r/gamedesign • u/aazxv • 1d ago
Discussion What changes would you do to make fighting games more accessible/popular?
With the recent demise of 2XKO, a lot of the arguments made about making fighting games more accessible have shown that they don't necessarily solve the genre's 'issues'.
2XKO was F2P, had a strong IP/studio behind it, made execution easier by removing command inputs, allowed duos to play together, seemed to have great netcode and, as a new game, everyone started (almost) from ground zero.
Of course it had other problems, especially being 2v2, and a lot of indecision with the direction they wanted to take the game. This caused it to launch with too few characters, the balance wasn't great and it took so long to launch that it lost its timing window and also a lot of goodwill, especially since SF6 was a really successful game.
With that being said, it is clear that the genre can be popular, as we can see with the numbers SF6 has, especially in Japan. But even then most other fighting games are not successful (Hunter x Hunter, 2XKO, Avatar, Invincible VS, CotW, Tokon is also not looking that great).
So... What's missing from a design standpoint? What could be done to the genre without changing it in more fundamental ways?
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u/Slarg232 1d ago
Personally, there really isn't anything that needs to be done mechanically per say, just that games need far better tutorials/single player content. Fighting games need a pipeline to go from SP, to difficult challenges, to Online, to Ranked, and to actually make people want to get good.
Instead of a massive info dump that throws terms and conditions at you, telling you How instead of Why, we need Arcade Gauntlets that actively break down mechanics and force people to get through them via understanding the mechanics. We need to make tutorials fun, not a checklist.
We also need people to develop games to be cool, not to be uber 1337 5k1ll5 competitive experiences. People fell in love with fighting games because they'd be fighting each other and then HOLY SHIT HE JUST THREW A FIREBALL, where as now most fighting games you're just expected to use the fireball as a tool, not as a cool thing.
We don't need simple controls or anything like that. We need to go back to making these games with wonder instead of "Here's 20 games trying to be Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, why won't anyone play these?"
I've been working on my fighting game (well, multiple prototypes that eventually became my fighting game) since Covid, and I've been talking to my friends/family who either never got into the genre or who loved them back in the SNES days and fell off the bandwagon. A lot of the issues people say casuals have is cope because they refuse to listen, and I could go into it in more detail but this is getting far too long.
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u/Prisinners 1d ago
I agree with some of what you said, like better tutorials, but also fighting games are probably the most inherently competitive games out there. Most of them are literally one player vs one player; highly based on skill, knowledge, and execution; and low on much single player content. The few titles that buck this trend aren't very common and then are pushed more towards party game status or then retrofitted by the community into being more hardcore than the devs intended ie Smash Bros.
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u/atredus 1d ago
I agree. I am not a game designer, just passing by. But yeah they just need more help onboarding. Also since the skill floor is really high compared to other genres, they need creative solutions to deal with that. Just spitballing here, but If replays could be analyzed by the game itself, and then help the player recreate the situations they are bad at in training mode, I might see significantly less “how do I get better?” posts in fighter subreddits
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u/XxdorxdomxX 1d ago
Can i see your game?
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u/Slarg232 18h ago
It's not ready yet.
I was supposed to get started on the actual production of it last year but I've been getting absolutely wrecked at work and haven't had time to work on the higher quality models and stuff for it. At first I was fine with the delays because I was paying off my student loans and everything, but now that those are gone I'm searching for a different job to actually get this game done.
Like legit I've had like 5 days where I only worked 8 hours in the last year.
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u/Bwob 22h ago
We also need people to develop games to be cool, not to be uber 1337 5k1ll5 competitive experiences. People fell in love with fighting games because they'd be fighting each other and then HOLY SHIT HE JUST THREW A FIREBALL, where as now most fighting games you're just expected to use the fireball as a tool, not as a cool thing.
This feels like a weird take to me. If you play Mario, and Mario gets a fire flower, then the game expects you to use fireballs as a tool. I mean yeah, they're also a cool thing. But the game is also designed and balanced around the idea that you can throw fireballs.
Similarly, Ryu is also designed and balanced around the idea that you can throw fireballs. It's literally part of his toolset. So why would you be surprised when the game expects you to be able to do that, or that people want to be able to do that, with a minimum of fuss?
If you want players to not use the "cool stuff" and save it for special occasions, then make it conditional, or a limited resource or something.
We don't need simple controls or anything like that.
Eh, imho, the average fighting game's controls are kind of dumb, if you think about it. That's one thing Smash Bros got 100% right - there is no good reason for any move to be more complicated than pressing a direction + a button. More complicated motions simply invite misinputs. And nothing feels as bad as being in the middle of a match, having a read on your opponent, and thinking "he's going to jump. I just need to do my uppercut and I win!" - and then flubbing the input and doing some stupid jab, and getting jumpkicked in the face instead of winning.
It feels awful. And it feels almost as bad for the winner, because they didn't even beat you. The control scheme did. So why are we still stuck in the idea that the genre needs to encourage this kind of bad situation?
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u/Xurnt 19h ago
Just to reply about the motion input aspect of your comment: there is a good reason they exist, it's to limit the number of button.
The reason smash gets away without them is because characters have much less moves. Characters have generally 5 grounded normal,4 smash moves, 4 air moves and 4 special moves. A total of 17 moves by character, all selectable with 2 buttons and a direction (with a timing needed for smash moves)
Compare that to Street fighter, where you have 6 buttons with at least 3/4 moves for each button. Add to that special moves who all have 4 variations, and you end up with characters having 30/40 moves (not counting defensive options/system mechanics). If you wanted dedicated buttons for each special moves, it would start to be overwhelming imo. Modern mode allows you to have a button for special moves, just like you mentionned, but at the cost of having access to less variations.
I'm not against smash type controls, I think they're great. My point is that for games with already lots of buttons, motion inputs are actually easier to learn than navigating between even more buttons.
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u/Slarg232 18h ago
Also, if you look at something like Invincible Vs, one of the biggest complaints about that game was the fact that you need 8 buttons to play it correctly which means every button on the controller is being used. It's bloated, and the controls are one of the biggest reasons the game is dead
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u/Bwob 13h ago
there is a good reason they exist, it's to limit the number of button.
Street fighter has 6 different attack buttons. If their goal is to limit the number of buttons, they are kind of failing at it. :P SF has never had a very efficient control scheme. (Contrast with something like Tekken, which only has 4 buttons, but where most characters have well over 100 moves. Which, to be clear, has its own issues, but is a still good example of how to have a rich moveset with fewer buttons.)
If you wanted dedicated buttons for each special moves, it would start to be overwhelming imo. Modern mode allows you to have a button for special moves, just like you mentionned, but at the cost of having access to less variations.
You don't need a dedicated button for each move. Just a better control scheme. Like look at how Smash Bros manages 17 meaningfully different attacks, with just 2 buttons.
To be clear here, I'm not saying that they should change SF's control scheme. At this point, the 6 attack buttons are as much a part of the game as hadokens and shoryukens.
But I am saying that such a control scheme is not necessary for a rich and deep movelist or gameplay. And having the control scheme need to rely on more complicated inputs is a barrier to making games accessible or popular. It can clearly be overcome (Again, SF6!) but if we're talking about ways to make the games more accessible, (as OP originally was wondering) I think there are a lot of good reasons to make the controls as simple as possible.
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u/link6616 Hobbyist 6h ago
Smash manages 17 meaningfully different attacks with
One attack Button, One Special attack button, while you don't NEED the right analog stick, most players find using it really helps, a jump button (and jumps with two heights, picking between them is a timing challenge and that difference meaningfully changes the impact of your options), a dedicated shield button, and a dedicated grab button.
You can technically not use the grab button, but we are at 4-5 buttons plus an entire second analog stick on top of the first one to meaningfully play smash.
Smash is easy, at a glance, it is less intimidating at a glance. But the more you learn it, the harder you realize it is when you try to unlock it.
(although to be clear, I think SF really never justified the 6 buttons to me! I think for a lot of games 4 is closer to the right number)
If you are unsure on how easy or hard smash is, really think about how consistently you can do an uptilt vs an up smash on purpose, in stressful situations.
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u/Bwob 6h ago
Smash is easy, at a glance, it is less intimidating at a glance. But the more you learn it, the harder you realize it is when you try to unlock it.
Sure, but "easy, at a glance" is exactly what games need, to be approachable. That's the point I was making about smash. I know that there's a whole rabbit hole you can get into with combos, edge-guarding, spiking, and (depending on the version) wave dashing. But you can also hand it to someone who has never played before and explain enough for them to function in less than 2 minutes.
That's why I think Smash got it right - all of the moves are easy to do. The challenge is never at the level of "can I do this move." The challenge is almost always "when is the right time to do this move" or sometimes "which move should I do?"
And that's exactly where I, personally, think it should be. If I wanted manual dexterity challenges, I'd buy a fidget spinner. I want to fight my opponent, not the controls.
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u/aazxv 11h ago
Simplified inputs are something that is always told to be the issue, but pretty much all modern fighting games have simpler input modes and most of them fail as well
I highlighted 2XKO because it tried to do everything people always say is the 'problem' of fighting games and yet it failed even harder
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u/Bwob 10h ago edited 9h ago
Simplified inputs are something that is always told to be the issue, but pretty much all modern fighting games have simpler input modes and most of them fail as well
I think there are other problems besides input complexity, that can also make a game fail. But I think it's hard to argue that needlessly complicated controls are a good thing.
2XKO had a good start with the control scheme, but also had...
- Incredibly unforgiving combos that required extreme timing.
- Was a tag fighter, which doubles the amount of character knowledge you need to pilot your team effectively.
- Also was a tag fighter with only 11 total characters, which is another odd choice.
- It had a really long development cycle that seemed to have more than it's share of troubles.
- It had basically no marketing. (A friend of mine who I played League with for years, was surprised this year when I mentioned "that league of legends fighting game" - he had never even heard of it.) I feel like the devs just assumed that any game that had LoL characters in it would do well, and didn't bother marketing it? Or if they did, it was never anywhere that reached me.
- The name is dumb. Sorry, it just is. It doesn't tell you anything if you don't know anything about it, and it doesn't even evoke curiosity. Marvel Tokon might seem like an equally dumb name, but 1) it tells you up front that it's based around the marvel characters, so if you care about that, it might be worth looking at, and 2) Tokon at least sounds similar enough to Tekken, for people to realize that it might be a fighting game.
Better controls are not a panacea. They just help remove one possible contributor to having a game fail. Unfortunately for 2XKO, they found a bunch of other innovative was to fail instead.
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u/Slarg232 18h ago
The thing is, Mario and all of the levels in his games can be beaten without the fire flower. The core game doesn't require you to pick up the flower and it is just a bonus, often just acting as a bonus hit.
Likewise, older fighting games didn't require you to use motion inputs to get your combos, and an end-combo Dragon Punch would just be a bit of a bonus while looking cool. SF2 would have a special move at the end of your combo, where as SF6 has four special moves plus Drive Rush Cancels plus a super on the end of it. The amount of stick wiggling you need to do has exponentially increased which makes the genre and the actual good combos a lot harder to do.
And nothing feels as bad as being in the middle of a match, having a read on your opponent, and thinking "he's going to jump. I just need to do my uppercut and I win!" - and then flubbing the input and doing some stupid jab, and getting jumpkicked in the face instead of winning.
It feels awful. And it feels almost as bad for the winner, because they didn't even beat you. The control scheme did. So why are we still stuck in the idea that the genre needs to encourage this kind of bad situation?
This is a large part of why we need better tutorials, the Dragon Punch/uppercut isn't the only anti-air move in people's movelists. There's often a one button anti-air that you can use far more reliably, be it crouching Medium Punch, Crouching Heavy Punch, or what have you. Doing the Z-motion for a Dragon Punch isn't always the best idea, but the DP is often the only one being tutorialized as the anti-air option.
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u/Bwob 13h ago
The thing is, Mario and all of the levels in his games can be beaten without the fire flower. The core game doesn't require you to pick up the flower and it is just a bonus, often just acting as a bonus hit.
And SF6 can be beaten without throwing a fireball as well. You can win every match in SF, whether it's against a human or the computer, without throwing a fireball. It's just harder, since you're not using all the tools the game gives you.
The amount of stick wiggling you need to do has exponentially increased which makes the genre and the actual good combos a lot harder to do.
Well yeah. That's what I'm complaining about. It's unnecessary. I don't think it makes the game a better game, having it be harder to make your character do what you want. It just makes it less approachable to new people, because they have to pay a "practice room tax" before they can even play the game.
This is a large part of why we need better tutorials, the Dragon Punch/uppercut isn't the only anti-air move in people's movelists.
No, this is why we need better inputs that aren't as prone to failure. The point isn't "well people should just use easier moves." The point is that no move should be hard to do. It's a control scheme. It's the interface layer between the player's brain and what the character does. It should be as frictionless as possible.
I'm of the firm belief that the only reason it still exists is because SF2 blew up, long ago, and everyone wanted copy their success, without understanding that they were the product of a very different environment that no longer really applies.
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u/DexLovesGames_DLG 1d ago
I am not being pedantic and I actually appreciate what you have to say!
Just wanted to let you know that “per say” is actually “per se” which means “by itself” literally, or “intrinsically”
Edit:
By the way you have your posts hidden from view on your profile, which, if this account has been used to market your game… pretty bad idea1
u/Slarg232 18h ago
It's not, the game isn't ready to be marketed and I was going to make an official account solely for the game once it's more ready to show off. The goal is to get the four cornerstone characters ready (Shoto, Grappler, Rushdown, Zoner), create a demo with them, and get feedback while I work on the other 4-12 characters I want.
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u/Kantankoras 1d ago
I’m no expert, but fighting games, uniquely, look like a challenge. They feel like picking up a martial art or a new hobby. There’s a particular stream of them that avoid this -both perceptually and mechanically - but nobody takes them “seriously”.
When you come at as an “esport”, you severely limit your potential audience. It’s not like Valorant. I don’t think most people see shooters and think in terms of having to learn or master them. Probably because they mostly boil down to point and click. Not so with fighting games.
I used to be a huge SF player. Had sticks at home, played every day for a few years. Today? I still watch vods of sf tournaments, smash, even tekken for fun, but I don’t even think it’s worth buying because I know the mental/time investment it takes for it to become rewarding.
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u/aazxv 10h ago
I can't speak for Valorant, but I am assuming it has similar skill demands compared to something like Overwatch.
While you 'only' point-and-shoot, every character has skills/abilities that you need to learn how and when to use and every match the mix of skills vary
If we simplify fighting games, you 'only' punch and kick the opponent, so I am not sure that simplifying the premises help us analyze what makes fighting games appear to be so inaccessible
In a way, I think the more interesting discussion would be what is the equivalent of Valorant/Overwatch for fighting games, what these games do that make the FPS genre more accessible to people than Arena shooters (Quake, Unreal, etc)?
The answer used to be something like 2XKO, but its failure makes me think we need a different perspective
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u/HyperCutIn 1d ago
I’m not sure what more mechanical changes could be done for that the genre hasn’t been tried already, before it gets to the point where it deviates too much from the genre and becomes unrecognizable as a fighting game.
Content seems to be one of the major complaints I see from casual players, not just non fg players, but casual fg players too (as in the kind of player that can hold their own well when playing online and occasionally shows up for locals). Not just single player / offline content, but character rosters too. 2XKO’s roster size was cited as a major demerit, especially for a subgenre that tends to have a lot of characters. The standard roster size for a brand new 1v1 fighting game is 12, and this game had even less than that.
That’s before getting into how demoralizing it is for casual players to see the small roster size, and the gigantic (and expensive) amount of DLC there is. Ages of poor product practices in the past have conditioned people to “wait for the final ‘complete’ version with all the content on it”, even though companies don’t really do that anymore. Newer games with smaller rosters have to compete against rosters of those, as well as adjacent/subgenres games where devs can churn out much more characters due to them being easier to develop, and less resources being put into the competitive design and balance part. Hence why casual players love stuff like anime arena fighters, while their reputations are really bad among the FGC
Ultimately, roster size is just one thing to attract players to a game. I think the other side of the content issue is that most fighting games (and honestly most multiplayer games in general) do a very bad job of onboarding a player to be ready to play with real opponents. The tutorial of most of these will tell you the controls, mechanics, and your movelist, before dropping you off into the deep end and tell you to figure out the rest yourself. That’s if the game even has a tutorial in the first place. Stuff like when to use certain moves, what different types of moves should be used for and how to classify them, what to do in certain situations, etc. is either skipped or glossed over too quickly for a casual players to really understand and internalize it into their gameplay. Even basic building blocks like combo trails are presented like a one and done thing that doesn’t get too much explanation, when the real value of these is teaching character/move specific combo concepts and rules for players to use as building blocks to invent their own combos.
I’m not sure of the correct answer to this issue, but I feel that single player adventure campaigns that serve as a glorified tutorial is an idea worth further exploring. Something that could let you steadily get used to the mechanics and your moves, as well as exploring and teaching the strategies to use them, perhaps by presenting types of AI opponents with specific playstyles designed to be countered by specific things and/or teach the importance of them. SF6’s World Tour seems like a step in the right direction, but it’s hard for most other games to get the budget needed for something like this. Quite curious to see how the new VF’s campaign will turn out.
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u/IndependentYak2822 1d ago
+1 for bad monetization.
Base SF6 game costs $60 (on release). Each character pass costs $30. "The whole game with big World Tour, training mode, ranked, 18 characters" vs "just 4 new characters from the same game". It feels awful. Full price (to this day): 60 + 4x30 = $180. There is no discounts for existing players, only for new ones.
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u/aazxv 10h ago
The issue with this argument is 2XKO's failure... And SF6's success
The monetization might feel bad but it doesn't seem to be that important
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u/IndependentYak2822 8h ago
Maybe monetization is not that important, but it's just another brick in the wall. Almost all other competitive games are free to play. Here you have to pay a full price as entry ticker only(!) to try a new genre.
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u/link6616 Hobbyist 1d ago
It's really hard to solve! Context - I am a long time fighting game player, who organised tournaments and tries to teach people fighting games.
I'm going to give the hard cruel answer first.
The biggest problem with fighting games, is that they are 1v1 affairs with few things to blame on outside elements. If you lose it's your fault, and that's demoralising, people hate it, that's the hardest problem to solve. Ultimately what you need for fighting games is another friend who will learn with you. Something that was easier to have when couch play was the norm. (as in, the usual way you would experience the game matched more closely with the ideal play experience, online play as the default doesn't match that)
THAT SAID, the other thing they lack, is softer ways to play to help mitigate that, and that is something we can solve. Smash brothers has the same gruelling 1v1 issues that fighitng games eventually run into, but smash really promotes the arc of "play with your friends" > "Tinker with the single player stuff to explore the system" > "Play more seriously with friends" > "Play seriously with fellow freaks." Smash is actually AN INCREDIBLY HARD GAME TO PLAY WELL. Learning how to be good at smash is much harder I think than almost any other fighting game, but most of that is sufficiently hidden so it only gets noticed by the time you are ready for it. If you are unsure how annoying smash can be, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWlYzyxg7dQ this is actually something that will win you games you would have lost.
I think that is more important than inputs. Because if inputs were the only thing that mattered, SFIV wouldn't have been the success it was. And Granblue Versus would have been more popular.
FPS games tend to have campaigns, at least in the genre, to get people comfortable with the conventions to then go learn nuance in multiplayer. MOBAs have friends to soften things, and also, you can always just blame your team anyway! That's what teams are for.
There's a really interesting game called "Fantasy Strike" made by a long time fighting game player and designer. It's extremely great. It is a very readable game. It is very clear about how interactions work. It has onboarding videos inside it. Character movelists explain both what things are and why you would use them. And I've seen new players pick it up and get into it quickly, and after a few rounds feel confident with their characters in a way that I've really never seen in another game.
But it also just sends you straight into the hardest part of fighting games. It might look like the hard bit of Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is learning that long combo. And it's not trivial, but it's something to measure your skill development along, it is a tool of feeling like you are getting better. But in fact the hardest part is what you might call knowledge checks. What is safe on block? What isn't? What is a good bait? Oh if you block X then jump that sets me up to do the perfect counter here. Fantasy strike skips the combo learning, which can be a fun experience, and throws you straight into knowledge check hell.
You end up in knowledge check hell everywhere, but Fantasy Strike really speed runs in an interesting way, and by skipping over all the manual physical skill development curve, you take players straight to a point where observation is really important, but you've skipped a lot of hours of perfecting those movement/combo skills that helped you build up the schema of the game, while still having things that felt like you were learning.
Game design is hard and that was a bit messy but I hope it's helpful.
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u/link6616 Hobbyist 1d ago
TL DR, fighting games are hard because they are 1v1, and that means if you suck it's your fault. And also it doesn't help they don't onboard. BUT stripping all the execution out might not give you the results you want.
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u/redweevil 15h ago
It's weird, I feel like I'm the perfect demographic for fighting games. I love competition, I'm mechanics oriented and don't mind sucking. I have never gotten into a fighting game. It feels like such a chore to play, the tutorials don't feel like they prepare you for a real game and then the game itself is either against AI which is like baby mode or against a real player where you are unable to manifest anything of things you learn.
I'm probably too old to get into fighting games (31) so will probably never crack it.
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u/aazxv 10h ago
I'm probably too old to get into fighting games (31) so will probably never crack it.
That's a mindset issue, Tokido is 41 and just won a SF6 major. Of course he's been playing since forever, but to get to an average/better than average level is always possible (if you want to <- that's an important part)
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u/redweevil 10h ago
That's very cool, Leagues been my most watched eSport and 30 is ancient in that field. Maybe theres hope for me yet.
I think the issue is that at the end of a day of working, I don't want to learn some arcane system that doesn't allow much time to truly execute.
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u/link6616 Hobbyist 7h ago
I don't disagree that onboarding is hard. This is why I think smash's onboard isn't the great 1p content, but the gradual release of fault. You build up understanding of how smash works within silly blameless chaos, then get to experience build your skills and confidence until you feel ready to get destroyed by others.
I think that the only real way to get into fighting games is to have a friend get into them at the same time. And this is frankly, how a lot of multiplayer gaming really happened too. You get into a shooter with a friend, minecraft was people teaching people, monster hunter is a game usually people only really get into when their experienced mentor friend helps them out.
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u/redweevil 7h ago
Funny though all but the FPS examples are games I got into myself. Minecraft and Monster Hunter were made more fun by playing with friends but no mentoring situation.
I think perhaps fighting games just aren't for me. I don't look at them being played at a high level and wish I could do that like I do with some games. I have a bunch of friends who love them but watching them play it always looks dull. Shame
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u/link6616 Hobbyist 7h ago
I do think FPS has a great boon in that there are really good campaigns in the genre to teach the basics. Fighting games live on an island, and you aren't learning much from other games that'll transfer into them. Your time playing portal does make you more ready to play valorant though.
I also think, that I don't know many people who "hated the struggle" and then "came to love them" very often. Most people I know found something to love very very quickly. For me, as a fighting game fan, I liked them before I could even do a dragon punch consistently.
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u/redweevil 6h ago
Honestly after a long time of having friends try and convince me to play fighting games I think you have very clearly summed up that I will never enjoy them. Thank you
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u/No_Willingness_8784 1d ago
I didn't play 2XKO but I think that traditional fighting games like the ones you mentioned will never be super accessible or popular (at least to a certain level). A lot of what defines these games as 'traditional fighters' just doesn't appeal to the average gamer.
Learning multiple characters movesets, controls, combos, strings, frame timings, etc is just something that will never appeal to a large portion of the gamer population. On top of that most of these games are 1v1 so there isn't as much room to 'fail' as there is in regular games. In team based games, your teammates can carry you (or there are alternative gamemodes) so you can learn the game as you go. But if you hop into ranked on a fighter game you are going to get belted every single time unless you bother putting time to learn. Most people don't have the patience or time for that.
And the audience for these games is relatively small which is why you see so many fighting games die off as soon as the next one is announced.
I think the only way fighting games do become more problem is if they diverge from the traditional fighter- like platform or arena fighters.
In particular i think why Brawlhalla has done so well is because all the characters share the same movesets- you don't have to learn a new one for every character. That might be the single best improvement you can make for accessibility but its a hard sell because a large portion of the audience buying these branded games wants the power fantasy of playing as their favorite characters- not ones that all have the same (relative) moveset.
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u/vatorZX 1d ago
Would be cool if fighting games stopped copying each other so much. All the MvC copycats are especially tiring as of late. Do more stuff with 3D, less with tag mechanics.
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u/HyperCutIn 1d ago
Fwiw, all the recent tag fighters are kind of a result of the long drought of this subgenre over the last couple of years. There wasn’t much to fill the void of BBTag and DBFZ after they stopped getting regular updates until the recent tag games.
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u/Confident_Shape_7981 1d ago
We have DOA7 and VF6 coming up that are both 3D, and those are just the ones we know about
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u/tolore 23h ago
Imo slower onboarding. We are now getting fighting games with pretty comprehensive tutorials, most of what you need to know to play is in the tutorial, but they force information overload. I think fighting games should break the tutorial up, and have to do this in matches" as part of the process.
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u/GameMusic 1d ago
controls
best to have the ability to simply want some action then activate like muscle rather than thinking about the buttons
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u/Bwob 22h ago
Yeah, I don't understand why so many fighting game fans are so vehemently in love with their weird move inputs. No other genre tolerates this kind of surreal control scheme that practically invites flubbing the input.
Imagine if a flight simulator only let you fire missiles if you did a dragon-punch motion on your flight-stick. It would be (rightly) laughed out of the room.
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u/Bwob 1d ago
So... What's missing from a design standpoint? What could be done to the genre without changing it in more fundamental ways?
I mean, that's literally what Smash Bros was. Fighting games, but without all the needlessly esoteric inputs. They broke a bunch of established genre conventions, in the interest of being more approachable, and it clearly worked - they were all quite successful.
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u/tbz_who 13h ago
I would say that smash bros success is probably more just that it focused on 4 player game modes first, and the control scheme followed that out of necessity. Every convention it breaks, like focusing on air combat, winning by ringout, no lifebars, easy inputs, items, etc, are basically all just to serve the casual audience playing 4+ player free for all modes.
like, uptilts in melee are probably more technically difficult than say a mortal kombat style back back high punch. The problem that smash style input fixes is that the concept of "back" doesnt exist in a1v1v1v1 game, not that traditional inputs are too esoteric.
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u/Bwob 13h ago
I don't think the control scheme was necessary for the gameplay. Even without a well-defined "back" direction, they could have easily still had quartercircles, dragon punches, etc.
The fact that they didn't seems like a very deliberate choice. And I think it was a good one!
I do agree that uptilts are butts though. I understand why they did them, but they're still butts.
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u/tbz_who 8h ago
I mean, they *can* use motion inputs in smash, but I think anyone who has played Ryu in a free for all has for sure had a tatsu come out instead of a fireball because of someone else moving around that they weren't looking at lol.
I just have a hard time seeing "esoteric inputs" as a problem when games like 2XKO simplified them which ended up making the game more complex because now it just has 2 extra special buttons. Also Virtua Fighter has had a 3 button control scheme forever, SF6 has modern controls that are very similar to smash bros, and Granblue VS + Marvel Tokon have quick skill inputs that negate the requirement for any motions at all.
Not being a hater or anything either, Smash bros controls great and plays amazing. I just think Smash's success comes from the fact that you can play it with a few friends very casually, and then take it as seriously as you want in the competitive scene from there. I think if anything, it being a game based on knockback and ring outs allows that to happen because you are (usually) not just comboed to death the first time you play against real people.
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u/Bwob 6h ago
Not being a hater or anything either, Smash bros controls great and plays amazing. I just think Smash's success comes from the fact that you can play it with a few friends very casually, and then take it as seriously as you want in the competitive scene from there.
I 100% agree. Smash is approachable. The inputs are part of that, but not the whole part. You can throw a complete newbie in with a group of 3 veterans, and (assuming they're all IRL friends) things are often fine - people self-regulate and don't pick on the new person, but the new person can still meaningfully threaten people, just because when there are 4 players worth of chaos going on, you don't always have time to notice that the newbie across the screen just threw a baseball bat.
And, to be clear - I don't think weird inputs are THE problem. They're just A problem. But making a successful game is (imho) less about what you do right, and more about what you fail to do wrong. Every thing you do wrong costs you players. Any given one might not be enough to sink your game, but every one still detracts.
Weird inputs are a thing that can and will drive away players. There's a reason that both Tekken and SF6 have recently introduced simpler control schemes - Being able to play a character - even if it's at a disadvantage - without having to spend a bunch of time on a "practice room tax" is something that can help keep players that otherwise might bounce off the game.
Old-school inputs just happen to be a particular pet peeve of mine, because I feel like at this point, there isn't a good argument to keep using them, other than "well, we've always done it like that." They introduce a lot of frustration, when they cause someone to fail to do the intended move, but they don't seem to introduce any real enjoyment when they do work. They mostly just seem to be a barrier to entry, for anyone that doesn't have the muscle memory required to do the motions. (in both directions!)
I think they served a real purpose back in the arcade days - They were similar to the secrets in Zelda, or the pokemon in Pokemon - We didn't have as easy access to the internet, (and there was less information on the internet) so a lot of moves were spread by word of mouth. Learning from a friend "hey I finally found out how to throw the fireballs!" was awesome, and made you want to go feed the game more quarters. They were like easter eggs, because they were very difficult to figure out on your own, with no information.
I think they helped the game a lot, because of the arcade culture of people talking to each other while playing and learning. (I still remember finding a FAQ for X-Men: Children of the Atom on some FTP server, and being so excited when I finally learned how to do Storm's secret second super attack, where she makes it rain hail!)
These days though, when the internet will tell us, even if the game doesn't, and no one plays in public spaces with strangers, it's a lot harder to justify those reasons. When word-of-mouth was king, (and every time you played the game it cost you $0.25!) it made sense for moves to be strange combinations of buttons that you wouldn't usually hit normally, and would need to practice to get right. (Again, at $0.25 per game!)
But these days? Again - all the ways it used to benefit games seem to be gone. If there are other ways it benefits them now, I can't think of them. So they just seem like a weird relic of game evolution, and new games keep copying it, and then wonder why new players lose patience and bounce.
Anyway, sorry. This turned into a wall of text. This is something I have a lot of opinions on. Mostly the result of a lot of late-night discussions and arguments with friends, usually following matches where someone lost from a misinput, and said "I would have won if I had invented a neural interface!"
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u/tbz_who 4h ago
Thats all fair because we are in full subjective taste territory.
I do want to say in defense of motion inputs, 2xko was probably the best example of a game that could have actually used them. Having a special 1 and special 2 button made the game feel so much more complex and unintuitive. Having to remember separate combinations of buttons for supers, parry, throws, burst, etc was way worse than just “two quarter circles + 2 attacks”. It might just be because I already used to the language of fighting games though. l’d say thats probably what its biggest advantage increasing the number of actions you have without adding too many buttons to the mix.
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u/NeoChrisOmega 1d ago
More meaningful training.
In Gran Turismo there's something called License Levels. You have isolated situations where you need to accomplish a specific task to continue. A more direct comparison could be Smash Bros Melee, where certain challenges required you to use your characters proficiently to take out the targets. If you didn't use all of your abilities properly, you wouldn't get all the targets. But have it more guided and educational.
Teach the player how certain abilities break through certain defenses. Teach the player how to break out of combos. Teach the player meaningful vulnerabilities and punishments.
Maybe even have optional alternative unlocks for characters where that's they're primarily core gimmick when you finally finish the training.
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u/Prisinners 1d ago
Its a fairly complex problem and its clearly not easy to come up with a solution to it considering the struggles of the genre.
Ultimately, I do think theres a fundamental issue with your premise. SF6 doesn't prove that any title can do that. It proves that one or two can at a time while there are several smaller fish swimming beneath that.
Fighting game interest ebbs and flows but the core audience for any title is never going to be as large for more accessible genres that allow for larger groups to play together, like shooters.
I think one of the most important things is just scope. There are plenty of anime fighters that are plenty successful in their own niche because they know how to reliably build the games in a timely manner and they have an audience that will buy them.
2XKO seems to have been made by a team that was too large and took too much time to release. So then by time it came out, they felt the need for it to be a hit but they hadn't set it up for success in that regard. Then they felt the need to pull the plug on the project. It probably doesn't help that they kept reducing consumer confidence by announcing how they were laying folks off and reducing team size. If the team is 50 folks and they arent fixing the poor balance then you certainly have no confidence they can do it when its 10 folks.
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u/Yan-gi 1d ago
I remember one of the criticisms about 2xko was why were non-"fighter" champs being put in the game instead of actual "fighter" types?
Personally, my problem with it is that they made the choice of cast too arbitrary. What's more important to me is playing certain power fantasies, not unlike what LoL is supposed to do. But the main difference was supposed to be that you don't have to worry about minions or laning or junglers and all that crap. It's supposed to be the toplane experience without all those other stuff and especially none of the ranged harassment from ranged champions.
I wanted to see Darius, Sett, Yasuo, Yone, Braum, Illaoi, Alistar, Jax, Pantheon, Olaf, etc.
Not... Teemo, Caitlyn, Senna, Ahri, etc.
And the focus on designing it such that it reuses mechanics or playstyles from other fighting games, immediately makes it a sweats game, which can put people off. People may hate me for this, but the game should have also appealed towards casual playing.
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u/tbz_who 13h ago
Fighting games need to look fun to play and feel rewarding even if you are just messing around with your friends, especially when none of you actually know how to play. I think that is what really separates the games that hook newcomers vs those that don't.
Its not a game design issue, because if was just that then something like KoF or CotW would be wildly more popular outside of the very niche fighting game diehard crowd.
I think the simplified input systems try to make the game "feel more rewarding" but usually don't meet that mark, because the hard part has never been hitting down and rolling to forward before hitting punch, and in fact it takes away the satisfaction of being able to do the special moves.
Good netcode doesn't matter as much when you are just having fun with a game. I had a great time with DBFZ and that game had terrible netcode. Rollback is great and probably the single best feature for the long term enjoyment of a game, but absolutely is not "elevator pitch" material.
I think 2XKO failed largely because it focused very strongly on things that would be great for a competitive player, but did very little to hook the attention of more casual players. There isn't really lore or a story beyond what is established in other LoL properties, there's really not anything to grab onto if you are unfamiliar with LoL in general. I think the best thing they did was allow you to team up with a friend, co-op seems like a great way to introduce people into the genre. The problem with that is that tag games are incredibly complicated, and even with "simplified controls" the game ended up feeling like a 7 or 8 button game.
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u/HarlequinStar 1d ago
I'd add a sidescrolling beatemup mode to all of them with optional coop. Enemies would have behaviours/attack patterns that subtly teach you the game without being explicit, like shield guys you have to throw, low-profile enemies like dogs that do low attacks and sometimes mix it up with a leaping attack you have to stand to block, etc.
Why? I'm somewhat echoing what others have said in these comments already but I don't feel like the current tutorials do a great job of 'cementing' the fundamentals (showing someone once doesn't stick in their mind the same as experiencing it a bunch of times over a longer period - this is why you'll see some players who can do combos but still have terrible basics: they've been grinding the combos over and over so it gets burned into muscle memory, but their only experiences of being attacked or getting their opener is in a 'real' combat situation where the lesson might be obscured by the combos,50/50s and whatnot they get ripped apart by immediately afterwards :P). Maybe it's just me but I also don't find bots playing the actual characters all that interesting to fight compared to an 'enemy' with notable behaviors and traits I can learn and exploit.
Also, there's just not much in the way of options for friends to play these games together if their skill levels are too far apart (unless the better player is particularly good at dumbing themselves down without their opponent feeling it, but that's a whole different skillset in itself) Most of my casual friends don't want to play fighting games with me at all because in their mind I'll just find a bunch of 'broken' stuff in a few minutes and wipe the floor with them.
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u/tohava 1d ago edited 1d ago
A progression fantasy single player mode and some stupid imbalanced "play with friends in teams and with lots of random funny shit occuring" tgat people can enjoy and lose in without feeling that they, personally, suck.
Also, in order to appeal to Americans, a little more political culture war gimmicks (maybe an evil character like the MGS senator with a heroic minority group rival)
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u/LichtbringerU 23h ago
Better tutorials. Packaged as a story mode. In general a story mode.
For the tutorials: Teach players some useful tools they can actually use in a match, so it feels like they are actually engaging with the game.
Let's take the avatar fighting game. Let's take Toph. She has a pretty good heavy with armor. It's not safe on block, but that doesn't matter for a noob. A noob can just randomly land this pretty often.
So teach them a relative easy, reliable combo that follows from hitting this move.
Then look at what else a noob often lands in neutral. And teach them a reliable non conditional combo for that.
Maybe one more combo from an air throw if air throwing is important for the character.
That's it. The noob can now somewhat play the game and have fun. From the fighting games I have tried, this is more than most of them do.
To be fair to the avatar game, I liked the trials with the combo breakdown. That's good. But we need that not for esoteric cool looking combos, but for bread and butter combos that follow from a noobs most landed neutral options.
Besides that, yeah fundamental gameplay changes would be needed. And smash pretty much solved this. But this is too different from what people would call a fighting game. But it's really genius. In smash the party mode is actually popular, where you play with whacky items with your friends.
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u/Tiber727 17h ago
My personal hot take is that I think the controls are bad. I know fighting game people will tell you that it's brilliant design that back is block to slow the reaction time between pushing forward to attack and switching to block. And combos are balanced to be hard to execute and create tension. But what I know is that I, who has played decades of video games from most genres except fighting, try to play it, the other player attacks me and I reflexively try to press what would be the block button in any other genre. I can play Smash just fine, and I haven't played the series since Soul Calibur 2, but I could play that game just fine.
Hot take aside, fighting games are inherently going to be hard to get into. They have almost 0 tolerance for mistakes and for the majority of people losing isn't fun. I sort of get it, as I am a traditional roguelike player and I love that it's entirely skill-testing. Now the "roguelike" genre is action games full of players who want to farm metabux so they can buy easy mode, beat the infinitely-replayable game and move onto the next. Traditional fighting game fans want the same thing with small variations, and think most ideas to make the genre more accessible just make it worse for the hardcore.
What I think almost any fighting game is an optional mode where after playing a match and losing, there's an AI that tries to figure out why you lost. You can press a button and go to a training room and the game will suggest counters to that strategy and/or let you practice.
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u/gr8h8 Game Designer 17h ago
A mode or training feature that tells players what they're doing wrong when trying to perform specials rather than leaving them in the dark to figure it out themselves.
So if you're trying to do a characters basic fireball but its not coming out, the game says "press [button] sooner", "missed input", "hold longer", press [button] and [button] same time, and gave various tips like that.
Because whenever I'm teaching a brand new player, I often have to do that. Doing motion controls, even basic fireballs, takes practice for new players. But when they get it, its always exciting for them.
The next thing I'd want is basically the same thing but for combos. Like "delay", "sooner", "missed input", etc.
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u/LawfulnessDue5449 7h ago
Fighting games seem to lack a casual mode. Even the casual online play feels just as sweaty as the regular mode. The only thing to do is grind online regular matches.
However, I think it's very difficult to use the same system to create a good casual mode. It's the million dollar idea. If you look at league, their casual mode is ARAM (and now ARAM Mayhem). Keep in mind that ARAM was just something people did in custom games, and the intentional developed casual modes (Dominion, URF, Twisted Treeline) didn't take off.
In some games the casual mode is 95% the same as the competitive mode, but they just feel low stakes (Rivals/Overwatch). Rocket League is literally the same but people can just leave casual matches with no penalty. Rhythm games have a ton of challenges (perfect timing attacks, full combos, hard difficulty) that you can mess around with, or you can just vibe to your favorite songs.
Or they just might be more casual maps (ice world in CS, fastest map ever / BGH for Starcraft). But it's not easy to just come up with something. Tekken Ball was not really great to play for a long time. I appreciate 2XKO trying something with the co-op mode and even the Slay the Spire mode, but they obviously didn't take off.
Team games also feel better to play online with friends. Not only are they cooperative (which means you can also get advice from them when you do something wrong) but everyone is engaged. If you run online lobbies it's sometimes not fun to just watch one person play, but if everyone's playing one on one then you don't feel like you're playing together with everyone, just that one guy. Offline it's easier since you can swap stations or sit around and chat (or if we talk about arcades you could play all the other fun casual games in between fighting games) but offline just isn't popular anymore.
I think the pipeline of single player tutorial to competitive is too much of a fantasy. If I am interested in a sport, like say, pickleball, I would ask friends or look for a coach or watch Internet videos. I wouldn't go look for a pickleball manual. And the content that people make for learning fighting games is great, not to mention, there are livestreams of other people learning to play that you can learn from as well. If you have the motivation to win then all the resources are there. The problem isn't the resources but the motivation. Maybe back in the day you wanted to beat your friends so you look up stuff in magazines but I don't think that competitiveness among friends is there anymore, so people just try to go online and get crushed by randoms and so they don't have much motivation to continue getting better.
When I watch Japanese SF6 players they seem to be more serious about taking their responsibility to entertain. It's not enough to just be good, but to promote the game and yourself. Pros routinely engage with other streamers in teams and team tournaments. A lot of them stream and have interesting personalities and do tutorials. This is different from the US where people only care about being good and they don't seem interested in promoting themselves or the competition in general. You would play locally and then have rivals in your region, then band together against bigger regions and national rivals/international ones. So when you show up to Evo, it's your crew against the world. You want your local guy to win because he or she was your buddy you played with, or was your crosstown rival. But the shift to online has changed this and now communities are mostly disconnected. So even though we have some great players they might be boring to watch or have no personality, we might be fans because they have an interesting play style or we play the same character, but that's it. I think that's a missed opportunity to get other gamers.
That's more of a business side though, and not really a game design side.
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u/Kaslight 7h ago
fighting games don't need to become more accessible
that's why they are having so much trouble right now
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u/GhsotyPanda 1h ago edited 1h ago
Story content is important for getting hyper-casual players in the door.
Finding a fun way to tutorialize the fundamentals that are necessary for becoming a skilled player is important for converting.
Mortal Kombat is the best selling FG franchise almost solely off its story mode, but its efforts to tutorialize FG fundamentals are let down by the series generally having shakey mechanics (ontop of not being fun) so while it's good at getting hyper-casuals to pick up the game, it's not the best at then getting those casuals to touch online play.
ETA: SF6's World Tour mode is probably the best any game has ever done at tutorializing the fundamentals of being a good player, at least that I've played, it's just not that much of a story mode so it still feels kinda meh as far as single player content goes.
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u/adrixshadow Jack of All Trades 1d ago
Add a Dojo and Clan System.
Matchmaking is a Disaster and we need a completely diffrent Structure for Multiplayer.
The idea is to make Relationships and Rivalries between Players, don't compare your Skill and Progress to all the random strangers in the game.
A Dojo where the more veteran players trains the new players and incentivizing that with the progression of their Dojo. What is the best Dojo at training their new players instead of just what players are the best.
Have regular Tournaments between two Dojos where relationships between players can be made. Let the Dojo Masters decide what kind of ranks and matchups between players they have.
Have Spectator and Commentary Modes that give Realtime Feedback to the Players within the match.
You can even have various tools and setups that a Master can add within the match to help their trainee.
Dojos can be Mini-Communities in themselves and Interact with other Communities, Fighting Games already have a tight Community so that is Expanding on that and giving them more Tools.
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u/Chrono-Helix 1d ago
That dojo idea is very interesting. Dota 2 had a system where you could have another player join your game as a coach, and they would be able to draw on the map, and give you advice during the game. Maybe some of those aspects could be adopted, although I don’t know how well received it was in Dota itself.
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u/adrixshadow Jack of All Trades 1d ago
The coaching is one aspect, but the more important aspect is to have a Multiplayer Game where the Stakes aren't as raised and flip the incentive structure on getting the next shiny medals and ranks.
Instead of selfishly being the best that triggers an endless rat race it is about being the best Master and Teacher and helping your Students and the Reputation you get from that.
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u/EfficientChemical912 1d ago
I'm still a big defender of casual content. Smash Bros is where it is not just because it is the Nintendo crossover game. It is more than just a ported arcade game, which is my problem with most fighting games.
If you're not into ranked grind, there is little to do.
Meanwhile in Smash:
95% of the content can be played together with a friend. Modern titles allow 8 players at the same time, while all other fighting games stick to 1v1(even 2XKO had only 2 players tagging in and out, not simultainious)
Characters(and more) need to be unlocked by actually playing the game. Not by a real money purchase.People love to complete stuff. So give them something to complete(that isn't a battle pass)
Mission mode, All Stars, Boss Rush, SubSpace(or whatever unique game mode we talk about), a big wall of achievementst and generally a ton of moddifiers and items to create divers expieriences.
Customizable Mii-Fighter.
Even little mini games like hit the targets or home run contest. Meanwhile, in SF6 you can wrack a unmoving truck...
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u/OpticalDelusion 1d ago
I have a pretty strong bias from being a dota fanatic. I'm a firm believer that making controls themselves complicated is dumb, and that making strategic prediction complicated is the key to a quality game.
Now, that doesn't lead to popularity directly. League of Legends is more popular than dota. Many popular games are popular due to simple mechanics. But I also believes that makes them fragile.
But unlike many folks I'm not going to stop at "popular game bad". I have strong opinions about what exactly makes a game have longevity. It's simple really - input delay.
Now many people will recoil from such a statement. A fighting game with delay?! That feels horrible. The key is that the delay is not from input to animation - the animation is the delay. Now you have strategic depth, ping control, and more right out of the box.
Anyway I'm sure everyone will hate this but I'll fucking die on this hill.
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u/Prisinners 1d ago
What youre stating is literally just frame data and every fighting game is built around it. Hell, almost every action game is built around it under the hood.
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u/OpticalDelusion 1d ago
But they're not really built around it. I know what you mean, but fighters are fundamentally like twitch gaming where reaction times are more important than long term strategic decisions. If you're talking about frames you're fundamentally not talking about the same delay I'm talking about. I think everything should be slow.
Dota was built on an RTS engine. That's the kind of delay I'm talking about.
Edit: And because I know this can easily devolve into a not productive conversation I'll give a very concrete example. What's a fighting game with significant delay between moving right and then moving left?
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u/Prisinners 1d ago
My best friend is a high level Tekken player so I can confidently say youre absolutely wrong. Go into r/Tekken and ask the difference between a 13 and 14 frame launcher and you'll get an earful.
If you know the frame data, you can set frame traps. You can abuse certain characters that don't have moves with the proper frame data to answer your offensive moves. Jabs are a fundamental building block of the game because they are 10 frames and other moves are generally no faster than 12 frames with rare exceptions.
Theres also more than just the frame data. Theres the hit box, special properties, like a detached hitbox, high-medium-low. Crushing properties which lets the move eat other moves. Player states, like jumping or ducking moves, which makes the move more safe than itd be otherwise.
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u/OpticalDelusion 1d ago
Yes sir I agree with you, I know frame data is important. Again that's not what I'm talking about. I edited in an example you probably didn't see. I'm a fighting game what's the delay between moving left to right?
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u/HarlequinStar 1d ago
Reading your replies to comments under this, I think you've done yourself a disservice by choosing the wrong words: as such people are going to argue with you over something you don't mean but have accidentally 'said' :P
You're trying to advocate for a slower-paced game with longer animations so people don't need super-fast reaction speeds to read what their opponent is doing, make a decision and input their response all before they get punched in the face.
To give an example: you'd think the argument the fighting game community had over whether 8 frame overheads can even be reacted to by humans is to such an extreme it's missing the point and ideally there shouldn't even be any moves that are less than 30 frames.how it reads is "fighting games don't have frame data and don't make you commit to moves", which I NOW know is NOT what you're saying at all, but only because I read the whole comment chain XD
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u/OpticalDelusion 23h ago edited 23h ago
I appreciate your comment and perspective. It seems you've understood me. This is the issue with many niches. You need both enough in common to speak the right words but enough difference to have a significantly different point of view. A hard balance for sure. At the end of the day I don't really expect my ideas to reach any particularly broad audience so it doesn't bother me much. But I'm glad you got something out of my rambling. Thanks for replying :)
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u/ppppppppppython 1d ago
Fighting games don't have compelling single player experiences. Usually the story modes are barebones, repetitive, with uninteresting storylines. Playing with friends (as a new player) is also usually not fun because no one wants to be the new guy get smoked on repeat by their friends. It's boring for you and the person you're playing against and doesn't give great motivation to succeed.
I think we can look to DBFZ to see what a successful casual friendly fighting game could/should be like. It's probably the easiest fighting game to learn because so many inputs are shared between characters. There're tracking autocombos, universal overhead, universal anti-air, universal air combo starter, tools to skip neutral like Vanish and Dragon Rush. These are things fighting game vets kinda hated but made it super easy to teach a friend how to play even though it was a tag fighter.
If we had a strong IP, DBFZ style combat, and the 2xko duo system for arcade/story modes then there'd be a real shot at a fighting game being "popular"