Memorization & Reactions: More Fighting Game Misconceptions 

Something I think about a lot - the guy talking about "forgetting the controller is there" is kind of taking for granted that he can do that when playing other genres. But have you ever seen someone who's never played an FPS try to move and aim at the same time? Or circle strafe? It's HARD, it takes practice just like how learning how to consistently do fireballs and DPs when you want them takes practice. But because of the massive popularity of games like Halo, CoD, Fortnite, etc most gamers have already developed these skills at some point. I wonder how different the perception of the difficulty of fighting games would be if there had been a massively successful fighting game in the modern gaming era that became a worldwide phenomenon the way SF2 did back in the day, or Fortnite is now.

There used to be a game that played like For Honor, but at half speed. It was the release version For Honor, and it was bad.

Recently had a conversation with some people who don’t play fighting games and it pretty much went “Fighting games would be better if you didn’t have to do X” “You don’t have to X. You can have fun and win without doing X- and if you really don’t like it there are fighting games without it.” “No. The entire genre should simply not have X.”

I feel like their complaint of "fast" is misdirected. It's not that fighting games are necessarily too fast, but rather that there's almost no downtime ingame. Like, in CS, you stare at a shop screen for a few seconds (buying stuff is a fraction of that), then a few more seconds autopilot waddling into position, some active gameplay where you actually need to pay attention, and if you die you can take your hands off the keyboard and chill till the round ends. Similar story with games like League/Dota, in many CCGs you can practically tab out while your opponent takes their turn, etc. In fighting games, your "breaks" are ROUND 2, FIGHT, and maybe a few seconds of getting comboed/doing combos. Even if it's just two people crouching at midrange, hitting no buttons, it's still a "fast" situation that's no different from someone holding a corner in the hopes a head wanders into your crosshair. It's even worse if the game has some sort of frequent combo breaker mechanic, because then even combos aren't a moment to catch your breath. No, seriously, I've gone full circle and I now find getting comboed to be the shockingly relaxing part of a genre that's otherwise demanding your intense, undivided attention for 3-5 minutes per game.

for the life of me when i started playing fighting games i had the memory of a goldfish when it came to remembering combos and even specials, but over time muscle memory just kicked in then instead of worrying what i was doing i started worrying about what my opponent is doing and remembered "oh, i've played against this character before, they have these 3 annoying moves that idk how to deal with so i better block" because taking a combo will do more damage than getting grabbed for 10 percent. it took me like a whole year to play with intentionality and yeah it was frustrating losing to some spamming because i refused to stop and pay attention to what they were doing but damn does it feel good to beat a flow chart or someone who is obviously trolling with gimmicks. competitive games are just that, they're competitive and getting good at anything competitive will make you learn what you're doing wrong by losing, it's not gonna happen over night and you'll either want to learn the game more or say "this is bullshit and hard and why am i gonna learn something that i'm supposed to be having fun in?". these games are fun when the learning is fun, and not everyone learns the same way or will have fun the same way. idk, i like fighting games

In the beginning, most of For Honor was juuuust a smidge slower than most fighting games. That meant everyone could block everything and it became way too punishing to attack and be proactive (some exploits non withstanding). Fighting games need to be a certain speed so that some moves are barely reactable if you are expecting them, otherwise, opening people up becomes impossible, and aggression becomes highly deemphasized.

Honestly the only thing stopping me from playing more fighting games is being able to make time to get into them. I love all fighting games and I'm obsessed with them, and Core-A-Gaming helped me figure out a good way to schedule my play time. All I got to do is putting that to practice and get used to the way the controls feel so I can actually combo.

I think an often overlooked difference between fighting games and competitive shooters (for example) is that most people are familiar with the basics of shooters because a lot of it is standard for non-competitive 3d games. I've never played CS, but I know the controls wouldn't confuse me the way that my first fighting game did. Maybe that's why platform fighters feel more accessible, because 2d platformers are a genre people are familiar with and the basic movement transfers over.

Yeah, he's definitely catching onto the mental tax of playing games. Especially when you're new, every second feels like a decision and it can be overwhelming. On the subject of combos, New players I've played with totally miss the interaction available in strings. Stuff like, they start getting combo'd and they don't press block in case the combo is dropped.

ill say one thing in defense of these people: losing in fgs really sucks, and it feels worse than losing in any other type of game i've ever played. i think a lot of people have the experience of starting an fg, learning controls and basic combos in training mode, and then dying a few matches into arcade mode or the second they go online. it's a tough feeling and people end up overthinking why they didn't like it by saying "execution is stupid" or "combos are too long" or "i can't react". in reality they only got bodied because they're not used to how the game works, just like someone playing a souls game for the first time for example, except it just *feels* worse in a fighting game. i think it might be because other games give you incremental feelings of progress, and while you can look at a fg that way (wow i landed a jab!) it requires a specific perspective and it's hard to get to the point where you're satisfied with such small victories.

The one about “button combos” is probably referring to strings in NRS games and Tekken

It's a cool topic, but I'm pretty sure him talking about "reaction time / fractions of a second" doesn't mean it in a way of "reacting to this 3f jab". Like you said, we see these things from FG players' perspectives, and I'm pretty sure assuming what being meant is something like "hey how many startup/active frames does this move have" is a very FG-player-way of thinking about it. Especially since he brings up the shooter/CSGO example, I think the intended message is more like: In FPS, you need the same amount of reaction time as in FGs (= decisions you have to make quickly based on what your opponent is doing), but you have a lot of downtime between these moments. Usually you don't see one or all opponents in an FPS at all times, and these moments either have no decision making at all or just decisions "you make yourself" (at your own pace, rather than decisions your opponent forces you to make). In FGs, these situations happen all the time, though. Your opponent is almost always at a range where he can quickly force you to make a decision: walking in => do I throw a fireball? do I press a button? do I block? jumping => do I anti-air? what do I use to AA? do I try to just get out of the way instead? do I block? Of course often characters have other/more options, but you get the idea. The player is always on the screen, and can always "force you to react" with a counter-measure to their offense. If you compare it to CSGO, you first have a part of the match where you just position yourself (buying phase, anything before both teams can meet) and then often just cover one or more angles for a while. There are literally no decisions your opponents force you to make quickly as long as they don't show up, so depending on play you have a downtime of say, half a minute. If you defeat the enemies on one spot, it also often takes a while until more show up, so that gives you more downtime between these moments where you're forced to make quick decisions / "react in fractions of a second". I believe this also is why newer players tend to walk back and corner themselves in FGs. In FGs you're often just a jump or 1-2 dashes away from being in immediate danger from your opponent's options, and the opponent is always visible on screen. It may not seem like much for FG players, but if you're new, not used to this and probably have to really think about which button was which normal or special before pressing it, these scenarios can seem a lot more "immediate" than they are. And the safest way to gain some distance and catch your breath, as they know from other game genres, is to, well, make some distance (walk back). It's a reaction from players that fear the opponent's options (=> ability to force you to make decisions quickly) or players that want to gain this "downtime" where there isn't an opponent whose actions they'll have to react to.

I feel like a lot of these issues that non-fighting game players mention could be alleviated by prioritizing teaching players movement and defensive options before offensive options. The crux of neutral in fighting games is movement and defensive options, but almost every fighting game tutorials prioritizes teaching player's the functionality of moves or combos. Even the best fighting game tutorials fall victim to this. This only feeds into the stigma of "Fighting games are all about the combos" when this clearly isn't the case. The day a fighting game noob says "Holy shit that mixup is rediculous" or "Holy shit these footsies are rediculous" before"Holy shit that combo is rediculous" is the day people will finally get the point of fighting games.

I think the main issue is that when competitive minded players find a new game which had different kind of skillset that they're used to you get a natural reaction to think that there is something wrong with the game. You see this happening inside fighting games also when people claim that game x y or z is too difficult to get into because the things they aren't used to using aren't working anymore. They don't want to feel like a beginner anymore, they've learned that you should make workers in rts games, how to position themselves in cs and how to lasthit in mobas and instead of learning the basics of a new genre they lash out when they find a genre with equal depth with completely different skillset.

I get the guy saying "I hate when I follow the instructions and nothing happens and I don't know why". Trying to learn fighting games and the character missions tell you to do this combo, you press all the right buttons but it fails and the game doesn't say why. Turning on input history can help to troubleshoot, but it'd be nice if the mode just straight told you why you failed. "Too slow", "wrong input", etc.

funny enough For Honor used to be that. attacks used to be way slower across the board and it was possible to react to almost everything. this led to situations where nobody wanted to go on the offense. making a game slower actually makes reaction even more important because if you can react to everything, you don't need to think about what your opponent is going to do and you don't have options to force your opponent into situations where they have to think about anything

Lol Sajam will forever have something to say about this topic.

Personally I had to go through an entire journey through a bunch of different games to finally get into fighting games. Skullgirls was the first game in the genre that I had ever owned, Guilty Gear was the game that sparked my love for fighting games, Under Night made me appreciate all the deep technical stuff, and the announcement of Granblue Versus converted one of my favorite things into the genre. Now I'm just neck-deep into fighting games to the point where it's like 50% of what I think about all the time. I've even convinced my entire friend group to play bbcf and they're having a blast. It's really great that almost all of their first experience of getting into a fighting game is with an entire group of friends, that's like one of the best ways to get into anything. Now they're all slowly trying to learn the really complicated things about fighting games, which I can help them with as they go. Everyone needs a different game and a different experience to get that spark they need to really get into fighting games.

People view from outside: man you gotta memorize so much. Fg player: I mashed because it felt right lol

I think it helps a fucking ton to get into fighting games as a kid where none of this shit occurs to you and you just play the game because it's fun. Failing that you could use some patient players that can both answer your question and point you in the direction of the question you should be asking. Because the tutorials in fighting games are fairly consistently trash. As complaints go these guys seemed kind of reasonable and perhaps fighting games could even stand to diversify to meet some of their concerns (and possibly already have if you look hard enough and/or don't care about netcode). It's entirely possible the guy who posted that has never heard of Sam Sho, and I haven't played Sam Sho because it's a broken game that doesn't work online. So I'm going to ignore Sam Sho when talking about the fraction of a second reaction times. Reacting to jabs is kind of a fucking nuts expectation but you might not know that if you haven't played fighting games a ton. That aside and it's not a small aside, that could be something that should be communicated to people that are interested in fighting games. Their is a need for fraction of a second reactions since 24 frames is still very much a fraction of a second and the games are balanced so you will get smoked if you can't block a snake edge in Tekken or an overhead in Mortal Kombat. Unfortunately if you can't learn to react at that speed you're just kind of fucked. I don't think that's a solvable problem either. If you slow them down too much they'd slide into being nothing but a memorization of frame data as good players would be able to block everything and always know if/what the punish was. Isn't there already Japanese pro who makes this into an issue for anime devs? But he says that moments of fast reactions are fine, it's just got to have a break and fighting games can be looked at as moments of action. A round of Tekken literally has a 60 second timer. Beyond that you get pauses in action; throws, cinematic supers, your opponents combo. Their are chances to take a glance around a meter, blink, even take a quick drink mid round. You've got to be right back at it since your opponent is always right on top of you but it's not like you have to play for 3 minutes straight trying not to blink until your eyes start to bleed. A for the second guys complaint about juggle combos, as much as I love fighting games. I kind of agree with him, I don't think he knows how to balance it right but I don't think it would hurt for some games to have shorter combos. I know tons of players love combos but for me learning mine just feels like a chore and watching my opponents is also not fun. It's like a price of admission I pay every time I want to learn a new character, rather than why I want to learn a new character. Personal preference and all that. I could do with a return to something like launcher, string, special or string, launch, ender string instead of something twice that long. We could still have big hits that you have to be good to land that open up a short combo but put more damage up front, scale less and have more gravity so the guitar hero aspect is lessened. I've heard Sam Sho might be a good example of this, but again it has shit netcode. I wouldn't want all fighting games to be like that because some people fucking love ToD tag battle bullshit combos and they should totally get to have them but we've reached the point where games where people bitch about combos being too simple have 10 hit plus combos. Maybe a few games could legit tone it down. Anyways just some thoughts. Really I think the biggest hurdle is getting into them after you've aged past like 12 and start to develop that fear of being bad at something that kids don't have.

Non-FG players: this is why I don't play FGs FG players: you have a misconception I find it interesting that discussions like these tend to go this way a lot of the time. I feel it stems primarily from their lack of clarity, especially 2D fighters. An example is how frame data is (not) communicated. A character lands an attack on your block and your block pose looks exactly the same as with every other move that character uses. There's nothing there to tell you that there's a difference and it greatly influences the options you have available to you.

"Half the speed of for honor"?!?! So like, turn based? smh.

i find it crazy that people say "i dont like juggling in fighting games cause i dont get to play the game" like shit bro if i die in league i gotta wait a bit and depending on where the fight is i gotta head over to the fight if you get got early on in a cs match you dont get to play for the rest of the round any turn based game christ just walking to a place in a big open world game there are so many instances in games where you are in a "not playing the game" state

Samsho is slow Good luck avoiding untechable 3 frame throws, have a nice day

I bought SF5 during the sale, and I'm really enjoying it. It's the first traditional 2d fighter I've really spent time with. I'm like 5-39 so I'm doing fantastic in ranked for no prior experience I would say what makes me most upset and demoralized about learning the game, which you very briefly touched on, is when I'm trying to execute something and It's simply not coming out. I went into the trials for juri really briefly and a specific combo was giving me trouble. It's jump in Light kick, standing light punch, standing light kick, 623 light punch. I'm having trouble even getting the first light punch to connect after the jumped light kick and im getting just no feedback on the timing. There's no "too slow" or "too fast" or even a "stop mashing". I'm just uselessly jumping over and over trying to hit this, what I would assume is, entirely basic combo and not getting anywhere. Mechanical obfuscation paired with precise timing means the feedback the game gives you is never helpful. The easier the combo is the less of a problem it is, but as you start to add more complexity to a combo you never quite know if youre dropping the mechanical requirement, or flubbing the timing and that is why learning is so difficult as a new player

The thing that really gets me about the memorization thing is that MOBAs 1)Have a premise that has to be explained as opposed to “kill other guy” 2) A shit ton of characters 3) tons of items and in general are an incredibly complex genre, but people will act like fighting games are somehow unique in their complexity. Clearly memorization/complexity is not the hurdle people *perceive* (hey there’s that word again) it to be otherwise there wouldn’t be millions of people watching these games. I can’t help but feel like that’s not the actual root cause of the problem but rather a reflexive reaction.

I think what these sorts of comments demonstrate is that fighting games fail to make learning how to play the game fun. Mainstream genres don't need to put in as much effort in this respect because players often bring years of experience with them to a new title. When a new FPS\BR\character action game is released a large proportion of the player base are not starting from scratch - they likely have years of experience to draw on. Whether they realize it or not they have already put in countless hours of practice in other similar games. Fighting games are a relatively niche genre and so its more likely that new players will be starting from scratch so if the genre wants to grow its 100% on fighting game developers to find creative ways to make the learning process accessible, intuitive and most of all, fun.

I agree that Fighting Game players under estimate how crazy some shit appears for new players. As someone who's trying to get into SFV after DBFZ got me into fighting games, not knowing what your opponent's options are & just how quickly things fall apart is the biggest hurdle. Basically if you guess wrong twice in a row & they get the stun, it's GG. However like most things, once you get past the initial hurdle, it does get better & you can just roll with it and learn on the fly.

This talk about speed and no downtime is pretty interesting. I actually feel similarly about Smash as a traditional fighting game player - I'm used to the downtime during combos, etc. where you don't need to worry about mindgames (outside of the occasional reset). Meanwhile "combos" in Smash are a rapid series of mixups which require active thinking on both sides. That game drains my mental energy way too quickly.

I used to feel like I had to do optimal combos consistently to even begin playing fighting games, which is why UNIST felt to bad for me when I started. I thought I had to play simpler games because I couldn't do tournament optimal combos off of any stray hit. Nowadays, I boot up +R and go "well this five hit Millia combo gets me knockdown, so let's do that and see how it goes" and the games are much more enjoyable. It took me almost a year of bashing my head against the wall for this to sink in though, and I've grown more in a month or two of this mindset than I learned in the entire last year. I think it's so important that games have a sort of reminder that being optimal is not the only way to play, it's about having good knowledge. I love the Under-Night character tutorials because they start off with "this is a good poke, this is an anti-air, this is a good way to control space, etc" and there's maybe 5-6 moves per character that, without knowing any combos at all, allow you run a gameplan. They also then teach you basic hitconfirms, a mixup, and some other fundamental/specific stuff with your character for those who are good to go on the basics. I wish every game did this, as going back through these in UNI has made the game so much easier to approach.

You're comparing a moment in CSGO to a moment in fighting games, saying they're similar. The poster is comparing a whole match of CSGO to a whole match in fighting games, saying they're very different.

The "headshot snap" is way faster than reacting to overheads. When you flick to a headshot its a very subconcious thing, you'll freak the fuck out when you land a crazy one. Mixups are conscious in their reaction, its all "and THERES the overhead" *stands up

as someone who's only just getting back into fighters recently after being put off the genre for years, I do have to admit that I'd get confused when I saw fg players talk about frame advantage and stuff, thinking "damn you need to react to something within 1frame? These guys are crazy", and only now do I realise that its not really like that at all

That one about following instructions and nothing happens and you don't know why. For me, that's links, when you press too soon, nothing happens. When you press too late, the combo drops. The difference between those two circumstances can be imperceivable and there's nothing to indicate what the mistake was, it just didn't work. The worst part is, lot of Arksys games have audio cues for combo challenges. But the game that needs this the most and then some, Street fighter, has nothing.

That's pretty interesting idea actually. The issue with beginners is that their reaction times are much much slower than veteran players. By the time they've registered that they've blocked something, the other person has long since recovered and their opportunity has passed, so they don't even register the idea of punishing on block as a possibility. So what if, in single player, instead of difficulty being done through damage values and introducing cheap attacks, easy difficulty involves slowing the attacks and the AI only being able to use a limited set of super reactable attacks? That way, they have far more time to react to situations and practice their responses to different situations, and get them down before they transition to reacting to faster and faster situations until its at the speed of the versus game. You could also slow the attacks in certain fights, so they have to carefully consider what attacks to choose, and teach them about whiff punishing.

5:35 I think you're missing the point. I think the idea is that you have to memorize the inputs. People new to fighters probably arent gonna know what "inputs" will generally give what moves. Quarter cricles giving projectiles for example, or DP's giving upwards/invulnerable moves. Some games just have Light, Medium, Heavy, and motion + button gives you the same move but three different strengths of it, but then you have Street Fighter or BlazBlue where the button you press might give you a completely different move. SF and KOF has buttons split between Punches and Kicks, so you have to remember whats Quarter Circle with Punch, and whats quarter circle with kick, and Blazblue can be even worse for that since, even if its less buttons overall (A,B,C, and Drive), alot of characters have only one or two versions of a move, so QcF A and QcF C might be moves but QcF B isnt. It is an extra layer of things you have to learn. You also have to consider different games might have different methods of supers. Some are just "press two buttons together with a motion input" and some are just fancier motion inputs, like Double Quarter circles, or QcB, HcF, or Forward, HcF, which further adds to the layers of things you have to "memorize" for a character just cause their supers might be completely different to everyone elses.

These people's opinion (which are as valid as ours) helped me understand why Smash Ultimate is an important game despite being (in my opinion) a "bad" game. By design, the FGC doesn't include anyone who doesn't like the current state of fighting games. If we go only by the opinion of people who are already in the community, things will always stay the same and we're hurting our growth. That thread was pretty interesting

There is a lot of memorization in counter strike so his point is moot.

As a betatester / player with only a super shitty laptop I have to play on lower speed to not lose frames and for the game to be enjoyable. It is kinda neat and it's also what allowed me to become a betatester, the lower speed (and my crazy creativity) was a good thing to find tons of infinite combos and techniques that the developers didn't intend. Even though this makes it so I can't play online against the other betatesters or the devs. anyway Sajam cheers from south amerca , argentina.

Just to comment on that guy who liked smash inputs with directions... If you think about it, Smash has 4 ground normals (up down neutral foward tilt), and 5 air normals (up down forward back neutral air) Now think about DBFZ. Typical character has something like 7 ground normals (LMH Crouching LMH and S), and 4 air normals (LMHS) No one is out here taking a fuckin math test with flash cards and an annotated bibliography, they just play the game and can easily point out one of 4 moves the character can do in the air that they've seen 10000 times. Took me two weeks to figure out how to play with a M+KB in shooters and how weak of an excuse is "I kept feeling like the keyboard was there"

I can kinda understand the complains about button combos, but it's probably more of a presentation issue, both in game and in terms of the community. When you play these mission modes that teach you the moves and combos, it's huge strings of various moves and when people talk about it online it's often the same. I mean it makes sense, combos are fun to do when you learn them, but it can be intimidating. And even if you get past that, Anime fighters in particular love throwing in other mechanics with nonsensical names. What the fuck is a vorpal supposed to be? Why can I both guard and shield?? And why the fuck is Akatsukis DP not done with the usual DP motion?! (I have been learning a bit of UNI recently lol) Most games nowadays do have tutorials that explain all these things, but let's be honest, nobody is gonna remember how vorpal works or why it matters after it was mentioned in tutorial step 37 out of 55. Although I think the nr 1 barrier to entry is that a lot of games just don't have any fun casual ways to play the game. Single player is often just the arcade mode and FG AIs are rarely fun to play against, so unless you really enjoy labbing in training mode or have a friend to learn with you, there isn't really a good place to get comfortable enough with the game to get ready for playing against other people. (this is getting better though, games like Mortal Combat or DBFZ do put much more effort into single player) anyway, just some opinion from someone who enjoys watching FGs more than actually playing them

I think it’s interesting that the first two comments mentioned how they would like games with one-button direction specials. Granblue and Power Rangers: BftG work to accommodate those people and they’re very fun. And when those games came out, fgc people would complain that “this isn’t actually what new players want.”

I think the main takeaway from this is that the fighting game onboarding process for new players is pretty bad. Both as a community and for the tutorial experience. (Ironically, TFH has one of the, if not the best tutorial out there.) Players feel like they need to grasp every concept at once, combos, neutral, guard, mixups, while this is not how anybody here learned. We all started more or less the same way. Pick a cool dude and press buttons. Then there's how to do a fireball. And we built on from there. Games should be doing more to get non-fighting game players to play them. Injustice did this splendidly, with strong IP and a full-on single-player experience. I feel like if more games had (good and engaging) single player campaigns, it would help a lot to alleviate those problems.

It's refreshing to see someone voice an opinion as to why they don't enjoy something as "its not for me, but here's what I would like" instead of how people usually come at this from the outside with the "fighting games are never going to get the precious market that is me, if you don't change now and its bad design that you haven't yet!" . I appreciate that 1st poster for that.

Imagine watching tekken shuffling at half speed bruh

I actually commented on this thread, which I'll link below. I go into more detail in the comment, but the gist of it is that while I do think that fighting games get unfairly stigmatized for their difficulty by people who aren't familiar with the genre compared to other genres, I don't think it is purely a coincidence that fighting games tend to get that rep even compared to other genres that are also very involved at high levels. "There are inherent barriers to jumping in and having fun compared to other genres that make the games an easy turn off for newcomers. Because of the knowledge-based, 1v1 nature, with no hiding spots or preparation phases, you're just kind of thrust into the thick of things with nothing to save you." "In an FPS, your aim can steadily get better over time, but combos in fighting games are a very on-or-off ordeal, where you can either do them or you can't. Even if you learn combos progressively starting with basic versions, you have to master each level before actually being able to use them in real matches. If improving your aim is a linear graph, improving fighting game execution can be more of a staircase with frequent plateaus and no visible results." "All that being said, I think that a lot of the intimidation surrounding fighting games comes largely from misinformation and a failure on the games' part to properly teach and guide newer players." Combinations of factors like this do contribute to fighting games being (imo) more intimidating to get into than other competitive games. Link to full comment: www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/jsw4b1/-/gc4nlhh

I think the problem is they want game thats easy to play, not a game that thats easy to play after you played it for about 100 hours

I know the lab and combo monsters don't agree, but as a casual lover of fighting games, there is absolutely no joy in seeing yourself be stuck in a combo for upwards to 15 seconds. It may be a blast to execute to people, but being stuck in that long ass state of helpnessness just feels shitty and disheartening to the max. Short sweet combos are awesome and fantastic, even if they cause immense damage (see Granblue), but getting dragged off the floor for the umpteeth time in tekken or god forbid allowing a single in through dbz fighters just feels horrid. Big thing about these is the LENGTH you're stuck there just looking as they just go ham on you. ps. As for the 'well you've several characters' argument, it literally feels worse to get stuck in that lockout three times in a row. MIND YOU, I fully support the combo-monster games and I know they're not for me, but the more the game leans away from extended combos the more I'm interested in it.

I mean people make the same complaints about FGs over and over for a reason; FGs in general do a terrible job of slowly opening themselves up to the player and letting them see why theyre special. Instead of a single player campaign that teaches you the things through gameplay, you're given an hour long tutorial that feels like homework, and probably an arcade mode where you button mash a bit. While far from perfect, at least Dbfz attempted to have a story mode that had banners at the top of fights giving you new aspects to focus on (block 3 X)

Allow me (someone who likes dive kick and footsies and thinks the rest are unnecessarily hard) to explain what I hate about fighting games: I don’t like that you can know what you need to do, and then not be able to do it. For example, in chess, let’s say you need to move a piece like 1. e4. There is no barrier at all to moving that pawn. You just do it effortlessly. That may have been the wrong move depending on the situation, but the fact is that you decided to make that move, and you made it. Whereas if chess was a fighting game, you could try to do e4 but then instead you get e3. So even if you’re big braining it and read your opponent every time and have the best options selects, you lose because you simply can’t do what you’re trying to do. For example. Let’s say J want to Safe jump as Nash in SFV After ⬇️↙️⬅️HK so that I can have a meaty option that also beats EXDP. In order to do this, I have to delay my jump by exactly 1 frame. That’s it. And that’s just a simple idea. In order to be able to do a jumping attack and block in time, I have to make a 1 frame link. Why? There’s no reason for execution to be this difficult. Which is why my favorite fighting game is dark souls 2 Arena. Everything you do is so easy, that you only make mistakes, not accidents. If they made a dark souls 2 arena type game where everyone was forced to be the same level, that would be fantastic.

So basically, go play samsho and then look into other things

I think this response makes a lot of sense and it's correct as far as the experience of playing fighting games one you're used to the game and its mechanics (I talk to people about a relatively long period at the start of a game where you "learn to see" what is happening - i.e. how player actions correspond to button presses, what is possible from a particular position, etc). However, what I think you really miss is that this person is describing how fighting games *feel* to outsiders. They feel like they constantly need to react and they are asking for, with their limited understanding of the genre, a fighting game where you would need to react less. Like, it's true that they misunderstand how often you are making decisions, but that misunderstanding probably comes from mis-identifying when they have an opportunity to take a turn. They start playing and it feels, to them, like every single hit in a string is a potential moment where they could do something if they were fast enough. I think there are actually a lot of features we could add to games that would make this more obvious to players. Like, training modes and replays could highlight missed inputs (i.e. you hit this button and if you had hit it 3 frames before / after it would have linked, a special move would have come out, etc). You could also have a mode where characters have...like auras showing if you have an opportunity to interrupt your opponent. Like - think how helpful it would be to have your character flash when the other person drops a link? It would help you see it and help you start to think about the game the way veterans do.

this makes me think of that topic about something called mental stacks or something

the memorization thing is interesting cause i find that problem usually fades away pretty quickly when i was playing yu-gi-oh some of the combos were giving me trouble so i just wrote them out on a notepad document and kept them on my screen but after some games of doing the combos i didn't really need to look at it very often i just knew what to do.

This is definitely a discussion worth having in detail. Shooters tend to be more intuitive, with every action being a single input that immediately makes sense to the player. There's probably some tech-skill lying around at top level, but everyone knows the basic actions from the get go, and from there it becomes an information war. In other words, you can win in shooters without being better than your opponent in a gunfight, but knowing more about the map/game. This is also true of fighting games, but it's less intuitive. In a fighting game, lacking tech-skill might mean you're losing an aspect of your character. It might be the difference between a win and a loss. You can still win based on knowledge, but you can also lose to someone with godlike reactions and execution despite knowing more. Sometimes, knowledge can hurt more than help (the old "No mixup mixup"). Both players have access to all the information, even though one may utilize it better. There's also the misconception that training mode is required in fighters. Private matches or gun ranges may exist in shooters but I've never felt the need to lean on them to understand how to play the game or improve. It's expected to learn through playing. We like to say this is true of fighters, but a game like Smash Melee is an entirely different beast between casual and competitive play. The really interesting bit of the comments in the vid are comparing to an RTS. RTS is known for having high execution and quick reactions, so I'd once again say the main difference here is access to information. You can't see the entire map in an RTS at once, so vision is still one of the major factors.

I'd say one thing that is important to the first guy argument is that csgo's reaction moments are more easily understandable, like the opponent head its sights on me I better take cover, or the opponent is trying to peek out of the cover better shoot them. While in fighting games similar situations are more artificial, like blocking high and low and dodging throws imo aren't as naturally understandable as a shootout. Not to say that in the end they aren't the same thing, but I think that first layer of dissecting what is happening and what are his options is probably something that requires more under standing than your average fps

He wants a fighting game slower than fucking For Honor? What do you want, bullet time?

Starting out of course people don't memorize "everything", but to actually eventually be good at fighting games and not play braindead, fighting games have a TON of knowledge you have to be able to process and retain. So personally I can understand the sentiment of some of these posts....

i think it's because of the misconception that you have to know so much and be able to execute so many things right off the bat that just scares people away. honestly to enjoy a fighting game at a basic level all you need is being able to move in all directions and press one button or two buttons at once, so you can more or less boil it down to 2 buttons at most, grab, punch, block, move forward and back and jump and duck. when it comes to the misconception that people are reacting to when a punch is thrown, they are not doing that. they are predicting a punch is gonna be thrown and try to give themselves enough margin to block in time in order to do anything else they themselves want to do. some newer people will sit and hold block the entire game because they don't know when they will get hit or how so they aren't able to make predictions and that's when they try to use reactions to compensate and ofcourse that doesn't work so they get frustrated and think you either have to have godlike reactions or all you do is just block the entire game. which in reality fighting games is more about spacing and trying to corner each other to make it easier to beat the shit out of the other player and try not to get cornered themselves. combos and a lot of special moves are just to make the game look more impressive and give the game more depth and complexity. Story Time i remember when i was a wee lad, i played street fighter 2, but the shocking thing with this story is, that the manual i got didn't tell you how to perform any special moves and i played with friends and none of us knew how to do anything like that which was totally fine and we had fun. so when i played the computer and they did a special move i was amazed and thought it was only the cpu that was allowed to have that and i thought this for a good chunk of time. but one day i accidentally did a special move and i was dumbfounded, i tried to replicate what i did and i failed hard, and so i stopped worrying about it and when i accidentally did a special move i started to understand what the game was telling me to do in order to do them and so i learned about 3 or 4 special moves, but i didn't become flustered because i didn't know how to do them all or anything, it was just this cool thing i could show off to my friends and tell them how to do it themselves. but the moral of the story is, you don't need to know everything in a fighting game to enjoy it, just need to know enough in how to not lose to it.

After playing strive and having genuine fun with a fighting game for the first time in years of trying to get into this genre my answer to "Would you play them if they were slower" is a definitive yes. Strive still has fast and intense moments, but it's slowed down JUST enough that I can finally play it with consistency and feel like I actually had some agency over the outcome of the matches I played.

the combo part hits home to me, i suck at combos but i still have tons of fun in fighting games, especialy fast ones, and you know why? cuz i play a very neutral playstile, most normals combo into specials, so i just do footsies and go for those short chains if i get a hit, got me some wins online, few, but some, and i was having fun, plus, fast games mean my oportunity to go at it again after being hit happens more times and i can keep playing, having fun

So many of these complaints and criticisms, not all mind you, I think the genre in general should experiment with defensive options WHILE getting combo'd beyond breakers/bursts, but most boil around "I should have intuitive mastery of fighting games because I sorta know how a fight works in real life"

The only issues with reactions is trying to properly combo off of shit with 0.5 hitstop frames before the foe techs and whoops your ass for dropping a basic bread and butter.

It's like my friend who said rising thunders inputs made it too easy and he didn't like it. But he only played Ed in SF5 because he couldn't do inputs on the other fighters.

"I like to go with the flow without memorizing" The U N G A beckons!

This is one of the reasons SamSho 2 is probably my favorite fighting game of all time. Speed is not really an issue. Also way back in the day my friend and I were playing CvS2 IRCC and he picked speed3 while I normally played on speed1. He demolished me 3 - 0 then i asked if we could re but with speed1. Reverse 3 - 0 and we both realized whatever you're used to is what makes the difference

I like sajam but I dislike videos like this, instead of acknowledging their points as possibly valid he counter argued or made excuses for fighters. Here you have people saying I'd play these games but....so they are potential customers as far as informing them that certain games that might fit their niche is good but still something needs to change across all fighters.

I’m trying to get into skullgirls on switch. I kinda get the OP. Training mode is rough, and playing with a controller isn’t helping. I haven’t even gotten into picking a character and wonder if I can memorize all the patterns and options to a reasonable extent.

in the words of fatality (the smash player): "im not reacting to what my opponent is doing, im reacting to his relative position on screen and what options he has in that situation"

Sajam is amazing. I wish more people were like him.

6:35 - i had an idea for this, and with it you could just convert any fighting game or any 3d action game to it. i think it's that good. tell me how u feel. you put a "confirm combo button" in. and it works the same as a confirm in any fighting game, you hit them, you react in time or know it'll hit, you press the button, a short stylish animation happens, that can be different each time based on how fast u do it to the confirm, and do different damage based on how close proximity wise, or what move u did before it, and it adds extra damage to what u just did in the same way a combo post confirm does. if it doesnt hit, it does a shitty unsafe animation like you missed a command throw. cos to me the skillful part of a combo, is the confirm or conversion. i admit it does remove the conversion side of it, like u wont have to worry about distance of your special or super, or if theyre in the air, or if its counter hit. but i think it's a really streamlined system that would work in every game. like imagine it, u hit your launcher in tekken, u press the confirm button, it molests the dude and takes 50% of their health, u hit ur cr lk, cr lk as akuma in sf3, u press confirm button it does 30% and his little super fireball. you eliminate so much dumb stuff. -then for whatever reason, i wrote a ranty essay explaining my thought process, but i shorted the first bit so u dont need this bit- in old games you used to not be able to go normal, normal, special, super, and longer variants exist with air chains and EX moves and OTG, and whatever, you could only do, normal to special, or normal to super, and that moved damage out of combos into neutral, and made fighting games popular with simpler players because they didnt need to know or memorise combos (or punishes, that's another side of memorisation), they could just win in neutral or with basic pressure that still hurt. and you could create and learn that pressure on the fly. the original reason SF2 had 6 buttons was because it looked more impressive on an arcade cabinet, that game design is wasteful, and creates memory problems for players, so many games have 2 or 3 buttons that hit you, that includes FPS games(shoot,knife,greande), RTS, VF (kick,punch,throw/block), DOA, DMC, and manage to put more moves in than SF does with 6 buttons. you can remove the heavy button by setting them as command normals of medium moves, this happened in SVC chaos, where chun li's cr mk, is a 3b, and her cr lk, is a 2b. u can remove special motions with a special button + directions, the majority of characters do not have 6 or more special moves for this to be a problem, smash and granblue did that. the long strings people have memorised are arbitrary, and the special inputs are archaic. they contribute to why fighting games wont be popular, people want to play the game, if u have to sit and watch ur character get beat up for 5-15 seconds, which can be up to 50% of a rounds time it's not a good experience, and vice versa, if u have to spend hours to learn and recall in a match scenario an arbitrary string because it does the most damage you have to waste time in the training mode, no one playing Fortnite, or league, or CS has had to spend time on that, u just play, and u can learn passively on the fly. other things that help with understanding this, you can batter somebody in League, or FIFA, or Rocket League or an RTS to an unwinnable position, but even if theyre losing horribly, they still get to make decisions, and play for a decent % of the game, in a fighting game, you have a chance to only get to play for 5% of a game, while the other 95% is ur character being combo'd knocked over, mixed and combo'd again. special motions are frustrating for everyone , especially newer players, not getting a move, not getting "what you want", it "dropping my inputs", it's not fun, there's a skill to it, but do you care about someone's thumb gymnastics routine or do u want to play a game. reloading a gun doesnt need you to do a fireball motion to have him move his hands, because it has a button, it's simpler, it's accessible and it doesnt detract from the experience by being easier. the majority of new players quit while still liking fighting games, they're that bad for themselves. other horrible mechanics. tight punish windows. tekken, doa, dont have this due to the massive buffer window, if u sit mashing something, it's coming out first frame, fantastic system, the exception is like mishima's trying to reversal wind fist, but i dont care, leave me alone. but SF and KOF, it's more practice required, it makes cheap moves exist, they arent just knowledge checks, theyre practice checks. decapre light hands -3, grappler easy churn and plink, 3f DP easy, u literally mash and the reversal window that's only for specials saves you. cammy or rog or something, perfectly time your 3 frame jab, then hit a 2f link, because 50 damage is 50 damage, and you've wasted hours of your life learning that in case a decapre feels like practice checking you. bad combo systems. KOF14 , SF4. kof14's combo system put max damage on every single move, you press maxmode off 2 light confirm or 1 heavy confirm, and u do the same optimal arbitrary combo for 500 damage, it changes in corner or on shorts that's it. as everyone, that's an example of why i came up with a confirm button idea, and why that video commenter feels the same way. sf4 had links that were basically roulette for 60 more damage, or to make other confirms scarier. and if you miss them you lose 300-600 hp, the risk reward on that isnt right, ur winning, and now ur dead. doing the right thing and being punished for it because mistimed it by what is basically random, terrible. i've just read a few of the youtube comments, i standby what i think, and people are going to point out games i could play, the thing is, i already play these games, i like sf2 sf4, kof98, vsav, and smash melee, i know what i like, theyre fast, simple and neutral heavy, i've played most of the genre, i know the best ones for new players are: smash, soul calibur, doa, and virtua fighter. i went through personally having the problems i list, and others i try to get into them have the brain power to tell me these problems exist, and i have to tell them to deal with it, as i send the boomer trolley problem their way. even with all boxes ticked, that knowledge is gated to rando forums and specific people, they wont go through an entire genre, the brand leaders, are SF, tekken, MK, and i swear mvc3 was massive among casuals, which makes no sense to me. those games have all the things that hurt someone getting into fighting games, and theyre the representatives that everyone hears about and tries. the comments about 1v1 and online, i dont think make much sense in strict matchmaking world. on new games (like released in the past year), new players fight new players they might have slightly less than 40-50% win rate, that's the same as any other matchmaking. if they play anything older, then they run the problem, again more knowledge new players probably wont know until they try it.

This may sound crazy but you aren't supposed to react to frame 3 jab

the question, though is: what can a game do to prevent people from feeling this way about it?

I think there is a solid argument for a middle ground here as far as the fast-pace is concerned. For example I have a notoriously slow reaction time, and struggle to recognize a counter-hit by the time the extension window is already closed and rarely if every get anything beyond what I would have off of a normal hit. But that has forced me into characters and styles that favour, big buttons and chipping out, or committal advances. Nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does sculpt the way I enjoy fighting games, because I simply can't play a bait and punish character because I just can't react to the effective abilities of the style of play.

10:20 No, that's not how it works and you know it. You just don't get a "feeling", because that's just super superficial angle you will get. Of course, if you play FGs for 20+ years, you will have a plan, but not a beginner.

I always feel like the trouble is no one does their research. I jumped into fighting games and bought every fighting game I could to find out that I have a very specific genre preference and character preference. I prefer single character fighters and like a more neutral heavy game over the air dashing anime style fighting games. As for execution characters, I think the difficulty for new players is finding characters that are "easy to understand". An example of the single button and a direction or just a couple buttons would be Ed. However I would say a character like Chun Li or E. Honda with relatively simple special inputs should be the characters these players try instead of going after the extra ridiculous high damage combo monsters. The dilemma is players who are new want to feel powerful and in a fighting game power often comes from high damage combos. For a player to stick with a fighting game long enough to enjoy it requires an initial investment that I don't think a lot of players want to buy into. A game like Gran Blue would be the perfect game if it wasn't as expensive and had better more populated online. The community sees project L as the next big fighting game because they think it will be F2P and offer some of the systems of Rolling Thunder with simple inputs and GGPO netcode. I think with the success of Fantasy Strike it is possible to have fighting games that are free or inexpensive lower the cost barrier and have some either assisted specials or simplified specials (I often wonder if a training wheels approach of having the combo buttons show on screen like a QTE would help, similar to when I have put up sticky notes with item buy orders for MOBAs I play).

As a person who never touches Fighting Game online and spend more time in arcade, versus, and training, I get a lot of enjoyment out of just experimenting and figuring out cool stuff and seeing characters, story, and just badass dudes and dudettes doing badass things. And I personally almost play it like a rhythm game than a fighting game. Does that mean I’m enjoying it the wrong way? Or that I need the game to accommodate to me because my bungo brain can’t tell the difference between an overhead or a low? No. I just wanna see cool stuff.

I remember the first time I did a dp input on purpose. I think that's the moment that really cemented my love for the genre. Execution and replication.

Here's what I don't understand: why do people always come up with these super complicated reasons why they don't like fighting games when a simple, "they're not my thing," would do? No one talks about FPS games or MOBA games like this. Its especially bad when they offer suggestions on how to "fix" them. Like, maybe you just, I don't know, don't like fighting games? Why should the genre change to suit you?

The best games I can recommend this person without correcting anything they said are Smash Bros. and Pokken Tournament. May also want to try Soul Calibur, as you can fight from farther away and get the hang of the general vertical/horizontal gameplay pretty quickly.

when it comes down to it fighting games are simulations of real life fighting just with more fireballs and craziness. Just like real life fighting it has to be based around predicting your opponent and defeating them using practiced sequences of moves. To want to get rid of that is like wanting to play battlefield but remove all the guns.

I have played fast games like GG to slow ones like GBVS as well as complicated like Tekken to simple like FS and I can say for sure that there is definitely a game for everyone. The issue is probably because fighting games are relatively niche that very few people know about the less popular titles even though it fits what they want. This is on top of the fact that a lot of FG players tend to play only one or two games. Unfortunately, I don't see an easy solution to it all.

I feel like maybe this would resonate better with non FGC people if you tried to look at it from their perspective more? It seems like most of this discussion was turning the talking points back on the commenter, coming up with some small counter as if it completely disproves their arguments, or willfully changing the heart of the complaint so you don't have to address it. I think it might be better in the future to try and take this outsider criticism and see how it could be applied to open the community up.

your only move is.. HUSTLE

The memorization thing is kinda legit. The brain flexes a different muscle when taking something from memory and applying that to physical action, and there are more things in a FG to pull from memory into action after pressing a button. That's why many people practice a combo in training mode, have it down, and can't execute in live matches because there are more things that have to be done to get to that combo. I appreciate GGST's slowdown on Counters for this very reason and is a big part of why FGs click with me where they never did before.

A well structured tutorial with a good learning path and spaced practice moments, some tool to create and share specific character/stuff tutorials in game, these all along with a good netcode would bring so much new people. Riot do it pls...

This guy would probably like the simultaneous turn-based fighting game I'm working on (Mega Knockdown). Or he's just not into the genre, who knows

I like watching fighting games and I can play Street Fighter(mainly Guile). I'm also pretty decent at Smash Ultimate(or at least I think I am). One thing that I dislike about seeing clips of Tekken 7 is the juggles. It doesn't seem believable to me that a couple jabs put you up in the air and lead to a wall carrying juggle.

I used to be of the "if you can get a 30% combo off of X move, then why not just make X move do 30%" mindset. I thought that combos were pure execution tests and that didn't interest me. It took me a long time of playing fighting games to understand that the actually hard part of a well-designed fighting game's combos is not _how_ to execute a combo, but _when_ to execute _which_ combo and how to create setups where you have a decent chance of being able to confirm into a combo. That's testing character/system knowledge and situational awareness, not execution, but it's a subtle aspect of the genre and not superficially obvious. That said, fuck 1 frame links.

There's a game called Phantom Breaker Omnia that's coming out, and it incorporates directional inputs for special moves a la Smash Bros. That might be interesting for some people to pick up next year (though it unfortunately won't have rollback).

Vampire Savior......

When SoulCal 5 came out, having played the rest of the entire series religiously and having grown up with the series (I started with soul edge on PS1 and bought a Dreamcast just for Soulcal 1) I felt like they had sped up the game engine or the frame data and it ruined 5 for me and led me to not even trying 6. I don't want super slow-mo gameplay, but I definitely feel like there is a difference between the speed of frame data and input windows for casuals compared to serious players. No game can make both happy anymore. If you look at MK2 fighting vets of today are bored instantly but that was a perfect game to set up with friends when I was a kid, whether they owned the game and played fighters sometimes or not. Now to appeal to my crowd we're given insulting games like Fantasy Strike, with no crouching, weird HP, and no inputs at all for specials. We don't need easier games than the ones that made the fighting genre take off. We don't need "Divekick" or "Footsies". Those of us looking for something to play with normies just need games that don't make them feel like they suck and that are fun when we sit down to play. You know without first spending time in training mode developing muscle memory and googling how to do BnBs. Many of my friends are insulted by auto combos, they want regular combos but they want very easy input windows so they can find them in-game and do them after finding them. Also, I'm really tired of the "it's not more commitment to get into than MOBAs" argument. MOBAs you play on your own time, plenty of people bounce off those too, and the execution requirements for most characters in League are really low compared to spending hours in training mode. Maybe not in Dota 2 but you know what? Dota 2 is less popular for a reason, it's too hard to play. Shared time with friends is always going to be harder to come by, and my friends don't own the game by definition of being a normie. If you are playing a MOBA, chances are you own it on your own machine. I just want games that feel good to pick up and play again with friends. You guys should definitely get great games to play too. The hardcore crowd should have games with 5 meters, just frame inputs, gray health, triple air dashing, only character-specific combos, Roman cancels, Greek Cancels, SJW cancels, whatever you guys want. I am fine with that being the vast majority of games even. I would just like the occasional one that isn't trying to court us both that doesn't suck, that's all. We'd all be better off if devs weren't constantly trying to chase the whole market at the same time.

“even when playing for over 10 hours…” LOL. It took me over 70 hours of playing Smash before I knew where my character was on the screen at any given time.

Some card games are a pretty alright simulation of a slow fighting game. Maybe it's just me, but I visualize Legends of Runeterra as a fighting game with options for counters, breakers, counter breakers, and meter.

However, what I will say is because fighting games HAVE to be (Usually) 60FPS, it has variable reaction times depending on how experienced you are and being put in similar situations. So, there is chances for people to be milliseconds ahead in knowledge. It's also why playing on the right equipment is stressed in importance.

If I think about it, there are some fighting games that are slower. The biggest one that comes to mind is Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition. World Warrior is slower than Champion but I feel that, out of the SF2's, Championship Edition has the perfect speed for me.

This is a really funny question to me because there's a rumoured pipeline that of some Tekken players just turning into a TCG player, and I almost became one 😂

I think these kind of opinions happen when players think they have a good grasp on other genres but really they dont. I like that the dude in the post brings up CSGO and R6S because tactical shooters are all about crosshair placement, most of the time reaction times dont even come into play and it is exactly the same way in fighting games. If you have enough knowledge to realize X or Y is coming your way, you can plan around that.

In the situation of casuals we have to think about their experiences. While experienced fighting game players understand there's something for everyone, the casual player base generally only knows the main games. The problems they mention seem to be for central games. Memorization- problem with tekken, can't deny you should learn alot of move frame data to try to block or not mash when trying to improve. Long combos - clearly a trait in Dragon ball, without a combo breaking mechanic. Street fighter - motion inputs tend to take awhile to develop the dexterity for if you've never played a fighting game before, can be frustrating experience to think you understand what you can do, but still not be able to do it. Smash seems to avoid these traits imo.

If you want slow just play sfv I hate slow fighting games. Thats why I play BBCF and XRDR2