The Fine Line Between Depth and Approachability

Celia WagarLeave a comment

For a developer, in your eyes, is it a necessary evil to sacrifice the complexity that translate to depth, in order to prevent alienating their target audience? It is a dilemna I struggle with. I want my game to be deep, which comes from complexity, but not if it means people won’t play it.

I think there’s ways of getting both, and I’d cite Smash Bros Melee for this. It was a commercial success, but it’s also tremendously complex and deep. It was able to accomplish this because the majority of people who played the game have no actual fucking idea how to play it, or what most of the functions are. It has a very simple foothold for people getting into the game. You move around like a platformer, you attack in the direction of your opponent and it usually works. Super simple.

Making a game deep but understandable is about connecting with what your audience actually wants and actually can understand. The key is building a low “skill floor”, the minimum level of skill necessary to functionally play the game.

Street Fighter has a very high skill floor in comparison to Smash Bros. To play on a basic level, you need to know a LOT more and be competent at a lot more, otherwise you can’t even make real decisions.

I think this is what holds back a lot of action games, they have these complex move lists and people take one look at that and go, “like fuck I’m gonna remember all that” or they just mash buttons and it usually works, so they call it a button mashing game.

A ton of really complex games are extremely successful, like league of legends, but they do that by making the players’ most basic means of interaction with the game really simple. You can move, you can shoot, you have like 4 abilities. A lot of the other stuff is more advanced and you don’t need to know immediately. You can feel like you actually understand the game well enough to play fairly quickly. Similar deal with Pokemon, which has hundreds of actual pokemon, hundreds of moves, abilities, and weird other shit, but kids don’t need to know all that just to play.

I think the key is layered complexity, and introducing things one at a time, while not holding advanced players back. It’s a fine line to walk.

The Effect of The Meta on a Game

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I’ve been hearing people say that if the meta of a game is figured out, the game becomes stale. If I’m not using the term right, I mean that if a game is basically figured out than it no longer becomes interesting and dies. Is this true?

You are using the word meta correctly. Metagame can refer to the ongoing process of figuring out the optimal way to play in a competitive versus setting. If the optimal way is found out, then it’s just a matter of improving at doing it closest to the optimal possible. Deep games help prevent this from becoming the case by having a massive number of relevant states. Shallow games are figured out more quickly. The efforts of the community can also affect this. Melee survived as long as it did in part because it is crazy deep, new discoveries keep being made, such as recently someone found a ledge tech option select that beats rising up Bs (Hold light shield as you grab ledge, then before they up B, hard press shield, this will trigger a tech instead of ledge roll, and you can punish them from tech, which also grants iframes) and in part because the tools that the community has used to explore the game were primitive initially and grew over time. SFV has not had the same benefit of slow lasting discoveries, because the community is way better at finding tech than in SFIV’s heyday.

When the meta is developed to its peak, then the game becomes samey because you only see people repeat similar patterns instead of playing in new ways. There are ways to fight this, like making the game deep, making the game require a ton of memorization and experimentation of permutations (making it complex), or patching it every month so everything is totally different and people have to figure it out all over again. You’ll never guess which one League of Legends does.

Even when the meta is fully developed and there is seemingly nowhere else to go, a game can still be fun for lower level players who have not gone that far into it yet, but it can be rather boring for high level competitors.

Checkers is considered dull by many high level players, same for chess. These are for similar reasons. the state space was explored to the Nth degree, and if the opponent pushes it somewhere undesirable, it’s easy to push the game into a draw. Despite that, Chess is a lot more popular than most video games. If you’re interested in this you should look into chess’s history, because it used to be considered a more romantic intellectual exercise, but modern development of the game lead to essentially memorization of massive numbers of board positions, which makes many high level chess champions not so fond of it. Go thankfully remains interesting at a high level, and probably always will.

So yeah, this is the primary thing that depth exists to fight. Staleness. On both a big level and a small level. Make every session different, make every moment different.

I would like to elaborate on my “meta” question. They stem from these two comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/59eimk/slug/d981lv5 and https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/59eimk/slug/d985e65. Are they correct?

The way I view it, the meta is a reflection of the game. The meta is the way it is, because the game is the way it is. The meta develops in reaction to players finding out more about the game, and showing more about how the game is efficiently played.

People hate the meta because they view it as a human social convention, rather than a human model of how the game works.

Creating balanced games is not impossible, blizzard just sucks at it. They got lucky with brood war, and also took a ton of community input, and the community balanced the game out by banning literally every map, and replacing them all with the equivalent of final destination (Lost Temple, and now Fighting Spirit). Blizzard haven’t really succeeded since then.

SFV released a year ago, and the meta has mostly solidified by now, however we’re seeing a massively diverse cast of characters in top 8s, taking tournaments, and bizarrely the top tier character, Chun Li, who is revenge of 3rd strike + SFIV light link into medium levels of good, is not winning any majors. Some characters clearly lost out, like Zangief, Bison, Juri, Ibuki, Alex, FANG, Laura, but this is a great result, and even the bad characters aren’t amazingly bad, with high level players repping them. So basically, good balance is not impossible. It’s possible to balance so well pre-release that you get this almost a year down the road. I think SFV is taking totally the right approach to balance by waiting a year between patches, and they did a super stellar job to begin with.

I agree that if the game doesn’t develop, it dies.

I totally disagree that smash bros becomes worse after knowing the metagame. The metagame is still developing, Fox’s dominance is still in contention, there are a fair number of viable characters besides the top two, there’s a massive number of strategies and approaches to the game that we still see play out regularly, which is why the highlight reels every week are so great. Melee has bad balance, but it is a deep game regardless. Throwing out half the characters isn’t a problem if the best characters are the most fun in the game. This is more of an issue in these team games, because the characters in those games are shallower, and the games rely on variety to create depth.

Dude has the wrong info on the pokemon tiers, that’s the smogon ruleset, which exists to essentially create a bunch of segmented off competitive pokemon games, so that each of the tiers can have diversity flourish within it. The official format has no restrictions and everyone runs the same team.

People hate the meta because they dislike being told how to play. They dislike playing to win. They have bad mentalities about winning, competition, and fairness. They don’t understand the subtleties of the game. They don’t want to accept that any way is more efficient than any other. They can get mad about it, but it will not change reality.

What do you think of when some games like League of legends make everything different for each patch and radically change the metagame? Is that a good thing? Or a bad idea?

I don’t think it’s a good idea. It obviously helps keep the game from getting stale, but it also means that high level play is impeded from developing, because anything you figure out will be gone or not viable next patch. It obviously helps their business, but it’s not the right thing for the game.

The key is to patch on long cycles, to keep patches as minimalist as possible, and to not screw up what the players develop. Sometimes bigger sweeping changes are necessary to get the game in the right place. Marvel 3 would need that if it was ever patched again. However you usually want to keep it minimal, because if you change too much stuff at once, you get this complex cascading effect, and you don’t know what really happens.

How to Talk About the Feel of a Game’s Controls

Celia WagarLeave a comment

When I play Project M I often think “these controls feel so good”. But how do I describe any game’s controls being good without using buzzwords like precise, tight, feels right etc?
Note that by controls I’m not only talking about buttons, but what makes what’s happening on-screen fun to see and satisfying to play. In PM/Melee’s case, for example, how the high gravity and the crunchy (here goes another one) sound effects make pummeling an opponent with repeated Marth’s utilt and uair feel so goddamn good. You probably know what I’m talking about, but how do I explain stuff like that in tangible terms?

First, you could try reading Steve Swink’s Game Feel. Second, try looking up the 12 principles of animation. Third, compare and contrast with similar examples that don’t feel as good, and figure out what the actual differences between them are. Fourth, consider how animations flow into one another, where the point where you’re allowed to input is, where each animation cancels.

It’s a lot of subtle things. Someone had a story once about a friend of his who made a side scrolling game where a dude shoots fireballs. Something about the fireball throw felt lame, but nobody could put their finger on it. Then the friend made it so the fireball was spawned a bit further in front of the character, and suddenly it felt great. Hearing this, I knew on the spot that it’s because there was a greater change between the frames, so it would feel like there was more force being applied in that moment.

In PM and Melee, when you attack in the air, your bottom collision point changes, so that you will collide with the ground further up into your body. In Brawl and Smash 4, this is not the case, so collisions with the ground feel abrupt and weak. In The Animator’s Survival Kit, Richard Williams points out that you can make a collision feel more impactful by adding a frame where the character is touching the surface before the collision happens.

You gotta watch for this sort of stuff. Another guy just linked me a Bloodborne review where the guy complains that attacks in Lords of the Fallen are so slow, but honestly they can be about as long in length or startup as a dark souls attack. The issue with them is that the weapon moves at a consistent speed through the whole animation, unlike dark souls where there’s that same “merihari” that Capcom described having to teach Ninja Theory, which Americans would know as slow in and slow out or easing. Basically, the actual active swing time of attacks in dark souls is really short, where in lords of the fallen it’s really long, even though the full animation is the same length overall.

Sound effects are not my forte, I’m generally a bit weaker when it comes to sound, but listen to what they actually are, compare with worse alternatives, look up some words people use to describe sound, like high pitched or low, tinny or bassy, etc. Do your best.

Though identifying this stuff is probably harder if you’re not an animator, because it’s harder to look for it if you don’t know what to look for.

The Line Between Content and Depth

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Would you say it’s possible to define the line between giving more options and just adding more stuff? An extreme example, let’s say a bigger weapon loadout contributing to the same combat system versus a jetskiing minigame in a shooter.

A minigame is segmented off from the rest of the game. It cannot interact with any of the other elements, therefore it cannot multiply or exponentiate the number of game states, only add. Think about how many matchups a fighting game can have, based on the number of characters. If you have 10, then there’s 45 different matchups. If you add 2 more, then that’s 66 different matchups (12 characters). 2 more on that is 91 matchups total (14 characters). Adding even a small number of new options can vastly increase the state size of the game. And the state size doesn’t merely get bigger additively, it has a rate of increase that is similar to an exponent, because you’re increasing the number of combinations. So as you add more elements, the state size increases drastically more depending on the number of existing elements.

This is why Go is so much more complex than Chess, you’re allowed to pick many more things on any given turn. There are many many more ways the stones can be combined.

Imagine if you made a fighting game with 10 characters, then you added 4, but those 4 new characters can only fight each other. 10 characters is 45 matchups, 4 characters is 6 matchups. Together that makes 51 matchups, which is significantly less than the 91 you could have if you integrated the cast together.

This isn’t a perfect example, you could nitpick it by examining whether each of these matchups themselves is deep (which for evaluating the game’s quality would be more important than just the sheer number of matchups, because you can consider each matchup segmented off from the others in much the same way as the segmented off mini-game is). The point is to make the math behind state size a little more concrete.

Given the way the number of combinations is related to state size, we can infer that an increase in depth translates to a perceptual increase in quality across an exponential, or logarithmic scale, similar to the way decibels are measured, rather than a strictly linear scale. Of course, this is theoretical and measuring the depth of a game precisely, I don’t know if it’s really possible except for extremely simple examples like tic tac toe. Especially because state size is not the only determining factor for depth, but also redundancy, and relevancy to the playerbase (in terms of their skillset and knowledge of the game).

Because redundancy and relevancy are also a factor, things that are pure increases to the state size of a game can ironically decrease the depth of the game, because the number of relevant states might decrease because of how new elements affect the existing elements, and the new states introduced might just be rehashes of the existing states. I have my 4 criteria/rules-of-thumb for depth to prevent this.
https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/4-criteria-for-depth/

The Next Souls Game

Celia Wagar4 Comments

If Miyazaki were to take the Souls series to a different setting and universe like they did with Bloodborn’s Van Helsing/Lovecraftian style, what would you want them to do?

Modern Warfare

Hipster Art Students

Mecha Fighting (I don’t think From Soft would be very good at this one, bit outside their field of expertise)

Cats. (Not humanoid)

Berserk, but for real this time

Pokemon

Metroid

Mario

Magical Girl

Undertale

Jet Set Radio

F-Zero

Dragon Ball Z

Ghost in the Shell

Mirror’s Edge

Skydiving

Snowboarding

Jojo

Kaiji/Akagi

My Neighbor Totoro

Lets see all of these adapted into the dark souls gameplay style.

How do I Determine if a Game is Good or Bad?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What is your method of approaching a game to determine whether it’s good or not. You hold depth and challenge as high points, but how would you use them to determine whether a good is game or not, like figuring out how good Street Fighter or Mario are?

It’s a matter of thinking about whether the game is getting you to make interesting decisions or not. Is the game pushing you to do something that is kind of tricky and uncertain? I don’t have a good word or term for this. I should probably coin one. It would be related to a “Dynamic” (a group of mechanics that have a relationship between each other and create a certain style of play). A good simple game is one of these, a good complex game is many of these dynamics stacked on top of one another.

Kirbykid and I have been going back and forth on “Discrete” versus “Raw” game design (his terms). He favors discrete design while I favor raw. Discrete is where everything is clear and spelled out for you, where everything has clear separations between states and few fuzzy values. Raw is where many fuzzy value evaluations are employed, and frequently change over time, or based on position, speed, or other factors. The initial appearance of a game like Punchout or Furi is that it’s very discrete, but if you dig deeper into how the game works, there are many raw factors that shake up what the optimal strategy actually is and create more interesting decisions based on situations. Raw games frequently have many complex overlapping factors that work together to deliver a unique reactive challenge, discrete ones typically have minimal overlap and less reactivity to the player. Raw games make more frequent use of randomness to vary the challenge. Raw games have more subtle ranges of success and failure, while discrete ones have very clearly defined measures of them.

It’s funny how him and I can have such similar views and goals overall, yet be polar opposites on this very fundamental point about what good design is.

Lately I’ve been walking a tightrope. Literally. There’s this Slack Line that I’ve been walking across and getting better at. It’s simple overall, but it’s really fun. I can now do it forwards, backwards, stop in the middle and touch a knee to the line then continue to the end, turn around 180 while walking it forwards or backwards and finish, jump in the middle of the line and finish, as well as stop and maintain my balance while other people have lightly pushed me or shaken the line, or even walk to the end, stop, then walk backwards to the beginning. Actually doing all this stuff is somewhat tricky. Figuring out a good method took a lot of experimentation and practice. And actually doing it each time is not a surefire success. I need to pay attention in the moment and compensate for things as they happen. Need to pay attention to how my weight shifts, speed up or slow down, etc. Crossing the line is a simple action, but there’s a lot of subtle depth in actually doing it. I watch other people try it, and try to explain to them how to do it, and most of them can’t figure it out, none ever get as consistent as me.

And since then I’ve been super bored and tried figuring out how to balance blocks on my head. Foam blocks about the size of my head. I can do as many of 5 of those at a time. It took me only half an hour to figure out, though getting from 1 block to 2 took me maybe a whole hour or hour and a half. It seems impossible at first, but it has a similar dynamic to it. I need to be mindful of the balance shifting and simultaneously walk the direction it’s tilting, while rotating my head the opposite direction. Next project is balancing a ball on my head, that’s a LOT harder and I’ve only done it for 15 seconds at most, where I’ve done the blocks for several minutes before.

The question is, how actively does the game push you to think? How does this correlate with the complexity of the game? How many different states and outcomes can you envision based on your input and the game’s reaction? How does the challenge force you to be insightful? How does it force you to finely control the characters or elements that are under your control, stressing the solving of NP-Hard math problems, or fine motor control, or adaptation to specific situations, or reaction time?

How do you distinguish between a complex game and a deep game?

Redundancy and Relevancy.

Redundancy is about having elements in the game be distinct from one another, actually function differently. JRPGs typically have this problem the worst. They have a hundred weapons which are nearly identical except for stats being higher or lower. They have 40 magic spells which deal more damage, less damage, differently typed damage, but are still just, deal damage to target. Very similar in effect. No matter how much you level up or what abilities you get, the gameplay is still very similar. Attack, heal, attack, heal, and try to deal more damage than you’re taking. A game with redundancy has a lack of interesting choices and more clear sorting orders between options. Modern Military shooters, you trade up for the best weapon in its respective class, because most weapons function extremely similarly.

Relevancy is about having the potential for depth, but sabotaging it by having poorly balanced options relative to each other. Nier is a great example for this. It has a ton of different sealed verses. It has dodging and blocking. It has melee attacks and charged attacks, it has that ability to finish off enemies who are knocked down, but you don’t want to use most of these options. You really only want to stick to regular melee attacks, dark blast, dark lance, dark hand, and dodge. Those options are great, but a small selection of the total available to you. The Charge attack is especially sad, doing barely more damage than a melee strike. The number you can do during the time it takes to charge far outstrips its damage, so there’s really no reason to ever use a charge attack. Blocking is super pointless, it’s directional, and you walk slower while doing it and can’t change direction from the way you initially start blocking.

Another example of relevancy would be smash bros melee. There’s 26 characters in the game and only 12 are really relevant to anyone who plays competitively. There’s a large segment of depth that is locked off, where the same is not true in say Project M.

Or the hypothetical example, imagine a fighting game where there was 1 move that just wrecked everything and the game became about doing that one move and almost nothing else. Super Turbo Akuma might actually be a good example for this, his air fireball was broken as hell.

Deep games are complex, but complex games are not always deep (though some games might be deep and not appear to be complex because they do a lot with a little, like divekick arguably). Depth is about determining how complex the end product you actually play is, about determining the complexity of tactics and strategy. To that end, you need to assess the total possibility space of the game, eliminate the states that are redundant, then limit the search to only those relevant to the players. This can vary by community, and can change as the community comes to understand the game differently over time with the relevant segments of the game increasing or decreasing.

Why does Execution matter?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What makes execution so special? I remember in Tatsunoko vs Capcom there was a button that you can hold down to perform a super. Why is it bad to map a specials or supers to a button (or at least a less complex execution method)? Why does execution matter?

For one, there’s a lot of things that are extremely difficult to implement without using execution in some way. It’s harder to implement a wide range of moves if you don’t include execution. Street fighter for example has 6 buttons, then even more special moves on top of those buttons thanks to being able to do command inputs.

I was playing Pocket Rumble for the first extended period of time recently with Pictoshark (Shoutouts to how you won’t punish my sweeps, and keep sweeping at the wrong times in 3s) and something that struck me was just how goddamned annoying it was to input crouching normals when I can’t hold downback to block low, then press the button to do say a crouching sweep.

Games like Rising Thunder, Divekick, Fantasy Strike, and Pocket Rumble inherently limit the number of moves they can implement, and the range of more subtle manipulations of those larger actions possible by removing the execution component that is present in the similarly structured games around them. When you insist, no command inputs, it means you simply cannot implement 5 normals and 5 special moves, one of which has 2 versions, another has 4 versions with 4 followups.
http://guilty-gear.wikia.com/wiki/Slayer/Command_List
It means you can’t have versions of the same special move differentiated by which button you press, like ryu’s slow, medium, and fast fireballs, or Oro/Urien/Gouken’s differently angled fireballs (Rising Thunder got around this with crow’s fireball toss, by having you press a direction during it, but that’s mildly tight timing, which still requires execution). Without execution you also don’t get cool stuff like Slayer’s backdash cancels (BDC). For example, the input on Slayer’s BDC Bite can be 6321447H or 44632147H. 44 is the point where you backdash, it can be at the beginning or end of the input. The first gives you a near-instant bite with little movement, the second gives you more invincibility frames and moves you backwards. They are applicable in different situations and should be treated like different moves.

Something else I have pointed out is that there is no way to implement wavedashing in smash bros that keeps all the current nuances of the move without it being difficult to execute. The closest thing you can do is have jumpsquat cancel directly into wavedash, but this still takes moderate execution skill to perform. As-is right now, wavedashing has an effect proportional to the time you airdodge off the ground, and the angle you dodge into the ground, allowing you to move more or less distance, and that gradient in distance can be important. Wavedash in place is a fast way to get out of shield or dash dance. To get this fine-grain level of tuning, you need to have the analog stick factor into the movement, it cannot be a single button or button combination. Not to mention Wavelanding and triangle jumping, which necessitates that airdodge is its own button to make all these nuanced possibilities available.

The other thing is, Execution is something that allows players to distinguish themselves. Having an execution gradient across a game allows players early on to play a game one way, then dig deeper and find out it’s actually played a different way. Then dig even deeper and find new ways to play. And you continually integrate these new ways with the old one and ideally end up with a more rich and varied game that stays fresh no matter how long you play it, and no matter how good you get at it.

SFV has kind of a setback there compared to SFIV. SFIV had really hard combos, and a combo system that allowed for a massive amount of intepretation. This lead to a lot of degenerate tendencies, which is unfortunate, but in the clean-up job for SFV, they ended up seriously limiting the potential of the combo system in regulating which moves are allowed to start juggles, continue juggles, and the gravity limitations on juggles. They started learning their lesson more around Urien/Ibuki/Juri, and they have a larger number of potential combos (but Ibuki and Juri have lame damage output and suck in other ways) however the damage was largely done by that point. So in tournaments we see a lot of top players doing the same combos we do at home and not varying them that much between each other, and that’s really boring. SFV improved its neutral and pressure games in many ways because of these changes, but it’s still a letdown overall.

It’s disingenuous to assume (as Sirlin typically does) that players in tournament will execute every single advanced technique 100% of the time, so therefore they should be made so easy that everyone gets 100% consistency. It’s like saying that every tournament player will get the 100% most optimal punish off any given hit like it’s a combo video. Not only do flubbed inputs happen, but players differentiate themselves through which combos off which starters they’ve mastered, as well as movement tech, specific setups, and so on. This is a part of why players each play the game with their own style. Being able to figure out what your opponent is weak at and exploiting that weakness is a standard part of competitive play and it doesn’t vanish at the highest level, because no player has perfectly balanced mastery of everything. Maybe one player is really good at okizeme setups, maybe a another has a strong neutral game. It’s not just a matter of flubbing X% of the time, it’s also a matter of confidence. Speedrunners have this issue too, they don’t always feel confident about a trick, sometimes they feel more confident, and they can judge to a degree whether they’ll get it that time.

Additionally, in fighting games and other games, many inputs are specifically designed to be balanced based on their ease of execution. The 360 input with Zangief is a classic example. The light punch version in SFV has more range than many pokes, and deals 180 damage, which is more than some weaker combos, like Ryu’s c.MK xx Fireball. His HP version does 240 damage, which is more than most up close combos. And they both have only 5 startup, and are unblockable. They’re balanced because in order to use them, Zangief needs to input that 360 motion, which takes real time. The fact that it takes real time not only adds something similar to startup, but it constricts where he’s allowed to do it to avoid startup. He can buffer that motion during other attacks to conceal the startup, which changes where you’ll be watching out for him trying to command throw.
http://shoryuken.com/2012/07/16/lost-strategy-series-the-role-of-execution-by-james-chen/

Guile and other charge characters are balanced on a similar basis. Their charge moves are given more power compared to normal special moves because they have that charge limitation on them. There’s a relationship between the power of the move and execution required to pull it off. When you have a relationship like this and it is proportional to the effectiveness of the move, then players feel this natural reward for pulling off hard moves.

L canceling in Melee is another example, as is Parrying in 3rd Strike. These mechanics exclusively work and are exclusively strategic because they are hard. If the window is wider, then the need to read the situation and correct difference in timing is completely removed. You wouldn’t need to read hit/whiff/shield. You wouldn’t need to read when they’ll attack, and how many times.

Put simply, people enjoy doing things that are hard to do and provide a reward for accomplishing them. People enjoy improving in consistency at things. This is the root of where fun comes from (in terms of what actually triggers dopamine release, favorable outcomes from typically inconsistent outcomes). The real design question shouldn’t be whether such mechanically difficult things are included, it should be “how hard is too hard?” “How good is too good?” The answer to that isn’t the same for every game, every move, or every character.

I think that to make a good game, you need to have some things that are harder than others, some things easier. There needs to be a skill gradient that players work their way up. Give players room to specialize. Give them room to learn. And in many cases, it just plain feels better kinaesthetically to perform this tight difficult motion.

Sirlin sees all the value in Daigo knowing Justin would use his Super. However if anyone could do that, if simply predicting the Super was enough, then events like that would be commonplace and boring. Chun Li’s super would be significantly weaker. Of course Sirlin is also on the 3s parry hatetrain, so whatever.

In fighters like Guilty Gear Xrd, you have Ramlethal whose dauro move turns green and does more damage if you just-frame the button input. In Marvel 3, a ton of supers do more damage if you mash them. In SF3 and SF2, a ton of pummel throws do more damage if you mash them. In nearly all 2D fighters there’s safe jumps which let you get in a meaty attack without risk of retaliation. If you’re going to do a crouching medium kick in street fighter with Ryu, there’s absolutely no downside to always buffering in a fireball every time. Reward on hit or block, no penalty on miss, no penalty for messing up the input. If you land a tatsu with akuma, you’d be dumb to not throw in a followup, because either you hit them for more damage, or you miss and they’re knocked down anyway. And should buffering into hadouken off a low short be automatic? Should there be a safejump command that does it for you? For that matter, why have inputs more complicated than quarter circles at all?

Yeah, it is a matter of feeling good, we play fighting games for the challenge, in part the challenge against the opponent, and against ourselves. People enjoy pulling off difficult combos, some more than others. Fun is variable success, in all its forms, head to head or individual. Good fighting games are a mix of both, not allowing one to destroy the other. Having that tight link between input and response is a good feeling, we shouldn’t toss it out just because it’s arbitrary from a decision standpoint, because it’s not arbitrary to enjoyment of the game.

Many people feel that fighting games should be these high-level competitive pure decision-making exercises, but these games are played in realtime. There is always a dexterity element, always a timing and reaction element simply because they’re in realtime at all.

People enjoy the process of working to hone their skills and pick up new techniques.

Sure combos have tradeoffs, but if someone wanted to they could easily substitute a combo system for a menu that gives you a few different pre-strung combos with meter/damage/positioning/knockdown tradeoffs between them, and vary these based on the starting move. But that’s obviously not as interesting.

You could have it so multishines are automatic on people’s shields as long as you hold down B in smash bros, but not only would that not be nearly as hype as someone making the 1 frame link continuously, but it would make the multishine option outright broken, beating shields effortlessly.

The benefit of having an executive barrier is also that players are all at different levels of execution from one another, people work in the lab to stretch just a bit further than the day before. The combination of reads, understanding the game, and execution are part of what make fighting games interesting. If you remove that factor, then you won’t end up with as interesting or as deep a game, because the depth of these games is very deeply tied to their realtime execution element.

The thing to learn from games like rising thunder is, no, there wouldn’t be more high level players. Execution barriers don’t hold people back from being high level players, you’ll still get your ass kicked by the same people who were better than you before. The thing to learn from games like Smash 4 and Brawl is, if you remove the execution barriers and all the tricks that people have to master using execution skill, you don’t end up with more people engaging in that high level play. Instead you end up with nobody being consistent enough at the game to form a high level playerbase in the first place. The top players shift around and nobody has that space to really develop themselves over others at all.

One answer is because then players will do combos that produce damage proportional to their skill, if it’s easy then people will either all do the same combo, which is boring, or combos will get ridiculously long at higher skill levels.

Another answer is because it’s more direct control over the character. The sensation of direct control, especially in hitting tight frame windows, feels really nice. It’s related to “Game Feel” or Kinaesthetics. If you have everything cancel into everything, or stick huge buffer periods on everything, or input shortcuts, and so on, then things feel really loose and like the response to your inputs is sloppy or delayed. Like compare trying to dragon punch on wakeup in SF2 or 3, to SF4. You have a 1 or 2 frame window versus a 5 frame window with input shortcuts. In SF4 you can just mash reversals, it doesn’t feel like a tight refined input, it feels like you’re slobbering on the stick practically, where in SF2 or SF3, you gotta do exactly the right motion at exactly the right time, and that feels really tight by comparison.

And the last answer is because, pulling off hard stuff, even if it’s small hard stuff like needing to link instead of cancel attacks, is really fun. The neurochemical phenomena of fun is essentially being able to profit off finding patterns in inconsistent phenomena. By having things be hard, by having a lot of hard things, people always have new things to find patterns in, to get consistent at. So games take longer to master and not everyone gets stuck in the hellscape of being consistent at everything except winning tournaments. Sure we can get these high-minded, “everything should be in the decisionmaking phase” ideals, but if that’s the case, then the game gets solved a lot faster, because people don’t discover new ways to use the characters as much, and people get bored when they learn how to follow the optimal set of decisions for their characters. Yeah, everyone can be a “high level competitor”, but being one matters less, and nobody can actually stand out from the crowd.

Games don’t inevitably become solved, they inevitably get closer to being solved, but there’s a ton of unsolved games, and skullgirls (along with nearly all fighting games except like divekick and smash 4) is one of them. Making games difficult to solve, having them be complex enough that people can’t just pick it up and play in the most optimal way possible, is related to what makes games interesting in the first place. Games are ostensibly about improving consistency. About learning things, picking up on patterns, and putting it back into your performance. Making a game complex and difficult to solve is a part of that (though it still has to be a good game underneath). If everyone can solve the game, if everyone can play optimally, like in tic tac toe, then the game straight up dies. The process of being able to pursue higher skill continually is what keeps games interesting for high level competitors (and low level ones too). It’s about the spirit of continual improvement, of always having some new way to stretch out.

However if you can simplify everything down to the optimal punishes, the optimal options, the optimal decision trees, then the game ends up getting repetitive, because you know it all already. You’re no longer improving. The fun cycle of picking up on something then steadily improving in consistency until you have it down stops. The draw of a truly deep game is being really far away from knowing everything about the game, the draw of always having something new to master or work on, and decisionmaking isn’t the only skill in the world, nor the only one that competitive games should ever test. We shouldn’t segregate competitions between pure execution and pure decisionmaking, mixing the two is great, and allows them to recombine in ways that test both of them to even greater levels.

I’ll admit that L canceling doesn’t add a lot to the game, it’s not a very deep mechanic compared to others. You could just halve aerial landing lag and not lose very much of the interesting elements that make smash what it is. The other thing is, you could disable L canceling for me, have it be automatic for yourself, and I would still probably kick your ass (unless you’re like a power ranked player in your region or something). I’m sorry that this sounds like bragging, but L canceling isn’t everything. There’s a lot of other strategic aspects of the game, and people who are bad at L cancels right now can get good at those other things, can outperform their opponents without using L cancels. L cancels give people a skill to expand out into and become more consistent at to get an advantage over their opponents. L cancels require people to recognize if they’ll whiff, hit, or hit shield. L cancels make it so sometimes people are vulnerable and sometimes they’re not, which you can exploit.

Meteor Cancels have nothing to do with reading or playing against your opponent either, they’re purely a reaction/timing test, press jump 18 frames after being hit, don’t press too soon or you die. Reaction Tech Chasing too. There’s TONS of elements like this in Smash bros that are pure optimization without any element your opponent can interfere in. And that’s alright. It’s alright to let people work to become more consistent at an element for a pure statistical advantage in certain scenarios. Not everything should be made flat-out automatic, or you lose that decision-making aspect of, “my opponent is weaker execution-wise in this area, I can exploit this” If I know my opponent can’t L cancel consistently, then I can abuse them in different ways than my opponents who can. If I know they can’t do the mew2king angle, then I can cover different recovery options without fear. If I know my ice climbers opponent doesn’t wobble often, I can be a bit less afraid of getting grabbed. Even though all these things are pure executional things that don’t involve your opponent, they still affect the way you strategize and can adapt to your specific opponent.

It’s nice to have games like Dive Kick and Rising Thunder where it is easy to execute. It is nice to have variety in the fighting games available to people so that people who are not as skilled have something to pick up so they can learn, and which also explore the unique strategic and design spaces those low execution barriers offer. However not all games should be this way, and we shouldn’t aim deliberately to make future games closer to this standard, we should aim to more or less stay the course, developing games that replicate the successes of the original ones and try new things so we can have a diverse environment.

What do you think of execution barriers for command moves in single player beat em ups like TW101’s Wonder Liner? Are they necessary to keep the game balanced and less spammy or does it not matter because you’re just pitted against AI?

Wonder liner is designed the way it is so you can perform a bunch of different functions with the same mechanic. So you can circle around people or objects on the ground, and so you can select different unite morphs. But it’s not just selecting unite morphs, it’s selecting between several different ones AND how big they are from your pool of wonderful 1s.

It’s also there because drawing shapes is more fun than tabbing through a menu, even though it’s slower.

Like yeah, you don’t need to worry about balance in that way versus AI. The player can’t really be overpowered or underpowered, and something like this isn’t necessary to balance the player’s options against the AI. You could balance morphs relative to each other based on how difficult it is to input in that system, and W101 chose to do that by making Sword one of the weaker unite morphs, but it’s not the biggest deal in the world for a single player game. If you could instantly pick any unite morph, then the game wouldn’t be significantly different than it is, but it would lose out on the multifunctionality of the wonder liner, and it would be harder to specify the size of the unite morph (which is important because that’s resources for the multi unite morph), and it would be slightlly less interesting than getting good at drawing shapes.

If you believe crazy david sirlin logic, then singleplayer games are the only place where arbitrary execution barriers make sense, since it’s not interfering with the raw decision-making that multiplayer games should be about.

Can a Game be Good Without Anything Extraordinary?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you think games with several different gameplay elements, where each of them is serviceable, but not great, amounts to a merely competent game, or can proper implementation of those features, make the overall product great. Does a game like Beyond Good and Evil succeed at it?

I’d say it’s competent or bad. I wouldn’t call Beyond Good and Evil good.

To make a good game, you can’t just do a bunch of things well. If anything I think it comes down to doing at least one thing really well, then continuing to do other things well or really well. Continue reading →

Why I’m not Fond of Smash 4

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How come you are not fond of Smash 4?

First off, grounded movement is fucked. In any normal game, you’re allowed to move left and right unimpeded. In fighting games this is especially important because you want to move into and out of your opponent’s range to bait attacks. In Smash 4 you can walk, which requires a turnaround animation before you can walk the other way, or you can dash, which either only lets you dash dance in an extremely small range, or locks you out of changing direction until you’ve moved far enough to get the long turnaround. In Melee, you have the same restriction on walking, but dash dancing lets you move back and forth in any interval at any time, thereby allowing you to footsie like in street fighter, or really any other game. Smash 4 has this irritatingly limited movement system that forces you to engage in these longer animations to change directions.

Next up, Defensive options are ridiculously good for no fucking reason. They’ve thankfully nerfed shield stun, I don’t really know where that sits right now, it used to just mean free shieldgrabs all day, but dodges are still super invincible as well as fast, making them difficult to punish on reaction, requiring a prediction instead. This means that they no longer need to be timed to escape pressure and can be thrown out without much risk.

Then on top of that, DI is completely fucked. They kept the stupid angular DI system from brawl, then tacked vectoring on top of it, and made vectoring crazy more powerful. Thankfully they realized that was horrible and removed vertical vectoring, but they left in horizontal vectoring, making it so everyone survives to fucking insane percentages on the left and right sides of the screen. This also means that the DI system as a whole is simplified, since if you’re sent upwards, you should hold left or right, and if sent to the sides, you hold the opposite side. It’s generally beneficial to just hold left or right primarily rather than all the different directions you’d need to in the other smash games. Plus they nerfed SDI into oblivion for no real reason, and since that fucks up the counterplay on rekka ken type moves (like rapidjabs or marth’s dancing blade), they nerfed all those moves and gave rapidjabs a finisher so you can’t trap anyone in them, since it’s no longer possible to SDI out.

They thankfully limited the dumb ability in brawl to cancel hitstun, but it’s still in the game, just you can cancel after 41 frames instead of like 13. This contributes to people surviving forever, because knockback is no longer sustained when you’re in a regular freefall state. This feature is still dumb and anti-competitive, limiting combo length

Then they gave everyone a crazy good recovery and magnet hands, so why even bother with on-stage ledgeguards? And got rid of edgehogging, so you don’t need to time when you cover the ledge, or judge whether your opponent will go high, low, or stall. It’s simplifying the offstage game and removing some basic counterplay.

Plus moves have longer fucking landing recovery times than Brawl in many cases. Wow, I can understand not bringing back L canceling, since that’s hard, but giving moves such stupidly long recovery times on the ground is absolutely awful. It slows down the pace of the game and prevents a lot of combos. Sure, there’s autocanceling now, but that serves a different and more restrictive role in combos and general neutral.

And the controls are totally fucked, because they didn’t make the C-stick its own macro function for smash attacks and aerials yet again (they did this in brawl too), instead making it press a direction and the A button for one frame, which leads to dumb shit like not being able to control yourself in the air if a c-stick direction is held (or vice versa, I don’t remember), or not being able to smash attack in the same direction the control stick is held.

In general they made the same fuckup as last time where different buttons with overlapping functions aren’t registered by the game independently, because the programmers don’t give a shit.

Oh, and a ton of advanced techniques were taken out, even from Brawl, but that’s really the smallest issue compared to everything else.

Plus they nerfed SDI into oblivion[….][…]since it’s no longer possible to SDI out Can you please elaborate/explain on this a bit? I don’t own Sm4sh, but I did notice watching videos that a lot of jabs are finisher, and I don’t understand why

http://www.ssbwiki.com/Smash_directional_influence

Here’s two different explanations of Smash DI, or SDI for short. 64 players call it “PI” or “Positional Influence” which is a better name for the phenomena honestly.

Basically, when you get hit, you enter hitlag before hitstun and knockback. Hitlag is a few freeze frames where the character is frozen in place before they start moving. Hitlag is different per-move. During this state, every time you press a cardinal or ordinal direction on the control stick, you will move a tiny bit, when you exit the state, if you are holding a direction on the control stick, you will be shifted a bit in that direction automatically (called ASDI). C-stick will take priority for this if it is also held when hitlag ends.

The effect of SDI is slight, but it can matter. It especially matters in escaping multi-hit moves, because during a multi-hit you have many chances to SDI over and over again. A common example of this is rapidjab type moves, like Fox, or Captain Falcon’s. If they hit you with one of those, then you can mash the control stick to get out.

So Smash 4 removed SDI, or nerfed it into irrelevancy. Many people were unsure on release, I’m pretty sure it’s still in the game but extremely weak right now. What does this mean? It means that all multi-hitting moves just got a massive buff. It means if you ever get your opponent up against a wall and use a rapidjab, that’s an infinite right there.

So they had to add finishers to all the rapidjabs, otherwise you’d have a cast with easy wall infinites. That’s probably also why they changed Pit’s Side B from how it was in Brawl.

Why’d they do this? Probably because they’re anti-competitive fucks, and considered SDI too hard for the average joe.