Skilletor said:
I don't even know what you mean.
Capcom's best fighting games are "designed around combos." You seem to be implying that combos don't allow for creativity or improvisation when that's not true at all. I mean, just looking at Ibuki in 3s (or 4) who is a pretty combo heavy character, and yet must use improvisation and trickiness in order to not die.
I consider SF2 to be one of Capcom's best fighting games and the combos were something players discovered after the game was in the wild. Not designed for. This has been stated by the developers of SF2 in old interviews in EGM/Gamepro from back in my high school days.
I only meant that the things you said (needing to study frame data, characters being written off, and practicing inconvenient inputs) has been around for quite some time.
No. There's nothing in SF2 as universally inconvenient as FADC or counterintuitive as parrying.
You certainly didn't need to rely on anything as inconvenient as FADC to be viable in SF2. You just needed common sense.
Isn't one of your favorite characters R. Mika? yeah, she's pretty much Dan levels of ass. Oh, yeah, lets not forget about Dan.
I like the character; that doesn't mean I don't understand why she's losing.
I might be inclined to argue that Dan set a bad precedent for Capcom in designing a joke character then opened them up to just designing wildly impractical and unbalanced lower tier characters. It would be fine if it was always and only Dan to mock SNK, but characters like Mika and Hakan ought to be viable without players needing to play twice as hard as the opponent.
Though Hakan's problems are more with SF4 design in general. Going from SSF4 to SSF4AE where his Oil Rocket input is generally regarded as NOW working like an SPD.
Why didn't it work like an SPD in SSF4? That's a bone headed design decision and 360 input regardless of the character should always function like the 360 input I'm used to with Zangief and T.Hawk.
Grokbu said:
There is creativity though. Depending of the starter, the combos are probably going to look different. You also get to choose wether you should go for full damage, max damage without meter, okizeme or resets, and the like.
I do understand that this is subjective though, and I'm not saying you have to like it. But I still feel that there can be lots of creativity.
You're viewing this exclusively as the attacker, which is part of the problem.
Modern fighting games make attacking aggressively more important than good defense. Rather, good defense is limited to blocking and waiting until your opponents fingers get worn out. I really have a problem with canned combos and putting the second player into a position of being a virtual volley ball for the attackers combos.
I'd love to see fighting game developers burn as many calories on the defensive end so that the flow of games would be less one sided, which is what I enjoyed about SF2 game flow. You didn't have a ton of defensive options, but attackers didn't have a ton of crazy combos and juggles.
Sorry this is sort of stream of consciousness here.
Juggles may be more the issue than actual canned combos. Sh*t makes me furious in Blazblue, getting stuck in a combo loop - even with barrier bursts, barrier block, and blocking it gets old fast. The defender is screwed while to chihuahua on cocaine is free to keep biting at your face all day.
Game developers took to penalizing defenders; how about penalizing attackers outside of the too little too late damage scaling on repeated combos. Give players a stamina meter in addition to a defense meter. This will end a lot of the ceaseless attacks in fighting games which make them no fun to play and force attackers to think, giving defenders a chance to retaliate.
KOF XIII have lots of this, I feel. Much thanks to drive cancelling.
I'm looking forward to KoF13.
I still love fighting games, but I feel they're in a place that's going to just force the rest of the market away due to the game design and the player base.
Competitive games will always have winners and losers, but well designed games will always have a players base outside of the hardcore audience. This is WHY Capcom attempted to go back to SF2 with SF4, regardless of my impression of how successful they actually were in that attempt.
