Month: June 2016

Getting Unstuck in Fighting Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

When you get ‘stuck’ in a fighting game, like, say, when you play against a character you don’t know how to fight and you just don’t understand how to deal with them because all of the moves of that character seem to have priority or the char. just has better ledge game (in SSB) or this one move you just don’t know how to counter, what is your process for figuring out how to deal with or counter this character (or a certain tactic)?

I almost never get stuck, because I generally have a good understanding of how the systems work. Mewtwo teleports at me, I know I need to have a hitbox on the spot he’s about to appear before he’s there. I’ve worked out plenty of anti-jank tactics versus snake’s grenades and mines. I’ve spiked lucas players trying to tether to ledge for free. I’ve uppercut dhalsim’s limbs. I’ve faultless defense’d Faust’s blockstring pressure into his unblockable (so he can’t run up into it as fast because FD pushes him away further, and since it’s an unblockable, I can’t jump out like with a throw). I pointed out to my friend in KoF98 that Athena’s hard autocorrect divekick was probably really unsafe on block, because it wouldn’t make sense to be safe on block (turns out, yeah it’s really unsafe).

Everything always has a counter. Either you hit them before they do it, you punish them after they try to do it, or hit them in the middle of it. Good understanding of the system as a whole, good expectation of the trends in the system (like knowing which moves are probably unsafe), being able to recognize what happens with the move in different situations, and thereby being able to diagnose the move’s weakness. Like Dudley’s cross counter in third strike doesn’t counter low attacks. I never read a guide mentioning this, I just played a lot and noticed it as I played.

If I’m having trouble with a character, I usually look up guides for the character I’m having trouble against. Learning how they see things from their perspective is helpful because it also includes their weaknesses and what they need to watch out for. Investigation into framedata can be helpful too, as it was with Necalli in SFV, learning that his blockstrings into the stomp special are tighter with the light stomp, but more disadvantageous on block, and have a gap with the heavy stomp, but more neutral on block.

There’s a large number of resources you can potentially look into in order to learn how to beat characters for any popular fighting game.

I recently played PM after a long time and for the first time against a player and how the FUCK are you supposed to fight Marth? ALL his moves have priority over everything I did (not to mention longer range). I could only beat the player using Charizard and his giant-ass hitboxes with flame-tip and claw sweetspots.

Hahaha, that’s funny. Marth has an advantageous matchup against charizard, because charizard’s tail isn’t disjointed and marth can just whiff punish slash it, also because marth gets good combos on floaties and can space against Charizard in shield really well (and charizard already suffers against shield pressure).

I play with the second best Charizard player in the world actually, and as you may know, I main Marth.

Some key things to remember are, priority doesn’t apply to air attacks. Air attacks cannot clank, so forward air from Marth will cut through your hitboxes.

Marth’s big weakness is that he doesn’t have any attacks that come out particularly fast, and his attacks don’t have great recovery. His fastest ground attacks are jab, down smash, and Up B, all coming out on the 4th or 5th frame.

If your friend is spamming SH double fair, you can either move out of the way, then hit him right when he lands (charizard has an amazing dash dance) either with a grab or forward tilt (charizard’s forward tilt is amazing), or move in closer to him and shield on the spot where he’s going to land, so he’s forced to land in your shieldgrab range. These apply to any character.

Marth’s dash attack sucks, can be beaten by shieldgrabbing or just letting it whiff and punishing it.

Marth’s down tilt is his best neutral move because it has amazing IASA frames, so it effectively has a short recovery. Also has a reasonably fast startup of 6 frames. He can usually dash out of it before getting shieldgrabbed, but it’s still susceptible to whiff punishing.

You want to DI marth’s fair chains out, to avoid getting spiked. His up tilt and dash attack have a trajectory that sends you in at Marth, so you’ll want to DI down and in at Marth. Those three moves are how he sets up most of his combos. His grab is normally useful in combos, but charizard is so heavy it rarely comes into play. Just be sure to DI down and away from him when he forward throws you. On lighter characters, he can also down throw as a DI trap into fsmash, so you’ll have to guess which way to DI to avoid getting fsmashed.

His fsmash by the way, has almost no shield pushback, so you can shieldgrab it no problem. If he’s out of range, then let him whiff the fsmash and you are totally free to run in and do whatever you want to him. I do this to a lot of marth players I know are worse than I am when I feel they’re about to fsmash. Just wait at the very edge of their fsmash range, let them miss the attack, dash in an grab.

As charizard, watch out with your dash dance, your tail lags behind you, and can be slashed if you’re not careful.

Any tips for Ganondorf in PM? I wsa using him and couldn’t do jack to Marth until I picked up Charizard. I’m surprised Charizard has a bad matchup against Marth, though that’s probably because the other guy just wasn’t that good. Also the setup was laggy so that might have given fatso charizard the advantage.

Ganondorf, he’s also on the lower tier side like charizard, hard to say how his matchup against marth goes. I think marth still has the advantage. Luckily I alt Ganon. Ganondorf is all about single hits and spacing, Marth is also about spacing and has disjoint. Ganondorf kills in a few hits, Marth has nice combos, though none of his grab setups work on Ganondorf because he’s too heavy.

Basically, you want to hit him when he misses you. Ganondorf gets great followups off his down throw versus marth. At lower percentages, he can regrab (marth can DI forward or behind ganondorf, so turn appropriately to catch him). At higher percentages down throw gets guaranteed followups into fair or bair depending on DI. Ganondorf can’t move that well to whiff punish grab marth, but he can move in on marth forcing him to land in bad positions and be open for a shieldgrab.

Ganondorf has a nice jab, much faster than any of marth’s moves (one of marth’s central weaknesses is that he has no good fast moves), so that can be useful in a pinch.

Ganondorf’s down B can outprioritize all of marth’s grounded moves, but it loses hard to aerials or shield. Side B is good for shenanigans, when you scare him into shielding you, or if he tries to shield while on a platform and thinks he’s safe (since normally you can’t grab people unless you’re on the same ground they are). Air version gets better followups, ground version has better range and can avoid attacks like Dudley’s short swing blow. Ground version can be teched before ganon can do anything about it, air version does a small juggle which ganon can usually at least jab off of before they get a chance to tech. Up B is also a grab and can shenanigan people in much the same way, grabbing them when they think you don’t have the grab option.

Most of the matchup is going to be moving carefully, and poking at marth before he swings or waiting for him to miss a swing and poking him. You’re just gonna have to get used to reading a lot harder and winning neutral more with worse tools. Ganon has nice range on a lot of his attacks, technically better than marth’s on fair, you need to get better at figuring out when he’s going to attack, avoiding it, and hitting him back. You don’t need to win neutral as many times as marth does, because you get bigger rewards for winning neutral.

I beat a guy playing falcon yesterday every single time while I played Bowser. In Melee. If you have good enough instincts, anything’s doable.

Precision in VR/AR

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How important do you think precision is in fpses? To increase precision, we have to reduce speed (see Doom to Quake to modern shooters), so where do you stand? How do you feel about a fully-realized AR shooter, like virtual paintball, but with different weapon-types? That would have very slow movement speed, but it would create new types of tactical depth that I think aren’t possible with traditional games.

Blah, there’s that word precision again. And used in such a way that it’s not clear what you mean. I think a better phrasing here might be, “to make aiming easier, we have to reduce speed […]” But it’s still not clear what the overall question is supposed to mean.

Speed was reduced in the move to modern shooters because of console controllers, which cannot aim with 1:1 precision like the mouse can. The mouse does not need slower character movement speeds as a concession to make aiming easier. Controllers have difficulty moving fine distances due to the necessity of dead zones at the center of them, and the difficulty of pushing it a slight amount then releasing the stick before the camera moves too far. Continue reading →

Dark Souls 3 Review & Roundup

Celia Wagar2 Comments

Once you finish Dark Souls 3, what’s your opinion on it as a whole?

First half of the game is really easy. Like, did From decide to put in an actual difficulty curve this time? Starts getting hard at the cathedral of the deep or the catacombs of Carthus, and gets legitimately hard at Irithyl. Also way too many bonfires for the first half of the game. Cathedral of the Deep is where they start reusing bonfires and they do it to amazing effect, with one central bonfire and tons upon tons of shortcuts. Continue reading →

Most Unique Fighting Game Characters

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Which fighting characters do you think have the most unique mechanics and why? Feel free to elaborate on each character as well.

You realize this list is going to be like, entirely guilty gear characters?

Lemme think.

Eddie comes to mind immediately, because he has control of a character separate from himself whose every move is controlled by releasing buttons rather than pressing them.

Arakune from Blazblue has a similar mechanic, except he needs to curse opponents, then he’s capable of releasing buttons to summon insect projectiles from all over the screen.

Ramlethal has 3d beat em up style attacks on her punch and kick buttons and remote swords that can be deployed and reeled in

Leo whitefang has a mode where he turns backwards and seriously can’t block or throw, but he can dash throw you and has a bunch of amazing normals with throw invincibility, also a counter move that beats your attacks.

Dhalsim, especially SFV dhalsim. There’ve been clones of him in a lot of other games, but it’s still a rare achetype.

Johnny needs to power up his mist finer by using coins that are a limited resource, and he can stick opponents with a cloud that makes his mist finer unblockable.

Crow in Rising Thunder had a super fucked up pressure game where he can continually hit people with normals, cancel them into close projectile tosses, then do a jumpin, mixup, and repeat until he lands a hit and confirm into a combo.

Jigglypuff is a highly mobile, small, short range poke based character. That’s weird by itself, then jiggs has an instant kill move.

Snake can launch projectiles directly on top of himself, plant mines in the ground, and stick opponents to extend combos or kill them, plus has a ridiculously good drill that can be used in combos and for (weak, but scary) pressure.

Bedman can perform moves, then have a duplicate of himself repeat them later on.

Venom can lay down pool balls and get them to rebound off each other.

Robo-ky has a heat meter and spends tension differently than the rest of the cast. Wants to build up heat and keep it close to the top, but also can blow himself up if he overdoes it.

Peacock has a ton of unique projectile tricks and extremely unique combo paths that rely on setting up projectiles to drop mid-combo.

Ice Climbers, they have the craziest chaingrabs, handoffs, desync tactics, and an infinite.

Yoshi. He’s Yoshi.

Peach, hovering and turnip projectiles for the craziest setups you’ll ever see.

Pikachu, just look at axe and capitulize. This character is nuts.

Magneto in MVC2.

FANG, a slow slow projectile that you can’t block, but which poisons you? Weirdness.

Elphelt, stance dancing weirdness, unblockables, grenades.

Beowolf, can hold opponents, carry them around, hype meter, stance/setup weirdness,

Bishamon, reversal-only DP, weird projectile

Fox/Falco

Kevin from Garou, Also B Jenet

Urien/Oro

Vega SFV

Doctor Strange

Phoenix Wright

Hakumen, weird meter, weird combos, weird counters

Juri, weird fireball

M Bison, head press

Zappa

Definitely others in games I haven’t played. Out of space.

Is it wrong for me to criticize 2D fighting games for being too similar? reasoning: they all carry the same fundamentals and to me personally makes less unique. also for the piece do 3D fighters suffer from this at all?

Yes. Stop.

I can’t say anything about 3d fighting games, I don’t understand them, I can’t play them, but you’re absolutely wrong for criticizing 2d fighting games for being too similar.

C’mon, you gonna criticize FPS games for all having the same fundamentals? or RTS? or Beat ’em up games? Platformers?

2d Fighting games are the most diverse genre I know of, because they have nothing else to fall back on. They can’t diversify by having different stories, different levels. Those aspects are barely a part of the experience. So they’ve had to diversify through making the characters and systems all unique.

http://xenozipnotes.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/fighting-game-mechanics.html
http://lowfierce.blogspot.com/2009/01/combat-systems.html

Here’s two lists of fighting game mechanics. These don’t cover what mechanics individual characters have, which would make a new list 5-10 times as long. Do you think there’s another genre with a list this big?

The fundamental strategy in every fighting game can vary a fair amount, between street fighter with a heavy emphasis on the ground game and block/throw, KoF with a faster game pace and a real high/low mixup game due to hops, anime fighters with air dashing and bullshit pressure games but also tons of defensive options, skullgirls and marvel with ridiculous combo games and team composition.

Consider just the range of projectiles in fighting games and the differentiation between how they’re deployed, how they move, and what function they serve. Do you see that much range in first person shooter games? in action platformer games? in Mobas?

Individual characters in fighting games are so dissimilar that people have trouble jumping between them.

Bloodborne 2 Ideas

Celia WagarLeave a comment

If they were to make a sequel to bloodborne, what improvements or new features would you want the developers to include?

Make the blood vial use animation longer.

Assuming Joseph Anderson is correct and the new blood vial system exists to force you to fight through enemies on the way back through the stage instead of running past them, then it might make sense to have a blood meter of some kind that fills up as you kill enemies, granting blood vials in a manner similar to bonus humanity in the original dark souls. This avoids having to spend souls on blood vials, and side steps random drop chance, not to mention keeps with the theme of the game. Probably not a perfect solution though, as it still allows/forces players to grind (and not even as effectively, given you can’t drop a huge number of souls on bloodvials, though you could have that as a backup) vials back up before challenging an area.

The real design goal here is to have players spawn with all their vials, since that’s what they use to get through the level, and want to kill every enemy, by tying progression to enemies in some way. The obvious solution is to gate progression until enemies are dead, like devil may cry, except that doesn’t fit the tone of the series. A less obvious solution is to make enemies better roadblocks, like in a lot of classic 2d games, such as castlevania or ninja gaiden. This way getting around them is as risky, or a riskier, proposition than fighting them straight up. Trouble is, that’s hard to implement in a game that is specifically designed to have longer drawn-out combat. Because enemies don’t deal damage on contact, you want players to hug up next to enemies sometimes, not get hurt slashing at them due to hitbox oddities, and enemies to have actual startup to their weapon swing animations so they’re fair.

Maybe one solution is to start players off with 10-15 vials and an empty blood meter on spawn unconditionally. This being true even if they warp. Then have it so killing enemies in the level fills up the blood meter, and instead of pressing up to regain silver bullets, they press it to convert blood meter into vials. Could upgrade your vial/meter capacity over the game.

The hunter’s dream is destroyed in the first BB presumably, so just have levelups/warps at the damn lanterns. Also resting to reset the level/vials. Teleporting to another area to perform common functions like leveling up is a terrible idea. I know they want to have the whole homey feeling of the nexus, but it’s a pain in the ass.

Link the damn world together. I loved the forbidden woods skip in 1.0, even if I permanently hard locked my game using it. Also don’t allow warping from anywhere to anywhere for the first half of the game.

Have more effects tied to insight. Have new enemies appear, new enemy attacks. Have them pop up around 5 insight, more at 10, and so on.

Remove the frenzy causing mini-mother-brain enemies completely. I’ve never been able to beat one without getting frenzied, I’ve lost a ton of souls to these enemies. They don’t feel fair at all.

Skip on the chalice dungeons, reintegrate the enemies into the main game, or flesh them out into more their own areas instead of being cookie cutter reassembly of parts. I know the design goal was to make something replayable, but that just doesn’t work.

Perhaps Chalice Dungeons could take the role of the side areas you normally explore, and be set up more blatantly as side quest things available to you during the main game, with a lower bar to entry and more obvious rewards for entering them.

Beast Blood pellet’s effect should drain more slowly.

More areas should match central yharnum’s interconnectedness, use of enemy patrols, and in some cases enemy count.

Unlock Caryll Runes sooner, and don’t put their device in an optional area. I honestly missed it until late in my first playthrough.

Do something to differentiate sets of armor. Maybe have weight be directly tied to the armor you’re currently wearing rather than a character stat. So you can have light armors that make you faster, heavy armors that make you slower, and your overall speed is determined as an average of these. Avoids hitting the endgame where you can wear heavy armors like they’re nothing that happens in other souls games. Don’t make the weight differences too much. Add actual damage resistance to the heavy armors too so they don’t suck. Keep poise based on weapons/attacks, so characters still get stunlocked easy in PVP and by enemies.

Have an undizzy-like combo system like reverse-poise where a meter fills up as you take hits in a combo, then once it’s full you’re allowed to cancel your hitstun into a roll/quickstep. Heavier armor makes the meter smaller or fill faster.

Am I the only one who found the rope molotovs to not be very useful? I don’t really understand their intended function honestly.

Have brainsuckers drop insight if they suck one out of you. Also do something about the stunlock effect Joseph Anderson mentioned. Probably let you roll out of their special knockdown.

The Blood Tinge and Arcane stats were disappointing in my experience. Especially because the various spell items had such high stat requirements, but weren’t very useful.

Might make sense to have a higher QS bullet max and to limit parry range/effectiveness. Parries are kind of messed up in every souls game though. They’re high risk/high reward, but extremely polarizing since you can shut down enemies doing nothing but parries. Might make sense to only have specific types of attacks be parryable in a future game, so you gotta watch out for those ones, and normally defend against the others. QS sidearms kinda suck for normal use.

Don’t have anything as confusing and poorly connected as bloodstarved beast to the upper ward, to vicar amelia. I got lost there in replaying (bought the expensive key first time, was better experience).

Have an actual beast transformation this time, tie it to consuming too many blood vials, add drawbacks like frenzy. Add another mechanic to heal beast buildup.

Vanquish better without regen health?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Would Vanquish be better without regenerating health?

Here’s a curveball answer: No.

You’d need to change a lot of things in addition to health to make it work without health regeneration. If you remove regenerating health and left the rest of the game as-is, it would not work, would not be playable. The reason for this is because the game is so lethal and enemy bullets are largely hitscan. If you remove regenerating health, then you won’t have enough health to survive the level, unless you’re extremely good at locking enemies down pre-emptively, which is a skill no one would be able to develop in a game like this unless they were doggedly persistent.

You cannot reliably avoid damage from enemy gunfire, you have no real defense against incoming damage, and the levels require you to move into harm’s way in order to progress. Despite Vanquish adding dodging, rocket boosting, and cigarettes, the game is still largely about intentionally absorbing damage in order to output damage to enemies, then healing your damage off before going another round. Enemies take damage permanently, unlike you, so you can whittle them down no matter what position you’re in or how bad it gets. Every enemy is designed to be able to kill you from full health.

Every enemy and level is designed under the assumption that the player has an infinite supply of healing items available to them everywhere. For this reason, even if you replaced the regenerating health system with health packs, players are likely to run out, or not be able to cross the gap to the next heal. It would generate a lot of random deaths for no good reason.

How could you make it work? One proposal I have is to treat hitscan weapons from enemies more like slow moving lasers, like the ones you avoid in DMC or other games. Imagine the player can see the target points where guns are being aimed at him, maybe the guns have actual laser targeting, and you need to avoid those as they close in on you. Going with more of a Nier-esque bullet hell route might also be viable, but not fit the theme as well.

The exact health system I’m unsure about. You could treat it like MGR, have a limited number of collectible healing powerups that are dropped from enemies/environment, maybe dark souls it up a little and require you to manually use them. So effectively you have what’s technically a longer health bar that has to be manually managed instead of infinite reservoirs of health waiting to be tapped into. I mean, this is what Ninja Gaiden did, and that was lethal as all hell.

I mean, if you were really careful and adjusted a lot of the game, yeah it could work and possibly be better, but as-is, it’s the best solution we have for the type of game Vanquish is.

Xrd thoughts

Celia WagarLeave a comment

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/730873-guilty-gear-xrd-sign-/70952891 This thread. Oh Lord.

I was discussing Xrd last night with that friend who’s way better at fighting games than I am.

His sense is that the new characters have a skewed ratio for effort versus reward, except for bedman who is as hard as a guilty gear character typically is. Leo is okay, because he’s easy, but not great as a character, where Sin and Elphelt are just derp.

His other remarks are that Daisuke Ishiwatari being put in charge of Xrd after another guy did AC lead to a lot of dinosaur-like decisions designwise, like danger time being put in because Daisuke liked the button mash sequences in Samurai Shodown. Also the general reversion to a lot of #reload moves which aren’t as versatile and cool as the AC moves.

His other remark is that he hates the Roman Cancel slowdown, because it makes the game more positional, set-play, knowledge based rather than reads and footsies.

His comparison is between how YRC is used in Xrd now to how FRC was used in GG AC: YRC is used to force respect and both players can react to it trivially, FRC is used to create opportunities that you must act on RIGHT NOW. So one creates mixups, one shuts down your opponent’s options and gives them a chance to react to yours.

Human reaction time is a constant we have to design around and consider carefully, both the average (18 frames), and the upper limits of it (13 frames).

That’s the unique thing about fighting games, frequently occurring unreactable decisions multiple times a second. You don’t really get that in other genres. In RTS, you have hidden information and micro, so there’s counterplay, but in actual encounters, most micro maneuvers don’t really counter your opponent, they’re more about efficiency. You focusing on a fight raises the efficiency of your troops, which helps in critical encounters. In FPS, it seems like there’d be a stronger opportunity for counterplay, but the counters are also soft. Because both of you can shoot and hit successfully at the same time without impeding each other, it’s again about efficiency. The counters are soft, based on terrain and weapon choice. About getting your opponent into a range where you can DPS them really well but they can’t DPS you as well.

And in fighting games, that stuff is a delicate balance, to make a game that has it all and makes it all work. His base point is, the current designers don’t really know what they’re doing and the game is only good because it’s built on top of a rock-solid foundation.

The thread is whatever, a lot of ad hominem insults towards Mike Z, but some people make legitimate arguments for and against his points, and that’s pretty alright. I disagree with some parts of Mike Z’s post, but that’s alright. I mostly cite it in my articles as where games criticism could be. It’s making intelligent evidence-based arguments, which is way better than a lot of other stuff. People won’t agree with all of it, but that’s fine. At least we’re having an intelligent conversation about game design.