One thing that's very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don't capture all the strategic implications of move properties.
The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish.
But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching & fast enough move to punish it.
At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block.
Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the "unsafe" blockstring can watch their opponent's character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move's recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!
If you’re interested in this, can I recommend Dave Sirlin’s excellent “Playing To Win” series? One of the few articles that I’ve read that permanently changed the way I think about games, both from the player’s and the designer’s point of view.
Target audience: Beginners who have some familiarity of Tekken and have already chosen a character to specialize in.
It's not meant for high levels of play. We have to start somewhere. I think it is perfectly a suitable to help beginners think about +/- frames or other situational info before getting into matchup specific strats.
I always go at it roughly like this: Figure out what buttons to use in what situations, get executions of special moves down first, learn a few bnbs/block strings (and other offensive strategies), oki situations, then once I really master the character do I worry about match up specifics, mind games, etc.
I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all. Deliberately missing out getting blocked to make the opponent think they have an opening is not a particularly high level play in other games. It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes that are maximally unergonomic.
Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
Motion inputs aren't arbitrarily difficult. They're intrinsically tied to the game's balance. Basic special uppercut moves like the Shoryuken use the forward->down->downforward motion to ensure the player cannot hold back to block during the motion. The player must commit to use their strong special uppercut move frames before they've actually unleashed it. Guile's Sonic Boom projectile requires the player to "charge" the move by holding back for a couple of seconds before being able to unleash it. This creates a risk factor, since the opponent is then incentivized to cross up Guile to make him lose his charge. However, this is where Guile's special uppercut, the Flash Kick, comes into play. The Flash Kick can be simultaneously charged along with the Sonic Boom, to disincentivize the opponent from attempting to jump over Guile. Mapping any of these moves to a single button press is a balancing nightmare. Street Fighter 6 has a "Modern" controls option that does exactly this, and it comes at the cost of a big chunk of the character's available movelist. Even with that huge tradeoff, the Modern versions of several characters are still considered high tier. Even then, you hardly see any Modern control players in the upper echelons of Ranked matchmaking because, ultimately, it's way easier to learn the motion inputs than it is to have a solid gameplan.
It is a simple concept, but I'm calling it "advanced" in the sense that people don't really do stuff like that except in the higher ranks of ranked play, because its effectiveness depends on your opponent actually being aware that they "should" be pushing a button in a certain situation.
In lower ranks, people are more concerned with the other strategic aspects of the game; there is a lot of stuff going on all at the same time.
> It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes that are maximally unergonomic.
The mechanical difficulty of certain actions is a deliberate design choice. The game tests not only your strategic decision making, but also your ability to execute difficult inputs, both under pressure, all at once.
"I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all" could probably go down as a copypasta, perfectly emblematic of someone speaking confidently and dismissively about something they've never done, seen, or even studied very closely.
In Mount & Blade you don't make nearly as many decisions or utilize raw mechanical skill, it is mostly strategy and preparation. Mechanical challenge is part of what makes fighting games, fighting games.
>Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
Most of M&BW depth is outside of the combat system (whereas fighting games are generally only comprised of a combat system) thus making them hard to compare directly. Simplicity is a not a good first principle for developing a successful fighting game combat systems historically. Simple = Less Skill Expression
Did you just compare Tekken to Mount & Blade Warband? Ummm, not even the same thing man. M&B does just basic collision detection, there’s no combos, counters, supers, throws, finishers… get out of here with that nonsense. I get what you are saying (simple systems craft complex experiences) but that’s not a good analogy. Use Mortal Kombat instead.
I played a lot of tekken 1, but never enough to join any tournaments (had one heard of any in the internet less early 90s)
But what I remember being very special about tekken was how easy and logical the moves where.
It was one button, one limb and more or less only buttons that controlled limbs involved in a move was used. It was quite easy to learn many moves without consulting the manual because they flowed well with the characters.
This was in stark contrast to street fighter and mortal combat where things were as cryptic as cheat codes.
This is why I always like soul calibur. The control language of the game is consistent across characters and when you go to perform a move, you generally understand what’s going to come, only variables like range, height and speed change (thanks to the dynamics of the weapons). Stances play a part too.
Probably considered “cute” to the fighting game community, I think it’s a great option for those of us who don’t care over the minutia of frame counting.
I don't think the game you cite is the same type of game. It's even simpler to control units in Sim City, but that's just because the game isn't about fine-grained, high speed control of one character.
I kind of noped out of the fighting game craze when they descended on the arcades in the 90's (?). To my eye they had abandoned the twitchy interactivity I had come to expect playing standard arcade games like Tempest, etc. Rather than a fire button and a spinner you had a joystick plus what amounted to a numpad of buttons. It seemed like maybe a game accountants or payroll managers would enjoy.
(To this day, though I have built close to a dozen MAME cabinets, I have never included the numpad of buttons you would need to play fighting games. Besides never getting into the genre, I think they clutter up the console and create confusion for other games: Metal Slug as an example, which of these six buttons is the grenade button?)
<rant \>
Reading this article gives me a new appreciation for the fighting game genre. I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering. (Still not sure it's my kind of game though.)
I think Tekken is 4 buttons, and Neo-Geo is 4 buttons, so I'm not sure your numpad rant quite applies. I've seen some Neo-Geo layouts with a 2x2 layout instead of the traditional swoosh, so I think it would be ok.
Personally, I've got lots of room, so if I were a multi-cade person, I'd build out different machines for different layouts.
Something for classic single joystick games with two buttons on either side (although that might not be perfect for everything, some games had three buttons on one side). Something for trackballs, hopefully a layout that's reasonable for missle command and two player marble madness. Something with three buttons each for four players (guantlet/turtles/nba jam). A 4-button Neo Geo layout, which might be enough for the two player two and three button games too; would need to try and see. A 6-button 2x3 layout. If I played MK, their 6-button layout with run, although since I don't play MK, I might put the pre-run games on the street fighter layout with the column in the middle both being block; definitely saw that in arcades.
Japanese arcade cabs typically have control panels that can be swapped out with different button layouts to accommodate the particular game in the cabinet at the time. So the same cab can go from accommodating two players side-by-side playing Street Fighter with two sticks and 6 buttons per player, to a setup with three buttons and only one stick for shmups.
Modern arcade controllers are pretty standardized. The 8 buttons on the right are your four face buttons and four shoulder buttons. That plus your 8-directional dpad means they work for just about any 2D game or 3D game that doesn't need analog sticks or a mouse.
The left half of the 8 buttons is where the four face buttons go, in their standard positions more or less, but rotated slightly. Top two are the west and north buttons, bottom two are south and east buttons. This means PlayStation Cross and Xbox A are the same button, but in Nintendo layout that button would be the B button (gets even more confusing when you consider that PS3 can use Cross or Circle for confirm depending on the region).
For the other four you have your triggers on the bottom and bumpers on the top, but right is before left. You may think that's backwards and confusing, but I think of it as putting the more important action first / on the stronger finger. You see the same with standard pad controllers vs the mouse. Left click on a mouse and right trigger on a controller both tend to be your primary fire. With that in mind you'd probably just treat it like a standard xinput controller for the bindings.
I've pretty much just gotten into arcade controllers this year thanks to the new leverless (4 buttons replace the 4-switch stick) arcade controller trend + accompanying DIY scene. They're fun for fighting games, platformers, puzzle games, shmups, whatever they can work for pretty much. With the modern firmware options you can even emulate an analog stick if required for a game. I've been using them for as many games as I can lately. They even make arcade controllers with extra buttons now to play Smash Bros and other platform fighters (e.g. Rivals of Aether).
I just cannot imagine investing the energy, time and resources, especially when you're a kid, with limited spending money, into these games that will just beat you down and take all of your money for weeks on end before you get even a moderate level of competitive skill.
I understand the attraction of mastering a difficult challenge for the sake of the challenge itself, but there's just too strong of a pragmatic streak in me to justify that challenge being something that doesn't generalize into any other aspect of life, and is almost completely a time sink. Plus a massive dose of what feels like an intoxicating and gratuitous level of violence and aggression, which I suppose one gets desensitized to after a while but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Always baffled me to see my otherwise quiet, good natured friends stand in front of these machines for hours when there were so many other, to my mind, more curiosity- inspiring games available at the time. To each their own I guess.
I chose to take up dance instead, and in addition to satisfying the need to master a difficult challenge, have greatly enjoyed the actual full body contact with one's erm, "sparring partners," that comes with it as well.
A lot of replies to this feel like they're missing that you're closer to the target audience for this than people already familiar with fighting game conventions. One of the first things researched to establish requirements for this project was compiling and categorizing questions from beginners.
> I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering
Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.
Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts.
Tekken feels particularly bad to play if you don’t know what you’re doing imo. It’s the least approachable.
Unexpected shoutout to Thems Fighting Herds, the mlp fan spinoff turned OC quadruped fighting game. Regardless of your care for the aesthetics, the single player story was extremely good imo.
Enemies were NOT just random CPUs but unique characters with formulaic strategies. Wolf that just does crouching attacks so you need to learn to block and prefer crouches. Snake that zones with projectiles so you need to learn to approach. Grapple bear so you need to learn to zone and avoid grabs. Something else with mixups so you need to learn to standing block sometimes.
And the enemies are pretty merciless. If you button mash without doing a combo they punish you hard from level 1. It is immediately taught that you must be trying to learn the game and not cheese your way to victory with lucky spammy shit or random attacks.
The bosses are cool too. Giant non standard shaped enemies with interesting attacks that all respect your usual defensive options while also being vulnerable to hit stun. A lot of fighting game bosses decide to crank up the bullshit rather than making them teaching moments.
Compared to other 3D fighters like SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, etc, Tekken is completely unintuitive for a casual button masher. Tekken, like Virtua Fighter, requires you to sit down in Training Mode for hours just to learn a single character's basic moveset, BnBs, and gameplan. Compare this to 2D fighting games, where all you gotta do is learn the basic Street Fighter 2 movelist, and you can quickly figure out how a character plays by taking one glance at their movelist. The funny thing about this is that Tekken hardly has any motion inputs, which is what most casual players are intimidated by when picking up fighting games.
You know I find that funny. When I want to mash in tekken I just remember each button corresponds to a limb. If I want to do the thingy that uses both legs then press the two leg buttons with a direction. If I want to do a left right left combination I press left right left punch in order. You can mash around with a character to see where it leads you to get really good basic understand imo.
Tekken is easy to win for a button masher. Once in a while, a button masher will beat a top-tier opponent. In SF/MK, a button masher has zero chance of winning against a top tier opponent. The skill curve is much steeper.
Thanks for warning me on Tekken. I was really digging the character design and all in the upcoming Tekken 8 but given I possess dexterity of a 10 year old, I should probably skip it and fighting games in general.
Dexterity is not the issue. For Tekken it’s just knowledge and experience. There’s a ton to learn and practice. It’s huge. Much higher than stuff like street fighter. And I’m not talking about fancy tech. I mean the basic controls and move lists. You will not likely get to a point where you know everyone’s moves.
The reason to play fighting games is strictly that you like the idea of honing the skill and playing competitive 1v1 matches to improve. Progression and reward is pretty different from other genres in this sense.
I wouldn't consider myself to have good dexterity at all but have been able to play fighting games and work my way up the ranked ladder. I'd say if Tekken 8 looks cool, give it a try.
The main problem with Tekken is that it doesn't really document its systems with tutorials or a manual. Fortunately, YouTube will teach you more than enough. Tekken also tends to reward legacy knowledge more than most fighting games, so you'll probably find that Tekken 7 tutorials get you farther than you expect.
As far as a visualization and alternate means of teaching, at least at a getting started level, this is awesome.
As someone who has picked up many fighting games and been immediately overwhelmed by having no clue what's going on or even where to start, I just mash buttons. Even just seeing what's possible, how to access it, and basics of how it works is really neat.
I guarantee you if someone was trying to teach me a fighting game and had this handy, it would go about twice as well as them saying "push these buttons to do this" which is the usual means.
I love alternate visualizations and unorthodox teaching aids. This ticks all those boxes.
I'm a long time fighting game fan and recently discovered YOMI Hustle[1] a turn based fighting game. I think it works really well for teaching fighting game mechanics, strategy etc., whilst not having to worry about the execution of the moves itself. It's pretty fun, and there's an old version free on itch with multiplayer support. I recommend trying.
For an amazing fighting game guide/tutorial I can't recommend https://ki.infil.net enough. Its centered around Killer Instinct but describes general fighting game concepts really well. It has really great visuals/inline videos
I don't like the flower petals to represent startup time. They show numbers for every other stat. They should just show 10 for a 10 frame jab, not two flowers.
And for the uninitiated, frame data is important to know what beats what. If they do a move that is -12 on block and you block it, a 10 frame jab is a guaranteed punisher, assuming they are in range. Conversely if it's +12 on block there is no move you can do that is safe and it's best to block or duck any follow up.
If you want to give it a try, Street Fighter 6 is really, really good. Aside from just being an amazingly well thought-out fighting game[1], it's also got a big player base so you'll have plenty of other noobs to play with in the ranked matchmaking mode, and the networking code is perfect[2] so you can just hop on and start having fun.
If you do decide to jump in, just remember that you will be terrible at the start. Everyone is. No, you don't have to understand frame data and have a bunch of sick combos and understand all of the mechanics to play online. Just hop in, the game will match you against players that are about at your level. SF6 is my first fighting game, I started at the very bottom of the ranked ladder (like literally, the very bottom) and now I've played more than 80 hours this year and I've just now started breaking into the "good" ranks (Platinum). In the lower ranks I had no combos and never used the super gauge at all and still won and had a great time. Don't stress too much about your rank, just think of it as a way to match you with good quality opponents.
The second article mentions delay based and rollback both of which seem to be appropriate for peer to peer graphs, but there is a third option: server authority. I created a game with mechanics very roughly analogous to fighting games (nebulous.io) where there is no client side prediction, no rollback, and a 20hz update loop. Clients just render what the server reports (with some smoothing). I never get complaints about fairness, and players can quickly learn to adapt to their latency to servers located in different regions. Its as well now as it did in 2015, when a significant portion of players used 3g or worse cellular connections.
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The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish.
But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching & fast enough move to punish it.
At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block.
Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the "unsafe" blockstring can watch their opponent's character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move's recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!
Edit: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win This is the overview but read the whole thing start to end, seriously.
It's not meant for high levels of play. We have to start somewhere. I think it is perfectly a suitable to help beginners think about +/- frames or other situational info before getting into matchup specific strats.
I always go at it roughly like this: Figure out what buttons to use in what situations, get executions of special moves down first, learn a few bnbs/block strings (and other offensive strategies), oki situations, then once I really master the character do I worry about match up specifics, mind games, etc.
Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
In lower ranks, people are more concerned with the other strategic aspects of the game; there is a lot of stuff going on all at the same time.
> It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes that are maximally unergonomic.
The mechanical difficulty of certain actions is a deliberate design choice. The game tests not only your strategic decision making, but also your ability to execute difficult inputs, both under pressure, all at once.
>Compare this with the simplicity of Mount & Blade Warband which achieves greater depth, in 3D, with a very simple and intuitive control scheme.
Most of M&BW depth is outside of the combat system (whereas fighting games are generally only comprised of a combat system) thus making them hard to compare directly. Simplicity is a not a good first principle for developing a successful fighting game combat systems historically. Simple = Less Skill Expression
But what I remember being very special about tekken was how easy and logical the moves where.
It was one button, one limb and more or less only buttons that controlled limbs involved in a move was used. It was quite easy to learn many moves without consulting the manual because they flowed well with the characters.
This was in stark contrast to street fighter and mortal combat where things were as cryptic as cheat codes.
Probably considered “cute” to the fighting game community, I think it’s a great option for those of us who don’t care over the minutia of frame counting.
Now laugh as they call you anti fun.
(To this day, though I have built close to a dozen MAME cabinets, I have never included the numpad of buttons you would need to play fighting games. Besides never getting into the genre, I think they clutter up the console and create confusion for other games: Metal Slug as an example, which of these six buttons is the grenade button?)
<rant \>
Reading this article gives me a new appreciation for the fighting game genre. I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering. (Still not sure it's my kind of game though.)
Personally, I've got lots of room, so if I were a multi-cade person, I'd build out different machines for different layouts.
Something for classic single joystick games with two buttons on either side (although that might not be perfect for everything, some games had three buttons on one side). Something for trackballs, hopefully a layout that's reasonable for missle command and two player marble madness. Something with three buttons each for four players (guantlet/turtles/nba jam). A 4-button Neo Geo layout, which might be enough for the two player two and three button games too; would need to try and see. A 6-button 2x3 layout. If I played MK, their 6-button layout with run, although since I don't play MK, I might put the pre-run games on the street fighter layout with the column in the middle both being block; definitely saw that in arcades.
The left half of the 8 buttons is where the four face buttons go, in their standard positions more or less, but rotated slightly. Top two are the west and north buttons, bottom two are south and east buttons. This means PlayStation Cross and Xbox A are the same button, but in Nintendo layout that button would be the B button (gets even more confusing when you consider that PS3 can use Cross or Circle for confirm depending on the region).
For the other four you have your triggers on the bottom and bumpers on the top, but right is before left. You may think that's backwards and confusing, but I think of it as putting the more important action first / on the stronger finger. You see the same with standard pad controllers vs the mouse. Left click on a mouse and right trigger on a controller both tend to be your primary fire. With that in mind you'd probably just treat it like a standard xinput controller for the bindings.
I've pretty much just gotten into arcade controllers this year thanks to the new leverless (4 buttons replace the 4-switch stick) arcade controller trend + accompanying DIY scene. They're fun for fighting games, platformers, puzzle games, shmups, whatever they can work for pretty much. With the modern firmware options you can even emulate an analog stick if required for a game. I've been using them for as many games as I can lately. They even make arcade controllers with extra buttons now to play Smash Bros and other platform fighters (e.g. Rivals of Aether).
I understand the attraction of mastering a difficult challenge for the sake of the challenge itself, but there's just too strong of a pragmatic streak in me to justify that challenge being something that doesn't generalize into any other aspect of life, and is almost completely a time sink. Plus a massive dose of what feels like an intoxicating and gratuitous level of violence and aggression, which I suppose one gets desensitized to after a while but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Always baffled me to see my otherwise quiet, good natured friends stand in front of these machines for hours when there were so many other, to my mind, more curiosity- inspiring games available at the time. To each their own I guess.
I chose to take up dance instead, and in addition to satisfying the need to master a difficult challenge, have greatly enjoyed the actual full body contact with one's erm, "sparring partners," that comes with it as well.
Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.
Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.
(It's a card game from a street fighter dev)
Unexpected shoutout to Thems Fighting Herds, the mlp fan spinoff turned OC quadruped fighting game. Regardless of your care for the aesthetics, the single player story was extremely good imo.
Enemies were NOT just random CPUs but unique characters with formulaic strategies. Wolf that just does crouching attacks so you need to learn to block and prefer crouches. Snake that zones with projectiles so you need to learn to approach. Grapple bear so you need to learn to zone and avoid grabs. Something else with mixups so you need to learn to standing block sometimes.
And the enemies are pretty merciless. If you button mash without doing a combo they punish you hard from level 1. It is immediately taught that you must be trying to learn the game and not cheese your way to victory with lucky spammy shit or random attacks.
The bosses are cool too. Giant non standard shaped enemies with interesting attacks that all respect your usual defensive options while also being vulnerable to hit stun. A lot of fighting game bosses decide to crank up the bullshit rather than making them teaching moments.
Idk, I thought it was cool
The reason to play fighting games is strictly that you like the idea of honing the skill and playing competitive 1v1 matches to improve. Progression and reward is pretty different from other genres in this sense.
The main problem with Tekken is that it doesn't really document its systems with tutorials or a manual. Fortunately, YouTube will teach you more than enough. Tekken also tends to reward legacy knowledge more than most fighting games, so you'll probably find that Tekken 7 tutorials get you farther than you expect.
As someone who has picked up many fighting games and been immediately overwhelmed by having no clue what's going on or even where to start, I just mash buttons. Even just seeing what's possible, how to access it, and basics of how it works is really neat.
I guarantee you if someone was trying to teach me a fighting game and had this handy, it would go about twice as well as them saying "push these buttons to do this" which is the usual means.
I love alternate visualizations and unorthodox teaching aids. This ticks all those boxes.
[1] https://ivysly.itch.io/your-only-move-is-hustle
And for the uninitiated, frame data is important to know what beats what. If they do a move that is -12 on block and you block it, a 10 frame jab is a guaranteed punisher, assuming they are in range. Conversely if it's +12 on block there is no move you can do that is safe and it's best to block or duck any follow up.
I play a lot of games, but never got into fighting games.
Seeing the strategy "laid out" might be a useful way to understand the mechanics rather than figuring them out with trial and error.
Trial an error can be fun (e.g Zelda), but it's always been something that stopped me getting too far with this genre.
If you do decide to jump in, just remember that you will be terrible at the start. Everyone is. No, you don't have to understand frame data and have a bunch of sick combos and understand all of the mechanics to play online. Just hop in, the game will match you against players that are about at your level. SF6 is my first fighting game, I started at the very bottom of the ranked ladder (like literally, the very bottom) and now I've played more than 80 hours this year and I've just now started breaking into the "good" ranks (Platinum). In the lower ranks I had no combos and never used the super gauge at all and still won and had a great time. Don't stress too much about your rank, just think of it as a way to match you with good quality opponents.
Anyway. Can't recommend it highly enough.
[1] Here's a very in-depth overview: https://words.infil.net/w04-sf6review.html
[2] They use rollback networking, which is the gold standard for online multiplayer games https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti...