Are there any successful fighting games in the vein of games like Bayonetta, DMC, and God of War, ie. a 3D environment, weapon switching, styles, etc?
Most 3d fighters are either in the tekken/virtua fighter/dead or alive/soul calibur category, or they suck. Few notable and arguable exceptions include Power Stone, Ehrgeiz, and maybe like one other. I haven’t played any of these, I know next to nothing about them, so I really can’t comment, just a number of people vouch for those games, and I’ve personally tried a number of the cyberconnect2 games and they’re complete trash.
I tried working out a game design to basically port the DMC style of gameplay into a versus setting once. Most of the big design issues are that DMC (and Bayonetta, and so on) has combos that do a ton of damage and are really easy to lock someone into. They need infinite prevention measures, damage scaling, an undizzy system, and probably some type of directional influence and air/ground tech system to really work without becoming completely degenerate to long unending high damage combos. This also probably means hitstun rules will have to be rethought.
The other significant issue is that these games don’t tend to have very varied defense systems. They’re kinda one-note stopping at dodge and parry. There’s no way to block for a sustained period of time, and the block that is in DMC is omnidirectional. You’d need to either adopt a smash bros paradigm where blocks can be concentrated in a direction and get weaker over time, so they can be stabbed through and aren’t a perfect aegis, go back to the classic paradigm of high/low blocks, or figure out a completely new blocking system. Blocking should generally be a reliable, easy, low skill defense, with obvious safeguards like chip damage, guard breaks, or guards getting weaker over time to prevent turtling, and ways to get around it, change the opponent’s block zone so it isn’t perfectly consistent all the time. Action games typically have a number of high skill defensive systems, but in a fighting game context you aren’t going up against enemies that telegraph their attacks far in advance, attacks will rightfully be timed so they cannot be reacted to, and must be at least partially predicted. The alternative is extremely easy defense, making commitment extremely dangerous, shifting the game in the direction where people are afraid to attack. Also throw type options are relatively scarce in action games, and Nero’s throws are perhaps a bit overpowered. The ease of mobility might make getting close to opponents easy, so having close range nearly instant throws would maybe break a lot of the dynamic, maybe not.
The final issue is that most moves in these games aren’t really designed to fit together or work around the other moves that player characters have. In fighting games you have a lot of different types of counterplay. Moves tend to work against each other in a number of different ways based on how they move you through space, the areas they control, and how they leave you open to other attacks. To really make that thing work, you’d have to rework a lot of moves probably.
Are there any concepts of ideas that you think would make a really cool game or that you feel haven’t been properly implemented in a game yet? Like I’d love to see a Godzilla/kaiju game, but everything up till now has been some awful, mindless brawler. Omegalodon had an interesting idea, but it was
I think that the control schemes we have currently aren’t really suited to games of that scale. That or we’d need to make a lot more advancements in animation and physics engines like euphoria. Like a critical thing about large monsters is their massive size, and more particularly the articulation on each of their limbs. Like in shadow of the colossus, there’s a massive amount of specific articulation that allows the colossi to be interacted with directly, have very accurate moving collisions. A computer system can handle interactions of that nature rather easily, because it can control each limb individually, but when you hand that over to a human, it’s completely impossible to really control each limb with only a dual analog controller.
Our controllers are good for moving around solid objects. Most video game characters are solid boxes, cylinders, or pills as represented in the environmental collisions. They’re essentially a big solid object that gets moved around as a continuous whole, then the character’s animations are rigged onto that, and the character’s more specific hitboxes are attached to their skeleton. Smash Bros characters for example are actually this diamond shaped collision object far as the stage and movement are concerned.
In Mirror’s edge you have a ton of more specific environmental animations made that correspond to character height in a lot of circumstances to kind of cheat being a more versatile hitbox, but Faith is a cylinder specifically.
I think that to really sell that genre, we’ll need a character AI that can naturally overlap the control inputs, much like the euphoria engine already does. I dunno how well euphoria works for characters that aren’t humanoid though, or on diverse terrain.
Concept I’m looking for is a true 3d fighting game or multiplayer 3d brawler. Nobody has quite gotten it right yet, most have stupid lockons or weak counterplay.
How can full 3D fighters like those terrible Naruto games become better designed so that the mechanics presents more complexity and ingenuity; getting rid of the shallow, repetitive nature plaguing these types of games?
I spoke about this in a previous ask a lot with my schema for a multiplayer DMC type game. The biggest trouble with full 3d fighters is making the game 2 dimensional, then 3 dimensional. Imagine a 2d top down game, like Zelda or Ys, in these games you have 2 dimensional relationships with the enemies. You move around their attacks and try to hit their sides (especially in older Ys games). In 2d or current 3D fighters, you have jumping, double jumping, hopping, air dashing, or other forms of up down movement that create a 2D relationship between the fighters. If you’re exclusively fighting on the ground then the relationship is closer to 1D, but not completely, because you can crouch to go under hits, and limbs extend out at different heights and can hit or miss each other. In current 3D fighters there’s also side stepping and tracking moves. Side stepping adds a shallow type of 3D into the mix, tracking moves home in on someone side stepping, some of them home exclusively to the left, some exclusively to the right, some both ways, some not at all. This creates a type of counterplay.
In the naruto games, gundam vs games, dark souls, anarchy reigns, and so on, there’s a very one dimensional relationship between the player and the enemy they’re locked onto. The lockon system makes it so both of them face each other. Players can’t crouch under some attacks (and it would look weird from a representation perspective probably, hard to judge that type of space), Attacks rarely can be whiff punished (attacking the opponent’s outstretched limb after they attack), mostly because the sense of scale and pace of movement makes that type of thing impractical over attacking their body directly, and also because these games rarely model the collisions with that much detail. Melee attacks in these games typically home in, further reducing the space component. These factors together collapse a lot of that sense of space down into one dimension, the only factor that matters is how far you are from your opponent and how far your attack reaches.
Dark Souls actually combats this a bit to give more a sense of space, when you attack, just as the swing starts, you’re not allowed to turn any longer, so the attack is forced to go in the direction you were facing. So this means the opponent can strafe around your attack and you don’t face towards them while you do. This means that dark souls players, especially those using heavier weapons, need to turn their lock-on off when they attack and manually aim where they swing. This means that during that phase, they’re not playing dark souls as a 1D game, but as a 2D one (dark souls still doesn’t have significant differentiation of the height of attacks because people are standing all the time and there’s no jumping in combat really).
The key to making a good full 3d fighter is really making a good 2d topdown fighter first, then adding things like jumping, crouching, and moves that hit at different heights (think of god hand).
Examples of stupid lockons in 3D FGs/brawlers? Were you referring to games like VF/Tekken/DoA or stuff like Anarchy Reigns and other MOBAs?
Actually referring more to things like the DBZ/Naruto games or Rise of Incarnate/. Normal 3d fighters have a camera that is kind of complicit in how they work, and that’s alright for that style of game. I’d just like to see a branch out into “true” 3d fighting, which I don’t think anyone’s quite managed to make interesting yet.
The thing is, if you have a perfect lock-on, then it kills a lot of the spatial dynamic. Suddenly it doesn’t matter as much where your sword swings or what area of space it occupies, only distance to the target matters, so what might be a 2d or even a 3d type of interaction becomes a 1d one. In Dark Souls and Chivalry for example, there are a lot of reasons to remove your lockon or aim in another direction than straight at your opponent. In Chivalry, I’ve seen people duck under or jump above slashes, and people frequently spin to change the way their sword slashes or its hit area.
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