Great article! Really interesting perspective on Rising Thunder and the difficulty of entering fighting games as a whole.
Personally, I believe that the core part of fighting games is the process of learning how to play them. It's a journey, one fraught with the perils of frustration, challenge and game rage. But at the same time a journey where, presuming you keep at it, progress is almost inevitably made and the results of your labor can be immensely gratifying. I'll draw a tentative comparison to the Souls series (+Bloodbourne); at first an area can seem insurmountable, but you learn the environment, you learn the enemies, you learn your character, the boss and eventually progress is made, and it feels good. Only in fighting games you have the added level of complexity of the opponent being human.
Essentially, both are difficult to learn and at times frustrating, with the games seeming to deliberately obfuscate their mechanics - but in a twisted sense, for many people that only adds to the appeal. It's a challenge, one which is really worth taking on.
Hell, I've only recently gotten into the genre, starting with Super Street Fighter AE when it was on Games With Gold for the 360, so I've got fairly recent experience of scaling that learning curve. But I'm bloody glad I kept with it, once you know your stuff the games are deep.
Anywho, enough about my experience, about Rising Thunder. The crux of your article seems to be that Rising Thunder's attempts to simplify fighting games to allow ease of access to newcomers, whilst a good first step, doesn't totally achieve it's goal. It changes special, motion-based move to a single key, but doesn't do much to help people with the other essentials; normals, movement, combos and tactics - and that you believe the game (or at least, future fighting games) should address this if they wish to expand their player base. If I've interpreted this right, its an interesting and very valid perspective, but I'll add my two cents to a few points
MyLifeIsAnRPG said:
But input complexity is only one aspect of fighting games that leads to a lack of mechanical transparency. There are tons of other mechanics, from combos, to mix-ups, to simple move utility, that are hidden from the player, and not necessarily behind an execution barrier! When the player doesn't understand how or why to use these mechanics, all he can do is mash buttons and hope something works, and that is where button-mashing comes from.
This is where Rising Thunder stumbles. It tells you how knights work and sends you off to capture the king, but we still don't know how bishops, rooks, and the queen work.
This issue is, in my opinion, less to do with game design and more to do with the game having an adequate tutorial - something that we won't know about until the game releases. In my experience with Rising Thunder, simply having the specials be single keys allowed me to focus less on execution, more on mindgames. That said, I have had quite a lot of experience Street Fighter 4's systems, which as you point out, shares many similarities to Rising Thunders. My issue with a lot of what you write is that some of the issues that you point out are, to myself and many others, some of fighting games' greatest strengths. The learning process is huge part of the appeal, and something that makes fighting games quite uniquely compelling.
MyLifeIsAnRPG said:
For example, Street Fighter's special moves are frequently criticized as being too difficult to execute, but rarely do we examine its normal moves. Conventional wisdom says these moves are simple to do: press a button and they happen. But Street Fighter characters sometimes use different attacks depending on how close they are to the opponent, and these attacks can differ greatly. Some are cancelable and some aren't. Some have large and disjointed hitboxes, some don't. Some are safe on block, and some open you up to huge punishes. How do you know what attack you are going to throw? You don't. You just have to judge what the game considers "close."
Normal moves are, in my opinion, harder to learn to use appropriately than combos, for all of the reasons you've stated. But at the same time, they
define a character, and are one of the main means of getting attached to a character in the game. The time you spend learning all of those different attacks, whilst a potential barrier to someone hoping to quickly know the game, can often positively impact a player in the long term, by giving them their character which they can play their way. It'd be hard to have this kind of character depth in a roster without this complexity.
MyLifeIsAnRPG said:
Rising Thunder does none of this. There is no simple universal cancel system. Instead, specific normals can only combo into very specific other normals via Street Fighter style "target combos." These target combos aren't told to the player in any way. Instead, they have to be learned in training mode. Outside of target combos, normals have to be "linked" together by timing them very precisely, sometimes within only a few frames. You can cancel normals into special moves and super moves, but only on hit or block. Even then, certain normal moves can't be special canceled at all... and the game doesn't tell you which ones. Meanwhile, games like Skullgirls allow you to cancel any normal you have, even when whiffe
Just want to point out that it's a hell of a lot easier to link normals together along with specials in Rising Thunder than it is in Street Fighter 4; and whilst Skullgirls may allow you to cancel any normal, that and other parts of the game adds oodles of horrific complexity when you actually fight another person. Similarly, you mention Persona 4's easy combo strings, whilst indeed easy to do that can lead to very immediately in your face, unpredictable combat that both fails to teach, and can lead to new players' defenses getting overwhelmed.
Also, one thing that I don't think you really touched on at all was the excellent ranking system in Rising Thunder. The tiered system does a pretty adept job at matching you up with players at whatever level of skill you are, leading to a fun times regardless of expertise.
Addressing your solutions:
1. Is 8 buttons really an issue? On a controller pad when someone's playing any other genre almost all of the buttons are incorporated, which takes some learning to get right.
2. Visual indictators mean nothing to a player without context - either through a tutorial or match experience. It's always a good idea, but if people aren't paying attention and are just fooling around with the game, it won't help.
3. Rising Thunder addresses this directly, but just for the sake of it, is it really 'hiding' moves to have them on a command list? I didn't think so when I started, just looked up in training mode, thinking it was a good idea to go there first before online! Special moves are crucial, and in some cases can be taught in character-specific tutorials (P4 Arena, GG Xrd).
4. True enough, learning from the past is important. But I don't think the past is always telling us that motion-controlled specials and such are redundant.
All in all, I think it's a bit too early to tell whether or not Rising Thunder will accomplish its goal. So far it's managed to juggle a good deal of mechanical complexity and character differentiation with a easy to use single button specials and a ranking system that pits people of the same level together. If a good tutorial gets included in the full game alongside other learning tools you've mentioned, it'll allow people to transition from button mashing fun to getting further into the game FAR easier than any previous titles. Even in pre-Alpha state, Rising Thunder is going a good way to increasing accessibility.
Apologies for the long and rambling response. Didn't have time for focused/structured one! Hopefully something of worth there, and again, nice article!
