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Posted By Shaun K. about 8 months, 2 weeks ago
Thumb Wars: Episode 11: Fighting Games – Has the Genre Peaked Again?,
Episode 11: Fighting Games – Has the Genre Peaked Again?
Welcome back to the show where we introduce the debate and you continue it. This week’s topic: Shaun & Oda get ready to fight it out over where fighting games currently stand and what the future might hold for the genre.
Thumb Wars is a weekly show hosted/produced by Shaun Kronenfeld dedicated to starting and encouraging dialogue and debate on a wide variety of topics within the video game industry. Look for a new Thumbs Wars every Sunday. Comments, opinions, and thoughts are not only welcome, they are the entire point. Feel free to follow Shaun on Twitter @bigred_13 if you feel so inclined.
They should focus more on how to make Online play better and more responsive. like King of Fighters XIII for example, it is by far the best and most purist 2D fighter to come out this gen but it’s netcoding makes high-level play unplayable.
I think players like me and Shaun K like fighting games because it’s like playing with action figures. Think about it: numerous action figures that take up little space and are more animated than any kind of plastic shell. (Of course, you could say that a lot of video games are like this, but this explanation is more appropriate for why gamers who suck at fighting games still get them.) Having action figures that kick ass is great, and seeing them play out in some epic storyline is icing on the cake. It’s like having your early childhood back again.
I’m sure this goes for a lot of gamers; even so, it’s not a good enough reason for such gamers to nab every fighting game that just comes out. And as Shaun said, seeing pro gamers have spectacular wins in tournaments can be a lot of fun, but that may still not be a good enough reason for casual players to plunk $50 or $60 on every new fighting game.
Fighting games are definitively over saturated. For a moderate fan like myself it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest fighters; having to skip out quite a few already what with a new fighting game coming out every few weeks it seems. And becoming decent at any particular one in the time it stays relevant is nigh impossible for fans like me. This problem is worsened by the community which can be hostile to new players, among other issues.
I too was disappointed by MvC3/UMvC3 lack of story mode; the point of a crossover is the interactions between the characters of different worlds, and the lack of a story mode limits this to into and victory dialogue.
I actually want the fighting game to collapse, because I think it *might* bring back arcades. Fighting games don’t do well on consoles because online play communities play TOO MUCH and newcomers quickly figure out they will never stand a chance. The players not on the top slowly drop out of the market.
An arcade? Almost no one can spend five hours a day in the arcade the way they could sit on their couch.
A modern arcade revival could do very well, but it needs fighting games to fall out of the console market first, and it will probably have to wait for cell phone gaming to die down a little. Unless those things happen, arcades will never get the titles to pull players.
Yeah, that’ll never happen. There’s just no reason for people to visit arcades anymore, since consoles can do everything any arcade machine can now. Why would anyone want to go off somewhere else and spend money steadily on a machine that charges them for every game when they can just play on their own system at home for the flat initial cost of owning that system and its games in the first palce? People who played arcades a lot as a kid and are nostalgic for that time are about it. Especially now that online allows many people to play together without physically being together.
Really I have to agree Shaun on alot of this since I love a good story with my game and arc system to me next to Netherelm studio have taken over the fighting genre. but do I do think calling Capcom the maybe killer of it a bit to harsh since they are learning from the failing of MVC3. I admit I’m one of those who really hated what they did, but still they are learning maybe they will change after resident evil 6.
Also, another thing! People who will only play Super Smash Bros multiplayer if it is without items, only on stock, and only in a handful of stages are tools and should be decked on the nose.
Comments like this just go show that people being assholes to other players for no good reason is by no means a phenomenon unique to the competitive side of fighting game communities.
Could you please find a way to say that without the casual homophobia?
Nothing against the BT podcast but this podcast is so much more interesting every time
Ok, it seems the focus was too much on Arc System Works games and Capcom, while I acknowledge they had a bigger hand on it’s resurgence, they also made some of the worst mistakes that make the genre feel over-saturated as stated with SF4 having 2 re-releases and BlazBlue followed suit, but as Capcom got the most flak for it since they advertised it like crazy while ArcSys kept a low profile.
The biggest problem with that practice and why people stopped caring has been said over and over, is the simple idea that if you buy a game it’ll feel like you’re buying a version that was left unfinished by design. Capcom for instance shot themselves on the foot especially with SFxT, the ideas were there and they wanted to cater both casuals and hardcores but their ideas were poorly handled the gem system wasn’t as good as they tried to make it out to be, pandora is useless and that’s not even addressing how the Tekken side of the roster had a poor presentation and characterization the looks are there and few of the moves as well but they ultimately play terribly, add that to poor balance, glitchy online and the DLC fiasco. And you got a solid reason why SFxT was a flop.
Capcom has a big issue of playing safe with the fighting franchises, SF4 was a disappointment to me, not because the game was bad, au contraire, it was fine, but it stuck too close to it’s SF2 template the roster is nearly the same and had nothing new to show for the mechanics were mostly dumbed down versions of SF3′s parry and the Ultra being closer to Samurai Shodown’s Rage bar.
As for being accessible that’s the biggest problem games has to introduce new players, most games right now doesn’t feature good tutorials to teach the finer aspects of the game one of the few who had better teaching tools was Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown as it had a mode to teach the basic functions of the game and a command training so you’d get acquainted with the character. Mind you that’s a game that has a small roster compared to other’s but has a solid gameplay, great balancing and decent netcode. Only problem is that it didn’t have a good single-player offering.
Even so a game that got pretty much everything right was MK9, it had a terrific single player offering with a very good story mode, arcade mode, good online, it was easy to get into it but with enough depth to master, great post-launch support to balance it out, the DLC was well handled. The fighting isn’t quite the same as the other bigger titles i’ve mentioned above and most of the female character designs are over-sexualized to the point of being ridiculous, but it got everything else right so much that it’s been a main game on big tournaments like EVO for 2 years straight.
If anything more games have to see what MK9 did right and aim for at least that many features to make games interesting since it hit the right spots, there was just as much online feature for the hardcore crowd as story and modes to ease newcomers into the game.
Eww, you LIKE Mortal Kombat? I thought that was forbidden or something.
Seriously. Most gimmicky shallow franchise I have ever played.
The franchise yeah sure they stumbled a lot with MK4 and on. But MK9 did get it right, only thing is that the X-Ray moves just drag on, but just about any annoyance you find on MK9 you’ll find on Capcom’s fighters.
In fact as long as we’re talking about a franchise being gimmicky, Capcom’s fighter’s since SF4 have been all about the comeback gimmicks to the point of annoyance, the Ultra’s in SF4 were ok, MvC3 X-factor was meh but SFxT is by far the worst offender you have pandora which is useless and the gems that quite frankly don’t make the game deeper nor more fun to play, in fact it had the opposite effect. Add that to crappy balancing, bad netcode, lack of depth, good chunk of characters being DLC that’s already on disc along with a couple more annoying DLCs to get the “full experience” you’ll see why I much rather go play MK9.
My point is that genre hasn’t peaked or went stale, but the biggest franchises lost their edge which holds true especially Capcom’s fighters despite them being the biggest contributors for the renaissance of the genre, their games weren’t as epic as they tried to make it out to be and got so much attention to the point of over-shadowing other good games that are still out there that got it right like King of Fighters 13, MK9 and Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown.
I love fighting games, and I always have. I consider myself a hardcore fighting gamer, although I’m not exceptionally good at them. Sometimes I take part in a tournament, I usually do pretty good, but so far I haven’t won one. I know not everyone is or can be as good as I am now, as I wasn’t this good when I started, and I know I probably won’t be getting any better. When I play against others, I know not to be a jerk to them, no matter the outcome.
The reason I’m telling you this is because of this guy I wanna talk about. Every time there is a con here in the city where I live, there’ll probably be one or two fighting game tournaments. Well, there’s this one guy. This f*cking guy. I don’t think he has a life, because every time a new fighting game comes out, he spends day and night training on it until he knows -every- combo, -every- mechanic loop, -every- single move, to the point fighitng him takes a couple of seconds top, depening on the number of rounds. I don’t know how he has fun of such short, effortless fights, since no one he plays with is a match anymore, but I think he does it because his fun is in simply beating people in games as humiliatingly fast as possible, which is kinda sad.
In cons, free play is organized this way: You win, you stay. You lose, you go to the back of the line. So yeah, this guy will appear out of nowhere, kick you out of the game and then just stay there because he beats everyone in a minute tops. Not only that, when someone somehow manages to beat him, he gets -angry-. And let me tell you, he is such an -asshole- because of all this. He is the ubber example of all that is wrong with the fighting game community. People like him are just elitist douchebags.
Sorry, I just wanted to vent my anger about this and this seemed like a good opportunity.
I don’t think oversaturation is a problem, I mean, look how many Shooters are released each year and see how well it’s going. The main problem is, unlike shooters, most fighters have a much longer time curve to become good at it. Whilst most Shooter Games play the same, that doesn’t apply to fighters as you have to learn different things to play each game, there are simple rules though that they all follow (Attack to place pressure and push foe into the corner/wall, Control space wisely, Guard when needed then punish an unsafe move, be unpredictable in your attack.) It still takes a long time to learn your character, all the moves and the match-ups. Which is what affects it.
Now as for Story Mode… not needed. Seriously, I don’t think Fighting Games need a story mode. As said earlier, the only good ones have been done by Arc System. Mainly because they get it right: Have a Story Campaign for every character (Not just 1 or 2 characters or only half the cast, you need one for every character) in which the stories intertwine and each character evolves at the end of each story. Most fighters tend not to do this because people like familarity with each character, and most games won’t dare kill off a character because from a gameplay perspective it means they can’t be in the next game to play as, meaning that fighting style is lost, which annoys everyone who learnt that style, or they are replaced with a suspiciously similar character with the same fighting style (Even Blazblue is guilty of this). Generally I have a loathing for stories as well because it generally means 9 times out of 10 you have to face off against the Final Boss who has been super-charged with 150% Health and Infinite Meter whilst you are stuck with the Games Main Character who you probably aren’t that good with and you want to chose your best character to take down this cheap foe but can’t.
I’m not saying DON’T have a single player mode, you can still do that and have a lot of unlocks in it. Just, make it more of a Mission Mode where you have to fight off against specific circumstances and you get choice of who to play as for them (I point to Soul Calibur 2′s Weapon Master mode as the perfect example of this.) Not the story mode that oftentime is just a simple “Team up and defeat the bad guy” kind of story that doesn’t change anything, or the “Get’s way too complicated with in-game terminology” like story that gets boring half way through, your probably stuck playing as characters you don’t even want to play as, and no character progression will happen by the end since none can happen if you want the same fight roster for the next game. Only Arc System has been able to do a Story Right, and even I think sometimes it’s cutscenes last for a little too long…
Deep Mechanics in a Fighting Game… funny… you mean game-breaking, overly extremized features that ruin fun for everyone who is not an expert.
I played the new soul calibur a few weeks ago and I had someone kill me in a single combo within 15 seconds…. he told me I had to break the combo, I told him: This is broken gameplay, because having only a single chance to escape death is in no perspective a good design choice…… and now don’t tell me to “L2P”….
It is just a ludicrous game design decision.
Capcom the reason why that game failed was the whole DLC bull*** practice ya did there. I remembered fans roaring in disgust because of that. Don’t blame other games for the failure because that was a lie because I clearly had no memory of any good looking fighting games during that time.
Let me start off by saying great topic to choose for Thumb Wars guys. With that out of the way, I feel fighting games have been designed as of late to appeal to different demographics. One being those who don’t care for it from a competitive stand point and want something they can play and enjoy. The other being a game designed around being for the FGC (fighting game community, monsters, etc).
You can add whatever features you like to a game, but if the gameplay isn’t fun or engaging, no one will care to play it. SFxT had alot of positive hype around before the leak of on disc dlc and what not, what killed the game was balancing in the end. The game wasn’t fun to the competitive scene and the spectators because of timeouts. SfxT could have had the greatest/longest story mode in any fighter ever, but I could bet you my fair penny that very few people would be playing that game if it is as balanced as the launch of the game.
Well, a few topics to comment on there.
One being the barrier of entry to playing fighting games online. There is certainly an issue with the barrier to playing them at all, but the more I play the genre, the more I think that it’s as much because it’s simply a complex genre to really learn. I was a button masher/special spammer when it came to fighting games until about two years ago, when I picked up BlazBlue (not the easiest game to learn the genre with by any means) and someone on a forum pointed me to Dustloop.com, a competitive fighter site dedicated to ArcSys games. There I started to learn the genre – at first just combos, then the more important stuff that allows you to actually start those combos, like mixups, oki, and so on. I can honestly say that over these two years I’ve been learning new things almost every time I start playing a fighting game again, many of which aren’t just applicable to one game, because there’s just that much to learn even with the basic system mechanics that 2D fighters use (I haven’t even really gotten to trying 3D ones much yet).
(Attempting to split this up – posting it in one part isn’t working, nor did my first attempts at shortening it.)
…okay, my attempts to post even my next paragraph right now aren’t working for some reason. I’ll try again later.
Now, it doesn’t help that most fighting games don’t include a tutorial worthy of the name – I think Skullgirls and BlazBlue have by far the best, but even they could be improved. Most are not nearly so helpful. And this is where websites sort of fill the gap right now: if you really want to learn to play fighting games at all decently, you pretty much have to go to sites like the aforementioned Dustloop, or more prominently Shoryuken. This can be intimidating, since they’re oriented towards the competitive community, but they do include sections for teaching beginners to get into the genre. But you’ll never know that unless someone else familiar with them tells you about them, which is a problem. So there definitely needs to be some improvement as far as in-game tutorials go.
But even with a very good tutorial I’m not sure how effective it would be compared to players simply learning through experience. Those kinds of lessons just don’t sink in as readily until you’ve seen how these things work in an actual fight – to go back to my own experience, I didn’t really get how potent crossups could be until I played Street Fighter x Tekken online and faced a ton of opponents who would do them all the time, and started using them a lot myself, and over time learned to both defend against and employ them more effectively. I knew what a crossup was well before that, but it was facing it and getting destroyed by it that made me truly learn it and integrate it into my play. A lot of aspects of the genre are like that, I think.
Now, as far as including stories in fighting games goes, as much as I think that including stories in games improves them substantially (RPGs being my favorite genre), I think that developers really need to hire better writers if they’re going to make them a more prominent part of the genre. Because frankly, with the sole exception of Arc System Works (who aren’t perfect but do genuinely do well on the whole), it seems like fighting game developers don’t have writers worth a damn. SF4 and SFxT’s little segments in arcade mode, Soul Calibur 5, DoA5, games like these have convinced me of that – they’re bland at best, awkward and dumb more often, pretty darn painful at worst. Even Mortal Kombat 9 seems to me to get a lot of praise for its story mode only because it’s good by comparison to the others – it’s really only on the level of a dumb action movie with a bloated cast when you get right down to it, but that’s still much better than the norm, so people hold it up as a shining example of the genre.
So yeah, while I’ll always applaud Arc System Works for pushing the genre well past what anyone else does in this regard, and especially applaud Atlus for their work on Labrys’ story in P4A (which is by far the best story ever told in this genre, and a worthy addition to the Persona series), I’m just not sure whether it’s worth raising a fuss about developers that don’t bother with stories anymore. Because when they do, it just doesn’t seem to turn out well.
As for the main topic, the question of saturation and a possible crash, I have less to say there. I don’t have the knowledge that would be necessary to form an informed opinion of something like that. I will say that there does seem to be quite the amount of fighting games coming out these days. This year alone we’ve seen Soul Calibur 5, Street Fighter x Tekken, and Skullgirls earlier in the year, and Persona 4 Arena, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and Dead or Alive 5 in the past couple month. And that’s not counting downloadable re-releases of older games, like Marvel vs Capcom Origins or the upcoming XBLA/PSN release of the last Guilty Gear game. So some kind of saturation I could see – especially when you consider that many competitively-oriented fighting game players stick to just a game or two at a time to try and be the best they can at, so you can’t count on even the most hardcore fans to buy every fighting game released.
There we go, it finally posted it all. The site seems to have had a problem with something in my second paragraph, as it refused to post even that part alone until I tweaked random parts of it. Never seen that in the comments section before – though I know that the forum did that to me sometimes, back when I was still trying to use it. Must be something with this WordPress thing the site is based on.
Love the games. Hate the community and the fans around the games.
That’s a bit unfair. I’m a part of the community, I consider myself a fan of many fighting games, but I know how not to be a douchebag. I realize there are many jerks in the fighting game community, but the same can be said about all other genres.
Funny you say that here, but one of your other comments insults those who prefer and choose to play a game in a way you don’t agree with, or at least don’t think should be the only way they play it, but if that’s the only way they want to play it why do they deserve to be physically harmed? You’re just like Sakurai who punished the competitive players, and everyone else in the process, by adding stuff like tripping to brawl.
I’ve liked fighting games since a friend of mine got me hooked on UMK3 and SSF2. Since then, fighting games have been my 2nd favorite genre next to JRPGs. I’ll continue enjoying them till my gaming days come to an end, despite not being a tournament level player. Then again, I don’t like fighters SO much that I’d dedicate ALL my gaming time to mastering a few characters out of many others.
As for the debate, I think fighters have made a comeback since SF4 and Blazblue were released. I just hope this recent obsession with stories in fighters doesn’t go as far as making story a necessity over the actual fighting. It’s cool if a fighter has an entertaining plot but don’t make the plot the deciding factor. Other than that, fighters are doing just fine so far. There aren’t many fighters out there that suck. Maybe Battle Fantasia…maybe.
Fighters should all have story modes and extensive ones at that because single player in ANY fighting game right now that ISN’T an ARC System Works is a JOKE.
It’s simple. The hardcore fans who do nothing but play online can continue to do so while the GAME actually can offer something to fans that aren’t so keen on wasting hours of their life playing against the same match over and over.
I would say that is a bit unfair. Some people obviously get a lot of enjoyment playing 100s of matches, and they do that because of the deep mechanics underlying the game. However, from a financial standpoint, a fighter should include a lot of other features to be worth a $60 purchase, since a single set of mechanics and characters does not have a good breadth of content. A good compromise I think would be to make fighters just with the competitive modes but only charge $10-$20 for it.
How is it unfair? I know some people get enjoyment out of it so I said to keep the online in and the multilayer aspect in general. So they get to keep playing and the single player actually has something to offer to people who don’t care for the competitive aspect of the games.
Really I think the competitive nature of the games and the way “fans” of the fighting games themselves are really the reason the games fail and will continue to fail.
Do you know what a reversal is? Do you know what a super cancel is? (or a cancel in general) If your new YOU DON’T. And NONE of the fighting games attempt to teach you any of this. The problem therein lies with accessibility. While a newcomer has all of this to learn (with no help from the game by the way) and that is a serious disadvantage one that is not overcome easily because if the game doesn’t teach you how to actually play the other option is the community.
And the community around fighting games is heinous. Absolutely terrible. For new players they are absolutely the worst. For one, they don’t want new players to “spoil” their fun.
Well, when I lose in a fighting game I analyze what I did wrong and what I can do to improve. It is a very similar mindset that I share with moba players. Isn’t the point of playing a game to try to get better? If not why are you even playing it?
(Can’t reply to kersplackle so I’m hitting reply here)
That’s good for you, I’m glad, and most people do this. However that doesn’t change the fact that fighters are deeper games than the current game’s tutorials are able to teach you.
Also I play P4 Arena to see the story. CRAZY RIGHT? If they actually add a story mode maybe people would be interested just for the story alone and they could get more sales!
No that’s just wacky talk. EVERYONE enjoys playing hundreds of hours in a fighting game that’s why they sell so well…oh wait.
To be fair Skullgirls did attempt to teach new players various terms used in the FGC.
So because not everyone really cares about the single player, no fighters should even have it and they should be purely online vs. experience? But hey, at least they’re cheaper, and fuck those people who don’t play hardcore online, they’re just wussy newbs anyway.
The opposite actually. A $60 fighter should include a good story mode, along with plenty of other modes, to make the game worth it. For those fighters which just want to solely focus on the competitive mode, then making those games cheaper might result in less skilled players taking a chance with the game since it will not be too big of a loss if they don’t like the game or if they cannot get better at it.