Here are bad ideas that would make fighting games FIGHTING GAMES again (to me):
Instead of FIREBALL and NOT FIREBALL, differentiate between bad player ScrubMotion and MrMiyagi-chopsticking-that-fly. Essentially make it hard to fail, easy to succeed, and hard to excel. Give the regular fireball most of the regular properties, but give the perfect fireball one or more of the following: more damage, more stun, better recovery, better chip, etc. Being able to fail softly would get newbs in, and being able to succeed would encourage mastery.
Remove any kind of complex meter management because that shit is dumb. Except on the characters with dumb meter management as their thing. Make sure to have at least one of those.
Add movement options without throwing slowpokes to the wolves. Idea: tie aggression e.g. attacking and connecting (even if blocked) to super buildup. Once you get 5 hits (aka not many) you have super. But If you ever do a defensive âmovement optionâ you lose all of your super buildup. Some moves could be defensive while still maintaining meter, but that wonât be universal. Edit: I know that some fighting games have done similar things (GG, P4A), but make it HARSH on the opposite end. Donât slow down Yu because heâs running away. Give the other player whoâs gaining ground better/faster/bigger options. And make it discrete. You start running you lose your offense.
Make supers valuable sideways and not just more damage. This is design space imagery. A super Shoryu should give you a ton of invincibility and a super Tatsu should gravity bomb and drag people in. More damage/bigger hitbox/etc isnât interesting. Combo potential might be, though. I know this sounds a lot like EX moves. The problem with EX moves is that they are ALSO super meter. Also, you can âstoreâ multiple EX moves which is dumb. Being aggressive is great but being aggressive and âconservative with your aggressionâ is like mind numbingly dumb. Make them use that super so that theyâre not wasting more of their aggression.
Similarly to the Fireball/NotFireball add defensive options that can be failed without getting stuffed in the face. Encourage people to parry more. Then some moves can outright lose to parry, some moves can be safe on parry, and the majority of moves can be a player determined gradient based on how fucking baller you are at parrying
And one more dumb thing: have both Parries and Just Defense. Have some movies that canât be parried (e.g. fireballs/grabs) but can be JDed to throw back at the other player. In my world JD wouldnât give you any frame advantage, it would be a move where you switched spots with them. No frame advantage difference than a regular throw, but if the move had horizontal movement TOWARDS you it now has horizontal movement AWAY from you. I know modelling after real life isnât the best excuse for game design, but the ways in which players trade left/right in most 2D fightmans is dumb. Again, this is a movement option which makes controlling space more interesting.
I donât know if these are bad ideas because all or almost all of these are in fighting games now days. Or maybe they are bad ideas because people still donât like fighting games.
Everyone buy arcana heart 3 love max and play it with me I swear itâs a Real Fighting Game and everyone here will love it I would never lie to you.
P.S.
Check out Koihime Enbu. It is on Steam in English and is pretty much that. (Itâs technically got Combos but they are a relatively smaller part of the game and not often used due to being very situational).
âhi i have never played competitive games competitively and here is a list of things i think you should do to make your competitive games more competitive and here is a copy of that list in case you throw it in the trashâ
To be more fair I get the perspective because most everyone approaches every fighting game casually except their One Main Game (usually Street Fighter). This is why youâll find a lot of people who only play SF to think all âanime fightersâ look the same and so on. Maybe because most games are now sequels in existing franchises there isnât a large enough shift in the game design or enough new mechanics to make it look visually new and exciting for casual players who want to play something new. People who really dig the genre can tell the difference but if you just like to approach them simply and use the mechanics on a surface level itâs not as distinguishable as youâd like. I canât tell the difference between roguelikes; they all look and feel the same to me too! (mario kart 8 is probably my favorite roguelike.) I donât think game budgets and the market are enticing enough for devs to make completely new fighters from scratch though. This isnât the 90s when you had like a wacky new game from a new company every other hour.
Maybe check out Pokken (very different from most fighters), the upcoming ARMS, or even Marvel vs Capcom Infinite (it looks like it will have some funky stuff going on with the gems).
I wonder if a lot of the issues with fighting games and their relation to the FGC has more to do with how the online communities are structured as opposed to any mechanical things
like, ARMS was the most fun Iâve had with a fighting game in a long time because I really, really like that Party Mode lobby system and the way you can construct mini-narratives with various people in your lobby as it shuffles you around to different modes against different people. like the person who does cheap shit that results in you losing in one game can all of the sudden be on your team in the next game, or you get matched up against that person with 80-something coins and you beat them, and itâs really cool how that kind of thing works to bring back that arcade-esque atmosphere while remaining completely anonymous and voiceless
but pretty much every other fighting game Iâve played has been that really simple someone hosts a match, someone joins that match, you play 1-3 games and leave and thatâs it. and they might come back, but you might also never see them again
and like, I donât really like going to tournaments. I know that thatâs what the FGC is, and itâs my own fault for not wanting to get better in the presence of other people, but it also makes the spectrum of participation in the community almost a binary. like I either buy ALL THE WAY IN to the FGC, or I donât participate in it at all outside of watching things â itâs become more and more binary, and Iâve been following FGC stuff for a while, and Smash for even longer
itâs kind of amazing how little work has been done bringing the participation in the community aspect of the FGC into the games themselves. or maybe itâs me; I havenât played fighting games very much recently. but honestly I find myself caring less about the mechanics themselves and more about the ability to apply them in a way that doesnât involve one-off matches against faceless strangers that disappear forever after weâre done playing
Koihime is a great example of The Fighting Game Problem: it has a skeezy anime aesthetic attached to a fun and interesting game, which also has crappy netcode so you will have a hard time playing it with anyone. I like it a lot, but I almost never play it. One day a company will make an accessible game with a cool, mass-market friendly license and roll back netcode, and it will still bomb because regardless of what anyone says, the only fighting games that sell Numbers on consoles are Mortal Kombat and its 300 modes that are not about fighting another player.
now that this has been split off with the perfect thread title i am going to start yelling at all of you.
I am 100% sympathetic to people who find the current dominant games impenetrable.
I am 0% sympathetic to people who want to change them without first understanding how we got to this point or why things are the way they are.
âSF3 was hated because itâs differentâ actually itâs hated because parries turn the mental game into just dumb RPS so instead you have a game which everyone tries very hard to not play mentally and as such puts too much emphasis on reaction speed and obscenely complicated option selects like SGGK where you can pretty much deal with half a dozen possible approaches simultaneously! What, you thought it added to the mental game? Hahahahaha
âMeters are dumbâ meters are pacing mechanics to add a sense of flow to the match beyond simply pressing buttons back and forth and to add layers of resource management beyond simply hitting the other guy which is honestly interesting and, as it turns out, can also enable the game to give more diverse styles of characters a chance than simply having different levels of damage and reactability to moves
ps: supers already have vastly diverse additional properties, there is a thing called ârisk vs rewardâ that make people conserve resources in most situations and you will indeed see people throwing them out in gambles even in high level matches
âYou have to learn all this stuff just to play the games at all!â actually the really competitive players i know start learning a game by jumping right the fuck in and pressing buttons and having fun even when nothing works the way they want it to so iâm pretty sure yâall are just expecting too much out of yourselves when just starting
my favorite is still âremove motionsâ because people donât understand how motions affect reaction speed and give players who are more able to play the mental game of processing ahead a better chance. did you know you can buffer motions ahead of time to anticipate actions, and donât simply have to react to every button the enemy presses with a complex action? wow! thatâs interesting!
there is no such thing as a perfect game, but a lot of the competitive tropes that exist do so because there are very good reasons for them to do so
tldr: modern fgs have a lot you can criticize about them but if you just say âugh, this is complex, get rid of itâ or âthis feels good, more of thisâ without thinking of the design reasons behind all of them and why they are there, then you are not making a game that will last competitively more than a day
I actually just want more novel 3D fighting games (not tekken 3 but worse looking & less well-documented than if you just emulate and upscale it), I donât have a specific list of things that I think 2D fighters are doing wrong mechanically (other than leaning too hard on established IPs and having generally uninspiring 3D art). I think part of the reason Iâm being such a dingus is because I feel like â2D 1v1 versus fighter with projectiles and supersâ should be about 50% of the genre at most but itâs like 90% of what you see at evo these days because the fanbase is so deep rather than wide. the reason I compared it to shmups (did I compare it to shmups? I meant to) is because I feel like a similar thing happened there with them being largely overtaken by sexy witch bullet hell stuff.
like I even tried to play this naruto game on steam a couple years ago (which turns out to be extremely uninteresting if you donât know anything about naruto) because it at least didnât look like it played identically to street fighter 2:
but idk if people would even consider that a âfighting gameâ (ditto fight night)
I donât see the point in complaining about Tekken. You will find literally 10000x more players for Tekken 7 over Tekken 3 largely because it is new and shiny. And if you want to play Tekken⌠Well, you want players to play against, donât you? So why would you want to buy Tekken for not-Tekken? Iâm entirely okay with Game People Liked N+1 and donât see much reason to complain about it.
I can dig wanting more variety in the games. You wanna know what the best 3D fighting game of recent years was in my opinion? Dark Souls 2. Iâm not even joking. Itâs 100% legit. I was surprised.
And to be completely fair to shmups: The âsexy witchâ part had less to do with shmup players and more to do with that taking over the entirety of many genres. Dead genres desperately seeking people to play their game find solace in girls in frilly dresses. (And this comes from a Touhou fan who will defend the franchise.) Have to capture a secondary market when the primary one is effectively dead. People say âoh only hardcore people play this genreâ but when game for people who are not hardcore also flop, well, what is a developer even supposed to do?
It does but thatâs not really the intent.
Suggesting a whole lot of design changes without understanding the ramifications of what those changes will do to the gameâs overall flow is just going to give you new things to complain about as people start sinking their teeth in and finding more than you see on the surface. Itâs nice to say âX is goodâ and âY is badâ and it helps weigh a cohesive game design, but simply shoving everything into a box is not helping anyone.
Again, a lot of genre conventions exist for a reason. Theyâre not(all) just there because people thought itâd be cool to have them.
I didnât actually mean to be down on tekken though I know thatâs how this whole discussion started, I just thought it was interesting that sales of tekken were spiking after it having been basically stagnant for 20 years (which, granted, might be preferable to what happened with soul calibur, but I bet namco wishes theyâd waited a few years to release that HD version of SC2). obviously none of the tekkens I played had anything resembling netcode so that right there is reason enough to release a new tekken, but I wasnât even talking about fighting games generally when I pointed that out.
Itâs not that âunusualâ fighting games like Gundam Versus donât exist, itâs that 1) theyâre not available to you, 2) you donât like the license (which is why it got made; even setting aside the anime titty factor, there hasnât been an original fighting game that was anything but a scene hit since maybe Soul Calibur), or 3) itâs a bad game. Yes, itâs a lot like the bullet heck problem, and it has a lot of the same outcomes: people who donât like those games, and/or donât understand them, try to make games that âfixâ them only to find there isnât an audience, or the things that thought were âwrongâ were actually well thought out and had an important purpose in the game as a whole.
Letâs talk about a different way to approach this.
One thing you can say is, "I want to approach the aesthetics of the genre without being limited by the mechanics. So you can say, I want a game about mans which fight, and then try to solve those problems independently of the current designs.
If you take the current designs and try to improve upon them, youâll undoubtedly break stuff which was added for reasons you donât quite understand, and also be stuck inside the problems those games have.
If you try to reach the aesthetic independently youâll create a whole bunch of new problems but youâve sidestepped the limited design space already existing.
(feel free to ignore the following argument from authority here but I want to share this story)
We spent a lot of time talking about and playing shooters during Galak-Z; we were consciously designing entirely outside that space. Mainly we stole from '70s, '80s mech anime â given powerful tech, and a 2D plane, how would you make Roy Fokkerâs dogfight?
The final game has tons of issues, even inside its base combat (dodge jumping isnât properly integrated with the rest of the systems and quickly becomes dominant, or, weâre running into dogfighting tactics that get boring). But! it was a lot more fun to work on and not directly comparable to the genre we directly looked at.
