The New Player Experience in Any Competitive Game 

Years ago when I was a teenager, I handed my mother an Xbox 360 controller so we could play co-op portal 2. That was the moment i realized things that i understand and have understood for YEARS like moving the stick just slightly to aim slower, moving both sticks at the same time, moving straight forward and jumping, all of those things that were burned into my brain, my mother could not wrap her head around. She's a PA, has a bachelor's degree in psychology, and taught special needs kids for years when i was a kid. She's not dumb, she just didn't play battlefield 2 and unreal tournament with her dad and never had the experience of going to her cousins house and playing halo in the basement for HOURS on end. Especially if you're part of the younger generation and grew up on shooters like i did, you don't always realize that these skills you've spent years honing are completely alien to most people.

Sajam will keep remaking this video with a different coat of paint and I'll watch it each and every time.

Ive been teaching my friends fighting games by showing them one thing, immediately countering it when they understand it, and looping that over and over Its cathartic as fuck to them when they do beat me, pop offs and all. I always have a stupid smile on my face whenever I see them improving whether its situational awareness or just outplaying me This is why I love fighting games

As a music teacher, I find a similar enjoyment in competitive games that I find in challenging musical pieces : as you said, it's not about being the absolute best, it's about reaching milestones, things that you thought were cool and brought you to this particular activity that one day become achievable because you spent some time training, practicing and improving. Every new game is like a new instrument, the first ones tend to be hard and you have to persevere for a while before you see the results, but once you mastered two or three, you can pick up any other one and slowly grind your way up.

Your Apex story is why I miss Titanfall 2, man. Cool stuff is also why I got into fighters, flash and style is way more important than people realise in some cases.

I've always had a rough time playing competitive games because that view of the end goal doesn't come to me naturally. I'm not easily motivated in the face of loss. It's taken real effort to build a growth mindset, but now that I've made an effort to do so, fighting games have become a lot more fun. I think Bob Ross had it right when he said talent was "applied interest".

It's really refreshing to hear someone say that not everyone needs to get into every game, especially competitive games. It's okay if some people don't like the thing you like, what matters is it being fun and enjoyable enough for enough people to keep the community going. No game can stay competitive while appealing to *everyone*.

Personally I relate to the "started playing, sucked at it, quit" mindset way more in team-based games than 1v1 competitive games. I don't like being the worst person on the team, the reason the team lost the game. I don't like that my lack of skill when starting out causes a worse experience for other players. Whereas in 1v1 games I'm the only one negatively affected by my lack of skill, and that's totally within my control. I'll just get better and/or not get mad when I lose, no problem.

Honestly stuff like this is why single player games are important. Not everything in gaming needs to be a competition or a skill to validate how much you play games. Some games should just be played for fun or entertainment.

Familiarity is absolutely a big part of the new player experience. FPS and RPG elements happen to be popular to mix into any game so they are easier to understand. Like the bow in Minecraft or "classes" in shooters with tons of stats. I do think these games aren't all exactly the same. They do have different learning curves and the "first step" to mastery comes a lot sooner. Like getting your first intentional kill in old COD was learn to aim use the grenade launcher at someone's foot. Smash has something similar with items or grabbing and jumping off the stage. Although features like good skill based matchmaking are probably a bigger factor into keeping players and making a good early experience

I got into GG accent core about 3 years ago, (I played a little back when I was younger) the reason why I got into the game in the first place is because you can do batshit crazy combos with neckbreaking speed, and thats what I loved about the game. I cant even get salty when I get destroyed in that game because everyone does cool shit and every character is good to some degree. Exactly how it should be lol.

I picked up fighterz after not playing fighting games for a long time and i straight up had a bad time at the start lol. But then i saw somebody do some super broly combo with multiple grabs, throwing j+s like 5 times in the combo and i was just like "that! That is what i wanna do to people!" And after i started trying to learn how to do that kind of shit i started to understand the game waaaaaay more and actually started having a ton of fun.

You mentioned it in the video, but I can't stress enough how the road to mastery doesn't just apply to video games, but really any skills that take a long time to develop. For me music and language have been my two high investment hobbies, and I simply haven't felt like I've had the leeway to want to commit to another long term skill as a hobby. Obviously you can just hop on a fighting game and mess around without being skilled, but to me getting good and playing higher level matches where you can really act with intentionality is the main draw of the genre, so ultimately I end up mostly as a spectator. And that's okay! Because you know what, fighting games are some sick games to spectate. Time is precious and finite, and to some extent you need to pick and choose what you want to spend it on. Really enjoyed this video. Obviously you've been saying this stuff for years, but every time it gets brought up I appreciate how well realized your take is. Short story: First time I played League (back in season 1) I remember asking some dude in the chat how he was so big (he was Cho'Gath) and he talked about eating people and the whole thing was rather confusing. League was a super overwhelming game to learn back then and while I'm sure there are a lot more resources out now I would imagine it's even trickier with all the additional content in the game.

When it comes to competitive games there’s such a disconnect of what people think is hard like I can do combos just fine because I play fighting games a lot but I can’t aim as good as the people who play competitive FPS on the daily every thing is hard to learn at first and things get easier because you sink time into it

I really want to get into fighting games with SF6 once it launches. I've given up on fighting games too often because I just don't feel like I have the patience to learn, but I need to remind myself that I have spent years of my life learning how to draw pretty pictures on paper and a tablet. If I can do that, I can force myself to learn a fighting game

i feel like sajam's "other competitive games are also hard" argument is the dead horse he gets the urge to beat every once and awhile

Sajamily Feud lmaooo. Sajam points to the screen and yells "WILL IT KEEL?"

Main thing for me is that if the game doesn't appeal to me on a shallow/surface level then I usually don't have the drive to waste time learning it. Even if my friends keep saying it's good. But if it's cool looking to me, then yeah I'll put in the work. The sucky and frustrating parts are always just one part of the overall picture. I kind of expect to get annoyed at the game, but once I'm doing something cool it feels that much better after. Lmao Also, for fighters it feels like you can more easily achieve goals/ milestones (learn combos, lab specific situations, improve teching throws etc.) whereas in shooters I die and just end up being like "yeah they had good movement and I need to aim at moving targets better" so they feel less rewarding for me when trying different ones.

I always wonder what percentage of 'fighting games are uniquely worse for new people to get into than other genres' style of comments/criticisms come from people who tried and failed to get their friends into fighting games and consider it a failing of the genre that their attempts failed and not, y'know, just their friends not vibing with fighting games.

Moste is killing it with the thumbnails recently

Soul Calibur 2 and Battlefield 3 both had the same kind of learning curve for me. Learning how to pull off Ivy's Summon Suffering in the arcade (not "arcade mode," the actual arcade against real people) was sick as hell, and that carried over into learning Taki's PORC technique. Same with learning BF3 and getting over the initial hump of being shit at the game. What mattered was having an over-arching desire to master the characters in SC2 - not be good at the game necessarily, just be good _with a character_ - and knowing that I could "Succeed" at Battlefield 3 without necessarily getting good at shoot-manning was a big boon in the beginning of the learning stages for both games. I think having an alternative to just "winning" is a bigger benefit than any tutorial or "Modern Control" setup could ever be.

That end clip . . . I absolutely need Sajamily Feud to be a thing. (LOL maybe a different name) I would 1000% watch a whole episode of that

i feel like you have to make one of these every few months 😂 you're so right though, sticking it out can be hard, but once you get even a little bit more stable the whole game starts to change

Your abel strategy reminds me of how i learned fighting games with leo in strive. I did S, HS, beserker slash over and over again, went into a stance and picked a button on the controller and won the game. the people who could beat it were few and far between. Eventually i learned about neutral and anti airs and junk but i had so much fun just monkeying around with that character.

Honestly, it's pretty far more healthy for any community to just play other games. Although some might not have the time, having a broader perspective on the challenges of any other PvP game will give you more respect to other people. As for myself, I've been in MobA, maybe a shooting game (I can't really remember this.), and all of them will have those elements. Of one player just dominating everyone else. Of one person just being entirely clueless. Some people who have experience and know what to expect, but just not the executional skills to really cut it. Yet others who dwell in the same game, maybe for lack of money. You've got all sorts around. I just grew up with a controller in my hand and just loving the games, despite some of them being unfair or really hard for my young self.

couple things: 1) when DOOM came out most people played it with the default controls, which didn't have left and right strafe bound. the left and right keys turned you, strafing was accessed via the shift key, or holding down right mouse button. speaking just for myself, the standard WASD shooter controls didn't make sense to me until I'd been playing it for a good long while. 2) the first shooter that I know of to use the gamepad controls that we're all familiar with (some variation on left stick for movement, right stick for aiming, triggers to fire, face buttons for what-have-you) was Alien Resurrection for the Playstation. when it came out, one of the things brought up in multiple reviews was that the controls were unintuitive. basically what I'm saying here is, if you think any of these things are simple, it's because you have a ton of experience, probably years of building your fundamentals in whatever mechanical paradigm.

I started playing SFV 6 months ago to get that foothold to where I can feel comfortable in the game. I feel much better prepared having had that experience as I was concerned I was going to be that guy who plays a couple of matches online then leaves like I did earlier in SFV.

I love that you play Hunt man. I keep thinking about making a video about how Hunt is incredibly similar to fighting games in it's level of mastery and decision making, and how many tiny details in the mechanics that lower level players don't even understand are happening. I play Hunt at a high 5 star/low 6 star level and the amount of nuance in the movement, stealth mechanics, and shooting is just insane. I don't think I've ever felt like more of a badass, and half the fights I have in Hunt feel like they could be one of the best action movie scenes I've ever seen.

I still remember my 50 match of Strive against pre-nerfed Sol using my main, Ky, and only win once. I try to challenge his ever move to no avail in the first couple of games but after analysing his play, I beat him once and never again. I was a beginner at that time and It was such a rough matches that I've ever did. But it was the most memorable thing I have ever done in Strive from that one win. Felt amazing 🎉

I was talking about this exact topic the other day when someone on r/Fighters said that beginner experience is much harder in fighting games than any other genre of games. I responded exactly the same things than sajam, it's kinda trippy.

When I got into playing TF2, I played a lot of Pyro. And as the newbie Pyro experience went, I ran into crowds of people and got fucked up immediately. But after a while of this, I came across the flare gun and it was love at first sight. And after so long of missing all my flares, w+m1’ing into crowds with no avail, and just getting totally screwed, I hit the dream combo of lighting someone on fire, air blasting them up, and shooting them with my flare for the kill. It was the only kill I got all game and it barely mattered at all but I was so ecstatic that I finally did it so I couldn’t care less. Just my own little story that I thought I would share.

One complicating factor working against fighting games that's uncommon but probably not unique is that the skills that lead to success for early players are not the things they really want to practice most of the time and are generally the more difficult skills to learn. Most new players in fighting games want to do sick combos or set-ups but the things that make new players win usually are the unsexy stuff like defense/blocking, learning to poke/play neutral, and anti-airing properly. If you look at the bottom level players in popular games they can usually do some nasty stuff with the right hit but once in front of an opponent they won't know how to get that first hit unless they're given it by a huge mistake. So your biggest hurdle for getting new players for a fighting game to stay is probably that the things they need to learn to start succeeding are usually not what they're here for and are usually more difficult to practice on your own.

Imagine how fighting game players would react if the next game required you to download a separate third party training mode just to practice

I swear sajam, you've made this video so many times now but it never gets old

Dr. Sajam with the therapy we need to understand not only other gamers, but our gamer selves! Hopefully he doesn’t start charging by the hour.

I try my hardest to convince people that I know who like Smash, even casually, to try fighting games. I have friends that play all types of games but I figured people that are used to playing a mostly 1v1 game may get into fighting games. It's even better now with SF6 because I just say "Street Fighter has a control scheme just like Smash bros now." and I've gotten a few "oh shit?"s from it. So hopefully they buy the game.

I think a huge aspect of getting interested is community. Something which fighting games excel at outside of the game but not so much inside. I really wish one day we could have a system like hearthstone where you can send little quips to your opponent in between rounds so people develop relationships with the community. It would be so awesome to recieve a little speech bubble after getting a round that says "Sick punish!!".

As a player of MOBAs, tact shooters and fightings games I think you nailed this… it’s the learning journey that’s rewarding not the winning in these PvP titles. Match making is supposed to get most rounds close to a 50/50 outcome so it really boils down to are you able to pull off the play you wanted and is the path to the “next cool thing to pull off” interesting enough to keep going. I think that’s why smurfing/cheating is so popular in the F2P versions of these games, it gives you an easy “yes” to both question sets.

I remember picking up sfv around in 21’ and losing my first 30 or so roomie matches in a row and then I won one and was so pumped because I knew that there was someone out there who was worse than me. A few days ago I hit Diamond 3… it’s been great. Every milestone has felt great and I’m excited for the future ones.

When I first started FGs it took me like a month to figure out what stuff like 6p or cS or 2k meant. Than I randomly came across a guide for a character I wanted to learn that had a little diagram showing that the numbers represented a directional input. I felt so stupid afterwards. This is a great video though and agree'd with everything you said.

The reason I learned mobas instead of fighters because I had friends that were also learning mobas and we could all make the journey together. The grind of figuring out what the hell to do felt hte same when I tried fighters later

When everything just _clicks_ in that one round it feels great, since I main pot in strive most of the time I'm just down backing but when I get a round where everything hits and the other player just *_implodes_* It just feels great

The hardest part of fighting games for me is the combo language. Staggering timing so inputs don't get eaten, finding things that actually combo. I win because of fundamentals, my conversions are usually trash. I can't even play Tekken because the combos and timing are so precise to me compared to like... Guilty Gear and Undernight.

Superb, everything you said was spot on. I think one thing though that I don’t often hear brought up around this topic is that, these things need to be hard, need to be difficult. If everything was easy and simple and the mastery of it could be achieved in just a few minutes, nothing would be fun. This can apply to literally any competitive game or deep single player game, but let's take a Lethal League for example. If lethal league was easy, there wouldn’t be discord servers and wikis and spreadsheets with tons of information, there wouldn't be people who’ve spent hours studying frame data and the trigonometry of each characters angles, there wouldn’t be people who are excited to teach new players just for the heck of it, just because they love the game. There wouldn’t be any of that if the game was simple and easy. There would be no point, people would just get quickly bored with it and end up looking for something deeper and more complex. Unfortunately the difficulty of a hobby is a necessary evil to muster the passion that people put into it. This doesn’t even have to be for hobbies, this can apply to the studying of mathematics, medicine, computer science, linguistics etc etc, you could name countless things, things that aren’t even considered hobbies. I think it’s a natural human tendency to want to desire the deep mastery/understanding of something, and that something can be pretty much anything, and it will be different things for different people.

I play a lot of games, including fighting games, but one of the games where I barely have any developed skills for is shooters. I can't aim on pad for anything and god forbid I try to move my character with keyboard controls. I'm totally fine and made peace with knowing that this isn't a skill I've developed and don't really care for developing. I still play single player shooters like Doom and coop shooters with my friends and have a lot of fun even though I'm very bad and need to carried lol. You don't need to grind or learn every genre or control scheme to have fun with it. You can just chill and mess around and not be competitive in the genre at all. There's people out there who'd be willing to indulge. Just mash bro, the buttons were made to be pressed.

I picked up Omega Strikers recently, which is a soccer beat em up moba type deal, and I'm in gold rank like two weeks later. I was like, "I guess this is just easy, it's the exception to the 'you need genre experience to pick it up quick' rule." But then i played with my friend, who big struggled with it, and I realized that I played Mario Strikers for like 3 years, and soccer for 8, and League for three years, and that's actually a ton of experience. I just didn't notice it, because chipping people down and identifying thresholds for an all-in, positioning myself on the field, and playing the mind games to beat someone 1v1 were second nature to me. It just goes to show that anything can be intuitive and easy to pick up once you have some experience in the genre. Like, fighting games. You can jump and move left and right. You have a set of 1-5 buttons. you pick up a character, you learn which button and direction combos they have, you learn which of like 6 motion inputs they have, you learn one or two BnBs, and then you go mess around with other people and get comfortable with them. Boom. You, the reader, are playing a fighting game, just like that.

i love fighting games now, and i strive to get better all the time. one of the things i regret as a kid was picking up and enjoy SFIV and Marvel 3 with my brother, but when no one was around, i really wanted to play and hopped online. i just remember a Sentinel and whoever else pretty much TOD-ing all of my characters when i didn’t know when to block and thinking, “if this is fighting games, this sucks.” and i dropped fighting games for another 10 years.

Neat discussion! You've got some great points. I have something to throw in. Goatmoth's video on Tarkov's cheating problem has revealed that there's a significant number of folks out there willing to cheat their asses off. A simple google search will show just how easy it is to buy your wins for plenty of games beyond just Tarkov, ESPECIALLY for FPS risk-reward looter shooters like Hunt, Marauders, etc. And the moderators for the subreddits for these games don't like people talking about cheating because they're scared it'll incentivize more cheating or, even worse, cause people to quit playing their game. That's a fair concern -- that's why I quit these types of games for the time being, in fact -- but then those posts about the issue get smothered, or users get banned, and the discussion goes underground. The only posts allowed to live are the "I got shot immediately, 0/10" posts -- the ones that are basically easy to dismiss as a skill issue. To be blunt, I don't trust that Hunt doesn't have as significant of a problem as Tarkov. Tarkov and Hunt have some very similar design philosophies and gameplay loops that make them similarly attractive to certain types of cheaters. That's not to say that Hunt isn't a great game, or that it definitively DOES have a cheater problem -- only that I'm personally unwilling to trust the community for these types of games right now, and think that the discussion needs to be had about how significant these problems have grown for these particular games. For fighting games and other high-skill games where cheating is less likely, I think you're right on the money about the need for players to learn to enjoy the process of learning and improving. I really liked your analogy to guitar; I'll never be as good as Steve Vai or Guthrie Govan, but I still love playing guitar, and that's a feeling more people should be allowed to experience.

so here we go at it again the never ending discussion on entry level difficulty

Been playing Splatoon since the first game, motion controls feel so natural to me, but if I hand any of my friends, who play console/pc shooters, they can't comprehend it, and that's just how it be, I'm able to aim with motion, but put me on sticks or mouse and I crumble, it's about what you're used to and how to get used to things to get better.

I found this out pretty hard in rhythm games, where the difference between them is even more compressed than between different fighting games, and the interest thing hits pretty hard. I look at high level pop'n tech and think "I want to do that", but I look at high level IIDX tech and think "this doesn't look like fun, I don't want to do this" and...that's it. I already know what determines whether I want to stick to a game, entirely because I see the high level stuff and know whether I want to or not. I think a lot of people could stand to spend a lot less time with stuff they're not satisfied with, or in grinds that make them miserable, if they go through this process for themselves.

The comment from the chat at 10:00 is true but only in a vacuum. In FPS, you can aim and shoot even though you will probably miss as a beginner. You were actual able complete the action of firing your classic in valorant even if you can’t hit anything. The same goes for Smite/LoL for hitting abilities. I can execute any ability in smite, but hitting the enemy in lane with said ability is a different story lol. In fighting games, you might not even be able to get your “ability” (in this case special moves), out because you can’t do 236 input yet. I’ve seen this turning people off before they even get to the pvp/losing aspect of learning the game as they feel like they are already fighting/losing to the game itself before they even played another real player. This is one reason why I like the option of simplified controls to ease in newer players. Although the same players who get turned off that easily by motion inputs might be the same players who will quit the game as soon as they lose a match for any reason lol.

That bit around 5 minutes is so accurate. I hang in the Guilty Gear +R discord and play casually, and people frequently give me advice after matches or ask why I don't do some better thing or whatever, and it's like, eh. It's not that I *can't* learn to do proper followups or better whatever, but I'm having fun with what I already do and just don't want to invest that time. I'm good where I'm at, thanks. I do appreciate the advice, though! I know it's well-meant! Just not what I'm there for. I spent all my getting good energy on Soulsborne games. Fighting games are for funsies. Edit: afterthought regarding differences between FPS games and fighting games, I think the *primary* difference I'd note between the two genres as far as relevance to new player experience has to be time to kill (TTK). Losing a fighting game by getting beat up, even getting double/triple-perfected, you've got some back and forth time, you have space to at least *see* what your opponent is doing to you (even if you don't understand what you're seeing yet), you have all this information on the screen presented to you. It can be discouraging to get curbstomped, but it's discouraging in a way that is at least theoretically constructive and involves some tangible playtime. Compare/contrast with getting headshot early into a round in a low TTK game like Counterstrike. That's it. You're dead. You're out of the round. GG go next. I, personally, find that a lot harder to get past as a new player. It's better in games like Overwatch or Valorant or something where, unless you're getting sniped or hit with a super or something, you're *probably* not going to die INSTANTLY, you have some time to get feedback on "hey you're taking damage" and try to get out of harm's way or fight back or do *something.* But when the game kills so fast that you're practically in a binary state of Alive or Dead and nothing in between? That's *rough* for a learning curve.

From my personal experience, it takes multiple different games to graduate from the initial learning phase to mastery phase. With one fighting game, you can learn what to do, but it requires multiple unique contexts to piece together why you do what you do.

I had a similar moment in apex the first couple of times I played apex I could not get a kill. Then I got a Kramber and went on a killing spree. After that I went months without living past the first ring close and could not get a kill or even like 100 damage. Now I have like 800 hours and sometimes win but I still die really early or just don't get a gun but I'm far better than I was back then.

this honestly happens too with single player games when you take them to a higher level or a competitive level, for example challenge or speed running. most people don't talk about that because in multiplayer games you are more likely to compete, in single player games it's more rare unless you get out of your way to do it. with singleplayer games it also happens when a game expects certain required mastery from you at some point, i see this a lot with precision platformers such as meatboy or celeste. and of course, happens A LOT more with shmups or bullet hells.

I've never understood the "why play fighting games when it takes hundreds of hours to even reach the level of mediocre" complaint Like that's the entire appeal. The fact that there's so much depth and skill that it takes that long is the reason so many people play fighting games

What sajam talks about in apex around 4 minutes in is how I feel most people get hooked. I got hooked on LoL when I finally killed someone for the first time. The feeling of "outplaying" someone was sooo good. I was playing Garen btw xd. Like that random kill on Garen put me into a 2000 hour grindset for the next 6 years of my life.

In league of legends, some "tech" that was considered LEGENDARY 10years ago, only seen in the pro scene, is now common place in gold rank(average). This is to prove the obvious, which is the player base on average becomes more skilled as time goes by. YET, you can hop on league as a complete noob, and within a couple weeks, stay at a fair 50% win rate. This is for one simple fact which is POPULATION. Aside from SF6 currently, every other fighting game simply has a TINY population and the skill of the average player is WAAAY higher than a complete noob because there is very little influx of new players to counter balance it. Worse yet, as a complete beginner, you will simply not find other complete beginners to have fair matches against. It's like learning how to box when your boxing partner is a bloodthirsty mike tyson, you'll just get your teeth punched in without even knowing what hit you. Solution? lowering the barrier to entry with things like modern controls help, having solid educational single player experience also helps, but those will NEVER create a FAIR environment for complete beginners. There is only one solution and it's simple but hard, which is increase the population size. The best way to do it is to go f2p which is why every competitive game genre is now 95% f2p, the FGC is a massive outlier thanks to dumb japanese boomer suits. TL;DR: fighting games are hard because population is small, going f2p is the best solution. Project L will be the saviour and hopefully help the push for going f2p.

Is Sajam hunt gameplay gonna ever make it to youtube? Or is that more of a thing I'd only be able to catch on stream?

Im an indie game dev and i released a skill based game. Youre very spot on with this sajam. Just to help with your arguement, add or ask fps/moba players to play other genres such as rts, rhythm game, or shmup.

The intuitivess of sHooters isn't the mechanics of individual games, but how straightforward the concept of point amd click is. It's easy to see how your actions on a mouse or controller translates to things online. Alot of popular FPSs using primarily hitscan makes the feedback obvious. Even not hitscan weapons are intuitive because they follow the rules of physics which we observe everyday. If you're a MKB player, it's probably even more intuitive since every person born in the last few decades will have grown up using MKB already. Compare this to how things are in fighting games even at the most basic level, where throwing out a special move is a mechanical challenge compared to point and click a mouse cursor. What I think might be the most confusing thing though is using the same buttons to move as you do abilities, which is very unique to fighting games, and doesn't make sense intuitively, since you would assume doing a special move would move your character. Another thing is how much we are exposed to specific things. Games like COD mirror the brainless action of movies well, amd dint have too many complexities, meaning people can connect get shot=dead easily, leading to easy understanding of how to use cover. However, add in shields like in Halo, and all of a sudden, you find that you don't have any references for what to do now that you don't die in half a second. Portal and Physics make sense, so those puzzles are easy for anyone to grasp. of course there are less intuitive elements in these games, for instance bunny hopping makes no sense without understanding game specific physics, but they key is that the very core fundamentals are easy to grasp, amd can take you a manifold distance. In another example, imagine two situations where you get thrown into an octagon with another person. In one, you're given a gun amd told to kill each other, and the other, to fight to the death. In the situation with a gun, someone with no combat experience would be able to discern this easily: Get shot bad, don't get shot good. Hide to avoid getting shot, pull trigger to shoot. You may not know the correct way to use an ironsight, but a gun makes the job so straightforward, anyone can grasp how to accomplish their objective. On the other hand, any one doing hand to hand without combat will struggle alot more, since we've had no reference for how to fight. Most people throw out big punches to do damage since they're used to seeing one hit kos and all out slug fests in action movies. Even so much of spectator fighting feels like it's about big move because it's not obvious how faster and smaller strikes impact the body. Humans don't intuitively understand that if a fast hit lands before you finish you big drawn back punch, that you cant just ignore it and get the big hit in, almost like an armor move , but instead the faster hit will do meaningful damage and render you bigger move useless once you're literally stunned out of it. Most people intuitively understand irl fighting a whoever does more damage wins, which is why when learning, they just throw out buttons.

I have 1100 hours in Hunt nowadays, I got it when it was in early access years ago, it was kinda of cool back then because no one knew what they were doing back then, my friend and I didn't even realize you can aim down sights, we just fired from the hip. We died alot because of it still had lots of fun.

GODS I used to feel so cracked at Apex when I would grapple launch, slide, into wall kick. I got to a pretty decent rank after forcing myself to play for another couple years, too, but improving at the game stopped being fun at that point. Those early months of the game were really special. I think that's the case for every game. If you get in at launch or the earliest days you have a chance to improve alongside other people at your skill level and makes it easier to buy-in. Being a new player in Apex TODAY?! Yeah, good fucking luck. There's a lot to learn but the other players know too much now and there's no going back. That's not to say you can't get started now, but it's by no means the same experience.

With Hunt, it's not so much that people don't want to fight other players inherently (so many BRs are wildly successful) or that the game is hard to master. It's that the game is PvEvP, and the consequences of dying are that you lose your entire character. So with the alternative win condition of avoiding players and keeping your character, then it incentivizes people of not engaging with the enemy players. I played Hunt and thought it was a great game, but I also never got deep into it because I didn't want to start losing characters after a loss.

Does Sajam stream Hunt:Showdown? If not, can we maybe get a highlight video? I would LOVE to watch that content!

I still suck at fighting games but I have a lot of fun playing them. Same for all the other games I play. 3/4 of the fun for me is just the experience of playing. It's why I play roguelikes and fighting games, I'm a bit of a gaming masochist. EDIT: On game language, I still don't know what banana is in CS:GO. I played casually with my 4000hrs friends a few years ago and I distinctly remember being told to go banana. Which to this day I have no idea what it means.

Its like that one meme "Every game has some difficulty to learning and playing?" "Always has been"

The feeling of accomplishment is unmatched once you get really good at a complex game. But, I can understand the frustration of going through that period where you are no longer a new player but you're also not a vet or master. In that time period you're thinking so hard about how to apply what you learned that for some they simply stop having fun.

fighting games are not for everyone at the higher level just like any other game, people can understand a function of something like an overhead or a launcher or a sweep or a meaty or a poke like this rock paper scissors game thing, but what i think a lot of people are not onboard with is the memorization of combos, that's the point of contention, that's where fighting games deviate a lot from other games. and i think a lot of people don't feel satisfied just learning the basics of this rock paper scissors and playing around in that small pond of that experience in specifically in fighting games and have no interest in learning combos because it's both rythm and a lot of memorization. that's where the meat of fighting game experience is i think and what makes it interesting to people who play them a lot but that's not what most players want to learn or do and that's what i think most people assume you have to learn in order to play those games to enjoy them. but just learning spacing and what certain moves do or what their functions are that's really all you need to enjoy a fighting game, just as much as you only learn the basics of let's say a shooter, you learn ok shoot head is good, learn to not run in the open and using angles ok good, and then they stop learning more stuff and are content with that but there's so much more to learn in order to be good at shooting games. so it's being content with learning the fundamentals and have fun with that, because most players are casuals and it's ok to allow yourself to be casual and have fun. because games are made to have fun in. there really should be a channel dedicated to only going through the basics of games to understand them in order to play them at the most basic fundamental level, because it's not THAT hard to learn most games fundamental things about them to enjoy them.

It's really disingenous to mention Jiyuna's skill without bringing up he was the South East Asia 2015 Persona 4 Arena Ultimax Champion. He has the shorts to prove it.

Sajamily Feud is great, that's one of his best post scenes, wow.

4:26 My journey into competitive Smash Melee was over 15 years ago at this point, but this is the truth. Once you get the advanced movement stuff down and it becomes second nature you just feel so sick.

I agree with everything Sajam said in this video, *but* I feel like he never really address's the unsaid second half of the "fighting games are too hard" statement. Which is, "and thats why fighting games have lower player counts." Hunt has literally 10x the average active players of any other fighting game on steam right now. Now weather or not we should care about player count is a different discussion, I don't, I mostly play +R with my friends. But people clearly do and devs obviously want more people to be playing fighting games and are changing the games they make to try and achieve that. Mortal combat was among the best selling games of its release window, but it still wasn't able to turn those sales in to "core" player, this just further begs the question as to why couldn't it do that? (I wasn't able to find the total player population who played ranked matches but I assume using tournament entrants as proxy for players who care enough about fighting games to be competitive is good enough). I agree, that if you can convince some one to sit down and really give fighting games a chance, they arn't harder. But there is clearly some barrier that in a world where esports is on the raise(despite the current bubble popping) that games like StreetFighter and MK, two of the most premier franchises in all of gaming, not just competitive gaming, can't muster dedicated player bases like that of other popular esports titles.

Jamily Feud might actually be fire would def watch

Now that I think about it, I never played a lot of shooting games after always doing really badly at them when I was hanging out with my friends playing CoD and Halo back in the day. Although I did play Destiny 1 and 2 for a while, that was the first one I felt like I was ok at. And I probably woudn't be into fighting games if not for the time when one of my friends wanted to have people over to play Super SF4 on Friday, so my other friend let me borrow their vanilla copy. So all week I played Arcade mode over and over so I wouldn't be embarassed when we were hanging out. And not long after that I played a lot of MK9 too.

"when I was a new player, all I did was [presents a coherent if limited strategy]" ah, that's the difference. When I was new, I just hit random buttons at all times without any thought whatsoever.

I basically only play fighting games, but I tried the Vampire battle royale game (Bloodhunt) to see what the deal was, and uhhh... turns out I have no idea how to play shooters and somebody shot me without me ever seeing them. Bounced off of the game pretty quickly. Turns out shooting games are not intuitive for people who don't know about shooting games.

4 months late but this is nothing but facts. I've been playing fps games since I was a teenager, and even if that wasn't very long ago, I've still spent 3k hours MINIMUM playing FPSs and probably around 2k playing LoL. I'm JUST now getting into fighting games cuz sf6 and guilty gear look dope. SF6 has been a miracle with introducing me through Modern Controls after a few days of those and getting sick of the lack of moves i can figure out, i decided to swap over to Classic and it feels like a whole new experience and I'm fuckin hype for it.

8:51 We need a meme of Sajam saying FAN-TASTIC

Weird enough you're one of the few in the FGC who actually gets it, probably because you also play other competitive games, anyone who likes competitive games has already realized all of this. I love these kinds of videos

A couple years back, my buddy and I were playing Edward Forty hands. Once we each had one hand free, we shared a controller and played a match of apex. That was the first match I ever won.

Okay I think a lot of it is people's perceptions of what fighting games are. A lot of people don't know how much depth there is, people think that fighting games are just about who can mash better than the other person. They might play their friends and mash together and have fun and that's the extent of what fighting games is to them, and a lot of the people I know. Whereas due to how popular fps games are people have a bigger understanding of the game by looking at it than looking at fighting games. So when you play vs friends, even if you both don't know how to move and aim at the same time you have an idea of how it's supposed to be played and fighting games is a lot more complicated. (Same with mobas too)

I've played pretty much 3 types of competitive games, FPSs, Fighting Games, and Rocket League. I've never been huge on competitive games, largely being more casual and singleplayer-focused. Here's some of the things that make these games more or less fun for me: One for sure is time-to-kill. I've played CSGO, COD, and Halo, and I like Halo most of all. The act of being slowed down when shot in CSGO makes being caught a death sentence, you can be killed quick in COD too but you still have a chance to escape and fight back. I get seen in CS and I'm immediately dead. Another is matchmaking. When I do play competitive games, it's mostly with friends. Bad matchmaking can pit new players against experts, and playing with friends who're better than you can do the same thing. I don't want to play CSGO by myself, but I can't stand a chance otherwise. I managed to get MVP on my third match and never got a kill after. Halo is the only shooter that's kept my interest because the ttk gives me an opportunity to learn, and I'm interested in the game enough to play alone. Rocket League is really fun, but it can be a lot harder to aim in a game like that than a shooter. While I like it more than shooters, there's two things it has in common for me: I often get stuck too far away from others to do anything (though it's more egregious in shooters where I'm just lost and not separated from my team or the ball) and the game's matchmaking started tanking (at least the last time I played, it may've gotten better). The more a player loses while feeling powerless to stop it, the less they have fun and the more they want to quit. Then there's fighters. I've only played a small few, but the rookie-friendliness of GGST and SF6 have me hooked. They can be harder due to execution and the fact that not every player is the same (in the sense that there's multiple characters and not 6+ identical cars or riflemen).

as someone who plays fighting games, but also enjoys dota and counter strike and valorant occasionally I know the thing that keeps me invested in fighting games to a degree that I'm not nearly as invested into the other games, is that for me, the other games, just take too long, like I LOVE splatoon for this exact thing, splatoon is so fast, 3-5 minutes in and out legit I've just casually pulled out my switch on my lunch break and ranked up because the games can go *that* fast, I can't help but think there's people who are the opposite of me, and to them, fighting games are too fast, and just go by faster than they'd like them to?

As a fighting game player but also a Hunt Showdown player, I think it's important to say that the 40% is a bit exaggerated due to different factors. For instance, as a new player the game puts you in empty lobbies for a couple of games to let you understand what's going on, and since we know that in most games people tend to do a couple of games then leave, the 40% isn't that much of a surprise. Add to this the free week-ends, the different sales, etc, plenty of people try the game then leave immediately.

From fighting games to RTS games to FPS games, the most sweaty competitive game that was also not abysmal as a new player that gets you to the "do cool shit" faster than the other games? Overwatch. I dunno what other genre's need to do/have to get players from starting to doing cool shit that OW was able to do for so many people.

I think for me a big aspect in this is my own tastes, and what I find enjoyable. A lot of fighting games, for example, have executional and visual barriers that I find actively abrasive. It feels less like a cool thing to learn, and more something keeping me away from the part of the game I find cool, which tends to be mind games, and systems knowledge related stuff. Skullgirls is an exception to this, since basically every time I return to it, it feels significantly more natural to play than basically any other FG for me personally, and I find it to be the only game I don't have trouble seeing in apart from street fighter (Though I don't play SF for reasons unrelated to anything I say here). Due to how I didn't feel I had to grind out a ton of muscle memory to even play, it let me focus more on what I enjoy so I could have fun even while I'm getting my shit kicked in. I kind of have to enjoy something enough, from the get-go, to want to learn it especially if it has types of challenges I either usually dislike or have issues with.

I think the main issue with difficulty curves in game is that we expect them to not be like any real life skill. If you show up to an mma gym and try to do bjj you will probably not submit another person (without them letting you) for dozens of hours. The main difference here is that people will push through because it's a permanent skill relative to games, has tangential health benefits, is a social experience where you'll make friends, etc. I think where fighting games really fail compared to other genres is letting you make friends through the game instead of having to look up a discord. In addition team games it's just easier to have someone win or feel like they're doing something sooner.

Battlefield 4 said this the best It's not about your KD or your W/L ratio, its about getting those "Battlefield Moments" where you throw C4 onto an ATV, get it into an Elevator, then drive it off the roof of a skyscraper to crash it into a Helicopter thats been annoying the point you're defending. the Moment to Moment gameplay should take priority over the results of the gameplay

This is a great video! I wish you talked more about how accessibility in most scenarios are in direct opposition to this concept. Longevity for a game, imo, needs the road of mastery. Some gaming companies think removing or shortening the road will make a good game. These games have never lasted.

My god, sajam spittin

I tried both a fighting game and a shooter after years of just playing rpg and the shooter still felt more intuitive. I can't explain how this sits with your "familiarity" explanation

My 6yo took a while to learn his way around the XB controller and now it's second nature for him. We recently dug out the Wii (the new SMB movie made him want to try Mario) so he could try various Mario games on the Wii but he ended up getting a little frustrated with the controls. That said, playing SMB Galaxy with him I found the slippery slidey nature of the controls was pretty annoying for me too, goodness knows how I finished the game back when XD

Ok but when I die in tarkov. I don't think "I got shot in the back, this sucks I don't want to play anymore" I think "I got shot in the back **and it will have consequences towards my next game**" the hardcore shooter genre of games (aka tarkov or hunt) make it really difficult for any player to "win" or progress. You could say the learning curve is very steep, but it's more that at any given point, you can go back to square one if you make a mistake. (And that makes players super anxious)

I still remember my first kill in Tarkov. it took a long time to get, but once it happened I couldn't stop.

When you described the Abel flow chart i had a flash back of my little brother beating me for the first time in Street Fighter X Tekken. Lol

Every hobby really does have its own language. Talk to a wrestling fan and see how often they use insider terms. Try following a conversation about Yugioh or Magic if you don’t know card game lingo.

"Sajamily Fued" needs to happen even if the top answer will always be "I don't even play this game."

thumbnail goes hard