Why do you think so few people enjoy fighting games?

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azuriel_abraxas

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Dec 2, 2011
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Neither Devil May Cry nor the Arkham games are in the fighting genre. Devil May Cry is action-adventure, and both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are stealth-action. You are referring to the combat mechanics in these games, which were handled very well, but I think you have your genres mixed up.
 

OtherSideofSky

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Dreiko said:
OtherSideofSky said:
Thank you very much. That's actually some of the most helpful and understandable advice about fighting games I've ever gotten.

I'm currently as far away from my PS3 as I can be while remaining on Earth and will be until the end of next summer, so it looks like I'll be a bit late to the party on the next Blazblue who thought a silent "z" was a good idea, anyway?). I played Lambda CS because I'd never seen a character in a fighting game who played like that before (it helps that I'm also a big ZOE fan), but I switched to Makoto after the first DLC because I enjoyed playing her more (shame about the costume, though).

I know that the tutorials technically cover everything, but they basically amount to a voiced instruction manual. I've done some work with teaching as part of studying languages, so it just really irks me when I see people dropping the ball on it so much. I mean, I'm sure it's more important for the designers to be working on balance issues or net code or whatever, but there are just so many better ways to teach people something than just reading it all off like that.
Ah, Makoto, yeah, she's simple to use but her drives are quite tricky for a newcomer. If you don't master getting them to lvl 3 every single time you won't get far with her since her average BnB relies on about 2-5 lvl 3 Ds being landed perfectly. It's something which will seem initially impossible and then 3 hours later pathetically easy. :D


As for Lambda, she's a zoner with some good damage potential but she has a unique playstyle not often found in fighters so you need to play her completely differently to everyone else. Blazblue is like that where you may know how to kick ass with one guy and completely suck with everyone else cause they're so different, it's why picking a main is strongly advised for new players.


As for the teaching thing, I can see how it's more of a personal peeve to you but take note how Rachel talks to you during it, she's basically torturing you during the tutorial, that's a tongue-in-cheek joke of the game. It's not the best way to do a tutorial, for sure, but if you're already a fan of the game you'll go through it regardless just to hear Rachel explain stuff and belittle you in her favorite way. She often jokes about how the player is a masochist and for other such things.


Lastly, there's no silent Z unless you're pronouncing it in Japanese and if you are you should know that they didn't actually type a Z in there in the first place lol. (it's called "burei-buru", not "bureizu-buru") In english it's pronounced like "blaze-blue", it doesn't have a silent "z", it has an invisible "e". XD
Thank you again.

Actually, the Japanese logo still uses the English text, it just has katakana underneath telling you how to pronounce it. I suppose it could be argued that it has both a silent "z" and an invisible "e". What's weird about that is that there's a "z" sound in the Japanese language, so I don't really know why they did that.
 

Grimfolse

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Feb 28, 2011
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On of the main problems for me is in most fighting games I've played, the special moves are really finicky about how you enter them. I enter one of those half-circle forward moves, and it only seems to work less than half of the time. I'm more likely to pull off a special move randomly mashing buttons than I am actually entering the command to trigger it, and either way my hands hurt. Sure, I could invest in one of those fancy arcade fighting stick things, but I don't want to spend a huge amount of money on something that's not very fun to begin with.

Mortal Kombat is one of the only ones I've played that didn't do that, actually. That and the Smash Bros. games, but that leads to my other main problem with fighters. Those super-competitive Stop Having Fun Guys. I'm not a competitive person, and most fighting games are super competitive. Some people take the game so seriously that the only way to have fun playing against one is to practice over and over and become one of those crazy competitive people yourself. Just seems like a waste of time to me, really. I have a similar problem with

Sorry if any of the above doesn't make sense. I'm a trifle exhausted right now.
I guess to sum things up in general, I just don't see the appeal in most fighting games.
 

crono738

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Sep 4, 2008
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As a number of other people have said, the learning curve. Sure, a lot of fighters can be easy to pick up and play, but becoming good at them takes quite a bit of time. The usually mediocre netcode can also be a turnoff for folks who want to play online. Hell, I can't remember the number of times I've dropped combos in MvC3 online because of lag.
 

Dreiko_v1legacy

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OtherSideofSky said:
Thank you again.

Actually, the Japanese logo still uses the English text, it just has katakana underneath telling you how to pronounce it. I suppose it could be argued that it has both a silent "z" and an invisible "e". What's weird about that is that there's a "z" sound in the Japanese language, so I don't really know why they did that.
I didn't mean the logo itself, I just meant the way they call the game. Usually the katakana comes before the english letters lol.


As for why they did it, it's simple, Japanese has this thing where they cut long words short just cause it sounds prettier. For example, "pasocon" stands for "paasonaru conpyuutaa" and is how they call PCs, they did the same with Blaze, only if you go at it with their own system, the english logo should have been "blablue", which I guess sounded odd even to them thus they added the extra Z, since it wasn't ambiguous enough apparently. :D


The funny thing is that people who don't know this pronounce it blahzblue, I've come across many people who were stunned to realize they've been calling their fav game wrong for ever.
 

Axyun

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Oct 31, 2011
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StriderShinryu said:
To win at a fighting game you need to understand:
- how the game engine works
- how your character works
- how your opponent's character works (or at least have a sense of their preferred play style)
- and, most importantly, you need to know how your opponent works
I'm not trying to be a jerk but these elements are the basics for any competitive game and, as a fan of strategy games, I'm fully aware that these come before anything else.

What I will take away from your post is that I should focus more on the basics and stop being misguided by the apparently worthless training mode. Unfortunately it only validates my opinion that fighting games don't really teach you how the game should be played. Or, even worse, lead you in the wrong direction.
 

Dreiko_v1legacy

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Axyun said:
StriderShinryu said:
To win at a fighting game you need to understand:
- how the game engine works
- how your character works
- how your opponent's character works (or at least have a sense of their preferred play style)
- and, most importantly, you need to know how your opponent works
I'm not trying to be a jerk but these elements are the basics for any competitive game and, as a fan of strategy games, I'm fully aware that these come before anything else.

What I will take away from your post is that I should focus more on the basics and stop being misguided by the apparently worthless training mode. Unfortunately it only validates my opinion that fighting games don't really teach you how the game should be played. Or, even worse, lead you in the wrong direction.
Here's the thing, they don't know how the game should be played since that is something the community discovers. The game itself may have even an idea and attempt to teach you but if it's wrong (as is often the case) then it'll be doing you harm rather than good.


Training mode is imperative, it's just not the entirety of what you should be exposed to if you wanna learn the game. Training is there for you to get a feel for your character without the pressure of your opponent trying to kill you, it's there for you to practice your combos and blockstring/setups and for you to freshen up your execution before going against an actual opponent.



In the end, due to the open nature of the games, you can play them in an infinite amount of styles. The important ones will rise to the top once discovered/invented and through experiencing the game and seeing how your foes play you too learn.


The main thing you should get out of this is that nobody ever starts knowing how to play, everyone had to start knowing nothing and worked up to their current level by simply playing the game and being a fan of it through interacting with other people who play it, therefore playing the game is all you need to do to learn how you're supposed to play. It's just not an instant thing and that kills the fun for some instant gratification types.
 

StriderShinryu

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Dec 8, 2009
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Axyun said:
StriderShinryu said:
To win at a fighting game you need to understand:
- how the game engine works
- how your character works
- how your opponent's character works (or at least have a sense of their preferred play style)
- and, most importantly, you need to know how your opponent works
I'm not trying to be a jerk but these elements are the basics for any competitive game and, as a fan of strategy games, I'm fully aware that these come before anything else.

What I will take away from your post is that I should focus more on the basics and stop being misguided by the apparently worthless training mode. Unfortunately it only validates my opinion that fighting games don't really teach you how the game should be played. Or, even worse, lead you in the wrong direction.
It's really not the training mode itself that's the problem at all. As Dreiko said, a proper fully fleshed out training mode will make any fighting game better. The issue is when what is essentially a combo movie test is presented as proper training. There are some people who actually play in tournaments and do well that can't complete all of the challenges in some fighters (the recently released King of Fighters game, for example). Combo training modes are really just things to concern yourself with once you know what you're doing and have time to kill. Sadly, very few fighting games do a good job of teaching you how to play at a fundamental level.. assuming they make the effort at all.

The best fighting game training mode/tutorial system ever was back in the Virtua Fighter 4 games released for the PS2. They really actually tought you to play the game right from totally new to expert level.

Either way, yes, it's all about the basics. And I didn't mean to imply you or anyone else was an idiot. It's just about focusing on the right stuff and learning to walk before you run. Say you're playing Street Fighter. Just go into training mode and get comfortable with all of your regular moves and movement options. Maybe even try playing some matches without using a single special move. That sort of thing. Highlight reel combo videos can be used as motivation, but no one should expect to use them as a training tool unless they are already very familair with the game (and once you are, you'll usually see how useless most of those fancy combos really are).
 

GeneWard

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Feb 23, 2011
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Because people have different tastes, and for many people, shooters and Farmville fare are easier to get into than SSFIV or MvC3. Why, I hear you ask? Because, though I consider myself a bit of a Street Fighter IV buff, newcomers playing for the first time will just be killed again and again. It takes a lot of perseverance to play those games well: particularly in the 3DS version of SSIV, where the touch screen combos are a little like training wheels in that at first they do help newcomers enjoy the game, but when holding your own against someone only using the buttons gets old and you need a new challenge, you'll eventually phase out your use of touch screen controls. My point is: Unless there's something to make it easier for new players, these games are VERY hard at first. Many people get bored and switch off.
 

LeQuack_Is_Back

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May 25, 2009
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I don't play them because I don't have the time to invest in them to be good. Playing against the AI will only go so far in those games, so I'll end up playing people, get my *** handed to me, then go back to what I'm good at. At least another human being isn't there watching me fail (possibly laughing and using unkind words) when I die in a singleplayer game.
 

XT inc

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Jul 29, 2009
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It is really quite simple.

A hard hitting combination of Developer greed, bad design choices and social interaction.

Fighters have fallen by the wayside, they are not as deep or involved as other games, at their peak they are a bunch of fighters, finely balanced on 2 or 2.5 d plane. With a very loose nit story to explain what is going on.

Developers chose to make these games with more entertaining features such as characters and costumes pay for DLC, in spades. Instead of trying to entice users to a game that has off put many a player in recent years.

It isn't a simple thing you can play, you have to really master it to get the fun from it, which in a sense makes it a "make work/fun" project. Where if you aren't making the fun you aren't having it.

The way the game plays between platforms is vast, feels different in your hands. There are no common conventions you can bust out without a move sheet near by. I can play damn near any ole shooter with a friend, no matter how complex it is always plug and play to most. Trying to find an opponent on your game, and console is a challenge in itself.

Point is, downgrade the price of a fighting game, whore it out, get a big fan base to make the competition work it is all about community, and it holds far less stake than RPGS, mmo;s or shooters.
 

Et3rnalLegend64

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Jan 9, 2009
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OtherSideofSky said:
They're impossible to get into.
You either have to devote your life to the things or you get so completely outclassed by the people who do that you can't really enjoy yourself (playing and losing can still be fun, but when the skill-gap is so big that you don't even have a chance it's just boring).

Most serious fighting game fans are either unwilling or unable to teach new players, and the average skill level online has gotten so high that there isn't really any good learning environment available. Because skills often transfer from game to game, it's pretty hard to just pick up the new Street Fighter and go online because you'll be up against all the crazy-good people who have been playing since Street Fighter II hit the arcades and don't want anything to do with you. It takes so much work to be able to even begin having fun that it's just not worth the time investment.

I occasionally pick up a fighting game that catches my interest and spend a decent amount of time on it, but the experience has always been pretty negative except when I'm playing with a similarly inexperienced friend in the same room.

Et3rnalLegend64 said:
I know no one who's not already an enthusiast will listen, but every match is a chance to improve. It's just you and the other player, no distractions or excuses. Your style and knowledge of the game against his. Just because you've seen the character he uses doesn't mean you know how to deal with him. Your ability to react under pressure and adjust your strategies to each others' as the match goes on determines who wins. If the game was a simple "twitch fest" then any random person can win by mashing uppercut every time the opponent jumps. The genre has as much depth as you're willing to look for, which is why we who play find so much enjoyment in it.
Based on my experience, I think this is only the case if you already have an understanding of the system and the muscle memory to actually pull off combos (I don't mean just the really big ones, a lot of people just starting out can't do them at all) and there really isn't a good environment to learn those things. Listening to fighting game fans describe what they're doing in a match is like listening to a different language, even to someone who's invested more than forty hours into a given game. On top of that, the fighting game community is usually pretty unfriendly to knew players, and even in the rare event that someone tries to explain things to you they just come off as unintelligible and intimidating.

A lot of people say you just need to put some effort into it, but the amount of effort involved seems to be roughly equivalent to learning a new sport and I could learn a fourth language in less time than most serious players recommend people spend practicing just to get good enough to go online.
This is true. The really "serious business" guys seem to look down on the newbies. Explanations aren't good enough. To be taught, one essentially needs their hand held for several hours and a layman's terms dictionary if the teacher can't translate properly. That, or the dictionary and a LOT of time. I eventually found the dictionary/glossary online. Much as I love the games, I don't think I'll ever be so serious as to study frame charts. In terms of raw skill, I think that limits my skill ceiling, but I don't have that kind of dedication to the game.