This video will make you chuckle, mind commenting on it? 3:56 is my favourite part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAX4DVhRhaA Continue reading →

What’s your favorite footie game from a fighting game? How about your least favorite?

I’m not totally sure about my favorite, I like a lot of them, I’m leaning on either Garou Mark of the Wolves or Street Fighter III 3rd Strike. Both of them get worse as you get better at the game unfortunately, due to parries and DP breaks/Guard Cancels, but I’m not at that level yet. I might want to get into Yatagarasu in the future because of its similarity to both of the above games, but I haven’t had an opportunity. Continue reading →

http://www.ultra-combo.com/growing-the-killer-instinct-community-combo-assist-mode/ thoughts on this? Its a game’s solution to getting in new players.

I read about this on Shoryuken, and in part brought up the KI combo system on twitter recently because I read it. Reminds me of the L cancel trainer in 20XX and 20XX TE, but it lacks the feedback indicating you did the input correctly.

In this case I guess they genuinely managed to decrease execution difficulty without any penalty to the decision-making game. I can’t honestly think of a downside to this. Good on them. It only really works with a combo system like Killer Instinct’s of course, but it’s a clever move. Perhaps the only trouble with it is the way that the same button can do auto-doubles and linkers back to back, makes it a bit less clear what’s going to happen when you press a button.

It also begs the question of why players shouldn’t play with this on all the time. I don’t have an answer there.

I still think better singleplayer content that teaches people the game is still the best method of bringing people in. If you give people the tools to bootstrap their way up, similar to having a mentor on hand, then you can get them into the game. Otherwise it takes dedication, research, and putting your nose to the grindstone a bit.

(In regards to KI) the mode can mess up manual timing. Manuals can replace Auto doubles in Combos. It can also screw with other characters combo traits. Manuals need a certain amount of time connect or else they become an auto double, topping it off any linker placed after a manual must be the Same strength or weaker. (Heavy manuals make Light mid and heavy linkers, light manuals make light linkers only) The heavier the manual the tighter the timing and the easier it is to react. Though the upside is 1-frame link manuals have 1-frame break windows

Uh, reading this over, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t affect manual timing at all. Like, if you want to do a manual after a linker, I’m pretty sure you’re capable of doing that with this system, because it’s just a matter of linking the manual, rather than canceling the linker with it. I don’t really see how the manual restriction makes a difference here, because this system doesn’t affect the timing or framedata of any of the moves. I mean, your rhythm might be different pressing the buttons, but otherwise manual timing should be the same relative to the move.

The only real drawback of this system that I can see is that if you have more than 1 linker or ender on any given button, you can only use the one they chose for assist mode, which is especially important for enders, because the enders have all different functions, like damage, corner carry, ground bounce, meter building, etc. Not sure, but I also think you can’t use Shadow moves, which are useful for extending combos, and can be used at any point in the combo, not just as a linker.

Though I don’t play KI, so I really don’t know. I’m basing what I say off the guides I’ve read.

Yeah you’re right it doesn’t. I was unclear with my thinking. http://forums.ultra-combo.com/t/growing-the-community-combo-assist-mode-discussion/3441/71 that post pretty much covers all concerns one could have about the combo assist system.

Yup. I read it.

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.

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.

What do you think of lengthy combos in fighting games? What purpose does getting stuck in a 90% combo in Marvel Versus Capcom or Guilty Gear or even Smash have?

I am not personally a fan of long combos. I think combo length in Guilty Gear and Smash is pretty reasonable on average. In Smash to get long combos you have to continuously read your opponent. In Marvel and Skullgirls it can get more drawn out. Skullgirls was designed with resets in mind which helps mitigate a bit of this, because to get real damage you need to reset continuously which gives people chances to break out.

The purpose of having combos in general is so that some situations can be punished with more damage than others. It creates this diversity between just footsies, wakeup situations, whiff punishes, jump-ins, or them whiffing a super or dragon punch. They can also vary depending on whether they are on the stage. Like in the corner in Skullgirls I can do this extremely beginner combo, s.HP (launch), j.HP, air dash forward, j.HP, j.HK (dunk) for a ton of damage. It’s certainly not the most damage efficient combo in the world, but it gets a lot more than my standard sequence midscreen (which replaces the third HP with an LK to catch them for the HK and allows for an OTG into another loop for ultimately more damage), however it doesn’t work anywhere outside the corner. If you whiff punish someone’s normal, you can’t link into another attack before canceling into special and/or super. If someone whiffs a dragon punch or super in front of you then you get a lot of time to perform a big attack that gets a lot of hitstun, and thus can be followed up into a lot.

There’s also this level of focus that goes into committing to a combo in a traditional fighter, and if you’re not punishing something, you don’t know if they’re going to block or not, so either you can confirm with low commitment moves, at the cost of damage, or you can risk going straight a combo which might be really unsafe on block.

If someone can get a 90 or 100% combo on you in a traditional fighter, it usually means spending a lot of your own resources in order to do so. This one Skullgirls introductory video showed how even though you can 100% a character on your opponent’s team with some effort, you end up expending all your resources to do so, and feed them a ton of meter in the process, which they can use to wreck you too.
Personally I’d like to see more work put into different ways that combos can be made more about reading the opponent in the future. This probably means increasing hitstun so combos require less tight timing, but allow people to react to what’s going on. Like making it so tech rolls in traditional fighters have a small vulnerability period at the end, making 2 juggle trajectories that have to be followed up differently, etc.

The purpose of getting stuck in a long combo is, you fucked up hard and really shouldn’t have done what you just did.