Dreiko said:
garjian said:
I agree, it is horrible design.
One player is reciting a combo they've done a thousand times, they're often making no decisions. The other player is simply waiting for it to end, having no real input.
That's true of Marvel and Skullgirls, and a few others, but not all.
Soulcalibur, combos are rarely more than 3 or 4 attacks. The player doing the combo sometimes has a few different options to end with for spacing, and the player receiving well... beyond air control and ukemi, they're still not doing much, but at least you're not out of the game for more than a couple of seconds and you actually have to pay some attention.
I used to play UMvC3 myself, but I got so sick of Magneto's Heavy Heavy Heavy Heavy Heavy Heavy combos that I completely stopped playing not long before SCV came out.
I'm in the early stages of making a little fighting game myself right now, as ridiculous as that ambition is, and it's something I'm very conscious of. I don't like the idea of having a BnB combo that's outright the best option, because you'll see it so often that it'll get boring, and I really don't like the idea of a player having no input for large portion of the game.
The best part of a fighting game is trying to outwit each other, and it's baffling to me that many of them waste so much time on the boring parts where nobody is really doing anything.
For someone making a fighting game you sure don't understand what combos really work like or what goes through the head of the player pulling them off. I see lots of factual errors here.
Every combo in every game that is good is done while taking into consideration spacing and knockdown and such factors. Because a combo is long it doesn't mean it's thoughtless. The notion is ridiculous. Longer combos take THAT MUCH MORE thought to properly pull off, with countless micro-delays to account for situational screen placement or general height adjustments etc. being commonplace. Usually, combos are either ones done to cause hard knockdown and end in such a way that allows you to attack someone as soon as they're recovering, or, they forgo this better positioning for the sake of maximizing damage in the hopes of killing someone off. Marvel is a horrible game and thus not the best example for a "combo heavy game" you could mention. Look into something like Blazblue to find a better example of a game with combos.
If you think you do nothing when being comboed, you haven't played a game to the level where you have to watch how you recover and how you air ukemi to avoid being reset. There's TONS of moments in combos where the attacker can let the combo purposefully drop, allowing you to ukemi in a bad position, then resetting you into ANOTHER full combo, rather than just finishing the first combo off. The defender has to watch for those situations and decide if it's worth it to try to ukemi or not and sacrifice positioning to avoid the reset risk while also deciding how they wish to tech after the combo ends and the timing with which they'll perform their first action after teching when they're being forced to receive the wakeup mixup. It's a LOT of stuff to deal with. If you haven't had anything to do or think of when being comboed in the past you hadn't been playing the game in a particularly high level I'm afraid or you never played some of the better 2D fighting games out there. Try blazblue or guilty gear or under night in birth for examples of good ones.
BnBs are supposed to be boring, they're there to help people who are learning the ropes to get a basic thing which does ok damage and gives them knockdown. You wanna focus on the non-bnb situational combos which occur in more uncommon instances and bring the actual excitement to the game. Those are the most fun.
Nonsense.
The point is that there is a lot of needless fluff. You can have different ends for different situations (spacing, damage, etc.) in a combo consisting of 2 hits, just by having multiple things that can connect from the first hit. You don't need 40.
All this "micro-delay" nonsense means nothing outside of practice mode, neither to the viewer nor either player. As soon as it's in muscle memory, it's just regurgitating it and yes, that is mindless.
You're not watching how you recover when they're going through to motion to rack up the damage before getting the the part where they reset. Back to Marvel 3, the only thing you'd sacrifice to do a reset is a super, where instead you would air grab their recovery... They've still had to sit through at least 2 air combos and god knows how many other excessive attacks.
There is never a need to waste time on anything even as little as a 7-attack combo, if neither of you have a decision to make on
every hit.
What's important is whether or not you can hit confirm, where the opponent is at the end (both in respect to the attacker and the stage), damage, meter cost, and reset potential. You can get all of those things in a combo with 2-3 attacks in it, and there's rarely a need to go higher.
The idea of a BnB where doing the most damage also puts them enemy in the most ideal place for the character is terrible. There would almost never be a reason to not use it, and it's boring for both the audience and players, especially if that combo takes upwards of 5 seconds to perform. These are used all the way up, and have nothing to do with a player being new.
An example of pointless fluff even from a game that doesn't have much.
In SCV, Viola's options from a successful 3B are:
3B AAB 66B 66A+B - Most damage, but bad recovery
3B AAB 2A+B - Low damage, but great recovery
3B AAB 6A+B - Even lower damage, but pushes the opponent very far away
Why does the AAB need to be there? What value does it add when it is by far and away the best thing to follow SET 3B with in any situation, even with meter, and it has long enough recovery to not require hit confirming? Why not just make 3B connect to the available follow-ups itself, instead of wasting a good second watching AAB happen?
