Well we still have a chance there’s 3 more characters at least
I personally hate DP motions. As long as I’ve been playing, it’s never felt natural to me. I can do them, but only about 90% of the time. The other 10%, my character either jumps (my health bar nooooo…) or does some sort of crouch crouch… waddle looking thing. Also not helpful. I use DPs of course, but if I absolutely need to land something, it’s not always the first move I go to.
I prefer back-forward or down up motions, but definitely not charging like Street Fighter. One of the things I love about MK and KI is that there’s no back-forward / down-up charge moves.
I don’t mind down-forward / down-back motions, though a few people I play against locally, who are rather casual when it comes to fighting games, tend to have more of a problem with them. I’ve steered them to Sabrewulf or TJ and they tend to fare a little better. So yeah, it’d be nice to get at least one back-forward, down-up character this season, if only for those that prefer that style.
I get this. Everyone misses a DP now and again, but until and unless you are getting them basically always it’s really nerve wracking. And people act like its a real thing when it’s just some crazy motion made up by Capcom because they didn’t have enough buttons to control the moves in Street Fighter. Other than historical accident there is essentially no reason to have them. People will make a case that the time it takes to do the move somehow introduces skill and reaction time to the game, but I think it’s a pretty weak excuse. Don’t make them all first frame invincible if you want them to come out slower or be riskier…
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Well, a fighting game has to feel fun, and for a lot of people the DP motion is extremely satisfying. I’m at the point where I can’t remember the last time I botched the input, probably during S1. As long as we have awesome D-pads like the Xbone’s then I strongly approve of their inclusion. I really dislike games that try to remove technical/mechanical skill for the sake of it.
First frame invincibility is really important, though, for reasons beyond just anti-airs.
And while the DP motion may have been invented without a ton of foresight, in hindsight it actually does some important things. It forces you to leave block to execute, for instance, which is an important consideration since you can’t OS block if you miss it. That’s why Cinder’s fireflash is so strong (and has to be slower startup as a result), because there is very little time you aren’t blocking while you are inputting it, and its input is side-agnostic.
Yeah, I think for those of us playing there is nostalgia associated with the motions. We worked to learn the skill and after a certain point you enjoy being able to perform it. I get that completely. But, it’s not “for the sake of it” to remove unnecessary technical or mechanical skills. It raises the barrier to entry for new players. My nephew can get on and play 85% of KI without even using combo assist. But he isn’t going to get DPs and he isn’t going to sit around practicing them because he doesn’t have friends to impress in the arcades. So it’s just a barrier.
I remember there was a huge uproar when Zelda went 3D and eliminated the jump button. Instead, Link just jumps when he gets to the edge of something. People were like “what!!! Why are they dumbing down games?” But 90% of gamers were experts at jumping off ledges and the other 10% spent all their time struggling to time ledge jumps right - and it was just pointlessly frustrating. Since games were no longer about trying to draw 12 hours of content out of 64KB of data, the idea that falling off the same platform a hundred times constituted gameplay just wasn’t the case anymore. Nintendo decided they wanted people to actually be able to play the game. And no one can tell me N64 Zelda is not a challenging game or that it requires no skill. Just not ledge jumps…
Yeah, we’ve sort of had this discussion before so I don’t want to draw this out. The DP motion in Street Fighter (and SF 2, since that’s where we all learned it) was super quick in comparison to the speed of the game. So the idea that you had to leave the safety of block to do it wasn’t a thing then - your opponent is in the air for an eternity in that game. Moving forward through Turbo and modern games like KI and even SF V that are quicker, I think this is more a case of people balancing games around the motions rather than putting appropriate motions in place for game balance. You can have first frame invincibility with or without a DP motion. You can also solve your block problem by having a true d-u for cinder’s flash kick. It’s slightly more challenging but still easier to do than a DP. Or, you can just do a side specific fireball motion - which is much easier than a DP, forces you to come out of block and is unidirectional for cross ups. Or, as is done with Cinder, you can just balance the character around a move that is actually easy for people to execute.
My point being, you can solve those issues and balance the game without resorting to DP motions. Will it be different? Sure. But I’m not convinced you can’t balance characters and make interesting gameplay without DP motions.
I don’t recall there being much of an uproar the jumping in Zelda 64. Zelda’s not really a type of game most people ever expected to do much jumping in. 1&3 didn’t have it at all, 2 was a different kind of game, and Link’s Awakening didn’t use jumping much, but when they did it was kinda awkward, so there wasn’t a real well established precedent to Z64’s jumping mechanics.
But I really enjoy there to be mechanical barriers to entry. That is a very important thing to me. I personally don’t enjoy games where the pros are on a similar level as beginners in terms of mechanics. To me, technical skill is a quintessential part of the game. Saying it is an unnecessary barrier is saying that you think the entire game is just mind-games, and not the sweat you have to pour in training mode to master technical skills. I don’t view the game as just individual matches, but as the entire journey of training for your matches. Mechanics are an extremely integral part of that, and I really enjoy it. I also hated that Starcraft 2 introduced a lot of easy-mode features that took emphasis off of mechanics and just replaced them with more mental games. And frankly, Zelda 64 games sound like they would be much better with a jump button. They are still great, make no mistake, but I think they would be much better with a jump button.
The way they handled it, you really don’t need a jump button. The game is laid out masterfully to where adding a manual jump really would add nothing to the game.
I disagree, it would feel better to play as Link. It would make you feel like you are actually doing the stuff that’s happening on the screen.
Well, it’s a philosophical difference. You are free to enjoy whatever you want. Lots of people love driving with a manual transmission. But if you are a car manufacturer, you are still very much limiting the interest in your vehicle if you only offer a manual transmission.
I would just point out that there’s already a huge number of people who can do DPs that aren’t pros. And certainly the best of the pros are not separated from the rest by their mechanical skills. In a game that moves as fast as KI, no matter how simple they make special move execution there will always be setups and situations that require reflex, reaction and skill.
Just as a frame of comparison, take a look at KI2, with its DB-DF moves and its roll back then forward supers. These moves are insanely hard to execute. KI 2013 uses fireballs and DP motions but none of that stuff. They don’t use the SNK roll back to straight forward motions and other crazy random inputs either. They could add all that stuff and make it more mechanically challenging. They could force all tournament players to play while riding a unicycle. It would certainly make it more mechanically challenging. But I don’t really think it makes the game more fun, and you can’t argue that it doesn’t keep new players from getting into the game.
You can slippery slope in the other direction too, though. Just as one could argue for increased mechanical execution to the point of needing to play the piano on the fightstick, another could argue for the complete removal of any form of input device so that players are using solely their mind. At that point or close to it, fighting games have completely died to me. There’s a reason I love SSBM but cannot take the other smash games seriously.
By the way I personally loved the DB-DF inputs from KI Gold and was very sad to see them removed. There are some things that I agree on that should be made mechanically easier, and that typically has to do with timing things. I hate very strict timings like the old shadow breaker inputs, so glad they made those easier. And that’s because not everyone can simply have that good of a sense of timing, and it will go away if you don’t practice it. But I refuse to believe someone could simply not be able to perform a DP motion or the DB-DF motion. They just aren’t thinking about hand/thumb placement and movement correctly, or didn’t when they first learned it and haven’t broken the first impression habits. I don’t think it’s a question of accessibility anymore. Players seem to appear more mechanically lazy in easier games, and gamers in general today are far less interested in learning to master skills and would rather just “play the game.” But again, to me the “game” itself is more than individual matches; It includes the entire training experience. And at some point for a non-turnbased game to be fun, there has to be some mechanical execution that makes the game feel fun.
Going back to Smash as an example. It actually feels like you’re fighting someone in SSBM. You’re pressing a bunch of highly complex directional commands for shairs and wavedances, and you are hitting the opponent back to back when you get that first opening. In Smash4, to contrast, the game doesn’t feel like a fight at all. It feels like a series of rock, paper, scissors, games. “He’s sprinting at me, is it a run up and grab? Is it a dash attack? Or will he roll past me?” There is no option to wavedash backwards and “fence” the opponent with spacing/footsies to cover many options. You kind of just have to partake in a series of guesses, and that is painfully boring to me.
Fighting games by default will always have those RPS mindgame, so why should we emphasize that over other skills? James Chen said that fighting games are essentially a bundle of mini-games. You have your spacing/neutral game where you try to bait ranges and missed attacks, you have your reflex/reaction game, and you have your mind games. I would add execution training outside the match itself as another mini-game. That’s kind of what makes fighting games so special: The need to multitask and master all of these components over the long run. You aren’t making a game more strategically deep by removing some elements that aren’t concerned with mindgames, you are just making the game less nuanced and more streamlined, like moving MMA to Boxing. Not to say Boxing is less skillful, but it focuses on a narrow set of skills that participants need to master on a very high level, whereas in MMA, participants can focus on different recipes for success.
Well, I think this is an interesting conversation, and others might be enjoying it so I will respond - even though I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you. If people are bored or think it’s too off-topic we can go to PM.
Obviously generalizations based on limited experience are fraught with peril, so take this in context. I don’t think “modern” gamers are more lazy, I honestly just think they have better things to do with their gaming time. SF 2 was the be all end all of my world at age 16. I sat at the dinner table, practicing DPs in my mind to try to get them down. It was not trivial AT ALL for me to develop this skill to the point that I was consistently confident in pulling them off. Back then, the input had to be a lot tighter, and arcade cabinets had all different builds, joystick types (and were often broken a bit), but even so. The input itself is not trivial. My 14 year old nephew is currently better at videogames, in general, than me. He certainly has quicker reflexes, better timing and is overall better coordinated than me in every way. For reference, he is already a much better combo breaker than I am, and he barely plays the game. But he isn’t going to sit around learning DP motions to play KI. He has other choices - even to play in KI. He can’t do DPs, and frankly I understand why he wouldn’t want to sit in the practice lab learning a non-transferable skill.
So, while I agree that mechanics are somehow involved in a game, we just disagree about where to put them. Not every game should be Divekick. But is DP execution fundamental to fighting games? I don’t think so. MK doesn’t use them. Execution in those games is about combo timing and juggles. You mention that you draw the line at the tight shadow linker break timing, but it’s not really different. Some people complain about the lack of one frame linkers in SFV making the game too easy and not deep enough. But I’m not interested in the type of depth that comes from excluding people from videogames on the basis of microsecond timing. KI ditched full circles for powerful command grabs - solely to make execution easier and more reliable. No one complains about this. I don’t really see how DPs are different. And remember - I am completely proficient in their use. Imagine yourself as someone who hasn’t been playing fighting games for 20 years.
Fighting games will always have mindgames, that’s true. But what your missing is that by having execution barriers you are excluding competitors who can’t execute from having the opportunity to play high level mindgames. We have lots of discussions on these forums about Combo Assist - and KI’s development team are squarely on the side of “quarter circle motions are not the measure of fighting game proficiency.” I tend to agree, and frankly I’m not sure why QC motions for combo execution would be seen as trivially important but DP motions for invincibles or anti-airs would be.
So, it just depends on what you want. If you want a small community of people with great reflexes and tons of practice time to be the competitive heart of a game, then feel free to put in whatever controls you want - although I would suggest for that purpose you should encourage developers to come up with new and weird controller inputs instead of the same ones the existing FGC is already super good at. That way you force people to develop new skills if what you are really interested is identifying the “committed” players. Or come up with some completely radical control concept. DPs are a skill that everyone involved in the FGC already has. So in my opinion it’s just a way of keeping the community small and making proficient DP players feel like they are more advanced than they really are. The insiders like that they can do this stuff in every new game, and fell good because “outsiders” can’t. I always liken this to music (because it’s another interest). People practice scales to improve their mechanical proficiency - but no one ever confuses the ability to play scales with the ability to be a musician. Lots of music programs focus on teaching mechanics but fail to teach music, which is why middle school bands (and plenty of garage band rockers) can play songs without missing notes but still sound like garbage. I don’t think being able to complete Dojo level 32 or any of the myriad FADC into super dexterity tests from SFIV should be a metric for whether someone is “good” at fighting games.
Whenever I introduce someone new to fighting games, they “get” everything right away up until I start to describe DP motions and then they are like “woah… What was that again?” And I just don’t think it’s necessary.
You realize charge characters aren’t anywhere even close to being just a “Street Fighter” thing, right?
Charge characters are present in all sorts of different fighting games, including SNK and anime fighters.
Everything you’ve described about KI is also present in games like Guilty Gear and KOF. Even more so, in some cases. And one seeing rosters of 50-something characters (in which you’re required to learn how to play at least 3 of them at a time) isn’t out of place in KOF games.
Hmm, I guess I just don’t understand how people can have trouble with DP motions. Strict one frame timing, I agree completely with you. That’s not something you can just learn, as I said. I’ve also noticed that with mechanical inputs I simply don’t forget. I can go back and play KI Gold and I’m sure I still know how to do everything that I learned before, so it feels like a more fair mechanical skill to utilize. I guess I really don’t see how a DP is any more difficult than quarter circle or back-forward.
You say to imagine I don’t have 20 years of fighting game experience, but I truly don’t in the first place. I have almost NEVER touched a Street Fighter game other than some grazing moments in social areas where it might have been on display. And even then, I never touched the series much. I’m not joking in that my total amount of SF time in my life is around 2-3 hours, all of which is against the AI.
As for other fighting games I have played the Smash bros series, the older KI games, Virtua Fighter 5 (very little, but still much more than SF), and MMA games. All of which besides KI don’t have quarter circles and DP’s. And at that, I never played the old KI games too much. I would hop on and go through the KI Gold arcade ladder a few times, then quit playing it for a year or so before I refresh the game for myself. I think the problem is that people don’t realize that they need to think about how they are inputting their motions when they first learn it so that they can ingrain good muscle memory habits. I’ve always been pretty mindful of how to perform inputs. If my move comes out wrong, I stay in training and stare at my thumb to see what’s going wrong. Then I make adjustments until my form is down. I feel like a lot of new gamers don’t want to have to think about this sort of thing. They don’t want the kind of “form” training that you would find in any other sport. But I think the presence of that stuff is precisely what generates hype in competitive venues.