Parrying is so cool that it short-circuits people’s higher brain function, leading them to slam it into everything, and allow it to beat absolutely everything. Parrying in single player games is an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS thing to add to your game, and it should be done with utmost caution, at risk of destroying your entire game’s design.
So first up, what exactly is a parry? A parry is a timed button press with a narrow window that will completely nullify almost any attack headed at you, and sometimes will leave the opponent in a state to be punished, or sometimes outright deal a massive amount of damage to your opponent. A parry is different than a block, because blocking can be held continuously for a variable length of time, and there are frequently penalties to blocking, or blocking too many attacks. A parry is different than dodging, because your character will not move, and will absorb the incoming attack rather than ignoring it. This can mean playing a paired animation, or taking some hitstop and parry-stun. For the sake of this article, if the first few frames of blocking will nullify an attack and negate all damage you take, I’ll be including it as a parry.
Mashing is when a player rapidly presses a button or buttons as fast as they can. Mashing is one of the simplest video game skills. It’s worth recognizing that mashing is actually a skill. Some people are better at mashing than others. People devise techniques for mashing most effectively. Mashing can vary by game. Mashing isn’t always recognized as a skill, because many people do it in order to avoid learning how to play certain games, and other people deride some games as “button mashers”.
There are a lot of reasons to mash buttons in all sorts of games. If you want to perform an action at the soonest possible moment, then mashing is a good way to guarantee you’ll be close, especially if you don’t know exactly when to press the button. If you want to hit a tight window, then mashing similarly gives you a lot of chances to align a button press with that window. If you don’t know how to play an action game with a lot of similar attacking moves, then mashing all the buttons can be a way to of useful results. If a move has a short or no recovery time, then mashing can help you perform that move as many times as possible in a second. And of course, some games include minigames and special moves that rate how fast you can mash.
In Charmed Chains, I chose some early restrictions to emulate some of how Yugioh plays, and over time I’ve been shifting towards different ideas of what I want to do with the game. I chose these restrictions because there are a lot of indie and industry collectible card games that emulate Magic The Gathering (Force of Will, Hearthstone, Lorcana, Final Fantasy, Digimon, etc) in whole or part, and very few that emulate Yugioh (Dual Spirits). When I started making this game, I was really into Yugioh (I’ve recently been swallowed whole by MtG Commander), and I was very much inspired by different facets of Yugioh’s design that I felt could be pushed further (having a defined grid and effects that are based on columns), as well as some aspects of Magic The Gathering (blockers getting a choice in whether to take damage with their creatures, or let it hit them directly).
However, these limitations have lead to some issues with granularity, which I’ve previously discussed. I’m worried that low granularity in creature costs will lead to homogenization in people’s decks, unless I either adopt a resource system more similar to most card games, or start to enforce more strict archetypal synergies, like Yugioh did.
To understand the issues I’m facing, first I’ll need to explain how the resources in Yugioh and Magic The Gathering work.
Many players of fighting games and beat em up games start out by mashing. When you have 2-6 attack buttons, it can be hard to tell the difference between moves, so you might as well press buttons and hope something good comes out. A better player will understand when to use each move, but a worse one will see a large movelist, say “nah, pass” and just mash it out.
Some games are designed to actually facilitate and reward this type of mashing, games with strings (a sequence of unique moves activated by pressing buttons in a specific order). By mashing the buttons, you’ll accidentally end up doing all sorts of moves, and since neither you nor your opponent has any idea what you’re about to do, that makes you unpredictable, and ironically more effective in a genre that is advanced rock paper scissors.
It’s easy for intermediate level players to shut down this sort of play by simply blocking and waiting for an unsafe move to punish, or by throwing out “knowledge check” moves that require a specific counter (you can also call this spamming). However among beginners, it can allow them to develop a surprising level of basic competency at the game. They might be throwing moves out randomly at first, but sometimes they see something cool happen, and remember the feeling in their hands when they got that, allowing them to iterate and repeat it. Also helpful is these games list the strings in the move list, so beginners can learn a string as easily as checking.
For many beginners, these strings are literally what combos are. They’ll call them “combos”, not knowing there’s a larger combo system in the game. In a way, this is really helpful for beginners, compared to other games, because strings don’t involve tight timing, and are listed right there.
Magic the Gathering invented trading card games, and with it, resource systems in trading card games. Countless games following MTG have mimicked MTG’s 5-color mana system, because of course they did, why wouldn’t they?
In Magic The Gathering, spells and creatures cost “Mana”, a resource that regenerates every turn, and builds up over time as you play “land” cards from your hand. Mana comes in 5 colors, Green, Red Blue, White, and Black. Each of these colors has a mechanical identity associated with it, called a “Color Identity”. Mana is the primary thing that divides the design space in Magic The Gathering, to create different types of decks.
Of course, there are other things, like card types, and creature types, which have effects that reference one another to create synergies. And there are more broadly playstyles, like Aggro (try to kill the opponent before they can get their good monsters out or reach their win condition), Control (destroy your opponent’s threats and eke out a win) Mid-range (shut down aggro and outclass weak aggro threats, rush the control players), and Combo (dig through your deck to assemble exodia in your hand, then win the game instantly or near-instantly).
Mono-color decks focus entirely on a single type of mana, and usually only play a single “basic” land color. This gives them incredible consistency, because their mana supply goes up every time they play a land, but limits what they have access to in the broader card pool. A mono-color deck may lack “answers” to certain types of “threats” generated by other decks, such as red and black having a tough time getting rid of enchantment cards.
I have a theory about fighting games. I think that even the worst fighting games are pretty good. We see this in the Kusoge Phenomenon, where people play “broken” “shit-games”. These games have massive combos, wacky mixups, poor regard for balance, strange damage scaling or infinite prevention, and strange attack design with cancel points and hitboxes that don’t really make sense. However people still enjoy playing them, because they’re still deep games. They’re still games with combo systems you can explore, with mixups you can try out, and with moves that have a variety of different effects. This is a mismatch between what we traditionally consider to be “good” about games, and what actually creates depth.
Street Fighter 2 created the modern fighting game, and all fighting games take from it. SF2 was such a solid template for a game that if you just implement all the features of SF2 you will have a decent fighting game, entirely by default. I’m going to list these features as:
Many modern fighting games have been integrating auto combos for the past 10 years or so. BlazBlue Cross tag battle and dragon ball fighterZ have auto combos on 2 different buttons even.
An auto combo is a string combo attached to a single button. Pressing that button will produce a sequence of attacks that combo, some of which may be unique to the auto combo sequence. Sometimes finishing an auto combo will produce a super attack if you have meter.
Auto combos have historically been controversial because they’re so much easier to perform than other combos, giving players who don’t know how to combo access to easy damage.
It is easy to focus on a myopic view of skill in video games as pushing a button to hit a tight timing window. It’s a common skill test. It’s a very obvious demonstrable skill. Most laypeople can easily recognize that it takes skill. However, there are a lot of other skills that are common in video games, and the purpose of these skill tests is not just to test skills in a vacuum, which is easy, you could go hop on human benchmark and do that all day, but to create a larger system of choices and interactions that test a variety of skills at once, and creates variety in the way each skill is tested. Continue reading →
Most games with 3rd person combat have enemies with slow reactable attacks, and player characters with very quick unreactable attacks, such as Ocarina of Time, Devil May Cry, God of War, Batman Arkham, Witcher, and so on. The Soulsborne series made a bold decision with regards to this. The standard attack speed of most weapons is roughly the same speed as enemy attacks. This means that attacking after an enemy does generally means they’ll hit you first, interrupting you, unlike other series where your attack will come out first. This means you can no longer react to an enemy’s windup with an attack of your own.
By slowing down your attacks, the souls games put you on the same timescale as enemies. Enemies need to be slow so you can react to their attacks and defend against them, and slowing down your attacks to match theirs means there’s more of a risk that they’ll interrupt you before you interrupt them. This means that enemies can afford to rely on hitstun less to be threatening. Overall, it creates more of a neutral game between you and your opponents, where you jockey for position and try to use attacks strategically. Because you’re less sure to hit first, whiff punishing becomes more important to safely hitting enemies.
Slowing down attacks also means that attacks could be more diverse in the time at which they hit, and thereby exhibit a wider range of tradeoffs between damage, range, and speed, which Dark Souls leveraged to create a diverse assortment of weapons. Nioh then leveraged this further by attaching a bunch of moves to the same weapon, and finding ways to distinguish them all using the stance system.
There isn’t a lot to say about this. Slowing down attacks while keeping your defensive options fast is a simple effective trick for emphasizing more of the neutral game in any game with 3rd person combat. It makes individual enemies more threatening, and multiple enemy fights more dynamic too. Obviously not every game should work this way, but it’s cool in the games that use it.
You’ve seen paired animation before, even if you didn’t know what it was called. Many people have frequently called these “canned animations” or some such. I first discovered the technical name for it is Paired Animation when I saw a production video on Assassin’s Creed Origins, that happens to define what it means.
“We’ve drastically changed the paradigm of what is fight. In previous [Assassin’s Creed games], we used what we call technically a paired animation system. Which means when you swing your weapon, the hero and enemy align, they play an animation together, you wait for it to finish, and then you continue fighting. We went to a hitbox system, which means that anytime you swing your weapon, no matter the distance or if anyone is around you, you’re gonna swing. That means that distance matters. The speed of your weapon, your position relevant to other enemies, [it all] matters. If you have a big spear and are swinging it around you can hit multiple enemies at the same time. It’s not just about the damage anymore, [but about] speed, length, position and the number of enemies you’re fighting.”
In short, it’s when both a player and enemy are involved in the same animation, one of the player attacking, and one of the enemy being hit, neither being allowed to move independently while this is going on. This approach allows animators to have the player manipulate the enemy’s body and limbs in the animation directly. This is necessary for things like catching an opponent’s punch.
So where have you seen Paired animation before? Assassin’s Creed is the obvious one, every game before Origins had paired animations for all combat. The Batman Arkham series uses paired animations for all punches, counters, and takedowns, plus jumping on top of an enemy’s head. Dark souls uses paired animations for backstabs and ripostes, plus opening doors and operating devices. Doom 2016 and Eternal use paired animations for glory kills and chainsawing. Every fighting game in existence uses paired animations for throws/grabs.
So what’s bad about paired animations? Many reasons were listed in the Asscreed developer’s quote. Paired animations don’t let you hit multiple enemies with large weapon, because they’d need to make a specific animation that hit multiple enemies and a coded way to transition into it smoothly (Deus Ex HR did this, but it cut to black so it could set the enemies up, otherwise the transition would be jarring). They don’t factor in the length of your weapons, because most weapons have distance-closing animations, letting you snap to a target. And the speed of the move doesn’t matter, because you can’t be interrupted by the opponent you’re attacking, since they’re caught in the damage receiving animation from you.
The key problem with paired animations is the way that they snap onto enemies. Snapping in general can be problematic, because it erases specific circumstances, normalizing them into the same outcomes every time. Paired animations don’t care what was going on before they started, your spacing, velocity, movement, they take whatever happened and deliver a uniform result. Many paired animations are also invincible, because it’s difficult to resolve what would happen if they were interrupted. This leads to the awkward circumstance of trying to initiate a paired animation on purpose to go through other attacks, or coming out of a paired animation with an attack directly on top of you. One clever move for Nioh from Dark Souls, was removing backstabs and instead giving bonus damage to hits from behind. Parries in Nioh are still frequently paired animations.
When is okay to use paired animations? Paired animations are good for actions that specifically require them, obviously, such as grapples, and operating objects. In most fighting games, throws make both participants immune to damage. In the Smash Bros series, people can still be hit during a grab, but there is hyper armor applied during the throw part of the animation, to guarantee it finishes successfully. Paired animations are acceptable in circumstances where 1 tap will eliminate an enemy completely, since it would already always have the same result, and already doesn’t depend on circumstance. Examples would be takedowns in Deus Ex Human Revolution, or Glory Kills in Doom 2016.
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