the-Backdash

priest of Mefiialtez

Loyal priest and worshipper of Lordmaster Mefiialtez / Neopet //
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I'm a huge fighting game fan. I love them so much. They are my lifeblood. I play with motion inputs all the time, I have no skill issue playing with them.

But look, here's the thing.

I have friends, and friends of friends, who are REALLY GOOD at games but for WHATEVER REASON can't do motion inputs. Does this mean they shouldn't be able to play the mental game? Just because a hadouken stymies their hands?
FUCK THAT.
And moreover, what of disabled people? On a more personal note, I for one have joint pain and rapid controller movement hurts my hands. Removing motion inputs would be huge for accessibility.

But there's this persistent attitude in the fighting game community that "mechanical execution" is somehow what we're hype about. The Daigo Parry wasn't a difficult mechanical input - it was a soul read. It was a moment where one player controlled the mental game completely. That's what we fundamentally want to see. But FGC players have this brainworm that making execution hard somehow makes the mental game better.

I want more fighting games that not only have easy special inputs but REQUIRE them. I want more fighting games designed designed with gamepad, keyboard, and arcade stick all in mind. I want more fighting games designed to be easy and comfortable to control and not sticking to tradition for its own sake.


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in reply to @the-Backdash's post:

My first thought; fighting games are as much about the difficulty of execution as it is the mental game and outplaying your opponent. Sure, with practice almost anyone can parry attacks in 3s (at least as far as I know, I've played very little 3s) but it's an entirely different beast when you're playing in a high-stakes tournament with no room for error. Fighting games will never break its ties to difficult execution because it feels good to hit a difficult input sequence, for both the players and the spectators.
I do believe that low execution fighting games should still exist; plenty of games like Tough Love Arena, Blade Strangers, and Footsies are all fun games and good entry tools into fighting games as a whole. Accessibility options like SF6's modern controls and audio assists are positives for the genre as a whole. A lot of fighting games already feel good to play on keyboard, and with many newer titles' lenient motion inputs make standard controllers viable to play on as well. Motion inputs will likely always be a part of popular fighting game releases, but I do believe there should be options for people who find them prohibitively difficult in the form of universal accessibility options and games that don't require motion inputs.

But are you saying that because motion inputs really ADD anything, or because... That's just the way it's always been?

I think all it's gonna take is one high profile tourney on SF6 where the stakes are everyone uses modern controls for everyone to see this is a good thing that helps people.

Motion inputs greatly increase the tools a character has access to, without the need for a dedicated button (helpful for street fighter where you already have 6 buttons to deal with). Most importantly, they make those moves marginally more difficult to execute so that they don't completely overshadow a character's non-inputs moves. If you can react soon enough, a DP is usually a better anti-air than a standard button, but it requires a faster reaction and more complex input, in a way that a special button system doesn't reflect.

Many people dislike modern controls because it greatly reduces the amount of options you have, with the minor benefit of making some moves easier to execute. For some players and even some general strategies, the tradeoff is worth it, and I dislike that it's an option that's looked down upon by some people. I don't know how much weight my opinion holds since this is the first street fighter game I'm really sinking my teeth into, but it seems like the best way to implement that kind of accessibility into a highly competitive game.

I've always felt the difficulty of motion inputs (aside of intentionally obtuse ones like pretzels and pentagrams) in of themselves is being somewhat exaggerated by both sides of the argument. What is imo really happening is that:

  1. These game's don't really share the muscle memory with any other genre. Have you ever seen someone struggle with controlling camera and walking in their first FPS video game? All other genres have natural entry points - you could have played Portal or a chill walking simulator before booting up Doom - while fighting games want you to master their own bespoke control scheme to the point of being pure muscle memory that doesn't encumber your mental stack.
  2. Past the complete newcomer baby stage, throwing a raw fireball isn't really a problem. All off the difficulty really comes from stringing them into tight combo - and a discussion sure could be had about their requirements and uninteractive nature and whatnot, but it's really about the combos and not motion inputs by themselves.

(and yeah, they do add something wrt to raw vs buffered input speeds and weighting options in different movement directions - which is tricky to replicate through other means in a genre built all around the fuzzy limits of human reaction time. As much as greater variety of games is generally good in general, what I'd personally like to see more than repeated attempts to put Smash controls into the 2D space is for the 3D fighters other than Tekken to finally resurrect and do their thing)

As an aside, I find the take that Daigo Parry wasn't a difficult mechanical input to be kind of wild. The entire point of the clip spreading like wildfire was how nutty it was to hit a tenth of a second 15 times in a row in most dramatic of circumstances. Nobody would remember that clip ever happening if Daigo, sitting on 1 HP, just made a good read against a medium kick or a fireball.

Today, many people have sat down to grind the Daigo Parry and hunt jwong online to the poitn it's almost routine among third strike sweats, but the entire point was that back at the time it seemed utterly insane to even attempt it, with people genuinely shocked that it fell within human capabilities.

These are some good points.
I think, my perspective is that if we can make controls that don't encumber the mental stack WITHOUT requiring practice, why make ones that DO?
Changing how buffered inputs work would certainly change some dynamics but I think street fighter 6 is already showing that this can work with modern controls. You can make an argument that modern controls aren't fair to classic controls users but you can't argue that two modern controls users playing against each other are playing the mental game at any lower a level than any other two given players.