Easiness vs Depth

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are some games you like that you would consider to be easy/lack a lot of depth in their mechanics?

What’s funny about this question is you assume there is a link between those two things. Easy ≠ lack of depth. In an objective sense, there’s absolutely no relationship between those things. The range of scenarios that can be produced has no relevance to how hard it is to produce a successful outcome.

As relevant to players though: a game that has a large objective depth will only have a large relative depth if it is at the right level of difficulty. Right meaning hard enough that players have to utilize everything available to them and engage with all the depth that is there, but not so hard that only a small selection of solutions are viable.

For example, a game that is about pressing a button as many times as possible within a minute. This game doesn’t have much depth compared to nearly any other game (like chess lets say, or checkers, or getting a good time in a racing game). However it’s inhumanly hard to press that button 1000 times in a minute.

Call of Duty is hard on veteran, that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly interesting game. I had this difficulty in writing the review for Thi4f, the game is legitimately really really hard with all the custom difficulty settings turned on. Some of my level solutions were downright arcane. This isn’t interesting though, because levels consist of repeating the same dumb thing until it works basically. There’s no room for improvisation or significant problem solving, the levels aren’t even nonlinear enough to give you an alternate means to pass through them. I had a similar issue playing through Super Meat Boy, that I did not have playing mario, contra, megaman, or ninja gaiden. I felt in super meat boy that I was just repeating the same small selection of inputs again and again until I got every part right rather than acting in the moment. It felt like there was only really one or two ways to beat the levels, and that was lame.

Issue with Save States

Celia WagarLeave a comment

So what are your thoughts on manual save points?

If you mean saving and loading from any point at any time, fuck it. Most people think It’s a point of convenience, and I think at best that type of thing should be like a suspend state (a temporary save deleted when you load it, so you can put the game down whenever you want and not lose anything), not something you can do at will.

When playing games that allow me to do that, I only use autosave points, or I try to make saves intermittently. Otherwise you end up in savescum territory, which is unpleasant to play, it removes a lot of the risk of numerous interactions by letting you just try things out and not lose anything for dumb decisions. If you have a checkpoint backing up every action you take, then you don’t need to be consistent (ie. good) at anything you do, you just need to be able to do it once by fluke or otherwise.

The thing that has to be recognized is that save systems are not just a user experience thing. They’re a game mechanic as much as checkpoints are, even if from a presentation standpoint they’re kind of presented as a thing outside the game. It may be nice to let people save and load to any point, but it also undermines the challenge and continuity of the game.

The only real exception I make to my save state rule is in games that have tedious things to do that aren’t really skill challenges, like collecting items in Thief, where I’d reload, pick up up the dozen items since my last save, and then get to the fun part with a guard. I don’t think there’s really a way to make that work without save states regrettably, not that I’ve thought about it very hard (maybe a dark souls approach where items you pick up stay picked up and you respawn from a single checkpoint per level? but then that would encourage running around grabbing items and getting bopped on purpose, so you could ignore how the item placements force you to go all around the nonlinear level doing stealth challenges from different approaches). Future Thief style games might just want to tone down the collectathon element so that they have less items to collect and the ones that are there work more in tandem with the stealth challenges. Like, only count the loot collection total from the bigger prizes and allow smaller steals like, pick pocketing, as a bonus.

Comeback Mechanics

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you believe that comeback mechanics have a place in fighting games or do you believe there’s an alternative in getting new players interested?

I don’t believe comeback mechanics help new players. I think that they just make the results of matches more inconsistent. Comeback mechanics (like ultras or Xfactor) are tricky enough to use that a first time player or even a low level player won’t be using them terribly well.

I think that what will get players into fighting games better is creating more interesting and fun tutorials that teach real skills players need in matches. Also these tutorials should let you fly through them as fast as possible, especially for the easier ones, because it’s boring and frustrating as fuck to have to go through the movement tutorial (literally how to press directions) and have to wait for it to register everything, then sit through a “COMPLETE!” message where your character does a pose at the end and have to hit next and get greeted by a loading screen.

Skullgirls did a lot in making its tutorials more fun by having the challenge of jumping over projectiles by peacock. Like ideally the tutorials stop seeming like tutorials and it becomes single player content that helps people get better at the multiplayer too. We need less random AI patterns and more of teaching people to solve canned setups that can be applied to multiplayer. Guilty Gear XX AC+ style mission modes might be cool too, like they have one mission where you can only win with an instant kill attack, and another where only combos over 2 hits do any damage, so people absolutely need to combo to win. Another where the player is prohibited from jumping.

One of Smash Bros strong points is having great single player content. Like Event mode, Adventure mode, Classic mode. Now it has enough brand momentum that they probably don’t need to do as well with those things anymore.

The lot of improvement to single player modes will be figuring out what the actual skills multiplayer tests and putting them into single player mode in a format that isn’t just rote and dull combo trials, but actually allows people to improvise and gives them positive feedback on things they do right (like imagine a mode where you have to defend against peacock projectile pressure in different ways, or AIs tuned to play with a certain style that’s beaten by playing with another style). The only thing you can’t really teach is reads, because it’s an abstract thing to read an opponent in the first place and computers are truly random, can’t be read. Playing against them and pretending like you’re reading them is a good practice though. PPMD of smash bros fame got good largely doing that (or so rumors go). You pretend like they’re actually a smart opponent and try to read what a smart opponent would do in that situation and cover it optimally.

The big hurdle is really getting people to see the game and go, “Oh, I can play this with my friends.” Most fighting games on a basic level don’t make sense to people just stepping into them. I honestly thought that button-mashers could win against mid/high level players before I got into it

With the Ultra Combos, some people believe that because they’re easily punishable, it doesn’t matter if you gain the most powerful moves in the SF4 by taking damage. Are the Ultra Combos fair or is there another layer of bullshit to this?

What it means is that the results will be less consistent really. Ultra combos don’t help the type of newbie player that might want to get into the game but is afraid, because ultra combos are hard to use and easily punishable. If you give someone a comeback factor, the good players will still be better at using it than beginner players. What this fucks up is mid to high level play because it means leads are less consistent. It means that when you’re ahead, there’s still this reversal of fortune thing they can pull off, by being closer to losing they’re also closer to winning. This means that close matches become more of a tossup. We play sets of 3, sets of 5, first to ten, because we don’t always perform consistently, but we can get a good read if we widen the sample size. Some games like rock paper scissors, since there’s so little to it, are really hard to be consistent in. Games with randomness involved are hard to be consistent in. Games with comeback factors are harder to be consistent in. Because in all of these there’s a really thin line between doing well and throwing it all away.

Ultra combos are a little less worrisome when you consider that you also gain ultra meter by absorbing attacks with focus.

http://xenozipnotes.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/comebacks.html This is another good commentary on the matter.

The Nature of Smash Combos

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How would you compare combos in Smash to combos in more traditional fighting games in terms of functionality and technicality?

It’s easier to confirm off random hits for combos in smash, it’s practically necessary. The big deal with combos in smash is, they get you damage and they get you positioning, which either sets you up to ledgeguard or sets you up to tech chase or otherwise lead them into a bad situation.Technicality, depends a lot on the combo. A lot of combos are not really technical, practically do themselves, like on Sheik. Some combos like shine combos with Fox are extremely precise, and the controller itself is laid out in a way that makes them difficult to perform.I’d say that smash bros combos are a lot like rocket combos in Quake, you launch the guy, you know the way they’re gonna go and shoot them again. Except in the process you also need to do a bunch of difficult inputs to make sure all your stuff strings together.

 I’ve been trying to get my Snake back together in P:M and he’s built like a trap, metaphorically speaking. His Fsmash is terrible and you never want to use it, his dash attack is terrible and you always want to DACUS instead (dash attack cancel up smash, a 1-2 frame input involving the control stick, C-stick, and Z or A button), his ftilt is great, but the second hit is awful, his jab is okay, but you never want to use the second jab. His F-air needs to hit grounded targets in order to kill them, his tranq needs to hit grounded targets to put them to sleep and it has a long startup. In general the character is just plain hard to play, but I’m really reluctant to let him go since I played the shit out of him in Brawl.
I’ve also been playing wolf, and he’s pretty much another space animal, except his combos are all DI mixups, where you catch them with different parts of the move so they get sent the wrong way based on their DI. And his shine hits people diagonally upwards, but can be crouch canceled, so it sets up a very different combo game from Fox and Falco.
Space animals in smash bros all have that shine, so they all can multishine, waveshine and so on, which involves using their reflector, down b, and jumping, then shining again exactly when they’re airborne, or wavedashing out of the shine, or you can even shinegrab, because prejump frames cancel into grab. Because you can jump and shine again in the multishine, you can shine on people’s shields over and over again to pressure them into getting hit or dropping their shield to escape. That’s a frameperfect input though, so it’s crazy hard.
The other thing about Wolf is his Wolf Flash, it moves up and diagonal and has a sweet spot exactly at the end. So you need to have crazy aim to land that thing, because if you don’t hit, it sends you into a helpless fall. However people can land that offstage and still recover. Add to it that he has the highest fall speed in the game and Wolf just gets crazy.

Here’s a video that shows that off, kind of old.

A lot of the technicality in Smash Bros involves hitting people with the sweet spot of the attack, like clean hits in Guilty Gear with Sol’s sidewinders. That’s not something that is common in any other fighting game. As well as the basic facets of movement which are more complicated in smash than other fighters, because the acceleration system and other accompanying systems and tricks are more complicated than other fighters.

You can moonwalk by doing a half circle back motion, but not touching down. Wavedashing, wave landing, pivoting within the dash dance range on every character, weaving in and out of attack ranges, crouching to cancel the dash to get normal options back or endure hits from opponents. You have a massive number of options, and I’m gonna need a more specific question if I’m gonna get anywhere with this.

Why do you dislike Chain Combos?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

In beat em up games, characters typically have movelists that look like sequences of punch punch kick punch (like in Bayonetta) and the funny thing is, the later moves in that combo will be different than your ordinary punch. If you mash slash with Dante in DMC 3 times, he will do a different move every time you press the button. This is what beat em up games call a Chain. Rather than having access to all the moves all the time, you essentially have generic context sensitive attack buttons that aren’t bound to specific commands. Bayonetta’s punch and kick buttons don’t refer to a specific punch or a specific kick, they differ based on the context of the punches and kicks that came previously.

In a fighting game, Chain Combos are very different. In fighting games, all the moves do the same thing every time you activate them. Chain combos in fighting games refer to lists of moves that cancel into one another when you hit the opponent. Like in Marvel vs Capcom 3, typically your light attack cancels into medium, cancels into heavy, cancels into launcher. In Guilty Gear, punch cancels into kick, close slash, far slash, heavy slash, dust. Another salient feature of these is that you can actually cancel from any lower move in the chain into a higher one, so you can go directly from light attacks to heavy attacks, skipping anything inbetween. So if I pick up a new character in a game with chain combos, I can see what their moves are, and use them as the situation is appropriate.

The thing is, fighting games have other types of combos too, like jump-in combos (because landing on the ground cancels your aerial attack.), juggles, links (where a move stuns an opponent long enough that you can get off another attack before they can recover), and cancels into special moves.

I think a lot of beat em ups, except Devil May Cry, end up just having you work from a dumb combo list, it’s less trying things out and seeing how you can create a combo off the situation available to you, and more memorizing and reciting whatever is on the combo list to play out the exact combo they intended you to. And for a game like Bayonetta, that combo list seriously long. I want to see more individual hits that work together rather than moves hidden behind these combo chains, because then you get drastically different moves working together rather than only specific moves coming out at the end of a chain sequence.

Full 3d Fighters

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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.

How do you feel about Nero in DMC4 in terms of playstyle?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I like the integration of back to forward commands, I feel like it adds an interesting kinaesthetic component to his playstyle.

The really key thing about Nero is that to make up for not having the weapon variety dante has, they made his commands a bit more straightforward and augmented his abilities in a few ways. Like his charge shots exploding, that’s cool, devil trigger letting you cancel anything and being a small burst, that’s cool. The table hopper dodge, also cool. The devil bringer obviously seems like it’s a gap closer a lot like dante’s trickster style teleport. Since his air dash has an attack at the end, you need to rely a bit more on jump canceling to get damage off it. Seeing as he can attack in the air without any style business, he has a more straightforward air game that incidentally leads players to try jump canceling, leading them into the advanced option, basically because of the air dash thing.

The trouble I have with Nero is that he lacks in options. He doesn’t have any good ranged options besides charge shot 2 and 3, and those take a long time to charge. His normal shots are only good for extending combos, his devil bringer does no real damage. This means he kinda sucks against cloaked enemies and blitzes because he has to wait for the charge shot to go through before he can actually fight them. (though devil buster and bringer are both rather effective on cloaked enemies). Dante meanwhile can get the cloak off those enemies instantly by teleporting at them, and doing DT rain storm. Against Blitzes, Dante has Drive on rebellion, charge shots, lucifer swords, honeycomb shot, fireworks on rebellion, royal guard parries and royal release.

With Nero it feels a lot like there’s a “right” way to play, with Dante it feels a lot more improvisational. with Nero you constantly hold down the charge shot, with Dante you don’t need to. With Nero you hit L2 after every single attack with the perfect timing. And so on.

I think Nero is designed pretty alright though. I like him more than MGR Raiden, or Bayonetta honestly. And that has to do with him having a lot of command moves. He does have more dial combos on account of the creators trying to get more out of just one button on one weapon, I feel like this isn’t an approach that is very enticing to most people, but having the number of distinct command moves he does is helpful to people getting into the game for the first time, less memorization. Or rather, it’s easier to remember. That and I personally prefer that style of design over its competitors using nothing but dial combos.

Smash 4 Deserves Respect

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Thoughts on this video?


This is the moron who made the “Melee is a Beautiful Accident” video. I’ve been meaning to make a response to that crap, because it’s ignorant.

I’m proud of the crowd chanting Melee. I don’t think Smash 4 deserves respect. Smash 4 went way over time. Smash 4 had its own stream, but top 8 had to happen on the melee stream and it was completely boring.

I don’t think the smash 4 scene deserves respect, I don’t think smash 4 apologists like this guy deserve respect. He’s saying Smash 4 is more calculated, it isn’t. There’s a common fallacy among morons to say that a slower game is more tactical/calculated/strategic/intellectual. It’s bullshit. It stems back to an old notion of dumb jocks who play fast games like football or basketball, versus smart nerds who play slow games like chess. Melee has more complex decisionmaking that hinges on more factors. The players have more options and more ways to use the options given to them.

None of the things he describes as strengths of Smash 4 are missing from Melee or Project M. “You have to make certain reads so you can land a certain move and follow it up.” Like this isn’t routine in the other smash games. “A lot of it is happening in the mind of the player” Like this isn’t in the other smash games too without being boring to play or watch. He doesn’t know about the neutral game, because describing the smash neutral game, compared to other fighters, is really fucking hard, because it’s really fucking weird. In slower paced fighters, what this guy doesn’t understand is, in the neutral game, you can’t really attack, because attacking is really unsafe, if you aggress then you get punished, so characters instead jockey over getting a position where they can attack safely and throw out safe ranged attacks. In a slower game you can see everything coming before it happens, so you have a lot less of people throwing things out simultaneously and a lot more of people hanging back and camping. This is a similar situation to what went on in the transition to Street Fighter 4 (though nowhere as bad).

He admits in the video that he’s not into melee, and he’s considering picking it up. He’s operating from a stance of ignorance, and deserves to be ignored.

Melee to Smash 4/Brawl is like Street Fighter Third Strike to Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix. I’m not going to respect people who push that shit. Far as I’m concerned, they’re sellouts or fools who are only in it because it’s the newest game or because they’re hoping to make money off pushing an inferior product.

Melee’s no accident, and anyone who comes at it from the standpoint that it is will never be able to address a situation like this accurately.

And someone tell this asshole to make his points more concisely. He meanders around the topic like a drunk guy at new years. Also to cut the damn machinima in his other videos, it makes me cringe.

Regarding Unlocks

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of certain types of moves like the dodge in TW101 and MGR being unlockable instead of available right from the start?

They’re core mechanics, it’s kind of pointless. It’s additionally silly how enemy step (jump cancel) was an unlockable move in DMC4. If you’re going to lock those mechanics away then you’re asking for trouble. Especially for something like unite guts. The theme of beat em ups is that the character has all the actions they need to overcome any sort of challenge within the levels available from the get-go and the only upgrades they receive are more powerful moves. Holding things like that back are just poor planning.

I honestly think all the unlock systems for moves in those types of games are kind of pointless. Having these as unlockable distracts from the intrinsic joy of mastering the system. People value accomplishments like clearing hard mode for their own sake. While people feel a type of contentment with finally unlocking everything, it’s a hollow achievement in comparison. Having the character change over the course of the game can help create a variety, a difference of feeling from when you first pick up the game and when you finish it, but I feel like those sorts of changes should be connected more directly to in-game challenges, like earning a new weapon in devil may cry by beating a boss or tracking down a new weapon in a remote area in dark souls, both of those have a more direct pattern of completing an action to receive a reward rather than ambiguous things like money systems between missions. It’s less like completing a grind to succeed and having more definite goals. It also wastes less of your time with repetition.

Regarding the unlock systems, in which types of games does it work fined in?

In general I think progression based unlocks work better than buying it from an amorphous shop, as a general rule. As for what games that sort of thing works well in… I’d think games where you don’t have very definite goals or stage based progression, such as Just Cause 2 or another open world game. The sort of idea is that the player will go all over the place and do whatever they want to do, and having a definite progression path based on accomplishing specific challenges at specific points in time wouldn’t go over very well. Though that doesn’t really justify the idea of being able to buy any of your upgrades at any time, because that seems more of a trade-offy grindy type of thing.

Unlock systems with point buy make sense in games where you’re forced in some way to specialize, because there’s inherently tradeoffs to getting one thing over another, and it comes across better thematically when different upgrades make the character more differentiated from other possible characters. In devil may cry, you eventually end up with all the upgrades, that’s the intention, so grinding for points to buy things is more of a holdover goal, preventing people from getting at the juicy part of the gameplay they really want to do. The notion is that there’s a limited number of these points and you can only get so much for them. Dark Souls softly enforced this with multiplayer, because people tried to stay around the level that other players tackling the same area were at so they could co-op and invade, so people had to make tradeoffs. Then Dark Souls 2 ruined that and everyone just went with optimal gear all the time.

What’s dumb about upgrades in console brawlers? You play well, get money, earn new abilities, and to compensate, enemies (should) get harder or more complex. It’s about progression of the player’s abilities and also a way to teach more complex movesets to players without overwhelming them.

I can agree it helps teach complex movesets to new players by limiting them to only moves they understand one at a time, but I dislike the grindy aspects of it, and I’d really hate to play a fresh game of DMC or Bayonetta and not have some ability I used all the time. Like not having the teleport on Trickster style, or the stinger attacks for bayonetta. That’s especially painful in MGR where I have to play the prologue and I can’t air parry. God hand gets along a bit better with it, because you’re limited in how much you can customize the moveset, you have to pick and choose between options rather than having all your options at once (and god hand starts you with more of a “full toolkit” to begin with), but games like DMC or bayonetta everything is always available if it’s unlocked (barring like equipment stuff). Given they fully intend to let you take that stuff back to the beginning of the game to have fun with it in the early areas, I don’t really see the point in locking it off from the player.

Making Good QTEs

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Since QTEs have become more controversial in gaming now, would you say games like “QTEs” in DMC4 and Mario and Luigi series are good ways of implementing the “mechanic?”

There are QTEs in DMC4?

I wouldn’t call those things QTEs in the first place. They’re mechanics with a consistent operation that fit into a larger schema. Quicktime events are when the game’s camera cuts to a cutscene and you are required to press an arbitrarily defined button within a certain window. The whole reason QTEs are bad is because they’re arbitrary and separated from the other mechanical interactions. They’re all or nothing and reinforce none of the core game skills.

QTEs aren’t there because anyone thought they would be a good game mechanic, they’re there because developers wanted to represent actions that are not possible among the existing game mechanics because when you have complete control of a scene you can make actions look a lot cooler. Then the button prompt gives the more bare of senses that the player did something, connecting them to the otherwise disjointed action onscreen.

The only game with good “QTEs” is God Hand, because they’re barely QTEs. Enemies have grab type attacks with unique animations and you always do the same input, shaking the stick back and forth, to escape them. Some enemies like demons can be countered by pressing the action button, but this is a context sensitive action and you’re not locked out of your other options to do that. There are mash QTEs too, but those are primarily for pummeling enemies that are already stunned, and Gene actually speeds up or slows down during them relative to both how fast you’re pressing the buttons and his momentum (it takes him a while to speed up the punches from when they’re slow and a while to slow down from when they’re fast, so if you dip in mash speed briefly, but recover, he won’t slow down very much). You only enter these voluntarily, or to escape one of the faster grab type attacks. They all consistently use the same inputs. They all serve a purpose in the gameplay and create a diversity that wouldn’t be possible without them.