighting games.
I don't know if that's a particularly fair comparison. I have never played the other games, or watched the animes; but I do admire the commercial art aspect of GranBlue, Hideo Minaba and other artists just going crazy.
Granblue Fantasy Versus was the nail in the coffin for the Japanese developer hubris that has long been with the fighting game genre. The ability to focus on the native arcade scene and close knit community, while treating online play as a necessary evil for the world market.
Covid-19 brake checked the Japanese arcade and local communities, effectively smothering the ability of the title to find an audience upon release.
Half assed online play smothered the game's ability to find a world audience online. In a year where online events were highlighted, and now more pros were emboldened to hold developers to account instead of cashing paychecks at tournaments. Suddenly, when your payday is impacted by jank online play - now they care. Good. We could not continue to exist with developers half-assing online play.
I am not arguing that GBFV would have been the second coming; but I do believe if it launched under different circumstances - it might have found a community. As much as I enjoy the production art and illustrations, I found a lot of the cast to be very generic / boring fantasy trope fodder. I was hoping more of the insane stuff would have been incorporated, and I also dislike some of the rigid adherence to streamlined game mechanics. I don't mind simplicity in ease of execution, and macro buttons being enabled, but I dislike not having an option to execute inputs manually. Much like Street Fighter 4 intended to appeal to a more casual audience with input shortcuts, it also included baffling mechanics like One Frame Links and the cumbersome FADC mechanic; not to mention it re-introduced super move obfuscation that Street Fighter 3 eliminated by streamlining Super Art inputs.
Fighting games are still figuring out the fine balance between ease of use, and legacy inputs that need to be taken out behind the shed. Looking at you Guile's flash kick super input. . . (despised that one since SSF2) The development ought to be an iterative process, holding on to the good, and eliminating the bad - not throwing it all out and starting over from scratch.
I wish Project L the best of luck, but in the FGC and amongst casual console gamers. I don't know how many people are that familiar with League of Legends - so it too may face an uphill battle finding an audience. Casual gamers like brands and familiarity, so this is why good online play, good game play, and snazzy visuals to draw the eye in will matter.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| | "Re(3):Here comes a new challenger!" , posted Wed 24 Nov 05:00
quote:
I am not arguing that GBFV would have been the second coming; but I do believe if it launched under different circumstances - it might have found a community.
Granblue's net code certainly did the game no favors. And with the low player bases, the lack of crossplay further killed the PC release.
I'd argue it had other serious issues though. One major problem was the lack of presence for the source material outside of Japan/Asia. As far as I know, Granblue Fantasy never had a Western release? The anime was brought over, but it was a generic licensed anime lost in a flood of other titles. When you strip away the license knowledge, you are left with a fairly generic looking fantasy setting, and I don't think that has ever really met with success in fighting games?
Another was not just the glut of available fighting games, but what I consider a fatigue for "Arc Sys" games. You need something to stand out in a market already packed with Street Fighter, Tekken, Smash Bros, Mortal Kombat (and Injustice), DOA, Killer Instinct, KOF, and the rest. Arguably more so these days where popular fighting games can stay current with continued DLC support. At one time, being an Arc Sys game was itself enough, but going the "Arc Sys" route now means going against all the other "Arc Sys" games, as well as the tangentially related titles (Kill la Kill If) and titles that try to copy the Arc Sys visual appearance. So Granblue had to go against Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and Dragonball FighterZ.
And Granblue simply wasn't going to win the "Arc Sys" licensed game war against DBFZ. It didn't matter that the two games played quite differently.
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| | "Re(5):Here comes a new challenger!" , posted Sun 28 Nov 02:33
Warning! A Huge Wall of Text is Approaching Fast! Sorry, this has been kicking around my brain for a while and I just took the time to empty the overflow…
That’s an interesting point, I am not a mobile gamer – being the “boomer” meme in gaming terms, I need a physical input device, and don’t want my finger obscuring the play area. Closest I ever got was a mild addiction to the Yokai Watch puzzle game. I didn’t realize the GranBlue game has zero presence for iOS or Android in the West. I only know the anime exists due to a weeb peer (no judgment – I attended anime cons in my youth when they’d still bring over people who worked in the industry) that stopped me explaining the game world to clue me into his familiarity with the cartoon.
I disagree on ASW “fatigue”, ASW is still a relatively unknown developer despite their existence for some time. Case in point, when I dared to go pick up my copy of the game just after Covid-19 lockdowns began in March 2020 – the cashier at Gamestop was blown away by the game. She could not stop gushing over the visuals, and if I weren’t doing my best to speed run that extraction mission during a global pandemic, I would have questioned how she avoided running across Guilty Gear Xrd or Dragonball FighterZ. Not that Granblue has an exact visual style to those two titles, but those are the foundations upon which GBFV is built.
Granblue Fantasy Versus is a low IP awareness game in the West, from a niche developer. Look no further than after 23 years of making fighting games, Guilty Gear Strive is their best selling Guilty Gear title. Consider that the utter unga bunga brainlet franchise Tekken was able to outpace the esteemed gentleman’s 3D fighter Virtua Fighter thanks to merely existing on the Sony Playstation – and well, that just sort of reveals a lot about the poor taste of video gamers, and the long shadow cast by Sony’s anti sprite based rhetoric in America during the launch of the Playstation brand.
The reality – even if I reject it – is fighting games are still a niche genre, and one in which the current mainstream standard bearers are fantastically inept or maliciously incompetent, see also: Street Fighter 5 at launch. How Capcom absolutely fumbles with The One Fighting Franchise they have remaining after the smashing success of Ugly Polygonal Street Fighter 2 Rehash: No, Not Street Fighter EX Edition from 2009 (see, the genre is so niche consumers got fooled into believing Street Fighter 4 was the first time the series attempted polygon visuals) – it’s a level of stupid that if scientists were to study it, ought to be used a renewable energy source.
You can be superstitious and go with – Odd Number Street Fighter Entries are Cursed (1,3,5), or Capcom doesn’t realize Street Fighter always tanks as a console exclusive title (1,3,5) – the later ports are appreciated; but ultimately they don’t help as first impressions and launch sales matter, and if you make the game exclusive to an unpopular platform (TG-16, Dreamcast) or spend all of Sony’s money on pachinko and cigarettes instead of the game’s development. . . well as the clown said, “You get what you (EXPLETIVE) deserve!”
Street Fighter 6 needs to be multi platform with cross platform online play. One of the most recognized franchises in the genre cannot exclude potential players.
Setting my love of the genre aside – Street Fighter, Tekken, and that Midway game are the only “mainstream” fighters here in the US. Mash Bros is it’s own thing entirely and I will go to my grave holding that opinion. No apologies. We now know why it was allowed into EVO given the revelation of 2020.
I wish the genre had wider success, but people get lost in their heads over it despite developers bending over backward to appeal to casual players (embracing polygons for ease of development, input shortcuts, embracing input macros, more cinematic/flashy visuals, curbing content for Western sensibilities ((“core values” are frowned upon but excessive and explicit graphic violence is just fine)) ). At the end of the day, fighting games are one of the last genres of gaming where you can be out played by the person who has invested more time in it, and losing is a bad feeling. You won’t see me making appeals to FPS developers to make me love their games, I simply acknowledge that genre is not for me and move on. I will take doing an SNK super move input / or 720 for grapplers every day over fighting with a thumb stick to aim at a moving opponents head.
What makes Arc System Works stand out above the competition is the visual fidelity, art direction, and overall presentation. I’m content with that as it’s working out well for them these days, being able to develop their own intellectual properties, and work on licensed titles using that foundation to earn income to keep making their own games, and publishing the titles of smaller fighting game developers (Arcana Heart, Chaos Code, Under Night In-Birth, Melty Blood) is why in my opinion; they are The Steward of the Japanese Fighting Game. The love for the genre is evident in their own product and the products they publish, they are the Terry Bogard to the fighting game genres Rock Howard.
Strange days indeed!
I never expected that in my future I would become a proponent of that upstart developer behind that niche Playstation game Nick Rox couldn’t stop gushing over.
A supplement on the Mash Bros genre – I find these games to be a more noxious brand of Fan Service than Dead or Alive. This is evident in the aforementioned examples coming from Warner Brothers and Nickelodeon. You’re not interested in a genre, you’re just interesting in banging your favorite toys together like a toddler. I will at least give Brawlhalla some credit for not being able to coast on massive intellectual property fandom.
Pity Pokken Tournament never took off, that scratched the old itch I had for the glory days of experimental 3D fighters from the likes of Dream Factory and Sega. Developers unafraid of the polygon based fighting with arenas and full 3D movement, unlike Namco who to this day has bowling bumpers on Soul Calibur. Just let it happen. Let the smooth brains fall out of the ring with ease. It’s a bit like natural selection. :b
The Dungeon Fighter Duel trailers have me quietly hoping a new BlazBlue series is in the works using their polygon game engine. It’s been six years since the last proper BB game (not counting ports), and BB was the series that made me respect ASW back in 2008 when all other developers were abandoning the sprite in favor of the unrefined polygon and gross normal map textures.
While I’m wishing, may as well put it out there – it sure would be awesome if ASW and Eighting hit it off and approached Konami about a making a new Bloody Roar entry. It wouldn’t need to utilize the current Red Team Unreal Engine, but I would demand every character return. Bloody Roar is one of those games that had a fantastic roster of wacky fighters, and without fail they’d axe my favorites from sequels. Give me a big bang Bloody Roar with all my favorite monstrous fighters.
Secretly I’m hoping Riot is moving toward bringing Project L in line with the visuals for Arcane. I don’t know how intensive that would be for current hardware, but it’s a worthy goal as this is a stunning approach to modern computer animation.
Fighting game boomers remember what Capcom took from you. :p
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| | "Re(1):GranBlue Versus Existence" , posted Wed 15 Dec 05:56
quote:
Granblue Fantasy: Versus “Legendary” and “Value” editions.
This is nice and I will most definitely snag a PC copy during a Steam sale to replace my PS4 copy.
For me, this shows how annoying the DLC situation is for Granblue Versus. I only bought the game and the first season pass, the game died pretty fast on PC.
The second season pass is $35. Vira & Avatar Belial are another $10. Legendary Edition is $50.
If you actually care about the extra stages and color sets, they aren't in Legendary Edition. That's another $12 for the stages ($4 each) and who knows for the seemingly randomly priced color sets (seriously, color pack DLCs range anywhere from $1 to $7 each.) Oh, and that character pass is so expensive because Granblue charges a premium for its characters as well, $7 per character.
The more I look at Granblue's pricing, the less I even want to consider supporting the game. I hadn't even noticed how money-grubbing it had become, particularly for a game that arguably was dead in the water up until the release of the Legendary edition. (Sure, Steam now shows 500-1000 players on PC, but just a few days ago it ranged from around 40 to 140.)
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| | "Re(2):GranBlue Versus Existence" , posted Wed 15 Dec 16:26
quote:
For me, this shows how annoying the DLC situation is for Granblue Versus. I only bought the game and the first season pass, the game died pretty fast on PC.
The second season pass is $35. Vira & Avatar Belial are another $10. Legendary Edition is $50.
If you actually care about the extra stages and color sets, they aren't in Legendary Edition. That's another $12 for the stages ($4 each) and who knows for the seemingly randomly priced color sets (seriously, color pack DLCs range anywhere from $1 to $7 each.) Oh, and that character pass is so expensive because Granblue charges a premium for its characters as well, $7 per character.
The more I look at Granblue's pricing, the less I even want to consider supporting the game. I hadn't even noticed how money-grubbing it had become, particularly for a game that arguably was dead in the water up until the release of the Legendary edition. (Sure, Steam now shows 500-1000 players on PC, but just a few days ago it ranged from around 40 to 140.)
I can understand your frustration. I've been adverse to this since the Playstation 3 days and the fighters on the platform, and my work around after the first two BlazBlue games was to wait for the inevitable mid-release game that included the past DLC on disk. That model died off for most Japanese developers, and some Western studios offered Game of the Year editions with all content; but I don't play those games.
As I mentioned in a previous wall of text - fighting games are struggling with the transition from games as a product to games as a service. Sadly this more often devolves into corporate/IP fan rhetoric, "Company A does a thing for product I like, therefore it is good. Company B does same thing, and it is bad."
No one game is unique in the absolute trash state of monetization being employed.
As a fan of the genre, I find most of the business model grating and do not support it at full price for the content I do want, e.g. extra characters. Other superfluous "content" doesn't even fly on to my radar. I'm not paying for stages, music, or colors (admission, I did buy a color pack on BB ages ago to play GaoGaiGar colored Tager). Full stop.
This is why I want to see a new challenger appear with a new business model to set a new precedent for fighting games. Bald faced cash extraction from the fanbase is not sustainable. A line must be drawn delineating what content is unlockable via play, which adds to the incentive to keep playing outside of winning matches, and which content should be paid to fund overall development.
The example from my previous wall of text was making colors unlockable through play, and maybe even some low grade character tchotchkes, e.g. glasses, hats, facial hair, earrings, little trinkets you can use to customize the existing character model.
As much as I love the fighting game genre, I find the current state of monetization disgusting and I only ever purchase characters, or in the case of SCVI customization items, when they go on sale.
Hell, I've gotten so burned on paying money for characters I don't use, I have even curbed buying single character DLC. Wait for a bundle to go on sale for a good price, then buy them all. If that means my play experience is incomplete - oh well, not my DLC circus; not my high priced monkeys. Dragonball FighterZ, SamSho 2019, GranBlue, Soul Calibur 6, Tekken 7, Street Fighter 5 - all of them incomplete in my library.
This is also why I'd like to see all characters, base and DLC available in training mode. I can't go in blind to purchases anymore and risk wasting money on a character I will not use. As cool as some characters look (Valkenhayn, Makoto Nanaya, Menat, Zeku), my brain is too small and smooth to adapt to their move sets or play styles.
I say this as a fan since 1992. Imagine how much of a turnoff it is for somebody that is only a casual player, or new to the genre.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| | "Re(4):Re(10):DNF Versus Existence" , posted Fri 24 Dec 05:17
quote:
Could this be the next great kusoge ArcSys game? It sounds like I'm going to have a hoot and a half with DNF when I dig it out of a bargain bin a few months after it is released.
That seems to be the vibe.
I find it fascinating that even amongst "The FGC" there's very little consideration given to the credentials of developer history. DNF Duel has exposed this for me acutely, although it has always been there.
Generally it's mindless brand loyalty and name recognition, with little consideration given to the staff, teams, and companies involved. It's such a shame because I see a lot of similarities in the old American comic book market, and to a lesser extent the uncredited assistants in the Japanese manga market (although those talents can often spin off into their own successful works), where the talent involved in these creations is so often ignored in favor of "IS IT SPIDERMAN?" The same argument could be made for film as well, general audiences tend to not have a top three favorite film directors, they just want the next big water cooler blockbuster, fastest cars, more video game-like "action" on screen.
The only potential weak link in the chain would be the Dungeon Fighter parent company, because Eighting and Arc System Works have multiple decades of quality games under their belt.
So it's fun watching people on Youtube and on antisocial media be surprised by this outcome. I went to a restaurant staffed by exceptional chef and cooks and am shocked by how good my meal is! :b I'm looking forward to giving this a shot. Assuming PS4 will be digital only, so I may default to PC yet again as I'm not keen on paying an additional fee to play the game I purchased, on the console I purchased, with the internet service I pay for.
Please Bandai, release Mobile Suit Gundam XTREME VS.Maxi Boost ON on PC. . . Then I could walk away from consoles with less anguish.
"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus
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| | "Re(5):Re(10):DNF Versus Existence" , posted Fri 24 Dec 10:39
quote:
The whole visual cool down thing is intriguing to me. How is this different from needing to wait for a street fighter projectile to clear the screen before launching your next projectile? The only thing that has changed is the timer now has a visual, as opposed to relying on player reflex / game knowledge. Even if I can't see the clock / meter, I still need to wait until two seconds have passed before I can chuck out my next Sonic Boom. If removing that "barrier" allows more access to the genre, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Cool down meters aren't the same as just restricting how many fireballs you can have onscreen, or how much recovery a move has. You can make cool down meters mimic those effects, but they are used for other purposes as well.
I believe cool down meters came out of much less complex combat systems. They existed simply to keep players from mindlessly spamming the most effective option. When moves went into short cool downs, you had to cycle through different moves to keep up your damage output. When moves had longer cool downs, you had to think more about when you used them.
Cool down meters are a pretty artificial mechanic, but fighting games have plenty of artificial mechanics. Juggle limits are similarly artificial, why does someone turn completely intangible after X hits? Chain combos are artificial. On-screen fireball limits are artificial. Not being able to OTG, or only being able to OTG with special OTG moves, is artificial. Etc.
Move-specific cool down timers are, well, move specific. During cool down, you are only locked out of the related moves, not all moves. This is mechanically different from regular fighting game move recovery, where you are locked out of all moves except the moves that allow you to cancel recovery.
The main benefit and downside of cool down meters is that they are separate from the move design itself. You could set a move to have a 0.5 second cool down, or 5 second cool down, or even a 50 second cool down without changing anything about the design or animation of the move itself. But again, this makes cool downs disconnected from the on-screen animation. According to a wiki, a Female Grappler's Shoulder Tackle has an 8 second cool down, even though the move itself completes in a couple of seconds and the fighter is able to do anything other than another Shoulder Tackle for the rest of that cool down time.
Of note, higher level DFO moves can have cool downs of several minutes. Indeed, this is one of the two restrictions on DFO's equivalent of super moves. The other restriction is an actual physical resource cost, anywhere from 1 to 15 "clear cube fragments". (A five-minute cool down isn't that different functionally from Samurai Shodown 2019's once-per-match super.)
Of a second note, DFO also offers a lot of moves. It doesn't really matter that a particular special might have a 30 second cool down, because you might have 10 viable alternatives. Once you get past those early levels and start unlocking more of your moves, you are never really locked out of being able to do *something*, even if it isn't necessarily your highest damage option. And you can find combos that cycle through enough moves to run out the cool down timers of earlier attacks.
Back to cool down meters in general. You could do fancy stuff with cool down meters. You could link different moves to the same meter, have different forms have different timer costs, have moves affect the meters of other moves, or have alternate conditions affect recovery times. As I said earlier, you could mimic traditional fighting game systems with cool downs, but there isn't really a need as you can get a better result just using both systems together.
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| | "Re(5):Re(10):DNF Versus Existence" , posted Fri 24 Dec 16:21
quote:
Needless to say there's already been I'm not the biggest fan of cooldown meters in fighting games, but if Duel wants its moves to behave similar to DFO then it probably needed to copy the cooldown system in DFO (or Granblue Versus).
Does the cooldown in DFO behave the same way as Granblue Versus? I never played the sidescroller so I have no idea.
Actually, I wonder if DFO also has a global-cooldown (GCD) system the way many MMOs inevitably do because the quantity of spells and abilities that any given character builds up over time leads to such a dementedly giant set of possible combinations that it becomes the only way to engineer any semblance of balance among the classes. While there are occasional moves with cooldowns in fighting games, I'd have to really think to try to recall fighting games where there's a GCD system.
quote:
That reminds me-- in the case of Granblue Versus there was a hilarious design flaw: the players could keep an eye on their opponent's icons and react on them. Like for example, if the opponent did a projectile their icon would immediately dim out, so the player could jump over while the opponent was still in motion to pull out the move. Similarly, if the opponent had a feint move and a real move, the player could easily tell by watching which icon disappeared. It's a flaw that probably could've been improved (dimming out after a slight delay for example), but never got changed in its two-year product life.
That is hilarious and tragic.
It's kind of a problem which game UI has when game UI has to always tell the truth, and both players share the screen. Sure knowing how close your opponent is to being stunned or whether they have started coming out of stun buildup lets you make more informed decisions, but it's also the case that many players use the opponent stun gauge as a way of confirming hits!
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| | "Re(6):Re(10):DNF Versus Existence" , posted Fri 24 Dec 19:32
I guess the other benefit of cooldowns in a fighting game is that it allows more design freedom to make overpowered feelgood moves. Let's say, you can make your psycho crusher plus on everything, deal tons of damage, and look super cool, but then if you find out the move is too powerful, rather than nerfing it to make it slower, super punishable and thus making the player feel less good about using this move, you just add 5 seconds of cooldown without changing the properties, allowing the player to still "feel good" while balancing the game.
It also opens other mechanics from other games with cooldowns: for example, a character with very long cooldowns, but a charging move that reduces the cooldowns of all other moves (so when you knock your opponent down, you have to decide whether to push your advantage and keep on the offense, or take the opportunity to charge while they're down, like some V-skills, Chin's drinking move in KOF2002 or Hakan's oil move). Or the opposite: a character that drains the opponent's cooldowns to make them longer when they're close to him. Fighting games don't have enough buff/curse characters in general I feel, especially team games.
You could also have shared cooldowns for a series of moves (a character with many projectiles, but all the projectiles share the same cooldown and you need to pick the right one for the right moment, no second guesses). Or EX moves: a Hadôken would have a 5 seconds cooldown, an EX Hadôken 10 seconds, a Shinkű Hadôken 20 seconds.
Of course, that wouldn't work for an established fighting game series like Street Fighter or KOF, but on a new IP like ArcSys has been doing is a good playground for that kind of things.
Or just go crazy and build MvC4 around that. Characters with rapid cooldowns on their basic moves but limited in their offense, others with long cooldowns so you have to cycle them out to allow them to recover, support characters that can buff their team's recovery or slow down the opposing team's... And add on top of that all the usual Mahvel craziness and finicky team-building strategy. It would also be a way to add some characters that are too difficult to implement, either because they are too powerful in-universe, or have powers that aren't directly used for fighting, like the telepaths or the power boosters. Or someone with a timer on their power: start the fight with rapid cooldowns, but the more you use the moves the more you add to their cooldown until they become unusable. Or vice-versa, a character that starts slow but have faster and faster cooldowns to become a monster at the end of the fight to mimic a RPG character leveling up. Put Naruhodo on a timer: he starts with a move already on a 2 minutes cooldown and he needs to survive AND find clues during that time, and if he manages, he can IGIARI and convict any opponent he wants.
Damn, I kind of want that now.
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| | "Re(6):Re(10):DNF Versus Existence" , posted Sat 25 Dec 00:22:
quote:
Actually, I wonder if DFO also has a global-cooldown (GCD) system the way many MMOs inevitably do because the quantity of spells and abilities that any given character builds up over time leads to such a dementedly giant set of possible combinations that it becomes the only way to engineer any semblance of balance among the classes. While there are occasional moves with cooldowns in fighting games, I'd have to really think to try to recall fighting games where there's a GCD system.
DFO has move-specific cool down. Cool down only really feels restrictive at the lowest character levels, when you only have a few moves.
Moves in DFO have pretty widely different cool downs, ranging from under 2 seconds (your most basic specials) to 290 seconds (your most super super move).
Similar to fighting games, different moves can have different cancel options. (Example: Female Grappler's Shoulder Strike on hit can be canceled into 13 of her grab moves, but not her other moves.) Some skills alter the properties of other moves, including adding new cancel options. (Example: Grappler's "Grappling Technique" passive skill, in addition to several other move modifications, allows her to cancel the post-hit "bounce" of Spiral (her spinning Izuna drop) into either of her air throws.) And some cancel options are locked to certain sub-classes. (Example: All Fighters get the Sand Strike move, but only the Brawler sub-class can cancel into Sand Strike.)
It may be worth noting that some moves do behave slightly differently in the PvP arena/duel mode than they behave in the main PvE game. Some moves have their cool downs increased, others see effects tweaked, etc. For example, while Neck Snap still stuns the target, it doesn't turn the opponent around in PvP.
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It's kind of a problem which game UI has when game UI has to always tell the truth, and both players share the screen.
This isn't an issue in PvP DFO because each player only sees their own icons.
I can think of a few gimmicky solutions. You could put a delay on when the timers start to report their status, but this can get weird with moves that have really short cool downs.
The "obvious" fix for feints is to have them report on the regular move's timer. You arguably don't need two separate timers at all. Just have a single timer for the move, have it start refilling at the same speed regardless of whether you do the regular move or the feint, but have the end of the feint jump to the end of the timer.
For a game with a lot of different cool downs, you could possibly treat the on-screen timers as an assistance tool that could be turned off. But that could prevent you from doing anything particularly wild or fancy with timers, as you'd want timings to be predictable by the player.
Back to more general discussion, meters in fighting games are kind of like cool down timers, just not locked to "time". Starting with an empty Super Meter is similar to starting with a Super that is in cool down, except it won't refill on its own.
Some versions of Assists, Strikers, and even Tag behaviors already are cool down systems.
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It would also be a way to add some characters that are too difficult to implement, either because they are too powerful in-universe, or have powers that aren't directly used for fighting, like the telepaths or the power boosters.
Saitama in the One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows takes this to an extreme. Put him on your team, and he isn't even available for the first three minutes of the match (but you can reduce the timer by attacking your opponent.)
[this message was edited by Baines on Sat 25 Dec 00:30] |
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