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[ClayKavalier]

The Trials confuse the shit out of me as a UI/UX designer.

You have a combo that has four steps in Trial #2/3. What? How is this so hard for you to grasp, Capcom? Trial #1 should be linking the first 2 hits of that combo. Trial #3 is linking the first 3 hits of the same combo. Trial #4 is linking all 4 hits of the combo.

You build the player up to what they're supposed to do and give them an obvious sense of progression. (You could also make Trial #2 the first two hits and Trial #3 the last two hits of a 4-hit combo, if the combo allows for it.) This is such a basic part of game design that I feel sort of embarrassed for having to type it out.

The best I can guess is they didn't want to "bore" experienced players by having anything other than front-to-back optimized combos in the Trials, but seriously, the Trials aren't really for those players, they probably went into Training Mode a month ago and worked out all their target combos to a high level of proficiency. This is basically an advanced tutorial, treat it like one.

So what, by the end you learn one single ten-hit combo?

Each trial should ideally be a different type of combo. Here's one you can land after you land an anti-air. Here's one that let's you hit-confirm into a special move. Here's your go-to combo after landing a crush counter. Here's how you combo into your Critical Art so you don't blow your meter.

Maybe they could be more clear that that's what you're being taught, but the way it's currently set up is way better than what you're proposing. You can already easily attempt the different parts of a trial within the trial itself. I'm not sure what good it does to break it up into such small components.

I agree that the trials are an advanced tutorial, but what you're asking for is too remedial. I really like Street Fighter, but I don't have any interest in messing around in training mode figuring out on my own what moves do and don't combo into each other. The trials are a convenient place to quickly learn some situational combos for each character and practice them.

I don't think any fighting game has combo trials so granular they go from 2, to 3, to 4 hits in entirely different steps. The trials are not supposed to be tutorials on what combos are at the most basic level; they are challenges and are supposed to make players spend at least some effort figuring things out.

The trials in SFV are in fact way more accessible than the trials in SFIV and in most other games. To me they seem like medium skill level introductions to building optimized combos. A few offer hints on non-obvious properties of certain links and buffers.

SFV's actual design problem, common to Capcom games, is the lack of a genuine tutorial system of the kind seen in something like VF4, Guilty Gear Xrd, or Killer Instinct. Combo challenge trials are different from true tutorials.

This is completely true. They really should spell out stuff like "The reason you're doing a jump-in and two normal moves before comboing into your special is so that you have time to see that your moves are connecting before you let you opponent block the special move and lay into you afterward."

Or "This is a combo that makes it hard for your opponent to retaliate if they block it, so you should use this offensively to stay in control of the match." Stuff like that.

As it is a new player who commits all of the trials to muscle memory is still going to have zero idea of when and why they should be using them.

 

[Pompadour]

So what, by the end you learn one single ten-hit combo?

Each trial should ideally be a different type of combo. Here's one you can land after you land an anti-air. Here's one that let's you hit-confirm into a special move. Here's your go-to combo after landing a crush counter. Here's how you combo into your Critical Art so you don't blow your meter.

Maybe they could be more clear that that's what you're being taught, but the way it's currently set up is way better than what you're proposing. You can already easily attempt the different parts of a trial within the trial itself. I'm not sure what good it does to break it up into such small components.

I agree that the trials are an advanced tutorial, but what you're asking for is too remedial. I really like Street Fighter, but I don't have any interest in messing around in training mode figuring out on my own what moves do and don't combo into each other. The trials are a convenient place to quickly learn some situational combos for each character and conveniently practice them.

I agree. I don't know if the remedy to that situation is to reward the player whenever they get a single part of a combo correctly. More trials, in general, may have been a good thing though. My execution level is probably intermediate and I rarely spent more than 5 minutes on any character trial so if they filled each character's trials with another 15 easy-to-medium difficulty combos I doubt it would take me that much longer.

Regardless, although trials may teach you a few things about a character you're not familiar with they shouldn't be what teaches you the game. A full-fledged, interactive tutorial mode could do what the guy you're replying to wants and it would be more appropriate for that mode.

 

[cwistofu]

Checked out MKX for the first time at a friend's insistence.

Holy shit why isn't all this frame data presented this neatly (or at all) in SFV?

 

[EmiPrime]

This patch has been very welcome but the loading times are killing this game for me.

 

[SupaNaab]

I feel a basic fix for survival mode should be the option to always fill your health bar, and have the cost vary based on health missing. Then you're survival is based more so on your capacity to reserve points and less on when the AI decides to turn it up to 11.

 

[Imperfected]

So what, by the end you learn one single ten-hit combo?

That's sort of a weird assumption. Obviously if some of your Trials are very simple (linking the first 2 hits of a 4-hit combo), then you have more than 10 Trials per character. The total amount of teaching is the same, you just break it down into bite-sized segments.

The point is to prevent a monolithic system wherein you have players (as in this thread) finding themselves saying, "I can't do almost any of these Trials, I must be bad at fighting games and should just give up." Instead, they end up saying, "I can do most of the Trials, but I'm having trouble with #4, #9, and #15"; the players feel more encouraged to learn and practice, and also can more correctly identify exactly what they're having trouble with rather than just sort of having a general sense of "I can't do Trial #2 for this character. Fuck it, I quit."

Each trial should ideally be a different type of combo. Here's one you can land after you land an anti-air. Here's one that let's you hit-confirm into a special move. Here's your go-to combo after landing a crush counter. Here's how you combo into your Critical Art so you don't blow your meter.

Again, you can teach all the combos, there's nothing wrong with that. There's just absolutely no reason not to break them down so that players progress through the combos while learning them rather than just kind of being thrown at them and told "git gud".

I know it doesn't matter to you, and won't to most of the people in this thread. The problem is, though, Capcom is dying due to all of the things that don't matter to most of the people in this thread. They're dying to poor messaging to players and insufficient user experience considerations. They're dying to design decisions that new players find obtuse and experienced players just couldn't care much either way.

The FGC is on lock. They need to be focusing their efforts far more on how to make the game approachable and easier to learn for new players.

Maybe they could be more clear that that's what you're being taught, but the way it's currently set up is way better than what you're proposing. You can already easily attempt the different parts of a trial within the trial itself. I'm not sure what good it does to break it up into such small components.

Let me put it this way: why doesn't Portal just have 4 rooms?

This is a system for teaching. Anytime it is possible to do so, you teach in increments for multiple reasons: the person learning is less likely to get frustrated, it's easier to identify where the person is having trouble learning the material, it's easier for the person to practice the specific thing that's difficult for them, and the natural sense of progression in learning and building on the foundation of mastery is motivating.

To put it another way: I'm not going to try to teach you how to do a differential equation unless I've already taught you how to do each of the individual operations required to perform that equation. I could, but why would I do that when the option exists to teach the process step-by-step instead?

I agree that the trials are an advanced tutorial, but what you're asking for is too remedial. I really like Street Fighter, but I don't have any interest in messing around in training mode figuring out on my own what moves do and don't combo into each other. The trials are a convenient place to quickly learn some situational combos for each character and practice them.

I mean, if you're already competent, it should only take you a fraction of a minute to get through the extra two steps added to take a 4-hit combo tutorial up from a 2-hit combo tutorial. You can always just use the menu to select the individual tutorials for completed combos and ignore the rest, if that's what you wanted to do. They're a ridiculously tiny inconvenience for the expert player and a very, very important addition for neophyte players trying to get into the game.

Frankly, if you want a better example of this being done (if by no means perfect)? Try Dead or Alive. Their Trials are enormously more inviting for new players, and things like that pay off when it comes to courting the casual audience that takes your sales numbers from <1,000,000 to something sustainable.

 

[ClayKavalier]

The point is to prevent a monolithic system wherein you have players (as in this thread) finding themselves saying, "I can't do almost any of these Trials, I must be bad at fighting games and should just give up." Instead, they end up saying, "I can do most of the Trials, but I'm having trouble with #4, #9, and #15"; the players feel more encouraged to learn and practice, and also can more correctly identify exactly what they're having trouble with rather than just sort of having a general sense of "I can't do Trial #2 for this character. Fuck it, I quit."

The thing is, combos have utility. You're not doing a combo just for the sake of doing a combo. Like I said before, you might teach a player a combo to reliably land their Critical Art so there's not wasting meter by throwing it out randomly, you might teach them a way to hit confirm into a powerful special move that's really unsafe on block, and you might teach them a combo that is safe on block so they can apply pressure.

Being able to do part of those combos doesn't do them much good. If something like

jumping heavy punch, standing medium punch, crouching medium punch, special move, critical art

is split up into several different trials and a player can do all put the last one or two, they may feel more accomplished but they really haven't made much progress. The whole point is that they learn to combo into the critical art. Getting new players to realize why they're learning combos in the first place is a lot more useful than giving them a constant pat on the back even though they haven't learned anything that will actually be of any use to them.

And do people really need so much positive reinforcement that under the current system they'll drop the game entirely but seeing the word "Success" every once in awhile will keep them engaged? If you asked me to list some of the most satisfying moments I've had playing SF successfully completing a trial wouldn't even cross my mind.

To put it another way: I'm not going to try to teach you how to do a differential equation unless I've already taught you how to do each of the individual operations required to perform that equation. I could, but why would I do that when the option exists to teach the process step-by-step instead?

Someone with no background in math has no clue how to even start doing a differential equation. Anyone familiar with games in general can look at the button prompts for a combo and see what they need to do, it's just a matter of practicing until you've gotten the motions and timing right. It's not like the idea of moving a stick in a quarter-circle motion is some kind of crazy alien notion until you've first learned that you can combo a light punch into a light kick.

Frankly, if you want a better example of this being done (if by no means perfect)? Try Dead or Alive. Their Trials are enormously more inviting for new players, and things like that pay off when it comes to courting the casual audience that takes your sales numbers from <1,000,000 to something sustainable.

Is DoA more popular than Street Fighter? News to me if true.

For all your talk about Capcom dying because of its treatment of new players, SFV is probably the most newbie friendly SF, certainly far more friendly than IV, and that seems to have been a success.

And honestly, if a brand new player genuinely wants to get good at the game as quickly as possible, the best thing they could do is quickly get frustrated with the training options and just play the game. Someone who has committed all of a character's trials to muscle memory won't stand a chance against someone who spent the same amount of time playing against other people, even if the latter doesn't know a single combo.

 

[Just_myles]

Missing that close mk for Alex. He 'feels' right. He is my entry point into this game. Bullying people with normals is always fun. Ask ya boy.