Kay

Gonna babble for a bit and hope this is coherent:

I was weirdly saddened today reading Strive's patch notes. A removal of the character weight system. A younger version of me would be SO RELIEVED by this. "Oh god I don't have to memorize a million different combos"! Yet now, an older me, is oddly sad?

Now, I'm not gonna hate on or argue about Strive, or any other game. Plenty of games I like have equal character weights and consistent hurt boxes. I'd rather game designers do what they want to do, rather than pander to me.

(Granted, I do wish more people were pandering to me, but that's a me problem.)

... Instead I want to be more positive about the stuff. So much of this conversation gets caught up in arguments about gatekeeping and "git gud" "Baby Game" BS but not a lot of people really go into why they might like some of these arcane systems.

A nice and polite twitter follower, immediately after I tweeted my disappointment, asked...

Why would you want combos to fail randomly per character performed on

... which like lol, when you put it like that, it sounds super silly. But it's that framing -- a framing I've seen many times. I remember being on a forum... very appropriately, it was David Sirlin's forum (thank god you can't name search on cohost). Being the Sirlin forums, you expect a... certain type of person and player. Very big anti-execution crowd and I was like the only real execution defender (at least who was a semi respected member of the community and not a random SRK troll). I remember one exchange talking about GG combos and the comment "Well what's fun about just doing the same rote thing over and over again?"

"Well you're not? Like I'm adjusting my combos as we go, depending on how high they are and stuff"

"I don't believe you."

Now, this is mid 2000s. I don't think anyone now would deny that's a thing that players do... but I think it still highlights a way a lot of people still feel. Combos as this discrete thing, these bits of work you get through to get to the Real Game (that forum LOVED talking about the "Real Game"). You learn your combos, so you get to play brain chess.

But instead the whole thing is very fluid, especially in a system rich game like the older Guilty Gears. You never stop learning, and that combo you learn isn't a discrete unit. It's a lot of different smaller parts and that perfect hit you need to do your idealized BnB is actually kinda hard to land. You need to learn how to put these things together in different ways. Combos are less raw memorization, and more a matter of a little memorization, but a lot of developed intuition.

This is no surprise to anyone whose played a lot of really nutty fighting games. But the important thing is more the mentality of "Combos are a thing that you need to have, and you fucked up if you weren't optimal" vs looking then as an extra and not taking them for granted.

"... Wait, can I convert to this route off this hit?"

Often in games with open ended combo, you'll get a hit and you won't actually know what you can get off it. I recognized the situation 3 hits in.. what's the gravity scaling like? What's their character weight? This route doesn't work on her hitboxes usually, but I think it might because of the weird height I hit at??

From there you gotta bet on yourself. Take the easy knockdown? Try to extend to a damaging route? What are the stakes of the match? How much life do you have? Is it worth maybe eating shit just to find out? Those sorts of situational, high speed valuation processes, for some people like me, are extremely fun and with games like +R or Rev2, I'm still, after thousands of hours, guessing and developing my intuition. Every matchup has new things to teach me not only in neutral, but on what to do when I even hit someone.

I don't like character weight because I like dropping my BnBs, or because I want to make the game harder for new players, but because they always keep me on my toes and give me great moments where I am rewarded for my intuition. I like it because I can do cooler combos.

... What if input buffers made games harder?

I was playing one day with Lofo, a really incredible +R Dizzy player and a former (lol, recovered?) Sirlin forum poster who ended up a huge execution lover. One day we're talking about Rev2 vs +R and hit me with something that has been in my head for like 2 years. Something to the extent of...

"Yeah, I don't like Rev2's input buffer. I feel like it makes the game harder, because everything is more consistent... I... don't think I like input buffers?"

Which to me at the moment felt like an insane position. Like there was a lot of simplifications made to fighting games I didn't like, but that one seemed like a clear win. That just makes games better, right?

But Lofo kept talking, about things that are borderline impossible in +R that would be consistent in Xrd and how one of the things that keeps +R reasonable is that everyone drops stuff all the time. Not just in combos, but in pressure. There is always wiggle room... and then talking about mashing to tech.

Mashing to tech feels like a vestigial part of Xrd. It doesn't bother me much (I come from X2), but if you're trying to tech and there's a gap, you're gonna get it. +R, much less so. It's almost an analog skill check between you and your opponent. Your ability to mash, vs their timing during the hardest parts of their combo. Defender can piano, so there is a bit of an advantage

Then that got me thinking about ST. "It's fucked up that you need to do a 1f reversal to beat tick throws in that game."

... But you don't. You need to have better timing than your opponent to beat tick throws. Can they time to 1f input? If you're playing someone great, probably, but when you watch mid level play, most DPed tick throw attempts aren't usually reversals. That analog sense of timing is part of the game's skill expression.

This goes into why people didn't care about exact frame data back in the day or players playing "by feel". A move being +1 really didn't matter unless both of you have sick timing. We HAD the frame data. We had Yoga Book Hyper for ST. It did help. But it's influence was different because the play conditions are were different.

In modern games, a +1 situation is often pretty rigidly defined. We have buffers. Our responses will come out on he fastest frame. If my opponent is slow and my suboptimal option keeps winning, people will call that fake... because it is. The expectation is that verse most players, even low ranked players, people will get their moves out as soon as possible. Meanwhile in older games, you can't take that as a certainty even with the best players. They'll hit a lot of frame perfect inputs, but not all of them. Finding where your opponent is being sloppy helps a ton. No one is clean all the time even in modern games, but it's so SO much harder in old games.

I even think a lot about setplay characters. In older games 'perfect knockdown into oki that grants an auto timed safe jump' is actually super hard (or really lucky happenstance). Heck, this is also where GG's variable wake up timing stuff also comes in. You could do it, but it would be so hard that it can never be the expectation. Now safe jumps are so easy once labbbed that if you whiff a normal before doing your oki people will just assume it's a safe jump even if it isn't. You get stronger setplay because frame perfect repeatability, while not at all trivial, is extremely practical.

Buffers help turn is into robots and, depending on your taste, that can be a good or bad thing.

ALRIGHT THE TAKE AWAY

One thing that I've also thought a lot about is... new players seem to have an easier time getting into +R than Rev2? Part of this might also be the lobby system and speed to matches, but part of it is, in Rev2, even a mid level player can be pretty scarily consistent, but +R... Welcome to the scramble zone, lol. And like granted you can run into cryptids with 10,000+ hours of play time who will Burst Safe Sidewinder Loop you into the negaverse, but even THEY fuck up or get wilded out by weird interactions. And I say this maybe liking Rev2 more than +R.

In a weird way, making games easier, also makes them harder, because you make them more consistent for everyone... and when everything is more consistent, the game is more rigid and unyielding. You're not making an old experience accessible to new people, you're making something new, with it's own pros and cons.

Again, this isn't a judgment zone. I'm okay with Strive. I'm actively loving SF6. But a rigid games forces players to play it how it was intended. This can help new players learn a lot faster. Hell, such design has lead to games that have even taught me lots of stuff! I don't hate these games.

... But I miss that looseness. I miss how you can have a combo so hard that only like 2 people can do it reliably and just this really hazy, unclear idea of what's even possible. Infinite weird, crufty interactions between interactions. Feeling like I wasn't just playing my opponent, but exploring a rich, emergent design space.

Fighting games as a genre increasingly feel like they're (metaphorically) moving from "analog" to "digital".. and like most of those changes, there are usually more advantages and disadvantages, but, even with the new advantages... there are always gonna be people who miss how the old analog models used to feel.

edit: Threw this on my blog, if you need a more permanent, easy to find source.

I Wanna talk about World Tour Mode, but I gotta talk about the Actual Game First

This is a repost from my blog, so feel free to check out kayin.moe

I wasn't planning on getting on SF6 right away. My experience with Day 1 fighting game is usually pretty poor. The mad rush is a lot of peoples favorite time in the life of a fighting game but for me, I prefer when things are a little more hashed out. First released ruined Blazblue, Xrd, and Strive for me and I didn't want to repeat that mistake with Street Fighter 6.

... Still, a friend (Thanks, Dasterin) got it for me so I was obligated to play a little! While real meat of this is going to be about World Tour mode, I do want to talk about my early impressions on the game and my experiences online. I feel like it's impossible to truly review a multiplayer game on release -- only after months of hindsight can we really say if a game is worth while... but that said, more so than the games I mentioned above... I like what I see?

This is a game for sickos, by sickos. The drive system is unhinged game design. Tons of free meter every round? Practically the ability to Valle CC with some characters? The most cracked out Focus Attack clone and boomer check in existence? ... and all of this bringing you one step closer to burnout or being smashed in the corner? Just absolutely nuts. I worry that the system mechanics might be too strong but this is the type of thing that gets adjusted as a game goes on.

It's also nice to have avatar lobbies that don't suck. I told everyone it was possible! And sure you got normal menu based player rooms and ranked elsewhere, but it's a nice diversity and leads to a lot of fun expression. This is also the first game I've played with a real, living ranked System. I enjoyed +Rs a bit when it was active, but besides that, well.. Rev2's ranked is dead and Strive's Tower is barely a ranked mode. Playing random people has been good for my composure when playing. Endless practice for me to Not Make Up a Guy while playing strangers. It's nice to play a game with a community so large that I am practically anonymous and where I feel no need to prove myself. I can just fiddle around, play a few games with Dhalsim, and go off to do something else.

That said, before any of this, I spent COUNTLESS hours in world tour mode.

Calling something a Playstation 2 Game as a Compliment

Late PS1 and Early PS2 was a weird time. Weird, experimental, goofy, unhinged game design, sacrificing polish and fidelity to do something weird. These aren't games you get a lot these days. Most games focus obsessively on graphics and gameplay polish and while indie cames can serve fill some of the gap, the weird but also content rich type of games from that era are rare. The closest thing that comes to mind is the SEGA made Yakuza which is also tightly bound to its PS2 roots.

So when SF6 needs a singleplayer mode that is fun and rich, but not as polished as it's online content, drawing from Yakuza seems like an obvious choice to make. Simple but uncommon voices like unvoiced dialog, or those 'stage diorama' locations you meet trainers in serve as a way to make a lot of content fast and cheap and while this content isn't always that great, quantity is a quality all it's own. Even just the way you can horridly amalgamate fighting styles seemed to come from a different time.

Even the ways WT mode is annoying feels PS2 era. Grindy, janky platforming, using weird special moves to pop balloons with power-ups... MINI GAMES??? Even the goofy way metro city is split in the beginning as if it was some engine limitation or something (it isn't, ultimately) just has such delicious, old school vibes. World Tour mode feels like SF6 came with an HD remake of an unreleased early era Playstation 2 game with all the fun and wild surprises that would entail.

Mechanically it's weird. You level up AND get a Not Skill Tree tournament bracket to spend points on. I hate Skill Trees, but this isn't -- instead new and old options get shuffled back in each new "tournament". This caused me to reset my stats at one point to respec, only to realize my change changed the later brackets massively. The clothing upgrade and skill system is weird and arcade. "+10 to Unique Attacks"??? I'm pretty sure that's for command normals, but some people say it's fireballs so we're all just confused. But all this confusing stat absurdity again, has that whole janky weird PS2 vibe. Attacking far outside your level range leads to doing so little damage it's painful. You can DO IT but it's miserable, which also sucks when you're hitting one of the weird XP/Opponent gaps in the game. The game has buffs but they... don't seem to do enough to make up the difference? But all that said, it's fun and the enemies are so dumb they basically train you

Characterizing the Uncharacterized

One of the big surprises in World Tour mode is how much character it gives everyone. Not that Street Fighter characters have been uncharacterized for 30 years, but that characterization is either painted with broad strokes, or limited to semi canonical sources like the Udon Comics. Simple endings, winquotes, match dialog, that sort of thing.

World Tour mode gives you a lot? Characters are chatty, they talk about their hobbies, their past, things they like, their relationships. You get an idea about how someone like Ryu actually lives. Funnily, this is a similar vibe to Strive, which definitely also set out to humanize it's characters both aesthetically and in story. We wanna know how these weirdos live and what their relationships are in the smaller details. It's fun to here Ryu talking about Chun-li dressing him so he can get through airports earlier or how he does construction work for money. It's amazing to see what an awkward weirdo Cammy is, still cool a cool operator, but... just a little off. Or endearing to see what a piece of shit Juri is, moping on her phone, filled with ennui as all her enemies are dead and she doesn't know how to socialize or be a person anymore. The text messages are half baked but charming, something that feels like it should have been more developed, but it so good. Cammy's cat-version of herself for her avatar is funny every time I see it. The leveling system for relationships is goofy, the gift system is simple and crude, but again, this is a side mode, it doesn't have to be AAA, it can just be an excuse to gate cute, fun content that helps endear the characters to you. This game even managed to endear PMC warcrimes Gamerbro Luke to me, showing him as just a perfect, well meaning himbo. Maybe one day we can sit around eating doritos and mountain dew as we talk about the horrors of the military industiral complex.

The plot was a slow start, going from "I don't care" to this perfect intersection between "Horrifying yet silly" to (and let me be vague to avoid spoilers) being... genuinely being an almost nihilistic downer? And not in a bad way! The whole thing, given the overall tone of the game, resolves very interestingly and bravely (in a creative sense). There are dumb plotholes and things that don't make sense, but with a mode like this, the game has to assume you're along for the ride. No one is here for perfection.

Was that... the... best Fighting Game Single Player Mode ever?

... Probably??? It wasn't perfect and some Netherrealm fans could probably point to some old (also PS2) MK game as an example. Maybe that one Soul Calibur mode in... 3... 4? I don't remember. But I've STILL have played more World Tour mode than the actual multiplayer game and I've been playing a BUNCH of SF6 online. But as long as I can get new outfits and dress up for the Battlehub, I'll still be dropping into World Tour Mode from time to time.

Some of the kids were grousing about a recent Rev2 Intermediate tournament and the cutoff point for 'intermediate' is and how it's discouraging to get bopped by experienced players in a lower skill setting.

The problem is, this is unavoidable. It's almost impossible to make a clear, good cutoff and players only a little better than someone can give a beating just as discouraging as the best player in the world. Sometimes even a worse beating! So what do you do for a tournament designed to give new, returning, or mid tier players goals and experience? You move over that ol' double elim bracket for some motherfucking Swiss.

Now, Swiss is by no means a 'beginner' format. It's used in pro sports and gaming everywhere. The TL;DR on swiss is it's 'round robin without the whole round part'. 64 player round robin would be infeasible. But swiss uses results driven matchmaking to determine a winner after a TO determined number of rounds (for some context, 6 would be considered the minimum number of rounds for a 64 person tournament). People play every round, win or lose. This format is a staple for a game like MTG that doesn't require a 'station' in the way fighting games do. It makes sense the format never caught on in the FGC. But we're in the online era due to COVID and all this Rollback, so 'how many PS4s do we have??' is no longer a factor.

What are the pros and cons?

Pros

• More games for everyone. This is great for lower skill tournaments where you want to give people experience.
• Matchmaking formula groups players of like skill The deeper you go, the more likely you'll be to play players of your skill level.
• Determines the skill of more than the top two players Double elim can only reliably tell you who the top 2 are. Placement otherwise is a lot more luck based.
• Fast This shit moves. When we used it on Warmrock the rule was to stream one game from each round and that shit flew by. 6 rounds in an hour is not unreasonable.
• Engaging Part of the reason the format is fast is there is little downtime. No waiting an hour to play your match.

Cons

• Not Hype You can fix this by adding a second stage bracket (by say, taking the top 4 players and doing a playoff, which is what we did on WR), but fundamentally, Swiss isn't very hype, sometimes with winners being determined early or through unsatisfying tiebreakers.
• One game can hold up the whole bracket Strict DQ policy is a must. The next round cannot be generated until the previous round is completed. This is easy to work around, especially when players aren't bored, waiting for their matches, but it IS a negative.
• Needs Software You're probably not going to understand the matchmaking formula and doing them on paper is possible but annoying. You must trust the machine. Luckily, both startgg and challonge support it.
• Not as Stream Friendly showing two matches from a round can really hold things up. You kinda gotta make that sacrifice for your players. Also mitigated a bitby having a playoff.
• No Downtime Positive, but also a negative. It's go go go for an hour or two. Sometimes it's nice to go 0-2 and then streammonster.

It's not FGC culture, which is also a bit of a hangup. But most of these can be worked around, it's fast and it gives people a lot of match experience. If a player is too good for most of the pool? Whatever, after 1 or 2 rounds they'll be with players that likely won't be as discouraged. No one is going 0-2 cause of bad luck. You get your games, and you get a semi accurate skill rank you can compare week to week. It's not perfect, but it's more reliable than Double Elim rankings.

Sometimes it's better to sacrifice some hype and the stream to support the real point of all of this, playing the game. In my experience, most people, once they try a tournament like this, even if it doesn't become their PREFERENCE, end up liking it way more than they thought they would. A lot of people just flat out become converts. It's a sick format, especially for smaller/community level events. And again, tweak how you do your Finals for the fun if your community and stream, it's fine, just try and also provide an awesome baseline experience for the weaker players in your community.

That difficulty post got me thinking about other things and how I generally kinda strongly dislike videogame advice that attempts to 'flatten' the medium. "You have to do this, you never should do this, use this trick all the time" blahblah you heard me talk about Coyote Time.

So here is one I loathe. "Players shouldn't think about the controls! They should be invisible! It's your job to put the player's intentions on screen. If the player isn't getting what they want, it's a failure of the game" ... or similar variations.

The most insidious little bits of advice are the pieces of advice that are true like, 90% of the time, cause most of the time, this is a great advice! But in this time where arcades are rare and virtually all games are designed for the same type of controller, people forget that sometimes the controller is as much of the game as the game.

I'm a flight sim nerd. I love controls, I love buttons, I like awkward operating mechanisms, cockpits with poor visibility. I dream about getting more gear that will, ultimately, make me less precise, but increase my immersion. I'm not the airplane. I am the little dude inside the airplane, trying to be the airplane... and I think this example makes sense to people? Like who is gonna say "Having to use a stick shift in a hardcore racing sim is a failure of UX", right? But lets extend this to other games.

I took a long time away from the FGC pre covid and when I came back and was watching a someone play on twitch (thx pat) and he said "I really like how [Player] pilots [Character]." and I immediately fell in love with this expression cause it bridged two concepts so perfectly. Fighting games are the poster child for the "If the players are messing up their moves it's a problem with the game! Why don't they do what Smash did already??" but a fighting games, especially the ones I love the most, are less about being a character and more about being a pilot. It's about having a character, with all these capabilities and this super high performance theoretical ceiling and being the horrible meat bag that has to try and cox a fraction of that out. There was a great Day9 I think about a Starcraft Broodwar and it's hard mechanics and chunky interface and all the things players think they need to learn before playing.

All of these are not requirements to begin to play the game... They are they game

The controls and interface are as just much of the games as the developer wants them to be... and you can take this single player and talk about Bennett Foddy games, or Dark Soul's infinite input buffer thats actually trying to get you killed, but it's the same idea. The game just did what you asked it to. It's on you to get better at communicating.