Month: September 2015

Disappointment in Critical Distance

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Can you elaborate on what you dislike about critical distance?

I was away at a tournament when I received this. I made it out of pools, so that’s progress.

Critical Distance is ostensibly a project to compile all the good games writing. Reading through their compilations shows either a serious bias in subject matter on the part of those selecting entries to highlight, or that there simply is no one talking about gameplay.

I’ve spoken to a few people representing other perspectives on how games should be, and the frequent perspective I receive is that, “yeah, gameplay is interesting, there should totally be people out there covering that, but I’m more interested in the story,” or, “gameplay and the rest of the game are equally important,” but what I don’t see is a lot of people talking about gameplay, or game mechanics if you prefer.

I went to a game exhibition run by Kill Screen in Manhattan once actually, and unfortunately the only game I wanted to play there (Grow Home) was on a laptop that got locked and they didn’t know the password. Then when it was unlocked, the game didn’t work, rendered a bunch of black geometry. I talked with some people there, journalists for Kill Screen, and they told me the games they liked were only games that “explored what games could be”. Then I was informed there was someone on their site who actually did really in-depth reviews of games and was supposedly a hardcore gamer, having done their bayonetta 2 review. Ctrl + F “Dodge Offset”, one result, no description of what it is, how it works, or why it’s even a good thing. It was purely a namedrop for cred. I throw pretty much any review of a platinum game in the trash if it doesn’t mention dodge offset (related, it annoyed the crap out of me how there was no BM cancel offset in MGR). http://killscreendaily.com/articles/hell-bent-leather-bayonetta-2/ This is a bad writer. This is a bad writer that another bad writer told me he envies and aspires to be more like. For comparison, http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1siersp this has a lot more details about the actual game, where the prior is empty adulation with a billion flowery little phrases to say, “it’s cool”. http://www.twitch.tv/europeanspeedsterassembly/v/6695652?t=29h55m30s Almost immediately into this you hear how much of a joke Bayo 2 is in general.

To wrap up the tangent, here’s another example of good writing, as described by something that is itself good writing.
http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2014/nov/22/why-i-taught-fighting-games-most-famous-moment-my-college-composition-class/
http://web.archive.org/web/20130707225150/http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-beast-is-unleashed-capcoms-seth-killian-explains-the-most-famous-minute

Critical distance makes me frustrated because it’s implicitly saying that nobody has anything to discuss about gameplay. They can discuss the writing, the use of sexuality, the way a mechanic might contextualize part of the world, the demographics of players, patents, diatribes about “pure fun”, but almost never mechanics.

Do they assume this mechanical stuff goes without saying? That people never make mistakes on it? Is it just that their blog ring is entirely uninterested with it and they don’t have access to the people commenting on how to put together mechanical game systems? Or is it that there is no one out there saying these things at all? They tend to regard formalism as a boogie-man, but from whence does the boogieman come? Is it a fear of the audience, the rabble?

If I asked them for a listing of articles about how to construct a system of game mechanics, or the shortcomings of mechanical systems from purely a design point of view, would they be able to supply me with anything?

Where did the interest in games go? Does it exist at all? Why is it so hard to cultivate it, even among people who pay lip service to the idea that “gameplay is the most important thing”?

So I go to Critical Distance, see a ton of articles that I really wish I had an alternative to reading on a long train ride or car trip, and feel disappointed.
Then I guess I feel disappointed in myself for not doing a better job producing my own content.

Mario Galaxy relative to Sunshine/64

Celia WagarLeave a comment

You find galaxy’s design limited? I mean it could use a 64 movement system to allow for more variety of ways to traverse something and let the player control pacing via speed, but I think they did great for what it was. Then again you probably don’t think Galaxy is a bad or even mediocre game anyway. What your own rating (between 1 and 5) of it would be, also you shouldn’t appeal to me, I’d prefer you’d be honest.

Yeah, the levels are more straightforward with more of a defined sequence. The level designs allow you to mess around with them in less ways and your moveset is more limited in general. A lot more of it revolves around gimmicks than solid platforming, like blasting off from the stars or pulling yourself in bubble sections. The new spin move is cool, but the means of using it is more awkward. A lot of the game revolves around collecting star bits, and I’m not a fan of collectathon type mechanics in general (then you get the purple coin levels). Shooting at the screen is generally not really integrated into standard play, and the need to shake the wiimote to spin makes it so you can’t do both at the same time (not that you’re required to). Many of the levels are small and flat and can frequently revolve around enemy fighting more than platforming which is what the game is strongest at. The focus of the game on planets with their own gravitational fields lends to the flatness of the level design, because a rounded planet ends up functionally as a flat planet, and the wonkiness of the camera that might be invoked with more interesting architecture leads to them making more flat planets. Even some of the more interestingly shaped planets, like a ? shaped one, end up being effectively flat because of this.

I feel like in comparison, Mario Sunshine had more going on with its levels, especially the secret levels, even if the main world levels were frequently a clusterfuck. The rotating puzzle blocks in the secret levels were a genius piece of level design if you ask me. There was a lot you could do with Fludd, even if the hover nozzle was slow and kind of dull. You can even beat the entire game without the hover nozzle. And you can slide on water, shotgun spray, spray while moving. Plus the turbo+rocket nozzles were great. And the game added the 360 spin jump, which you can even do loosely to not get the full spin, but to go higher/further without the same physics as the spin jump, effectively replacing the long jump, though not entirely. It has the best walljump physics too if you ask me.
64 has the best level design of the lot, and a strong platforming moveset overall, with great Z-action on most maps, or at least obfuscated paths forward with a ton of different ways to get around things, and almost never only one path forwards, which I think helps it win by itself.

You get things like mario 64 free running, which can be really varied and technical. Mario Sunshine freerunning is alright, and mario galaxy freerunning is nonexistent, and would probably be a joke. It doesn’t have the levels/moveset for it.

I just see Galaxy and 3D world as weaker games, with the spin attack as a solid addition to games that don’t really demand it, though hey it’s cool that it resets on walljump I guess.

Mario 64, 5/5 (basically perfect)
Sunshine, 4.5/5 (very good, bit shy of greatness for various reasons)
Galaxy, 3/5 (average, doesn’t stand out much to me)

On 3d Mario: http://pastebin.com/BpyS7Y8X

Okay, I’m probably sending mixed messages here.

My primary inspiration here is the secret levels in Mario Sunshine. These are like a playground, generally don’t have Fludd, and the game has enough movement options that there are a lot of ways to deal with each obstacle.

I don’t like the way mario 64 levels and the main levels of mario sunshine are filled with so much unnecessary stuff. I don’t like the 100 coin challenges. I don’t like the scavenging for the stars. I like the Secrets because they’re direct and to the point, but still open enough to allow different approaches. I’d like them more if they had just a bit more leeway, a few more moving parts, bits of geometry.

Mario Galaxy by contrast has fewer movement mechanics and more constrained levels. It’s true that they’re straightforward, but they’re so much so that they kind of force you to rotely follow sequence. Also yeah they’re too slow.

Mario 64 has a lot of little level design elements that are really cool for speedrunning, wrapped up in a cacophany of a level. It would be cool if those could be focused into a more straightforward course, like the bowser levels, or of course mario sunshine secrets.

I’d like to find the middleground between these two extremes of straightforward + constrained and clusterfuck + freedom.

Also 3d world far as I’m aware is really easy except for the green star scavenger hunts and has less movement options than even galaxy.

How would you expand on fludd for a future mario game?

Change the hover nozzle to not be so damn slow or remove it completely.

Add rain sections where you have infinite water.

Maybe let you switch between all the functions at any time.

More traditional dual analog third person shooter controls for fludd starting from whenever the button is pressed. If the console allows light presses, then keep the existing light press function in.

Add in more combination moves, fludd + another move. Like maybe if you dive right when you do a rocket boost, you can do a rocket dive.

Apart from that, I got nothing.

High Execution in Fighting Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Should fighting games have high executions?

Not the best worded question.

The simplest answer I can give is, yes, some things should be hard to do, other things shouldn’t be, these should ideally be in some way proportional to their role. If it’s a central character defining option, it should be more straightforward probably, as straightforward as can be managed with the control scheme. Like Eddie/Zato’s Shadow, there’s no way you could really make that simpler execution-wise without changing how the character functions.

That new game Rising Thunder is probably the elephant in the room here. I am in the alpha, and the design of the game does limit it. It has a 6 button layout, with 3 normals and 3 specials, meaning that you can’t get different versions of the specials by pressing different buttons, and many characters don’t have a normal anti-air (or in dauntless’ case, a sweep). It is a fun game, there’s no apparent flaws or mistakes in the character or system designs, and the characters are fairly unique. However by the nature of the way the game is designed, there’s just less moves and less way to combine the moves, because to get a more flexible system that allows for more differentiation between moves, you need to use command motions. It also leads to this effect where every character sort of feels like a charge character in that performing anti-airs or other hard punishes is only one button, so you can do it on reaction rather than buffering the input on anticipation. Crow has different versions of his flaming ring special (close, medium, far), but that’s about it. To get KoF hops, you have to add an execution barrier. To get high/low blocking, you’re adding something of an execution barrier. Sometimes you need execution-heavy things to implement a feature at all, or to differentiate between different functions of a single button.

Do games really need 1 frame links? Not really. If you have like, one 1 frame link somewhere or another in a place where it has a big reward for success, but isn’t integral to the character’s function, then go ahead. Hell, a lot of people didn’t really like the 3 frame FRCs in Guilty Gear AC+R, including Mike Z for one, because a lot of them came off as integral for how given characters play and it was a pain to have to work so hard for options that you should basically always be doing. Now I can gunflame pressure with Sol, which should be a fairly standard and easy thing to do (though that wasn’t one of the harder FRCs in AC).

Fighting games need some things to be high execution in order to balance them, like reversals, like 360s, like 720s, and those things attract people, in particular the 360s and 720s because they make the moves intrinsically work in this different way, where you need to buffer them with other movements, or be wary of jumping in the process of executing them. Reversals, you want those to be a somewhat risky proposition rather than something easy that people always have to respect, so that (unrelated: it feels soooo great to get a reversal super in Guilty Gear considering the input, HCB F + HS, and it’s a 1 frame window).

Something like shield dropping in Smash Bros, or moonwalking are probably harder than they reasonably need to be, but the multishine on fox and falco (frame perfect each time) are exactly as hard as they need to be. Moonwalking and shield dropping don’t provide very significant benefits and are best when players can do them consistently on demand. Shield dropping in particular is very difficult to do quickly, when it’s mostly useful for how quick it can be performed versus releasing shield and dropping.

Extra Credits on Fighting Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_xG1Yg_QoM
Would you mind mocking this SPECIFIC extra credits video?

Sure, I’d love to.

Despite their praise of fighting games, Extra Credits have absolutely no goddamn idea how fighting games work, and as usual, they’ve done no research, no thinking, no introspection on this matter.

Probably my favorite highlight in this video is the part where they suggest slowing down time, and presenting in big flashing letters, REVERSAL OPPORTUNITY, when neither of the two characters is knocked down or in hitstun. The fact that they don’t actually know what a reversal is (or that they think it’s a counterhit), is absolutely pathetic. They reinforce this earlier in the video by showing a small woman hitting a big man when he attacks her after mentioning a mode where enemies can only be harmed with reversals.

They’re right on one thing, fighting games do need a tutorial mode and they need it more than a single player mode. They’re wrong about pretty much every other element of how to design a tutorial for them, and they very clearly didn’t consult any existing tutorial for fighting games whether online or ingame. Their proposals don’t teach players the rules of combos, they don’t teach players what basic normals are even good for.

Beyond that, locking off player’s moves until they unlock them is a TERRIBLE way to teach players. It’s one thing to have a specific section of a tutorial where some moves are emphasized by locking the others off, but requiring the player to grind to unlock moves means players will get used to fighting with incomplete versions of their characters, and develop bad habits. Most characters have sets of moves that work together or fill in for specific situations. If you play a fireball/anti-air character, but have the anti-air locked off, then you won’t learn to play correctly.
Not to mention, most fighting games don’t have an RPG-like system, and extrinsic rewards a shit.

Slow motion is bad, because players should be learning what things they can react to and cannot react to in what situations. Rewind is pointless and less effective than focused training. Also dumb to tell players directly the correct option.
Maj made a better proposal for a fighting game tutorial mode a long time ago on his website here: http://sonichurricane.com/?p=5849 Not to mention the skullgirls tutorials do a decent job of teaching you how to do all your characters’ moves, and what they’re useful for, as well as most of the systems across the board and things like mixups and blockstring pressure.

Something I’d personally add to Maj’s tutorial is having a dummy that straight up plays the basic fireball game with you, throws lots of fireballs, and anti-airs if you jump in when he’s not vulnerable. But I’d have the dummy get like a glint or jab first before throwing a fireball, so players can get a clue of when the dummy is about to do it, and get an idea of what timing they need to use in order to jump fireballs safely, simulate reading the fireball. This type of visual language can help signal other reads too in that mode.

The Guilty Gear missions mode is cool too, for having missions where you can only damage with combos over 2 hits, or where only supers deal damage, or where you’re not allowed to jump or use special moves. Especially the jump one, because the most frequent mistake beginners make is jumping forward.

In general the tutorials shouldn’t be these generic, they should be focusing in more on the actual skills required by the genre. A lot of them should have dummies that spam the same few moves so that players can get experience in breaking up common patterns (like fireball spam, blockstring pressure, spamming literally nothing but sweeps or low light kicks.) Teaching players the combo rules common to the genre. Teaching players directly how to do special move inputs by displaying them on the screen as people do them, and the framebuffer timer for the special as well, and instructions for what they did wrong when they do it. Specials are hard for a lot of beginners, and having a tool that can show them exactly what is going on inside the engine as they input movements would be extremely helpful. Hell, someone should make a tool like that on PC, that displays the player’s inputs as they do them, what move the current inputs are read as, and how long before the movement expires from the buffer.

This is just another case of EC not thinking ANYTHING through. Their recent episode on Speedruns is equally bad, I’m tempted to write something on that and post it to their forums.

The 10/10 game rating scale

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Do you believe that we could ever accurately use a numbering system for rating games? I can’t really say that I’ve ever played a perfect game or even near perfect, so I don’t believe any game is deserving of 10/10

The issue I’ve observed with rating things out of 10 is you feel like giving things at least a 6, because hey, they put effort in, it’s “above average,” “It’s not a BAD game, just really boring”. That’s the sense I get from these things. We tend to rate on a logarithmic scale, rather than a linear scale. I think rating out of 5 keeps us a bit more honest with ourselves if we remember what the numbers stand for, and keep our standards in mind. 1 and 2 are for games we dislike, 3 for games which don’t lean strongly towards good or bad, 4 and 5 for games we like.

This might sound a bit silly, but I like to rate out of 5 first, then out of 10, with the out of 10 rating expressing whether a game should fall on the upper or lower value for the out of 5 number. Rating out of 5 keeps me honest, rating out of 10 helps me differentiate a bit closer. There are cases where I feel like two games with the same number should be a bit above or a bit below one another, but I don’t worry over it too much.

That and I think it’s fine to hand a 5/5 or 10/10 to a game with flaws. Every game is going to have flaws of some kind, we shouldn’t be scoring out of “literally not a game at all” to “perfect”. Sure you might say, “well what if there’s some game that’s 10/10, then a sequel is released that’s literally better in every way” and I’m gonna ask how often does that really happen? Give them both 10/10 and check your cognitive dissonance at the door. Games aren’t a medium where standards have gone up over time, and it doesn’t look like it’s moving to become one either.

Just ask, is it good? Is it really good? Is it in the upper echelon of really good games? Then give it a 10 and don’t worry about whether it’s perfect or not. You’re not gonna hand 10s out for very many games anyway and a ton of really popular games deserve worse than a 5.

Making a Horror Stealth Action Game

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Is it possible to make a good game with elements of survival horror, stealth, and action? (something Resident Evil 6 poorly attempted to do)

Conventional wisdom says, “Sure, just switch between them.” If you want Stealth + Action, easy, you have Crysis and MGS GZ. If you want Stealth + Horror, that’s already practically the basis of horror games. If you want Horror + Action, you run into some trouble.

Closest thing I’d say is that the original Doom is honestly a bit scary in ep 2. Like they have dark sections, then invisible enemies in the dark sections. So I’m already freaking out from turning a dark corner onto barons of hell I’m not sure I see clearly, but then I have something I can barely see stalking me and I’m just like, “The level designer is a DICK.”

I’d say, take a page from Doom E2M6, impose some ammo limitations, limit the ammo overall, add some actual stealth, and you probably have something of a foundation to work with.

Horror as it pertains to games is based on uncertainty of information, like level layouts, enemies approaching you, uncertainty of whether you can dispatch them, uncertainty of whether you can avoid them, uncertainty of whether they’re even there. Also the threats should probably be really highly lethal, because otherwise there’s not really any sense of urgency when they’re in your face demanding your attention. This means random number generation can be handy if used sparingly at the right times. Random number generation makes it more difficult to figure out how a mechanism works, because it prevents people from making hypothesis and getting deterministic results. Horror games stop being scary when people figure out how they work well enough to know when a scare is going to happen before it does. There needs to be that tension with an uncertain payoff. If it’s all action all the time then there’s no time to build tension. Also considering that games are built on repetition, you repeat sections when you die, a horror game, or section of a horror game, will naturally lend itself to becoming less scary over time unless something is done to break the tension only at moments the player cannot predict.

Also probably consider how Left 4 Dead isn’t really scary, despite having a zombie theme, poorly lit levels, and random number generation all over the place. It’s not really doing anything to build tension on uncertainty, or making this horrifying sudden threat to the player. It’s just waves of enemies that are handled in a rather standard fashion, with occasionally stronger enemies at regular intervals. They aren’t intensely lethal except the Witch, who can be kind of scary and unpredictable sometimes.

So in short, highly lethal threats, get hinted at a lot before they show up, ideally in a way that is mechanically sound (like silent hill’s unreliable radio static), rather than aesthetically or narratively sound, appear suddenly, are hard to detect before they appear, hard to predict their appearance, difficult to kill, slow down, or escape from. Some filler enemies inbetween might be appropriate to build tension before the main attraction.

Is Depth not Enough if it’s not Stressed?

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Would you say that a deep system in a game is not enough, the game must appropriately push it? thinking about this while playing Bulletstorm, which has great weapon variety and ways to defeat enemies, but encounters don’t really demand it, and you get points for doing combinations to compensate and in DMC series, often you can just get used to the attack patterns of enemies to avoid them, and spam a basic attack, and you can get through even Dante Must Die with that, and the game basically becomes God of War, despite having far greater possibilities. Whereas Quake for example ammo depletion forces you to change weapons, and enemy positioning forces you to use movement options and level geometry more fully, so you necessarily get a more complete exploration of the system’s possibilities through the game itself, and those possibilities are actively being tested.

To an extent yes. I have two measures of depth, absolute versus relative. Absolute is the amount of differentiated game states in the game as a whole. Relative is the number relevant to the playerbase. There might be a huge depth inherent in a game, but the playerbase will only access a certain portion of it. To that extent, the game developers must be cognizant of how the game will actually be played. Creating depth relative to the playerbase is a matter of balance. If you have one weapon for which ammo is abundant which does the highest DPS to enemies in all possible situations, then the amount of depth relative to the playerbase will shrink in relation to the absolute depth of the game. If you have enemies which can be dispatched easily regardless of weapon choice, then the game loses the depth of strategic weapon selection as the situation demands it. If you have a ton of weapons that are each only good at killing one enemy, options that only do one thing and don’t even slightly overlap, then you lose all the scenarios when you use a normally suboptimal weapon for an optimal situational purpose (and a lot of alternate solutions, the game becomes more puzzle-like). If you have a ton of options that all do the same thing, then they lose differentiation, which also is a lack of depth.

Designing for depth is about making it so as many different components of the game are relevant in as many different situations as possible. That’s why I have my 3 criteria shorthand, a given option should have it’s own niche (different role from other options), it should have multiple uses, and create different outcomes based on manipulation of the option or circumstances (like allowing jumps of different heights, getting more distance from different timings, more damage for better timing/positioning, inheriting properties from other variables). It occurs to me that I should add a 4th criteria, for whether an option has an interaction or synergy with another mechanic.

From a design perspective, I feel it’s stronger when a ruleset is enforced by winning or losing, by barring progression or recognition of victory until you actually succeed. It’s one thing to have scoring or time as a supplementary objective, but for most people, that feels really weak. Most people don’t care, I usually don’t care. Difficulty can act as a selective force, pushing players to try different things out to optimize their play, which is what brings out the depth of the game.

Yes, I’ve considered how you can just get by spamming a basic attack before and discussed it with a few different friends. I didn’t like how multiplayer games push us to master everything about the game, but single player games seemingly lack this capacity to always push us higher. How do you even grade high level play in DMC? It’s a matter of style and creativity? How could you make a pass/fail system for that type of thing? The truth is, you can always win literally any beat em up game by spamming the weakest attack and not getting hit. This isn’t true of another human opponent, because they adapt. You can’t spam the same thing forever because they’ll just start doing the thing that beats your spam every time. Though theoretically, you could win a match against a human opponent by spamming if you just always did it at exactly the right time.

If you push for scoring systems, then more often than not, solutions become incredibly rigid and repetitive, rather than vaguely allowing anything that manages to get through.

Yeah, you could probably beat DMC3/4 by spamming nothing but stinger, but I don’t imagine it would be particularly easy to beat it that way. Ninja Gaiden can be beaten with flying swallow, but it’s slow and harder than using other moves.

NG is arguably a good case study here, you shouldn’t always use flying swallow because it doesn’t have the best damage output (though it can insta-kill many smaller enemies), and it can be blocked and punished. You shouldn’t always run directly at opponents because many have ranged attacks that will punish a straightforward approach. You shouldn’t always block and counterattack because enemies have guard breakers or throws, which require you to either reverse wind away or dodge outright. You can’t always spam powerful combos because other enemies are around to hit you, and some will block and punish you (though this is only really true of enemies with super armor in NG1, I noticed the chapter 2 boss of NG2 will do this, requiring hitconfirming). Even without an adaptive AI, if you throw in moves like these which incentivize using some moves for some situations, it influences the decision-making process of the player. Oh, and you should always use the ultimate technique, it just may be tricky to find an opportunity.

Another good case study is DMC4’s bloody palace, which has not only waves of enemies, but the timer which you need to defeat enemies quickly and efficiently in order to earn more time for (with only the loose bonuses for enemy deaths, and no damage). Where in story mode you can win with anything, bloody palace is far more selective, pressuring players to not only deal damage without taking it, but to continually do it the most efficiently they can. Though if you play well enough, you can earn a ton of time and not care how much you waste. Might have paid to set a cap on the maximum amount of time you can earn, to like 15-20 minutes or something maybe.

Regrettably even Quake doesn’t require everything from you. I’m pretty sure it can be beaten with nothing but an axe. (Don’t quote me on that, a vore + shambler like in the final map might be trouble). Still yeah, Quake does a lot to make sure all the components in the system are used through ammo limitations (otherwise lightning gun or rocket launcher would wipe everything out).

Still it’s a pretty good example. Custom Gamer goes over rather frequently how even though one enemy, like a Shambler, might be easily beaten with just an axe (which he does) by itself, if you have two enemies, they can fill in for each other and prevent you from just repeating the thing that kills one enemy dead easily. If you throw in a fiend, then you can’t move into melee range for the shambler, then out again as he attacks, the fiend will hit you. You need to dodge both the fiend and the shambler at once, and the optimal pattern for one doesn’t overlap with the other.

But yeah, difficulty, in particular challenges that stress the different options the player has, requiring them to prioritize some over others, making it difficult to pick the one necessary to survive on a moment-by-moment basis, and giving each a chance to shine, is a big deal for depth.

DMC4: SE Vergil Criticism

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How are you enjoying the new characters in DMC4: SE?

Only played Lady and Vergil so far. I’ve been avoiding grabbing any health powerups for the challenge. Lady is hard to use, has trouble getting in close to enemies, her controls are a bit tricky to manage, but I feel like she has some potential, because she still does have a varied moveset, she just has a very different approach from the other characters. Like she has the extremely slow, but heavy hitting kalina ann attacks to interrupt enemies up close, shotgun stinger and back blast for big damage, a dedicated long distance launcher, launcher on her pistols, charge shots on all her weapons. A bomb type of super attack that makes her temporarily invincible.

Vergil meanwhile is fast and super destructive. He’s more or less just his DMC3 SE self, except with more moves and some minor changes. I’m a fan of the new air trick teleport, using the sword as a device for it, however I’m not a fan of how you cannot trick up if you have that sword in an opponent, and in general how the trick up command has been deprecated. To trick down while fighting an opponent you need to enter DT mode, it’s oddly restrictive to only offer Trick down at the cost of meter, considering it’s not a very useful move to begin with. Vergil can rapid slash like crazy in DT mode, which looks cool but in my opinion is too powerful and free, even compared to dante’s similar stinger ability. Not a fan of Judgment Cut End, the new super ability either. Lady’s super ability is at least restricted to an area, and costs all her meter. It’s weird how he can’t use summoned swords during taunts anymore. Cute is the decision to make Rising Sun DT only.

I like that Vergil can cancel things with his darkslayer teleport now, but I feel like it cancels way too much. It’s especially nice to cancel rapid slash on yamato with the teleport, but being able to cancel attacks in midair with it is overkill, especially with the emphasis the game typically places on jump cancels. Instead of doing the more difficult and limited jump cancel option you can now teleport straight to them even if they’re out of range. Its use as an alternate dodge type attack is still appreciated though. It would be smart if they limited the number of things he’s allowed to cancel with darkslayer to a more specific set that don’t entirely overlap with jump cancels, like more ground options maybe to retain the feeling of commitment most attacks have. Like limit it to things with long recovery times, like rapid slash, or things with low commitment that aren’t performed within JC range in the air. Or maybe it could uniquely cancel things with high commitment like judgement cut, drive, or round trip? I dunno, just pick a theme, make sure it doesn’t overlap with JCs too much.

Approaches to Fighting Game Balance

Celia WagarLeave a comment

In a fighting game, should an OP character receive nerfs or should their weaknesses be amplified to balance out their strengths?

It depends on circumstance. Nerfs make the audience angry. Buffing the characters below them is sometimes more appropriate. Which is appropriate depends on circumstance.

The key thing is, it should be identified which matchups the character dominates in and why they dominate those particular matchups, then those elements of the character should be tweaked so those matchups are 5:5. If characters below them are having that type of trouble, then their options should be reconsidered as well. You really want to preserve diversity while giving every character a way to beat every other character’s options. Part of a way of preventing imbalance in advance is to give characters defensive options across the board that can be used to nullify most options you can give a character, for example Guilty Gear’s myriad array of defensive and movement options tends to allow characters to at least nullify their opponent’s offense.

For example, Bowser in Project M has a really great getup attack from ledge, it’s hard to punish in conventional ways because it’s so fast and far reaching and leaves him pretty safe. However it can be beaten easily by any character just by shielding near the ledge and grabbing him when the ledge attack is done. Characters have these universal defensive options, spot dodging, rolling, air dodging, that help give them options even in bad matchups. Obviously this isn’t going to solve everything, a bad matchup is still a bad matchup, but it can help. Even if your character doesn’t have some of the more specialized tools that another might have to win in a matchup, you can fall back on these universal tools frequently to at least prevent the opponent from gaining too much of an advantage.

Part of it also comes down to the direction the game wants to go in. Sometimes a character’s moveset combines to create a playstyle the development team doesn’t want, which happened for a LOT of characters in Project M 3.02. If you keep going too far in the awesome offensive direction, you end up with a game where everyone has such great combos that people become afraid to aggress, or you get Hokuto No Ken, and that isn’t always what you want.

On paper it sounds good to always buff the underdog, because people hate nerfs, but it’s a question of getting the game into the playstyle where you want it to be. On the other hand, don’t just hand out nerfs all the time or your playerbase will feel punished for improving with characters only to see them get nerfed, especially true with lower tier or lesser played characters.

Amplifying weaknesses to balance out strengths is a concept that only makes sense on paper, with a very one-dimensional understanding of character balance. Weaknesses tend to be situational to the matchup. The matchup tends to determine what counts as a weakness in the first place. Yeah a character might be vulnerable to up throw chaingrabs, but if their opponent doesn’t have an up throw chaingrab or a good followup on their up throw, then it doesn’t matter much. Sure a character might be susceptible to shield pressure, but amplifying that weakness will lead to them getting crushed in shield pressure matchups, but run unopposed in matchups where the opponent can’t do much shieldpressure.

If all the matchups are 5:5, then no character can be S tier.

Getting into Speedrunning

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What games are recommended for those who want to get into speedrunning?

The usual recommendation I see people give is, pick a game you’re into. People speedrun nearly every game under the sun, there’s almost bound to be a community for whatever game you pick.

What I can say beyond that is, it’s a matter of finding a game you want to learn more about and get better at. It’s good to pick a game that has good documentation on it because then you’ll have other people to ask about how the game works and you have readily available information on what you should be doing to try to get faster, like tutorials on how to perform various tricks.

Unless you want to become leaderboard style competitive it doesn’t matter if you’ll stick it out for 1000 hours or only 100 or 30. Speedrunning is just another way of having fun with a game. Speedrunning is a way of testing yourself, finding out new things about a game and working to do better. It’s a way of turning single player games into something you can do with friends in a comparable and measurable way, even competitive.

Good games to recommend depend on what you’re into, even though speedruns are collectively a community, it’s filled with subcommunities that can be rather divided. If you want an easy run, then Dark Souls 2 current patch and Deus Ex are both really simple and easy to learn. If you want something with more complex movement, try Mirror’s Edge, Half-Life 1 or 2, Megaman X2, or Mario 64. If you want something really focused on improvisation, try Minecraft, Binding of Isaac, Hotline Miami, or Animal Crossing. Lots of glitches, go 3d Zelda, castlevania sotn, dark souls 2 broken%, portal, megaman 1 and 2, or morrowind. Combat focus, go Dark Souls, DMC4, or Bloodborne. If you want pay2win, go Warframe. http://www.twitch.tv/celestics/c/6769673 If you want something technical, go for Dishonored, yoshi’s island, super metroid, metroid prime, F-zero GX, Shadow of the Colossus. If you want something somewhat straightforward and less glitchy, go for Super Monkey Ball, Portal 2, a Kirby game, Dark Souls 2 or Bloodborne current patch, Super Puzzle Strike, Super Mario Bros, Smash Bros Melee’s event and adventure modes. For stealth go for Deus Ex Human Revolution, and Metal Gear Solid 3 European Extreme. For something classic, try Contra, Gimmick!, Metal Slug, Ninja Gaiden NES, Castlevania 3.

Check some of them out, pick something for yourself.

To repost something older I wrote on this:

Picking a game isn’t just a matter of picking a game you like I think. It’s a matter of finding a game you want to learn more about and get better at. It’s good to pick a game that has good documentation on it because then you’ll have other people to ask about how the game works and you have readily available information on what you should be doing to try to get faster, like tutorials on how to perform various tricks.

That and unless you want to become leaderboard style competitive it doesn’t matter if you’ll stick it out for 1000 hours or only 100 or 30. Speedrunning is just another way of having fun with a game. Speedrunning is a way of testing yourself, finding out new things about a game and working to do better. It’s a way of turning single player games into something you can do with friends in a comparable and measurable way, even competitive.

Here’s how you get into speedrunning: Pick a game, grab a timer, work out the shortest route you can manage on the tricks you can currently do, have a playthrough. Don’t worry so much about getting the best times, just try to do better than you did previously. Check out the latest tricks, talk to other people working on the same game as you, make some friends who can help you out and who eventually you might help out. Try the route again, see if you can integrate some new tricks. Give the stuff you’re close to being able to do an attempt or two every run. Maybe even stick it out for an hour on the same trick if you really want to get it. Try thinking of it like a risk/reward type of thing. You got a good run going, and you could do this trick that saves 5 minutes or you could take the safe route instead of spending 10 minutes repeating a trick that doesn’t work.

Then do another run, maybe take this one slow. Go through the route at your own pace, try out the tricks you can’t do yet. Maybe this time you’ll get a few. Try working out how you did it on your correct attempt. Look at the other stuff around you that isn’t in the route you’re following. Since you’re probably not following the official route yet, there’s probably stuff that doesn’t make sense in a world record run that would still help you shave off some seconds.

For the timer, it’s there to both tell you your score as well as tell you how well you’re doing on each segment, help inform where your problem areas are and where you could save more time. Make up some splits based on what you think the major segments are or borrow some from the better players. As you do more runs it’ll be able to tell you how well you could be doing from your best split times.

Back on game choice I’m gonna relate a personal experience that lead me into speedrunning. I previously had an interest in it because I have an interest in glitches in all games, however I didn’t like the idea of resetting a billion times to replay what was essentially the same string of inputs until you matched the perfect string of inputs. It seemed to me like speedrunning was an efficiency race without a lot of the dynamics of the games when played more normally. So I enjoyed watching speedruns and learning about the glitches and tricks in the game and just seeing how cool the run was, but I thought I’d never do it personally since I loath repetition. (I’m not even the type to practice combos for fighting games, the few games I do have thousands of hours in)

What ended up happening for me was a friend challenged me to speedrun something, and we both happened to have mirror’s edge. He had beaten the game like 4 times and I had only beaten it once like a few years prior. Mirror’s edge is short and I figured it would be worth a go. I ended up getting lost a lot, and wasn’t even close to winning the race. We ended up also running crysis warhead and sonic generations, both of which I also lost because the guy knew the games better than I did, and then we returned to Mirror’s Edge. I looked up some strategies so I could win the race that time. I figured out I could go a bit faster with things like the fall break kick and the side dodge boost, as well as a simple short skip in chapter 1 I was able to pull off. I lost that race too, but my time was way ahead of where it was previously.

So I continued trying to play Mirror’s Edge and learn new strategies to beat my friend, and eventually I started really picking stuff up. In my older routes I used to use the kick glitch exactly once in this one spot where it was safe even if I messed it up and I seemingly always got it for some reason. I started watching more mirror’s edge streams and what I noticed was that every runner had their own strategies. Every time I’d watch someone play through I’d learn some new thing about the game. I watched OvenDonkey’s old videos, done on PS3, with advice for chapter runs, and those used ridiculously outdated strategies that were optimized for a controller. However in those old strategies, I found easier tricks I could use that would help me go a bit faster in the places where I couldn’t do the skip. I did slow runs of the game where I’d just look around for faster ways to do things and try out tricks until I could do them consistently and was sure I could use them in my route.

In the process I was frankly addicted, I loved every new thing I found out about the game, how the geometry worked in this one place to enable this thing, the proper way to get the most speed off this trick, how speedvaults weren’t random or based on geometry but something players specifically controlled. It was cool. I was never really into mirror’s edge. I thought it was a screwed up game from my first time playing it that didn’t really live up to its speedrunning promise with incredibly linear levels that limited all but really dumb and obvious shortcuts. As I learned the game and speedran it, I came to understand it in a way I completely hadn’t before. I thought the controls were kinda clunky, I thought the levels didn’t have much to use for alternate routes, and as I learned the whole game, as I saw all the little bits and bobs people used to get to new places, I realized that Mirror’s Edge was like, the perfect speedrun game. There was a beauty to the controls that I just hadn’t seen being unacclimated to them, and I loved how the advanced techniques expanded how everything worked.

So hey, for me speedrunning Mirror’s Edge changed it from a game I didn’t have all that positive an opinion on to being one of my favorite games. In large part because it was so well documented, because I think I took the right approach to it, and because it’s a game with such huge growth potential for a player.

So hey, don’t be nervous, think it over. Play your favorite games a lot, be open to trying something you see potential in, have fun.