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Fighting Games are Approaching Accessibility Wrong

Pompadour

Member
The biggest issue is that fighting games can't teach you how to play without making it feel like you're doing homework. The Xrd tutorial is extremely well done but it still feels like work where you're learning all the minutiae. There's no FG equivalent to Zelda or Mario where the game teaches you how to play without making it obvious you're being taught.

Frankly, I don't know if that's even possible, though. The reason why someone like LI Joe can pick up a fighting game he's never touched, like DBFZ, and body a guy who also has never touched that same game but also doesn't play fighting games seriously is because fighting games have a high level of knowledge transfer. Maybe a fighting game can make learning the absolute basics fun but players expect that if the game teaches them how to play that they should be able to hold their own online which absolutely isn't reality.

When I learned how to do counter hit combos it's not like I had to specifically learn how to do it for each game. Once I was comfortable doing it in one game applying that knowledge to another game took like a tenth of the time. I've been aware of shit like frame traps, counter hits, option selects, etc. in fighting games for 15-20 years now but I ignored most of these universal features because learning them all at once seemed overwhelming. Instead I would learn a few per game over time when the character I played's gameplan revolved heavily around a specific concept.

So I'm not sure how a game can give a crash course on fighting game mechanics that players can absorb in a few days which took me years to learn.
 
People asking for a fuckton of work for people that are going to be like, "I COMPLETED THIS RPG-LIKE TUTORIAL, SURELY I CAN HOP ONLINE AND WIN NOW," only to get bodied, quit and never play again.

Not necessarily, though I'm not saying there wouldn't be plenty of people who end up doing that.

Even if everyone did, those are still people who purchased the game up front so that's still a worthwhile reason to implement it if it's encouraging people who would not normally purchase a fighting game to give one a go.

For every person who gets bodied post-tutorial and quits forever, there's another who gets bodied but has a far better understanding of why they got fucked up and wants to try again. Better knowledge makes things feel fairer, reassuring them that they categorically can get better. Souls games sounds like an annoying but apt reason here. Every time I died I felt like, even as a totally new player, I knew what I did wrong and where I needed to get better.

I enjoyed playing SFII as a kid, I often watch Evo and CPT etc. now but i've not bought a fighting game in years because of the online focus. I suck, I'd like to improve, but don't have the tools to do so (or rather, the tools exist but I don't have the time) and my friends aren't into those kinda games. I bought a BlazBlue collectors edition years ago because they had a tutorial DVD, that was enough to tip me from 'sort of interested' to 'buying', dumb as that may sound.

Like the OP said, it's about developers not crafting something that's well-suited to players who want to learn. I don't want to play on an 'automatic' setting, I also don't want to be thrown online and get smashed to pieces with no feedback as to why. There's got to be a middle ground, surely?
 
D

Deleted member 752119

Unconfirmed Member
The biggest issue is that fighting games can't teach you how to play without making it feel like you're doing homework. The Xrd tutorial is extremely well done but it still feels like work where you're learning all the minutiae. There's no FG equivalent to Zelda or Mario where the game teaches you how to play without making it obvious you're being taught.

Frankly, I don't know if that's even possible, though. The reason why someone like LI Joe can pick up a fighting game he's never touched, like DBFZ, and body a guy who also has never touched that same game but also doesn't play fighting games seriously is because fighting games have a high level of knowledge transfer. Maybe a fighting game can make learning the absolute basics fun but players expect that if the game teaches them how to play that they should be able to hold their own online which absolutely isn't reality.

When I learned how to do counter hit combos it's not like I had to specifically learn how to do it for each game. Once I was comfortable doing it in one game applying that knowledge to another game took like a tenth of the time. I've been aware of shit like frame traps, counter hits, option selects, etc. in fighting games for 15-20 years now but I ignored most of these universal features because learning them all at once seemed overwhelming. Instead I would learn a few per game over time when the character I played's gameplan revolved heavily around a specific concept.

So I'm not sure how a game can give a crash course on fighting game mechanics that players can absorb in a few days which took me years to learn.

I don't think anyone is suggesting game should teach all that stuff, especially higher level stuff in some easy way. That's just not possible.

I think people are just saying that all fighting games should have decent tutorials that cover the basics of movement, punishing, counterhits etc. in a digestible fashion as learning the fundamentals is the key to starting to get better and have fun. More advance tutorials can cover more advanced things,and plenty of games like KI do well at these. Having good character tutorials is nice as well, ones that don't just show specials but also mention a little about the characters designed play style etc.

Others have suggested some ways to improve the delivery of tutorials as well--guitar hero like button prompts that help you get timing down rather than just showing the buttons, improving training modes by having AI presets for things like practcing anti-airs etc. rather than making players record AI moves themselves everytime they want to practice, gameifying tutorials by building them into single player modes, breaking tutorials up in to more digestible lessons with guides urging players to then go play online and try to win some matches just using what they've learned so far before moving on etc.

Most of peoples requests are just for fighting game devs to take the best of past tutorials and put them in each new fighting game and make some minor tweaks to improve teaching/learning a tad in terms of how they're presented. No one is suggesting any of this will significantly cut down on the time it takes to get good, just that perhaps more will try if it's in-game and delivered better vs. having to hunt for decent stuff on YouTube etc.
 
The biggest issue is that fighting games can't teach you how to play without making it feel like you're doing homework. The Xrd tutorial is extremely well done but it still feels like work where you're learning all the minutiae. There's no FG equivalent to Zelda or Mario where the game teaches you how to play without making it obvious you're being taught.

Frankly, I don't know if that's even possible, though. The reason why someone like LI Joe can pick up a fighting game he's never touched, like DBFZ, and body a guy who also has never touched that same game but also doesn't play fighting games seriously is because fighting games have a high level of knowledge transfer. Maybe a fighting game can make learning the absolute basics fun but players expect that if the game teaches them how to play that they should be able to hold their own online which absolutely isn't reality.

When I learned how to do counter hit combos it's not like I had to specifically learn how to do it for each game. Once I was comfortable doing it in one game applying that knowledge to another game took like a tenth of the time. I've been aware of shit like frame traps, counter hits, option selects, etc. in fighting games for 15-20 years now but I ignored most of these universal features because learning them all at once seemed overwhelming. Instead I would learn a few per game over time when the character I played's gameplan revolved heavily around a specific concept.

So I'm not sure how a game can give a crash course on fighting game mechanics that players can absorb in a few days which took me years to learn.

I think that's a really good point about knowledge transfer and not having players inorganically being force-fed lots of complex ideas all at once.

Certainly not easy but one idea would be to only take it up to a kind of 'medium' standard. A tutorial that interactively guides you through the core concepts and when, generally, certain types of moves or actions are employed and why. As someone interested in fighting games but put off by how complex it looks and the difficulty of learning without friends into the genre to learn with/from, this would make a huge difference.

Worth saying that I also think it's good that higher level knowledge and techniques aren't taught in-game. I feel like people who do the research, the testing, who put the hours in should be rewarded for their effort.

Like, I wouldn't expect a game to teach me about frame traps but I would hope for a tutorial that leaves me in a place that when I inevitably get destroyed by some stranger online, I have a sense of why that was and feel like I'm progressing because of it. Without that level of base knowledge, it's hard to get feedback from defeats I think. Appreciate this may sound lame but the online element is a part of this, too. I acknowledge learning means losing a lot but losing to a friend sat next to you or the AI in a tutorial is far preferable (to me) than getting repeatedly battered by some person online when you're trying to learn.

I think many people interested in getting into fighting games don't have (much) of a problem with the reality of getting beaten a LOT, but they do have a problem with feeling like they aren't improving. I wouldn't want or expect an interactive tutorial that makes you 'good', just one that equips you with the skills you need to learn yourself and be half-way competent with the genre's basics.
 
The game is not done yet but I really like the idea of the predator enemies in Them's Fightin' Herds story mode.

Rather than cut scene -> fight -> cut scene, the story mode in this games has you exploring locations 16-bit rpg style which also means that you can run into and fight enemies. Each of these enemies are based on a specific fighting game concept. For example there is one enemy type that is all about high and low attacks, there is another enemy type that is all about cross-ups, etc. Basically they are a way of getting practice of common fighting game situations into the story mode without feeling like a tutorial.

Developer stream giving a rundown of the predators.
 
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