It's about the little victories, when you can't get the big one. My sisters and I do this with rhythm games. Do bad in the song? At least I hit the last note.
@@Boyzby if you don't win we get permission to trash talk each other and loser can't say anything back Until we both yell at each other we stop playing then (it was 2AM don't blame me for getting mad!)
When I just started getting into fighting games, I thought that to get somewhere I need to know most optimal combos, all framedata, punishes and all that. But all I had to do to get out of beginners is overcome anxiety and anti-air alot
Yeah I feel like that should be one of the first things a beginner should learn. Instead of mashing buttons, block to get a read on your opponent, then slowly start to get used to punishing their attacks, and then slowly build on what you can do. Hell, I've been playing Tekken 7 for almost a year now and I only just started getting used to understanding neutral, as in 'okay we're this far apart, what attack can reach them without putting me in danger?' like sure I know how to cause counter-hit sure I know how to punish, but what about when I'm far away from my opponent, what can I do from far away or to get closer? I'm still learning. There is absolutely no need to force all of the information in fighting games in one go, take the time to breathe.
You know its really funny. Back when it was just arcades, there was no frame data, no discord tech. You were lucky to even see "top player" footage. Even GameFAQs didn't really have "the best" information. You know what we did have? Lots and lots of quarters and tokens.
It's not always malicious. Spectators can see what's happening much much better than the ones currently playing, who'll have to worry about a ton of other things
I..... agree. HOWEVER I do think a lot of other genres do a better job of still being fun even when you don't know how to play. Either because of the chaos introduced by having teammates, or because there are miniature goals that the game acknowledges and rewards i.e. "i lost but at least I got a kill" in shooters, or "i lost but at least I finished my daily quest" in card games
@@raychangalarza179 That's a personal goal that you set for yourself, not quite the same thing. If it has the same effect as a sidequest for you then great, but fighting games shouldn't shouldn't rely on players wanting to do cool stuff even when they lose.
@@angryskeleton5676 It also assumes they're aware of those smaller goals and why they're important. If you don't play fighting games than you don't realize you made a couple good moves or how you spaced well or landed a sick anti-air all you know is that you loss and you're bad.And being confused while constantly getting kicked into the dirt isn't a fun learning process for most people.
Most of the time when I hear "Fighting games are too hard" its coming from people I'm trying to get into a fighting game I'm playing. I don't think the stigma exclusively comes from the community itself, its a general perception of the genre.
@@Venomousse the FGC adores driving people away and clowning on other games for being "too easy" or "for scrubs. Many FGC members are super possessive of their niche genre and don't want any noobs. Keep l in mind I said many members, not all. Most larger FGC figureheads are very open to new players and willing to teach others. Some of those figureheads draw heat from the FGC for being open to new players.
@@jreut09 I only started playing FGs seriously in 2018 and I found the community very welcoming as long as you're humble going in. People can have a bit of a chip on their shoulder regarding game difficulty but that's understandable and part of most competetive communities I think. Asking questions and taking criticism without making excuses is all I've needed to do to get tips and help.
See, I would agree that having a friend helps making learning fighting games easier except every friend I've tried teaching refuses to listen on even the very basics. I blame myself in some aspects, maybe I'm a shitty teacher, but even when I show them video guides designed for beginners or in-game examples it's the same issue. It may be more accurate to say fighting games are more rewarding to learn compared to other games. With team games the easing in is because you can still win while losing, it distorts loss aversion inherently.
im the same way with my friends. i think they'd rather just play the game instead of spending time trying to learn them. i think the main reason for this is because nowadays you can just pick up and play most games, but for fighting games you have to spend the extra time so that you can even do specials. most casuals dont like that, so they give up really fast.
@@ymsmash9526 See I don't agree with you and I think I know why I agree with this video. Most people have never actually spent time to actually get good at a shooter or moba. When I play csgo I try to teach my friends smoke spots and spray pattern but they are just content playing the game and never improving. I play league and I try to teach more advanced tactics like freezing waves and how go manipulate the minions to your advantage but they don't really pay attention. That's why you see most people stay hardstuck at a certain rank for many games but see people like dyrus pick up a new game and get good. The key is to actually put effort into improving and that's something that's not specific to just fighting games.
@@GrimReaper1526 100% agree with this as my friends are content with not learning to play games and just want to play. It's up to a person's personality on whether they enjoy pick up and play games or the grind of research and learning the ins and outs of competitive games. In a way it's like anime. Some people just watch the seasonal 13 episode animes and others will invest time into the 100+ (or 800+ looking at you One Piece) animes.
Burpinator we at 900+ now 😎 lol. I actually started one piece last July. Finally got up to the reverie, just before wano. Seemed daunting at first but it was worth it. And then I have my friends who won’t watch an anime past 30 episodes, and won’t play a fighting game longer than 2-3 weeks before quitting. Like you said, different personalities. Some people like to challenge themselves and some don’t.
matchmaking in anime games is nonexistent, since everyone plays in lobbies, and among the 15 people in the lobby, for new players it's a bit daunting when most of the people there are high rank gods at the game. it's currently what ive been running into while learning bbtag
Team battle is an emotional massage that can't be understated. In fact, lots of the latest hit games have buffers against failure to massage your emotions while fighting games have almost none.
This is probably true for fighting games with a healthy player base, but when the whole pool of players are sharks and I drop in with my guppy-ass skills it's going to feel a lot harder. I've been getting into Guilty Gear and there's one room each night I get good ping to and I only show up when I want to get my rectum reversed. In Dota I can drop into a pool of what, 400,000 players? And it'll sort me into my shit rank and I can have fun in the mud with the other shitters. But when there's 4 dudes with 12,000 hours between them tearing it up in one room on Guilty Gear, yeah man it feels a hell of a lot harder. If there were 400,000 players playing GG then it'd be different but fact is there aren't. So theoretically it's not any harder, but in practice it for sure is.
THIS, I've been in the exact same situation twice (UNIST and GG) where the only players I get matched with are way better than I am, and I end getting clobbered without being able to do anything. or in the case of the latter game (GG) I can't even find anyone to play with online. I would imagine even the bigger fighting games (Tekken or SFV) would have times where online at the beginner ranks is completely empty, we have to keep in mind that theee isn't a constant flow of new players coming into FGs. and this isn't taking into account how shit most FG netcode is.
@@naseralsalem236 I think if you're a beginner in a fighting game, especially if you're fighting better players and have the mindset to learn, then you'd have to change your thinking from playing to win to playing to learn. When I was getting into unist vs way better people, I would accept that I'm probably not going to win and legit block most of the match and see what pieces of info I can get. From some game mechanic I'm using improperly like green shielding or guard thrust, to picking up on habits the better player showed in the matches. Then when I fight again, I do way better than I did in the beginning.
@@nicklez01 I see where you're coming from. but alot of the time the players are wayyyy out of my league that I just get rushed down, especially when they play characters I am unfamilar with (Hilda, Vat and Seth are probably my worst MU as a player), the game kinda without me know where to block. I agree with your approach and do it alot of times, but it can be useless when you're just starting and they probably won some regionals and they come at you as if you're a good player (not saying they shouldn't).
My advice to everyone in this situation is to start joining Discords. There are tons of people in the same situation you are -- interest in Guilty Gear for new players is pretty high right now. It sucks that Xrd can't just matchmake you, but there are ways that you can find each other yourselves.
*Has flashback to last month of the 45 min session (and 60 games) of getting gaped by a guy with 9,400 wins in BBTAG to my 5 wins (only one of which was from him and that was due to him using a brand-new, never before used team). I didn't even want to look at the game for two days.
I never thought I would encounter it, but the biggest barrier people I've tried to help had are doing motions. I spent an hour with a friend teaching him to do quarter circle and DP motions, and he can only get them half the time. I didn't know what to tell him other than to keep trying.
A few other people are making similar points in the comments too. Whilst everything you say is true about "getting good" it misses the point of the execution floor being so much higher in most FGs than in any other genre. This is why games like Fantasy Strike are SO needed and so much better for people to learn! You should really cover it!
Learning fighting games feels like when i FIRST started playing games altogether. None of the previous knowledge can be applied, I'm starting with a blank slate and that's why it's so frustrating. I feel like i should know this even though there's no reason for me to know.
But after you have some experience with fighting games, you can apply that knowledge to every other fighting game you play. Even if its as simple as understanding good neutral tactics like footsies or even learning frame data to decide the best moves for your style of gameplay. Its not like you start out from 0 every time you pick up a new fighting game.
That is 50% true. Yes, In principle you can use the higher level techniques like bait and punish, good neutral, good oki tech, in every “Fighting Game”. But the “MECHANICS” you will be using are very very different across fighting games. By that I mean (and back me up here FGC community members) Street Fighter is not the same game/mechanics as Tekken or Marvel Vs Capcom or SMASH or Mortal Kombat or Ark Systems games. While almost every FPS is the same game with a different skin. (Fort-Nite however is the Exception in my opinion, their is building) Same with MOBAs. However, you will have too re-train your muscle memory much more in fighting games then in any other game. (And also suffer more). That’s why I don’t agree with this video. Fighting Games are the hardest.
@@Ozark5e ????? A team shooter like CS:GO is going to play completely differently from a team shooter like Overwatch, which also might play differently from Halo or CoD. There are plenty of mechanics to differentiate each of those games, like abilities, time to kill, types of guns, etc. a single mechanic (turn rate) makes playing a carry in DotA worlds apart from playing a carry in LoL. Hell, you need to relearn the jungle every single year in just League alone, and DotA's jungle is completely different from that as well. A game like HotS throws the item building part of MOBAs out the window and replaces it with talents as well as changing the mechanics of last hitting and team objectives. I (and Sajam) are not saying that differences in fighting games don't exist, but I am saying that similar differences exist in other genres as well. If you're going to criticize each fighting game for having different mechanics, you need to apply that same criticism to other genres too.
Sibai I acknowledge that you are right if we look at it the way you are looking at it. I acknowledge that their are definitive differences if you go specific or granular, into not only the mechanics but also the gameplay experiences between players playing Overwatch Vs Halo. Or the experiences between playing a carry in one MOBA vs’s in another. But (Concerning FPS’s) those are only really stylistic differences (or different paint jobs + a polish) between what is essentially a point and click game coupled with different abilities, and different movement options. The reason why FPS’s are popular in the first place is that the basic understanding of what is the only skill you need to get started (not to get good or even master, just to get started) is accuracy. You could argue it’s accuracy and movement that are the fundamentals, regardless the way any numbskull wins is by matching the target reticle to the enemy and firing first and best. In fighting games (Excluding Smash which is amazing) there can sometimes be between 2-6 buttons you would need to hit (usually in a pattern that you have to learn) and you hit them till they KO. Because hitting them with a button seems so simple, fighting game developers have to add complexity after effing complexity to make their games different from other fighting games. FPS’s are essentially the same mechanics requiring little memorization and more just intuitive optimization. They allow players to intuitively know the game versus memorizing a manual of options. The only fighting game to break this mold is SMASH. SMASH allows you very few options and is designed to be as noobie friendly ( AKA Nintendoey) as possible. This is the games MO, allow few options and a lot of easy tactics to make a party 🎉 fighting game that everybody loves. (Effing Brilliant) It is a popular opinion (as far as I know), that everyone feels they are semi decent at shooters. They can pick them up and the amount of negative feedback a shooter will give you on your skill level only truly becomes more apparent in the higher tiers. This is compounded by the fact that you are playing team games vs 1v1 games. The gaps between fighting game players are however crystal clear. Pain is part of the learning process in fighting games. If you doubt what I’m saying look at how these games are marketed, and who the real fans of these games are. Fans of FPS like the aspect that you can if your lucky get results sometimes by just being in the right place and right time (they will deny this but the randomness of this aspect allows more fairness, giving the game an unknown element not related to skill). They hate when some noob gets a lucky shot off at them when it’s reversed. FPS’s are marketed to all players and have become more popular. Staples such as Fortnight are leading the charge (actually it’s probably passed the torch to Warzone but I still give Fortnight credit). Fighting game fans know that almost all mistakes they make are due to a lack of skill not luck. They are pushed to the limit with the games multiple complex systems and at the same time reading an opponent who is doing the same. Lastly (in my opinion) Each fighting game has to try harder to be different and still be a fighting game. FPS’s OR third person shooters don’t really try to be that different. (Not on the same level IMO)
Maybe it's a matter of how condensed the stress level is in a FG compared to something like a MOBA. In MOBAs you've more downtime, walking to lanes, shopping, waiting for last hits, being dead etc. You've some time while playing to think things over. FGs are way more intense and could overload someone's brain way faster than a MOBA. I played GG Rev 2 for like an hour some time ago and it was intense AF. I felt exhausted (and got totally bodied). It's been weeks and I still don't feel comfortable diving back in, eventhough it was decent fun.
Different storkes, I'd say. I think the longer time-investment in MOBAs is actually the worst part about them as a beginner. While alot of that downtime let's you think things over, it also let's you wallow in your failure for so much longer. Losing in a MOBA is a commitment. When a game of League of Legends starts going south, I'll usually have figured that out by the first 15 minutes. The next 20-30 minutes of the game is thus spent torturously waiting for it to be done and over with already. All the while, you are put into 0-sum games, where you are literally unable to win because your opponent is fed, therefore statistically superior to you, you are making the game less fun for the rest of your party who now have to clean up after your feeding and there is no reset back to neutral, so to get another chance at starting fresh, you have to wait until it's done. By the 25th minute, all the thinking I'll be doing during that is whether I prefer the taste of cyanide or lead. If you're bad at fighting games, you get sandbagged for at most 2 minutes and it's done. You're off to the next challenge. Even within a set, the round usually starts at neutral, so you immediately get a chance to fix your situation from an even footing instead of trying to win an uphill battle against someone who is now in a better position to keep winning from your past failure.
I think basically all the points Sajam brings up are valid, but I think the reason why the perception that fighting games are hard to learn is because there are very few games similar to fighting games that people can bring information over from What I mean is that it's going to be easier for the average gamer to pick up CS:GO compared to SFV because they probably played Halo or CoD in the past at a non competitive level so they might be comfortable with the shooting mechanics. People joining MOBAs might already have played 3/4 view top down games where you control movement with a mouse like Age of Empires or Diablo. But people playing their first fighting game have a lot less to ease them into learning basic mechanics. Back to block, special inputs, etc are not easy to grasp initially. No type of game other than fighting games make you do quarter circles. I don't think fighting games are harder than other multiplayer games, but I think most gamers start fighting games at the ground floor, while most gamers start other multiplayer games a few stories up
Yeah, and Smash had an easier time selling because it resembled other platformers like Kirby. That level of comfortable familiarity is rare in the fighting game genre. Familiarity is comfortable. Street Fighter and MK are familiar franchises, Tekken's presentation of close combat is familiar, and said series' semi-realistic art style is familiar. Aside from MK's ultraviolence, a week of casually experiencing the singleplayer as one or more cool characters, and a night or two of brining the game out to play with friends, that's all the gaming public at large wants out of a fighting game. The genre needs to figure out new hooks to draw people into the cycle of competition and improvement like other genres have, otherwise it'll never really make it big.
@@RougeMephilesClone lol nice one people who play smash for the first time literally kill themselves because they have trouble with the movement. Makes it hard for me to play with someone who is new because I feel like I have to play extremely basic to make sure my friend has a good time.
I am so glad I found Sajam so early in my fighting game career. It’s tremendously encouraging to hear you talk about learning fighting games in a way that’s fundamentally different from a lot of other content.
Unironically, you're not actually wrong aha. At school you typically only get taught how to regurgitate information which isn't the most useful skill as opposed to having teachers break down various learning methods so that all kinds of people can figure out something that works for them.
I think think it’s the style of play with fighting games being head to head against a single person that the pressure and anxiety of the fight makes it difficult to concentrate and execute what you think you should do. I love all types of games, well most types, but it’s always seemed more rewarding when you finally get confident and start winning after all the practice and ass kickings you’ve endured along the way. I’m all about MK11 right now but I’m about to finally see if I can figure out some Tekken
I'd argue that team-based games make for a lot more pressure and anxiety than a fighting game because the experience and disposition of your entire team can rely a lot on how well you perform rather than just your own. Your opponent in a fighting game isn't going to start screaming at you because you're just getting destroyed but your teammate in CSGO or Dota might. You can also just leave and find another opponent or take a break if somebody is destroying you and taunting you while in a moba or shooter you're basically stuck getting bodied and trying to make yourself useful to your team for upwards of an hour. Most fighting games don't even have voice chat and you don't suffer at all for just muting it if they do while you might struggle to coordinate with your team or miss out on important information if you mute somebody giving you shit in a team-based game. You will also run into situations in games like CS where you are just head to head against a single person except that four other people are watching everything you do and are relying on you to win. From personal experience, the worst experience I ever had with another player in Tekken was somebody ki-charging on me over and over. The worst experience I ever had with another player in CSGO was somebody literally screaming at the entire team because we lost a few rounds, despite us still being in the lead, until the entire team started throwing.
I don't know if Fighting games are *harder* to learn, but having to sit there and do nothing while your character gets comboed to death from the very first second of the match while you're just trying to figure out the basics can be extremely frustrating. Starcraft is hard as hell too, but at least I get to practice my build order before I can get stomped into the center of the earth by someone playing on a smurf account.
If you play league against a good player you won't be able to push up to the minion wave after he gets a lead and eventually you will just die Everytime he sees you for 40 min straight. Trust me when I say that getting beat in other games is far worse that the few second you lose in a fighting game. Only difference is people will blame their team in other games but in solo games people blame the game.
@@GrimReaper1526 I play Dota and used to play Starcraft and have never felt an hour of those games to be half as exhausting as 25 minutes of bad UNIST matches.
@@GrimReaper1526 There's just less consequence to your actions, if you die in a team deathmatch of some shooter it decides the match just as rarely as doing something awesome. When sajam says to enjoy doing something small correctly in a fighting game, it can sometimes be hard because it's immediately overwritten by 'did I win or lose that round/match'. Fighting games are extremely condensed activities, the entire first to 2 can be over in two minutes.
@@GrimReaper1526 usually when that happens you can learn to run away from that player really quick and have friends to help take them out, or move somewhere that it is safer to farm. Unless you're playing Smash, you can't run from your opponent in a fighting game.
"How can I practice my combo strings in a match if I'm spending all my time stunlocked in a touch of death combo?" I've thought this myself more than once.
I think is because are the least fun to learn, bringing back the example of FPS if you beat the campaign, the skills during that run are more helpful and fun that the arcade mode on a fighting game, perhaps thats why the base level of casual players at mk or injustice is higher than those at SF, since those have an overall better story mode and other single player modes. Even if the game have good tutorials or training modes like GG, while good additions, those are not going to make the average player more interested, those are for people who already have the desire to learn.
Gotta love the moba logic. People making alt accounts and finding new players at low levels complaining about having noobs on their team. A++ tier logic.
Good luck dude, general advice for the lower ranks: be patient, block and punish random stuff, also abuse meaties because your opponents probably won't block on their wakeup!
You may very well get destroyed. This is normal. I can't stress how much that getting destroyed and I mean DESTROYED when you first start going online is normal. We ALL went through it. Do.Not.Give.Up. In order to give out beatings you must first get beat up.
I mean let's be honest here, the reason fighting games are harder to learn is because they're not as intuitive. If you play cs:go it's very easy to learn what it is you need to do, most of it comes down to micro rather then macro, you don't need to learn frame data, move properties or character matchups. A closer genre to fighting games would be mobas, they atleast have more macro involved with the easy to understand intuiative gameplay. You have around 4 abilities, each one with it's properties and cooldowns. The similarties in these genres are spawn timers and map knowledge. Compare that to fighting games, you have more then 4 moves, they have tons of diffrent properties and hurtboxes and you still have matchups to think about, you need to know framedata aswell. I've played all 3 genres, fps, moba and fighting games. Fighting games have so much more information you need to have in your mind... memerization, execution, mobas the closest thing to it in difficulty due to mobas having so many champions and items. But because in mobas you have so few moves to worry about in every matchup, things are more condensed and the "work load" is shared amongst multiple players. For example, if im a jungler in lol it is my responsibility to keep track of the enemy jungler, their rotations and even their builds, then communicate with teammates on how to "defeat" this jungler. If the enemy jungle gets fed and steam rolls everyone, then the fault is "mostly" at me, same if he secures all objectives. This applies to all the roles, you as a player are not facing all 5 enemy players your focus is mostly on one primarely then the rest. This division of responsibility does not exist in a fighting games, yet you still have more moves to think about. I would say Fighting games are the hardest from these genres, then comes mobas, then at last place fps. You can easly one trick poney in a moba playing the exact same character, the exact same role with mostly the exact same build.... now suddenly you have alot less to think about.
I think this response needs WAYYYY more attention than it gets, and i would love to know more people's opinion on it. I completely agree with you. Fighting games are not only unintuitive, with a LOT of information that you need to know if you re going to compete at your personal best, BUT they also have the execution barrier, where you have to grind for hours , to learn combos, blocking, etc, etc , and that;s just for HANDFUL of characters, not even the entire roster. You can simplify inputs to the point Smash Brothers does, and still the important things that should matter in order to win (reads, whiff punishing,baits, etc etc you know, all the mind-games) are still going to be there and important. I don't midn execution-heavy fighting games and remembering all that info, per se. What i DO mind, is that the aforementioned is still the standard for the genre , for no apparent reason, and there's literally about 5 (or maybe less) modern fighting games that don't have these archaic design shortcomings (DBFZ i would put somewhere in the middle, whereas SSBU is the ideal in that aspect).
@@jacebeleren1703 I would say that execution is the least difficult aspect in fighting games in general and that the macro aspect is what puts most people off. I've thought about it since making that post and came to realize that "frames" are the main obstacle that deters players regardless of their backround. Framedata is an essential mechanic in fighting games, more so then any other genre i know of. The key reason being that in fighting games if i block or get hit by something, the game automatically puts me in "stunned" state for an ex amount of frames. (Frame advantage and disadvantage) Same goes if i execute a move myself. There is no other genre ( i know of) that operates in this way, for example in League if i get hit by an auto attack i can still do whatever i want during or after without the game putting me in some staggered state, same goes for fps. Ofcourse stuns exist, but they are usually few and very obvious. You can cancel your "Starting Frames" in fgs but not your active nor recovery Frames (You can only lower the last in some games/some moves through various techniques/complex inputs) if you want, an exeception rarther then a rule. In Fighting games every hit basically operates as a "Stun" locking you or your opponent. Full commitment on everything. Some people figure this out as they button mash the concept of "Taking turns" but the truth is that most people don't. Now some games offer visual indicators for when you're at minus frames but most games don't, this is the first big hurdle... that's why i can beat every begginer/intermediate player by just knowing some frames. Now add an arsenal of moves on top of that, with alot of characters and Space and you have a barrage of possibilites that you have to think about. Frames (F)= Time. Space (S)= Space. There are three "sub types" of Frames aswell... Starting Frames (SF) Active Frames (AF) Recovery Frames (RF) Both (S) and (F) are always playing a major role in your decision making and what's actually happening in the game. Mobas have (S) and (F), but (SF) and (RF) can be cancelled at any given time usually, thus framedata can mostly be ignored if not completely. Wherever there is (F) (SF,AF,RF) to think about aswell it's usually so negilable that you don't have to think about it for most scenarios since you can't effect it in any way that would make a real diffrence. (Unless we speak of Very high level play) FPS games have (S) but no real (F) to think about, meaning that you can shoot and move around however you want without any limitations. Ofcourse a weapons rate of fire could be categorized as (F) and not all fps are the same, but generally speaking. That's it. So if fighting games could better visually show the frames and more so universalize alot of it, then that would help alot of newcomers. (So instead of moves having incremental frame diffrences "1,2,3,4,5" etc etc, just divide it into 3 "types", +-1, +-5, +-10. Low +-, medium +- and heavy +- with N neutral aswell. This would dramatically lower the difficulty and players wouldn't have to memorize what's what, it would allow them to see the move once and know exactly what it is in real time and adapt/respond in real time. (So no labbing frames)... Learn as you play. That's if you really want to make things easier in a way that truly matters for beginners. We could ofcourse say "Just play and don't worry about frames", but reality is whether you know about frames or not they will ALWAYS matter since they effectively determine what goes and what doesn't, and if you beat someone and they don't understand the invisible hand that is frames then they effectively have no idea WHY they lost, same way you have no idea WHY you won... This strips the player of any real sense of controll that they could have/feel to have, which is THE key component of frustration. (There are studies around this). So the most likely outcome is that people will quit since they'll get super tilted, even if you tell them to "Just play and not worry about frames". Some will stay, but most won't. Nobody will play if they can't even understand the reason move x beat move y everytime and all the changing conditions that effect it. Either way, just my two cents. I accidentaly wrote an essay, sorry. :/
in the actual arcade scene that fighting games came from in the 90s, a lot of information gossip happened in person. the culture was so different and I think it doesn't translate well to the MOBA or FPS.
The problem in learning fighting games was never an issue of complexity. The true barrier has always been the execution barriers that new players will always come up against in contrast to other genres. Those who are saying FGs aren't truly hard to get into vs other games are inherently biased because they have already most likely invested hundreds upon hundreds of hours grinding out hit confirming and like mechanics. For the average gamer in 2019 even something as simple as hit confirming may be an astronomical mountain to climb. If you look at other games, Sajam brings up FPS games, the "execution" there is intuitive. Given that you have a player who has most likely used a PC all his life, and aren't basing your opinions off a sample of people who would suck at any genre(your mom/dad/grandma) the action of aiming is much much easier and intuitive because you've held a mouse in your hand all your life. A small minority of people on the other hand have ever used an arcade stick/hitbox, in truth the most intuitive control scheme for FGs for them would be a keyboard a control method not often pushed in the FGC. Also the most popular FPSes of this era are also some of the most dumbed down and fisher priced to have ever existed. There is a reason why Quake/Unreal-esque games have largely fallen out of favor with the general gaming community, and it's not because they were purely 1v1 games, you also had TDM/FFA and so on. This is a really complicated topic, one one hand yes FGs aren't harder to learn than other games as they are often less complex, but the barrier to entry in terms of mechanical skill are much steeper.
RTSes mirror fighting games in being hard to learn, but it depends on what RTS you're talking about. Blizz RTSes are more like fighting games than actual strategy games. There's a reason both RTSes and FGs are either dieing or incredibly niche genres.
I think the problem is really that most fighting games do a bad job of making the game fun to play even when you lose, which is something that I think other genres do better. I think that's the key, making a game that's fun to play even if you lose. So it's psychological, rather than a question of difficulty. And it's something FG devs need to work harder at. (By the way, part of solution would be having functional netcode, so that online play is fun rather than an endless, futile struggle against lag.)
That's close to how I defined fun, actually: enjoying the game even when losing. At least before you start winning more, then it can overlap with winning or improving.
I get what you are arguing, but from my experience and what I more often see is that people would rather be "stuck" in he middle of a moba, shooter, or some other multiplayer game than watch someone else personally juggle them to death in a fighting game. There is a level people want to get comfortable at and that is the minimum skill floor to get in and i personal feel it is harder for fighting games especially when cant exactly do that with randoms online. at least they can be stuck doing things and naturally figure things out instead of spending a repeat 20 seconds of them just dying. perfect world sure i can see that the curve is identical, but the reality is that fighters more often have a much smaller community as a whole and there are far more people in other genres. It also doesnt help that tons of fighting games have garbage netcode to boot.
You're making the mistake of assuming that the skill floor is anything other than little Timmy mashing LP from full screen and never holding back or down back.
Spot on analysis from Sajam. One thing I will say about fighting games though is that the danger is immediate--the opponent can instantly approach you and cause harm. In games like LOL, CS, and Fortnite, the player has several minutes to do things like take position, gather resources etc. So there's less stress in those games.
As someone coming from League I can tell you the idea of spending time in training mode to improve does not sound fun at all for a casual player. In league you just play to improve. I remember my brother was playing MK for the first time and he was getting mad he did not know how to beat this character online and I told him you have to learn the match up/counters in training mode. And he says 'I dont want to do that, I just want to play'. Fighting game players love hitting the lab. If you don't like that, you don't like fighting games.
@@nitomono It may take longer, but it's better that they do what's fun which will motivate them to keep playing rather than doing it the correct way, getting bored and then giving up.
Thanks for the video, Sajam. It's good to come at things from a positive perspective. As a Blaziken main in Pokken (and a wide-range fighting game casual), your talk of teaching new players their "cool moves" and letting them play and improve speaks to me. Blaziken lives and dies by his rushdown and big unga EX moves. Getting in is hard, but if you land even one, you feel like you made a chunk of progress. I need to rope my brother into playing more real matches with me so I (and perhaps even he) can improve.
SkullGirls got me to try picking up fighting games again. Their tutorial systems made learning the complicated stuff FUN somehow. Small step by small step. And by the end of it, I had learned full combos for most of the characters simply by learning mechanics. Fighting games need fun tutorials and mass appeal will revive. Skullgirls got curbstomped by bad situations time and time again, and yet the game is still loved. If it had a clean launch, it would arguably be called a legendary fighting game.
Xrd Rev2 Tutorial is one of the best out there. They make them like a quicktime event where they don't go "Okay do this once then move on". They have you do it over and over to get that repetition and throw some mixups as well.
The problem I had with fighting games is that you can't acknowledge what you don't know. Playing various fighting games since the introduction of Street Fighter 2 and never having more that 3 other people to ever play against, 15 years later, finding out you can crouch guard a standing attack made me realize "Yeah, I really have no idea what I've been doing for over a decade."
I 100% agree with fighting games being just as hard as any other game, but in regards to the perception of them being harder, I feel that you heavily underestimate the fact that other games are team based, just the fact of sharing the loss with other people really distributes the blame and eases newbies into the learning process even if just a little. I think core-A-gaming said this too
On the other hand I really don't think it's any mentally easier to get blamed by your teammates for ruining their game, if anything it's worse than just losing a set to a better player in FGs imo
Lorvi yeah that sucks too haha, but most of the time the loss won't be due to one person only, most of the time several mistakes are made by every teammate and even if it was clearly one person's fault, that person can debate and make excuses, you don't even get a chance to do that on FG. You know you fucked up, you and only you
@@Cafetos0777 wht kind of player are you? losing is losing. The winnera are going to say : "see those losers" they won t give a shit to who do what. second pont there is nother thing that matter. if you are good and you play with bad player you will lose that disturnbing and that for me is the biggest point with team based game. this is the other side of the medal that you don t see in FG. imagine that for Daigo to win, infexious and all the beast team have to win? It will bee much more harder to win any tounney. And I see many players crying that "I should be reward for my work, not punish for the bad work of other" So what you see as an ease has in fact a dark side and people inside the FGC don t see that side.
@@Venomousse Low levels in MOBAs still basically have no communication and everyone's solo queueing. You rarely get blamed that much, and even if you do you tune it out until you know enough about the game to realize when you fucked up.
domingoIST and mugen made a really good point here, just to be clear I don't think FG are actually harder they are just perceived as harder I think. While having to rely on others to cooperate in order to win can be very stressful and lead to a lot of salt, I think most beginners won't have that in mind as they are just familiarizing themselves with the game and they don't know what the other people are supposed to do on top of loosing maybe feels a little more immediate in FG when you are new
Its because of the muscle memory. I played League for a couple months, and I got pretty decent at it, winning most of my matches. I've been playing fighting games since I was a kid, playing seriously for like 6 years and I still can't compete at all. Its very hard simply because of what you have to do with your hands, imo.
As someone with a new love for fighting games, I think in a way they are harder, because of both the execution barrier and how that leads to needing to "work" before you have fun. If you're new to a shooter, you can't aim well. But if you're given a static target then straight away you can slowly aim and fire. The input is simple, and from there you begin the slow but smooth task of improving your speed. Crucially, you can improve at this simply by playing the game. If you're new to a fighting game and input your special move incorrectly, nothing comes out at all. I can do them pretty consistently now, but it took about 10-15 hours to get to that point. Up to that point, I didn't feel in control of my character and the game honestly wasn't fun. Doing 10 hours of practice before you can even figure out if you enjoy a game is not a sane thing to do, and the only reason I didn't quit like the three other attempts over the last 12 years is that I've played enough Smash and watched enough great fighting game content on RUclips to know I would enjoy these games. Lol I don't mean to sound salty, just thought you might appreciate a perspective from a new player.
I think the difference is that in a moba you can kill monsters,gain money,buy itens continue to play,shooters if you have the basics you walk on the map,shoot things,get a car and go aroud but in a fighting game if you get someone on the matchmaking that are a lot better than you they just destroy you in seconds and new players feel they dont learn nothing and feel that they play nothing.
You'll just be clicking on a monster and buying random items and for the shooter not all of them offer vehicle combat. Even if u can't land a single hit u can block and u can improve that. Yes it's boring but I think it's as stimulating as hitting a monster in Leugue for 3 mins getting killed by a man in the bushes and the looking at a Bible of items just clicking random shit and then running back to do it again
Tl:dr at the bottom It all comes down to the pace of learning. When I was learning MOBA games, all the tutorials taught me was what each button did, how to recall, how to buy items and that killing the enemy base is all that matters. In FPS games, all I'm taught ate controls and that switching to my secondary is always faster than reloading. MOBA tutorials don't open up by telling you about counterpicking in champ select, building good team comps, counterbuying items on the fly, how to last hit, how to poke, how to gank/counter gank or jungle/counter jungle. In FPS games I was never introduced to the concept of spawn control, reticle centering, map rotations, line of sight abuse, economy control or anything else. If I wanted to learn any of the above things, I had to basically get my ass kicked by someone using the above techniques or have a teammate introduce it to me. Before that, /I literally don't even know these concepts exist/. What this does is make learning simple. Starting out, all I had to do was press buttons and move at the same time, and other basic tutorial stuff. Then one by one advanced concepts are introduced to me, and I slowly understand/master them all. Its dripfed over the course of weeks/months/years of playing these games, which makes learning more palatable and improving/succeeding in the game feel more like an actual possibility. Now go to RTS games or fighting games, and realize that the moment I watch a high level player, its going to look like they're playing a completely different game. Back in the day the tutorials for games I would play like Command & Conquer Generals or Tekken 4 would basically only tell me the controls. So, much like with the aforementioned MOBA or FPS genres, you get cozy, thinking that you're solid and understand the game. Flashforward to watching your first big tournament or playing the games online, and you're exposed to players who are doing things you didn't even know were possible, and suddenly when you break it all down you realize that these people were doing twenty different things you didn't know about and you feel like you have to learn them all at once, which is a nightmare. Alternatively for fighting games, look at "good" tutorials like UNIST and Guilty Gear Xrd. Instead of just being told the controls of the game that in most games is done in the span of a 3-4 minute prologue scene for the game, fighting game tutorials hand you DOZENS UPON DOZENS of lessons in various menus with different titles and such, which already makes the most basic of information feel scarier and less accessible, but also encourages people who already know what a light/medium/heavy attack are and that holding back means block to dive into the next handful of tutorials. Suddenly, they're in a situation where the game is explaining a bunch of roman cancel mechanics, or the game's weight system, or how fuzzy guarding/buffering works. /And that was just one confusing tutorial on a menu filled with likely a dozen other concepts that barely make sense to you/ So to make this long comment short. Fighting games constantly throw more at players right away, which leads to a mote confusing, poorly paced learning curve that has far steeper of an entry point than any other genre (except for maybe RTS). While the skill ceiling might even out to be on par with other genres, the progression is far worse and leaves many new/intermediate players feeling overwhelmed by the amount of learning the games (and communities) tell them is right in front of them. When I was struggling to play ADC in League, my Platinum friend taught me how to better last hit. When I struggled in SFIV, my buddy tried teaching me how to space, how to hit 1 frame links, and a dozen other things all at once, and I feel that that's common in the FGC
As someone who doesn't play fighting games I was intrigued by Guilty Gear xrd rev just because I heard it had a great tutorial and I love the art style. However, what you explained is exactly why I couldn't continue playing it. In my opinion I don't think fighting games should list out all the combos you can do right away and just let players play the game with just the button inputs explained. Possibly have those combos be added to a list as a player inputs them, so they get that good feeling like they actually accomplished something. Maybe Riot games new fighting game will bring some other improvements to the genre so that the learning curve feels more reasonable without letting down the current fighting game community.
The "cool move" method is why I got so into Tekken, my friend wanted me to play so I decided I'd learn the game. I ended up choosing Paul because his gameplan was so simple and satisfying that I could focus on learning the mechanics. Just make them miss and demo fist, and thinking about that now, something similar would work for a lot of other fighting games I enjoy
Sure, it's hard to be good at anything; but I think it's harder to get to a point in a fighting game *where you're having fun* as opposed to other games, where you don't have to learn very much to still have fun
"Pound for pound" the difficulty probably isn't significantly higher for fighting games. People always have this misconception about the difficulty of fighting games. The problem isn't necessarily the difficulty, it's where that difficulty is situated. In mobas and non-arena FPS games the difficulty comes from getting better at the game after you've already started playing. In fighting games the difficulty literally starts as soon as you put your foot in the door. You have to study and practice to even do the basic actions of a fighting game. CSGO for example, becoming proficient at awping is difficult. However, simply shooting it isn't difficult. Imagine if in order to take a shot with the awp you had to input a combo and perfectly execute it like in a fighting game. Or substitute that with mobas and abilities. You guys might think quarter circle forward to throw a hadoken is no big deal because you've all been doing it for ages but for someone who hasn't played a fighting game before they literally have to study before they can even play. Not before they get good. Before they even start the game at all. Sure it takes work to get good at a moba or a shooter but it doesn't take practice and studying to start playing like it does in a fighting game.
This was what I was about to comment, whilst everything he says is true about "getting good" it misses the point of the execution floor being SO high in most FGs. Which is why games like Fantasy Strike are SO needed and so much better for people to learn.
Comparison with other types of game is wrong. Shooting with awp is same as pressing the punch button in fighting game, you don't need to practice to press punch key. You have to study and practice all of these games. You can't even begin to play CS unless you understand counter strafing and recoil control for example. example like this are in every competitive game ever.
@Bblurre In this context we were talking it is same. it doesn't take skill to press the button. Execution is sure hard in FGs but other competitive games have just as difficult mechanics that need to be learned just to play. Just look how hard CS is.
7:29 The importance of training mode grinding is dependent on the game. An extreme example would be GGXX, practicing FRC timings. Killer Instinct also has some with practicing breaking. However, with exception to learning command lists, most fighting games can be learned through matches.
Yeah, I usually agree with you Sajam, but I'm going to have to hard disagree here. You mentioned that matchmaking is in fighting games just like everything else, but unless you're playing the biggest games out there, that's just not true. It's why the only fighting game I've ever taken the time to learn is Street Fighter 5. I can actually play people around my skill level and improve. That's just not true for something like Gear. If I want to play Gear, I have to go to a player lobby with people that are almost always on a magnitude of a higher skill level than me. Now throw in how fast and mobile that game is. You mentioned intermediate goals like punishing and anti-airing, but despite actually having some knowledge of those skills now from another fighting game, the vast majority of my matches end in double perfects. I'm CERTAINLY not going to be learning even basic combos in such a situation, so yeah, at least some training room time is going to be required. So what does that leave? Basically discord. It's a reality that if you want to get meaningful playtime for anything but the largest fighting games, then you're going to have to do some legwork outside of the game, which instantly turns off a vast number of people. It's difficulty before you're even in the game. I also feel like what you considering "getting good" and what most people consider "getting good" is skewed. For most people, something like silver rank in SFV is the metric for "good". You know, the thing you waved off like it was nothing and comparable to an afternoon in a shooter. It took me 100 hours to reach silver rank in SFV. Most would call that a non-trivial amount of time to dedicate to one thing. Most (including yourself in this video) would consider that a low skill know-nothing rank, but despite that, Silver rank players, as of Season 4, are better than 80% of the online player base. Most people aren't looking to go to EVO or be diamond rank. They just want to get to a level where they can confidently say "Yeah, I play fighting games.". You also kind of blew off the team thing. Like yeah, you as a player are ass, even if you get carried, but you're underestimating what that does for morale. You know what the number one thing that I had to beaten into my head by other people before I started improving was? Learning to lose. Over and over and over again. I didn't improve until I was forced to embrace losing. I was told "Don't even think about winning. Even if you win it doesn't matter if you can't explain why you won". Lose and lose and lose again. Maybe one day you'll have enough knowledge to try for wins, but that's not for a long time coming. And it works. Learning to embrace constant losses and not only be happy about it but use it to your advantage is the most important skill to learn in a fighting game. Until you develop that skill, fighting games are hard. Losing an hour long moba game doesn't feel nearly as bad as losing for an hour in a fighting game. Number of losses absolutely matters to a person who hasn't learned to embrace them, and shrugging off one loss (no matter the time spent on it) is a lot easier than shaking off 20 of them, even if you sprinkle in a smattering of wins here and there. The last thing I'm going to mention is that you bring up teaching a lot. Most people don't really have teachers. They're teaching themselves. Any game is easy to learn if you have a more experienced player showing you the ropes. I had the pleasure of working with someone who was on our state's power rankings for Smash Bros Melee. We brought a setup to work and played most days on breaks. I learned more in an hour playing with him than I did in 10 hours teaching myself SFV. Just having someone else explain what I did wrong vastly accelerated my learning. I went to a tournament, despite my only experience being with him for maybe 20 hours cumulatively, and put on a great showing. And I get it. I realize this is a wall of text and you probably disagree with everything I say here, but it was a pretty visceral reaction from me. I play video games of literally every genre, and to me, fighting games are undoubtedly the hardest. It's why I find playing them so rewarding.
My two-cents on the reason why people say fighting games are hard. One he actually outlined himself at one point here. It's the incentives. Fighting games obviously have bad netcode so they can feel bad, there's never a ton of content or ways to play and have fun with the game, and frankly, even the tutorials in fighting games can be quite tough. I remember in UMvC3 I was trying to do some of the combo tutorials and even when I had learned how to do the inputs, I literally couldn't figure out how to chain them together in a combo because to new players, the timing aspect is just invisible to them. You think someone new is gonna realise that sometimes a slight delay in inputs will actually bypass i-frames to continue the combo? In a shooter, you point at the dude and hit the shoot button. Granted there's recoil control but you can clearly see that if you hold the shoot button with an automatic weapon, your aim flies up so countering that is obvious. I-frames, block stun, animation recovery, etc are all things that are much harder to spot and internalise in fighting games. So there's all that with FGs, then when you lose that's on you and you alone, whereas in shooters getting carried by teammates can help the learning process because you actually get time to react to things and internalise what's happening as opposed to getting fucked in the corner.
I definitely feel you on those trials. I was doing combo trials on blade strangers and ran into the same problem. Figuring out the timing for each combo without the game telling you can be a very frustrating experience in comparison to other games.
Can relate. Got KoF XIII (?) back in the day because I was curious or whatever. Got into the tutorial to get my feet wet. Took me about 2-3 hours to do a super they showed you once. Once. Never wanted to play the game again. Music is cool though.
@@otooandoh9556 Can definately feel this. In Skullgirls different characters have different fall speeds as well as center and corner only combos (Delayed hits, first hit only cause the rest will mess it up, x number of hits cause to many or less will mess it up depending on the character). In SFV there are some combos that require you to dash inbetween inputs but the combo list doesn't tell you to dash. So for the longest time you're like why am I always wiffing it, until you watch the demonstration and notice a dash in the combo where it never told you to do one.
The big difference between fighting games and other games is you can give yourself a tonne of time to get used to the game. If youre just walking into a wall and changing weapons, youll be fine until someone finds you in a shooting game. If you stand still working out the controls in a fighting game you die immediately because the other guy starts next to you
The downtime is important because people can (unconsciously probably) reflect and adjust what to do. If instead you get 3 2 1 go and youre being hit again. An hour of fighting games you may have a few minutes between matches to reflect. A 1 hour moba game you probably only spent a few minutes engaging with an enemy as a beginner
@@pauldaulby260 Understandable, but another inherent difference here is that the only way to win in fighting games is essentially hitting your opponent while avoiding getting hit. There's no other strategy or way around it and you have to engage with your opponent somehow. I had this mindset when starting MOBAs/LOL as an FG player, but I soon realised that it didn't really matter. If your opponent knows the match-up better or can trade better or have better mechanics etc., just don't try to fight without clear advantage like summs or CDs. Just hug your tower, try to last hit, get vision and wait for your jungler/teammates to help. You can be useful in teams fights or provide utility in other ways even if you're a "worse" laner and would lose a 1v1. Unfortunately, there's no secondary way to win as a beginner or learner in FGs. You just have to interact and deal some damage, even in games where you can play runaway, keepout or turtle very successfully.
The thing is, a lot of critical stuff is totally invisible in fighting games, and the only way to learn it is to study the mechanics of the game outside of playing (by learning from friends, or RUclips vids or guides or now by digging into tutorials). Like, you’re not just gonna learn frame data by playing the game if you’re a beginner. Whereas you can walk into a shooter as a noob and you’ll still be bad but you’ll at least know why you’re losing and what you need to do to get better.
I disagree, but only to a certain degree. Yes, fighting games are not as much harder as many claim. HOWEVER I would still argue that they are. It's not that people aren't learning the right way, there's just so much more to learn. I have friends from master/grandmaster in league saying that tekken is indefinitely the harder game (diamond myself and agree). There are macro concepts in both types of games, but the execution barrier is what makes fighters so much more difficult and attractive. While you want to just leave that barrier to the "beginners", I feel like it's something that affects every level of play. At any level of play, it's a lot easier to drop a max dmg combo in a fighter than it is to miss a flash over a wall in league, Yet both are significant play-making executions in their games. Understanding concepts in a game is about the same in any competitive game, but the execution requirement is something I feel you're underplaying quite heavily. I feel like anyone PREACHING the fighting game gospel about difficulty just wants to feel good about the time they put into it, sure I agree with that. However, I don't think that it discredits their point, it's just with bad intention.
This is such a bad take with a lot of bias. I'm willing to bet that you and your friends have played more hours than you care to admit in league and have also played games that require you to use a mouse and keyboard prior to even learning league. Sajam makes a point when he was talking about people who have never even held a controller before play a shooter and can't wrap their head around what the sticks even do, but you know what a mouse and keyboard does. The amount of subconscious practice that you have, using the peripherals just by browsing the internet and using your mouse to click things, plays a huge role in what you consider an "execution barrier." I'm confident enough to assume that your friends have never played any game that requires the kinds of motions that fighting games do or let alone have had enough time spent on a fightstick compared to a mouse and keyboard. It's easy to not remember the countless hours that you've grinded in league compared to a fighting game. Like Sajam mentions, getting fucked up in a round takes about 10 to 20 seconds, but in league you can be trapped in an hour long match. I feel people tend to equate a match in a fighting game to be as long as league. Even a match in a shooter can last way longer than a fighting game match. Equating a dropped combo in, at max, a 99 second round to a 5 minute flash cooldown is not the same thing. Fucking up a rotation on your champion is a better example, and even then it's basically the same thing, you can't play for however long the death timer is, if you die from fucking up your rotation. This is all just considering individual play btw. What is there so much more to learn about in a single fighting game than there is in league? Team comps exist. Builds exist. Matchups exist in both genres but league has specific roles where you may even be auto-filled. Nothing in a fighting game is stopping you from picking the character that you want to play til the day you die. You only need to learn one character's matchups. I don't know why people who complain that fighting games are more punishing even bring up the "but your team can carry you" point, because if you've died twice and your opponent freezes the lane on you, you literally can't play the game at all. That's the match. That's outcome. Except you can't leave until your team wins or surrender. The real problem is the unwillingness for people, like your friends, to learn a new genre from the ground up because there's very little carryover mechanics from other genres. It's not that it's hard, they just have too much pride to admit that they're going to suck at a fighting game from the get-go and they don't want to bother with feeling that way. To build a safety net and say "it's too hard" is such a bs excuse when people have thousands of hours in league and aren't even the best players on their server, but then give up on a fighting game in only an hour.
@@JK-gw9jb I think they understand that it will take them a while too eventually be good.its just that from their perspective the skill floor is so high that they won't be able to have fun until they've dedicated hours to the game and most people don't really have the commitment to do that when they just want to have fun playing a game. As you said the skills in many games Don't really carry over into fighting game witch makes it like getting into video games all over again and for most beginners to just about any game failing over and over again isn't fun witch is why most people can't get into video games at an older age or without a great teacher. Fighting games are hard because the skills you need to play them aren't really be gathered from anywhere else at it feels like getting your ribs kicked in for hours.
I think the main issues just comes down to matchmaking. In MOBAs and more popular genres, there are enough players to where even if you suck, you're also going to be playing against other people that suck as well, so there's a smooth curve for improvement. In fighting games, you can go on discord to find matches and people around your skill level, but most people from other games simply aren't aware of this. They mistakenly queue up for matchmaking earlier than they should, and get ass blasted by people much better than they are. Afterwards, they kinda just chalk up the game as being too difficult and give up before they've really given it a chance. Fighting games have really come a long way as far as tutorials and easing people into the game, (except for Tekken, wtf) and it's nice to see videos like this that try to dispel the myth that fighting games are too difficult for the average person. I think it's just people's apprehension in joining the game that ironically makes the games feel more difficult than they actually are, just by the fact of having less scrubs to play with.
Dyrus also picked up Final Fantasy XIV recently. Granted, skillcap on MMO aren't near other stuff, but he's already clearing the hardest content in the entire game, something cleared by about 0.0709% of players on the NA servers. Guy's generally good at games.
The first fighting I tried to seriously get into was skullgirl and 5 minutes later I just shut it down, because I started pressing buttons and nothing happened. Then I just played and eventually got descent, so I got ultra street fighter 4 and 5 minutes later I shut that down because I couldn't hit confirm for shit. I can play both but not a fan of street fighter.
Its definitely not a perception issue. With the exception of rts games, all the other genres are a breeze in comparison to fighting games, and I say this from personal experience. It took me a week to become decently skilled at shooters before I started competing. When I started competing it took me 3 months to start washing entire strong teams at the fps equivalent of a local. It took me a year and half of returning to fighting games to get 5th place, in a game no one really played much, at a local. I could argue this so hard I could write an essay.
Here's the reality: It's not that fighting games are harder to learn, it's that you don't get regular dopamine hits from wins you didn't deserve. In mobas/shooting games, you get dopamine hits when your teammates carry you, or the enemy team throws even if you got wrecked all game.
@@vegaspony I feel you only really get that feeling when your actually good cause when your trash you think you deserve everything cause your ignorant to your mistakes or the facts
This is one of the best evaluations I've seen. I hope you are proud man. I absolutely love R6S, TF2, Insurgency and watching Dota but those games reward you for being shit if your teammates are good. I go into a match thinking "I hope I get carried by a god this game" but in Tekken or KI or GG it's just you and them. Reminds me of Quake deathmatch where you have no one to blame but yourself.
They're harder than other games emotionally. In shooters you can go 0-7 and win or drop 30 kills in tdm and your team still loses. In fighting games you're not going to see the words "victory" until you've really learned and put in work and most people don't want to.
I don't really agree with that. When you play larger scale and more complex FPS games like Arma, Planetside, or Red Orchestra 2, losing does not feel good. In Red Orchestra you feel like you're in a constant death loop of bullets and explosions all because the other team has better intel and teamwork than you. Or losing a base in Planetside 2 after fighting your hardest with your Outfit and the best damn tactics you could come up with for LITERAL HOURS because the enemy bombarded your base with a Bastion, all while you're helpless to stop it. Not to mention the lack of Voice Chat in many fighting games. Imagine hearing somebody hit you with Halo 3 back on the 360 level trash talk while counter breakering you and t-bagging you during the match while you can't do anything about it. I have yet to have that happen in a fighting game, but FPS is filled with the absolute emotionally abusive aspect at times that Fighting Games lack. You can emotionally devestate somebody with your moves in a Fighting Game, but you can't also Verbally devestate somebody at the same time like you can in a lot of FPS. There are some exceptions, like Killer Instinct or MVC 3(I think, unless that's no longer there.) but it's not as widespread as it should be. Voice chat would improve the Fighting Game experience a lot.
I don't know why chat was playing such staunch devil's advocate against Sajam. He's right, but the *perception* of fighting games is that they're harder. It's worth examining the stuff around that. The excuse "you have a team in MOBAs" only goes so far as having someone to directly teach you, otherwise using that excuse just means "Someone is there to carry me."
My boi, a long time CoD player, got SFV for free on PSN. He went Ryu. All I taught him was fireball and it didn't take long for him to understand that it was a good tool to use when at long range. He learned the execution very fast as well. He asked me how to grab and figured out just as quick that it good up close or as a get off me tool. He even learned on his own that he could challenge my jump ins with a jump of his own. Learned anti airing without even knowing the term. Very simple strategies he had already adapted into his game plan. Not a second was spent in training.
The one thing that genuinely makes fighting games harder is the lack of information the actual game provides. I cant just improve through playing and watching guides, I need to go out of my way to learn frame data, which is not conveyed in any meaningful way in game.
@@arielpeluso959 mortal kombat too. Unfortunately I'm currently into tekken where theres a metric fuckton of moves and learning their properties means using 3rd party resources for some reason.
Tbf most of the "lack of information" stuff comes from legacy games. There are games that give you a decent amount of information and tactics like Arcsys games or Fantasy Strike (I think). Even then, MK and now SFV tell you frames.
@@kholdkhaos64ray11 that's a fair point but even then it does require you to go into training mode and find the moves/setups your opponent was using to see what your options are. The only game I can think of that made a serious attempt at conveying information to players mid match is fantasy strike.
I think the reason fighting games come off as more difficult is because they have a relatively small and dedicated playerbase. This means the average player has more experience and is more proficient in their game than the average FPS or Moba player is. It's just that you can play a fighting game, start to get the basics down and beat max level CPUs, then go online and get rolled by real players that know 10x more than you. It's like a bronze player in league only having people plat and up to practice against.
The average MOBA player is trash compared to higher tiers. I'm only master and I can absolutely body people in diamond or lower, making their entire 20-40 minutes hell, to the point where they can't even reach waves to level up Against the average rank (silver), I would shit stomp them so hard they'd consider quitting the game entirely. People who play just fighters don't realize how big the gap is in mobas, as well.
I think the biggest problem that people run into with fighting games compared to other genres is the barrier of intentionality. Dropping in fresh to a fighting game, you've got this period where you're not thinking about strategy or position or basically anything else... you're thinking about how to control your character. (Side note, that's why I'm *really* not a fan of ensemble story modes in fighting games. It's a step up from what we got before, but I think there's still a lot of room to improve). In a MOBA the barrier of intentionality is relatively small, you can move your character just like everybody else and all the cool things your character can do are relatively easy to access, barring certain gimmicks or the more advanced characters. It's the same with FPS games, for the most part... (Barring things like Rocket Jumping in TF2 or other gimmick mechanics that aren't necessarily core to the game). There isn't this point where you've got no idea how to make a character work... and being there feels *really* bad.
Intuition to learn is a great point. If I leave you to play Mario without lessons, you'll figure it out very soon. If I leave you to play FPS, you'll take some time, but you'll get there pretty soon. Your aim is shoddy, but you'll understand what you need to do cause every button is intuitive. But a FG? You have a menus of tutorials in GG, yet, you still gotta teach yourself neutral, frame data, reads and adaption, all from out of the game sources. And that's after you learn the cluster fuck of base mechanics like animation cancel, disjoints, and teching, all of which are the opposite of the word "intuitive." Moba have the same problem, when you leave a person in the game alone, there's a billion things that are not intuitively designed (eg. items vs HOTS's progression tree), thanks to its root from 15 years ago. For that reason, Riot, Valve, Blizzard and Hi-rez have placed alot of ingame learning material + community incentives to guide the learning process. The shop recommendation that you can auto-purchase in every game? That's one of these newb assistance tools.
On the team games thing...they ease you in in that hey, you may get carried, but you'll feel the feeling of winning still. When you lose in a fighter, you just lose. It's not realistic to think most people can jump in and lose constantly and keep wanting to play.
I feel like there's more resources to learn the fundamentals of other games than fighting games. Like it's a lot easier to learn how to group up for a team fight than it is to defend against frame traps.
6:18 As someone who has been playing MOBAs for almost half my life now, I can tell you most people don't understand builds, comps etc. They might know a hero is "Meta" right now but they wont know exactly why or how to best abuse them. As for drafting, AKA "making comps that are really good" it is such a difficult skill to learn that some Dota teams have coaches who dedicate most of their job to drafting. I have friends with upwards of 11k hours who still are not fully confident in their drafting abilities. Knowing what to do in a MOBA I would argue, is much harder than a fighting game. Fighting games have a higher exaction barrier than MOBAS hands down, Tinker, Meepo, and Invoker all have nothing on 1 frame links or taunt jet-uppers.
As someone who plays both fighters and shooters regularly, I'd say fighting games are a little harder overall. Just by playing casual matches over and over I can get a feel for the game and it's recoil system, as well as improve my aim over time without any dedicated drilling. Just from playing matches, I got decently high ranked in CSGO (got to Legendary Eagle) with no advanced drilling. When playing fighting games on the other hand, I can't just play matches and expect to improve my base skills. I need to drill B&B combos and setups into muscle memory, do defensive training for individual characters, etc.
I think team mate definitely is the barrier breaker. People tend to be scared of remembering commands and learn basics ON THEIR OWN. Some people hate not able to be carried or carry others. I have two friends who are new fighting game players, they like the game mechanics, like to lab and fight AI for some ideas, but they're scared to play against me or with me(like a party game we take turns to fight high level AI). Their nervous factor come from being the center of spotlight, win or lose it's their fight alone.
So basically, all of the things that make people think fighting games are uniquely difficult to pick up come down to there not being enough fighting game players
One thing I love about fighting games is that normally there are no scapegoats. Its just you and your opponent. No teammates or ways out (Ragequit aside).
I disagree with the point made at 15:00 a lot. He says that a new player won't recognize basic things like last hitting or whatever in a moba when they're getting stomped, but I think a better comparison would be like just killing minions at all. In a Moba I doubt any player would be incapable of recognizing that they can kill minions and seeing what they get for doing so. They're also given a tangible gold reward for doing so. And hell even killing an entire enemy champion or assisting in a kill isn't nearly as big a deal as say winning a round in a Fighting Game. Like I know I am absolutely trash at Mobas, but I can at least see when I kill a champion and feel good about myself even if I don't understand most of the underlying strategy. In comparison to a fighting game, killing an enemy champion is the equivalent of landing like 1 or 2 punches in a single round, considering it's something that's expected to happen dozens of times across the match. And so even if you go 1-15 or whatever and you only get that one kill while dying 15 times, it still feels like you did something. Whereas if I reduce my enemy's life in a fighting game to less than 50%, but then I lose the round, I don't feel very accomplished at all, despite the fact that I was way closer to winning in that than I ever was in the MOBA. Landing a hit in a fighting game just isn't as inherently satisfying compared to getting a kill in a shooter or a Moba or whatever. It doesn't feel like a complete action and thus it doesn't trigger a response from me that makes me feel like I did something. Not even compared to just killing a few minions in a Moba. Killing a minion feels like a complete action and I get the happy juices in my brain a little. Landing a punch, only to then be grabbed and combo'd to death, does not give me the happy juices.
I think one of the biggest differences was how important your choice of controller is in fighting games compared to any strictly keyboard+mouse game. I tried learning SF with xbox360 pad, bashed my head on the game 100 hours and didn't get anywhere, but when I switched to a better one I immediately started to see progress. This is not the case with games like CS or Dota which are of course smoother with better equipment but won't stop you from learning the game.
I feel like part of the perception is that with team games, the lack of accountability makes the learning process so much easier. In fighting games, you can't blame your teammate for messing up or think that you're improving just because you got carried. You're by yourself so you're confronted with your flaws a lot more obviously in a fighting game than in team based games like.mobas
Training mode is the most boring (subjective but probably a common perception) thing in the world when you start a FG. Hell, still boring even when you get to a decent level where you can identify and analyse what happened and what could've/should've been done. Any game, regardless of genre, I simply learn what my buttons do and I get straight into it. As soon as I meet a wall I can't out think or approach differently with my existing knowledge and then I'll bite the bullet and learn the thing I'm obviously missing.
Came back to this video bc I have recently started playing an FPS (Apex) and I have never felt so out of water. Anyone who says "in a shooter you just move the mouse and click" obviously got into them at a young age bc that shit is difficult. In 5 trios matches with my friends, the only 2 times I did any damage is when I punched a guy who dropped on top of us and when I shot someone who wasn't moving with my shotgun. That second one was even more embarrassing bc I managed to miss them like 3 times with the pistol even though he wasn't moving.
Perhaps fighting games have an association with being hard because there's no non-competitive games people can start with. People can transition into competitive fps from a whole bunch of non-competitive games with first person controls (skyrim, minecraft, portal, etc.). People can also transition into mobas pretty easily from diablo-style games most obviously, but I think the basic mechanics of just clicking things to do things means basically anyone that's used to using a computer will understand the basics right away. Contrast either of those with fighting games and the closest thing they have is probably just platformers. imo this is why smash is so successful. It focuses more on the familiar platforming aspect of fighting games and removes the unfamiliar command system entirely.
I completely agree. I don't think Fighting games are "harder" than other genres to learn (I'd actually argue they may be easier, due to the limits of player interactions, but I digress). I think the problem for people is it's harder to feel externally MOTIVATED to learn a fighting game. To me I think it's just the difference between intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic, and the amount of time you get to reflect on what happened. MOBA's, card games, even shooters I'd argue, all get you a little "something" to show that you did a good job. You kill the enemy's monster, or get a tally in your kill count, or gold for taking out a minion. Small, little tangible rewards that the player can visually see and understand, and know that it's positively influencing their game later down the line. It's extrinsic rewards that inform the player every step of the way. And perhaps best of all, the player has a lot of time to understand what went right or wrong. They can look back on the play they just made that went really well, and have several minutes to try and set up that scenario again. There's time to process, and the game motivates you to do so. Fighting games actually do this too- but I think people find it harder to see, so it takes a lot more internal effort to really focus on. Things like getting a Counter hit, blocking the opponent's Burst, landing anti-airs, all of these are just like in the other games. Little rewards that positively impact your chances of winning the whole match. But people don't seem to "see" that as easily, and I think it's because of the speed of rounds. The rewards come much, much faster than in most other competitive genres (most), and the majority of it results in your opponent losing their Life Bar as the reward. It can be hard for new players to understand how "well" they're doing, since a new player may not have time to really reflect on what even happened. They could press some buttons, get blown up, and not have time during the match the process how it even started. As a fighting game player, you have to motivate yourself to sit down and think things through. You have to set your own goal of "Okay, I lost the round, but I'm learning the timing for working around their anti-air. I'll do even better against it next time.". The game doesn't do it for you. There's speed and freedom in how you reach your goal, beating the opponent, but it comes at the cost of a slower pace for people to ruminate on. You hit the ground running in fighting games, as does your opponent. I think that's the part that intimidates people. At least it did for me at first. Not that other games don't also throw you into the thick of it, or benefit from research and analyzing outside of actual matches. I just think most new players feel more rewarded for processing during the match of different genres than fighting games.
I can tell you as a guy who used to play a lot RTS and had to learn bunch of other competitive game genres during my college life to have fun with friends, fighting games have one of the WORST learning tools and resources for new players and it took me very long time to break into some of the subgenres in fighting games. This is coming from a guy who used to play and practice starcraft for fun.
@@U9B I think the biggest problem I have with the learning content in fgc in comparison to other ones is that the guides made by fgc people seems more like a guide made by high level players to one day create another mid-high level player. The guides are terribly open ended and is more of analysis of the character's moveset and often times all over the place. If you know the game already you can nod along and approve of the things being said and be like "Yeah those are things newbies should want to know." But they are not very good guides to help someone start out. And I'm not here saying all dota guides or league guides or starcraft guides and so on are better. But those games have beginner guides that is relatively easy to find that just tell you what to do so that new players can have some scaffold to grab on to while they start learning the game. This used to lead me into having to relearn characters multiple times in the span of the first few days of picking up fighting games. Because of this, I have created a sort of flow chart of what I type of content I would like to look at when I pick up a new fighting game. But I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for someone who doesn't have the same level of experience trying to learn a fighting game for the first time.
@@MageKirby You mean because you have to cut through the jargon of the selected game? That's the only barrier of entry I can see that being an issue with. I think many of those are written under the assumption you have basic skills in Fighting Games or that game in particular.
@@U9B Yes! There is too much open ended info in a guide for beginners. The beginner opens a guide for beginners hoping the expert is giving the most important learnable bit to start from. And the horizon for the player needs to be slowly widened. But there isn't guides thats does this. Its more of an information dump of what a high level player views as basic.
Which other games have barriers of execution? I can easily jump from months of playing R6S into playing COD and only need 20 mins tops of adjusting (given that I know the maps) But I can’t play SFV for 6 months straight and go into BlazBlue online expecting wins. Skills from other games transfer pretty easily. Single player games like Spider-Man or Uncharted can be easily picked up and played by any “gamer” ..... but fighting games can be very intimidating to play at first
Thats because its COD, try going into CSGO. Or try playing Starcraft. Fighting games are hard to learn but they are not the only ones with an execution barrier.
@@FFXfever Only if the gameplay really just was about "Just 1 tap with AK lel". P90 example doesn't work either since it's pretty much 100 % useless in high level play. While shooting looks very straightforward, it comes to multiple things how to control it effectively (spray control, spray patterns, crosshair placement, counter-strafing, reseting accuracy penalty etc.) After that is figured out, there's some other mechanics that indirectly affect gunplay like bunnyhopping, runboosts, strafe-jumping, surfing. Then there's finally understanding an economy and nades blah blah but I don't want to continue or I'm still writing this tomorrow. List just goes on. So am I saying CS:GO has things like Kazuya's d/f + 2 into the PEWG? Of course not. I'm just saying there's tons of more than meets the eye in the gameplay.
id argue that fighting game basics transfer very easily to other games knowing how to block, anti air, use lights to beat out heavies, etc. have the same functionality and uses in the same way that knowing how to run, shoot, throw grenades, and take cover do the things that don’t transfer are character specific matchups, moves, and meta bc every game is different, HOWEVER, shooters also have map and weapon differences and quirks as well as their own metas that take time and practice to learn in the same way you can point and shoot in any shooter, but do you know the map in every one? do you know the specific weapons in every one? what about system mechanics or movement options? bc those are certainly different i’m a skullgirls player, but the knowledge i gained from that has let me go to other games like guilty gear where you have to know how to defend against fast pressure it took me a long ass time (and i’m still learning) to figure out what my tools were good at doing and what other characters tools were good at doing, but i knew how to block, anti air, air dash, and get past some stuff and it was a HUGE help for me to actually learn the game specific mechanics
I think learning fighting games is just way less intuitive than other genres. Sure, if you have a friend who knows how to teach you, or you already have a basic understanding of fighting game systems, you can discern what you need to work on. If you're doing it solo, and you're a beginner, just figuring it out with trial and error is going to be tough. You really need to research.
I've been playing fighting games my whole 31 years of life and never actually knew what I was doing until I learned playing a game called Punch Planet :)
agree 1000% with this video. was just talking to some friends about this the other day. its so hard to get people into the genre because of preconceived notions of difficulty. i appreciate that this video exists so much, thanks for talking about this in such a clear, concise, well thought other manner with solid examples. i will be showing this video to legit every person i hear mention FG difficulty going forward. keep up the quality content! :D
I'm curious as to what you think about the aspect of memorization as well. Shooters for example, require execution grinding to be precise, but the inputs from getting your cursor from point A to point B are mostly homogenous. There's a certain amount of memorization that goes into strings and combos, as well as matchups
That's why this video is a bit bunk. There's no mediocrity to settle on with fighting games: you can only improve or get left behind. MOBAs you are afforded some resignation of rank and play among your own and win/loss stuck in stagnation.
I just found this video randomly while searching for something else, but I really like what you said. I think that what you said applies to learning/teaching most things. You have to start with the basics and work your way up. Pretty much everyone sucks at everything until they spend the time and learn the thing. As for teachers, they shouldn't be too harsh to the students and they shouldn't start by telling them that the thing is super hard or that they need to know advanced things early on.
I think a lot of the PERCEPTION that fighting games are harder comes from non-transferrable skills as a a general video game player. If I've played video games all my life, and I want to pick up CoD, then in my brain it's like "Oh, you played Doom 20 years ago, so here's the basic concepts." Or if I wanna play league my brain says "Remember Starcraft, same basic premise." There's a lot of history associated with other genres particularly when it comes to single player experiences. But fighting games have historically struggled with single players campaigns, and were less popular. So people are coming in legitimately fresh and learning something brand new. Where the other genres they often have similar touchstones, so aren't actually "new players" when they're new players. So they end up comparing apples to oranges. Something they're actually learning for the first time. And something they already have built in context and muscle memory. And it's the same reason why fighting game players find it easier to pick up new fighting games, even if they're very different.
The difference between fighting games and other games is that most games don't lock moves behind proper execution. Anybody, no matter how new, can use any ability in a MOBA. Sure, if they're completely new to the genre it might take them a moment to look at their controller and find the button, but they can do it. Try getting somebody who has never played a fighting game to perform a Shoryuken input, much less input a double qcf ultra. Notice how nobody complains about the difficulty of smash bros, even though melee is one of the most technical games on the planet. If nothing else, even the brand new player can perform all of their attacks without spending hours training. This is exacerbated by the fact that fighting games are well known to revolve around combos, and each combo takes hours of muscle memory to learn (for a new player). This leads to the feeling that you aren't "playing the game" unless you can perform a full combo that ends with an ultra. And of course, the execution shortcuts for these moves can be hilariously misleading. It took me literally years to learn that comboing from hadoken into a super hadoken only took a grand total of 2 qcf motions, not 3. These things require months of training at least, and lead to a very different experience when compared to learning most other video games.
I think FG are harder then others games because they require a lot more base knowledge before you're allowed to have fun. Like if you put a non gamer in a shooter they'll probably figure out it's point, shoot and kill even if they will get rekt they know how to play and have fun, but in a FG they are gonna wonder why did that attack hit them, how can they even attack while pressured etc.
Yeah...Mobas and fighting games are nothing alike in terms of skill. For one, Mobas have an incredibly low execution ceiling. You press one of four buttons. The build list is literally just a shopping list and guides exist to the point where you don't have to think about what you're buying. Fighting games have much more executiom emphasis so even if you know what to do, your chances of fucking up are a lot higher. "Losing 100 matches in a fighting game takes less time than losing 3 matches in a moba" Yeah but at the end of those 3 matches I don't feel like I want to bash my head in with a brick because of how bad I am.
As someone who has graduated from the idea that FGC jargon is important for the sake of it retaining a name, it is difficult because to me, a fighting game hits you with all of your mistakes at once. Then when you seek to get better, people can only teach you the way they were taught. Back when I started I could still go to arcades (RIP Family Fun Arcade, Arcade Infinity, Japan Arcade, LA Arcade scene) but that method was just lose until you either quit the game altogether or until you understood what your buttons and moves do and applied it in an incrementally increasing fashion. I feel that this philosophy never died even though the reason why it existed did. I feel like that natural gatekeeping exists because from a design standpoint, it is the most effect way to teach. Skullgirls and Killer Instinct do a great job of subverting this with their tutorials, but even those can be improved upon. I doubt we will get an AI that will make you "PvP ready" and that to an extent you will always need to find out what works and what doesn't by playing it against another person, but like Sajam say that is a part of learning. It's kind of crazy to see how many people rationalize time dedication in one medium vs. Another.
this video gave me a new way of looking at fighting games, most in-game tutorials are bad in teaching you the most basic skills so i focus only on doing combos and supers
To add to the discussion. I started playing fightings games very recently, like two months tops. Playing regularly that is. I'm in my late twenties and have been playing everything but fightans. I believe that the issue with fighting games and other genres of competitive gaming, is that most of the skills necessary to play fighting games are not really that translatable to and from other games. Competitive MP FPS' basic skills can be learned very well through single-player FPS'; MOBA games have much in common with the control schemes of RTS' and some RPGs, like Diablo and your generic korean MMORPG. So there is a lot of familiarity already in the playerbase for those kinds of games. Of course there are games that use something akin to the control scheme of fightans, with their button combinations for different strings of combos that you can do, but I don't think that they get anywhere near the level of intricacy that the average fighting game has (maybe that is why I found Tekken to be the easiest to get into at first). Some inputs feel completely unnatural to do on a d-pad, the typical "forward, down, down+forward" is terrible to do on one of them and are clearly tailored for the arcade experience and analog sticks are not well suited to that kind of work.
The inputs do feel odd yes but are completely doable, they are just a little bit different, if you practice them then you can get them out and fighitng games get more and more lenient with inputs every year. Z motions were difficult at first but now I can do them no problem on my PS3 pad. It's more just about using it in the middle of battle at the right time and even getting it out, which is hard to do even when using a stick or being at an actual arcade machine. There are really good SF and Tekken players that use pads too, I can name them if you want.
I think the real reason fighting games are hard for people to get into is because they believe all the things you're debunking here. I agree with you on all your points, I just got into fighting games 3 weeks ago and I'm already pretty good. But trying to get my friends into GGst I can tell you it's impossible because they all believe these things.
While most team-based game chats are either dead or toxic, it's still a factor that's worth noting. There's built-in communication systems. I've had teammates (and even opponents) in Overwatch give me pointers in chat, during the match or after. In fighting games, it's going to be after the match and it's going to be using some 2nd party interface (PSN messaging or Steam messaging) and most people don't care to help their opponents improve because it's not helpful to them.
13:00 is exactly how I felt when I first made it into D2 (always hovered D4/D3) I could feel my skill capping in a demoralizing way. No more solo kills, always down in cs, no pressure in lane to rotate. I was horribly outclassed and dropped back down immediately.
Learning things like match ups and strategies can be equally difficult in all competitive games, I agree. However inputs in fighting games are harder to do, and I'm not even talking about combos. You don't have to press 632146HS to shoot a rocket in COD, and you don't have to do 236236HS to activate one of your 7 or 8 attacks in League. Sure, all genres share certain difficulties like reaction time, matchs ups, etc, but in fighting games you are either learning universal input motions at the entry level (236, 41236, 632146HS) or you're trying to memorize a long string of commands that involve these newly learned inputs at a competitive level. Whether you are a new player or experienced you are learning things that you wouldn't have to learn in other competitive games because other games don't expect you to press multiple buttons for any one action (with a few exceptions). Once a new player learns all of these inputs then sure the difficulty of the end game becomes the match ups and knowledge of the mechanics, etc, but fighting games still require that one little extra hurdle to go through before you can get to that point. I agree that people exaggerate how difficult fighting games can be sometimes, but that doesn't mean they still aren't technically harder in general, even if only by a little bit.
I would agree that fighting games aren’t as hard as it is put but I would still say fighting games are harder because of the amount of outside of the game work to get better such as learning frame data matchups and all other things outside of just the execution
To add to this, team games can also feel hard to get into because even if your team wins, if you didn't do well individually you'll feel that. There have been games of LoL that my team won or even crushed but I personally did really poorly. And after those games I didn't come away thinking "at least we won" it was always "man I suck, that was terrible I want to quit". I ended up playing League for a long time because my friends and I could always que up together and play on the same team, and even if we were terrible we could get some sick plays and win every now and then. Being able to play cooperatively with friends was a big part of what kept us coming back. If you play a fighting game with a friend, it always has to be competitive against each other and that's a totally different vibe. It can be really exhausting. Having to play against your homies all the time isn't nearly as chill as getting to play on the same side with your homies.
Every game is difficult at high level. But for a beginner Fighting games are the hardest to learn. That’s why there is a training mode! There’s no training mode in any other game!
I feel like people are making up reasons for why fighting games are harder to make themselves feel better for playing a harder type of game. Even if it doesn't really make all that much sense to claim that it is.
I don't know anyone who grinds drills in shooters. Most people don't as far as I can tell. Literally anyone who plays a fighting game eventually hits the lab.
If what you were saying was true, then fighting games would sell much better than they do and be played by more people. The inaccessibility is why the genre barely exists compared to all the other types of games you are comparing it to in terms of the number of people playing. Fighting games on twitch are some of the least viewed and least played on the platform.
I'd argue vs. AI play gets you to a better level in fighting games than in any other competitive genre sans maybe puzzles. Sure fighting game AI doesn't learn, yet you do and when you learn it's patters it's exploitable. But still it's testing your reaction times, teaching you the distance and timing limits on punishing a live opponent and beating you up if you lose focus. FPS AI fluctuates from "just let the baby win" to sniping you through walls going up a single difficulty setting. And rts/tcg/etc. Ai just lets you win unless it's some sort of gacha where it instead wrecks you through messing with your rng because it's still playing like it's programmed backwards.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
"I lost the match but atleast i didnt get perfected"
"I landed my BS setup once that I practiced for like 7 hours, that whole L was worth it"
I got a perfect on my cousin in Tekken
(He's the same age as me)
It's about the little victories, when you can't get the big one. My sisters and I do this with rhythm games. Do bad in the song? At least I hit the last note.
@@Boyzby if you don't win we get permission to trash talk each other and loser can't say anything back
Until we both yell at each other we stop playing then (it was 2AM don't blame me for getting mad!)
honestly getting at least one hit on someone who feels like hes just steamrolling you or even just a knockdown feels so good
When I just started getting into fighting games, I thought that to get somewhere I need to know most optimal combos, all framedata, punishes and all that.
But all I had to do to get out of beginners is overcome anxiety and anti-air alot
I've had the same issue, now I just get frustrated because I know more stuff than I can actually make use of at my level.
Yeah I feel like that should be one of the first things a beginner should learn. Instead of mashing buttons, block to get a read on your opponent, then slowly start to get used to punishing their attacks, and then slowly build on what you can do. Hell, I've been playing Tekken 7 for almost a year now and I only just started getting used to understanding neutral, as in 'okay we're this far apart, what attack can reach them without putting me in danger?' like sure I know how to cause counter-hit sure I know how to punish, but what about when I'm far away from my opponent, what can I do from far away or to get closer? I'm still learning. There is absolutely no need to force all of the information in fighting games in one go, take the time to breathe.
You know its really funny. Back when it was just arcades, there was no frame data, no discord tech. You were lucky to even see "top player" footage. Even GameFAQs didn't really have "the best" information. You know what we did have? Lots and lots of quarters and tokens.
@@decksteroussnail And, of course, an average player back then is just as good as an average player is now?
@@decksteroussnail we did not have arcades where I'm from
And still even today fighting games are not that popular in my country
If you go into twitch chat during worlds, you get the idea that everyone believes they can play better than the losing team.
In every single game
The funniest part is they likely never played in that type of environment (no lag, very strong coordination) so they'd end up getting dumpsterred
@@QuantemDeconstructor they might get dumpstered, but not me. I’m better than them.
@@harrylane4 lmao
It's not always malicious. Spectators can see what's happening much much better than the ones currently playing, who'll have to worry about a ton of other things
I..... agree.
HOWEVER I do think a lot of other genres do a better job of still being fun even when you don't know how to play. Either because of the chaos introduced by having teammates, or because there are miniature goals that the game acknowledges and rewards i.e. "i lost but at least I got a kill" in shooters, or "i lost but at least I finished my daily quest" in card games
I mean “I lost but I got the anti-air” or “that difficult combo” so those goals can be applied to FG’s but everything else it’s true
@@raychangalarza179 That's a personal goal that you set for yourself, not quite the same thing. If it has the same effect as a sidequest for you then great, but fighting games
shouldn't shouldn't rely on players wanting to do cool stuff even when they lose.
@@angryskeleton5676 I mean, why not?
@@EnderTitan because it assumes that every player will just make goals besides winning which just isn't going to happen.
@@angryskeleton5676 It also assumes they're aware of those smaller goals and why they're important.
If you don't play fighting games than you don't realize you made a couple good moves or how you spaced well or landed a sick anti-air all you know is that you loss and you're bad.And being confused while constantly getting kicked into the dirt isn't a fun learning process for most people.
Most of the time when I hear "Fighting games are too hard" its coming from people I'm trying to get into a fighting game I'm playing. I don't think the stigma exclusively comes from the community itself, its a general perception of the genre.
Honestly, I think most people who say that, and aren't already playing fighting games, aren't looking to actually be good in a fighting game.
The perception exists in part because the community likes it and plays it up, I think.
@@Venomousse the FGC adores driving people away and clowning on other games for being "too easy" or "for scrubs. Many FGC members are super possessive of their niche genre and don't want any noobs. Keep l in mind I said many members, not all. Most larger FGC figureheads are very open to new players and willing to teach others. Some of those figureheads draw heat from the FGC for being open to new players.
@@jreut09 I only started playing FGs seriously in 2018 and I found the community very welcoming as long as you're humble going in. People can have a bit of a chip on their shoulder regarding game difficulty but that's understandable and part of most competetive communities I think. Asking questions and taking criticism without making excuses is all I've needed to do to get tips and help.
It's the fucking reality it the genre and pretending otherwise is keeping it niche
See, I would agree that having a friend helps making learning fighting games easier except every friend I've tried teaching refuses to listen on even the very basics. I blame myself in some aspects, maybe I'm a shitty teacher, but even when I show them video guides designed for beginners or in-game examples it's the same issue.
It may be more accurate to say fighting games are more rewarding to learn compared to other games. With team games the easing in is because you can still win while losing, it distorts loss aversion inherently.
im the same way with my friends. i think they'd rather just play the game instead of spending time trying to learn them. i think the main reason for this is because nowadays you can just pick up and play most games, but for fighting games you have to spend the extra time so that you can even do specials.
most casuals dont like that, so they give up really fast.
Fighting games feel more personal that's why.
@@ymsmash9526 See I don't agree with you and I think I know why I agree with this video. Most people have never actually spent time to actually get good at a shooter or moba. When I play csgo I try to teach my friends smoke spots and spray pattern but they are just content playing the game and never improving. I play league and I try to teach more advanced tactics like freezing waves and how go manipulate the minions to your advantage but they don't really pay attention. That's why you see most people stay hardstuck at a certain rank for many games but see people like dyrus pick up a new game and get good. The key is to actually put effort into improving and that's something that's not specific to just fighting games.
@@GrimReaper1526 100% agree with this as my friends are content with not learning to play games and just want to play. It's up to a person's personality on whether they enjoy pick up and play games or the grind of research and learning the ins and outs of competitive games. In a way it's like anime. Some people just watch the seasonal 13 episode animes and others will invest time into the 100+ (or 800+ looking at you One Piece) animes.
Burpinator we at 900+ now 😎 lol. I actually started one piece last July. Finally got up to the reverie, just before wano. Seemed daunting at first but it was worth it. And then I have my friends who won’t watch an anime past 30 episodes, and won’t play a fighting game longer than 2-3 weeks before quitting. Like you said, different personalities. Some people like to challenge themselves and some don’t.
matchmaking in anime games is nonexistent, since everyone plays in lobbies, and among the 15 people in the lobby, for new players it's a bit daunting when most of the people there are high rank gods at the game. it's currently what ive been running into while learning bbtag
Team battle is an emotional massage that can't be understated. In fact, lots of the latest hit games have buffers against failure to massage your emotions while fighting games have almost none.
This is probably true for fighting games with a healthy player base, but when the whole pool of players are sharks and I drop in with my guppy-ass skills it's going to feel a lot harder. I've been getting into Guilty Gear and there's one room each night I get good ping to and I only show up when I want to get my rectum reversed. In Dota I can drop into a pool of what, 400,000 players? And it'll sort me into my shit rank and I can have fun in the mud with the other shitters. But when there's 4 dudes with 12,000 hours between them tearing it up in one room on Guilty Gear, yeah man it feels a hell of a lot harder. If there were 400,000 players playing GG then it'd be different but fact is there aren't. So theoretically it's not any harder, but in practice it for sure is.
THIS, I've been in the exact same situation twice (UNIST and GG) where the only players I get matched with are way better than I am, and I end getting clobbered without being able to do anything. or in the case of the latter game (GG) I can't even find anyone to play with online. I would imagine even the bigger fighting games (Tekken or SFV) would have times where online at the beginner ranks is completely empty, we have to keep in mind that theee isn't a constant flow of new players coming into FGs.
and this isn't taking into account how shit most FG netcode is.
@@naseralsalem236 I think if you're a beginner in a fighting game, especially if you're fighting better players and have the mindset to learn, then you'd have to change your thinking from playing to win to playing to learn. When I was getting into unist vs way better people, I would accept that I'm probably not going to win and legit block most of the match and see what pieces of info I can get. From some game mechanic I'm using improperly like green shielding or guard thrust, to picking up on habits the better player showed in the matches. Then when I fight again, I do way better than I did in the beginning.
@@nicklez01 I see where you're coming from. but alot of the time the players are wayyyy out of my league that I just get rushed down, especially when they play characters I am unfamilar with (Hilda, Vat and Seth are probably my worst MU as a player), the game kinda without me know where to block. I agree with your approach and do it alot of times, but it can be useless when you're just starting and they probably won some regionals and they come at you as if you're a good player (not saying they shouldn't).
My advice to everyone in this situation is to start joining Discords. There are tons of people in the same situation you are -- interest in Guilty Gear for new players is pretty high right now. It sucks that Xrd can't just matchmake you, but there are ways that you can find each other yourselves.
*Has flashback to last month of the 45 min session (and 60 games) of getting gaped by a guy with 9,400 wins in BBTAG to my 5 wins (only one of which was from him and that was due to him using a brand-new, never before used team). I didn't even want to look at the game for two days.
I never thought I would encounter it, but the biggest barrier people I've tried to help had are doing motions. I spent an hour with a friend teaching him to do quarter circle and DP motions, and he can only get them half the time. I didn't know what to tell him other than to keep trying.
Maybe he's missing out on some shortcuts. It took me years to realise what the shortcut to a DP motion actually was and how to do it.
I come here for the content, but stay for the sick segues into thanking subscribers.
Those segways are pretty sick...
But nearly as sick as Justin Seymour coming in hot with the twitch prime sub! Appreciate ya, buddy.
@@justsomeguy727 you missed a "not" :d
Yeah. You’re right
But I tell you what I’m NOT missing HighLanderPony hitting us up with a new sub!
@@letmeshowumypkmn sheet dawg!
@@SeaJay4444 Just like i'm "segue"-ing into thanking WeedGoku69 for the 420 months!
A few other people are making similar points in the comments too.
Whilst everything you say is true about "getting good" it misses the point of the execution floor being so much higher in most FGs than in any other genre.
This is why games like Fantasy Strike are SO needed and so much better for people to learn! You should really cover it!
Learning fighting games feels like when i FIRST started playing games altogether. None of the previous knowledge can be applied, I'm starting with a blank slate and that's why it's so frustrating. I feel like i should know this even though there's no reason for me to know.
But after you have some experience with fighting games, you can apply that knowledge to every other fighting game you play. Even if its as simple as understanding good neutral tactics like footsies or even learning frame data to decide the best moves for your style of gameplay. Its not like you start out from 0 every time you pick up a new fighting game.
@@itraynell exactly your first fighting is likely the hardest. I'm just trying to get over the hump
That is 50% true. Yes, In principle you can use the higher level techniques like bait and punish, good neutral, good oki tech, in every “Fighting Game”. But the “MECHANICS” you will be using are very very different across fighting games. By that I mean (and back me up here FGC community members) Street Fighter is not the same game/mechanics as Tekken or Marvel Vs Capcom or SMASH or Mortal Kombat or Ark Systems games. While almost every FPS is the same game with a different skin. (Fort-Nite however is the Exception in my opinion, their is building) Same with MOBAs. However, you will have too re-train your muscle memory much more in fighting games then in any other game. (And also suffer more). That’s why I don’t agree with this video. Fighting Games are the hardest.
@@Ozark5e ?????
A team shooter like CS:GO is going to play completely differently from a team shooter like Overwatch, which also might play differently from Halo or CoD. There are plenty of mechanics to differentiate each of those games, like abilities, time to kill, types of guns, etc.
a single mechanic (turn rate) makes playing a carry in DotA worlds apart from playing a carry in LoL. Hell, you need to relearn the jungle every single year in just League alone, and DotA's jungle is completely different from that as well. A game like HotS throws the item building part of MOBAs out the window and replaces it with talents as well as changing the mechanics of last hitting and team objectives.
I (and Sajam) are not saying that differences in fighting games don't exist, but I am saying that similar differences exist in other genres as well. If you're going to criticize each fighting game for having different mechanics, you need to apply that same criticism to other genres too.
Sibai
I acknowledge that you are right if we look at it the way you are looking at it.
I acknowledge that their are definitive differences if you go specific or granular, into not only the mechanics but also the gameplay experiences between players playing Overwatch Vs Halo. Or the experiences between playing a carry in one MOBA vs’s in another.
But (Concerning FPS’s) those are only really stylistic differences (or different paint jobs + a polish) between what is essentially a point and click game coupled with different abilities, and different movement options. The reason why FPS’s are popular in the first place is that the basic understanding of what is the only skill you need to get started (not to get good or even master, just to get started) is accuracy. You could argue it’s accuracy and movement that are the fundamentals, regardless the way any numbskull wins is by matching the target reticle to the enemy and firing first and best. In fighting games (Excluding Smash which is amazing) there can sometimes be between 2-6 buttons you would need to hit (usually in a pattern that you have to learn) and you hit them till they KO.
Because hitting them with a button seems so simple, fighting game developers have to add complexity after effing complexity to make their games different from other fighting games. FPS’s are essentially the same mechanics requiring little memorization and more just intuitive optimization. They allow players to intuitively know the game versus memorizing a manual of options. The only fighting game to break this mold is SMASH. SMASH allows you very few options and is designed to be as noobie friendly ( AKA Nintendoey) as possible. This is the games MO, allow few options and a lot of easy tactics to make a party 🎉 fighting game that everybody loves. (Effing Brilliant)
It is a popular opinion (as far as I know), that everyone feels they are semi decent at shooters. They can pick them up and the amount of negative feedback a shooter will give you on your skill level only truly becomes more apparent in the higher tiers. This is compounded by the fact that you are playing team games vs 1v1 games. The gaps between fighting game players are however crystal clear. Pain is part of the learning process in fighting games.
If you doubt what I’m saying look at how these games are marketed, and who the real fans of these games are.
Fans of FPS like the aspect that you can if your lucky get results sometimes by just being in the right place and right time (they will deny this but the randomness of this aspect allows more fairness, giving the game an unknown element not related to skill). They hate when some noob gets a lucky shot off at them when it’s reversed.
FPS’s are marketed to all players and have become more popular. Staples such as Fortnight are leading the charge (actually it’s probably passed the torch to Warzone but I still give Fortnight credit).
Fighting game fans know that almost all mistakes they make are due to a lack of skill not luck. They are pushed to the limit with the games multiple complex systems and at the same time reading an opponent who is doing the same.
Lastly (in my opinion) Each fighting game has to try harder to be different and still be a fighting game. FPS’s OR third person shooters don’t really try to be that different. (Not on the same level IMO)
Maybe it's a matter of how condensed the stress level is in a FG compared to something like a MOBA. In MOBAs you've more downtime, walking to lanes, shopping, waiting for last hits, being dead etc. You've some time while playing to think things over. FGs are way more intense and could overload someone's brain way faster than a MOBA. I played GG Rev 2 for like an hour some time ago and it was intense AF. I felt exhausted (and got totally bodied). It's been weeks and I still don't feel comfortable diving back in, eventhough it was decent fun.
Different storkes, I'd say. I think the longer time-investment in MOBAs is actually the worst part about them as a beginner. While alot of that downtime let's you think things over, it also let's you wallow in your failure for so much longer. Losing in a MOBA is a commitment. When a game of League of Legends starts going south, I'll usually have figured that out by the first 15 minutes. The next 20-30 minutes of the game is thus spent torturously waiting for it to be done and over with already. All the while, you are put into 0-sum games, where you are literally unable to win because your opponent is fed, therefore statistically superior to you, you are making the game less fun for the rest of your party who now have to clean up after your feeding and there is no reset back to neutral, so to get another chance at starting fresh, you have to wait until it's done. By the 25th minute, all the thinking I'll be doing during that is whether I prefer the taste of cyanide or lead.
If you're bad at fighting games, you get sandbagged for at most 2 minutes and it's done. You're off to the next challenge. Even within a set, the round usually starts at neutral, so you immediately get a chance to fix your situation from an even footing instead of trying to win an uphill battle against someone who is now in a better position to keep winning from your past failure.
@@AlluMan96 There's also that angle, yes.
Fighting games really do struggle to make people overcome the anxiety to actually play as a beginner
I think basically all the points Sajam brings up are valid, but I think the reason why the perception that fighting games are hard to learn is because there are very few games similar to fighting games that people can bring information over from
What I mean is that it's going to be easier for the average gamer to pick up CS:GO compared to SFV because they probably played Halo or CoD in the past at a non competitive level so they might be comfortable with the shooting mechanics.
People joining MOBAs might already have played 3/4 view top down games where you control movement with a mouse like Age of Empires or Diablo.
But people playing their first fighting game have a lot less to ease them into learning basic mechanics. Back to block, special inputs, etc are not easy to grasp initially. No type of game other than fighting games make you do quarter circles. I don't think fighting games are harder than other multiplayer games, but I think most gamers start fighting games at the ground floor, while most gamers start other multiplayer games a few stories up
Yeah, and Smash had an easier time selling because it resembled other platformers like Kirby. That level of comfortable familiarity is rare in the fighting game genre.
Familiarity is comfortable. Street Fighter and MK are familiar franchises, Tekken's presentation of close combat is familiar, and said series' semi-realistic art style is familiar. Aside from MK's ultraviolence, a week of casually experiencing the singleplayer as one or more cool characters, and a night or two of brining the game out to play with friends, that's all the gaming public at large wants out of a fighting game. The genre needs to figure out new hooks to draw people into the cycle of competition and improvement like other genres have, otherwise it'll never really make it big.
@@RougeMephilesClone lol nice one people who play smash for the first time literally kill themselves because they have trouble with the movement. Makes it hard for me to play with someone who is new because I feel like I have to play extremely basic to make sure my friend has a good time.
@@GrimReaper1526 Literally how i think my friend feels and I feel bad sometimes. But, Ive gotten better and matches are 40/60 now.
spot on
Oh I'm so glad I found someone in the comments saying this.
I am so glad I found Sajam so early in my fighting game career. It’s tremendously encouraging to hear you talk about learning fighting games in a way that’s fundamentally different from a lot of other content.
Most people don't know how to learn. That is something they don't teach in school
Unironically, you're not actually wrong aha. At school you typically only get taught how to regurgitate information which isn't the most useful skill as opposed to having teachers break down various learning methods so that all kinds of people can figure out something that works for them.
Add it to the list
I think think it’s the style of play with fighting games being head to head against a single person that the pressure and anxiety of the fight makes it difficult to concentrate and execute what you think you should do. I love all types of games, well most types, but it’s always seemed more rewarding when you finally get confident and start winning after all the practice and ass kickings you’ve endured along the way. I’m all about MK11 right now but I’m about to finally see if I can figure out some Tekken
I'd argue that team-based games make for a lot more pressure and anxiety than a fighting game because the experience and disposition of your entire team can rely a lot on how well you perform rather than just your own. Your opponent in a fighting game isn't going to start screaming at you because you're just getting destroyed but your teammate in CSGO or Dota might. You can also just leave and find another opponent or take a break if somebody is destroying you and taunting you while in a moba or shooter you're basically stuck getting bodied and trying to make yourself useful to your team for upwards of an hour. Most fighting games don't even have voice chat and you don't suffer at all for just muting it if they do while you might struggle to coordinate with your team or miss out on important information if you mute somebody giving you shit in a team-based game. You will also run into situations in games like CS where you are just head to head against a single person except that four other people are watching everything you do and are relying on you to win.
From personal experience, the worst experience I ever had with another player in Tekken was somebody ki-charging on me over and over. The worst experience I ever had with another player in CSGO was somebody literally screaming at the entire team because we lost a few rounds, despite us still being in the lead, until the entire team started throwing.
@@Cadaurny I agree Im both a toxic and calm player in League of Legends.
I don't know if Fighting games are *harder* to learn, but having to sit there and do nothing while your character gets comboed to death from the very first second of the match while you're just trying to figure out the basics can be extremely frustrating. Starcraft is hard as hell too, but at least I get to practice my build order before I can get stomped into the center of the earth by someone playing on a smurf account.
If you play league against a good player you won't be able to push up to the minion wave after he gets a lead and eventually you will just die Everytime he sees you for 40 min straight. Trust me when I say that getting beat in other games is far worse that the few second you lose in a fighting game. Only difference is people will blame their team in other games but in solo games people blame the game.
@@GrimReaper1526 I play Dota and used to play Starcraft and have never felt an hour of those games to be half as exhausting as 25 minutes of bad UNIST matches.
@@GrimReaper1526 There's just less consequence to your actions, if you die in a team deathmatch of some shooter it decides the match just as rarely as doing something awesome. When sajam says to enjoy doing something small correctly in a fighting game, it can sometimes be hard because it's immediately overwritten by 'did I win or lose that round/match'. Fighting games are extremely condensed activities, the entire first to 2 can be over in two minutes.
@@GrimReaper1526 usually when that happens you can learn to run away from that player really quick and have friends to help take them out, or move somewhere that it is safer to farm. Unless you're playing Smash, you can't run from your opponent in a fighting game.
"How can I practice my combo strings in a match if I'm spending all my time stunlocked in a touch of death combo?"
I've thought this myself more than once.
I think is because are the least fun to learn, bringing back the example of FPS if you beat the campaign, the skills during that run are more helpful and fun that the arcade mode on a fighting game, perhaps thats why the base level of casual players at mk or injustice is higher than those at SF, since those have an overall better story mode and other single player modes. Even if the game have good tutorials or training modes like GG, while good additions, those are not going to make the average player more interested, those are for people who already have the desire to learn.
Idt the base casual mk players are at a higher level doing a string in mk is like doing a Gatling in Xrd or one hit confirm into a special in sf.
Gotta love the moba logic. People making alt accounts and finding new players at low levels complaining about having noobs on their team. A++ tier logic.
Those two might be different groups of people.
This is part of why I don't like people that smurf just to smurf
And then when they lose in lane they complain that there are too many smurfs to play in the low ranks. lmao
I'm playing my first online match tonight. I'm tired of making excuses and just doing arcade
Good luck dude, general advice for the lower ranks: be patient, block and punish random stuff, also abuse meaties because your opponents probably won't block on their wakeup!
You may very well get destroyed. This is normal. I can't stress how much that getting destroyed and I mean DESTROYED when you first start going online is normal. We ALL went through it. Do.Not.Give.Up.
In order to give out beatings you must first get beat up.
Good shit and good luck bro!! Remember, if you're losing you're also learning
I mean let's be honest here, the reason fighting games are harder to learn is because they're not as intuitive.
If you play cs:go it's very easy to learn what it is you need to do, most of it comes down to micro rather then macro, you don't need to learn frame data, move properties or character matchups.
A closer genre to fighting games would be mobas, they atleast have more macro involved with the easy to understand intuiative gameplay.
You have around 4 abilities, each one with it's properties and cooldowns.
The similarties in these genres are spawn timers and map knowledge.
Compare that to fighting games, you have more then 4 moves, they have tons of diffrent properties and hurtboxes and you still have matchups to think about, you need to know framedata aswell.
I've played all 3 genres, fps, moba and fighting games. Fighting games have so much more information you need to have in your mind... memerization, execution, mobas the closest thing to it in difficulty due to mobas having so many champions and items.
But because in mobas you have so few moves to worry about in every matchup, things are more condensed and the "work load" is shared amongst multiple players.
For example, if im a jungler in lol it is my responsibility to keep track of the enemy jungler, their rotations and even their builds, then communicate with teammates on how to "defeat" this jungler. If the enemy jungle gets fed and steam rolls everyone, then the fault is "mostly" at me, same if he secures all objectives. This applies to all the roles, you as a player are not facing all 5 enemy players your focus is mostly on one primarely then the rest. This division of responsibility does not exist in a fighting games, yet you still have more moves to think about.
I would say Fighting games are the hardest from these genres, then comes mobas, then at last place fps.
You can easly one trick poney in a moba playing the exact same character, the exact same role with mostly the exact same build.... now suddenly you have alot less to think about.
Now this is an excellent response.
I think this response needs WAYYYY more attention than it gets, and i would love to know more people's opinion on it.
I completely agree with you.
Fighting games are not only unintuitive, with a LOT of information that you need to know if you re going to compete at your personal best, BUT they also have the execution barrier, where you have to grind for hours , to learn combos, blocking, etc, etc , and that;s just for HANDFUL of characters, not even the entire roster.
You can simplify inputs to the point Smash Brothers does, and still the important things that should matter in order to win (reads, whiff punishing,baits, etc etc you know, all the mind-games) are still going to be there and important.
I don't midn execution-heavy fighting games and remembering all that info, per se.
What i DO mind, is that the aforementioned is still the standard for the genre , for no apparent reason, and there's literally about 5 (or maybe less) modern fighting games that don't have these archaic design shortcomings (DBFZ i would put somewhere in the middle, whereas SSBU is the ideal in that aspect).
@@jacebeleren1703 I would say that execution is the least difficult aspect in fighting games in general and that the macro aspect is what puts most people off.
I've thought about it since making that post and came to realize that "frames" are the main obstacle that deters players regardless of their backround.
Framedata is an essential mechanic in fighting games, more so then any other genre i know of.
The key reason being that in fighting games if i block or get hit by something, the game automatically puts me in "stunned" state for an ex amount of frames. (Frame advantage and disadvantage) Same goes if i execute a move myself.
There is no other genre ( i know of) that operates in this way, for example in League if i get hit by an auto attack i can still do whatever i want during or after without the game putting me in some staggered state, same goes for fps. Ofcourse stuns exist, but they are usually few and very obvious. You can cancel your "Starting Frames" in fgs but not your active nor recovery Frames (You can only lower the last in some games/some moves through various techniques/complex inputs) if you want, an exeception rarther then a rule.
In Fighting games every hit basically operates as a "Stun" locking you or your opponent. Full commitment on everything.
Some people figure this out as they button mash the concept of "Taking turns" but the truth is that most people don't.
Now some games offer visual indicators for when you're at minus frames but most games don't, this is the first big hurdle... that's why i can beat every begginer/intermediate player by just knowing some frames.
Now add an arsenal of moves on top of that, with alot of characters and Space and you have a barrage of possibilites that you have to think about.
Frames (F)= Time. Space (S)= Space.
There are three "sub types" of Frames aswell...
Starting Frames (SF)
Active Frames (AF)
Recovery Frames (RF)
Both (S) and (F) are always playing a major role in your decision making and what's actually happening in the game.
Mobas have (S) and (F), but (SF) and (RF) can be cancelled at any given time usually, thus framedata can mostly be ignored if not completely. Wherever there is (F) (SF,AF,RF) to think about aswell it's usually so negilable that you don't have to think about it for most scenarios since you can't effect it in any way that would make a real diffrence. (Unless we speak of Very high level play)
FPS games have (S) but no real (F) to think about, meaning that you can shoot and move around however you want without any limitations.
Ofcourse a weapons rate of fire could be categorized as (F) and not all fps are the same, but generally speaking. That's it.
So if fighting games could better visually show the frames and more so universalize alot of it, then that would help alot of newcomers.
(So instead of moves having incremental frame diffrences "1,2,3,4,5" etc etc, just divide it into 3 "types", +-1, +-5, +-10. Low +-, medium +- and heavy +- with N neutral aswell. This would dramatically lower the difficulty and players wouldn't have to memorize what's what, it would allow them to see the move once and know exactly what it is in real time and adapt/respond in real time. (So no labbing frames)... Learn as you play.
That's if you really want to make things easier in a way that truly matters for beginners.
We could ofcourse say "Just play and don't worry about frames", but reality is whether you know about frames or not they will ALWAYS matter since they effectively determine what goes and what doesn't, and if you beat someone and they don't understand the invisible hand that is frames then they effectively have no idea WHY they lost, same way you have no idea WHY you won...
This strips the player of any real sense of controll that they could have/feel to have, which is THE key component of frustration. (There are studies around this). So the most likely outcome is that people will quit since they'll get super tilted, even if you tell them to "Just play and not worry about frames". Some will stay, but most won't.
Nobody will play if they can't even understand the reason move x beat move y everytime and all the changing conditions that effect it.
Either way, just my two cents.
I accidentaly wrote an essay, sorry. :/
in the actual arcade scene that fighting games came from in the 90s, a lot of information gossip happened in person. the culture was so different and I think it doesn't translate well to the MOBA or FPS.
The problem in learning fighting games was never an issue of complexity. The true barrier has always been the execution barriers that new players will always come up against in contrast to other genres. Those who are saying FGs aren't truly hard to get into vs other games are inherently biased because they have already most likely invested hundreds upon hundreds of hours grinding out hit confirming and like mechanics. For the average gamer in 2019 even something as simple as hit confirming may be an astronomical mountain to climb. If you look at other games, Sajam brings up FPS games, the "execution" there is intuitive. Given that you have a player who has most likely used a PC all his life, and aren't basing your opinions off a sample of people who would suck at any genre(your mom/dad/grandma) the action of aiming is much much easier and intuitive because you've held a mouse in your hand all your life. A small minority of people on the other hand have ever used an arcade stick/hitbox, in truth the most intuitive control scheme for FGs for them would be a keyboard a control method not often pushed in the FGC. Also the most popular FPSes of this era are also some of the most dumbed down and fisher priced to have ever existed. There is a reason why Quake/Unreal-esque games have largely fallen out of favor with the general gaming community, and it's not because they were purely 1v1 games, you also had TDM/FFA and so on.
This is a really complicated topic, one one hand yes FGs aren't harder to learn than other games as they are often less complex, but the barrier to entry in terms of mechanical skill are much steeper.
RTSes mirror fighting games in being hard to learn, but it depends on what RTS you're talking about. Blizz RTSes are more like fighting games than actual strategy games. There's a reason both RTSes and FGs are either dieing or incredibly niche genres.
I think the problem is really that most fighting games do a bad job of making the game fun to play even when you lose, which is something that I think other genres do better. I think that's the key, making a game that's fun to play even if you lose. So it's psychological, rather than a question of difficulty. And it's something FG devs need to work harder at. (By the way, part of solution would be having functional netcode, so that online play is fun rather than an endless, futile struggle against lag.)
That's close to how I defined fun, actually: enjoying the game even when losing. At least before you start winning more, then it can overlap with winning or improving.
I get what you are arguing, but from my experience and what I more often see is that people would rather be "stuck" in he middle of a moba, shooter, or some other multiplayer game than watch someone else personally juggle them to death in a fighting game. There is a level people want to get comfortable at and that is the minimum skill floor to get in and i personal feel it is harder for fighting games especially when cant exactly do that with randoms online. at least they can be stuck doing things and naturally figure things out instead of spending a repeat 20 seconds of them just dying.
perfect world sure i can see that the curve is identical, but the reality is that fighters more often have a much smaller community as a whole and there are far more people in other genres. It also doesnt help that tons of fighting games have garbage netcode to boot.
You're making the mistake of assuming that the skill floor is anything other than little Timmy mashing LP from full screen and never holding back or down back.
Spot on analysis from Sajam. One thing I will say about fighting games though is that the danger is immediate--the opponent can instantly approach you and cause harm. In games like LOL, CS, and Fortnite, the player has several minutes to do things like take position, gather resources etc. So there's less stress in those games.
As someone coming from League I can tell you the idea of spending time in training mode to improve does not sound fun at all for a casual player. In league you just play to improve. I remember my brother was playing MK for the first time and he was getting mad he did not know how to beat this character online and I told him you have to learn the match up/counters in training mode. And he says 'I dont want to do that, I just want to play'. Fighting game players love hitting the lab. If you don't like that, you don't like fighting games.
Not really. I know plenty of people who love learning while playing fighting games and will only ever lab for combos.
Lolhounds!!!!!!!!
Not labbing stuff will just take longer than actually trying to learn it in training mode.
@@nitomono It may take longer, but it's better that they do what's fun which will motivate them to keep playing rather than doing it the correct way, getting bored and then giving up.
@@Necromitzu1 That's right, yes. If you don't find it fun to lab, just play a lot.
Thanks for the video, Sajam. It's good to come at things from a positive perspective.
As a Blaziken main in Pokken (and a wide-range fighting game casual), your talk of teaching new players their "cool moves" and letting them play and improve speaks to me. Blaziken lives and dies by his rushdown and big unga EX moves. Getting in is hard, but if you land even one, you feel like you made a chunk of progress. I need to rope my brother into playing more real matches with me so I (and perhaps even he) can improve.
SkullGirls got me to try picking up fighting games again.
Their tutorial systems made learning the complicated stuff FUN somehow.
Small step by small step. And by the end of it, I had learned full combos for most of the characters simply by learning mechanics.
Fighting games need fun tutorials and mass appeal will revive. Skullgirls got curbstomped by bad situations time and time again, and yet the game is still loved. If it had a clean launch, it would arguably be called a legendary fighting game.
Xrd Rev2 Tutorial is one of the best out there. They make them like a quicktime event where they don't go "Okay do this once then move on". They have you do it over and over to get that repetition and throw some mixups as well.
The problem I had with fighting games is that you can't acknowledge what you don't know. Playing various fighting games since the introduction of Street Fighter 2 and never having more that 3 other people to ever play against, 15 years later, finding out you can crouch guard a standing attack made me realize "Yeah, I really have no idea what I've been doing for over a decade."
I 100% agree with fighting games being just as hard as any other game, but in regards to the perception of them being harder, I feel that you heavily underestimate the fact that other games are team based, just the fact of sharing the loss with other people really distributes the blame and eases newbies into the learning process even if just a little. I think core-A-gaming said this too
On the other hand I really don't think it's any mentally easier to get blamed by your teammates for ruining their game, if anything it's worse than just losing a set to a better player in FGs imo
Lorvi yeah that sucks too haha, but most of the time the loss won't be due to one person only, most of the time several mistakes are made by every teammate and even if it was clearly one person's fault, that person can debate and make excuses, you don't even get a chance to do that on FG. You know you fucked up, you and only you
@@Cafetos0777 wht kind of player are you? losing is losing. The winnera are going to say : "see those losers" they won t give a shit to who do what.
second pont there is nother thing that matter. if you are good and you play with bad player you will lose that disturnbing and that for me is the biggest point with team based game. this is the other side of the medal that you don t see in FG. imagine that for Daigo to win, infexious and all the beast team have to win? It will bee much more harder to win any tounney. And I see many players crying that "I should be reward for my work, not punish for the bad work of other"
So what you see as an ease has in fact a dark side and people inside the FGC don t see that side.
@@Venomousse Low levels in MOBAs still basically have no communication and everyone's solo queueing. You rarely get blamed that much, and even if you do you tune it out until you know enough about the game to realize when you fucked up.
domingoIST and mugen made a really good point here, just to be clear I don't think FG are actually harder they are just perceived as harder I think. While having to rely on others to cooperate in order to win can be very stressful and lead to a lot of salt, I think most beginners won't have that in mind as they are just familiarizing themselves with the game and they don't know what the other people are supposed to do on top of loosing maybe feels a little more immediate in FG when you are new
Its because of the muscle memory. I played League for a couple months, and I got pretty decent at it, winning most of my matches. I've been playing fighting games since I was a kid, playing seriously for like 6 years and I still can't compete at all. Its very hard simply because of what you have to do with your hands, imo.
Have you ever played a fighting game as consistently as you did league?
Only asking because it seems like most people just aren't consistent in playing them and that's why they struggle with execution
Ya Blazblue Centralfiction, I played for months. Only that game.
As someone with a new love for fighting games, I think in a way they are harder, because of both the execution barrier and how that leads to needing to "work" before you have fun.
If you're new to a shooter, you can't aim well. But if you're given a static target then straight away you can slowly aim and fire. The input is simple, and from there you begin the slow but smooth task of improving your speed. Crucially, you can improve at this simply by playing the game.
If you're new to a fighting game and input your special move incorrectly, nothing comes out at all. I can do them pretty consistently now, but it took about 10-15 hours to get to that point.
Up to that point, I didn't feel in control of my character and the game honestly wasn't fun. Doing 10 hours of practice before you can even figure out if you enjoy a game is not a sane thing to do, and the only reason I didn't quit like the three other attempts over the last 12 years is that I've played enough Smash and watched enough great fighting game content on RUclips to know I would enjoy these games.
Lol I don't mean to sound salty, just thought you might appreciate a perspective from a new player.
Oh wait this vid is 2 years old
I think the difference is that in a moba you can kill monsters,gain money,buy itens continue to play,shooters if you have the basics you walk on the map,shoot things,get a car and go aroud but in a fighting game if you get someone on the matchmaking that are a lot better than you they just destroy you in seconds and new players feel they dont learn nothing and feel that they play nothing.
You'll just be clicking on a monster and buying random items and for the shooter not all of them offer vehicle combat. Even if u can't land a single hit u can block and u can improve that. Yes it's boring but I think it's as stimulating as hitting a monster in Leugue for 3 mins getting killed by a man in the bushes and the looking at a Bible of items just clicking random shit and then running back to do it again
Tl:dr at the bottom
It all comes down to the pace of learning. When I was learning MOBA games, all the tutorials taught me was what each button did, how to recall, how to buy items and that killing the enemy base is all that matters. In FPS games, all I'm taught ate controls and that switching to my secondary is always faster than reloading.
MOBA tutorials don't open up by telling you about counterpicking in champ select, building good team comps, counterbuying items on the fly, how to last hit, how to poke, how to gank/counter gank or jungle/counter jungle. In FPS games I was never introduced to the concept of spawn control, reticle centering, map rotations, line of sight abuse, economy control or anything else.
If I wanted to learn any of the above things, I had to basically get my ass kicked by someone using the above techniques or have a teammate introduce it to me. Before that, /I literally don't even know these concepts exist/. What this does is make learning simple. Starting out, all I had to do was press buttons and move at the same time, and other basic tutorial stuff. Then one by one advanced concepts are introduced to me, and I slowly understand/master them all.
Its dripfed over the course of weeks/months/years of playing these games, which makes learning more palatable and improving/succeeding in the game feel more like an actual possibility.
Now go to RTS games or fighting games, and realize that the moment I watch a high level player, its going to look like they're playing a completely different game. Back in the day the tutorials for games I would play like Command & Conquer Generals or Tekken 4 would basically only tell me the controls. So, much like with the aforementioned MOBA or FPS genres, you get cozy, thinking that you're solid and understand the game. Flashforward to watching your first big tournament or playing the games online, and you're exposed to players who are doing things you didn't even know were possible, and suddenly when you break it all down you realize that these people were doing twenty different things you didn't know about and you feel like you have to learn them all at once, which is a nightmare.
Alternatively for fighting games, look at "good" tutorials like UNIST and Guilty Gear Xrd. Instead of just being told the controls of the game that in most games is done in the span of a 3-4 minute prologue scene for the game, fighting game tutorials hand you DOZENS UPON DOZENS of lessons in various menus with different titles and such, which already makes the most basic of information feel scarier and less accessible, but also encourages people who already know what a light/medium/heavy attack are and that holding back means block to dive into the next handful of tutorials. Suddenly, they're in a situation where the game is explaining a bunch of roman cancel mechanics, or the game's weight system, or how fuzzy guarding/buffering works.
/And that was just one confusing tutorial on a menu filled with likely a dozen other concepts that barely make sense to you/
So to make this long comment short. Fighting games constantly throw more at players right away, which leads to a mote confusing, poorly paced learning curve that has far steeper of an entry point than any other genre (except for maybe RTS). While the skill ceiling might even out to be on par with other genres, the progression is far worse and leaves many new/intermediate players feeling overwhelmed by the amount of learning the games (and communities) tell them is right in front of them.
When I was struggling to play ADC in League, my Platinum friend taught me how to better last hit. When I struggled in SFIV, my buddy tried teaching me how to space, how to hit 1 frame links, and a dozen other things all at once, and I feel that that's common in the FGC
Can relate, the mission list in Rev 2 is daunting.
As someone who doesn't play fighting games I was intrigued by Guilty Gear xrd rev just because I heard it had a great tutorial and I love the art style. However, what you explained is exactly why I couldn't continue playing it. In my opinion I don't think fighting games should list out all the combos you can do right away and just let players play the game with just the button inputs explained. Possibly have those combos be added to a list as a player inputs them, so they get that good feeling like they actually accomplished something. Maybe Riot games new fighting game will bring some other improvements to the genre so that the learning curve feels more reasonable without letting down the current fighting game community.
@@chieferik7964 unlcking more totorials as you level up through playing games sounds like an amazing progression system for fighting games
The "cool move" method is why I got so into Tekken, my friend wanted me to play so I decided I'd learn the game. I ended up choosing Paul because his gameplan was so simple and satisfying that I could focus on learning the mechanics. Just make them miss and demo fist, and thinking about that now, something similar would work for a lot of other fighting games I enjoy
Sure, it's hard to be good at anything; but I think it's harder to get to a point in a fighting game *where you're having fun* as opposed to other games, where you don't have to learn very much to still have fun
"Pound for pound" the difficulty probably isn't significantly higher for fighting games. People always have this misconception about the difficulty of fighting games. The problem isn't necessarily the difficulty, it's where that difficulty is situated. In mobas and non-arena FPS games the difficulty comes from getting better at the game after you've already started playing. In fighting games the difficulty literally starts as soon as you put your foot in the door. You have to study and practice to even do the basic actions of a fighting game.
CSGO for example, becoming proficient at awping is difficult. However, simply shooting it isn't difficult. Imagine if in order to take a shot with the awp you had to input a combo and perfectly execute it like in a fighting game. Or substitute that with mobas and abilities. You guys might think quarter circle forward to throw a hadoken is no big deal because you've all been doing it for ages but for someone who hasn't played a fighting game before they literally have to study before they can even play. Not before they get good. Before they even start the game at all. Sure it takes work to get good at a moba or a shooter but it doesn't take practice and studying to start playing like it does in a fighting game.
This was what I was about to comment, whilst everything he says is true about "getting good" it misses the point of the execution floor being SO high in most FGs. Which is why games like Fantasy Strike are SO needed and so much better for people to learn.
Comparison with other types of game is wrong. Shooting with awp is same as pressing the punch button in fighting game, you don't need to practice to press punch key.
You have to study and practice all of these games. You can't even begin to play CS unless you understand counter strafing and recoil control for example. example like this are in every competitive game ever.
@Nivrap pressing the button to shoot is only part of process just like pressing the hit button after you perform qc.
@Bblurre In this context we were talking it is same. it doesn't take skill to press the button.
Execution is sure hard in FGs but other competitive games have just as difficult mechanics that need to be learned just to play.
Just look how hard CS is.
@Bblurre That's awesome! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :-) (also plug you may like some of the videos on my channel, haha :D )
7:29 The importance of training mode grinding is dependent on the game. An extreme example would be GGXX, practicing FRC timings. Killer Instinct also has some with practicing breaking. However, with exception to learning command lists, most fighting games can be learned through matches.
Yeah, I usually agree with you Sajam, but I'm going to have to hard disagree here.
You mentioned that matchmaking is in fighting games just like everything else, but unless you're playing the biggest games out there, that's just not true. It's why the only fighting game I've ever taken the time to learn is Street Fighter 5. I can actually play people around my skill level and improve. That's just not true for something like Gear. If I want to play Gear, I have to go to a player lobby with people that are almost always on a magnitude of a higher skill level than me. Now throw in how fast and mobile that game is. You mentioned intermediate goals like punishing and anti-airing, but despite actually having some knowledge of those skills now from another fighting game, the vast majority of my matches end in double perfects. I'm CERTAINLY not going to be learning even basic combos in such a situation, so yeah, at least some training room time is going to be required. So what does that leave? Basically discord. It's a reality that if you want to get meaningful playtime for anything but the largest fighting games, then you're going to have to do some legwork outside of the game, which instantly turns off a vast number of people. It's difficulty before you're even in the game.
I also feel like what you considering "getting good" and what most people consider "getting good" is skewed. For most people, something like silver rank in SFV is the metric for "good". You know, the thing you waved off like it was nothing and comparable to an afternoon in a shooter. It took me 100 hours to reach silver rank in SFV. Most would call that a non-trivial amount of time to dedicate to one thing. Most (including yourself in this video) would consider that a low skill know-nothing rank, but despite that, Silver rank players, as of Season 4, are better than 80% of the online player base. Most people aren't looking to go to EVO or be diamond rank. They just want to get to a level where they can confidently say "Yeah, I play fighting games.".
You also kind of blew off the team thing. Like yeah, you as a player are ass, even if you get carried, but you're underestimating what that does for morale. You know what the number one thing that I had to beaten into my head by other people before I started improving was? Learning to lose. Over and over and over again. I didn't improve until I was forced to embrace losing. I was told "Don't even think about winning. Even if you win it doesn't matter if you can't explain why you won". Lose and lose and lose again. Maybe one day you'll have enough knowledge to try for wins, but that's not for a long time coming. And it works. Learning to embrace constant losses and not only be happy about it but use it to your advantage is the most important skill to learn in a fighting game. Until you develop that skill, fighting games are hard. Losing an hour long moba game doesn't feel nearly as bad as losing for an hour in a fighting game. Number of losses absolutely matters to a person who hasn't learned to embrace them, and shrugging off one loss (no matter the time spent on it) is a lot easier than shaking off 20 of them, even if you sprinkle in a smattering of wins here and there.
The last thing I'm going to mention is that you bring up teaching a lot. Most people don't really have teachers. They're teaching themselves. Any game is easy to learn if you have a more experienced player showing you the ropes. I had the pleasure of working with someone who was on our state's power rankings for Smash Bros Melee. We brought a setup to work and played most days on breaks. I learned more in an hour playing with him than I did in 10 hours teaching myself SFV. Just having someone else explain what I did wrong vastly accelerated my learning. I went to a tournament, despite my only experience being with him for maybe 20 hours cumulatively, and put on a great showing.
And I get it. I realize this is a wall of text and you probably disagree with everything I say here, but it was a pretty visceral reaction from me. I play video games of literally every genre, and to me, fighting games are undoubtedly the hardest. It's why I find playing them so rewarding.
I agree with it.
This exactly!
Learning fighting games is easy if you don't care about winning
My two-cents on the reason why people say fighting games are hard.
One he actually outlined himself at one point here. It's the incentives. Fighting games obviously have bad netcode so they can feel bad, there's never a ton of content or ways to play and have fun with the game, and frankly, even the tutorials in fighting games can be quite tough. I remember in UMvC3 I was trying to do some of the combo tutorials and even when I had learned how to do the inputs, I literally couldn't figure out how to chain them together in a combo because to new players, the timing aspect is just invisible to them. You think someone new is gonna realise that sometimes a slight delay in inputs will actually bypass i-frames to continue the combo?
In a shooter, you point at the dude and hit the shoot button. Granted there's recoil control but you can clearly see that if you hold the shoot button with an automatic weapon, your aim flies up so countering that is obvious. I-frames, block stun, animation recovery, etc are all things that are much harder to spot and internalise in fighting games.
So there's all that with FGs, then when you lose that's on you and you alone, whereas in shooters getting carried by teammates can help the learning process because you actually get time to react to things and internalise what's happening as opposed to getting fucked in the corner.
I definitely feel you on those trials. I was doing combo trials on blade strangers and ran into the same problem. Figuring out the timing for each combo without the game telling you can be a very frustrating experience in comparison to other games.
Can relate.
Got KoF XIII (?) back in the day because I was curious or whatever.
Got into the tutorial to get my feet wet.
Took me about 2-3 hours to do a super they showed you once. Once.
Never wanted to play the game again. Music is cool though.
@TheFeFfilms In that sense FGs have terrible conveyance.
@TheFeFfilms Yeah man, I've 100% been there too lmao
@@otooandoh9556 Can definately feel this. In Skullgirls different characters have different fall speeds as well as center and corner only combos (Delayed hits, first hit only cause the rest will mess it up, x number of hits cause to many or less will mess it up depending on the character). In SFV there are some combos that require you to dash inbetween inputs but the combo list doesn't tell you to dash. So for the longest time you're like why am I always wiffing it, until you watch the demonstration and notice a dash in the combo where it never told you to do one.
The big difference between fighting games and other games is you can give yourself a tonne of time to get used to the game.
If youre just walking into a wall and changing weapons, youll be fine until someone finds you in a shooting game.
If you stand still working out the controls in a fighting game you die immediately because the other guy starts next to you
The downtime is important because people can (unconsciously probably) reflect and adjust what to do.
If instead you get 3 2 1 go and youre being hit again.
An hour of fighting games you may have a few minutes between matches to reflect.
A 1 hour moba game you probably only spent a few minutes engaging with an enemy as a beginner
@@pauldaulby260 Understandable, but another inherent difference here is that the only way to win in fighting games is essentially hitting your opponent while avoiding getting hit. There's no other strategy or way around it and you have to engage with your opponent somehow.
I had this mindset when starting MOBAs/LOL as an FG player, but I soon realised that it didn't really matter. If your opponent knows the match-up better or can trade better or have better mechanics etc., just don't try to fight without clear advantage like summs or CDs. Just hug your tower, try to last hit, get vision and wait for your jungler/teammates to help. You can be useful in teams fights or provide utility in other ways even if you're a "worse" laner and would lose a 1v1.
Unfortunately, there's no secondary way to win as a beginner or learner in FGs. You just have to interact and deal some damage, even in games where you can play runaway, keepout or turtle very successfully.
2:45 *watching woolie playing FPS games*
me: yep sounds about right.
The thing is, a lot of critical stuff is totally invisible in fighting games, and the only way to learn it is to study the mechanics of the game outside of playing (by learning from friends, or RUclips vids or guides or now by digging into tutorials). Like, you’re not just gonna learn frame data by playing the game if you’re a beginner. Whereas you can walk into a shooter as a noob and you’ll still be bad but you’ll at least know why you’re losing and what you need to do to get better.
I disagree, but only to a certain degree. Yes, fighting games are not as much harder as many claim. HOWEVER I would still argue that they are. It's not that people aren't learning the right way, there's just so much more to learn. I have friends from master/grandmaster in league saying that tekken is indefinitely the harder game (diamond myself and agree). There are macro concepts in both types of games, but the execution barrier is what makes fighters so much more difficult and attractive. While you want to just leave that barrier to the "beginners", I feel like it's something that affects every level of play. At any level of play, it's a lot easier to drop a max dmg combo in a fighter than it is to miss a flash over a wall in league, Yet both are significant play-making executions in their games. Understanding concepts in a game is about the same in any competitive game, but the execution requirement is something I feel you're underplaying quite heavily. I feel like anyone PREACHING the fighting game gospel about difficulty just wants to feel good about the time they put into it, sure I agree with that. However, I don't think that it discredits their point, it's just with bad intention.
This is such a bad take with a lot of bias. I'm willing to bet that you and your friends have played more hours than you care to admit in league and have also played games that require you to use a mouse and keyboard prior to even learning league.
Sajam makes a point when he was talking about people who have never even held a controller before play a shooter and can't wrap their head around what the sticks even do, but you know what a mouse and keyboard does. The amount of subconscious practice that you have, using the peripherals just by browsing the internet and using your mouse to click things, plays a huge role in what you consider an "execution barrier." I'm confident enough to assume that your friends have never played any game that requires the kinds of motions that fighting games do or let alone have had enough time spent on a fightstick compared to a mouse and keyboard.
It's easy to not remember the countless hours that you've grinded in league compared to a fighting game. Like Sajam mentions, getting fucked up in a round takes about 10 to 20 seconds, but in league you can be trapped in an hour long match. I feel people tend to equate a match in a fighting game to be as long as league. Even a match in a shooter can last way longer than a fighting game match. Equating a dropped combo in, at max, a 99 second round to a 5 minute flash cooldown is not the same thing. Fucking up a rotation on your champion is a better example, and even then it's basically the same thing, you can't play for however long the death timer is, if you die from fucking up your rotation.
This is all just considering individual play btw. What is there so much more to learn about in a single fighting game than there is in league? Team comps exist. Builds exist. Matchups exist in both genres but league has specific roles where you may even be auto-filled. Nothing in a fighting game is stopping you from picking the character that you want to play til the day you die. You only need to learn one character's matchups.
I don't know why people who complain that fighting games are more punishing even bring up the "but your team can carry you" point, because if you've died twice and your opponent freezes the lane on you, you literally can't play the game at all. That's the match. That's outcome. Except you can't leave until your team wins or surrender.
The real problem is the unwillingness for people, like your friends, to learn a new genre from the ground up because there's very little carryover mechanics from other genres. It's not that it's hard, they just have too much pride to admit that they're going to suck at a fighting game from the get-go and they don't want to bother with feeling that way. To build a safety net and say "it's too hard" is such a bs excuse when people have thousands of hours in league and aren't even the best players on their server, but then give up on a fighting game in only an hour.
@@JK-gw9jb I think they understand that it will take them a while too eventually be good.its just that from their perspective the skill floor is so high that they won't be able to have fun until they've dedicated hours to the game and most people don't really have the commitment to do that when they just want to have fun playing a game.
As you said the skills in many games
Don't really carry over into fighting game witch makes it like getting into video games all over again and for most beginners to just about any game failing over and over again isn't fun witch is why most people can't get into video games at an older age or without a great teacher.
Fighting games are hard because the skills you need to play them aren't really be gathered from anywhere else at it feels like getting your ribs kicked in for hours.
I think the main issues just comes down to matchmaking. In MOBAs and more popular genres, there are enough players to where even if you suck, you're also going to be playing against other people that suck as well, so there's a smooth curve for improvement.
In fighting games, you can go on discord to find matches and people around your skill level, but most people from other games simply aren't aware of this. They mistakenly queue up for matchmaking earlier than they should, and get ass blasted by people much better than they are. Afterwards, they kinda just chalk up the game as being too difficult and give up before they've really given it a chance.
Fighting games have really come a long way as far as tutorials and easing people into the game, (except for Tekken, wtf) and it's nice to see videos like this that try to dispel the myth that fighting games are too difficult for the average person. I think it's just people's apprehension in joining the game that ironically makes the games feel more difficult than they actually are, just by the fact of having less scrubs to play with.
RIP my beautiful 60% winrate while the free Street Fighter 5 weekend.
Dyrus has been a FG player, that's why he learned Tekken and UNIST pretty easily. I already knew FG fundamentals.
Dyrus also picked up Final Fantasy XIV recently. Granted, skillcap on MMO aren't near other stuff, but he's already clearing the hardest content in the entire game, something cleared by about 0.0709% of players on the NA servers.
Guy's generally good at games.
The first fighting I tried to seriously get into was skullgirl and 5 minutes later I just shut it down, because I started pressing buttons and nothing happened. Then I just played and eventually got descent, so I got ultra street fighter 4 and 5 minutes later I shut that down because I couldn't hit confirm for shit. I can play both but not a fan of street fighter.
Its definitely not a perception issue. With the exception of rts games, all the other genres are a breeze in comparison to fighting games, and I say this from personal experience.
It took me a week to become decently skilled at shooters before I started competing. When I started competing it took me 3 months to start washing entire strong teams at the fps equivalent of a local. It took me a year and half of returning to fighting games to get 5th place, in a game no one really played much, at a local. I could argue this so hard I could write an essay.
I dunno, but most of my friends plays MOBA but can't play RTS. After teaching them, they just gave up and loathe the game (WC3).
Yeah, RTSes are way more complex than MOBAs, if only because you control multiple units at once.
@@HighLanderPonyYT they just require very different skillsets. MOBAs skills don't necessarily translate into RTS skills, and vice versa.
@@giordihero Well yeah, that, too.
Here's the reality:
It's not that fighting games are harder to learn, it's that you don't get regular dopamine hits from wins you didn't deserve.
In mobas/shooting games, you get dopamine hits when your teammates carry you, or the enemy team throws even if you got wrecked all game.
Counter point: I didn't deserve most of the wins I've gotten in fighting games lmao
@@vegaspony touche
One of the first intelligent responses I've read!
@@vegaspony I feel you only really get that feeling when your actually good cause when your trash you think you deserve everything cause your ignorant to your mistakes or the facts
This is one of the best evaluations I've seen. I hope you are proud man. I absolutely love R6S, TF2, Insurgency and watching Dota but those games reward you for being shit if your teammates are good. I go into a match thinking "I hope I get carried by a god this game" but in Tekken or KI or GG it's just you and them. Reminds me of Quake deathmatch where you have no one to blame but yourself.
They're harder than other games emotionally. In shooters you can go 0-7 and win or drop 30 kills in tdm and your team still loses. In fighting games you're not going to see the words "victory" until you've really learned and put in work and most people don't want to.
I disagree. Team games are imo just because of the feeling of guilt from letting an entire team down.
@@comet8157 no
Yes, they don't want to put in "work". It's called a game and not a job for a reason.
@@HighLanderPonyYT That's kind of my point
I don't really agree with that. When you play larger scale and more complex FPS games like Arma, Planetside, or Red Orchestra 2, losing does not feel good. In Red Orchestra you feel like you're in a constant death loop of bullets and explosions all because the other team has better intel and teamwork than you. Or losing a base in Planetside 2 after fighting your hardest with your Outfit and the best damn tactics you could come up with for LITERAL HOURS because the enemy bombarded your base with a Bastion, all while you're helpless to stop it.
Not to mention the lack of Voice Chat in many fighting games. Imagine hearing somebody hit you with Halo 3 back on the 360 level trash talk while counter breakering you and t-bagging you during the match while you can't do anything about it. I have yet to have that happen in a fighting game, but FPS is filled with the absolute emotionally abusive aspect at times that Fighting Games lack. You can emotionally devestate somebody with your moves in a Fighting Game, but you can't also Verbally devestate somebody at the same time like you can in a lot of FPS. There are some exceptions, like Killer Instinct or MVC 3(I think, unless that's no longer there.) but it's not as widespread as it should be. Voice chat would improve the Fighting Game experience a lot.
I don't know why chat was playing such staunch devil's advocate against Sajam. He's right, but the *perception* of fighting games is that they're harder. It's worth examining the stuff around that. The excuse "you have a team in MOBAs" only goes so far as having someone to directly teach you, otherwise using that excuse just means "Someone is there to carry me."
My boi, a long time CoD player, got SFV for free on PSN. He went Ryu. All I taught him was fireball and it didn't take long for him to understand that it was a good tool to use when at long range. He learned the execution very fast as well. He asked me how to grab and figured out just as quick that it good up close or as a get off me tool. He even learned on his own that he could challenge my jump ins with a jump of his own. Learned anti airing without even knowing the term. Very simple strategies he had already adapted into his game plan. Not a second was spent in training.
The one thing that genuinely makes fighting games harder is the lack of information the actual game provides. I cant just improve through playing and watching guides, I need to go out of my way to learn frame data, which is not conveyed in any meaningful way in game.
You know, unless you're playing VF/DoA
@@arielpeluso959 mortal kombat too. Unfortunately I'm currently into tekken where theres a metric fuckton of moves and learning their properties means using 3rd party resources for some reason.
Tbf most of the "lack of information" stuff comes from legacy games. There are games that give you a decent amount of information and tactics like Arcsys games or Fantasy Strike (I think). Even then, MK and now SFV tell you frames.
@@kholdkhaos64ray11 VF4 Tutorial and Pro A.I. 'nuff said. I agree with Arcsys too, they try to help.
@@kholdkhaos64ray11 that's a fair point but even then it does require you to go into training mode and find the moves/setups your opponent was using to see what your options are.
The only game I can think of that made a serious attempt at conveying information to players mid match is fantasy strike.
I think the reason fighting games come off as more difficult is because they have a relatively small and dedicated playerbase. This means the average player has more experience and is more proficient in their game than the average FPS or Moba player is. It's just that you can play a fighting game, start to get the basics down and beat max level CPUs, then go online and get rolled by real players that know 10x more than you. It's like a bronze player in league only having people plat and up to practice against.
The average MOBA player is trash compared to higher tiers. I'm only master and I can absolutely body people in diamond or lower, making their entire 20-40 minutes hell, to the point where they can't even reach waves to level up
Against the average rank (silver), I would shit stomp them so hard they'd consider quitting the game entirely.
People who play just fighters don't realize how big the gap is in mobas, as well.
It's not really even the game that brings the difficulty. It's the competition
I think the biggest problem that people run into with fighting games compared to other genres is the barrier of intentionality. Dropping in fresh to a fighting game, you've got this period where you're not thinking about strategy or position or basically anything else... you're thinking about how to control your character. (Side note, that's why I'm *really* not a fan of ensemble story modes in fighting games. It's a step up from what we got before, but I think there's still a lot of room to improve). In a MOBA the barrier of intentionality is relatively small, you can move your character just like everybody else and all the cool things your character can do are relatively easy to access, barring certain gimmicks or the more advanced characters. It's the same with FPS games, for the most part... (Barring things like Rocket Jumping in TF2 or other gimmick mechanics that aren't necessarily core to the game). There isn't this point where you've got no idea how to make a character work... and being there feels *really* bad.
Intuition to learn is a great point. If I leave you to play Mario without lessons, you'll figure it out very soon. If I leave you to play FPS, you'll take some time, but you'll get there pretty soon. Your aim is shoddy, but you'll understand what you need to do cause every button is intuitive.
But a FG? You have a menus of tutorials in GG, yet, you still gotta teach yourself neutral, frame data, reads and adaption, all from out of the game sources. And that's after you learn the cluster fuck of base mechanics like animation cancel, disjoints, and teching, all of which are the opposite of the word "intuitive."
Moba have the same problem, when you leave a person in the game alone, there's a billion things that are not intuitively designed (eg. items vs HOTS's progression tree), thanks to its root from 15 years ago. For that reason, Riot, Valve, Blizzard and Hi-rez have placed alot of ingame learning material + community incentives to guide the learning process. The shop recommendation that you can auto-purchase in every game? That's one of these newb assistance tools.
On the team games thing...they ease you in in that hey, you may get carried, but you'll feel the feeling of winning still.
When you lose in a fighter, you just lose. It's not realistic to think most people can jump in and lose constantly and keep wanting to play.
I feel like there's more resources to learn the fundamentals of other games than fighting games. Like it's a lot easier to learn how to group up for a team fight than it is to defend against frame traps.
6:18
As someone who has been playing MOBAs for almost half my life now, I can tell you most people don't understand builds, comps etc. They might know a hero is "Meta" right now but they wont know exactly why or how to best abuse them. As for drafting, AKA "making comps that are really good" it is such a difficult skill to learn that some Dota teams have coaches who dedicate most of their job to drafting. I have friends with upwards of 11k hours who still are not fully confident in their drafting abilities. Knowing what to do in a MOBA I would argue, is much harder than a fighting game. Fighting games have a higher exaction barrier than MOBAS hands down, Tinker, Meepo, and Invoker all have nothing on 1 frame links or taunt jet-uppers.
As someone who plays both fighters and shooters regularly, I'd say fighting games are a little harder overall. Just by playing casual matches over and over I can get a feel for the game and it's recoil system, as well as improve my aim over time without any dedicated drilling. Just from playing matches, I got decently high ranked in CSGO (got to Legendary Eagle) with no advanced drilling. When playing fighting games on the other hand, I can't just play matches and expect to improve my base skills. I need to drill B&B combos and setups into muscle memory, do defensive training for individual characters, etc.
I think team mate definitely is the barrier breaker. People tend to be scared of remembering commands and learn basics ON THEIR OWN.
Some people hate not able to be carried or carry others. I have two friends who are new fighting game players, they like the game mechanics, like to lab and fight AI for some ideas, but they're scared to play against me or with me(like a party game we take turns to fight high level AI). Their nervous factor come from being the center of spotlight, win or lose it's their fight alone.
So basically, all of the things that make people think fighting games are uniquely difficult to pick up come down to there not being enough fighting game players
One thing I love about fighting games is that normally there are no scapegoats. Its just you and your opponent. No teammates or ways out (Ragequit aside).
I disagree with the point made at 15:00 a lot. He says that a new player won't recognize basic things like last hitting or whatever in a moba when they're getting stomped, but I think a better comparison would be like just killing minions at all. In a Moba I doubt any player would be incapable of recognizing that they can kill minions and seeing what they get for doing so. They're also given a tangible gold reward for doing so. And hell even killing an entire enemy champion or assisting in a kill isn't nearly as big a deal as say winning a round in a Fighting Game. Like I know I am absolutely trash at Mobas, but I can at least see when I kill a champion and feel good about myself even if I don't understand most of the underlying strategy.
In comparison to a fighting game, killing an enemy champion is the equivalent of landing like 1 or 2 punches in a single round, considering it's something that's expected to happen dozens of times across the match. And so even if you go 1-15 or whatever and you only get that one kill while dying 15 times, it still feels like you did something. Whereas if I reduce my enemy's life in a fighting game to less than 50%, but then I lose the round, I don't feel very accomplished at all, despite the fact that I was way closer to winning in that than I ever was in the MOBA.
Landing a hit in a fighting game just isn't as inherently satisfying compared to getting a kill in a shooter or a Moba or whatever. It doesn't feel like a complete action and thus it doesn't trigger a response from me that makes me feel like I did something. Not even compared to just killing a few minions in a Moba. Killing a minion feels like a complete action and I get the happy juices in my brain a little. Landing a punch, only to then be grabbed and combo'd to death, does not give me the happy juices.
I think one of the biggest differences was how important your choice of controller is in fighting games compared to any strictly keyboard+mouse game. I tried learning SF with xbox360 pad, bashed my head on the game 100 hours and didn't get anywhere, but when I switched to a better one I immediately started to see progress. This is not the case with games like CS or Dota which are of course smoother with better equipment but won't stop you from learning the game.
I feel like part of the perception is that with team games, the lack of accountability makes the learning process so much easier. In fighting games, you can't blame your teammate for messing up or think that you're improving just because you got carried. You're by yourself so you're confronted with your flaws a lot more obviously in a fighting game than in team based games like.mobas
Training mode is the most boring (subjective but probably a common perception) thing in the world when you start a FG.
Hell, still boring even when you get to a decent level where you can identify and analyse what happened and what could've/should've been done.
Any game, regardless of genre, I simply learn what my buttons do and I get straight into it. As soon as I meet a wall I can't out think or approach differently with my existing knowledge and then I'll bite the bullet and learn the thing I'm obviously missing.
Came back to this video bc I have recently started playing an FPS (Apex) and I have never felt so out of water. Anyone who says "in a shooter you just move the mouse and click" obviously got into them at a young age bc that shit is difficult.
In 5 trios matches with my friends, the only 2 times I did any damage is when I punched a guy who dropped on top of us and when I shot someone who wasn't moving with my shotgun. That second one was even more embarrassing bc I managed to miss them like 3 times with the pistol even though he wasn't moving.
Perhaps fighting games have an association with being hard because there's no non-competitive games people can start with. People can transition into competitive fps from a whole bunch of non-competitive games with first person controls (skyrim, minecraft, portal, etc.). People can also transition into mobas pretty easily from diablo-style games most obviously, but I think the basic mechanics of just clicking things to do things means basically anyone that's used to using a computer will understand the basics right away. Contrast either of those with fighting games and the closest thing they have is probably just platformers. imo this is why smash is so successful. It focuses more on the familiar platforming aspect of fighting games and removes the unfamiliar command system entirely.
I completely agree. I don't think Fighting games are "harder" than other genres to learn (I'd actually argue they may be easier, due to the limits of player interactions, but I digress). I think the problem for people is it's harder to feel externally MOTIVATED to learn a fighting game.
To me I think it's just the difference between intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic, and the amount of time you get to reflect on what happened. MOBA's, card games, even shooters I'd argue, all get you a little "something" to show that you did a good job. You kill the enemy's monster, or get a tally in your kill count, or gold for taking out a minion. Small, little tangible rewards that the player can visually see and understand, and know that it's positively influencing their game later down the line. It's extrinsic rewards that inform the player every step of the way. And perhaps best of all, the player has a lot of time to understand what went right or wrong. They can look back on the play they just made that went really well, and have several minutes to try and set up that scenario again. There's time to process, and the game motivates you to do so.
Fighting games actually do this too- but I think people find it harder to see, so it takes a lot more internal effort to really focus on. Things like getting a Counter hit, blocking the opponent's Burst, landing anti-airs, all of these are just like in the other games. Little rewards that positively impact your chances of winning the whole match. But people don't seem to "see" that as easily, and I think it's because of the speed of rounds. The rewards come much, much faster than in most other competitive genres (most), and the majority of it results in your opponent losing their Life Bar as the reward. It can be hard for new players to understand how "well" they're doing, since a new player may not have time to really reflect on what even happened. They could press some buttons, get blown up, and not have time during the match the process how it even started. As a fighting game player, you have to motivate yourself to sit down and think things through. You have to set your own goal of "Okay, I lost the round, but I'm learning the timing for working around their anti-air. I'll do even better against it next time.". The game doesn't do it for you.
There's speed and freedom in how you reach your goal, beating the opponent, but it comes at the cost of a slower pace for people to ruminate on. You hit the ground running in fighting games, as does your opponent. I think that's the part that intimidates people. At least it did for me at first.
Not that other games don't also throw you into the thick of it, or benefit from research and analyzing outside of actual matches. I just think most new players feel more rewarded for processing during the match of different genres than fighting games.
I can tell you as a guy who used to play a lot RTS and had to learn bunch of other competitive game genres during my college life to have fun with friends, fighting games have one of the WORST learning tools and resources for new players and it took me very long time to break into some of the subgenres in fighting games. This is coming from a guy who used to play and practice starcraft for fun.
How so?
@@U9B I think the biggest problem I have with the learning content in fgc in comparison to other ones is that the guides made by fgc people seems more like a guide made by high level players to one day create another mid-high level player. The guides are terribly open ended and is more of analysis of the character's moveset and often times all over the place. If you know the game already you can nod along and approve of the things being said and be like "Yeah those are things newbies should want to know." But they are not very good guides to help someone start out.
And I'm not here saying all dota guides or league guides or starcraft guides and so on are better. But those games have beginner guides that is relatively easy to find that just tell you what to do so that new players can have some scaffold to grab on to while they start learning the game.
This used to lead me into having to relearn characters multiple times in the span of the first few days of picking up fighting games. Because of this, I have created a sort of flow chart of what I type of content I would like to look at when I pick up a new fighting game. But I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for someone who doesn't have the same level of experience trying to learn a fighting game for the first time.
@@MageKirby You mean because you have to cut through the jargon of the selected game? That's the only barrier of entry I can see that being an issue with. I think many of those are written under the assumption you have basic skills in Fighting Games or that game in particular.
@@U9B Yes! There is too much open ended info in a guide for beginners. The beginner opens a guide for beginners hoping the expert is giving the most important learnable bit to start from. And the horizon for the player needs to be slowly widened. But there isn't guides thats does this. Its more of an information dump of what a high level player views as basic.
Which other games have barriers of execution?
I can easily jump from months of playing R6S into playing COD and only need 20 mins tops of adjusting (given that I know the maps)
But I can’t play SFV for 6 months straight and go into BlazBlue online expecting wins.
Skills from other games transfer pretty easily. Single player games like Spider-Man or Uncharted can be easily picked up and played by any “gamer” ..... but fighting games can be very intimidating to play at first
Thats because its COD, try going into CSGO. Or try playing Starcraft. Fighting games are hard to learn but they are not the only ones with an execution barrier.
@@beganfish It's not that much harder. Just buy a p90, or 1 tap an AK.
RTS is the noly other genre with FG level of execution barrier.
@@FFXfever Only if the gameplay really just was about "Just 1 tap with AK lel". P90 example doesn't work either since it's pretty much 100 % useless in high level play.
While shooting looks very straightforward, it comes to multiple things how to control it effectively (spray control, spray patterns, crosshair placement, counter-strafing, reseting accuracy penalty etc.) After that is figured out, there's some other mechanics that indirectly affect gunplay like bunnyhopping, runboosts, strafe-jumping, surfing. Then there's finally understanding an economy and nades blah blah but I don't want to continue or I'm still writing this tomorrow. List just goes on.
So am I saying CS:GO has things like Kazuya's d/f + 2 into the PEWG? Of course not. I'm just saying there's tons of more than meets the eye in the gameplay.
id argue that fighting game basics transfer very easily to other games
knowing how to block, anti air, use lights to beat out heavies, etc. have the same functionality and uses in the same way that knowing how to run, shoot, throw grenades, and take cover do
the things that don’t transfer are character specific matchups, moves, and meta bc every game is different, HOWEVER, shooters also have map and weapon differences and quirks as well as their own metas that take time and practice to learn in the same way
you can point and shoot in any shooter, but do you know the map in every one? do you know the specific weapons in every one? what about system mechanics or movement options? bc those are certainly different
i’m a skullgirls player, but the knowledge i gained from that has let me go to other games like guilty gear where you have to know how to defend against fast pressure
it took me a long ass time (and i’m still learning) to figure out what my tools were good at doing and what other characters tools were good at doing, but i knew how to block, anti air, air dash, and get past some stuff and it was a HUGE help for me to actually learn the game specific mechanics
I think learning fighting games is just way less intuitive than other genres. Sure, if you have a friend who knows how to teach you, or you already have a basic understanding of fighting game systems, you can discern what you need to work on. If you're doing it solo, and you're a beginner, just figuring it out with trial and error is going to be tough. You really need to research.
I've been playing fighting games my whole 31 years of life and never actually knew what I was doing until I learned playing a game called Punch Planet :)
agree 1000% with this video. was just talking to some friends about this the other day. its so hard to get people into the genre because of preconceived notions of difficulty. i appreciate that this video exists so much, thanks for talking about this in such a clear, concise, well thought other manner with solid examples. i will be showing this video to legit every person i hear mention FG difficulty going forward. keep up the quality content! :D
I'm curious as to what you think about the aspect of memorization as well. Shooters for example, require execution grinding to be precise, but the inputs from getting your cursor from point A to point B are mostly homogenous. There's a certain amount of memorization that goes into strings and combos, as well as matchups
90% of moba players don't care about improving as long as wins happen occasionally
That's why this video is a bit bunk. There's no mediocrity to settle on with fighting games: you can only improve or get left behind. MOBAs you are afforded some resignation of rank and play among your own and win/loss stuck in stagnation.
I just found this video randomly while searching for something else, but I really like what you said. I think that what you said applies to learning/teaching most things. You have to start with the basics and work your way up. Pretty much everyone sucks at everything until they spend the time and learn the thing. As for teachers, they shouldn't be too harsh to the students and they shouldn't start by telling them that the thing is super hard or that they need to know advanced things early on.
I think a big issue is people have a hard time taking L's. Gotta play to learn and not to win.
I think a lot of the PERCEPTION that fighting games are harder comes from non-transferrable skills as a a general video game player. If I've played video games all my life, and I want to pick up CoD, then in my brain it's like "Oh, you played Doom 20 years ago, so here's the basic concepts." Or if I wanna play league my brain says "Remember Starcraft, same basic premise." There's a lot of history associated with other genres particularly when it comes to single player experiences. But fighting games have historically struggled with single players campaigns, and were less popular. So people are coming in legitimately fresh and learning something brand new. Where the other genres they often have similar touchstones, so aren't actually "new players" when they're new players.
So they end up comparing apples to oranges. Something they're actually learning for the first time. And something they already have built in context and muscle memory. And it's the same reason why fighting game players find it easier to pick up new fighting games, even if they're very different.
How I did it was learn the basics and go straight online. Treat it like I’m in the Arcade and learning based on the people I match with
The difference between fighting games and other games is that most games don't lock moves behind proper execution. Anybody, no matter how new, can use any ability in a MOBA. Sure, if they're completely new to the genre it might take them a moment to look at their controller and find the button, but they can do it. Try getting somebody who has never played a fighting game to perform a Shoryuken input, much less input a double qcf ultra. Notice how nobody complains about the difficulty of smash bros, even though melee is one of the most technical games on the planet. If nothing else, even the brand new player can perform all of their attacks without spending hours training.
This is exacerbated by the fact that fighting games are well known to revolve around combos, and each combo takes hours of muscle memory to learn (for a new player). This leads to the feeling that you aren't "playing the game" unless you can perform a full combo that ends with an ultra. And of course, the execution shortcuts for these moves can be hilariously misleading. It took me literally years to learn that comboing from hadoken into a super hadoken only took a grand total of 2 qcf motions, not 3.
These things require months of training at least, and lead to a very different experience when compared to learning most other video games.
Now this is the truth.
I think FG are harder then others games because they require a lot more base knowledge before you're allowed to have fun.
Like if you put a non gamer in a shooter they'll probably figure out it's point, shoot and kill even if they will get rekt they know how to play and have fun, but in a FG they are gonna wonder why did that attack hit them, how can they even attack while pressured etc.
Yeah...Mobas and fighting games are nothing alike in terms of skill. For one, Mobas have an incredibly low execution ceiling. You press one of four buttons. The build list is literally just a shopping list and guides exist to the point where you don't have to think about what you're buying. Fighting games have much more executiom emphasis so even if you know what to do, your chances of fucking up are a lot higher.
"Losing 100 matches in a fighting game takes less time than losing 3 matches in a moba"
Yeah but at the end of those 3 matches I don't feel like I want to bash my head in with a brick because of how bad I am.
As someone who has graduated from the idea that FGC jargon is important for the sake of it retaining a name, it is difficult because to me, a fighting game hits you with all of your mistakes at once. Then when you seek to get better, people can only teach you the way they were taught. Back when I started I could still go to arcades (RIP Family Fun Arcade, Arcade Infinity, Japan Arcade, LA Arcade scene) but that method was just lose until you either quit the game altogether or until you understood what your buttons and moves do and applied it in an incrementally increasing fashion.
I feel that this philosophy never died even though the reason why it existed did. I feel like that natural gatekeeping exists because from a design standpoint, it is the most effect way to teach. Skullgirls and Killer Instinct do a great job of subverting this with their tutorials, but even those can be improved upon.
I doubt we will get an AI that will make you "PvP ready" and that to an extent you will always need to find out what works and what doesn't by playing it against another person, but like Sajam say that is a part of learning. It's kind of crazy to see how many people rationalize time dedication in one medium vs. Another.
this video gave me a new way of looking at fighting games, most in-game tutorials are bad in teaching you the most basic skills so i focus only on doing combos and supers
To add to the discussion. I started playing fightings games very recently, like two months tops. Playing regularly that is. I'm in my late twenties and have been playing everything but fightans.
I believe that the issue with fighting games and other genres of competitive gaming, is that most of the skills necessary to play fighting games are not really that translatable to and from other games.
Competitive MP FPS' basic skills can be learned very well through single-player FPS'; MOBA games have much in common with the control schemes of RTS' and some RPGs, like Diablo and your generic korean MMORPG. So there is a lot of familiarity already in the playerbase for those kinds of games.
Of course there are games that use something akin to the control scheme of fightans, with their button combinations for different strings of combos that you can do, but I don't think that they get anywhere near the level of intricacy that the average fighting game has (maybe that is why I found Tekken to be the easiest to get into at first). Some inputs feel completely unnatural to do on a d-pad, the typical "forward, down, down+forward" is terrible to do on one of them and are clearly tailored for the arcade experience and analog sticks are not well suited to that kind of work.
The inputs do feel odd yes but are completely doable, they are just a little bit different, if you practice them then you can get them out and fighitng games get more and more lenient with inputs every year. Z motions were difficult at first but now I can do them no problem on my PS3 pad. It's more just about using it in the middle of battle at the right time and even getting it out, which is hard to do even when using a stick or being at an actual arcade machine. There are really good SF and Tekken players that use pads too, I can name them if you want.
I think the real reason fighting games are hard for people to get into is because they believe all the things you're debunking here. I agree with you on all your points, I just got into fighting games 3 weeks ago and I'm already pretty good. But trying to get my friends into GGst I can tell you it's impossible because they all believe these things.
While most team-based game chats are either dead or toxic, it's still a factor that's worth noting. There's built-in communication systems. I've had teammates (and even opponents) in Overwatch give me pointers in chat, during the match or after. In fighting games, it's going to be after the match and it's going to be using some 2nd party interface (PSN messaging or Steam messaging) and most people don't care to help their opponents improve because it's not helpful to them.
13:00 is exactly how I felt when I first made it into D2 (always hovered D4/D3) I could feel my skill capping in a demoralizing way. No more solo kills, always down in cs, no pressure in lane to rotate. I was horribly outclassed and dropped back down immediately.
Learning things like match ups and strategies can be equally difficult in all competitive games, I agree. However inputs in fighting games are harder to do, and I'm not even talking about combos. You don't have to press 632146HS to shoot a rocket in COD, and you don't have to do 236236HS to activate one of your 7 or 8 attacks in League. Sure, all genres share certain difficulties like reaction time, matchs ups, etc, but in fighting games you are either learning universal input motions at the entry level (236, 41236, 632146HS) or you're trying to memorize a long string of commands that involve these newly learned inputs at a competitive level. Whether you are a new player or experienced you are learning things that you wouldn't have to learn in other competitive games because other games don't expect you to press multiple buttons for any one action (with a few exceptions).
Once a new player learns all of these inputs then sure the difficulty of the end game becomes the match ups and knowledge of the mechanics, etc, but fighting games still require that one little extra hurdle to go through before you can get to that point. I agree that people exaggerate how difficult fighting games can be sometimes, but that doesn't mean they still aren't technically harder in general, even if only by a little bit.
I would agree that fighting games aren’t as hard as it is put but I would still say fighting games are harder because of the amount of outside of the game work to get better such as learning frame data matchups and all other things outside of just the execution
To add to this, team games can also feel hard to get into because even if your team wins, if you didn't do well individually you'll feel that. There have been games of LoL that my team won or even crushed but I personally did really poorly. And after those games I didn't come away thinking "at least we won" it was always "man I suck, that was terrible I want to quit".
I ended up playing League for a long time because my friends and I could always que up together and play on the same team, and even if we were terrible we could get some sick plays and win every now and then. Being able to play cooperatively with friends was a big part of what kept us coming back. If you play a fighting game with a friend, it always has to be competitive against each other and that's a totally different vibe. It can be really exhausting. Having to play against your homies all the time isn't nearly as chill as getting to play on the same side with your homies.
Every game is difficult at high level. But for a beginner Fighting games are the hardest to learn. That’s why there is a training mode! There’s no training mode in any other game!
I feel like people are making up reasons for why fighting games are harder to make themselves feel better for playing a harder type of game. Even if it doesn't really make all that much sense to claim that it is.
I don't know anyone who grinds drills in shooters. Most people don't as far as I can tell.
Literally anyone who plays a fighting game eventually hits the lab.
If what you were saying was true, then fighting games would sell much better than they do and be played by more people.
The inaccessibility is why the genre barely exists compared to all the other types of games you are comparing it to in terms of the number of people playing.
Fighting games on twitch are some of the least viewed and least played on the platform.
I'd argue vs. AI play gets you to a better level in fighting games than in any other competitive genre sans maybe puzzles.
Sure fighting game AI doesn't learn, yet you do and when you learn it's patters it's exploitable. But still it's testing your reaction times, teaching you the distance and timing limits on punishing a live opponent and beating you up if you lose focus.
FPS AI fluctuates from "just let the baby win" to sniping you through walls going up a single difficulty setting. And rts/tcg/etc. Ai just lets you win unless it's some sort of gacha where it instead wrecks you through messing with your rng because it's still playing like it's programmed backwards.