Control Schemes
How important are controls? Do you deal with awkward control schemes or is that something you have no patience for?
It depends on the game. Awkward control schemes can be annoying to pick up, in general it makes more sense to stick to something standard. Mastering an awkward control scheme can be rewarding, but fighting with an awkward control scheme is a pain in the ass. You want to make the action as direct as possible, so players can put their attention on the game rather than necessarily the controls.On the flip side, a weird control scheme can work for some games in ways that a less awkward one just wouldn’t. Like God Hand, Mirror’s Edge, and Dark Souls. Dark souls wouldn’t make sense with its left hand right hand thing without putting the various weapon and shield options on the shoulder buttons in my opinion. God Hand doesn’t really work without the tank controls given how the movement options work, it creates this feeling of commitment that you don’t get in a lot of other action games.
Awkward control schemes that I don’t think worked include The Witcher 2, I think their weird softlock, directional sword swings, and other business was more confusing and communicated information poorly than functional. MGS3’s crawling controls seizing up along the ground and the difficulty between stance changes made things irritating (though I generally like the game otherwise) Also having the button for holding someone in a CQC lock be pressure sensitive and have you slit their throat for pressing too hard, I just don’t think that was a good idea at all. Another bad design decision was having to press both R3 and L3 in MGR to go into jack the ripper mode. Makes it annoying to do in the middle of attacks.
Sometimes a nonstandard control scheme can help define a game, and sometimes it ends up being awkward and hard to adapt to. You want options to be readily accessible to the player and for it to flow from an intuitive model of the game’s operation, not to have them get confused and forget where things are, or press the wrong button in the wrong context. At the same time, the controls will be dependent and reflect on how the game operates, choosing to have the player defend themself by a button press and smashing the stick in the direction of the incoming attack is a unique control decision that helped define and set MGR apart from other action games. Same for how they forced you to commit to that defense. Similar deal in Mirror’s Edge with the large number of contextual actions for each button, especially the jump button, and requiring turning around as an actual key to make their movement system work, then having complicated wallrun chains with all the turnarounds. Doesn’t flow from prior understanding, but it’s necessary to the design of the game.
Spatial dynamics for 2d & 3d games
You dislike 2D beat-em-ups, but enjoy 2D fighting games?
Absolutely. 2d fighting games have high and low blocks, they have crouching, they have attacks that hit at different heights and moves that go above and below each other. 2d beat em ups have none of these elements, in exchange they have a Z axis that lets characters move forward and back, and no attacks that really move along the Z axis. Characters can’t face forward or back in most of these like you could with an overhead game like zelda, so they can’t attack into the foreground or into the background, so they don’t make use of space.
I’m curious about what you said to that guy about spatial dynamics and 2D beat-em-ups lacking them. In what way do 3D brawlers have these dynamics, and before that, what are these dynamics in the first place?
it’s it obvious from my explanation? In a purely 2d sidescrolling game game, like metal slug, you have all this shit going on on the 2d plane. you have bullets that move across it, the character can jump and crouch around various obstacles. In a 2d overhead game, like Zelda, Ys (the 3d Ys games too, like Ys Origin), or a shmup, you have a similar thing going on, you can have all these different enemy sizes, projectile sizes, the characters can move at different speeds, a lot of different stuff can go on.
In a 2d beat em up, every character is like a flat piece of cardboard, characters aren’t square or circular, they’re more like a line drawn on the ground projected upwards. moves aren’t high or low or mid, they’re all a line projected a fixed distance in front of the character. More than that, the characters can never face backwards in any way. They don’t have 8, 6, or even 4 facing directions, they have two. They can only attack two ways, forward or back, and all their attacks only vary in startup time and strength. They can’t attack across the Z axis at all. Even though 2D beat em ups allow jumping, the lack of spatial dynamic in the rest of the game makes the application of these jumps limited where a game like Ys Origin or Oracle of Seasons can actually have a semblance of aerial combat.
In a 3d brawler game, you can fully move around the 3d environment, the character can attack in any direction and face in any direction. the attacks are capable of having specific hitboxes rather than being a projection of a line stemming off a projection of a line.
I don’t get your point about spatial dynamics in 3D brawlers. Spatial awareness is very important in something like VF. Distance is what defines a 2D attack, but in 3D you’ve got stances and positions, e.g. is that roundhouse kick coming from the L or the R. In response you must react or position accordingly.
Aaaagh! No. Virtua Fighter and Tekken get it right! I swear I need to draw some diagrams to demonstrate what I mean. Virtua fighter and Tekken completely have the character’s hitboxes represented in a three dimensional space. I’m saying that in the camera behind the back type of games, if you have a perfect lock-on system that never ever faults, then the only factor that matters is 1 dimension, distance between the two opponents. When you have something like a 2d fighter, you can have 2 dimensions matter, distance + height, which exponentiates the number of possible interactions you can have.
Virtua Fighter and Tekken let you move back and forth in 3d space in addition to this, and have moves that sweep across or track the person left, right or both.
The trouble is, this is still kind of a shallow 3 dimensional interaction, rather than it being relative to 360 degrees of possible rotation, you have kind of a left/right/mid thing in addition to the full 2d plane. However when you move into a behind the shoulder type of 3d camera, a common occurrence is you get these lock-on systems, like in the DBZ fighters, or Rise of Incarnates (some shitty PC soul calibur spinoff I played the alpha of) where everything is perfectly locked onto the opponent. Imagine if in a 3d fighter every single move had full left/right tracking, there would be no point in making it 3d or having side-stepping anymore because everything effectively exists everywhere on the Z axis. Extreme lock-ons in behind the shoulder type of fighting games have a similar effect, it converts a 3d game into a 1d game.
Like, compare to Dark Souls, that game’s combat ends up being mostly 2d, because there’s almost no jumping in the middle of combat, especially not over people’s attacks, and there’s almost no ducking under attacks either except in extremely rare situations, there’s also a lockon system, which makes it so you always face your opponent, so dark souls is ALMOST a 1d game in that similar way (barring like terrain shenanigans), but characters become unable to rotate when they start swinging their weapon, so in that short period of time you can move around them. This is why a lot of dark souls matches end up being circle strafing, because if someone swings, the other guy moves around it while one is locked on. So it adds this great dynamic to sometimes not lock-on, and instead free-aim the direction of your slice, making dark souls slightly more 2d than it would be otherwise. In multiple enemy combat, you of course have multiple enemies all in different positions, so that’s very 2d.
Here’s a picture I just drew up. I didn’t have time to include examples like DBZ, Dark Souls, Naruto, or Chivalry. (Also those are harder to draw with good perspective.)
You can jump over and under moves in those games to. It depends on how defined the combat system it. In Naruto everyone has a sort of generic hitbox, if you will, whereas in VF/Tekken, the characters have very detailed models with specific points and areas on their bodies.
Yes, the naruto point is exactly what I was addressing, happens in the DBZ fighters too, everyone feels like they have a very generic hitbox, probably because they do, and because that lock-on prevents the hitbox shape from really mattering.
What I really want to see is someone conquering the whole 3d fighting game thing (not because current fighters are insufficient, but because it would be interesting in its own right), to make a fighting game in full 3d where all the hitboxes matter and you can have that intense level of articulation, but that’s a very tricky thing to do from a control standpoint. I think Chivalry really comes closest to that type of ideal, but it’s simple and awkward in a lot of ways. Blade Symphony works in a similar vein, but both have a weak type of counterplay compared to what you get in traditional fighters and that’s a tricky design problem to solve on PC. DMC or Bayonetta would run into a similar problem if it were made multiplayer, along with the lock-on being too accurate, you’d have to introduce more moves that shoot off into the diagonals or sides to really take advantage of all the space around the players, having them avoid things on the 2d plane that is the ground, as well as try to diversify the block zone thing, because you block omni-directionally, which is lame.
In DMC though, you’d at least get away from the lock-on problem in the up-down thing, like when people jump, because characters don’t angle their attacks upwards or downwards like in DBZ or rise of incarnates. So you can go over other people’s attacks by jumping over them, so you get 2D gameplay on a plane composed of the distance to the other player, and your height. Only Chivalry has distance on both axes, and height involved so far.
I’m not convinced by your argument against 2D brawlers. How many have you played? All the things you accuse them of not having are there. What does “you can’t face backwards” even mean? Look at GH, that game is basically a 2D brawler in 3D.
No it’s not. God Hand’s gameplay, if you imagined it from an overhead perspective, does end up being pretty 2D, but it doesn’t abide by nearly the same limitations to its moveset.
Here, I ended up drawing a picture to try to illustrate my point.
Life Systems
How do you feel about life systems? There seems to be this idea that they don’t belong in modern console/PC game design since they’re a hold-over from arcade games. I’ve feel this idea that there are certain things that just shouldn’t be done anymore to be shallow but I’d like to know what you think
It’s completely dumb. Life systems are just another way that games can checkpoint themselves. The only reason life systems are looked down on is that most modern games featuring them make them superfluous by only setting you back a small amount for losing all your lives, like NSMBW or NSMBU, and the others don’t exist.
The transition away from lives as a type of currency against an overall failure, or being set back multiple checkpoints is concurrent with a transition away from the concept of overall failure and checkpoints that set you back much further than a few feet. Very few modern games, excluding roguelikes, want you to suffer consequences for failure. Suffering severe consequences for failure means the likelyhood of you seeing the ending is very small, when the likelyhood of you seeing the ending in games without severe consequences is already very small.
The other thing is that lives are not immersive. They’re anti-immersive. They’re very blatantly artifice. The industry wants to move away from reminding people that they’re playing a game. The two most common representations of lives are like a shoot ’em up, where you lose a life and the character instantly respawns and you keep going, such as space invaders, touhou, ikaruga, dodonpachi, or a run and gun like contra or metal slug. Losing all your lives will mean restarting the game from scratch or from the beginning of the stage if it’s more of a home console game. Or like in a platformer such as megaman or mario, where you have a limited set, losing a life will send you back to the beginning of the screen or to a mid-level checkpoint, but losing all your lives will send you back to the beginning of the world (mario) or the whole level.
Seeing your character die and instantly come back like in Shmups or Run & Guns, doesn’t make any sense from an immersive point of view. In a game like say an RPG or an FPS, you load from a save, you recover from the last checkpoint, and it’s sort of implicitly taken that the session where you died didn’t really count. The “story” of the game that sticks with people is that the character miraculously defeated swarms of thousands of enemies single-handedly, leading to Gordon Freeman being taken as a messiah in HL2. The alternate takes get cut, those are your story, not the character’s story, and the developers silently hope you forget that story. If you’re dying and respawning, then all illusions that you’re watching and vaguely participating in a story instead of yourself acting are shattered. Arcadey games are the ones most separated from immersion because early games were heavily influenced by the artifice of Pinball. They operated on a more limited narrative syntax, had scores, flashing lights, lives (also carried over from pinball actually, pinball even coined the term 1up).
Modern creators don’t want to create games, they want to create worlds, and in order to do that, lives have to die, no matter what merits they may have.
Re: live systems. Sorry, I didn’t get what you were calling “completely dumb”. Life systems or the industry looking down on them?
The industry looking down on them. I don’t mind life systems at all. It’s just kind of funny that people reject them so hard lately. I really think it’s because of a collective push for immersion, which I’m frankly not a fan of.
Right after answering that I tweeted about this concept: Imagine when you die in a game you get a commander or something pulling you out of the field, and debriefing you, in the process telling you how many chances you have left to complete the mission. Maybe you earn more chances by performing well.
I’m sure that, if written and presented well with a bunch of unique lines of dialogue so people don’t become overly familiar with the commander’s lines, the crowd that dislikes lives would still like this presentation; even though it’s exactly the same mechanic, just a different wrapping paper. The thing they dislike about lives is literally none of the actual operation of lives, it’s the fact that it’s game-y and an artifice. They don’t dislike the concept that you have a counter that ticks down every time you run out of health and undoes one of your checkpoints sending you back to a further one when the counter runs out. They don’t even consider it that way. They dislike that our collective presentation of this in video games is so blatantly artificial and not fitting into the concepts of the fictional worlds in question. “Megaman collects a copy of his own head allowing him to come back from being literally destroyed? Why are Megaman heads littered everywhere? How is he storing his heads? What device is being used to resurrect him?” There’s no answer to these questions but contrivance and these people get mad over that.
I don’t see why lives would matter outside ‘arcade-style’ games. In an FPS you have a checkpoint system, so having lives would be pointless. I mean, say you were playing Half-Life, and ran out of all your lives, what would happen? Would you restart the entire game? That would be terrible pacing.
Most games where you had to restart the entire game when you ran out of lives were games that were only 30 minutes long if you won, like shoot ’em ups or run & guns. The exception is Mario 3, which I think had limited continues, and once you ran out of those you had to start from the complete beginning. Even then, there was a life counter in addition to a continue counter.
You’re thinking too far in the bounds of the games you’ve played before. Most first person shooters create a presentation style where there is no view of a continuous game. You have these save states you can save and load to at any time. Imagine if the presentation style was a bit different for a first person shooter, like how Quake has episodes. Imagine you started a quake episode with a limited number of lives, you couldn’t save or load in levels, and there was a dialogue between levels that automatically saved what level you were on and let you quit out or continue. All restarts were from the start of each level, and when you die it asks if you want to retry the level you were on sans one life or quit out of the episode. When you run out of lives, you have to try the whole episode and the levels inside it over again. Only real issue there is that episodes are maybe a bit long for this type of thing.
In a game like Half Life, all the areas are continuously connected, there’s no overworld or dialogues between levels, from a presentation standpoint it’s not clear where you’d go back to when you die in the first place (made further ambiguous by the crazy save-state system you can use at any time), let alone with a life and game over system in place. In these types of games, you’d need to implement a more clear checkpoint system for it to really make sense. Like how Borderlands and Far Cry have checkpoints you revive at when you die.
Easiness vs Depth
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 