I have complicated feelings about hitboxes because I like the axcessibility of keyboards? And keyboard players? Because I hate the idea of any game being hated behind a 150+ dollar accessory like an arcade stick.
But I really think the physicality and interaction with the stick is something I really like about fighting games, and would hate for that aspect to get pushed out like hitboxes seem to be doing for a lot of games because it’s so much easier to be precise with them.
But like I said, I hate being an elitist snob about it!
Thus goes my likely ill informed thoughts on the subject.
I’ve dropped too many inputs with sticks over the decades now
I am done with them
Though ideally no game would be making pull weird combinations of circling under microsecond-urgent conditions anyway
I will never resent simplification of inputs in fightman
I mean that’s what I like about the stick though. The need to pull off a physical motion is really unique to fighting games. If you’re gonna eliminate that just go even further and have almost no complex directional inputs.
That isn’t even facetious. I genuinely think that if simplification and hard to fuck up commands is the way forward, make it even simpler and have games that don’t need weird inputs at all. Make them simple enough to play on a regular controller. That would be a game I’d like to see folks try to make outside of Smash.
But I like the stick, and nuances and feel of the stick, and it’s arcane anachronistic weirdness. It’s something unique and I’d be sad to see it and it’s difficult motions go away.
In my imagination I got a nice mechanical keyboard and replaced some of the keycaps with different colors so I could trick my brain into using one like a Hitbox, if that makes sense. A layout of keys that mimics the layout of the buttons on a Hitbox.
Oh, right, Rising Thunder is the one fighting game I’ve played for more than an hour. Why did they have to get bought by Riot (who has seemingly done nothing with them)?
Also, the newer Smashes are more approchable but Melee requires all kinds of arcane inputs to play at a tournament level. Mother fuckers are making notches in their GameCube controllers to get specific angles (and the one dude that uses a hitbox for Melee has a bunch of key combinations to get specific angles).
I go back and forth between thinking “this game is fun to control” and “analog inputs are pure hell”.
I don’t know what fadc means but I got this impression too. Superficially the inputs seemed easy but I found what I needed to press at any given time was still rather difficult.
There’s a box which has keyboard keys for the directional side and arcade buttons for the…buttons side.
I think I’d really like a thing where the directional side was half a playstation controller with a saturn style d-pad and the right side was a box with arcade buttons.
but then I’d also just like something like a hitbox.
I’ve never got along with arcade sticks. Someone on SB bought my nice madcatz tournament edition stick (or whatever they were called) back in 2011. Because I. could. not. do. anything. with it.
I had all these plans for it and and ended up hardly using it and selling it in great condition.
yeah a lot of modern fighting games still have trouble with how much distance there is between accessible and high level play
it’s gotten a lot better thanks (imo) to the virtua fighter lineage gradually overpowering mvc derivatives over the past 15 years but sometimes it’s still like “oh man I gotta learn this totally different thing from where the game is already intuitively at for me”
Yeah, VF lineage is weird, because ithas been really slow in making its way into things, but like, having a game series where the important lessons are “crouching punch” and “never jump dogg wtf why would you do that” seems really good, looking back on it.
MK11 plays very well on a regular controller and has a tutorial as good as VF4 and is as thoughtful about mixing and matching the best parts of other games as the best indie fighter could ever be with a budget big enough to actually have a huge roster and fun production values!!!
Yeah the issue with Rising Thunder was they simplified special inputs and introduced cooldowns cuz non-FG players are always complaining about “finger puzzles” and “spamming”. But the rest of the game was pretty much Street Fighter 4 and if you wanted to do damage you had to learn how to Focus Attack Dash Cancel, where you burn meter to cancel a move, dash, then do another move and that shit is a fucking pain in the ass. It was probably easier than it was in SF4 but it was still a terrible idea.
Remember this guy.
(I’m sure that video is loaded with lots of awful language, maybe don’t watch it I dunno.)
Fighting EX Layer also lets you choose simplified inputs so you just have to hit forward + punch to throw a fireball, but it still has link combos and chain combos and command normals and perks and all this shit that’s going to overwhelm a new player and negate any advantage that comes with being able to easily chuck hadokens.
IIRC BlazBlue Tag is all quarter circle motions which I think is a fine middle ground. (I think DBFZ is all QCs too but somehow Arcsys did a better job making a newbie friendly tag game with BlazBlue??) No one is quitting these games cuz they can’t do special inputs. It’s cuz most people really hate losing.
yeah DBFZ is solidly a marvel derivative and sure enough it’s way too hard to do assist supers on a regular pad but they aggressively simplified so many of the other inputs and so explicitly designed the game around combo strings and momentum (which is, as everyone has already observed, a really smart thing to do if you’re making a modern mvc derivative and/or or a dragon ball z game) that it still feels like a breath of fresh air, though it still has the old problem of being poorly suited to intermediate-level play compared to a lot of other current stuff
I had a few practiced combos in Rising Thunder and then the rest of my inputs could be pretty succinctly described as “panic”.
I picked the grapple guy cause I figured he had to be broken if part of the balance of grapple characters is working the long full-circle inputs in. I still don’t know if that was true or not.
