A lot of comments seem to be saying that I claimed only bugs are "emergent gameplay". I know they are not, I mentioned the distinction in the beginning of the video to draw a line between INTENTIONAL and UNINTENTIONAL emergent design. I just chose to focus the discussion on UNINTENTIONAL emergent gameplay because that's what I found the biggest chasm between old school/modern fighting games
Emergent gameplay is one that is not designed but emerges from player interaction and game provides the tools. One of most famous games in that regard is EvE online.I wouldn't boundle uninteded mechanics into emergant gameplay because there is big distinction there. difference is that emegent gameplay is intended and ecouraged outcome while unintended mechanics are not. Uninteded mechanics are much smaller in scale and are just that, they can become core mechanics or patched out because it breakes the game.
I just wish they would start embracing what their games become and fine tuning that, rather than dramatically changing them every time to where the series loses its identity. It splits the player base and creates this constant negative feedback loop were living in now. “Sf6 sucks and has no depth, sfV was way better, it doesn’t even feel like a real street fighter game. Strive isn’t guilty gear.” Its no wonder so many people pick up tekken even though its hard, at least they know what to expect and those skills carry over game to game.
Not sure if you mentioned it in the video but i think "crossups" were also originally an unintentional thing that existed in Street Fighter which later became an intentional game design choice that added to the whole genre. I love when the community shows through gameplay what they want in the game and the designers are leaning into it, instead of designers forcing their vision of the game onto the player. I also gotta say its not just roll cancelling that adds to depth of fighting games, just the concept of being able to kara moves adds so much to a fighting game. Like enabling otherwise impossible combos like Kens double shoryuken combo in 3s or just adding that little extra range to your kara grab to make your footsies just a little scarier and so on. The whole topic is super interesting. You could make whole series about these kind of topics. Would be super interesting to know what kind of concepts originated from what game. Like for example: What was the first fighting game with back dash, what propertiers had that back dash, what was the next game that backdash how did i change over time, what lead to some games going for the invicible backdash or backdashes that allow for cancels, put you in airborne states to be able press air attacks low to the ground and so on. You could do a whole deep dive on this symbiotic relationship of fighting players and game designer over time. Its just so interesting to see how intension can change and design/engine oversights are getting exploited to do something that the designer never wanted you to do. The greatest example of the players will over design intension in fighting games can be found in Hokuto no Ken in my opinion, the game has this gravity system which was build into the game to circumvent infinite combos but ended up giving infinites to the whole cast! The biggest joke in fighting game history :D The gravity system lets the characters drop faster to the ground the longer a combo goes but if you are able to go over a certain threshold the effect gets reversed and you end up playing basketball with your "bouncing" opponent. Thats just amazing that people pushed through that threshold and found all these super specific bounce combo setups over time. They bend the game to their will and those setups are so specific and with frame perfect inputs, positiong, lots of them even utilize reverse air/ground crossup hitboxes and other shennanings to enable the bounce state, just so much hard work behind it. Its a testament to the free spirit of the people who came up these combos, poetry in motion XD I wish i could know what the original engine designer of Hokuto no Ken thought about that meta development. Was he like "happy little accident" or "noooo, you cant do this, you have ruined it!!" we´ll never know :D
Idk if you saw my comment, but I'm the guy doing the glitch in the arcade. Thanks for showing it some love, it was always fun messing with alchemist killer. That dude was an asshole
The nerf to the Danfinite is still one of the best nerfs I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. Making the fireball randomly become a buffed version is hilariously in character for Dan, and is a buff in all aspects except the infinite. Technically it’s even still possible to do the infinite based on how lucky you are, which makes it all the more special to see the combo last more than a few reps.
@@Raxyz_0 tbf that’s because it broke a fundamental rule of predictable jump arcs. It’s cool but it’s wrong. The base game has to have predictable jump arcs because of how strong jump in combos are. That level of unpredictability has no real nuance on both parts.
@@Neogears1312 And then there is Cammy, Seth, Rashid and Akuma all of which can alter their jump arc or AA timing. That *is* a part of the game. Hell, Oro can actually do that with the double jump, the fast fall isn't so much a jump-in tool so much as mixup one that can very easily be fuzzy blocked, it really wasn't that broken.
SF4 was great in how it had edition select. I have fun going back just to see how broken certain vanilla characters were, and it absolutely helps preserve important history to the game.
It also allows for some dumb matchups like Vanilla Sagat vs Elena. A bit like how ST had "Old" versions of characters who didn't even have super moves but sometimes they had other things going for them.
I also think there's a survivorship bias when looking at older games and emergent gameplay. For every example of emergent gameplay that is positive and interesting, there are countless games that are just broken and forgotten.
Old school shooters had lots of physics bugs that created interesting movement - skiing in Tribes and bhopping/ strafe-jumping in Quake. Fun story, when John Carmack was working on Quake 3 he announced in a dev blog that he was removing strafe jumping. And not because of balance implications or anything, he just thought it looked dumb. But because of a combination of technical issues and internet nerds yelling he backed off that decision. Over time free movement became so core to the spirit of Quake, you really can't make a Quake-like fps without it now.
I think emergent gameplay wouldn't have been around in older games if the ease of pushing a fix to everyone was where it is now. The idea of sending out new boards to arcades or just having different SKUs for console games with every new patch is simply unreasonable. That being said, bring back Oro fast fall
The thing is, you can see examples of this not being true. GGXX kept throw OSs throughout it's whole life, while removing the more degenerate FD Throw OS, as well as formalizing bugs such as Jump Install. SF4 never got rid of plinking. So while patching is ESSENTIAL to the modern intentional style of fighting games, I think devs, used to be a little bit more "Cowboy" in their design decisions. You could fairly argue that's cause a lack of patching too (kinda just gotta accept a cowboy mindset back then), but I think it's just as much the age of the genre AND medium at the time as well as less concern about wider appeal.
@@kayinnasaki that's a good point. Kind of an aside, but it's interesting that the same button priority system is in SFV, plinking is just all but useless thanks to the generous input buffer
Oro isn’t good already. I think it would definitely be fun to have his fastfall back. d+two or three punches or something in midair. Or slightly more sad, maybe they’d make it vskill2 only, vskill button in midair.
@@kayinnasaki Reason for that, was because A. More cowboy esque and B. Patching costs quite a bit. It's like 12k to upload during the 360 days if i recall. Another big reason for why SFV is the way it is...is because a fighting game player designed it. Woshige being a millia player makes so much sense as to why SFV is the way it is, for example
I think from a dev standpoint, it's kind of hard to let some of these emergent gameplay mechanics stay. If something like roll canceling was discovered in a modern fighting game, the community would pressure devs to patch it out. In the most interesting cases of emergent gameplay, it's really hard to judge if it adds depth to a game and isn't just an over centralizing mechanic in the future. It's insane to take that risk for a dev especially in a market that is saturated with good games, and an audience that will stop playing games to hop on the newest one.
To be fair, if it were possible to patch it out fans would have been clamoring for it then! It was a VERY divisive issue for longer than you would think.
developers generally being bad players is an inherent issue here. if developers try to design a game for their own skill level, the experts will have nothing to do.
@@joshuasanderson7359 Exactly. Not a developer, but I can imagine that having the public discover a major flaw in your game must suck, considering how much time is spent in the development process.
@@shaolinotter I mean Street Fighter V's Battle Designer is Woshige and I even though he is part of that one moment in Guilty Gear history, I wouldnt say he is a bad player.
I can give an example from halo. In the halo infinite beta, the bxb glitch was back (and even stronger than in halo 2), and they patched it out for the full release. (Honestly, probably for good reason. It was kinda broken)
There’s two examples I can think of. One is a glitch in Smash Ultimate where Mega man could cancel his nair into other actions, which gave him some incredibly hard but insane infinites, and let him basically have some of the best approach in the game if it was properly optimized. The other is Millia having a cross up set up with her S disk the got taken away by a buff, of all things
Guard Flying in devil may cry 4 is so sick and you can mod it into devil may cry 5 and it's so fun and cool. Also mostly useless. Jump Canceling on the other hand can allow combos that simply wouldn't exist and they kept that in DMC5.
A fairly recent example of this is a technique called the gravity cancel in the platform fighter Brawlhalla. This technique allows you to cancel a neutral air dodge into a grounded attack. It was originally a bug, but it provided such interesting gameplay that it was not only promoted to feature but recently got a visual upgrade to make it much clearer to each player when a player does a gravity cancel.
@@Josie.770 It's nothing like a SHFF. Short hop fastfall allows you to land sooner after jumping, which can be combined with aerials or some specials to create better pressure. Brawlhalla has a comparable technique called dash jump fastfall, but it has completely different uses and is completely different from the gravity cancel. Gravity cancels allow you to perform any grounded move in the air given you have access to your air dodge, which has many different uses including combos, edgeguarding, recovery, etc. It doesn't allow you to land any sooner, it just lets you use one grounded attack while otherwise still being in the air.
This is exactly why I tell people to be very cautious with their hype for Project L. Riot has a well-documented history of very much intentionally steering balance and meta into their exact preferred direction to get win% and play-rate% of certain champions and characters in League and Valorant down to the decimal of their liking. This kind of super micromanaging can be extremely harmful for a game where you have to be specific in frame data to plan out entire punishes and whatnot and suddenly the next Tuesday it just doesn't work anymore.
@@Enlaceeee They still set a precedence considering that's one of the things that a lot of people really don't like about how Valorant is being handled and it's how Legends of Runeterra has been handled. That's 2 games that are also under completely different development teams that follow the same micromanagement balance philosophy as LoL. People said those exact words before Valorant was released and they grubbed their way into that as well.
Emergent gameplay was the magic in LoL which everyone who remembers those early times intuitively feels like they miss in the game as it is now. Feels bad, man.
@@VoermanIdiot I've only played LoL so i don't know much about the balancing in the other Riot IP's, if what you say is true it can be a little concerning but I won't be taking anything for granted, maybe the Cannon brothers vision of what Project L should be and how it should be balanced differs from Riot's, and we don't know who is going to have the last word in that regard, only time will tell.
This is probably long winded and rambly so hopefully it makes sense. I really only play newer fighting games cause I can't keep up with the complexity of older games but I still feel some of the things about the way intentional design affects games. I think what would make modern emergent gameplay getting patched hurt less would be if the developers looked at those things and said "how can we add this into the character in a way that's intentional." It sucks how weird quirky stuff like that Oro fastfall gets removed, but the worst part is usually you won't see the developers play with that again in the future. I feel like it would be nice if big devs could embrace the retooling of this stuff rather than just outright removing it. Hell, I've heard about people going to international tournaments and purposely hiding tech till that tournament, not so that people can't develop counterplay, but literally because they knew the developers would patch it if they ever used it. A former Pokken player named Midori found a really tight window that you jump-cancel Darkrai's drill, which did not make the low tier any less of a low tier but gave him at least something more to compete with, and then because the Pokken devs didn't intend for it, the moment he used it at Worlds, despite getting bodied, despite Darkrai being a low tier, it was still patched out immediately. The issue with how devs deal with emergent gameplay is that they are often removing tools from characters without compensating them with anything else. It's why Smash Ultimate patches are so boring because they often don't give characters tools to fix their core issues, they just make characters more annoying, or they often gut the good parts of a top/high tier without actually retooling the rest of their moveset to compensate and it just makes them less interesting overall as a result. Shoutouts to the Dan infinite, best nerf I've ever seen. However, the one thing that I will give to intentional design is that you almost never get characters who just, don't work. You rarely if ever get a character like Twelve in who just does not work at all in modern fighting games. Most joke characters now are intentionally designed to be joke characters, but they often have things to them, such as Croagunk in Pokken or Dan in SFV, who are designed to still be actual characters but have weird quirks, such as Croagunk having some absolutely busted moves and just being frustrating to fight but also sometimes literally just blowing himself up when trying to use those moves, or Dan's danfinite nerf and the way they use one of his throws being a failed version of the other throw to show him as a joke rather than making him literally unplayable.
there was this thing with Josie in Tekken 7 where you can input her rage drive normally (f,n,d,df3+4) or you can do a shortcut the developers didn't intend (f,n,d3+4) and it made it so you can do her rage drive standing up and whiff punish a lot easier if you do it fast enough. I loved doing it and then they removed it in the season 2 patch. It was such a small thing but it made her a lot more fun to play for me.
Guilty Gear's Slayer's Back Dash Cancels in Guilty Gear are such an incredibly weird mechanic that kinda works like CvS2 rollcanceling. It involves jump canceling out of his teleport backdash and keeping all the frames of invulnerability. You could then also Tiger Knee move inputs out of a backdash to give them invulnerability. They nerfed it over time to not give him the backdash's full invincibility (which was way too much) but didn't remove it and still included it in Xrd. Just completely formalized a weird bug as part of the character.
Same happened to Faust's faultless defense cancel (I know other characters have FDCs, but Faust makes the most frequent use of his, and I know him best). You can kara-cancel his dive kick into faultless defense (GG's push block equivalent), allowing him to instantly alter his momentum and air trajectory (kind of like Oro fast fall, but sort of hovered instead of shooting straight down). This gives him access to low commitment air-to-airs, very fast overheads, and multiple ways to modify his jump ins and go for weird cross ups with his items. It took a character who was already completely accessible for new players, and gave him exciting options for higher level players to explore, raising his skill ceiling immensely. Just like BDC, they kept it for Xrd, largely unchanged, but they removed it in strive. I miss it more than anything else in his kit that he lost (even the "being top tier" part), but it's clear to me that its influence was not lost in the character design. They knew that the character was now defined by having scary high/low, so they gave made his command grab give opponents an afro that raises their hurt box, and they knew that he need to have unique air control without have a fast air dash, so they made his air dash able to move up and down, and gave full directional control to mix mix mix. They aren't perfect substitutes, but it reminds me that modern fighting game devs are smarter than they sometimes seem when it comes to streamlining complex systems and redesigning characters for new audiences.
@@MMurine much as I miss pogo and drill cancels and even considered MMM a garbage move (21f startup mid that's -7 on block and low scaling as a starter, how could you not), I have to admit it's weird jankiness has given way to a lot of interesting tech. MMM loops, controllable frame advantage, momentum keeping, and even incredibly ambiguous crossups. If it ever gets buffed so that grounded 2S can combo into MMM I'd even call it good move, even though basically the only other change it has gotten on paper being a scaling nerf.
If he makes it into strive, i hope they make it intentional and just remove the tk, just let him cancel the dash into specials and keep the invuln, at the cost of maybe having a minimum dash cancel frame, so it increases the startup, so you don't always want to do it
@@peterma362 I honestly feel like Faust is just so close to feeling like an overall really neat and solid character. As it is he still has some cool options, though he feels like he needs a few options tweaked to have a bit better frame data and an overall nudge upwards in terms of damage.
The movement shooter genre only existed because of emergent gameplay that started since doom/quake and has been at risk of being phased out not only because they are often tied to execution being a very loose "you just feel it" type but also because modern game/engine designers simply don't deal with the mishaps that happen from engine quirks and have a standardization process when it comes to implementation for what's simple features like movement. Quakes systems especially exist because of what other designers would view as "flaws" from an outsider perspective on naive implementation of acceleration physics based movement. Even further back simple diagonal movement was sometimes emergent gameplay because both directions would result in moving faster than just one cardinal direction because the vectors would add together. In todays age these systems aren't often developed again by hand, most are standard engine packages to achieve what the average joe designer actually would want to make, no bullshit strings attached WASD movement. Designers more than ever are also like you said are very explicit in what is intended gameplay with what they make. I hate to bring it up but OW and TF2 are good examples of the opposite sides of that design philosophy split. Pharah vs Soldier from a designer intent standpoint is a good example, pharahs jets are very explicit in what you can do its only upwards with very clear defined uses you cant really be super creative with it, while soldiers rocket jumping was intended as freeform movement and expression so intricate with the physics system its heavily dependent on the map geometry when it comes to his strength, some maps are too open or don't have enough vertical depth for him to utilize his bombing power in a competitive environment. Its becoming more rare for new true movement shooters of any kind to thrive, games like diabotical in the arena shooter type often dont last long when it comes player count or tournament competition and most get called a quake 3/live clone and die off before they even hit the ground anyway. tough out there for fps boomers
I feel like Titanfall 2 was the last semi-mainstream boomer shooter. The game had a lot of issues and it’s kinda dead without community tools rn but it had some really cool experiments.
@@Pacemaker_fgc titanfall 2 certainly had it rough without good modding support, seems weird to take inspiration from them and not understand that subculture is interconnected by its self-developed content for a good reason, they like playing with those systems more than most designers care to make content for it. Id give anything to have something like defrag in a modern engine with the same public tools just to enjoy the mechanics raw. people to this day still dicking around with kz is a testament to the fact that just the movement alone is fun enough as its own game.
I believe korean back dashing from tekken is an example of emergent gameplay. But it became such an integral part of tekken that is has been brought forward for everyone game since
My favorite "emergent gameplay" is from the snes version of Samurai Shodown, where you can infinite jump if you have a turbo controller, or mash up really fast, you can just keep jumping forever and when you stop doing it your character slowly floats back down, but they're still in a standing state, you can do some really silly stuff with Nakoruru.
Wow, this is easily my favorite video of yours so far that isn't something SFV-specific. This type of topic is the kind of thing I like to talk to friends about, and while I was watching the video, the clean pacing and sensible progression really stood out to me. It felt like every time an "okay, but..." or "but what about..." thought popped into my head, you quickly transitioned into the exact line of thought I was on. I can tell you put a lot of thought into what people would be thinking or how they would react to each point as you structured the video. It felt almost like I was having a conversation.
This is a strange perspective on emergent design, because it seems squarely focused on accidental emergent gameplay, mostly via glitches. The go-to example for emergent gameplay used to be Far Cry 3, where you could unleash a tiger, and that tiger would attack enemies in the camp you were clearing. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Streets of Rogue, Dwarf Fortress, and RimWorld are very intentionally designed around emergent gameplay, creating systems that are designed to have inputs and outputs that create exponentially more situations than they could possibly foresee. In fighting games, Guilty Gear Strive is intentionally designed around emergent gameplay via its Roman Cancel system, which behaves in predictable ways but can create those exponential different outcomes and use cases, and that allows people to make galaxy-brained plays that no one saw coming. Any tag fighter with assists has intentional emergent gameplay, which allow you to create fun, dumb setups or enable gimmicky strategies. In Dragon Ball FighterZ, you can run Base Goku and SS4 Gogeta with meter build assists so that you can do something stupid with all of the meter in the world, and we call that emergent because it's combining simple systems that are in the game by design. You're right that Street Fighter V seems to be lacking a design like this, but I wouldn't say that about "modern fighting games" in general. As broken as DNF Duel's first beta was, their version of baroque cancelling is an intentional design for this sort of thing, though it may not create as much opportunity for emergent gameplay as Strive's Roman Cancels do.
This might be Cap but I think the DBFZ example doesn't really fit. Running Base Goku to store meter with his assist is just using a tool for it's specific function, and then capitalizing with a character that can use that meter efficently, so pretty much what the devs seems to think the assist is used for. I think something closer to emergent design is land cancelling in Skullgirls, landing gets rid of any blockstun and it's mostly used as a way to beat oppressive jump-ins by jumping into them and then blocking to recover faster than the opponent and punish, but certain characters can use it to set up mix ups scenarios by forcing the opponent on the ground and using the blockstun cancel to throw them.
@@karibu9933 Oh, Skullgirls is definitely MORE emergent than DBFZ, and land cancelling wouldn't even be where I start to describe it. I'd probably start with custom assists. It's an intended design to use H Pinion Dash assist to get a wall bounce, but it's emergent design to use that to convert Super Sonic Jazz into a full combo, which they probably never intended for you to combo out of. Emergent design can still be used for its intended function, but it's combined with other mechanics in ways that your solution is unique and not explicitly what they asked you to do.
I think you nailed it here. Also I'll add that the type of "emergent gameplay" Brian mentions here, mostly glitches, can actually often serve to _reduce_ the overall "depth" of a game, such as by making certain characters or situations far stronger or more oppressive than they otherwise would be in the context of that game's cast. I might be totally off-base here, but wouldn't MvC2 have more "depth" if more of the roster was competitively viable without having "point-buy" systems forced onto it?
It's funny you should bring up Strive's RC system as Yellow RCs actually removed some of the depth since they replaced Dead Angles. All Yellow RCs are the same whereas Dead Angles were different between characters in past GG games. Red RCs being your standard resource cancel mechanic with the choice to maintain the burst that props up or go into the instant cancel is a great example of emergent gameplay especially with the ability drift wherever you want, but I find it boring since it is tied to meter. A lot of the examples Brian supplied us with are meterless. That's where I take the stance that RCs are a boring example. Roll cancelling, while busted, has a high execution requirement and extremely versatile while being meterless. The same goes for wavedashing and unfly. One of my problems with fighting games nowadays is the excuse that strong mechanics be tied to resources. They can offer a wealth of options, but they are also less accessible because of that restriction.
@@jorgemartinez6902 I don't see how YRCs all being the same removes depth. You know how it works intuitively, and you can apply it in different ways; THAT is depth. I'm not an expert in +R, and I've played next to no Xrd, but I think YRCs might actually give you more options than Dead Angles.
Honestly, the "emergent" gameplay successes seem like a combination of great design intuition from the developers (in terms of setting a foundation) and then the magical power of accident. Take Starcraft: Brood War (from the RTS genre). The foundation of the game is solid - the resource collection, unit design, map mechanics and so forth. However, tons of glitches that were not anticipated became a part of the toolbox of players (see: Mutalisk stacking/Air unit stacking behavior, worker stacking, patrol micro, hold position micro, even drone extractor trick). All of these were exploits of the game engine. Many of them would seemingly break the game...and yet somehow all this brokenness resulted in remarkably balanced game (of the three race choices in the game, all are represented relatively evenly at the pro level). How this happened is clearly the result of luck. The pro players (mostly Koreans) do not care about the sanctity of the game's "intended" play patterns. They set out to take every possible advantage and break the game in their favor, and they did. The fact that the game is such a shining example of balance without patching is pure happenstance. I don't think we will ever see something quite like it again.
Survivorship biases is also likely at work. People remembering times where 'emergenent' gameplay made the game better and not times it completely dominated or ruined a game.
@@FlameEcho Absolutely, a definite factor - when luck rolls in their favor, it produces something remarkable, but as you said it often results in a broken mess.
I wouldn't be quite so quick to call Brood War's balance luck. The game's balance depends heavily on map design, such as keeping Zerg in check by having wallable ramps into the main base as a common design paradigm, or being really careful about the use of islands, or ledges near bases, to keep Terran from doing shenanigans. Also, while I'm not a big fan of Brood War's user interface, the fact is that the units that could be more broken are limited in power by the UI, such as Mutalisks being only stackable in groups of 11 (assuming you use a drone at home to keep them stacked), or basically every caster being made not worth using unless they were High Templar, because having to select them one-at-a-time to avoid wasting their spells is a burden only worth it if the effect is significant compared to just making more direct firepower.
@@dominiccasts Yes, map design is a huge component of the game balance. We can see that in certain experimental maps that were using in the Afreeca Starleague (ASL) and which resulted in some pretty terrible balance (look up games on Sparkle for example, a hilarious experimental island map that ended up being a pretty big failure). The point of my response is that, at the professional level, where player performance is at its absolute peak - it is in these situations where advantages like Mutalisk stacking could have completely ruined the game. And yet, it did not - partially due to the luck of the UI limiting the amount of Mutalisks that can be stacked and controlled at once. Were the unit selection somehow modified to 24, or any higher number, the delicate (by virtue of luck) balance would be upset drastically. Your example of spellcasters doesn't apply to the pro level, where spellcasting units are used by all races and are, in fact, some of the most important units in army compositions (High Templar in PvT and PvZ, Arbiter in PvT, Science Vessel in TvZ, and the strongest spellcaster in the game, the Defiler in ZvT and ZvP).
@@patrickmchugh4616 I was referring more to the second-rate spellcasters like Queens and Dark Archons, which have some situationally useful abilities but aren't worth the effort to use. My point was that only the absolutely most impactful spellcasters see any use at all. That being said, given the changes in BW to limit mutalisks with specific anti-muta units, I would expect that UI limitations wouldn't necessarily be required, though I haven't followed SC2 enough to be sure.
@@BrainGeniusAcademy i really appreciate it, man. Nah, i didn't get banned. I've been going to that arcade since i was a little kid and know the managers
"charm" is imo the perfect word for it. it's not universal and these gamebreaking tools only helped some games. they ruined others. but when it hits it's special. we probably overall get more complex and more acceptable-quality-level stuff now, but it feels guided, belongs to the developers rather than the players. It's good for both types of games to exist, and I think this type of charm still exists in certain game development spaces. lots of crazy indie fighting games. plus it's easier to play the broken old stuff than ever.
While emergent gameplay is “fun”, I often feel like older games therefore had higher skill gates and more unviable characters. Back to Melee, theres a lot of characters that are unviable compared to Ultimate’s roster. In addition, have you tried to go to a local without knowing wavedashing? Again, emergent is cool, but I felt it pigeon holes me into ways of playing I dont want to do.
"Have you tried to go to a local without being able to do a DP?" Wavedashing is as essential a motion to know as a DP for a fighting game, and is way easier to do. It's a bit disingenuous to act like it's a barrier to entry, when all it is is pressing two buttons then holding diagonally down. Having more techniques in a game, especially for movement, allows for people to be creative and develop more interesting options. Characters get deeper, and individual players get better at showcasing their individual strengths.
Well wave dashing is so integral to the game that it's basically a regular mechanic which allows players to do that do the cool things with movement, and platform fighters are all about movement Do you what they really aren't though? Having an obstructive barrier of entry to get decent. Like L Canceling
If you don't want to play like that, then it's simple.Dont compete. If a feature is not patched out then that means it's part of the game pretty much. So there should be no reason for you to ever consider doing something that requires you to play in a way you don't want(i.e. wavedash). Just look for another game where you are willing to embrace every feature 'cause that's where you will have the most fun.
The first developer I heard talk about emergent design and the intentions of keeping it in the game to add depth to it, was John Romero speaking about keeping strafe jumping in the legendary FPS Quake. I'm willing to bet there were other genres before that where a designer or programmer kept in unintended bugs for the good of the game, but it's still one of the earliest pvp games to do so on a larger public scale.
In SFV, the combo training sorta preserve the engine from different versions in case patch notes remove/add combos that wouldn't work. It would be interesting to see if there's a way to setup PVP fights in these cryo bubbles.
I remember not being that into Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite when it came out, but when the HSD glitch was found that allowed for these super cool, super long combos that were really high execution but super satisfying to pull off, I got pretty invested! The moment they patched the HSD glitch, I felt like what little I had to enjoy about the game disappeared along with it. I can't even go back and do those super fun HSD combos anymore because they exist only in a version of the game that is no longer playable. Sucks.
I used the "Boxer" control scheme in Halo 2 to make BXRing easier for me as it placed the melee action on the left trigger. And to this day I still rebind my controls this way even though it no longer provides any tangible benefit. It's just what I'm used to. This is the equivalent of using an arcade stick in a modern fighting game.
I think it's important, even when devs find these glitches, to always consider whether or not it would be interesting to alter or implement the exploit as an actual mechanic, such as with the Dan infinite. So, for Oro, it could be cool to see him get a new movement option fastfall as an actual special or command move.
@@zobdos Basically due to how button priority works in SFIV, you quickly input a button into a lesser strength button (e.g. HP>MP). The end result is you get two inputs of the higher strength button within 2 consecutive frames. This doubles your chances of hitting a 1 frame link in combos, kinda making it like a 2 frame link.
Its the feeling that we're all a part of the game design process. Emergent gameplay is fun because its not crafted and it belongs to everyone. Definitely something to think about if youre a designer. Does your design allow players to create and discover things on their own?
@@Lusecose That's the keyword, show. Tutorials are so dense with words and honestly with fg tutorials I'm too impatient to read through em. Definitely not when I'm starting a game holy shit. There's a lot of other parts of the game to fit that tutorial stuff into. Stuff like survival modes, arcade modes etc. Of course designers will have their own ideas. That's perfect to against difficult computers. I think bad matchups can be okay, depending on how bad they are and how careful the devs are around them. Like they should be at absolute minimum 6/4. It's game dependent though. So in tag fighters or things of that nature, it becomes an interesting decisions building a well rounded team. I believe bad matchups will almost always bubble up naturally. That's a part of having a diverse cast, but natural isn't always good. (see cyanide or plant/villager being like 7/3). If it it's really really bad that's when we should do something about it. I kinda agree with the point on execution barriers. I don't really care much for motion inputs honestly. Like a lot of things it's kind of situational if they're ever really necessary. ~The clouds
2 examples I really love are the Hokuto no Ken fighting game and F-Zero GX. I think it's beautiful that an anime/manga series about martial artists regularly TOD-ing their opponents ended with a game that is centralized around getting your opponent in a infinite and cycling it until KO or time up. It may not be the most fun but it captures the spirit of the series better than a properly balanced and fair game. Similarly F-Zero GX with it's glitches enabling you to accelerate above the max speed of your machine and making the game much more about how well you can control your insane speed captures what many people think about F-Zero better than what we'd probably get if there were a modern iteration.
I think a melee Samurai Shodown with super high damage might work better for representing HnK but I don't know that series too well. It could also borrow from BlazBlue with elaborate low health only supers - Astral Finish (this isn't rage, since your opponent needs to be low health not you). I don't get how to go that fast in GX yet, but from what I've seen it is just how I play but a 100x faster. Totally acceptable for single player or speedrunners. If the game was on the Wii U especially with online, that would have been patched so quick.
@@thelastgogeta The series tends to fall back of the trope of "I hit 30 vital points in a split second so now you die" so I personally think more hits on the combo counter is appropriate although you could rationalise either approach. Either way dying due to leaving a single opening is very HnK.
Bara cancelling in Melty Blood Act Cadenza. I had friends who were arguably higher skilled than me, but were still terrified to fight me because of how consistent I was with these. Bara cancelling allows you to kara cancel the game's bunker cancel (essentially a guard cancel/alpha counter). Bunker cancel cost 50% meter to use and an EX move would use another 50%. Most people who used this technique just played characters with good, invulnerable QCB+C EX moves, like Ciel (I was a Ciel main, too), but I quickly discovered you could input ANY special or super move as long as you input the QCB first and ended your input with D~# (#=whatever button you need for the move you want). So to bara cancel super moves, you'd input QCB, HCF+D~C, but I could do a lot more. I've got a video on my channel called Bara Cancel Exhibition, if you wanna take a look.
Wouldn’t emergent gameplay include the use of mechanics in a way that developers didn’t predict or understand that aren’t bugs per say? Like what about SF3 parry and GG roman cancel. These have intended uses but are so broadly applicable that manifest in ways that are not foreseen by developers.
The ultimate example of emergent gameplay in a non-fighting game has to be Starcraft: Brood War. You could fill a book with all the strange glitches and techniques players have utilized over the last 20+ years of competitive play that were never intended by the developers.
While I can emphatise with the opinion about emergent gameplay raised by the tweet...., the problem is, game developers (ideally) pay attention to bugs and exploits from previous games and try to fix or properly incorporate them into their next games. Thats just the way any kind of efficient job works, by constantly trying to improve upon your previous work. So, in some ways, advocatring for that kind accidental emergent gameplay is also advocating for less competent or experienced developers....
Good points, this also applies to other genres, world of warcraft is a perfect example, where the original version of the game (also known as vanilla) was very wild west with a lot of different mechanics that were used in ways the developer didn't intend. But with every expansion the game has become more and more streamlined, with content that is very designed and restricted, not leaving much up to the players themselves. A developer is not necessarily making the game worse when patching unintended mechanics, sometimes it's absolutely needed, but it really sucks that developers today, in general, are so intent on not letting players "design" the game themselves but rather have control over how people play the game.
I definitely feel that something was lost when fighting games transitioned from individual version releases to a single version thats patched over time. Hopefully in the future this could be addressed. Maybe "edition select" could return. Cheers
True. Every patch holds the risk of alienating a group of players who gained specific knowledge about the previous patch that made them feel accomplished. It’s always a bummer when a patch makes some player feel like they’re losing a major time investment
I feel Luke was an indication of the design intensions for SF6, in the sense of being rewarding for us sweaties while keeping the starting learning curve simple. Honestly, I love SFV, but it was a major learning point for Capcom an they learned the lesson now, I think.
the last 2 seasons gave me a lot of hope to what the future of street fighter might bring. i hope they can deliver something really, really fun right upfront, rather than coming into its own after a couple of years
This is an interesting topic and so well presented. Brian, your breakdown reminded me of another famous (infamous?) technique that may have been mentioned by other commenters below: the Korean backdash (KBD) in Tekken. I understand that it has long been a point of discussion as to whether the KBD should be removed from future iterations of the game due to being a relatively high execution technique in exchange for what on its face is a basic good of any fighting game: the ability to move backwards. (And to clarify, by summarizing the above, I don’t mean that I agree with scrapping KBD). Thanks for all you do! Nick
An exemple of emergent gameplay in a fighting game I know (that's less competitive) is All Star Battle where, if you Heat Canceled (RC basically) a projectile into a taunt while the projectile was on top of a downed player, they would get hit and you could continue the combo. CyberConnect saw this and found the idea actually very interesting so, instead of fully patching it out, they changed it so that you were allowed to do it once per combo, getting rid of the infinite but adding a new combo route for a lot of characters.
Also rotation canceling which allowed you to cancel into more moves after specials. Helped some characters like Williamn Zeppeli who had limited combo options even with meter.
Strive's PRC throw option select; if the throw lands, the roman cancel would fail to come out, if it got backdashed then the 66PRC would put you into position to just grab them again. This was a huge part of Potemkin's gameplan prior to it getting patched so you could roman cancel during a throw animation.
Totally agree with, and it's not limited to just Fighting games. Pretty much all major releases in all genres have been designed to death. This is a byproduct of huge QA teams and focus testing having a say on design. It also doesn't help that todays gamers are quick to declare something as broken and with social media, it gets back to the developer instantly.
Sadira's Jump Cancel in KI Season 1. The most polarizing thing of this was there was an "infinite" that was created from this but due to the combo structure of the game, you had to the break the one-time opportunity that the user enabled for the damage to count. Best examples were CDJR, who used this to an incredible degree. While this was an unintended glitch, it was incredibly powerful because, at the time, Openers were technically unbreakable at the time and you needed to master a tiger knee motion to continually get this so it was prone to messing up. Also, this was only possible during Instinct (~15 seconds). This made Sadira arguably the best characters in the game at this time. The tech still remains in, however the game mechanics were altered to allow breaking in this scenario for the character.
There was an old glitch with Snake in I want to say the beginning of Ultimate. It was a frame perfect tech but if you slide off the platform well using C4 it just sticks to snakes hand allowing for him to stick the C4 on anyone. This wasn't majorly gamebreaking since C4 can fall off fighters. It was a REALLY cool tech that was hard to master. It was a cool tech and shouldn't have been patched out
Tha outro is basically the reason I keep each version of games I come across until the end of the universe. Sometimes I prefer things an older version does so I want to have the option to switch back to that if I want to. One of the many reasons why I just don't invest much time into more modern , big releases these days. If anyone were ever to ask me if there was game that made me quit because of it's many changes I would probably go first with Destiny 2. Good video.
One technique I like is in the pre-Ultimate versions of DOA2, where holding back and pressing the freestep button rapidly basically allows you to KBD while blocking. I think it makes the game a lot more fast-paced than it already was originally. Most of the community prefers 2U, but since the technique isn't in it due to replacing the freestep button with the typical sidestep input of down down/up up, I slightly prefer the original Dreamcast/PS2 version. ...and the Japanese Dreamcast version has rollback via Fightcade 😉
i think its more of a case of ease of patching, there are definitely emergent techniques that come up from time to time, but most of it is considered a "bug" that needs to be fixed today, while back then in many cases the cost of fixing was not worth it, so when something like this comes up today, it gets patched most likely.
One of my favorite examples of emergent gameplay that still exists in modern fighting games is backdash canceling in Tekken. It existed in Tekken 3 and Tag 1, and it was *strong*. So strong that the developers actively removed it in Tekken 4. Because of that (among other reasons), 4 is kind of the black sheep of the Tekken franchise. They brought it back in 5 and it's still the backbone of movement in that series to this day.
IIRC in Mortal Kombat X there was a time where you could infinitely refresh Grandmaster Sub-Zero’s Ice clone during block pressure. This, combined with the fact that when Sub spawns the ice clone he moves about a character length backwards, would not only be a safe pressure ender, but placed him at the best range to anti air a jump attempt. Sub Zero’s ice clone was also intangible, so if the opponent would try to contest Sub’s pressure using ice clone, many options would simply hit Sub but trade with ice clone, freezing them as if they were hit by ice ball guaranteeing a free 40% combo. It was a truly cold hearted time to play Sub Zero back then. This was patched out to make him unable to refresh the clone and give it somewhat of a cool down. If he did attempt to use ice clone during its cool down, he would still go through the animation of spawning it, but would not spawn anything, making him have an ability that, if mistimed to the cool down, would leave you -30 or more on special cancel on hit or block. Arguably a really disappointing way to deal with something that fit into Sub Zero’s theme of being a character centered around lock down.
I'm an MK player and MKX was one of the most busted games ever on launch but thankfully it ended up in a good place by the end and i would say is a perfect example of there being enough jank still in there to be emergent and juice can still be squeezed from it compared to *cough* MK11 *cough* Subs ice clone nerf was warrented, the nerf didnt kill the character and it caused new ways to implement the clone that basically make him more bearable but still ultimately a corner monster, they didnt neuter him so it is the best possible outcome.
not from a fighting game, but my favorite example of emergent gameplay is from Dota 2. For a while Wraith King had an ability that gave hiim a passive crit chance, and his crits would one shot creeps. The ability could also be activated to summon skeletons for every creep killed with a crit. Normally buying critical hit items on a character that already had crits is really inefficient because oof how crit chances stacked, but if you bought a cheap crit item, tthe crits from the item would have the one-shot property of WK's normal crits. So, you could walk around one-shot killinig creeps earlier than any other hero in the game with a 2k gold item that can also pressure towers with skeletons, and fight with an inflated crit chance where most characters miss out on fighting power to focus on farming items. This was of course too much fun, so the ability got reworked to a guaranteed crit on a cooldown with no one-shot on creeps, and the skeletons were just 1 per every 2 creeps killed.
A similar phenomenon is true in RTS. Much of the balance in and love for Starcraft 1 derives from severe engine limitations. You can't select more than a dozen units at a time. You can't multi select buildings. Maximum of 3 camera hotkeys. AWFUL unit pathfinding. These limitations meant cultivating APM as a resource was very important. With better APM you can overcome these limitations and make sure your Dragoons don't get stuck in a movement loop trying and failing to go up a ramp while also managing your economy. Starcraft 1 with Starcraft 2 QoL features would probably make Terran the best faction. That all being said, Starcraft 2 and all its modern sensibilities is much more fun to pick up and play.
Great vid. I think one nuance that gets lost is the distinction between unintended mechanics and emergent gameplay. Your Oro fastfall was an unintended mechanic, and the emergent gameplay is a new frontier of mixup potential. While unintended mechanics often create emergent gameplay, you can obtain emergent gameplay from purely developer-intended mechanics. Chess has tons of emergent gameplay, but nobody's doing any unintended maneuvers. Dev meddling and rebalancing is a big factor too. If the game is unchanging, players will search deeper into the decision tree and find emergent gameplay. But if there's a constant stream of buffs, nerfs, and new game engines, then nobody bothers with all that research-and-development. Whatever new gameplay emerges, the foundation is likely to get shaken up and render it all moot. EDIT: whoops just read your pinned post. I guess you've heard this all already lol
One example I like to think of for emergent gameplay is hitfalling in Rivals of Aether. It was a bug caused by hitstun setting your vertical speed to 0, meaning you could fast-fall out of it and get to the ground quicker, but because of how much Dan Fornace liked it and how much it opened up combo games for characters, it stayed as a feature ever since its discovery.
There was a Yoshimitsu combo in Tekken 7 where you could land a normal hit u/f 2 and the way the opponent's character would stagger meant that you could combo it into Flash...Making it better than the counter hit version as well as one of Yoshimitsu's highest damaging combos at the time (IIRC). I was so sad when they patched that out because I would love fishing for it even though it was a launcher that was -16 on block.
Melee jumping cancels shields You can cancel your jump squat animation into an upsmash or an up B. Or you can jump and do an aerial. It opens up 3 out of shield options for the shielder. It's kind of cool to have only certain options available to do out of shield rather than everything
Gotta be honest, I prefer for PvP games to be tightly designed enough to NOT have much emergent gameplay. But I'm fine with having all the emergent gameplay in single-player or co-op PvE games. I'll be going in-depth in a video on my channel or in my podcast, but I'll give the logical basis of my stance in two bullet points: - In PvP, especially if it becomes important to the meta, emergent gameplay inevitably has negative effects on the experience of some portion of the playerbase who may not want/like it. And the only way to not have it forced upon them by opponents is to play the genre's historically lacking single-player content. - In PvE, the same type of emergent gameplay only adds to the experience of those who choose to partake in them, while not being forced upon those who choose not to (or aren't aware) nor necessary to enjoy the game as devs intended.
Not a fighting game example but the Tony Hawk series of games has tons of emergent glitches that are still being found to this day that add tons of depth. They don't even focus on getting a high score which is the original intended goal. It's why I still love the games to this day because this always more to them.
One of my favorite emergent gameplay mechanics is in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, and it's based on the unique baroque mechanic. Every character has a way to do an unblockable using baroque, which does provide for a way for a lot of lower tier characters to open up people. It's a pretty neat meta-shifting bug, that I would put on par with CvS2 roll cancels or UMvC3 TAC infinites. But of course, the top 3 characters have some of the easiest baroque unblockaables in the game, which makes me love the game even more. The busted get busteder
18:00 as an FFXIV player I feel this so hard. Probably my favourite rotation in the history of the game was tornado kick monk, which was the result of a complete accident and gave an otherwise kind of simple job this super technical and busy rotation that felt super rewarding to pull off, but obviously it ended up being removed in the expansion afterwards. Although I guess monk is still pretty much Emergent gameplay: the job to this day since the theorycrafters for it are insane
I like emergent gameplay in general, but I'm not a fan of high skill floors often created by emergent gameplay, like in Melee. It usually hurts the playerbase of a game. I much prefer emergent gameplay in single player games.
"Usually hurts the playerbase of the game" Quite literally in Melee's case. How many pros have ended their careers after repetitive strain injuries that required surgery again?
Physical media would get "patched" too, but it wasn't forced on people who already had the "bugged" version. These companies would release new carts with the fixes, so if you wanted the bugged version, you had to know what to look for on the cart to know if it was the updated edition or not. For example, my version of Melee still has the bug with Link's boomerang and hookshot that sends him to the edge of the top blast zone. Later editions of Melee don't have this bug.
Killer Instinct Season 2 opened up the game to more juggling combos especially with Cinder being released. One cool thing you could do in Season 2 is when you are being comboed by the opponent, you break the combo & pop instinct (KI's version of V-Trigger). Normally, the opponent would be knocked to the ground after a combo breaker. However, you could pop instinct right when the combo break happens & combo them. You were being heavily rewarded for breaking their combo. Nowadays, combo breakers just flip you out into a "neutral" state.
2 года назад+1
Insightful commentary. I think the theme seems to be that developers of especially big budget games try to remove emergent techniques where they discover them. In my own idle exploration of game dev, I far prefer to create games full of _systems_ that interact, deliberately allowing room for players to innovate and discover new techniques. You can always patch the truly grotesque stuff out. Oro fast fall should have stayed.
The only time I remember breaking a game was in computer class in elementary. The homies used to play this browser drag racing game. We'd all start off with low class cars and work our way up to the s class/sports cars and race for pink slips before class would end. One day, I was in the lab testing on the test track, trying to get as fast as I could. Hitting the gas as fast as my little fingers could go, practicing shifting at just the right time to maximize my top speed. Testing at which time and gear I should pop that nitrous tank. When I accidentally forgot to refill my tank on a test run. And to my surprise, if you had an empty nos tank, used it at the start of the race as soon as that light went green, you hit top speed nearly instantly. Which was great, but your car would break if you couldn't shift gears fast enough. I tried to finish the race a bunch of times, shifting to 6th gear as fast as I could, it wasn't good enough. So, I went back to the lab. I needed more time to test. I start my day, C class cars as always. First upgrade, a nitrous tank. I drain that mf. Go back on the track, hit the gas and shift to 6th gear afap. And I cross the finish line. I felt like a damn God. I'd put Mercury to shame. Next I tested with nearly every class c and up car. It only worked on the class Cs. And if I remember correctly, the VW Jetta or Honda S2000 were the fastest. I surprised the fuck outta everyone when I showed up to race them for their mclarens and Ferraris with my s2000.
There's another element at play here which is the sharing of tech on the Internet. In the days of old, you had your local arcade and if you were really good you'd spend money to travel. Maybe you had a copy of the B3 tape. Things took longer to discover (it seemed) because there were few people working on it and there was less sharing. Now with Twitter, if one person in the world finds something cool it'll be worldwide in a day or less. Devs may or may not patch it at this point, depending on intention. But a game can certainly feel less deep when it's "solved" faster than games in the past. If ST was released today, how long would it take to find his command grab loop? Desk or Toolassisted would discover it in days or weeks and shortly after that you'd see pro grappler players like Itazan and Snake Eyes using it in tournament.
playing GunZ way back in my high school underclassman years was my first exposure to this variety of "crazy emergent movement tech that breaks your hands but looks cool af" ("k-style", "butterfly", etc.). it was so synonymous with the game that when a sequel came out a decade later, people were immediately turned off by its immediately noticeable lack all of this tech...and apparently people still play the original GunZ to this day on private servers (similar to people sticking with melee despite other smash games coming out later). ... while modern competitive games almost universally have these things patched out quickly, it's nice to see that a lot of single player speedrunnable games tend to be less hasty in patching out such exploits and emergent tech. always really cool watching speedruns for games (especially ones i've played before), and seeing all the wild and ingenious ways people have figured out how to break games with movement tech or RNG manipulation or even directly altering game data and RAM.
While emergent gameplay is valuable to the fighting game experience, so does a healthy set of options and mechanics that allow the player to reach a level where anything is possible (if they're good enough). Because those designs create the existence of emergent gameplay. Consider how parrying drastically changes the gameplay direction in 3rd (even with the acknowledgement of option selects and kara). Consider how Alpha 3 and CVS2 provide multiple play systems to use along with exploits such as roll cancelling (as you mentioned). KOF, CVS2, and MVC2 offering multiple characters. MVC2 is definitely packed with exploits that could be seen as mechanics in their own right plus the whole character properties stuff. Then there's the whole utility of the assists that are probably still the best usage of them incomparison to probably every entry but Infinite. KOF has been revising Max Mode since 2k2. To simplify. Yes, it's because they are more emergent, but the presence of emergent gameplay exists for a reason and that's because the games have systems that aren't limited by the developer which allow for players to improve In not only game knowledge but execution, strategy, and embrace some degenerate ass forms of setplay. I don't know if those times will ever return because when I saw people discussing KOFXV and claiming that execution was a form a gatekeeping and fighting games, I died a little inside. Sorry for rambling.
@@bguy6778 I feel you fam, but consider this. Custom Combo was developed, then players figured out the best way to use it. On an even deeper scale, from hit stun to recovery, all of these things are mechanics more or less that had to be developed first in order for players to take advantage of. The strategies of chess exists because the rules of Chess exists. It's possible for emergent gameplay to inspire new mechanics, but it's still due to the existence of previous mechanics/options. Can't roll cancel without roll.
Coming from a Smash (non-Melee) background, Ultimate doesn’t even have as much tech as Smash 4. Out of a dash, you can grab an item, jump in the opposite direction (which changes your momentum from the dash), and throw it in one motion. That, roll-boosted grab, dash walking, and this one obscure tech with Captain Falcon allowing him to land on a platform smoother are all the emergent tech I can think of in the game Great video
I'm not sure if one would call this emergent gameplay but one thing I really enjoyed doing in BlazBlue Contiuum Shift Extend was trap people in a pseudo Infinite air grab loop with Relius Clover. When he caught you in an air grab he would slam you into the ground and then you bounce back up for a follow up attack but you could instead just keep grabbing but doing so would increase the window that you could tech out of his air grab. It was only in that version of the game as far as I remember since I remember trying it in Blazblue Chrono Phantasma and it no longer working since the air grab didn't bounce you as high.
Emergent game design sometimes happens on accident because the real trick in game design is to give players something they did not know they wanted and developers tend to give players only what they want.
Season 5 Honda being able to do Hands juggle in the corner without Vs2 was my fave buff ever, It made Honda's corner game bonkers. But it was clearly unintentional as it was nerfed immediately in the next patch.
GunZ: The Duel embodies this quite a lot as well. K-style, and to a lesser extent D-style, made this game into literally one of the best shooters I've ever played to this day. I wish that many things that really hurt it (Locust Plague, etc.) wouldn't have happened and it was still played as much as it was back in the day. Definitely will always be one of my favorite gaming memories going from a scrub rolling around with a rifle to being able to RHS and TBF without even thinking about it.
Even if there's an unintended glitch that changes gameplay, it's not really emergent unless it changes gameplay beyond its apparent immediate scope. So, in the street fighter example, you play to avoid your opponent jumping in, or you try to jump in while he avoids yours, because jump ins provide an easy combo, which is an emergent phenomenon, but executing the jump in combo itself is not emergent. Also, I wouldn't classify basic combos as a glitch, anyway. The special cancels in Street Fighter II were a glitch, though. The glitch was related to the random chance your move could become a special move if I remember correctly.
I think a good example of modern emergent gameplay is the GGStrive overdrive startup cancel, roman cancelling an overdrive before the startup finishes and you essentially get an invincible pause button for only 1 bar of meter. (Pretty good with Faust) The devs explicitly stated they know about the exploit but they decided to let it rock to see how it plays out.
I also wanted to add in the aspect of "Comeback Mechanics" that was implemented and it became a split between some thought it added immersion to the game while others felt it was an easy cop out that exploited the game and made it lack different ways to explore more intuitive ways to win from behind. A lot of the really older FGC fans disliked when they hit the scene like "Rage" mechanic in Tekken 6 or "X Factor" in MVC3 where I remember this same debate was a thing then. Funny enough Tekken 6 is now 15 years old and MVC3 is 11 yrs old now. They were sayin stuff like. MVC3 is just 1 touch of death combo and XFactor is a scrubby come from behind tactic etc. But alot of the 09ers or just FGC fans on the other side of the spectrum up at the time knew it brought so much hype and just saw it as a fresh new element to the game to explore into with new insane combos and rushdown tactics which really put the whole Rushdown vs Turtle matchups on a bigger display than ever that help give the scene new life. I'll even go WAAYY back where playing lame or turtle in StreetFighter Alpha 2 and more footsy play you were rewarded vs the next Alpha 3 game with more adrenaline rushdown nature with the implementation of "V-Isms" and guard break meters for blocking too much which mechanic wise did a whole 180 where some griped on that too and this was still the 90s
OVerwatch may be the ultimate example of a developer forcibly rolling back one design mistake after another. Originally they promised an experience where you could switch to any roll at any time to win the match, that was on the box. Then they instituted hero limit, so you couldn't have five Genjis and a Lucio, which was effectively impossible to balance. Then they implemented Roll Lock and the game isn't even remotely what it used to be. It's been forced down an extremely narrow path
I remember early on in the original console release of Pokken Tournament, there was an infinite block string with Dark Mewtwo where would send out a homing projectile, let it hit the opponent's block, and then boost it over and over again so the projectile never went away. When Dark Mewtwo boosts a move, it replaces some health with gray health, which is recoverable in many ways. But when an opponent blocks a special, the same thing happens, AND they lose some health, meaning Dark Mewtwo could start a round with a homing projectile, knock the opponent down to 1 health, use a recovering move, and then have the easiest match of their lives ahead of them
This makes me remind of GunZ: The Duel. All those moves we used to do with the K-Style were a byproduct of a lot of bugs, it shaped the game as we used to know it, gave it depth and made it REALLY competitive, to the point of making the skill gap the higher i've ever known in comparison to every other games. GunZ was truly a masterpiece.
In SF4, by plinking Gen’s focus attack with a stance change button would create a parry like scenario, where the focus is immediately canceled into stance change, allowing Gen to hit some really cool things in regards to punishing normally safe moves. This is immensely difficult though.
Putting the emergent gameplay topic aside and purely reacting to the first tweet, new fighting games aren't simpler. They may be more lenient toward execution (360° and Dragon Punches are more difficult to pull off in SSF2T than in SFV for instance) but there are so many more game mechanics to learn now. From SF2 to SSF2 you didn't have a super bar. SSF2T added throw techs and the super bar was only used for the Super (hence the name, and no EX moves). The Super/Ex bar only gained new uses in the Alpha/Zero series (EX, Custom Combos...). SF3.3 added Parry. SFIV added Focus. And in SFV we have V-Skills, V-Triggers, V-Shift, V-Reversal (in addition to Supers/CA, Ex moves, Tech and parry for some characters). And that is without even mentioning the size of the roster which means more Match Ups to learn! So no, new Fighting Games are definitely not simpler.
special mention to dantes style switch glitch in vanilla MVC3. Basically a certain combo of button inputs would let you perform an infinte using the style switch with his gunshots that would fill up the screen with so many effects that after multiple reps would crash the game. I was able to pull this off in an online match one time and hopefully crashed the other guys PS3 lol
Not a fighting game thing, but neither Rocket Jumping (Quake) or Strafe Jumping (Quake 2) were intended, but were elements of emergent gameplay which got incorporated in the sequels. Starcraft 2 had things like Marines animation cancelling to almost effectively move and fire at the same time. The developer had never expected Terran players to use supply depots to wall themselves off from opponents in the original Starcraft. But it defined the meta.
That oro double jump tech reminds me of how double jump cancels work in smash. Characters with double jumps that dip (ness, mewtwo, etc) could cancel their jump with another jump and an aerial to do that aerial super close to the groud. It allows you to mash a lot of buttons on block and opened up a lot of combos and movement
brian learned oro fast fall because he knew it would leave him someday. sajam refused to learn sol infinite because he knew it would leave him someday. they are not the same.
I think a part of "explicit design" that does go towards the point that "games are simpler now" is that there are games designed to draw in casual players these days. This has been ongoing, so yes, games are simpler now and that is by design. Games now are designed in a way to streamline, simplify, and make the experience easier so they draw in a larger audience. Compare Fantasy Strike and 3rd Strike. One was designed with simplicity in mind and one wasn't and the design choices behind 3rd strike were the most prevalent back in the late 80s and 90s, and in the mid to late 2000s to now, the design choices are quite different.
I recently had a lot of fun breaking Jago in the original ki; combo that stuns, inescapable reset, one frame links, etc. NRS nerfing Aquaman was done very poorly, instead of adjusting frame data and decreasing damage they changed the character completely.
Combos being a bug or an accident in SF2 is 100% a myth. It was an intended feature, which is unsurprising considering the influence from beat-em-ups, which have had combos since their inception. Wavedashing was an accident, but kept in by the devs, meaning it isn't a bug.
In Project M 3.0 there was a bug with Bowser's down special where the ledge grab box extended a few pixels down, so if you spaced it just right (I had found a consistent setup on a few stages), you would teleport to the ledge instead of going into endlag. This led to a situation where you could down special someone at ledge, become immediately actionable by teleporting to ledge, and get them with your command grab while they were still in shield stun. In 3.5 Bowser's size was reduced by 5%, making the technique no longer possible. This was intended to be a buff, as Bowser's hurtbox used to poke over standard platforms making him very easy to reverse-shark. And as far as I'm aware I was the only one using the tech anyway. I actually intentionally held the knowledge back and only used it in one tournament match so that the PMBR wouldn't find out and patch it out in 3.5, but I guess that ended up backfiring lol. (That isn't to say that the teleport part wasn't known about, but I afaik I'm the only one that found consistent setups for it)
As a fighting game player, i care more about the game mechanics first and foremost before balance. MvC2 imo is the best fighting game simply because the mechanics although unintended in many ways, gave the game so much depth. Yes, its broken in a way that only a handful of characters are tournament viable. But all the developers had to do is to buff the lower tier characters and fix some game breaking bugs and things would be good. By contrast, games like SFV is designed to make characters balanced first and foremost, where match up is generally 5-5, 6-4 or 4-6. This is good no doubt, compared to SF4 where there are match ups that are literally 7-3 or 8-2. However, they did it not by character balancing, but by designing mechanics that lacks depth so the disparity between the characters become small. Another thing about fighting game that matters much imo is skill ceiling. Things like fast fly, unfly, refly, guard break, guard cancel etc. are advance mechanics that requires skills to pull off. Players who spend more time practicing can see their growth in skills vs players who don't. That's why even after 20 years, we have players like Khaos rising above Jwong, Yipes and Sanford. The skill ceiling is so damn high that even among the top players there are visible gaps. SFV's design again by comparison, reduced the combo difficult to 3 frames and had one button anti air normals be as good as a command move srk. And mechanics like two different quick rise that are only 5f apart, making wakeup game more random and less consistent. All these are why seasoned fighting game players felt newer games are made "easy" to play. New players can easily replicate any combos done by pros with little practice and even in top level plays, comebacks and perfects are way more common. Older games simply had a better learning curve and journey. Hype moments were memorable and epic because they were extremely hard to pull off. Hypes in current gen of fighting game feels like an influencer type of hype, where everyone are trying to do the same shit but none feels unique.
Also man those closing statements make me wish USF4's edition select made more of an impact, it's something that would be welcome in any game to me honestly, I always play with it any time I go back to USF4.
A lot of comments seem to be saying that I claimed only bugs are "emergent gameplay". I know they are not, I mentioned the distinction in the beginning of the video to draw a line between INTENTIONAL and UNINTENTIONAL emergent design. I just chose to focus the discussion on UNINTENTIONAL emergent gameplay because that's what I found the biggest chasm between old school/modern fighting games
Emergent gameplay is one that is not designed but emerges from player interaction and game provides the tools. One of most famous games in that regard is EvE online.I wouldn't boundle uninteded mechanics into emergant gameplay because there is big distinction there. difference is that emegent gameplay is intended and ecouraged outcome while unintended mechanics are not. Uninteded mechanics are much smaller in scale and are just that, they can become core mechanics or patched out because it breakes the game.
I just wish they would start embracing what their games become and fine tuning that, rather than dramatically changing them every time to where the series loses its identity. It splits the player base and creates this constant negative feedback loop were living in now. “Sf6 sucks and has no depth, sfV was way better, it doesn’t even feel like a real street fighter game. Strive isn’t guilty gear.” Its no wonder so many people pick up tekken even though its hard, at least they know what to expect and those skills carry over game to game.
Wow I can't believe u had to say this
Not sure if you mentioned it in the video but i think "crossups" were also originally an unintentional thing that existed in Street Fighter which later became an intentional game design choice that added to the whole genre. I love when the community shows through gameplay what they want in the game and the designers are leaning into it, instead of designers forcing their vision of the game onto the player.
I also gotta say its not just roll cancelling that adds to depth of fighting games, just the concept of being able to kara moves adds so much to a fighting game.
Like enabling otherwise impossible combos like Kens double shoryuken combo in 3s or just adding that little extra range to your kara grab to make your footsies just a little scarier and so on. The whole topic is super interesting.
You could make whole series about these kind of topics. Would be super interesting to know what kind of concepts originated from what game. Like for example:
What was the first fighting game with back dash, what propertiers had that back dash, what was the next game that backdash how did i change over time, what lead to some games going for the invicible backdash or backdashes that allow for cancels, put you in airborne states to be able press air attacks low to the ground and so on. You could do a whole deep dive on this symbiotic relationship of fighting players and game designer over time.
Its just so interesting to see how intension can change and design/engine oversights are getting exploited to do something that the designer never wanted you to do.
The greatest example of the players will over design intension in fighting games can be found in Hokuto no Ken in my opinion, the game has this gravity system which was build into the game to circumvent infinite combos but ended up giving infinites to the whole cast! The biggest joke in fighting game history :D
The gravity system lets the characters drop faster to the ground the longer a combo goes but if you are able to go over a certain threshold the effect gets reversed and you end up playing basketball with your "bouncing" opponent.
Thats just amazing that people pushed through that threshold and found all these super specific bounce combo setups over time. They bend the game to their will and those setups are so specific and with frame perfect inputs, positiong, lots of them even utilize reverse air/ground crossup hitboxes and other shennanings to enable the bounce state, just so much hard work behind it. Its a testament to the free spirit of the people who came up these combos, poetry in motion XD
I wish i could know what the original engine designer of Hokuto no Ken thought about that meta development. Was he like "happy little accident" or "noooo, you cant do this, you have ruined it!!" we´ll never know :D
Idk if you saw my comment, but I'm the guy doing the glitch in the arcade. Thanks for showing it some love, it was always fun messing with alchemist killer. That dude was an asshole
Thanks for the shout-out! Love the idea for this video
The nerf to the Danfinite is still one of the best nerfs I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. Making the fireball randomly become a buffed version is hilariously in character for Dan, and is a buff in all aspects except the infinite. Technically it’s even still possible to do the infinite based on how lucky you are, which makes it all the more special to see the combo last more than a few reps.
I wish they were as criative in nerfing Oro's fast fall...
@@Raxyz_0 tbf that’s because it broke a fundamental rule of predictable jump arcs. It’s cool but it’s wrong. The base game has to have predictable jump arcs because of how strong jump in combos are. That level of unpredictability has no real nuance on both parts.
@@Neogears1312 And then there is Cammy, Seth, Rashid and Akuma all of which can alter their jump arc or AA timing. That *is* a part of the game. Hell, Oro can actually do that with the double jump, the fast fall isn't so much a jump-in tool so much as mixup one that can very easily be fuzzy blocked, it really wasn't that broken.
66A->5A(2hit)x3->3B->6A(2hit)->66B->1A->6A(2hit)->[66A->MC.unblockable->66A(loop)]
The most important thing is obviously that it's lore-appropriate
SF4 was great in how it had edition select. I have fun going back just to see how broken certain vanilla characters were, and it absolutely helps preserve important history to the game.
It also allows for some dumb matchups like Vanilla Sagat vs Elena. A bit like how ST had "Old" versions of characters who didn't even have super moves but sometimes they had other things going for them.
@@thelastgogeta Vanilla Sagat vs Hugo is 10-0 because Hugo can't duck the high fireball lol
"Hyper" versions overall are super fun to mess with, and I'm glad Capcom did it on the regular, be it with SFII, Alpha, SFIV or Darkstalkers
Also there’s Omega Mode which adds new moves and creates completely new playstyles for some characters. T. Hawk is a major example of this.
Here's hoping we'll get something similar for the final SFV patch
I also think there's a survivorship bias when looking at older games and emergent gameplay. For every example of emergent gameplay that is positive and interesting, there are countless games that are just broken and forgotten.
but that's exactly why patching could have led us to the promised land. but instead we just decided that no fun would be allowed period
Bunch of games with “emergent features” in the cost of bunch of failures is better than what we have now
Bunch of games with “emergent features” in the cost of bunch of failures is better than what we have now
Bunch of games with “emergent features” in the cost of bunch of failures is better than what we have now
Bunch of games with “emergent features” in the cost of bunch of failures is better than what we have now
Old school shooters had lots of physics bugs that created interesting movement - skiing in Tribes and bhopping/ strafe-jumping in Quake. Fun story, when John Carmack was working on Quake 3 he announced in a dev blog that he was removing strafe jumping. And not because of balance implications or anything, he just thought it looked dumb. But because of a combination of technical issues and internet nerds yelling he backed off that decision. Over time free movement became so core to the spirit of Quake, you really can't make a Quake-like fps without it now.
B-hopping is so iconic that every(good) movement shooter has it in one way or another (e.g slide hopping in Titanfall 2)
I think emergent gameplay wouldn't have been around in older games if the ease of pushing a fix to everyone was where it is now. The idea of sending out new boards to arcades or just having different SKUs for console games with every new patch is simply unreasonable.
That being said, bring back Oro fast fall
The thing is, you can see examples of this not being true. GGXX kept throw OSs throughout it's whole life, while removing the more degenerate FD Throw OS, as well as formalizing bugs such as Jump Install. SF4 never got rid of plinking. So while patching is ESSENTIAL to the modern intentional style of fighting games, I think devs, used to be a little bit more "Cowboy" in their design decisions.
You could fairly argue that's cause a lack of patching too (kinda just gotta accept a cowboy mindset back then), but I think it's just as much the age of the genre AND medium at the time as well as less concern about wider appeal.
@@kayinnasaki that's a good point.
Kind of an aside, but it's interesting that the same button priority system is in SFV, plinking is just all but useless thanks to the generous input buffer
@@AP-qu2li omg I didn't know that, that's amazing. I love when little legacy engine things like that manage to fly under the radar.
Oro isn’t good already. I think it would definitely be fun to have his fastfall back. d+two or three punches or something in midair. Or slightly more sad, maybe they’d make it vskill2 only, vskill button in midair.
@@kayinnasaki Reason for that, was because A. More cowboy esque and B. Patching costs quite a bit. It's like 12k to upload during the 360 days if i recall. Another big reason for why SFV is the way it is...is because a fighting game player designed it. Woshige being a millia player makes so much sense as to why SFV is the way it is, for example
I think from a dev standpoint, it's kind of hard to let some of these emergent gameplay mechanics stay. If something like roll canceling was discovered in a modern fighting game, the community would pressure devs to patch it out. In the most interesting cases of emergent gameplay, it's really hard to judge if it adds depth to a game and isn't just an over centralizing mechanic in the future. It's insane to take that risk for a dev especially in a market that is saturated with good games, and an audience that will stop playing games to hop on the newest one.
To be fair, if it were possible to patch it out fans would have been clamoring for it then! It was a VERY divisive issue for longer than you would think.
As a developer, this is how I feel too.
People finding exploits reflects poorly on me if they are in my game.
developers generally being bad players is an inherent issue here. if developers try to design a game for their own skill level, the experts will have nothing to do.
@@joshuasanderson7359 Exactly. Not a developer, but I can imagine that having the public discover a major flaw in your game must suck, considering how much time is spent in the development process.
@@shaolinotter I mean Street Fighter V's Battle Designer is Woshige and I even though he is part of that one moment in Guilty Gear history, I wouldnt say he is a bad player.
Can you think of any examples of emergent gameplay that have been patched out and lost to the digital era? Let me know.
Oro fast fall sadge
I can give an example from halo. In the halo infinite beta, the bxb glitch was back (and even stronger than in halo 2), and they patched it out for the full release. (Honestly, probably for good reason. It was kinda broken)
All Speedrun/gameplay tech that gets patched out, not just fighting games.
There’s two examples I can think of. One is a glitch in Smash Ultimate where Mega man could cancel his nair into other actions, which gave him some incredibly hard but insane infinites, and let him basically have some of the best approach in the game if it was properly optimized. The other is Millia having a cross up set up with her S disk the got taken away by a buff, of all things
Guard Flying in devil may cry 4 is so sick and you can mod it into devil may cry 5 and it's so fun and cool. Also mostly useless. Jump Canceling on the other hand can allow combos that simply wouldn't exist and they kept that in DMC5.
A fairly recent example of this is a technique called the gravity cancel in the platform fighter Brawlhalla. This technique allows you to cancel a neutral air dodge into a grounded attack.
It was originally a bug, but it provided such interesting gameplay that it was not only promoted to feature but recently got a visual upgrade to make it much clearer to each player when a player does a gravity cancel.
Sounds like SHFF
@@Josie.770 What's that?
@@bguy6778 Just an abbreviation of short-hop > fast fall
@@Josie.770 It's nothing like a SHFF.
Short hop fastfall allows you to land sooner after jumping, which can be combined with aerials or some specials to create better pressure. Brawlhalla has a comparable technique called dash jump fastfall, but it has completely different uses and is completely different from the gravity cancel.
Gravity cancels allow you to perform any grounded move in the air given you have access to your air dodge, which has many different uses including combos, edgeguarding, recovery, etc. It doesn't allow you to land any sooner, it just lets you use one grounded attack while otherwise still being in the air.
@@Josie.770 🤦♂️
This is exactly why I tell people to be very cautious with their hype for Project L. Riot has a well-documented history of very much intentionally steering balance and meta into their exact preferred direction to get win% and play-rate% of certain champions and characters in League and Valorant down to the decimal of their liking. This kind of super micromanaging can be extremely harmful for a game where you have to be specific in frame data to plan out entire punishes and whatnot and suddenly the next Tuesday it just doesn't work anymore.
The team that develops Project L is entirely separate from the balancing team in LoL
@@Enlaceeee They still set a precedence considering that's one of the things that a lot of people really don't like about how Valorant is being handled and it's how Legends of Runeterra has been handled. That's 2 games that are also under completely different development teams that follow the same micromanagement balance philosophy as LoL. People said those exact words before Valorant was released and they grubbed their way into that as well.
Yeah, you fuckin get it [squints to read username] Vore Man.
Emergent gameplay was the magic in LoL which everyone who remembers those early times intuitively feels like they miss in the game as it is now. Feels bad, man.
@@VoermanIdiot I've only played LoL so i don't know much about the balancing in the other Riot IP's, if what you say is true it can be a little concerning but I won't be taking anything for granted, maybe the Cannon brothers vision of what Project L should be and how it should be balanced differs from Riot's, and we don't know who is going to have the last word in that regard, only time will tell.
This is probably long winded and rambly so hopefully it makes sense. I really only play newer fighting games cause I can't keep up with the complexity of older games but I still feel some of the things about the way intentional design affects games.
I think what would make modern emergent gameplay getting patched hurt less would be if the developers looked at those things and said "how can we add this into the character in a way that's intentional." It sucks how weird quirky stuff like that Oro fastfall gets removed, but the worst part is usually you won't see the developers play with that again in the future. I feel like it would be nice if big devs could embrace the retooling of this stuff rather than just outright removing it.
Hell, I've heard about people going to international tournaments and purposely hiding tech till that tournament, not so that people can't develop counterplay, but literally because they knew the developers would patch it if they ever used it. A former Pokken player named Midori found a really tight window that you jump-cancel Darkrai's drill, which did not make the low tier any less of a low tier but gave him at least something more to compete with, and then because the Pokken devs didn't intend for it, the moment he used it at Worlds, despite getting bodied, despite Darkrai being a low tier, it was still patched out immediately.
The issue with how devs deal with emergent gameplay is that they are often removing tools from characters without compensating them with anything else. It's why Smash Ultimate patches are so boring because they often don't give characters tools to fix their core issues, they just make characters more annoying, or they often gut the good parts of a top/high tier without actually retooling the rest of their moveset to compensate and it just makes them less interesting overall as a result.
Shoutouts to the Dan infinite, best nerf I've ever seen.
However, the one thing that I will give to intentional design is that you almost never get characters who just, don't work. You rarely if ever get a character like Twelve in who just does not work at all in modern fighting games. Most joke characters now are intentionally designed to be joke characters, but they often have things to them, such as Croagunk in Pokken or Dan in SFV, who are designed to still be actual characters but have weird quirks, such as Croagunk having some absolutely busted moves and just being frustrating to fight but also sometimes literally just blowing himself up when trying to use those moves, or Dan's danfinite nerf and the way they use one of his throws being a failed version of the other throw to show him as a joke rather than making him literally unplayable.
I agree with everything but that last part. SFV Claw is.... man. I've seen so many players try to climb that mountain and drop him.
The only reason you don’t see them is because they are usually patched into relevance.
Twelve could win a tourney so that doesn’t make sense.
there was this thing with Josie in Tekken 7 where you can input her rage drive normally (f,n,d,df3+4) or you can do a shortcut the developers didn't intend (f,n,d3+4) and it made it so you can do her rage drive standing up and whiff punish a lot easier if you do it fast enough. I loved doing it and then they removed it in the season 2 patch. It was such a small thing but it made her a lot more fun to play for me.
Guilty Gear's Slayer's Back Dash Cancels in Guilty Gear are such an incredibly weird mechanic that kinda works like CvS2 rollcanceling. It involves jump canceling out of his teleport backdash and keeping all the frames of invulnerability. You could then also Tiger Knee move inputs out of a backdash to give them invulnerability. They nerfed it over time to not give him the backdash's full invincibility (which was way too much) but didn't remove it and still included it in Xrd. Just completely formalized a weird bug as part of the character.
Same happened to Faust's faultless defense cancel (I know other characters have FDCs, but Faust makes the most frequent use of his, and I know him best). You can kara-cancel his dive kick into faultless defense (GG's push block equivalent), allowing him to instantly alter his momentum and air trajectory (kind of like Oro fast fall, but sort of hovered instead of shooting straight down). This gives him access to low commitment air-to-airs, very fast overheads, and multiple ways to modify his jump ins and go for weird cross ups with his items. It took a character who was already completely accessible for new players, and gave him exciting options for higher level players to explore, raising his skill ceiling immensely. Just like BDC, they kept it for Xrd, largely unchanged, but they removed it in strive. I miss it more than anything else in his kit that he lost (even the "being top tier" part), but it's clear to me that its influence was not lost in the character design. They knew that the character was now defined by having scary high/low, so they gave made his command grab give opponents an afro that raises their hurt box, and they knew that he need to have unique air control without have a fast air dash, so they made his air dash able to move up and down, and gave full directional control to mix mix mix. They aren't perfect substitutes, but it reminds me that modern fighting game devs are smarter than they sometimes seem when it comes to streamlining complex systems and redesigning characters for new audiences.
@@MMurine much as I miss pogo and drill cancels and even considered MMM a garbage move (21f startup mid that's -7 on block and low scaling as a starter, how could you not), I have to admit it's weird jankiness has given way to a lot of interesting tech. MMM loops, controllable frame advantage, momentum keeping, and even incredibly ambiguous crossups. If it ever gets buffed so that grounded 2S can combo into MMM I'd even call it good move, even though basically the only other change it has gotten on paper being a scaling nerf.
If he makes it into strive, i hope they make it intentional and just remove the tk, just let him cancel the dash into specials and keep the invuln, at the cost of maybe having a minimum dash cancel frame, so it increases the startup, so you don't always want to do it
@@peterma362 I honestly feel like Faust is just so close to feeling like an overall really neat and solid character. As it is he still has some cool options, though he feels like he needs a few options tweaked to have a bit better frame data and an overall nudge upwards in terms of damage.
The movement shooter genre only existed because of emergent gameplay that started since doom/quake and has been at risk of being phased out not only because they are often tied to execution being a very loose "you just feel it" type but also because modern game/engine designers simply don't deal with the mishaps that happen from engine quirks and have a standardization process when it comes to implementation for what's simple features like movement. Quakes systems especially exist because of what other designers would view as "flaws" from an outsider perspective on naive implementation of acceleration physics based movement. Even further back simple diagonal movement was sometimes emergent gameplay because both directions would result in moving faster than just one cardinal direction because the vectors would add together. In todays age these systems aren't often developed again by hand, most are standard engine packages to achieve what the average joe designer actually would want to make, no bullshit strings attached WASD movement. Designers more than ever are also like you said are very explicit in what is intended gameplay with what they make. I hate to bring it up but OW and TF2 are good examples of the opposite sides of that design philosophy split. Pharah vs Soldier from a designer intent standpoint is a good example, pharahs jets are very explicit in what you can do its only upwards with very clear defined uses you cant really be super creative with it, while soldiers rocket jumping was intended as freeform movement and expression so intricate with the physics system its heavily dependent on the map geometry when it comes to his strength, some maps are too open or don't have enough vertical depth for him to utilize his bombing power in a competitive environment. Its becoming more rare for new true movement shooters of any kind to thrive, games like diabotical in the arena shooter type often dont last long when it comes player count or tournament competition and most get called a quake 3/live clone and die off before they even hit the ground anyway. tough out there for fps boomers
I feel like Titanfall 2 was the last semi-mainstream boomer shooter. The game had a lot of issues and it’s kinda dead without community tools rn but it had some really cool experiments.
@@Pacemaker_fgc titanfall 2 certainly had it rough without good modding support, seems weird to take inspiration from them and not understand that subculture is interconnected by its self-developed content for a good reason, they like playing with those systems more than most designers care to make content for it. Id give anything to have something like defrag in a modern engine with the same public tools just to enjoy the mechanics raw. people to this day still dicking around with kz is a testament to the fact that just the movement alone is fun enough as its own game.
I was looking for a Quake shoutout here!
@@justdakotamusicI'd perform Quake-like acts of horror if meant I got a faithful Quake remake...
Ultrakill's done pretty well
I believe korean back dashing from tekken is an example of emergent gameplay. But it became such an integral part of tekken that is has been brought forward for everyone game since
They could just allow backdashing repeatedly… but where’s the fun in that?
It was removed in Tekken 4 but they brought it back in Tekken 5
My favorite "emergent gameplay" is from the snes version of Samurai Shodown, where you can infinite jump if you have a turbo controller, or mash up really fast, you can just keep jumping forever and when you stop doing it your character slowly floats back down, but they're still in a standing state, you can do some really silly stuff with Nakoruru.
Alex's Yami Drop in SFV was a bug that has been removed, but then intentionally re-added.
Maybe Oro will get the same treatment, only Capcom knows.
Wow, this is easily my favorite video of yours so far that isn't something SFV-specific.
This type of topic is the kind of thing I like to talk to friends about, and while I was watching the video, the clean pacing and sensible progression really stood out to me. It felt like every time an "okay, but..." or "but what about..." thought popped into my head, you quickly transitioned into the exact line of thought I was on. I can tell you put a lot of thought into what people would be thinking or how they would react to each point as you structured the video. It felt almost like I was having a conversation.
This is a strange perspective on emergent design, because it seems squarely focused on accidental emergent gameplay, mostly via glitches. The go-to example for emergent gameplay used to be Far Cry 3, where you could unleash a tiger, and that tiger would attack enemies in the camp you were clearing. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Streets of Rogue, Dwarf Fortress, and RimWorld are very intentionally designed around emergent gameplay, creating systems that are designed to have inputs and outputs that create exponentially more situations than they could possibly foresee. In fighting games, Guilty Gear Strive is intentionally designed around emergent gameplay via its Roman Cancel system, which behaves in predictable ways but can create those exponential different outcomes and use cases, and that allows people to make galaxy-brained plays that no one saw coming. Any tag fighter with assists has intentional emergent gameplay, which allow you to create fun, dumb setups or enable gimmicky strategies. In Dragon Ball FighterZ, you can run Base Goku and SS4 Gogeta with meter build assists so that you can do something stupid with all of the meter in the world, and we call that emergent because it's combining simple systems that are in the game by design.
You're right that Street Fighter V seems to be lacking a design like this, but I wouldn't say that about "modern fighting games" in general. As broken as DNF Duel's first beta was, their version of baroque cancelling is an intentional design for this sort of thing, though it may not create as much opportunity for emergent gameplay as Strive's Roman Cancels do.
This might be Cap but I think the DBFZ example doesn't really fit.
Running Base Goku to store meter with his assist is just using a tool for it's specific function, and then capitalizing with a character that can use that meter efficently, so pretty much what the devs seems to think the assist is used for.
I think something closer to emergent design is land cancelling in Skullgirls, landing gets rid of any blockstun and it's mostly used as a way to beat oppressive jump-ins by jumping into them and then blocking to recover faster than the opponent and punish, but certain characters can use it to set up mix ups scenarios by forcing the opponent on the ground and using the blockstun cancel to throw them.
@@karibu9933 Oh, Skullgirls is definitely MORE emergent than DBFZ, and land cancelling wouldn't even be where I start to describe it. I'd probably start with custom assists. It's an intended design to use H Pinion Dash assist to get a wall bounce, but it's emergent design to use that to convert Super Sonic Jazz into a full combo, which they probably never intended for you to combo out of.
Emergent design can still be used for its intended function, but it's combined with other mechanics in ways that your solution is unique and not explicitly what they asked you to do.
I think you nailed it here. Also I'll add that the type of "emergent gameplay" Brian mentions here, mostly glitches, can actually often serve to _reduce_ the overall "depth" of a game, such as by making certain characters or situations far stronger or more oppressive than they otherwise would be in the context of that game's cast. I might be totally off-base here, but wouldn't MvC2 have more "depth" if more of the roster was competitively viable without having "point-buy" systems forced onto it?
It's funny you should bring up Strive's RC system as Yellow RCs actually removed some of the depth since they replaced Dead Angles. All Yellow RCs are the same whereas Dead Angles were different between characters in past GG games. Red RCs being your standard resource cancel mechanic with the choice to maintain the burst that props up or go into the instant cancel is a great example of emergent gameplay especially with the ability drift wherever you want, but I find it boring since it is tied to meter. A lot of the examples Brian supplied us with are meterless. That's where I take the stance that RCs are a boring example. Roll cancelling, while busted, has a high execution requirement and extremely versatile while being meterless. The same goes for wavedashing and unfly. One of my problems with fighting games nowadays is the excuse that strong mechanics be tied to resources. They can offer a wealth of options, but they are also less accessible because of that restriction.
@@jorgemartinez6902 I don't see how YRCs all being the same removes depth. You know how it works intuitively, and you can apply it in different ways; THAT is depth. I'm not an expert in +R, and I've played next to no Xrd, but I think YRCs might actually give you more options than Dead Angles.
Honestly, the "emergent" gameplay successes seem like a combination of great design intuition from the developers (in terms of setting a foundation) and then the magical power of accident.
Take Starcraft: Brood War (from the RTS genre). The foundation of the game is solid - the resource collection, unit design, map mechanics and so forth. However, tons of glitches that were not anticipated became a part of the toolbox of players (see: Mutalisk stacking/Air unit stacking behavior, worker stacking, patrol micro, hold position micro, even drone extractor trick). All of these were exploits of the game engine. Many of them would seemingly break the game...and yet somehow all this brokenness resulted in remarkably balanced game (of the three race choices in the game, all are represented relatively evenly at the pro level). How this happened is clearly the result of luck. The pro players (mostly Koreans) do not care about the sanctity of the game's "intended" play patterns. They set out to take every possible advantage and break the game in their favor, and they did. The fact that the game is such a shining example of balance without patching is pure happenstance. I don't think we will ever see something quite like it again.
Survivorship biases is also likely at work. People remembering times where 'emergenent' gameplay made the game better and not times it completely dominated or ruined a game.
@@FlameEcho Absolutely, a definite factor - when luck rolls in their favor, it produces something remarkable, but as you said it often results in a broken mess.
I wouldn't be quite so quick to call Brood War's balance luck. The game's balance depends heavily on map design, such as keeping Zerg in check by having wallable ramps into the main base as a common design paradigm, or being really careful about the use of islands, or ledges near bases, to keep Terran from doing shenanigans. Also, while I'm not a big fan of Brood War's user interface, the fact is that the units that could be more broken are limited in power by the UI, such as Mutalisks being only stackable in groups of 11 (assuming you use a drone at home to keep them stacked), or basically every caster being made not worth using unless they were High Templar, because having to select them one-at-a-time to avoid wasting their spells is a burden only worth it if the effect is significant compared to just making more direct firepower.
@@dominiccasts Yes, map design is a huge component of the game balance. We can see that in certain experimental maps that were using in the Afreeca Starleague (ASL) and which resulted in some pretty terrible balance (look up games on Sparkle for example, a hilarious experimental island map that ended up being a pretty big failure).
The point of my response is that, at the professional level, where player performance is at its absolute peak - it is in these situations where advantages like Mutalisk stacking could have completely ruined the game. And yet, it did not - partially due to the luck of the UI limiting the amount of Mutalisks that can be stacked and controlled at once. Were the unit selection somehow modified to 24, or any higher number, the delicate (by virtue of luck) balance would be upset drastically.
Your example of spellcasters doesn't apply to the pro level, where spellcasting units are used by all races and are, in fact, some of the most important units in army compositions (High Templar in PvT and PvZ, Arbiter in PvT, Science Vessel in TvZ, and the strongest spellcaster in the game, the Defiler in ZvT and ZvP).
@@patrickmchugh4616 I was referring more to the second-rate spellcasters like Queens and Dark Archons, which have some situationally useful abilities but aren't worth the effort to use. My point was that only the absolutely most impactful spellcasters see any use at all.
That being said, given the changes in BW to limit mutalisks with specific anti-muta units, I would expect that UI limitations wouldn't necessarily be required, though I haven't followed SC2 enough to be sure.
thanks for sharing some love. i'm the guy that does the ruby heart glitch. it was done at a tilt arcade in hilo, hawaii
Can I just say you are an actual legend. Hope u didn't get banned from that arcade.
@@BrainGeniusAcademy i really appreciate it, man. Nah, i didn't get banned. I've been going to that arcade since i was a little kid and know the managers
"charm" is imo the perfect word for it. it's not universal and these gamebreaking tools only helped some games. they ruined others. but when it hits it's special. we probably overall get more complex and more acceptable-quality-level stuff now, but it feels guided, belongs to the developers rather than the players.
It's good for both types of games to exist, and I think this type of charm still exists in certain game development spaces. lots of crazy indie fighting games. plus it's easier to play the broken old stuff than ever.
While emergent gameplay is “fun”, I often feel like older games therefore had higher skill gates and more unviable characters. Back to Melee, theres a lot of characters that are unviable compared to Ultimate’s roster. In addition, have you tried to go to a local without knowing wavedashing? Again, emergent is cool, but I felt it pigeon holes me into ways of playing I dont want to do.
"Have you tried to go to a local without being able to do a DP?"
Wavedashing is as essential a motion to know as a DP for a fighting game, and is way easier to do. It's a bit disingenuous to act like it's a barrier to entry, when all it is is pressing two buttons then holding diagonally down.
Having more techniques in a game, especially for movement, allows for people to be creative and develop more interesting options. Characters get deeper, and individual players get better at showcasing their individual strengths.
Well wave dashing is so integral to the game that it's basically a regular mechanic which allows players to do that do the cool things with movement, and platform fighters are all about movement
Do you what they really aren't though? Having an obstructive barrier of entry to get decent.
Like L Canceling
Well, point still stands. It's divisive and some forms of it lead to unwanted "basic mechanics". No point in learning it if you don't have fun.
I mean... Borp exists.
If you don't want to play like that, then it's simple.Dont compete. If a feature is not patched out then that means it's part of the game pretty much. So there should be no reason for you to ever consider doing something that requires you to play in a way you don't want(i.e. wavedash). Just look for another game where you are willing to embrace every feature 'cause that's where you will have the most fun.
The first developer I heard talk about emergent design and the intentions of keeping it in the game to add depth to it, was John Romero speaking about keeping strafe jumping in the legendary FPS Quake. I'm willing to bet there were other genres before that where a designer or programmer kept in unintended bugs for the good of the game, but it's still one of the earliest pvp games to do so on a larger public scale.
In SFV, the combo training sorta preserve the engine from different versions in case patch notes remove/add combos that wouldn't work. It would be interesting to see if there's a way to setup PVP fights in these cryo bubbles.
I remember not being that into Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite when it came out, but when the HSD glitch was found that allowed for these super cool, super long combos that were really high execution but super satisfying to pull off, I got pretty invested! The moment they patched the HSD glitch, I felt like what little I had to enjoy about the game disappeared along with it. I can't even go back and do those super fun HSD combos anymore because they exist only in a version of the game that is no longer playable. Sucks.
I used the "Boxer" control scheme in Halo 2 to make BXRing easier for me as it placed the melee action on the left trigger. And to this day I still rebind my controls this way even though it no longer provides any tangible benefit. It's just what I'm used to. This is the equivalent of using an arcade stick in a modern fighting game.
I think it's important, even when devs find these glitches, to always consider whether or not it would be interesting to alter or implement the exploit as an actual mechanic, such as with the Dan infinite.
So, for Oro, it could be cool to see him get a new movement option fastfall as an actual special or command move.
In SFIV I am thankful plinking was discovered and never removed. On top of it making combos much easier to execute, I think it's pretty fun to do.
What is plinking ?
@@zobdos Basically due to how button priority works in SFIV, you quickly input a button into a lesser strength button (e.g. HP>MP). The end result is you get two inputs of the higher strength button within 2 consecutive frames. This doubles your chances of hitting a 1 frame link in combos, kinda making it like a 2 frame link.
Its the feeling that we're all a part of the game design process. Emergent gameplay is fun because its not crafted and it belongs to everyone.
Definitely something to think about if youre a designer. Does your design allow players to create and discover things on their own?
@@Lusecose Thats actually a good point the lack of tutorials makes knowledge feel personal.
@@Lusecose That's the keyword, show. Tutorials are so dense with words and honestly with fg tutorials I'm too impatient to read through em. Definitely not when I'm starting a game holy shit.
There's a lot of other parts of the game to fit that tutorial stuff into. Stuff like survival modes, arcade modes etc. Of course designers will have their own ideas. That's perfect to against difficult computers.
I think bad matchups can be okay, depending on how bad they are and how careful the devs are around them. Like they should be at absolute minimum 6/4. It's game dependent though. So in tag fighters or things of that nature, it becomes an interesting decisions building a well rounded team. I believe bad matchups will almost always bubble up naturally. That's a part of having a diverse cast, but natural isn't always good. (see cyanide or plant/villager being like 7/3). If it it's really really bad that's when we should do something about it.
I kinda agree with the point on execution barriers. I don't really care much for motion inputs honestly. Like a lot of things it's kind of situational if they're ever really necessary.
~The clouds
2 examples I really love are the Hokuto no Ken fighting game and F-Zero GX.
I think it's beautiful that an anime/manga series about martial artists regularly TOD-ing their opponents ended with a game that is centralized around getting your opponent in a infinite and cycling it until KO or time up. It may not be the most fun but it captures the spirit of the series better than a properly balanced and fair game.
Similarly F-Zero GX with it's glitches enabling you to accelerate above the max speed of your machine and making the game much more about how well you can control your insane speed captures what many people think about F-Zero better than what we'd probably get if there were a modern iteration.
I think a melee Samurai Shodown with super high damage might work better for representing HnK but I don't know that series too well. It could also borrow from BlazBlue with elaborate low health only supers - Astral Finish (this isn't rage, since your opponent needs to be low health not you).
I don't get how to go that fast in GX yet, but from what I've seen it is just how I play but a 100x faster. Totally acceptable for single player or speedrunners. If the game was on the Wii U especially with online, that would have been patched so quick.
@@thelastgogeta The series tends to fall back of the trope of "I hit 30 vital points in a split second so now you die" so I personally think more hits on the combo counter is appropriate although you could rationalise either approach. Either way dying due to leaving a single opening is very HnK.
Bara cancelling in Melty Blood Act Cadenza. I had friends who were arguably higher skilled than me, but were still terrified to fight me because of how consistent I was with these. Bara cancelling allows you to kara cancel the game's bunker cancel (essentially a guard cancel/alpha counter). Bunker cancel cost 50% meter to use and an EX move would use another 50%. Most people who used this technique just played characters with good, invulnerable QCB+C EX moves, like Ciel (I was a Ciel main, too), but I quickly discovered you could input ANY special or super move as long as you input the QCB first and ended your input with D~# (#=whatever button you need for the move you want). So to bara cancel super moves, you'd input QCB, HCF+D~C, but I could do a lot more. I've got a video on my channel called Bara Cancel Exhibition, if you wanna take a look.
Wouldn’t emergent gameplay include the use of mechanics in a way that developers didn’t predict or understand that aren’t bugs per say? Like what about SF3 parry and GG roman cancel. These have intended uses but are so broadly applicable that manifest in ways that are not foreseen by developers.
The ultimate example of emergent gameplay in a non-fighting game has to be Starcraft: Brood War. You could fill a book with all the strange glitches and techniques players have utilized over the last 20+ years of competitive play that were never intended by the developers.
While I can emphatise with the opinion about emergent gameplay raised by the tweet...., the problem is, game developers (ideally) pay attention to bugs and exploits from previous games and try to fix or properly incorporate them into their next games. Thats just the way any kind of efficient job works, by constantly trying to improve upon your previous work.
So, in some ways, advocatring for that kind accidental emergent gameplay is also advocating for less competent or experienced developers....
Good points, this also applies to other genres, world of warcraft is a perfect example, where the original version of the game (also known as vanilla) was very wild west with a lot of different mechanics that were used in ways the developer didn't intend. But with every expansion the game has become more and more streamlined, with content that is very designed and restricted, not leaving much up to the players themselves. A developer is not necessarily making the game worse when patching unintended mechanics, sometimes it's absolutely needed, but it really sucks that developers today, in general, are so intent on not letting players "design" the game themselves but rather have control over how people play the game.
I definitely feel that something was lost when fighting games transitioned from individual version releases to a single version thats patched over time.
Hopefully in the future this could be addressed. Maybe "edition select" could return. Cheers
True. Every patch holds the risk of alienating a group of players who gained specific knowledge about the previous patch that made them feel accomplished. It’s always a bummer when a patch makes some player feel like they’re losing a major time investment
I feel Luke was an indication of the design intensions for SF6, in the sense of being rewarding for us sweaties while keeping the starting learning curve simple. Honestly, I love SFV, but it was a major learning point for Capcom an they learned the lesson now, I think.
the last 2 seasons gave me a lot of hope to what the future of street fighter might bring. i hope they can deliver something really, really fun right upfront, rather than coming into its own after a couple of years
This is an interesting topic and so well presented. Brian, your breakdown reminded me of another famous (infamous?) technique that may have been mentioned by other commenters below: the Korean backdash (KBD) in Tekken. I understand that it has long been a point of discussion as to whether the KBD should be removed from future iterations of the game due to being a relatively high execution technique in exchange for what on its face is a basic good of any fighting game: the ability to move backwards. (And to clarify, by summarizing the above, I don’t mean that I agree with scrapping KBD).
Thanks for all you do!
Nick
I should cite Core-A-Gaming’s treatment of this subject as my source for this idea linking KBD to emergent gameplay
An exemple of emergent gameplay in a fighting game I know (that's less competitive) is All Star Battle where, if you Heat Canceled (RC basically) a projectile into a taunt while the projectile was on top of a downed player, they would get hit and you could continue the combo. CyberConnect saw this and found the idea actually very interesting so, instead of fully patching it out, they changed it so that you were allowed to do it once per combo, getting rid of the infinite but adding a new combo route for a lot of characters.
Also rotation canceling which allowed you to cancel into more moves after specials. Helped some characters like Williamn Zeppeli who had limited combo options even with meter.
Didn't realize it was a JoJo game until later
Strive's PRC throw option select; if the throw lands, the roman cancel would fail to come out, if it got backdashed then the 66PRC would put you into position to just grab them again. This was a huge part of Potemkin's gameplan prior to it getting patched so you could roman cancel during a throw animation.
Totally agree with, and it's not limited to just Fighting games. Pretty much all major releases in all genres have been designed to death.
This is a byproduct of huge QA teams and focus testing having a say on design.
It also doesn't help that todays gamers are quick to declare something as broken and with social media, it gets back to the developer instantly.
Sadira's Jump Cancel in KI Season 1. The most polarizing thing of this was there was an "infinite" that was created from this but due to the combo structure of the game, you had to the break the one-time opportunity that the user enabled for the damage to count.
Best examples were CDJR, who used this to an incredible degree. While this was an unintended glitch, it was incredibly powerful because, at the time, Openers were technically unbreakable at the time and you needed to master a tiger knee motion to continually get this so it was prone to messing up. Also, this was only possible during Instinct (~15 seconds). This made Sadira arguably the best characters in the game at this time.
The tech still remains in, however the game mechanics were altered to allow breaking in this scenario for the character.
There was an old glitch with Snake in I want to say the beginning of Ultimate. It was a frame perfect tech but if you slide off the platform well using C4 it just sticks to snakes hand allowing for him to stick the C4 on anyone. This wasn't majorly gamebreaking since C4 can fall off fighters. It was a REALLY cool tech that was hard to master. It was a cool tech and shouldn't have been patched out
Babe wake up, new Brian_F video
Wife: Honey It’s Like 3am
Husband: Brian_F just mention Melee
Wife: R E A L S H I T
Tha outro is basically the reason I keep each version of games I come across until the end of the universe. Sometimes I prefer things an older version does so I want to have the option to switch back to that if I want to. One of the many reasons why I just don't invest much time into more modern , big releases these days.
If anyone were ever to ask me if there was game that made me quit because of it's many changes I would probably go first with Destiny 2.
Good video.
One technique I like is in the pre-Ultimate versions of DOA2, where holding back and pressing the freestep button rapidly basically allows you to KBD while blocking. I think it makes the game a lot more fast-paced than it already was originally.
Most of the community prefers 2U, but since the technique isn't in it due to replacing the freestep button with the typical sidestep input of down down/up up, I slightly prefer the original Dreamcast/PS2 version.
...and the Japanese Dreamcast version has rollback via Fightcade 😉
i think its more of a case of ease of patching, there are definitely emergent techniques that come up from time to time, but most of it is considered a "bug" that needs to be fixed today, while back then in many cases the cost of fixing was not worth it, so when something like this comes up today, it gets patched most likely.
One of my favorite examples of emergent gameplay that still exists in modern fighting games is backdash canceling in Tekken. It existed in Tekken 3 and Tag 1, and it was *strong*. So strong that the developers actively removed it in Tekken 4. Because of that (among other reasons), 4 is kind of the black sheep of the Tekken franchise. They brought it back in 5 and it's still the backbone of movement in that series to this day.
IIRC in Mortal Kombat X there was a time where you could infinitely refresh Grandmaster Sub-Zero’s Ice clone during block pressure. This, combined with the fact that when Sub spawns the ice clone he moves about a character length backwards, would not only be a safe pressure ender, but placed him at the best range to anti air a jump attempt. Sub Zero’s ice clone was also intangible, so if the opponent would try to contest Sub’s pressure using ice clone, many options would simply hit Sub but trade with ice clone, freezing them as if they were hit by ice ball guaranteeing a free 40% combo.
It was a truly cold hearted time to play Sub Zero back then. This was patched out to make him unable to refresh the clone and give it somewhat of a cool down. If he did attempt to use ice clone during its cool down, he would still go through the animation of spawning it, but would not spawn anything, making him have an ability that, if mistimed to the cool down, would leave you -30 or more on special cancel on hit or block.
Arguably a really disappointing way to deal with something that fit into Sub Zero’s theme of being a character centered around lock down.
I'm an MK player and MKX was one of the most busted games ever on launch but thankfully it ended up in a good place by the end and i would say is a perfect example of there being enough jank still in there to be emergent and juice can still be squeezed from it compared to *cough* MK11 *cough*
Subs ice clone nerf was warrented, the nerf didnt kill the character and it caused new ways to implement the clone that basically make him more bearable but still ultimately a corner monster, they didnt neuter him so it is the best possible outcome.
not from a fighting game, but my favorite example of emergent gameplay is from Dota 2. For a while Wraith King had an ability that gave hiim a passive crit chance, and his crits would one shot creeps. The ability could also be activated to summon skeletons for every creep killed with a crit. Normally buying critical hit items on a character that already had crits is really inefficient because oof how crit chances stacked, but if you bought a cheap crit item, tthe crits from the item would have the one-shot property of WK's normal crits. So, you could walk around one-shot killinig creeps earlier than any other hero in the game with a 2k gold item that can also pressure towers with skeletons, and fight with an inflated crit chance where most characters miss out on fighting power to focus on farming items. This was of course too much fun, so the ability got reworked to a guaranteed crit on a cooldown with no one-shot on creeps, and the skeletons were just 1 per every 2 creeps killed.
A similar phenomenon is true in RTS. Much of the balance in and love for Starcraft 1 derives from severe engine limitations. You can't select more than a dozen units at a time. You can't multi select buildings. Maximum of 3 camera hotkeys. AWFUL unit pathfinding.
These limitations meant cultivating APM as a resource was very important. With better APM you can overcome these limitations and make sure your Dragoons don't get stuck in a movement loop trying and failing to go up a ramp while also managing your economy.
Starcraft 1 with Starcraft 2 QoL features would probably make Terran the best faction.
That all being said, Starcraft 2 and all its modern sensibilities is much more fun to pick up and play.
Great vid. I think one nuance that gets lost is the distinction between unintended mechanics and emergent gameplay. Your Oro fastfall was an unintended mechanic, and the emergent gameplay is a new frontier of mixup potential. While unintended mechanics often create emergent gameplay, you can obtain emergent gameplay from purely developer-intended mechanics. Chess has tons of emergent gameplay, but nobody's doing any unintended maneuvers.
Dev meddling and rebalancing is a big factor too. If the game is unchanging, players will search deeper into the decision tree and find emergent gameplay. But if there's a constant stream of buffs, nerfs, and new game engines, then nobody bothers with all that research-and-development. Whatever new gameplay emerges, the foundation is likely to get shaken up and render it all moot.
EDIT: whoops just read your pinned post. I guess you've heard this all already lol
I think Them's Fightin' Herds gives the player a lot of freedom in terms of combo structure so I feel like that is an exception to this.
One example I like to think of for emergent gameplay is hitfalling in Rivals of Aether. It was a bug caused by hitstun setting your vertical speed to 0, meaning you could fast-fall out of it and get to the ground quicker, but because of how much Dan Fornace liked it and how much it opened up combo games for characters, it stayed as a feature ever since its discovery.
There was a Yoshimitsu combo in Tekken 7 where you could land a normal hit u/f 2 and the way the opponent's character would stagger meant that you could combo it into Flash...Making it better than the counter hit version as well as one of Yoshimitsu's highest damaging combos at the time (IIRC). I was so sad when they patched that out because I would love fishing for it even though it was a launcher that was -16 on block.
Melee jumping cancels shields
You can cancel your jump squat animation into an upsmash or an up B. Or you can jump and do an aerial. It opens up 3 out of shield options for the shielder. It's kind of cool to have only certain options available to do out of shield rather than everything
Gotta be honest, I prefer for PvP games to be tightly designed enough to NOT have much emergent gameplay. But I'm fine with having all the emergent gameplay in single-player or co-op PvE games.
I'll be going in-depth in a video on my channel or in my podcast, but I'll give the logical basis of my stance in two bullet points:
- In PvP, especially if it becomes important to the meta, emergent gameplay inevitably has negative effects on the experience of some portion of the playerbase who may not want/like it. And the only way to not have it forced upon them by opponents is to play the genre's historically lacking single-player content.
- In PvE, the same type of emergent gameplay only adds to the experience of those who choose to partake in them, while not being forced upon those who choose not to (or aren't aware) nor necessary to enjoy the game as devs intended.
Not a fighting game example but the Tony Hawk series of games has tons of emergent glitches that are still being found to this day that add tons of depth. They don't even focus on getting a high score which is the original intended goal. It's why I still love the games to this day because this always more to them.
One of my favorite emergent gameplay mechanics is in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, and it's based on the unique baroque mechanic. Every character has a way to do an unblockable using baroque, which does provide for a way for a lot of lower tier characters to open up people. It's a pretty neat meta-shifting bug, that I would put on par with CvS2 roll cancels or UMvC3 TAC infinites. But of course, the top 3 characters have some of the easiest baroque unblockaables in the game, which makes me love the game even more. The busted get busteder
18:00 as an FFXIV player I feel this so hard. Probably my favourite rotation in the history of the game was tornado kick monk, which was the result of a complete accident and gave an otherwise kind of simple job this super technical and busy rotation that felt super rewarding to pull off, but obviously it ended up being removed in the expansion afterwards. Although I guess monk is still pretty much Emergent gameplay: the job to this day since the theorycrafters for it are insane
I like emergent gameplay in general, but I'm not a fan of high skill floors often created by emergent gameplay, like in Melee. It usually hurts the playerbase of a game. I much prefer emergent gameplay in single player games.
"Usually hurts the playerbase of the game"
Quite literally in Melee's case. How many pros have ended their careers after repetitive strain injuries that required surgery again?
Physical media would get "patched" too, but it wasn't forced on people who already had the "bugged" version. These companies would release new carts with the fixes, so if you wanted the bugged version, you had to know what to look for on the cart to know if it was the updated edition or not. For example, my version of Melee still has the bug with Link's boomerang and hookshot that sends him to the edge of the top blast zone. Later editions of Melee don't have this bug.
Killer Instinct Season 2 opened up the game to more juggling combos especially with Cinder being released. One cool thing you could do in Season 2 is when you are being comboed by the opponent, you break the combo & pop instinct (KI's version of V-Trigger). Normally, the opponent would be knocked to the ground after a combo breaker. However, you could pop instinct right when the combo break happens & combo them. You were being heavily rewarded for breaking their combo. Nowadays, combo breakers just flip you out into a "neutral" state.
Insightful commentary. I think the theme seems to be that developers of especially big budget games try to remove emergent techniques where they discover them. In my own idle exploration of game dev, I far prefer to create games full of _systems_ that interact, deliberately allowing room for players to innovate and discover new techniques. You can always patch the truly grotesque stuff out. Oro fast fall should have stayed.
The only time I remember breaking a game was in computer class in elementary. The homies used to play this browser drag racing game. We'd all start off with low class cars and work our way up to the s class/sports cars and race for pink slips before class would end.
One day, I was in the lab testing on the test track, trying to get as fast as I could. Hitting the gas as fast as my little fingers could go, practicing shifting at just the right time to maximize my top speed. Testing at which time and gear I should pop that nitrous tank. When I accidentally forgot to refill my tank on a test run. And to my surprise, if you had an empty nos tank, used it at the start of the race as soon as that light went green, you hit top speed nearly instantly. Which was great, but your car would break if you couldn't shift gears fast enough.
I tried to finish the race a bunch of times, shifting to 6th gear as fast as I could, it wasn't good enough. So, I went back to the lab. I needed more time to test. I start my day, C class cars as always. First upgrade, a nitrous tank. I drain that mf. Go back on the track, hit the gas and shift to 6th gear afap. And I cross the finish line. I felt like a damn God. I'd put Mercury to shame.
Next I tested with nearly every class c and up car. It only worked on the class Cs. And if I remember correctly, the VW Jetta or Honda S2000 were the fastest.
I surprised the fuck outta everyone when I showed up to race them for their mclarens and Ferraris with my s2000.
There's another element at play here which is the sharing of tech on the Internet. In the days of old, you had your local arcade and if you were really good you'd spend money to travel. Maybe you had a copy of the B3 tape. Things took longer to discover (it seemed) because there were few people working on it and there was less sharing. Now with Twitter, if one person in the world finds something cool it'll be worldwide in a day or less. Devs may or may not patch it at this point, depending on intention. But a game can certainly feel less deep when it's "solved" faster than games in the past.
If ST was released today, how long would it take to find his command grab loop? Desk or Toolassisted would discover it in days or weeks and shortly after that you'd see pro grappler players like Itazan and Snake Eyes using it in tournament.
playing GunZ way back in my high school underclassman years was my first exposure to this variety of "crazy emergent movement tech that breaks your hands but looks cool af" ("k-style", "butterfly", etc.). it was so synonymous with the game that when a sequel came out a decade later, people were immediately turned off by its immediately noticeable lack all of this tech...and apparently people still play the original GunZ to this day on private servers (similar to people sticking with melee despite other smash games coming out later).
...
while modern competitive games almost universally have these things patched out quickly, it's nice to see that a lot of single player speedrunnable games tend to be less hasty in patching out such exploits and emergent tech. always really cool watching speedruns for games (especially ones i've played before), and seeing all the wild and ingenious ways people have figured out how to break games with movement tech or RNG manipulation or even directly altering game data and RAM.
While emergent gameplay is valuable to the fighting game experience, so does a healthy set of options and mechanics that allow the player to reach a level where anything is possible (if they're good enough). Because those designs create the existence of emergent gameplay. Consider how parrying drastically changes the gameplay direction in 3rd (even with the acknowledgement of option selects and kara). Consider how Alpha 3 and CVS2 provide multiple play systems to use along with exploits such as roll cancelling (as you mentioned). KOF, CVS2, and MVC2 offering multiple characters. MVC2 is definitely packed with exploits that could be seen as mechanics in their own right plus the whole character properties stuff. Then there's the whole utility of the assists that are probably still the best usage of them incomparison to probably every entry but Infinite. KOF has been revising Max Mode since 2k2.
To simplify. Yes, it's because they are more emergent, but the presence of emergent gameplay exists for a reason and that's because the games have systems that aren't limited by the developer which allow for players to improve In not only game knowledge but execution, strategy, and embrace some degenerate ass forms of setplay.
I don't know if those times will ever return because when I saw people discussing KOFXV and claiming that execution was a form a gatekeeping and fighting games, I died a little inside. Sorry for rambling.
I would argue that these options exist because emergent gameplay is a thing at all but I suck at arguing
@@bguy6778 I feel you fam, but consider this. Custom Combo was developed, then players figured out the best way to use it.
On an even deeper scale, from hit stun to recovery, all of these things are mechanics more or less that had to be developed first in order for players to take advantage of.
The strategies of chess exists because the rules of Chess exists.
It's possible for emergent gameplay to inspire new mechanics, but it's still due to the existence of previous mechanics/options. Can't roll cancel without roll.
Coming from a Smash (non-Melee) background, Ultimate doesn’t even have as much tech as Smash 4. Out of a dash, you can grab an item, jump in the opposite direction (which changes your momentum from the dash), and throw it in one motion. That, roll-boosted grab, dash walking, and this one obscure tech with Captain Falcon allowing him to land on a platform smoother are all the emergent tech I can think of in the game
Great video
I'm not sure if one would call this emergent gameplay but one thing I really enjoyed doing in BlazBlue Contiuum Shift Extend was trap people in a pseudo Infinite air grab loop with Relius Clover. When he caught you in an air grab he would slam you into the ground and then you bounce back up for a follow up attack but you could instead just keep grabbing but doing so would increase the window that you could tech out of his air grab. It was only in that version of the game as far as I remember since I remember trying it in Blazblue Chrono Phantasma and it no longer working since the air grab didn't bounce you as high.
Emergent game design sometimes happens on accident because the real trick in game design is to give players something they did not know they wanted and developers tend to give players only what they want.
Season 5 Honda being able to do Hands juggle in the corner without Vs2 was my fave buff ever, It made Honda's corner game bonkers. But it was clearly unintentional as it was nerfed immediately in the next patch.
GunZ: The Duel embodies this quite a lot as well. K-style, and to a lesser extent D-style, made this game into literally one of the best shooters I've ever played to this day. I wish that many things that really hurt it (Locust Plague, etc.) wouldn't have happened and it was still played as much as it was back in the day. Definitely will always be one of my favorite gaming memories going from a scrub rolling around with a rifle to being able to RHS and TBF without even thinking about it.
Even if there's an unintended glitch that changes gameplay, it's not really emergent unless it changes gameplay beyond its apparent immediate scope. So, in the street fighter example, you play to avoid your opponent jumping in, or you try to jump in while he avoids yours, because jump ins provide an easy combo, which is an emergent phenomenon, but executing the jump in combo itself is not emergent.
Also, I wouldn't classify basic combos as a glitch, anyway. The special cancels in Street Fighter II were a glitch, though. The glitch was related to the random chance your move could become a special move if I remember correctly.
I think a good example of modern emergent gameplay is the GGStrive overdrive startup cancel, roman cancelling an overdrive before the startup finishes and you essentially get an invincible pause button for only 1 bar of meter. (Pretty good with Faust) The devs explicitly stated they know about the exploit but they decided to let it rock to see how it plays out.
I also wanted to add in the aspect of "Comeback Mechanics" that was implemented and it became a split between some thought it added immersion to the game while others felt it was an easy cop out that exploited the game and made it lack different ways to explore more intuitive ways to win from behind.
A lot of the really older FGC fans disliked when they hit the scene like "Rage" mechanic in Tekken 6 or "X Factor" in MVC3 where I remember this same debate was a thing then. Funny enough Tekken 6 is now 15 years old and MVC3 is 11 yrs old now.
They were sayin stuff like. MVC3 is just 1 touch of death combo and XFactor is a scrubby come from behind tactic etc. But alot of the 09ers or just FGC fans on the other side of the spectrum up at the time knew it brought so much hype and just saw it as a fresh new element to the game to explore into with new insane combos and rushdown tactics which really put the whole Rushdown vs Turtle matchups on a bigger display than ever that help give the scene new life.
I'll even go WAAYY back where playing lame or turtle in StreetFighter Alpha 2 and more footsy play you were rewarded vs the next Alpha 3 game with more adrenaline rushdown nature with the implementation of "V-Isms" and guard break meters for blocking too much which mechanic wise did a whole 180 where some griped on that too and this was still the 90s
OVerwatch may be the ultimate example of a developer forcibly rolling back one design mistake after another. Originally they promised an experience where you could switch to any roll at any time to win the match, that was on the box. Then they instituted hero limit, so you couldn't have five Genjis and a Lucio, which was effectively impossible to balance. Then they implemented Roll Lock and the game isn't even remotely what it used to be. It's been forced down an extremely narrow path
I remember early on in the original console release of Pokken Tournament, there was an infinite block string with Dark Mewtwo where would send out a homing projectile, let it hit the opponent's block, and then boost it over and over again so the projectile never went away. When Dark Mewtwo boosts a move, it replaces some health with gray health, which is recoverable in many ways. But when an opponent blocks a special, the same thing happens, AND they lose some health, meaning Dark Mewtwo could start a round with a homing projectile, knock the opponent down to 1 health, use a recovering move, and then have the easiest match of their lives ahead of them
Brian seemed confident talking about Melee but less sure when it came to judging Ultimate.
This makes me remind of GunZ: The Duel. All those moves we used to do with the K-Style were a byproduct of a lot of bugs, it shaped the game as we used to know it, gave it depth and made it REALLY competitive, to the point of making the skill gap the higher i've ever known in comparison to every other games. GunZ was truly a masterpiece.
In SF4, by plinking Gen’s focus attack with a stance change button would create a parry like scenario, where the focus is immediately canceled into stance change, allowing Gen to hit some really cool things in regards to punishing normally safe moves. This is immensely difficult though.
Old games were explicitly designed too, but when methods emerged to circumvent that design, they couldn't immediately patch it out.
Two words, cinematic supers. Good vid Brian F!
What's awesome about MvC2 is it's a halfway moderately polished MUGEN
The glitches it had turned the game into MUGEN
Putting the emergent gameplay topic aside and purely reacting to the first tweet, new fighting games aren't simpler. They may be more lenient toward execution (360° and Dragon Punches are more difficult to pull off in SSF2T than in SFV for instance) but there are so many more game mechanics to learn now. From SF2 to SSF2 you didn't have a super bar. SSF2T added throw techs and the super bar was only used for the Super (hence the name, and no EX moves). The Super/Ex bar only gained new uses in the Alpha/Zero series (EX, Custom Combos...). SF3.3 added Parry. SFIV added Focus. And in SFV we have V-Skills, V-Triggers, V-Shift, V-Reversal (in addition to Supers/CA, Ex moves, Tech and parry for some characters). And that is without even mentioning the size of the roster which means more Match Ups to learn! So no, new Fighting Games are definitely not simpler.
The FGC could argue over if unclogging your toilet is considered a blockstring or a combo and honestly I couldn't ask for anything else
special mention to dantes style switch glitch in vanilla MVC3. Basically a certain combo of button inputs would let you perform an infinte using the style switch with his gunshots that would fill up the screen with so many effects that after multiple reps would crash the game. I was able to pull this off in an online match one time and hopefully crashed the other guys PS3 lol
Not a fighting game thing, but neither Rocket Jumping (Quake) or Strafe Jumping (Quake 2) were intended, but were elements of emergent gameplay which got incorporated in the sequels. Starcraft 2 had things like Marines animation cancelling to almost effectively move and fire at the same time. The developer had never expected Terran players to use supply depots to wall themselves off from opponents in the original Starcraft. But it defined the meta.
Melee+3rd strike= forever pushing forward!
That oro double jump tech reminds me of how double jump cancels work in smash. Characters with double jumps that dip (ness, mewtwo, etc) could cancel their jump with another jump and an aerial to do that aerial super close to the groud. It allows you to mash a lot of buttons on block and opened up a lot of combos and movement
brian learned oro fast fall because he knew it would leave him someday. sajam refused to learn sol infinite because he knew it would leave him someday. they are not the same.
I think a part of "explicit design" that does go towards the point that "games are simpler now" is that there are games designed to draw in casual players these days. This has been ongoing, so yes, games are simpler now and that is by design. Games now are designed in a way to streamline, simplify, and make the experience easier so they draw in a larger audience. Compare Fantasy Strike and 3rd Strike. One was designed with simplicity in mind and one wasn't and the design choices behind 3rd strike were the most prevalent back in the late 80s and 90s, and in the mid to late 2000s to now, the design choices are quite different.
I recently had a lot of fun breaking Jago in the original ki; combo that stuns, inescapable reset, one frame links, etc.
NRS nerfing Aquaman was done very poorly, instead of adjusting frame data and decreasing damage they changed the character completely.
Combos being a bug or an accident in SF2 is 100% a myth. It was an intended feature, which is unsurprising considering the influence from beat-em-ups, which have had combos since their inception.
Wavedashing was an accident, but kept in by the devs, meaning it isn't a bug.
In Project M 3.0 there was a bug with Bowser's down special where the ledge grab box extended a few pixels down, so if you spaced it just right (I had found a consistent setup on a few stages), you would teleport to the ledge instead of going into endlag. This led to a situation where you could down special someone at ledge, become immediately actionable by teleporting to ledge, and get them with your command grab while they were still in shield stun.
In 3.5 Bowser's size was reduced by 5%, making the technique no longer possible. This was intended to be a buff, as Bowser's hurtbox used to poke over standard platforms making him very easy to reverse-shark. And as far as I'm aware I was the only one using the tech anyway. I actually intentionally held the knowledge back and only used it in one tournament match so that the PMBR wouldn't find out and patch it out in 3.5, but I guess that ended up backfiring lol. (That isn't to say that the teleport part wasn't known about, but I afaik I'm the only one that found consistent setups for it)
I was waiting for the melee shoutout lmao
As a fighting game player, i care more about the game mechanics first and foremost before balance. MvC2 imo is the best fighting game simply because the mechanics although unintended in many ways, gave the game so much depth. Yes, its broken in a way that only a handful of characters are tournament viable. But all the developers had to do is to buff the lower tier characters and fix some game breaking bugs and things would be good. By contrast, games like SFV is designed to make characters balanced first and foremost, where match up is generally 5-5, 6-4 or 4-6. This is good no doubt, compared to SF4 where there are match ups that are literally 7-3 or 8-2. However, they did it not by character balancing, but by designing mechanics that lacks depth so the disparity between the characters become small.
Another thing about fighting game that matters much imo is skill ceiling. Things like fast fly, unfly, refly, guard break, guard cancel etc. are advance mechanics that requires skills to pull off. Players who spend more time practicing can see their growth in skills vs players who don't. That's why even after 20 years, we have players like Khaos rising above Jwong, Yipes and Sanford. The skill ceiling is so damn high that even among the top players there are visible gaps. SFV's design again by comparison, reduced the combo difficult to 3 frames and had one button anti air normals be as good as a command move srk. And mechanics like two different quick rise that are only 5f apart, making wakeup game more random and less consistent. All these are why seasoned fighting game players felt newer games are made "easy" to play. New players can easily replicate any combos done by pros with little practice and even in top level plays, comebacks and perfects are way more common. Older games simply had a better learning curve and journey. Hype moments were memorable and epic because they were extremely hard to pull off. Hypes in current gen of fighting game feels like an influencer type of hype, where everyone are trying to do the same shit but none feels unique.
Also man those closing statements make me wish USF4's edition select made more of an impact, it's something that would be welcome in any game to me honestly, I always play with it any time I go back to USF4.