Street Fighter VI - 3rd Strike Times Two.

Dreiko

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Not a fan of SF, more into airdashers, will keep an eye on this with no hopes and if it surprises me I may give it a shot. But yeah sf5 was so uninteresting that they had it for free on ps+ and I did add it to my library but never cared to actually play it yet, and fighters are my favorite genre alongside Jrpgs. I much rather spend my time with guilty gear or granblue or melty blood or blazblue.



As for simple controls, I'm of two minds on it. I don't dislike them, but I like how they are handled in games like Granblue and the upcoming DNF where you get an extra benefit if you do the move the normal way, but if you're someone who hasn't learned to do inputs yet you can still play the game at a basic level.

Some games are out to COMPLETELY eradicate motion inputs, and that I am against, but merely including a simple input is fine.

Also here's a secret about this whole issue, some people wrongly blame motions for being bad, they think if they could just do the moves they would win more. Sadly, doing the moves is the LEAST execution-demanding element in playing a fighting game. You still, in any fighter, will have to time attacks right and space them right and account for fraction-of-a-second-differences all the time, so if even hitting a simple sequence of inputs in stable timing is beyond you, assuming that hitting varied delay frame perfect inputs is not beyond you makes no sense, but people who are stuck thinking inputs are the issue haven't gotten to the level of play that allows them to notice what is entailed in actually playing the game and just like, moving around the screen properly and stuff, so they don't realize this yet.

That's fine but the problem is that don't Fighting game communities fall off hard if:

1. The game isn't good at launch
2. There is a long wait before the "full version"

Sure you can wait until all the shit is out and buy it as a bundle but doesn't that mean you are coming into a weaker online community? A competitive game shouldn't have to wait to get good for people to start playing and enjoying it. Kind of defeats the purpose.

All let's not forget when they put commercials into the game lol.
Not really at all an issue of a full version because as of late there is no full version but rather a constant trickle of dlc, with varying levels of pricing (sf5 had it earnable ingame but you could also buy it) so by the time a bundle with absolutely everything is out it means the very very last dlc char has been out for a long while, at which point the game is at the end of its life and a new one will be coming out soon. For context, dragonball fighterz still doesn't have a bundle with every char included. so that is kinda outdated thinking.

As for the community shrinking, that happens always irrespective of the game. The issue is some games have a larger install base than others going into release, so even if 80% of people go away you still have a decent population online anyways. It's more of an issue of marketing and brand recognition, and the recent move away from releasing new packaged versions in favor of a trickle of dlc is in an effort to keep reminding people games exist every time a new character is released, which is actually provably effective in keeping a game alive longer than the alternative.


Another huge aspect is having functional rollback netcode. That alone has served to fully revive decade + old dead games that got patched with rollback and went from like 20 active players daily to over 5000.


I personally like simpler controls. I've played enough random fighters to be comfortable with quarter circle inputs, but I tend to struggle with half circle and 360 insanity. I already struggle with getting my BnBs using basic attacks right, but then I mostly used to play anime fighters with really absurd BnB chains.

I always wondered if a fighting game can prioritize reflexes + decision making over complicated execution. A fighting game could in theory be balanced around a simpler control scheme though. Part of me believes that experienced players can pull off the specials with little trouble anyway, so the complicated inputs just serve as an additional barrier.

Though I also understand the flipside of certain moves potentially being OP without difficult execution, and there's also a lot less appeal and awe when it comes to the pro scene. And well, a controller can only handle so many basic inputs so movesets can't be anywhere as expansive without special inputs.

But as expected, the simplified moves will probably limit your ability to do a whole bunch of stuff. I think it's cool to have these controls as an option, but the newer players will probably get schooled by better players on classic controls anyway.

I remember I was at some event some years back, and they had MvC3 set up so I just started playing with randoms. I got matched with a random kid who selected the simple controls and started bragging about how he was really good. And.... I schooled him.

I guess these modern controls can still be good for players to learn other basic skills like timing, blocking, spacing and all that jazz without struggling with inputs initially, then if they want to get better at the game they will have to switch back to classic. I do question how many players will actually be able to make this transition though, or will they just get filtered eventually? Or maybe there will be casual lobbies for these people. Not sure how the community will turn out but I do feel that fighting games can be intrinsically new/casual unfriendly.

For long running games with established fanbases, having simple controls be optional is definitely the way to go. Forcing it to be the only control scheme will just lead to stupidity.
Thing is you just dumb down decision-making to only a few viable decisions if you remove input complexity, cause we only got so many fingers to hit single button inputs with. It's more fun if you are new at a game and don't plan on spending thousands of hours of your life honing your skill but for me that sort of premise sounds totally uninteresting outside of like, an arcade setting where you blow a couple quarters and are done with the game after that.

Fighters thrive in a sense of growth and mastery, there's nothing worse than feeling you learned all there is to learn and have nothing more to discover. So the more options and depth you have the more fun there is to the game.


Also, and this is a big one; you are not supposed to be good! You are not supposed to be comparable to people who have spent ten thousand hours in the game! Any game that allows for that is a bad game. You are supposed to be destroyed by someone with many times more experience than you. It's not a sign of you being bad or the game being hard, it's a sign of your opponent being incredible. People too often choose to be down on themselves or the game, instead of being inspired by their foe and their amazing skill. If they just changed mindset into one of seeking growth and improvement instead of victory they would enjoy this genre a lot more.
 
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I decided I wanted to make some stupid observations about Guile's hair. I'm not criticizing it, I just find it weirdly amusing....


Some games are out to COMPLETELY eradicate motion inputs, and that I am against, but merely including a simple input is fine.
I personally think if you design a game around a control scheme without motion inputs, it can potentially be done well. I usually like to bring up Smash Brothers as an example, and it has a thriving community and a competitive scene - but it is a very different type of fighting game. But at the end of the day as you said, there's only so many inputs you can slap onto a controller, and only so many fingers we have, so one that doesn't use motion inputs will simply have a lesser moveset. Whether this makes for a lesser game though, is another matter altogether.

I don't think existing fighting game series should ever attempt to eradicate motion inputs though.
 
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Dreiko

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I personally think if you design a game around a control scheme without motion inputs, it can potentially be done well. I usually like to bring up Smash Brothers as an example, and it has a thriving community and a competitive scene - but it is a very different type of fighting game. But at the end of the day as you said, there's only so many inputs you can slap onto a controller, and only so many fingers we have so one that doesn't use motion inputs will simply have a lesser moveset. Whether this makes for a lesser game though, is another matter altogether.

I don't think existing fighting game series should ever attempt to eradicate motion inputs though.
It can be done well but it hits up a wall. Like you can make a DMC or something and those games are super deep, but not 10% as deep as a fighting game at the same time.


I just think we can have both things, some games can be simpler, some games can be super complex. Not ALL games need be easy input games.
 

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From everything I'm seeing, it's looking like this game is going to depend heavily on reads and knowing exactly when to commit. It really does seem like a fairly big shift from previous entries.
Exactly why I am getting this game. I am thinking of all the wonderful strategies I can come up with.
 

Dreiko

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So looking into the systems, I'm liking all of those drive options and the parrying and the super armor attacks being tied to a single resource. This will allow for individual playstyles to emerge, because some folks will try to parry everything, some folks will try to smash through attacks, I'm gonna be trying to do dash cancel combos and sneaky grabs and other fast stuff, also it's tied to the guard cancels too.


Now this is gonna depend on the chars for me, the one new char I have seen is actually by far the most interesting char in the game so far, I love drunken masters and levelup mechanics where you wanna find time to use your buffing moves and then you go ham once you have them on. The game seems to also be a lot more liberal with combos because you can juggle off of grounded antiairs sometimes apparently, it never made sense to me that you couldn't in other games so this is great.
 

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Going though the input modes, the easy inputs in this game seem REALLY weak. Basically you only get a single strength of your special moves (as opposed to 3) and only one button per button-strength as opposed to 2. You legit have half a character when in the easy inputs mode.

You may get more of the moves in the autocombos but not in neutral that's for sure, and you still have to charge to do charge inputs. This basically makes the easy input mode really weak and unusable if you wanna do well, it's gonna be just something that total beginners will wanna use to do some fancy stuff while drunk at a party or something.
 

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I expected a video from nutsVSguts to pop up a little sooner. I do hope we get more III/Third Strike characters to return. Mainly Sean, Alex, Elena, and Makoto.

 

Dreiko

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3S chars are kinda weird but also have some of my favs like Ibuki and Oro so I'm good with some of them coming back for sure.
 

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3S chars are kinda weird but also have some of my favs like Ibuki and Oro so I'm good with some of them coming back for sure.
All the Street Fighter games have weird characters. It's just a different type of weirdness fans weren't used to. I know SFIII didn't do well, but I played those games whenever I could. I remember when a friend would bring his Dreamcast over, and we would play fighting games almost non-stop. Despite how Max and the Crew feel, I would not mind Ibuki coming back either. I wanna see these characters in their mid to late 20s or early 30s. I know this game already has a (American) ninja type character, Kimberly, so Ibuki coming back might seem redundant. I still think she should be in the roster for whatever season pass Capcom has planned. Just have her be the more experienced kunoichi. I hope one of the season passes is all Final Fight characters.