Sajam infinite FGC content creation combo: "Skill Based Matchmaking" into "Fighting game aren't harder than other competitive games" into "Old games vs new games" into "fighting games need a good rollback netcode".
I think people should always be aware that these videos aren't Sajam sitting in front of a camera for 14 minutes, recording for the sole purpose of discussing discourse. It's just an excerpt from the stream from the time he goes over it. It's not an active effort to make the same video again and again(also new stuff does get said). All that said, I'm here for the pre-discussion edits. Next time should be Kazuya killing Heihachi and Kazuya remembering years of discourse that Heihachi represents
I prefer to think that these videos actually are Sajam sitting in front of a camera for 14 hours recording the same discussion over and over and it's just overlaid onto whatever started the discourse this time. That's optimal
8:10 im so glad he reads this comment cuz this is LITERALLY how everyone talks about fighting games vs other games for no reason fgs have a lot of depth but the basis of them is not hard to grapple with: go up to your opponent and punch them if anything that might be why everyone says "dude fgs are the hardest because i have to do dps, pressure, blockstrings, w/e" because the basis is so easy so it just goes over their head; the "hit your opponent to reduce their hp" part of fgs has resonated with them a long time ago so now they dont even think about that, they think about the complexities that comes from that design
Yeah even in FPS you literally cant damage the opponent without aim. A lot of new players struggle to kill even a stationary enemy because of recoil control. That's why so many casual FPS singleplayer games have boring zero recoil gameplay. And FPS games have a bunch of strategy on top of needing that mechanical skill.
It's also a factor that when you try to get someone new to play a fighting game, they never, *ever* want to use normal attacks, at least in my experience, and that's what causes so much of the complaints. There's something in the casual perspective of a fighting game that says "using special moves" should be the same level of frequency and ease of access as "left click to attack a minion" or "press trigger to shoot gun". Despite there being 6 fucking buttons for regular attacks in street fighter, you know what the first thing any new player wants to do is? It's either a fireball or a command grab. Obviously this isn't realistic for fighting games, but it's what I've noticed from my experience learning and teaching fighting games to people.
@@Tomoka51 i can see this happening theres so many people who talk about special moves like they arent *special* and im not surprised that a mindset like that is messing up newbies
@@Tomoka51 Calling them "Specials" is part of the problem. People are going to reflexively think they're inherintly better in all scenarios than 'Normals' with that name and without something to force them to recognise that using them all the time (like cooldowns) they're not going to think otherwise until a fair bit along the path. Unfortunately that will normally take them past the point of steam refund requestability but that's another discussion.
One year for Christmas, I played through Return of the Obra Dinn with my family. It was great fun, but one thing which stood out to me was how at first we would take turns holding the controller but pretty quickly they asked me to do it the whole time - they were still engaged in asking questions and trying to solve the mystery, but they found the challenge of navigating a space using 2-stick controls aggravating. In a game with no action, no timing requirements, no pressure! To someone who doesn't play video games, simply moving with FPS controls is difficult. They only reason people think fighting games are unusually hard is that they don't come into them with years of pre-existing knowledge about the way they control.
You're absolutely right. Gamers take for granted the amount of game literacy they walk into genres already having, which creates the false perception that they're inherently easy to understand. There's a reason why Lakitu was a thing in Mario 64, to explain the idea of a controllable camera following Mario, but today games feel very little need to acclimate people to a digital space in the same way. I've walked multiple non-gamers through various games and fighting games, relatively speaking, are on the easier side of the spectrum. But because the control scheme is so different from a regular game you're essentially starting at zero, and it can be a very humbling experience to spend an hour figuring out the controls. You just don't remember spending those same hours for more mainstream genres when you were a kid
I'll never forget all the people I've seen try halo for the first time and they just looked at the floor or ceiling 80% of the time. And they grew up playing videogames
Super glad someone mentioned this, even if it might get lost in here. Game literacy is like any other literacy. Musicians can manage playing multiple instruments b/c they understand the fundamentals of playing an instrument. It doesn't mean learning the instruments are easier. It just means you have a better perspective on how to approach it than someone who's never played ANY instrument.
One stick for moving and another for looking is not entirely human relatable. Humans generally don't sidestep in everyday life unless they're actively trying to focus on something nearby AKA _look it over,_ and vertical on the look stick is just for the head while horizontal is for turning the whole body, something strongly associated with _movement_ as it's natural to want to actually orient one's body to where one wants to go, especially visually. It's why DOOM engine games had the left and right arrows be for turning with sidestepping and vertical looking (where it existed, anyway) being on separate keys.
It's probably the best argument for this point IMO. In fact, the Sajam Slam style tournaments really only work and are fun to watch because it's fighting games, it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining if it was some other "eSports" game
i believe fighting games are def not as hard as evey other game but bro they have literal coaches who are nasty teaching them how to play. not all of us have that lol
@@nits95The coaches just streamline the process, there are a lot of resources out there for most games released today. The main difficulty is knowing what to look for. As soon as I find out what an “anti-air” is, I’m a couple of clicks away from finding my solution. Hell, half of these coaches also make content that you and I can watch for advice, difference being that it isn’t personalized.
Tbf, the slams contain people who not only have pro coaches but are also content DEMONS. Grinding is literally breakfast, lunch, and dinner for them, and since it's also their job, they get to do it without having to really worry about other things. I agree with Sajam but obvs there's nuances here.
@@EarthLordCJ i am top 40 in the world and across my main and my 3 alts, it took me 13,102 hours, i think more than any other game rl requires the most hard work to stay consistent, cs maybe is at the same level of mechanical demand, if i dont play for 3 days i play like absolute dog and i think a lot of the things people falsely say that fighting games require you to do in terms of working to improve are actually true of that game, it's kind of unfair
"fighting games are the hardest genre to get into" My brother in christ the ruthlessness of the children when I tried Valorant combined everything else that goes into a tac shooter had me THWUMPED (And yeah MOBAs are an obvious one) Ultimately, for the Nth time, competitive games are hard. Thats why they are also competitive But also getting into anything these days with the amount of content online is much easier and at the end of the day its about what can you / are you willing to invest time into to learn Thanks for joining the ted talk
"Genre hard" discourse is so stupid because legitimately the only reason people think MOBAs are easy for beginners is because MOBAs are popular right now. And in the same vein, people think fighting games are hard for beginners because fighting games are niche right now. If the popularity of these two genres were reversed, people would be talking about how fighting games are braindead easy and MOBAs are hypercompetitive ultrasweat games that are hostile to newcomers
I would absolutely be entertained with a video talking about how there are too many barriers to novels and that reading without illustrations is sweatlord privilege. Just to recommend S again.
No? Games like League are Easy for beginners because you play with your friend carrying you in a smurf agains terrible players until you get lv 30. in FGs you have to actively try and learn the game to have fun, I have a friend who plays 1k - 2k+ matches of league every years and he refuses to learn how to play, he also plays some fps and rocket league, all the games he never tries to learn and always gets carried by friends who play better, but even if he likes games like tekken he just played against bots and dropped online in an instant. there is a giant wall in FGs called not having a team, 2XKO may be able to turn FGs into a popular genre by introducing this concept for a large audience that is interested yeah FGs aren't harder if you want to learn, but different from other genres its impossible if you refuse to do so.
Mobas are absolutely easy to get into. There’s builds that you can just rely on. You can mimic a person’s gameplay strategy by watching and learning and feel fine. There’s no execution barrier immediately like what you get in a fighting game.
First time I played Dota2 was with my brother. I picked Enchantress (not a great beginner pick!) and fed a crap-ton because I didn’t realise towers and creeps hit really hard, and that you’re not actually supposed to be going after enemy heroes that hard early on. Oh, okay, so last-hitting enemies gives you hold and XP, but I’m playing a support character so I’m *not* supposed to be doing that? Wait, I’m supposed to get by on just a Wand and some regular old boots? The rest of the gold I get is for Wards and other consumables!? Wait, what do you mean Enchantress isn’t really a Support hero, the game *LITERALLY SAYS* she is right there!? People really do be forgetting that what is “simple” or “intuitive” to learn is really dependent on a number of factors that aren’t easily communicable. FGs being ‘hard’ to learn doesn’t mean other genres are inherently ‘easier’.
People have forgotten that you can be okay with just playing at a super basic level. If I learn how to swim, I don't have to be really good to enjoy it. I picked up BlazBlue because I thought it looked cool and Makoto seemed rad and I really liked her English VA. Now I love BlazBlue(don't play Makoto anymore), but I am just okay at it. I have very basic fundamental knowledge. But that's okay because I have a blast playing without being great. Personal enjoyment is unique to the player. You don't have to enjoy the game the same way everyone else does or play it the same way. Take your time finding what it is you actually enjoy about the game and it won't be hard to improve.
This is every blazblue player because the game is too big and too ass at top level to take seriously. Tekken and Smash are similar, they're so daunting from a competitive level that even some people with that hunger will silence it in the sheer face of the task. You have fun while being bad in street fighter, that's a real challenge. My personal opinion is it's impossible to be bad, to want to be good, and to be satisfied. I don't think that makes any sense
Which is kind of the point I keep rehashing whenever this point comes up. When someone says they're bad at fighting games because fighting games are so hard, it's just because it feels way worse to be bad at fighting games than it does in other genres. Dumping your social responsibility on your teammates yada yada, I don't even think that's the big one. The big one is that fighting games are stressful. Even if you're just mashing you're still dealing with the mental stack in some way, either paying attention to it(and SF6 really hammers home for new players that you got hit with that DI because you're just bad) or falling victim to it. Yeah, in other games you die to stuff you don't understand all the time but you get a moment to calm down, you have less decisions to make on a moment to moment basis, it's e easier to treat any round of a shooting game like a deathmatch where you just rush out there and do whatever. To the new player, getting hit by a jump-in or a big punish counter or a throw loop is like getting ganked in top lane on repeat so they get stressed out and _now_ is the part where they'd blame their jungler, _"if they had one!"_ . But crucially, they were already stressed out of their gourd before even getting that heated. It's also just that other games like shooters/MOBAs have a way of telling players who aren't good that they're at least somewhat good. They hide their flaws and accentuate their strengths. The people who think fighting games are harder mostly also suck in other games they're just less aware of it.
The reason people think so is because the difficult stuff in fighting games-the special moves-is singular, distinct actions presented as standard, and is also the fun, power fantasy stuff that makes playing a video game meaningful to many. People often don't come to kick ass in a competitive video game _just_ to kick ass; they do it to kick ass _in style._ And most people can at least do basic punching and kicking in real life albeit not very refinedly. Certainly not shoot ki fireballs from their palms or do helicopter split kicks across twenty feet. But those're what require the motions. And when beginners can't do the supposedly standard cool shit AND "git gud" at once, they tend to bow out, unlike with other genres where the cool stuff is far more accessible and thus won't jeopardize your ability to win a few early on. It's the same reason many hardcore FGers hate facing trap characters: they need to stop playing their own character the usual, appealing way in order to win. It's a sad reality, and only FGs or modes where complicated motions are generally a nonfactor in being flashy, like Smash or SF6's Modern controls, can be exceptions. It's not that special move motions complicate gitting gud; rather, they complicate _having fun._ Two different things, not necessarily at odds, but here they certainly can be. TL;DR winning at FGs isn't harder than winning at other genre types… UNLESS you understandably insist on scratching the cool-shit-I-could-never-hope-to-actually-do-that-makes-the-game-stand-out itch along the way because of how much harder THAT typically is in FGs.
Something funny is to see someone learn platformers. Watching a person scramble to figure out how to Mario/Donkey Kong is amazing and being there to give tips and watch their progress is beautiful.
I just realized that the people complaing how "fighting games are uniquely hard" are probably the same guys who gave a strategy game specialist journo shit for being bad at Cuphead (a bad game, BTW)
@@maduinargentus5878 cuphead isn't necessarily *bad* imo, but it's def hostile to the player, especially with how you can't get an actual ending on easy mode. that's just rude af, imo.
That last rant got me “I dont care how bed potato every other minute of the day you are but when it’s time to game with ME? You better lock the fuck in”
The point people were trying to make (and not communicating effectively) is that other games have simpler breakdowns in objectives. As in, the equivalent of killing a creep is blocking an attack, where as killing creeps is a measurable milestone to victory and blocking an attack can be anywhere from very good to gets you killed depending on the context. The building blocks to victory in a FG are more obscure, the lowest measured accomplishment is a round victory. In other games you have kills, objective captures, gold acquisition, etc. For someone to understand the basic building blocks of a FG, it requires thinking about the game system a little more intensively. This makes sense because the majority of the gameplay is contained in one match of a few rounds with 2 characters, so the game system has to be complex within that frame. But that just makes it less obvious what leads to victory (or even progress) and where you're faltering. I agree that FG's aren't inherently more difficult, but I do think it's a matter of mindset and how you approach a FG that most people have difficulty understanding. What bothers me is that Sajam often digs his heels in and refuses to try to understand the source of criticism and instead dunks on people for being bad at explaining what their frustration is (which makes sense bc the source of their frustration itself is difficult to understand, lol)
You are not gonna sit here and tell me u genuinely believe that mobas where the map consists of several different objectives down each lane, the final objective at the enemy base, creeps to farm, jungle to farm, and 100 different items to buy is less complex than ‘there’s you’re opponent you both have a health bar, get theirs to zero before yours, good luck!’
@@oneunripemango1858 I have played all of a handful of hours of MOBA's. None of my friends like to play. I do, however, play fighting games every week on Wednesdays with my buddies. We'll be playing CvS2 tonight on fightcade, actually. You on the other hand seem to have only spent a handful of hours reading English text because you did not at all understand the point I was making. The point being that when a task can be broken down into simpler parts of that greater task, it is more approachable. That's literally it. Read my comment again and then tell me the part where I said MOBA's are less complex than FG's, cuz I don't see it written anywhere in there.
@@KuzuTomokithe options are you’re a moba player talking about fighting games despite not knowing them, or you’re a fighting game player arguing about how your toys are cooler and require more skill than other peoples toys. I picked the one that was less sad.
@@KuzuTomokiif u agree that the games aren’t actually harder and it’s just a perception and mindset issue then… What is your issue with pointing that out instead of placating people who are saying the games are just to hard when they literally aren’t? If people said ‘the games don’t have great onboarding tools and need to be a complete feature rich product to attract the mass market’ sajam would agree because he’s been saying that shit for over a decade. But they’re not saying that they’re saying the games aren’t as popular because they’re just to hard and that’s literally not true
after learning how to somewhat competently play league, picking up fighting games was a ridiculously easy task and i wondered to myself why i was convinced that they would be impossible. there are so many fewer moving parts to keep track of while playing a fighting game when compared to any other genre where you have to collect and manage resources while navigating an entire map. fighting games are hard, but they’re no harder to pick up than other genres once you get over the initial hurdle of learning how to control your character and the basic rules of engagement (mostly frame data).
Fighting games are WAY easier to pick up than league. It's just that the playerbase is small and so people get matched against high rank players which makes it feel hard. If you started league for the first time and had to fight plat players you would want to unalive there too.
@@NihongoWakannai yeah the FGC does have a playerbase issue for sure especially in smaller regions. for the people who struggle with that, the only options are really to find a locals and/or some friends to play with (either irl or on discord), or to just pick a popular fg like sf6 and try your luck there.
@eebbaa5560 because the fighting games that have come out recently the ones you can easily buy are a lot easier to get into than what is typical. And they get dragged through the mud for it too.
The thing ive come to realize over the years is that, rather than fighting games being harder to be good at than ither games, its a lot harder to have fun when youre bad at them. There's a reason Tekken and Smash are so popular among even non fighting game players, and its because theyre fun to be bad at, and similar goes for these competitive team games like rocket league, deadlock, or league of kegends. I was omega ass at LoL for ages but i played with my friends and I could have fun deleting people with Garen ult or cheesing people with blitzcrank. I may not have had the micro skill to pilot a hard champ like katarina and win twamfights by myself, but i could kill minions, and smack towers and make decent contributions to the objectives that way. Conversely my time in fighting games was me trying six times over just as many years trying to get into fighting games and not having any fun cause i couldnt even throw a fireball and my opponents were carrying me corner to corner and back again. It took finally finding this very channel and making a couple friends that actually wanted to play with me before i could reach the level of familiarity and understanding to start actually having fun.
Random thing I'll always remember is when a FGC streamer made a video making fun of some game journalists who were mashing in SFV at a preview event. Then he did a stream where he played Overwatch for the first time and every time he got shot at it seemed like he reflexively pressed every button on his keyboard and ran into the wall.
I agree like 70% of the way with Sajam, but I think FGs have a much bigger buy in because if you ever played halo or cod or battlefield or counter strike or valorant or pubg or fortnite or apex legends you’ve learned the skills of how to interact with shooter games. Fighting games’s intrinsic mechanics like motion inputs, holding back to block and pressing up to jump are rare to non-present in any other genres. I’m not booting up a CSGO game and hitting a quarter circle to reload my pistol; it’s just not a skill that the gamer populace is ever taught. Are these impossible hurdles to overcome? No, not really, but to pretend they don’t exist is doing the newcomers a disservice.
One thing that stands out to me after playing fighting games versus other games is that fighting games have next to no downtime mid match. Dying in an FPS or MOBA, you get get put in timeout for a bit where you both can do nothing and don't need to think about the game. You can more easily think "what did I do wrong? What do I do next?" For 10-15 seconds. Fighting games, even getting comboed, you need to be focused on if the combo drops and respond. It's hard to have time in the moment to silence the internal screaming of "AHHHHHH, what do I do? What do I do?!". It feels like you need to go back to that moment after the match to figure out both what you did wrong (if anything) and what you should have done. I think the more constant action of fighting game matches require players to do 'homework' outside of the match sooner than other game types.
fighting games are kinda the only premium/paid multiplayer genre that exists Basically everything that isn't COD (or I guess Splatoon) is F2P which drastically lowers the barrier of entry by a lot
Yeah for sure, especially with the dumb DLC. People look at a store page like "ok so I have to pay $60 and then another $60 to actually get all the characters? And I might not even like the game? No thanks"
@@Vsolid What universe are YOU living in that you have somehow forgotten that the vast majority of MMOs, Battle Royales, MOBAs, and other such multiplayer-centric live service games of the past 10 years are free to play?
@@Vsolid name me one paid multiplayer centric, competitive focused game releases in the last 3-4 years, outside COD and I suppose Splatoon, that can only be purchased
@@NihongoWakannai Real. Highlights how FGs are STILL behind contemporary genres even in simple things like letting you at least use the DLC characters in training mode, something even the most predatory of MOBAs let you do. Even worse in Bamco games which periodically end up having hilariously overtuned DLC characters, or more recently, their ghost function in Tekken where you can't use even the ghost of a character you don't own.
I think part of it is that FGs are a "genre isolate"; i.e. there's not much cross-genre influence between them and wider gaming world. This means that, as a newcomer to fighting games, you're going to have more to learn than, say, if you pick up an FPS for the first time with a background in other kinds of actions games. Combine that with the fact FGs are a pretty niche genre to in the first place, and yeah, that _does_ present barrier to entry that other types of games don't have. But note that this has nothing to do with the games themselves being inherently more complex and everything to do with their awkward place within gaming culture.
It's been said before but the favorite Sajam video I'm waiting on is when 2KXO comes out and we get a video titled "Yes, old fighting games did indeed have mixups". We all know it's coming.
Honestly it all comes back to a 1v1 environment vs a team environment. Team games SEEM easier to learn cause you can play with friends who already know the game on the same side as you and they can help to pick up your slack in the game while giving you tips in real time. Compare that to a 1v1 game where if you're playing with a friend who knows the game they're either just talking to you and giving you pointers while watching you stream over discord, or they're playing against you. The other part of it is that in a team game you can always blame your teammates when you make a mistake if you have a bad attitude and aren't actively seeking to improve. In a 1v1 game, there's no outside forces or variables to blame when you lose a match.
yep, tried deadlock today with a friend, I did nothing and won since he carried me, I can just play more matches with him and have some fun until I learn how to game works, for FGs it would like you described. with team games I have 0 need to active learn about the game, with FGs I have to seek guides and train.
The key to “getting good” at challenging games starts with you believing that you can do it. As simple as it sounds, it revolutionized how I approach harder games.
3:51 That's not an argument about why fighting games are hard to get into though. It's an argument about the value proposition of these games. Dota, LoL, TFT, CS and many others are free to play. Fighting games still cling on AAA pricing (for the big names at least), so they absolutely need single player content if that's the way they want to monetize it. There's no better and more recent example of that than Concord. The game was one of the biggest flops in the entire industry, and that's on a genre that's super popular like hero shooter. Of course, there were many factors that worked against that game, but a price tag for an exclusively multiplayer experience was definitely high on the list. Not even Call of Duty could get away with it. It's a huge name and 90% of the playerbase is there for the multiplayer, but to this date only Black Ops 4 made away with the campaign mode. Fighting games either need single player content OR a lower price tag if they're going to be multiplayer only.
It always boils down to two things for me when it comes to this discussion: 1. FGs being single player and 2. Familiarity/time spent playing other genres. First one is obvious, even if you suck ass at a FPS, you can always use your teammates as a crutch. "Yea, I might have died more times than there were rounds in the match, but my team is the one to blame for the loss." A match in league, where every lane played perfectly except for the Garen that fed Nasus the first 5 minutes of the match, you would find the Garen complain the most how everyone else was the problem. Having teammates blinds you from seeing just how trash you are, but in FGs, if you get your ass beat, it is on you. But secondly and most importantly, many people just have grown up with other genres. As a bulgarian, I was pretty much born with CS in my vains. I may not be the greatest FPS player, but I can pick any FPS game and start playing at a decent level almost immediatly due to me having played them all my life. Same with Moba games, I have been playing league on and off ever since Jinx released. I may not know what items to build at every situation, but I can play at a decent enough level due to the time I have spent in the game itself. Not to mention how a lot of the time with the mainstream genre of games, you often times play with friends, so that first barrier of entry seems lighter to cross, because you are just fucking around with your friends whilst also getting better in the meantime, while FG is a solo game that although not inherently harder, does miss out on that "blinding" factor that playing with friends can give you at the start. I have been playing FGs casually every since I was a kid in an arcade. I never found the montion imput for a hadouken difficult, because I was doing that move before I was even 10, but now when I try to teach a friend how to do it, you would think that a quarter circle imput is rocket science. In general it isn't hard, but they lack the muscle memory/expirience someone who has been playing for most their life have.
As a beginner in fighting games, i find the issue is in resources. I tried to play league of legends for the first time like a 2-ish years ago, never played mobas. and i managed to find guides that roughly explain how game works and explained me what i need to focus on first. i still got destroyed by Silver players when i unlocked ranked, but i had rough understanding what is going on and ways to improve. But in fighting games, all guides are made for fighting players. Beginner guides are made either character specific or for people that transition from other games. and nobody really teaches how to begin to being a beginner. what is important to learn first? why my combos don't work? how to read Input history? i spend 9 hours in MK11 tutorial, never beat it, played 1 online match, and never touched it again. played SF6 a bit, modern controls help a lot, it's probably why it's most popular FG currently, modern controls and World tour making onboard experience a lot better. Tekken 8 while being 2nd most popular, for some reason feels like have no new players, and i get destroyed by people with 1500 prowess, so i can't even reach Fighter rank.
I started playing SF6 as my first fighting game because of the slam, and I 100% agree that people forget what it is like to learn an entirely new game. Initially I was confused how I was supposed to learn what all these characters do, then I realized I could explain almost every spell in LoL if you asked me. I just forgot what it's like since I didn't have to learn the moves of a bunch of characters at once since 2015
The only thing I did find weird is that unranked matches seemingly aren't seeded by skill levels. I personally didn't mind and hopped into ranked after getting beat up and learning some more stuff, but I can definitely see why some people would dislike that. Whereas LoL normals still use skill based matchmaking, so new players generally play against other entirely new players
@@xn--b49athis is very true. Most FGs have atrociously bad skillmatching online, as soon as you win a couple of matches you start going against the 1000 hour sweaties.
@@phantomfenrir4976 that's the one and only reason fighting games feel hard, because you're matched against people way too good at the game. Everyone competitive game would suck if that were the case.
@@xn--b49a sf6 absolutely has skill based matchmaking in casuals. You just have to play a few people for it to settle. Its much quicker and finding suitable skill levels than ranked as well. Look at peoples stats. Bost people have about 50% win rate in casual matches. people get thrown off because they play like 5 people and complain its random but its not, Its just finding you skill level by matching you against diff skill people. Its a hidden MMR and has nothing to do with your actual rank.
I want to mention Celeste, a very simple game where all you do is jump, dash, and wall climb. That's the core mechanics of the game, but it's one of the most challenging games I've ever played, I didn't complete it, but I did beat the game and finished some of the extra levels. I'd say that Celeste is a very complex game that requires about as much execution as a fighting game, if not more in some cases.
Sure but your average gamer probably understands how to move and jump in a 2d environment in the way Celeste does it from their previous gaming experiences but it’s not like you boot up games that aren’t fighting games that ask you to do quarter circles
I'd reel you back on the harder execution bit, I'm like 2/3rds through Farewell and I ain't seen nothing like an Ed desync, let alone a Kouma bnb in MBTL.
@@lagspike7763 Different people have different skillsets. I can't play Fromsoft games for the life of me (okay I really only played Sekiro and got hardstuck a few hours in), my buddy is a huge fan and has completed their whole library to my knowledge. But I've beaten Celeste (IIRC every level except Farewell), and he claims he's bad at platformers. Either way, fighting games are fundamentally multiplayer (unless you're into speedrunning arcade modes or something), so the difficulty is gonna depend on your opponents. Chess is a ridiculously difficult game when played by grandmasters, but there are definitely people you can beat at it even if you've just learned the rules. I guess you could complain about control schemes, but SF6 has modern and 2xko is doing its thing too, so there's clearly at least some movement towards rendering them unnecessary.
"In these other games you're also fucking bad, you just don't know it." I think this is what it boils down to. In a fighting game there are no teammates, there's no objectives, there's no items, there's no map macro. It's just you and your opponent and when you lose you know it's because you fucked up, people lose in other games all the time not knowing why and so they assume it wasn't their mistake, it's a lot harder to push that responsibility off when it's just you, your opponent, and a can full of whoop ass.
People say this, but who honestly enjoys blaming their teammates? That's not a fun time. Playing a 1v1 game where you know your wins and losses are something you did rather than have 40 minutes of your life wasted by teammates is way better.
@@NihongoWakannai it's not really about it being fun or even being a conscious decision people are making. In a game of league of legends you will usually have 20 or 30 minutes of gameplay with dozens of interactions per minute that all compound to influence the outcome of the game. Most players are not and will never be aware of even half of the minor interactions that they are doing wrong that cause their losses. In a fighting game if you don't know how to deal with your opponent jumping at you you get to sit there and watch them jump at you and hit you over and over again til you're dead. Not anti airing like that can be compared to something like walking into your lane and never last hitting minions. It's a hugely impactful gameplay interaction that is causing the player to lose, but getting your face kicked in til you're dead is a lot more immediate and visible feedback than falling behind in items causing you to lose lane and not do well in teamfights.
@@bipolarprobe yeah but that's what makes fighting games more fun to improve at for me. Mobas have so many small hard to notice things it can feel like a complete mystery on how to improve. When playing fighting games, an opponent will find a weakness of yours and exploit it in such an obvious way that you're like "damn, I obviously have to fix that now" It makes fighting games feel much easier than mobas for that reason. Especially with modern games like SF6 which show frame data in the lab, you can figure a lot of stuff out yourself without any guides. Whereas improving at mobas basically requires just looking at guides 24/7 especially with the ever changing meta, even when you're just bronze.
@@NihongoWakannai Yeah I agree. The feedback loop of losing, labbing, winning, repeat is really fun and is a big part of the appeal of fighting games. I'm more trying to point out that for some people that feedback feels harsh and unpleasant and is likely what they are conflating with the game being "too hard" to improve at. I actually think it's funny that people bring up mobas in the conversation about which genre is easier to learn because I think mobas are way harder to learn on average than fighting games, but plenty of people express feeling the exact opposite, so I'm trying to consider why they might feel that way.
I've always said that there's little to no overlap between fighting games and other genres compared to like RPGs or Shooters who have an overlap of moving your character and camera simultaneously, which is not natural no matter how many gamers like to think so. Because of this, fighting games *feel* harder, even though they're really not because it *feels* like you never played a video game before. I've taught many friends how to play fighting games and I always have to remind them that they are improving, even if they're not winning. That they are getting better and learning more despite their gameplay looking "trash" compared to top level players. I think the Sajam Slam series is a really good way to *show* non fighting game players what fighting games *really* look like at all levels of play.
Its moreso because the "introductory" genre of beat em ups dissapeared (mostly) as the arcade era ended, so the control schemes and what is considered as "winning" (slowly whittling down the bosses health ) doesnt apply in a similar way in most other genres
@@Yeet-ing In my experiences, it's one of the most common problems for newer players as they start developing a better understanding of the game. "I'm not hitting this mix." "I'm dropping this combo." "I can't tech a throw to save my life." That's fine dude, I do that shit all the time, it's just not noticeable to them because they don't know what's happening in my head.
I think the problem, very simply, is that the fighting game learning experience is lonely. There is nobody to share the in-the-moment experience with. There's no comradery. "Just play with a friend" that is still not sharing the experience. One of you is winning and the other person is losing. And usually the person who's new is losing. One of the reasons why the Slam is so good at helping the streamers learn is that they're in a team. You get cheered for. You cheer for others. You feel bad for losing together. Shoutout to 2xko :) I truly don't think the Slam would do as well if it was like, 16 players with their own individual coaches.
I think my only issue with the Crofts tweet is the use of the word "Uniquely". After getting good at a number of different types of games I think the difficulty is about the same. But I think the ways in which they're difficult offer unique challenges when learning them that do make them pretty unique.
He used uniquely 100% accurately, it's just a usage you might not be used to. The uniquely in this case is referring to how noteworthy it is in that regard, not that it's the exact same skills. All these different genres are similar in that they require different skills that take a lot of time to learn, which is the same as fighting games.
I think a lot of this discussion is meaningless, because we're talking about so many concepts rolled up together at once. Is basic competence in fighting games knowing how to jump, push buttons and do motion inputs? Or does it also include basic knowledge of all your match-ups? Does basic competence in Siege mean knowing how to aim and shoot, and what your ability does, or does it also include basic strats for each level? Does advanced skill in any game mean being able to compete competitively? Is that even meaningful if the game has a good matchmaking system where you're always playing against people who can compete about as well as you anyway?
I think what makes fighting games uniquely hard for people is the simple fact that it's a completely different genre they are usually not familiar with to any large degree whereas with other games there's much higher chance that they've played a somewhat similar game in the past that they can build upon. In Counter Strike, you don't usually have to teach your friend how to look around with the mouse without getting dizzy and how to move with WASD without bumping into walls and obstacles like a toddler. To a lot of people it seems like a silly, convoluted scenario that someone could struggle with the controls so. Chances are rather high that they've played a game before with the first person view and they know how to do basic movement. They will gloss over basic movement as "easy" and "intuitive" and will not factor it in at all when talking about the difficulty. But it's definitely an obstacle for an actually brand new player - anyone who watched their girlfriend struggle with this will tell you so. Fighting games are the same, except they speak a different language so all those hours in Counter Strike or Starcraft or League of Legends or Skyrim or Palworld or Fortnite or whatever else are mostly irrelevant. A brand new player is going to struggle even with basic movement. Even though we might think there's nothing more intuitive than a 2D game where you press right to go right and press left to go left and press up to jump, they will struggle. They will think the floor is lava and jump around like a rabbit.
i do think there's something to be said about genre familiarity. like if you know how to move and shoot in a shooter you have a comfortable place to start in any shooter game, even extremely weird ones with lots of knowledge checks like rainbow six siege or hunt showdown. you probably wont understand how you died but youve already got the skill floor of moving around and defending yourself down, you can work with that jumping into a fighting game having never played one before means you dont have that skill floor to fall back on. you dont know how to move, you dont know how to hurt people on purpose, and you definitely dont know how to deal with a blanka ball. without that foundational knowledge it can be very frustrating and i think that's the word people mean when they said fighting games are uniquley hard, theyre just uniquely frustrated because theyre used to having some kind of fundamentals to work with. strategy games like starcraft tend to have this problem as well, with people having no earthly idea how to even move their units let alone make new ones. people tend to bounce off things unless theyre really ready to commit and thats something really cool about the slams. participants are commiting to learning just by participating and are putting their best foot forward to learn this weird new thing theyve never tried. having a coach definitely helps but i think it's way more important that they circumstances demand that they put some effort in and really try with some gentle social pressure from being on a team. it's kind of perfect. and any brand new fighting game player who participates in a slam will have that foundational knowledge to being to another fighting game. that's really cool!
I gotta note how impressive it is the amount of time you've put and are putting into games that aren't FGs, yet are still this amazing of an FG personality. I have a feeling you could commentate your opinions on pretty much any other game and still be truth nuking every other statement.
If I'm bad at a shooter, at least my gun can shoot all of its bullets. If I'm bad at a racing game, at least my car can get to top speed. If I'm bad at a fighting game, the cool things I want to do with my cool character can't happen. Games are generally about doing the cool things the game advertises, and the game is fun if those cool things happen, even if I'm doing the bare minimum. Being bad at a fighting game means there aren't any cool things in the game. It doesn't matter if you use facts and logic to tell me I'm bad at Guitar Hero, because the power fantasy of playing Guitar Hero is fun regardless.
If I’m bad at a fighter at least my character can walk around and throw punches, if I’m bad at a shooter I walk around a corner get instantly one shot by a person who’s been playing since I was 6 and have to sit out for the next 5 minutes or so till the next round starts. At least fighting games ur never literally just sitting there watching other people play instead of u.
its true that in fighting games a lot of the fun is less accessible though, although if you are fighting an equally skilled opponent it should still be fun assuming basic understanding of the game
I suspect one of the driving reasons behind this continuing to come up is how quickly fighting games will show you you suck if you suck. Like, even if you're losing the whole game in a strategy game, you might at least feel like you're executing your gameplan, you're doing your thing, you're getting production done, whatever, so even if you lose you might fool yourself into thinking you were doing well up until then. If you get cornered and stomped and it's over in 20 seconds gg shake my hand, it's easy to walk away with that immediate "wow this is hard and sucks" reaction. You didn't accomplish anything during the match to assuage that feeling. Even if you're dying a lot in an FPS like, say, Overwatch, as long as you get one kill here or there or push the cart or do *something* you might feel like you're getting better at it or at least like you contribute, even if you're basically dead weight in reality. Similar to that "why do I lose to scrubs" mentality where living longer against the better player felt good even though living longer was only a result of your opponent not choosing to go HAM and kill you immediately.
First of all, I love all of this kind of videos from you. Second, from my perspective, I agree that fighting games are not inherently more difficult, but for me fightings are like a chore sometimes, that you don't usually needs to do with other games. Learning combos, tech, checking some frame data, asking for advice versus some hard matchup.... As a personal example with a background in SFV and LoL: I'm learning Dota 2 a bit right now, and I only watched a few 5 min video series about the main things in the game and I can jump into the real matches while learning at the same time I spend hours playing. If I just jump into a fighting game I can do somewhat fine if I had some experience (like SFV) and I'm learning Guilty Gear Strive right now, but as I said, when I need to go to the training to learn some combos I feel I'm doing a chore, because you can't learn that on the fly in a real match. Same for specific character tech for example For me that's the worse about fighting games, I have to push myself doing chores that are very repetitive to improve in the game
I just went through this with a friend because he was in a position where he wanted to try fighting games and about 17 minutes in decided it was too hard so he refunded the game despite me holding his hand through it. He didn't understand the value in getting good at a fighting game (He chose BBCF). His excuse was that he couldn't see himself understanding what to do so I asked him what was so different about league (because he also just picked that up) and his response was, yeah but we're on the same team. Money aside, it was easier for him to not be accountable in league than in BBCF and that progression was not obvious or didn't feel good. Other than league he doesn't play any competitive games without friends and is often the worst player on the team but he's hanging out with us so he's having fun learning. Additionally, it's easier to sell him a game that doesn't cost money. League, Omega Strikers, Valorant, etc. I'll save this comment to copy/paste it next year when you make this video again
I do think it can be more confusing to learn fighting games from scratch since you have to learn many concepts and terms. Frame data, inputs, nomenclature, character movesets and combos to at least get you started. I think that once you have the basics fighting games are quite engaging in the sense that you will encounter issues that you can probably figure out or work around on your own with the tools that you have. But starting from scratch can be daunting
@@Vsolid and that's fair, Tarkov is a game that requires a lot of game knowledge. It's not a question about which is more difficult because if you are passionate enough eventually you will learn any game as well as if you don't vibe with something it will feel like a drag to try and learn it. What I meant is that fighting games are a genre of their own and not a very big one at that (they might sell millions but not that many people actually play fighting games). With a game like Tarkov you most likely transferred some knowledge or skills from a number of other shooter games that are way more popular. Learning both games from absolute zero (you've never played a game like it in your life) is equally as hard but most "gamers" tend to have a background in genres like shooting games, action games, some sport games, etc so usually picking up a new one tends to be less challenging.
fighting games rely much more on mechanical skill than most other genres, so you can watch as many videos as you want on fighting games as a noob none of those will help you do a combo unless you're watching a guide while sitting in the training mode doing what the guide tells you (not to mention how a lot of guides for fighting games are just worse in my experience then for say mobas, but i guess the nature of game is what causes this). For other genres if you just watch a ton of content of the game you'll have way more practical knowledge than with fighting games, for example with mobas you'll know loosly what to build, what your positioning should look like etc.
I agree to everything but to play some devils advocate. What makes some games seem more accessible "easy" is because there is a choice to play in an easier way that makes you feel useful. League - play malphite hit ult on this person, valorant - play sage and wall this every round, tft - pick up every sugarcraft unit. Now while these aren't optimal play styles they make it seem easier. Now fighting games have gotten better at this with integration of modern controls, and pulse fuse. But at the end of the day learning the game SYSTEM is very hard and will take years to master.
the biggest difference ive noticed is not just if its a team game or not but more specifically if the more experienced friend can actively help you. games like tf2/ow2 mean a friend is usually able to actively help with damage or some form of direct supporting ability or in the case of fighting games platform fighters doubles formats mean two friends can muck around and the more experienced one is able to quickly intervene at any given time whereas even something like 2xko is relatively limited to assists, tags, and bursts
Crofts is spitting about TFT being incomprehensible. I tried learning that for a month straight and just couldn't get into it. It's a game made for people who jerk it to excel spreadsheets.
I have my theory and what you was describing at like 1:45 is really good examples of it. Theory is, FGs (and rts) lack timely feedback, in other games you either can judge by yourself why you died, either just raw mechanical skill, using kill cam, checking enemy items\stats, abilities (both in league or dota you can check it while you playing), spectating or asking a teammate. But in FGs, when you getting beaten by something and you have no idea frames\hitboxes on that move and how to deal with it, you can't just check it mid match. If someone doesn't understand frame data yet, they don't have knowledge that they can't attack after certain moves and there is no feedback besides "you get hit even after you block it". There is no death recap, no kill and nobody to tell you what is the problem. So you have to stop playing, go to youtube to learn FGs basic knowledge, then go to training against one specific character and check how you could beat that move. And the more you know how your specific game works (universal mechanics) more answers you will find. And when you do all that, you may not find that same character again for some time, or other opponent may not use that specific move. Repeating that for multiple characters will take a lot of time you could spent on playing other people.
I personally think the reason that people see them as harder, is because the controller is an active part of how the game functions, and doesnt just melt into your hands. It requires active thinking to do motion inputs.
You talking about updates to fighting games not being as frequent as other games, I've seriously been itching for another costume to buy for a year and Capcom won't fucking give it to me. Coming from SFV it's so bizarre, when they added outfits all the time and gave so many for free.
Because SFV was done in such a way that the costume were very much easier to make. Not only that, but some of theses costumes there were clearly hastily cobbled together on the cheap. Compare that to the level of detail on SF6 costume, with stuff like Zangief glasses getting fogged when he blow steam from his nose. SF5 costumes would be more comparable to the avatar costumes in SF6 (which do get updated a bit more frequently) It's a shame it take that long to get more stuff, but it's explainable.
It's all marketing and popularity I think. When League was new I remember people talking about thsi shit being too complicated, but it got enough marketing that it didn't matter. Strive gets a lot of people but by most standards strive is real hard with a lot of incomprehensible mechanics to the outside observer - people play it because it's popular and it creates a virtuous cycle. At some point when there's a critical mass of people playing a competitive game, it crosses over into "easy" territory even when they all have similarly heavy conceptual load.
Hopping in on the question asked around 4:20 (I know it's rhetorical but still). For games like league I feel like the "single player content" is stuff like RTS campaigns or ARPGs like Diablo. Games like that provide ego safe, fun spaces to learn the very basics of how to play isometric click to move games. When I first started trying to play fighting games they at a base level felt a lot different to control from what I had experience with. I didn't have that core muscle memory for picking one up like I would XYZ new shooter or moba on the market. I think most people who play games got out of the "how do I even move my character phase" when they were young for genres like shooters or mobas, and are frustrated when they regress to that step trying out fighting games. This is where stuff like world tour, or games like Slave Zero X, River City Girls, or Streets of Rage 4 slot in to on boarding people.
I really felt like I was missing something in my life recently, I'm glad sajam got to do his yearly learning fighting games is not inherently more difficult than other competitive games video
@sajam as soon as you compared it to learning siege, my brain clicked. It was so hard learning and teaching that game(especially during utility meta). I'm still not even good and I have 1700 hrs in it. I just have a lot of knowledge, like identifying every operator based on the sound of their gun or gadget.
I really just think it is that fighting games are very unique and require a unique skill set. You really need to play fighting games to get better at fighting games. However, there are translatable skills between FPS and TPS, between RTS and MOBAs, between different action games. It makes it feel more difficult because you're developing a new skillset, meanwhile nearly everyone has played an FPS or some kind of MOBA/Strategy game before.
People who say that fighting games are harder than other genres apparently forget when they were a kid and they were just mashing and having fun. It may be "hard" to get good at it but you can step into a fighting game and roll the controller on your face and have fun. I doubt mashing works as well in shooters or Dota or anything else.
Fighting games are indeed more difficult to approach in a certain way. There are two distinct categories in the concept of difficulty - complexity (how much you need to know and how you make decisions) and execution. As an example TCGs will have very high complexity and zero execution requirements - your effectiveness is almost entirely determined by how much you know. Fighting games have high execution requirements, require alot of knowledge, and require high speed of decision making. For example, you have to know what you can punish, react to an opponent's unsafe move, decide what kind of punishment you're going to use, and execute it. Mashing in fighting games is certainly easier than playing LoL even at silver-gold level, but midgame in fighting games is much harder.
i think fighting games do have one problem that some other genres don't that make them harder to learn which is how open ended they are. Your goal is "just" to beat your opponent but there's no one set way or path to achieve that goal, as the way to defeat your opponent also depends on how they play. This in my opinion is what makes it difficult for fighting games to teach new players how to get better and improve passively simply just through playing. While plenty of external resources exist to help people get better (and increasingly more internal resources) making the process happen naturally and gradually over time rather than requiring extensive effort and research or help from a knowledgable friend/coach is part of what makes it tough for new playeys to get into and stick with fighting games.
Team based games allow for people to sometimes hitch a free ride onto wins. League you can at least control your character for a bit. Maybe farm some.creeps before you bite it. In fight games when someone is new alot of times they will just get utterly dominated. Rushed down into oblivion or zoned completely out. Not to mention if you wanna play fighting games with friends who are new you have to play against them. The first gaming company that finds a way to make fighting games a team game which allows for carries is going to be huge
I don't know, SF6 is my first fighting game and it felt like learning an instrument. Just using the pad to move and up to jump felt extra weird because no other game had ever ask me to do this. In LoL even though there are a lot of informations to soak up at least moving the character and using a skill bar is common in other games like RTS and MMORPG.
Fighting game players say fighting games aren't hard to learn. Shooter players say shooters aren't hard to learn. League/DOTA players say their games aren't hard to learn. Top end MMO raiders say raids aren't hard to learn. Just because something is not hard to learn for you personally, doesn't make it easy for someone else to pick up. If you play the genre as much as you do, of course it's not going to seem hard to learn. Sure, there are things that carry over between genres, such as reaction time and situational awareness, but once you start getting into things like frame data (which I know is not essential, but let's be real it's important to know) and whatever else, my eyes glaze over and I'm out. I was super stoked for SF6, all over the internet the FGC was saying how good of an entry-level fighting game it would be for new players to the scene. I even bought a fight stick in anticipation, was planning to get into T8 it dropped, and I thought stuff like Strive and GBVS looked fun too. After a few weeks in SF6, trying various characters to see which fit my playstyle and in the end not even being able to manage combo trials, I just dropped it with a shrug. Playing with a pad felt terrible, modern controls felt awful to me, as well.
That talk about League resonated _hard_ with me. My partner's trying to get me into the game and I can't help but feel dumb even in practice mode. I mean... okay. Riven's hard, sure. She's combo-heavy, okay I can live with that... but what's her item build? Which spells should I pick? Splitpushing? What's that? _When_ do I get to do that? Actually, which lane should I be in when I pick Riven, or other characters? Am I allowed to leave my lane? So on and so forth. Honestly seeing Sajam saying "I don't care if you throw insults at me, just play and don't bail the friggin game" is something that I need for a confidence boost to *_maybe_* start playing some games proper, instead of sticking to TFT.
league is a game where you have lots of ambiguity but its oke to be bad and make bad choices you are supposed to be playing with other noobs who also are completely clueless, if you soloqueue you should be put against people of similar skill level, i would probably play some co op vs ai games first, and if someone is talking shit immediately mute them from the tab window as for items and runes there is a recommended section in the game now that is quite reliable as for splitpushing my impression is that its something you do if you are behind or if the champion you play isnt as valuable in teamfights but dont quote me on that also riven should be in the top lane
@@dj_koen1265 Oh wow I didn't expect a reply for my comment at all I've already gotten enough understanding on the basics of League by the time you told me all these, but I still appreciate it regardless; played a couple of vs. AI and Quickplay games as well, though the latter not enough to unlock Ranked as of yet (still 2 matches out of the required 10). Also, I _definitely_ need that "it's okay to be bad and make bad choices" thing. Also also I swapped to Jax because good lord I had a rough time playing Riven lol
@@nellancaster np, and yeah riven is hard, i used to play riven back when i still played a lot of league but i would usually struggle to get things done with her
I had playback speed on .25 from a different vid when I clicked this. The slow mo "It's this man's fault, this seemingly innocent man" with the slow fade to JM's face absolutely killed me
i think an argument against fighting games is that its much easier to reach intentionality in other competitive games while fighting games theres a much steeper curve before you stop mashing buttons and youre pressing the buttons you want to press. other competitive games dont have this issue or at least as much as fighting games, while you are still bad when you start any competitive game youre still likely controling your character enough to do what you want to do (badly)
Some friends of mine convinced me to play Omega Strikers last month. It is basically 3v3 Air hockey where you can ko the other team off the edges of the field, sounds easy right? Only if you never want to get past silver rank. You have to be constantly aware not only of your own position but of your teammates, opponents and the "core" (puck), in addition to ability cooldowns, various stage hazards, and more stuff I am probably forgetting. Plus there is equipment, two random items and a predetermined set depending on if you are goalie or forward before the game starts and more randomized to gear choose from between every round. Learning the basics is pretty intuitive though, just hit the "core" towards the other teams goal, but not straight towards their team members, and remember to pass if you can't get it past them..
I got into Dota 1 mostly because I could watch replays, which was huge at a time when youtube was barely a thing. It was groundbreaking for me to just be able to watch someone else play, see their strats, look at what they were doing, figure out why it was or wasn't working. These days though that's just basic entry level. Shit's a lot easier to learn these days, the problem has always been a mixture of people not really trying to learn and games teaching poorly (mixed with gatekeepers all over the place making noise)
I feel like this video is a great example of how fighting game players usually don't understand fighting games compared to other genres, and how genuinely different they are. Fighting games are fundamentally rock paper scissors with an execution requirement. Until you've spent an enormous amount of time grinding execution, far more than any other genre requires, most strategies are negative value. For any other genre, new tech becomes useful anywhere from instantly useful to maybe needing up to half an hour of practice. You won't get the benefit a pro gets, but you will benefit rather than just guaranteeing losses for rarely tens but more typically hundreds or thousands of hours until you've downloaded the timing and the tech instantly swings from actively bad to amazingly good. It's an enormous difference that people who long ago spent those thousands of hours grinding out timing memorization usually don't grasp. The other thing that's really telling is the mis-made analogy between being in a combo and being dead in a shooter. Being in a combo isn't like being dead, it's like being shot at. It's making one bad guess and being hard CC'd for 10 seconds. Combat is non-interactive when it's not your turn, which is fundamentally different from combat in other genres where CC is generally very limited and you still have most or all of your kit active to some extent through most of combat. It's more like being the target of an opponent's combo in a card game with no interrupt mechanics. Sure, some fighting games add bursts to crutch this (though that is ultimately just another RPS), and Smash has DI which is a good concept, but for mainstream fighting games the thing normal people are complaining about is that they're playing RPS with a stat disadvantage that also wastes their time when they guess wrong. That's fundamentally not fun, and you don't experience the other side unless you spend thousands of hours memorizing timing.
In Dota 2, for a new player, they are bad and they don't know what deny is, so they get massive advantage because of that, but they don't know that they are losing because the game doesn't show it to them. But in fighting games, when a new player is doing bad, the game makes sure they know it. Like in Strive, if you get counter hit, the announcer says "COUNTER" and the game slows down to make sure you know you fucked up.
For most of my lifes, almost no shooters appealed to me, they looked boring as fuck. Then I gave DOOM 2016 a chance because it has a great artistic direction, I swear to you, on a high DPI mouse I could not aim for MY LIFE, it was so scary because certain enemies would tank more if i did not aim for their head, I could not walk while shooting, I could not manage the other weapons and special weapons at first. I got better at it, even when I got to play DOOM Eternal, it was much more natural, even though anything I did on Eternal would seem so hard when I played 2016, it was so rewarding, so yeah, I do not think FGs are more difficult than any other genre
The thing that makes any competitive game difficult is your opponent. If the mechanics are hard for you, then they're hard for them - and likewise if the mechanics are easy for your opponent then they're easy for you. The variable is always the opponent.
My bad
@jmcrofts Folks, this was my bad**
Do you have anything to say to the folks?
✋😐🤚
Don't apologize for spitting fact lol
Weren't you basically saying that FGs are not uniquely difficult?
"Every year someone says this shit and every year I get a free video idea." ~Sajam, every year
This isn’t even the first time hes done this specific topic 🤣
@@julianmccann2934this is like the 5th man but I think it’s still relevant as new players enter the scene
@@how7639 His Fighting Game Difficulty playlist has like 16 videos including this one, but for new player experience this is like the 8th. It's crazy.
Thats a dope profile pic btw
Idc I enjoy this video every time he makes it
biggest barrier to fighting games is that tekken 8 costs a third of my monthly wage
you brazilian?
probably. Living here sucks. @@ΚρανίΩ
@@ΚρανίΩ yup
Do you want me to buy you the game
@@ΚρανίΩ lmao is it that obvious? seriously fighting game pricing is a PROBLEM here...
“You’re also bad at those games” is the truest statement ever made.
Yeah it just feels like you're doing something and lost for reasons outside of your control so people don't recognize their deficiencies
Sajam infinite FGC content creation combo: "Skill Based Matchmaking" into "Fighting game aren't harder than other competitive games" into "Old games vs new games" into "fighting games need a good rollback netcode".
"Should mid set coaching be allowed"?
"Frame Data doesn't tell the whole story"...
What else?
@@stanm4410 I think "repeating the opinions of streamers" might be used as a combo extender but it's not quite as used..
@@emperormegaman3856 its the max damage option, but it only works in the corner and you is meter intensive so best used to end a round
@@emperormegaman3856 Is repeating other people's opinions in place of your own the neutral skip of the FGC?
And I'll eat it up every single time
babe wake up new entry to the samsara of cyclical FGC discourse just dropped
Goated asf comment
May you know peace. May you know joy. May your strike/throw never be guessable.
Me playing LoL: Fuck if we ball.
Me playing Deadlock: Fuck it we ball.
Me playing Siege: Fuck it we ball.
Me playing SF6: Fuck it we ball.
I think people should always be aware that these videos aren't Sajam sitting in front of a camera for 14 minutes, recording for the sole purpose of discussing discourse. It's just an excerpt from the stream from the time he goes over it. It's not an active effort to make the same video again and again(also new stuff does get said).
All that said, I'm here for the pre-discussion edits. Next time should be Kazuya killing Heihachi and Kazuya remembering years of discourse that Heihachi represents
meanwhile heihachi has, at the moment of his death, a vision of a red rock and a blue rock and some bald dude says "alllllriighty then chatroom"
I prefer to think that these videos actually are Sajam sitting in front of a camera for 14 hours recording the same discussion over and over and it's just overlaid onto whatever started the discourse this time. That's optimal
Bon fg fans would actually be more receptive to these vids of they weren't just stream clips.
The only way I can tell this isn't just RUclips recommending me the old video(s) is not recognizing the thumbnail.
8:10 im so glad he reads this comment cuz this is LITERALLY how everyone talks about fighting games vs other games for no reason
fgs have a lot of depth but the basis of them is not hard to grapple with: go up to your opponent and punch them
if anything that might be why everyone says "dude fgs are the hardest because i have to do dps, pressure, blockstrings, w/e" because the basis is so easy so it just goes over their head; the "hit your opponent to reduce their hp" part of fgs has resonated with them a long time ago so now they dont even think about that, they think about the complexities that comes from that design
Yeah even in FPS you literally cant damage the opponent without aim. A lot of new players struggle to kill even a stationary enemy because of recoil control.
That's why so many casual FPS singleplayer games have boring zero recoil gameplay.
And FPS games have a bunch of strategy on top of needing that mechanical skill.
It's also a factor that when you try to get someone new to play a fighting game, they never, *ever* want to use normal attacks, at least in my experience, and that's what causes so much of the complaints. There's something in the casual perspective of a fighting game that says "using special moves" should be the same level of frequency and ease of access as "left click to attack a minion" or "press trigger to shoot gun". Despite there being 6 fucking buttons for regular attacks in street fighter, you know what the first thing any new player wants to do is? It's either a fireball or a command grab.
Obviously this isn't realistic for fighting games, but it's what I've noticed from my experience learning and teaching fighting games to people.
@@Tomoka51 i can see this happening theres so many people who talk about special moves like they arent *special* and im not surprised that a mindset like that is messing up newbies
@@Tomoka51 Calling them "Specials" is part of the problem. People are going to reflexively think they're inherintly better in all scenarios than 'Normals' with that name and without something to force them to recognise that using them all the time (like cooldowns) they're not going to think otherwise until a fair bit along the path. Unfortunately that will normally take them past the point of steam refund requestability but that's another discussion.
That last speech about telling people to lock the fuck in was great lmao
One year for Christmas, I played through Return of the Obra Dinn with my family. It was great fun, but one thing which stood out to me was how at first we would take turns holding the controller but pretty quickly they asked me to do it the whole time - they were still engaged in asking questions and trying to solve the mystery, but they found the challenge of navigating a space using 2-stick controls aggravating.
In a game with no action, no timing requirements, no pressure! To someone who doesn't play video games, simply moving with FPS controls is difficult. They only reason people think fighting games are unusually hard is that they don't come into them with years of pre-existing knowledge about the way they control.
You're absolutely right. Gamers take for granted the amount of game literacy they walk into genres already having, which creates the false perception that they're inherently easy to understand. There's a reason why Lakitu was a thing in Mario 64, to explain the idea of a controllable camera following Mario, but today games feel very little need to acclimate people to a digital space in the same way.
I've walked multiple non-gamers through various games and fighting games, relatively speaking, are on the easier side of the spectrum. But because the control scheme is so different from a regular game you're essentially starting at zero, and it can be a very humbling experience to spend an hour figuring out the controls. You just don't remember spending those same hours for more mainstream genres when you were a kid
I'll never forget all the people I've seen try halo for the first time and they just looked at the floor or ceiling 80% of the time. And they grew up playing videogames
Super glad someone mentioned this, even if it might get lost in here. Game literacy is like any other literacy.
Musicians can manage playing multiple instruments b/c they understand the fundamentals of playing an instrument. It doesn't mean learning the instruments are easier. It just means you have a better perspective on how to approach it than someone who's never played ANY instrument.
One stick for moving and another for looking is not entirely human relatable. Humans generally don't sidestep in everyday life unless they're actively trying to focus on something nearby AKA _look it over,_ and vertical on the look stick is just for the head while horizontal is for turning the whole body, something strongly associated with _movement_ as it's natural to want to actually orient one's body to where one wants to go, especially visually. It's why DOOM engine games had the left and right arrows be for turning with sidestepping and vertical looking (where it existed, anyway) being on separate keys.
And then after this we'll get the SBMM discourse and the cycle will be renewed once again. In Sajam's name, Gamin'.
then we'll get the same smash bros melee melee jokes and I'll be there for it no matter what
Oh boy another Sajam repost of the evergreen discourse of FGC twitter
I feel like Sajam started putting on his Slam tournaments just to prove to everyone that fighting games aren't harder than other genres
It's probably the best argument for this point IMO. In fact, the Sajam Slam style tournaments really only work and are fun to watch because it's fighting games, it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining if it was some other "eSports" game
i believe fighting games are def not as hard as evey other game but bro they have literal coaches who are nasty teaching them how to play. not all of us have that lol
@@nits95The coaches just streamline the process, there are a lot of resources out there for most games released today.
The main difficulty is knowing what to look for. As soon as I find out what an “anti-air” is, I’m a couple of clicks away from finding my solution. Hell, half of these coaches also make content that you and I can watch for advice, difference being that it isn’t personalized.
Tbf, the slams contain people who not only have pro coaches but are also content DEMONS. Grinding is literally breakfast, lunch, and dinner for them, and since it's also their job, they get to do it without having to really worry about other things. I agree with Sajam but obvs there's nuances here.
@@shahs1221 Also tbf, they have about a week to learn to play, and most gamers have more than a week to spend on their game if they want to get good.
that Metal Gear edit is absolute gold
It's been a while, Ｆｏｌｋｓ，
Even the rocket league story came back, time truly is a circle.
Rocket League is bonkers to me. I got no idea how anyone can learn how to control a digital Hotwheels to hit a soccer ball with such finesse.
@@EarthLordCJ i am top 40 in the world and across my main and my 3 alts, it took me 13,102 hours, i think more than any other game rl requires the most hard work to stay consistent, cs maybe is at the same level of mechanical demand, if i dont play for 3 days i play like absolute dog and i think a lot of the things people falsely say that fighting games require you to do in terms of working to improve are actually true of that game, it's kind of unfair
@@Venom272X Damn man, top 40 in such an insanely competitive game like RL is legitimately insane. Good shit dude. 👍
Sajam spinning the hits
THE FIRST TIME WAS SO NICE, HE HAD TO DO IT 5 TIMES (I BELIEVE)
Sajam fighting this discourse like Batman seeing Riddler up to his nonsense again
Sajam calling people on drugs is what I live for
"fighting games are the hardest genre to get into"
My brother in christ the ruthlessness of the children when I tried Valorant combined everything else that goes into a tac shooter had me THWUMPED
(And yeah MOBAs are an obvious one)
Ultimately, for the Nth time, competitive games are hard. Thats why they are also competitive
But also getting into anything these days with the amount of content online is much easier and at the end of the day its about what can you / are you willing to invest time into to learn
Thanks for joining the ted talk
"Genre hard" discourse is so stupid because legitimately the only reason people think MOBAs are easy for beginners is because MOBAs are popular right now. And in the same vein, people think fighting games are hard for beginners because fighting games are niche right now. If the popularity of these two genres were reversed, people would be talking about how fighting games are braindead easy and MOBAs are hypercompetitive ultrasweat games that are hostile to newcomers
I would absolutely be entertained with a video talking about how there are too many barriers to novels and that reading without illustrations is sweatlord privilege. Just to recommend S again.
@@NotFortheMoonay I laughed. That's funny
@@NotFortheMoonaythis comment is a gem lmfao
No?
Games like League are Easy for beginners because you play with your friend carrying you in a smurf agains terrible players until you get lv 30.
in FGs you have to actively try and learn the game to have fun, I have a friend who plays 1k - 2k+ matches of league every years and he refuses to learn how to play, he also plays some fps and rocket league, all the games he never tries to learn and always gets carried by friends who play better, but even if he likes games like tekken he just played against bots and dropped online in an instant.
there is a giant wall in FGs called not having a team, 2XKO may be able to turn FGs into a popular genre by introducing this concept for a large audience that is interested
yeah FGs aren't harder if you want to learn, but different from other genres its impossible if you refuse to do so.
Mobas are absolutely easy to get into. There’s builds that you can just rely on. You can mimic a person’s gameplay strategy by watching and learning and feel fine. There’s no execution barrier immediately like what you get in a fighting game.
I've been teaching my dad how to play Dark Souls and I genuinely think teaching him a fighting game would be easier.
First time I played Dota2 was with my brother. I picked Enchantress (not a great beginner pick!) and fed a crap-ton because I didn’t realise towers and creeps hit really hard, and that you’re not actually supposed to be going after enemy heroes that hard early on.
Oh, okay, so last-hitting enemies gives you hold and XP, but I’m playing a support character so I’m *not* supposed to be doing that?
Wait, I’m supposed to get by on just a Wand and some regular old boots? The rest of the gold I get is for Wards and other consumables!?
Wait, what do you mean Enchantress isn’t really a Support hero, the game *LITERALLY SAYS* she is right there!?
People really do be forgetting that what is “simple” or “intuitive” to learn is really dependent on a number of factors that aren’t easily communicable. FGs being ‘hard’ to learn doesn’t mean other genres are inherently ‘easier’.
People spend hundreds of hours in mobas and still barely understand the basics. It's crazy that people think FGs are more complex.
People have forgotten that you can be okay with just playing at a super basic level. If I learn how to swim, I don't have to be really good to enjoy it.
I picked up BlazBlue because I thought it looked cool and Makoto seemed rad and I really liked her English VA. Now I love BlazBlue(don't play Makoto anymore), but I am just okay at it. I have very basic fundamental knowledge. But that's okay because I have a blast playing without being great.
Personal enjoyment is unique to the player. You don't have to enjoy the game the same way everyone else does or play it the same way. Take your time finding what it is you actually enjoy about the game and it won't be hard to improve.
Dude same I'm just trying to land sword super with Susano because it's hilarious how big the move is to me 😂
This is every blazblue player because the game is too big and too ass at top level to take seriously. Tekken and Smash are similar, they're so daunting from a competitive level that even some people with that hunger will silence it in the sheer face of the task. You have fun while being bad in street fighter, that's a real challenge.
My personal opinion is it's impossible to be bad, to want to be good, and to be satisfied. I don't think that makes any sense
Which is kind of the point I keep rehashing whenever this point comes up. When someone says they're bad at fighting games because fighting games are so hard, it's just because it feels way worse to be bad at fighting games than it does in other genres. Dumping your social responsibility on your teammates yada yada, I don't even think that's the big one. The big one is that fighting games are stressful. Even if you're just mashing you're still dealing with the mental stack in some way, either paying attention to it(and SF6 really hammers home for new players that you got hit with that DI because you're just bad) or falling victim to it.
Yeah, in other games you die to stuff you don't understand all the time but you get a moment to calm down, you have less decisions to make on a moment to moment basis, it's e easier to treat any round of a shooting game like a deathmatch where you just rush out there and do whatever. To the new player, getting hit by a jump-in or a big punish counter or a throw loop is like getting ganked in top lane on repeat so they get stressed out and _now_ is the part where they'd blame their jungler, _"if they had one!"_ . But crucially, they were already stressed out of their gourd before even getting that heated.
It's also just that other games like shooters/MOBAs have a way of telling players who aren't good that they're at least somewhat good. They hide their flaws and accentuate their strengths. The people who think fighting games are harder mostly also suck in other games they're just less aware of it.
The reason people think so is because the difficult stuff in fighting games-the special moves-is singular, distinct actions presented as standard, and is also the fun, power fantasy stuff that makes playing a video game meaningful to many. People often don't come to kick ass in a competitive video game _just_ to kick ass; they do it to kick ass _in style._ And most people can at least do basic punching and kicking in real life albeit not very refinedly. Certainly not shoot ki fireballs from their palms or do helicopter split kicks across twenty feet. But those're what require the motions. And when beginners can't do the supposedly standard cool shit AND "git gud" at once, they tend to bow out, unlike with other genres where the cool stuff is far more accessible and thus won't jeopardize your ability to win a few early on. It's the same reason many hardcore FGers hate facing trap characters: they need to stop playing their own character the usual, appealing way in order to win. It's a sad reality, and only FGs or modes where complicated motions are generally a nonfactor in being flashy, like Smash or SF6's Modern controls, can be exceptions. It's not that special move motions complicate gitting gud; rather, they complicate _having fun._ Two different things, not necessarily at odds, but here they certainly can be.
TL;DR winning at FGs isn't harder than winning at other genre types… UNLESS you understandably insist on scratching the cool-shit-I-could-never-hope-to-actually-do-that-makes-the-game-stand-out itch along the way because of how much harder THAT typically is in FGs.
I remember the old league of legends tutorial that tells you to build Thornmail on Ashe because "It's a powerful defensive item"
Something funny is to see someone learn platformers.
Watching a person scramble to figure out how to Mario/Donkey Kong is amazing and being there to give tips and watch their progress is beautiful.
I just realized that the people complaing how "fighting games are uniquely hard" are probably the same guys who gave a strategy game specialist journo shit for being bad at Cuphead (a bad game, BTW)
@@maduinargentus5878 nah, Dean Takahashi deserves the flak (if it's him) and cuphead is alright
@@maduinargentus5878 cuphead isn't necessarily *bad* imo, but it's def hostile to the player, especially with how you can't get an actual ending on easy mode.
that's just rude af, imo.
That last rant got me “I dont care how bed potato every other minute of the day you are but when it’s time to game with ME? You better lock the fuck in”
The point people were trying to make (and not communicating effectively) is that other games have simpler breakdowns in objectives. As in, the equivalent of killing a creep is blocking an attack, where as killing creeps is a measurable milestone to victory and blocking an attack can be anywhere from very good to gets you killed depending on the context. The building blocks to victory in a FG are more obscure, the lowest measured accomplishment is a round victory. In other games you have kills, objective captures, gold acquisition, etc. For someone to understand the basic building blocks of a FG, it requires thinking about the game system a little more intensively. This makes sense because the majority of the gameplay is contained in one match of a few rounds with 2 characters, so the game system has to be complex within that frame. But that just makes it less obvious what leads to victory (or even progress) and where you're faltering.
I agree that FG's aren't inherently more difficult, but I do think it's a matter of mindset and how you approach a FG that most people have difficulty understanding. What bothers me is that Sajam often digs his heels in and refuses to try to understand the source of criticism and instead dunks on people for being bad at explaining what their frustration is (which makes sense bc the source of their frustration itself is difficult to understand, lol)
You are not gonna sit here and tell me u genuinely believe that mobas where the map consists of several different objectives down each lane, the final objective at the enemy base, creeps to farm, jungle to farm, and 100 different items to buy is less complex than ‘there’s you’re opponent you both have a health bar, get theirs to zero before yours, good luck!’
My brother in Christ mobas are not more straight forward than fighters u just already play mobas not fighters.
@@oneunripemango1858 I have played all of a handful of hours of MOBA's. None of my friends like to play. I do, however, play fighting games every week on Wednesdays with my buddies. We'll be playing CvS2 tonight on fightcade, actually.
You on the other hand seem to have only spent a handful of hours reading English text because you did not at all understand the point I was making. The point being that when a task can be broken down into simpler parts of that greater task, it is more approachable. That's literally it. Read my comment again and then tell me the part where I said MOBA's are less complex than FG's, cuz I don't see it written anywhere in there.
@@KuzuTomokithe options are you’re a moba player talking about fighting games despite not knowing them, or you’re a fighting game player arguing about how your toys are cooler and require more skill than other peoples toys. I picked the one that was less sad.
@@KuzuTomokiif u agree that the games aren’t actually harder and it’s just a perception and mindset issue then… What is your issue with pointing that out instead of placating people who are saying the games are just to hard when they literally aren’t? If people said ‘the games don’t have great onboarding tools and need to be a complete feature rich product to attract the mass market’ sajam would agree because he’s been saying that shit for over a decade. But they’re not saying that they’re saying the games aren’t as popular because they’re just to hard and that’s literally not true
after learning how to somewhat competently play league, picking up fighting games was a ridiculously easy task and i wondered to myself why i was convinced that they would be impossible.
there are so many fewer moving parts to keep track of while playing a fighting game when compared to any other genre where you have to collect and manage resources while navigating an entire map.
fighting games are hard, but they’re no harder to pick up than other genres once you get over the initial hurdle of learning how to control your character and the basic rules of engagement (mostly frame data).
Fighting games are WAY easier to pick up than league. It's just that the playerbase is small and so people get matched against high rank players which makes it feel hard.
If you started league for the first time and had to fight plat players you would want to unalive there too.
@@NihongoWakannai yeah the FGC does have a playerbase issue for sure especially in smaller regions. for the people who struggle with that, the only options are really to find a locals and/or some friends to play with (either irl or on discord), or to just pick a popular fg like sf6 and try your luck there.
@eebbaa5560 because the fighting games that have come out recently the ones you can easily buy are a lot easier to get into than what is typical. And they get dragged through the mud for it too.
@@eebbaa5560 even older games have newer players, i see new people pick up uni or old guilty gear quite often
The thing ive come to realize over the years is that, rather than fighting games being harder to be good at than ither games, its a lot harder to have fun when youre bad at them. There's a reason Tekken and Smash are so popular among even non fighting game players, and its because theyre fun to be bad at, and similar goes for these competitive team games like rocket league, deadlock, or league of kegends. I was omega ass at LoL for ages but i played with my friends and I could have fun deleting people with Garen ult or cheesing people with blitzcrank. I may not have had the micro skill to pilot a hard champ like katarina and win twamfights by myself, but i could kill minions, and smack towers and make decent contributions to the objectives that way.
Conversely my time in fighting games was me trying six times over just as many years trying to get into fighting games and not having any fun cause i couldnt even throw a fireball and my opponents were carrying me corner to corner and back again. It took finally finding this very channel and making a couple friends that actually wanted to play with me before i could reach the level of familiarity and understanding to start actually having fun.
Random thing I'll always remember is when a FGC streamer made a video making fun of some game journalists who were mashing in SFV at a preview event. Then he did a stream where he played Overwatch for the first time and every time he got shot at it seemed like he reflexively pressed every button on his keyboard and ran into the wall.
I agree like 70% of the way with Sajam, but I think FGs have a much bigger buy in because if you ever played halo or cod or battlefield or counter strike or valorant or pubg or fortnite or apex legends you’ve learned the skills of how to interact with shooter games.
Fighting games’s intrinsic mechanics like motion inputs, holding back to block and pressing up to jump are rare to non-present in any other genres. I’m not booting up a CSGO game and hitting a quarter circle to reload my pistol; it’s just not a skill that the gamer populace is ever taught.
Are these impossible hurdles to overcome? No, not really, but to pretend they don’t exist is doing the newcomers a disservice.
One thing that stands out to me after playing fighting games versus other games is that fighting games have next to no downtime mid match. Dying in an FPS or MOBA, you get get put in timeout for a bit where you both can do nothing and don't need to think about the game. You can more easily think "what did I do wrong? What do I do next?" For 10-15 seconds.
Fighting games, even getting comboed, you need to be focused on if the combo drops and respond. It's hard to have time in the moment to silence the internal screaming of "AHHHHHH, what do I do? What do I do?!". It feels like you need to go back to that moment after the match to figure out both what you did wrong (if anything) and what you should have done. I think the more constant action of fighting game matches require players to do 'homework' outside of the match sooner than other game types.
fighting games are kinda the only premium/paid multiplayer genre that exists
Basically everything that isn't COD (or I guess Splatoon) is F2P which drastically lowers the barrier of entry by a lot
Yeah for sure, especially with the dumb DLC. People look at a store page like "ok so I have to pay $60 and then another $60 to actually get all the characters? And I might not even like the game? No thanks"
What universe do you live in where games are just always free I want to go there
@@Vsolid
What universe are YOU living in that you have somehow forgotten that the vast majority of MMOs, Battle Royales, MOBAs, and other such multiplayer-centric live service games of the past 10 years are free to play?
@@Vsolid name me one paid multiplayer centric, competitive focused game releases in the last 3-4 years, outside COD and I suppose Splatoon, that can only be purchased
@@NihongoWakannai Real. Highlights how FGs are STILL behind contemporary genres even in simple things like letting you at least use the DLC characters in training mode, something even the most predatory of MOBAs let you do.
Even worse in Bamco games which periodically end up having hilariously overtuned DLC characters, or more recently, their ghost function in Tekken where you can't use even the ghost of a character you don't own.
I think part of it is that FGs are a "genre isolate"; i.e. there's not much cross-genre influence between them and wider gaming world. This means that, as a newcomer to fighting games, you're going to have more to learn than, say, if you pick up an FPS for the first time with a background in other kinds of actions games. Combine that with the fact FGs are a pretty niche genre to in the first place, and yeah, that _does_ present barrier to entry that other types of games don't have. But note that this has nothing to do with the games themselves being inherently more complex and everything to do with their awkward place within gaming culture.
It's been said before but the favorite Sajam video I'm waiting on is when 2KXO comes out and we get a video titled "Yes, old fighting games did indeed have mixups". We all know it's coming.
Honestly it all comes back to a 1v1 environment vs a team environment. Team games SEEM easier to learn cause you can play with friends who already know the game on the same side as you and they can help to pick up your slack in the game while giving you tips in real time. Compare that to a 1v1 game where if you're playing with a friend who knows the game they're either just talking to you and giving you pointers while watching you stream over discord, or they're playing against you.
The other part of it is that in a team game you can always blame your teammates when you make a mistake if you have a bad attitude and aren't actively seeking to improve. In a 1v1 game, there's no outside forces or variables to blame when you lose a match.
yep, tried deadlock today with a friend, I did nothing and won since he carried me,
I can just play more matches with him and have some fun until I learn how to game works, for FGs it would like you described.
with team games I have 0 need to active learn about the game, with FGs I have to seek guides and train.
The key to “getting good” at challenging games starts with you believing that you can do it. As simple as it sounds, it revolutionized how I approach harder games.
3:51 That's not an argument about why fighting games are hard to get into though. It's an argument about the value proposition of these games. Dota, LoL, TFT, CS and many others are free to play. Fighting games still cling on AAA pricing (for the big names at least), so they absolutely need single player content if that's the way they want to monetize it. There's no better and more recent example of that than Concord.
The game was one of the biggest flops in the entire industry, and that's on a genre that's super popular like hero shooter. Of course, there were many factors that worked against that game, but a price tag for an exclusively multiplayer experience was definitely high on the list. Not even Call of Duty could get away with it. It's a huge name and 90% of the playerbase is there for the multiplayer, but to this date only Black Ops 4 made away with the campaign mode. Fighting games either need single player content OR a lower price tag if they're going to be multiplayer only.
0:32 did Maid Mint edit this one? lmao.
It always boils down to two things for me when it comes to this discussion: 1. FGs being single player and 2. Familiarity/time spent playing other genres. First one is obvious, even if you suck ass at a FPS, you can always use your teammates as a crutch. "Yea, I might have died more times than there were rounds in the match, but my team is the one to blame for the loss." A match in league, where every lane played perfectly except for the Garen that fed Nasus the first 5 minutes of the match, you would find the Garen complain the most how everyone else was the problem. Having teammates blinds you from seeing just how trash you are, but in FGs, if you get your ass beat, it is on you.
But secondly and most importantly, many people just have grown up with other genres. As a bulgarian, I was pretty much born with CS in my vains. I may not be the greatest FPS player, but I can pick any FPS game and start playing at a decent level almost immediatly due to me having played them all my life. Same with Moba games, I have been playing league on and off ever since Jinx released. I may not know what items to build at every situation, but I can play at a decent enough level due to the time I have spent in the game itself. Not to mention how a lot of the time with the mainstream genre of games, you often times play with friends, so that first barrier of entry seems lighter to cross, because you are just fucking around with your friends whilst also getting better in the meantime, while FG is a solo game that although not inherently harder, does miss out on that "blinding" factor that playing with friends can give you at the start. I have been playing FGs casually every since I was a kid in an arcade. I never found the montion imput for a hadouken difficult, because I was doing that move before I was even 10, but now when I try to teach a friend how to do it, you would think that a quarter circle imput is rocket science. In general it isn't hard, but they lack the muscle memory/expirience someone who has been playing for most their life have.
As a beginner in fighting games, i find the issue is in resources. I tried to play league of legends for the first time like a 2-ish years ago, never played mobas. and i managed to find guides that roughly explain how game works and explained me what i need to focus on first. i still got destroyed by Silver players when i unlocked ranked, but i had rough understanding what is going on and ways to improve. But in fighting games, all guides are made for fighting players. Beginner guides are made either character specific or for people that transition from other games. and nobody really teaches how to begin to being a beginner. what is important to learn first? why my combos don't work? how to read Input history? i spend 9 hours in MK11 tutorial, never beat it, played 1 online match, and never touched it again. played SF6 a bit, modern controls help a lot, it's probably why it's most popular FG currently, modern controls and World tour making onboard experience a lot better. Tekken 8 while being 2nd most popular, for some reason feels like have no new players, and i get destroyed by people with 1500 prowess, so i can't even reach Fighter rank.
I started playing SF6 as my first fighting game because of the slam, and I 100% agree that people forget what it is like to learn an entirely new game. Initially I was confused how I was supposed to learn what all these characters do, then I realized I could explain almost every spell in LoL if you asked me. I just forgot what it's like since I didn't have to learn the moves of a bunch of characters at once since 2015
The only thing I did find weird is that unranked matches seemingly aren't seeded by skill levels. I personally didn't mind and hopped into ranked after getting beat up and learning some more stuff, but I can definitely see why some people would dislike that. Whereas LoL normals still use skill based matchmaking, so new players generally play against other entirely new players
@@xn--b49athis is very true. Most FGs have atrociously bad skillmatching online, as soon as you win a couple of matches you start going against the 1000 hour sweaties.
@@phantomfenrir4976 that's the one and only reason fighting games feel hard, because you're matched against people way too good at the game.
Everyone competitive game would suck if that were the case.
@@xn--b49a sf6 absolutely has skill based matchmaking in casuals. You just have to play a few people for it to settle. Its much quicker and finding suitable skill levels than ranked as well. Look at peoples stats. Bost people have about 50% win rate in casual matches. people get thrown off because they play like 5 people and complain its random but its not, Its just finding you skill level by matching you against diff skill people. Its a hidden MMR and has nothing to do with your actual rank.
Sajam describing his Rocket League skill level sounds like the inner thoughts of a golden retriever when they see a tennis ball.
"it's been a while, FOLKS!" Lmao
I want to mention Celeste, a very simple game where all you do is jump, dash, and wall climb. That's the core mechanics of the game, but it's one of the most challenging games I've ever played, I didn't complete it, but I did beat the game and finished some of the extra levels. I'd say that Celeste is a very complex game that requires about as much execution as a fighting game, if not more in some cases.
I'd put that slightly differently: Celeste is a very challenging that isn't complex at all.
Sure but your average gamer probably understands how to move and jump in a 2d environment in the way Celeste does it from their previous gaming experiences but it’s not like you boot up games that aren’t fighting games that ask you to do quarter circles
@@lagspike7763 when do we get to bring up that Celeste has wave dashes 😂
I'd reel you back on the harder execution bit, I'm like 2/3rds through Farewell and I ain't seen nothing like an Ed desync, let alone a Kouma bnb in MBTL.
@@lagspike7763 Different people have different skillsets. I can't play Fromsoft games for the life of me (okay I really only played Sekiro and got hardstuck a few hours in), my buddy is a huge fan and has completed their whole library to my knowledge. But I've beaten Celeste (IIRC every level except Farewell), and he claims he's bad at platformers.
Either way, fighting games are fundamentally multiplayer (unless you're into speedrunning arcade modes or something), so the difficulty is gonna depend on your opponents. Chess is a ridiculously difficult game when played by grandmasters, but there are definitely people you can beat at it even if you've just learned the rules.
I guess you could complain about control schemes, but SF6 has modern and 2xko is doing its thing too, so there's clearly at least some movement towards rendering them unnecessary.
"In these other games you're also fucking bad, you just don't know it." I think this is what it boils down to. In a fighting game there are no teammates, there's no objectives, there's no items, there's no map macro. It's just you and your opponent and when you lose you know it's because you fucked up, people lose in other games all the time not knowing why and so they assume it wasn't their mistake, it's a lot harder to push that responsibility off when it's just you, your opponent, and a can full of whoop ass.
People say this, but who honestly enjoys blaming their teammates? That's not a fun time. Playing a 1v1 game where you know your wins and losses are something you did rather than have 40 minutes of your life wasted by teammates is way better.
@@NihongoWakannai it's not really about it being fun or even being a conscious decision people are making. In a game of league of legends you will usually have 20 or 30 minutes of gameplay with dozens of interactions per minute that all compound to influence the outcome of the game. Most players are not and will never be aware of even half of the minor interactions that they are doing wrong that cause their losses. In a fighting game if you don't know how to deal with your opponent jumping at you you get to sit there and watch them jump at you and hit you over and over again til you're dead. Not anti airing like that can be compared to something like walking into your lane and never last hitting minions. It's a hugely impactful gameplay interaction that is causing the player to lose, but getting your face kicked in til you're dead is a lot more immediate and visible feedback than falling behind in items causing you to lose lane and not do well in teamfights.
@@bipolarprobe yeah but that's what makes fighting games more fun to improve at for me.
Mobas have so many small hard to notice things it can feel like a complete mystery on how to improve.
When playing fighting games, an opponent will find a weakness of yours and exploit it in such an obvious way that you're like "damn, I obviously have to fix that now"
It makes fighting games feel much easier than mobas for that reason. Especially with modern games like SF6 which show frame data in the lab, you can figure a lot of stuff out yourself without any guides. Whereas improving at mobas basically requires just looking at guides 24/7 especially with the ever changing meta, even when you're just bronze.
@@NihongoWakannai Yeah I agree. The feedback loop of losing, labbing, winning, repeat is really fun and is a big part of the appeal of fighting games. I'm more trying to point out that for some people that feedback feels harsh and unpleasant and is likely what they are conflating with the game being "too hard" to improve at. I actually think it's funny that people bring up mobas in the conversation about which genre is easier to learn because I think mobas are way harder to learn on average than fighting games, but plenty of people express feeling the exact opposite, so I'm trying to consider why they might feel that way.
I would agree but scrub quotes is a thing
I've always said that there's little to no overlap between fighting games and other genres compared to like RPGs or Shooters who have an overlap of moving your character and camera simultaneously, which is not natural no matter how many gamers like to think so.
Because of this, fighting games *feel* harder, even though they're really not because it *feels* like you never played a video game before. I've taught many friends how to play fighting games and I always have to remind them that they are improving, even if they're not winning. That they are getting better and learning more despite their gameplay looking "trash" compared to top level players.
I think the Sajam Slam series is a really good way to *show* non fighting game players what fighting games *really* look like at all levels of play.
Its moreso because the "introductory" genre of beat em ups dissapeared (mostly) as the arcade era ended, so the control schemes and what is considered as "winning" (slowly whittling down the bosses health ) doesnt apply in a similar way in most other genres
Here in lies the problem, comparing yourself to top players when you have no where near the knowledge and mechanical base to do so.
@@Yeet-ing In my experiences, it's one of the most common problems for newer players as they start developing a better understanding of the game.
"I'm not hitting this mix."
"I'm dropping this combo."
"I can't tech a throw to save my life."
That's fine dude, I do that shit all the time, it's just not noticeable to them because they don't know what's happening in my head.
i don't understand the rpg comparison, so many rpgs are grid based and in combat you don't control camera or the character movement
@@evilded2 I was more so referring to modern western RPGS, Like Bioware games or Elder Scrolls.
CRPGs are of course a different story.
Looking forward to a few good meme clips of Sajam saying “if you wanna do whippets and fentanyl I don’t care”
I think the problem, very simply, is that the fighting game learning experience is lonely.
There is nobody to share the in-the-moment experience with. There's no comradery.
"Just play with a friend" that is still not sharing the experience. One of you is winning and the other person is losing. And usually the person who's new is losing.
One of the reasons why the Slam is so good at helping the streamers learn is that they're in a team. You get cheered for. You cheer for others. You feel bad for losing together. Shoutout to 2xko :)
I truly don't think the Slam would do as well if it was like, 16 players with their own individual coaches.
I think my only issue with the Crofts tweet is the use of the word "Uniquely". After getting good at a number of different types of games I think the difficulty is about the same. But I think the ways in which they're difficult offer unique challenges when learning them that do make them pretty unique.
He used uniquely 100% accurately, it's just a usage you might not be used to. The uniquely in this case is referring to how noteworthy it is in that regard, not that it's the exact same skills. All these different genres are similar in that they require different skills that take a lot of time to learn, which is the same as fighting games.
I think a lot of this discussion is meaningless, because we're talking about so many concepts rolled up together at once. Is basic competence in fighting games knowing how to jump, push buttons and do motion inputs? Or does it also include basic knowledge of all your match-ups? Does basic competence in Siege mean knowing how to aim and shoot, and what your ability does, or does it also include basic strats for each level? Does advanced skill in any game mean being able to compete competitively? Is that even meaningful if the game has a good matchmaking system where you're always playing against people who can compete about as well as you anyway?
I think what makes fighting games uniquely hard for people is the simple fact that it's a completely different genre they are usually not familiar with to any large degree whereas with other games there's much higher chance that they've played a somewhat similar game in the past that they can build upon.
In Counter Strike, you don't usually have to teach your friend how to look around with the mouse without getting dizzy and how to move with WASD without bumping into walls and obstacles like a toddler. To a lot of people it seems like a silly, convoluted scenario that someone could struggle with the controls so. Chances are rather high that they've played a game before with the first person view and they know how to do basic movement. They will gloss over basic movement as "easy" and "intuitive" and will not factor it in at all when talking about the difficulty. But it's definitely an obstacle for an actually brand new player - anyone who watched their girlfriend struggle with this will tell you so.
Fighting games are the same, except they speak a different language so all those hours in Counter Strike or Starcraft or League of Legends or Skyrim or Palworld or Fortnite or whatever else are mostly irrelevant. A brand new player is going to struggle even with basic movement. Even though we might think there's nothing more intuitive than a 2D game where you press right to go right and press left to go left and press up to jump, they will struggle. They will think the floor is lava and jump around like a rabbit.
i do think there's something to be said about genre familiarity. like if you know how to move and shoot in a shooter you have a comfortable place to start in any shooter game, even extremely weird ones with lots of knowledge checks like rainbow six siege or hunt showdown. you probably wont understand how you died but youve already got the skill floor of moving around and defending yourself down, you can work with that
jumping into a fighting game having never played one before means you dont have that skill floor to fall back on. you dont know how to move, you dont know how to hurt people on purpose, and you definitely dont know how to deal with a blanka ball. without that foundational knowledge it can be very frustrating
and i think that's the word people mean when they said fighting games are uniquley hard, theyre just uniquely frustrated because theyre used to having some kind of fundamentals to work with. strategy games like starcraft tend to have this problem as well, with people having no earthly idea how to even move their units let alone make new ones. people tend to bounce off things unless theyre really ready to commit
and thats something really cool about the slams. participants are commiting to learning just by participating and are putting their best foot forward to learn this weird new thing theyve never tried. having a coach definitely helps but i think it's way more important that they circumstances demand that they put some effort in and really try with some gentle social pressure from being on a team. it's kind of perfect. and any brand new fighting game player who participates in a slam will have that foundational knowledge to being to another fighting game. that's really cool!
I gotta note how impressive it is the amount of time you've put and are putting into games that aren't FGs, yet are still this amazing of an FG personality. I have a feeling you could commentate your opinions on pretty much any other game and still be truth nuking every other statement.
If I'm bad at a shooter, at least my gun can shoot all of its bullets. If I'm bad at a racing game, at least my car can get to top speed. If I'm bad at a fighting game, the cool things I want to do with my cool character can't happen. Games are generally about doing the cool things the game advertises, and the game is fun if those cool things happen, even if I'm doing the bare minimum. Being bad at a fighting game means there aren't any cool things in the game. It doesn't matter if you use facts and logic to tell me I'm bad at Guitar Hero, because the power fantasy of playing Guitar Hero is fun regardless.
If I’m bad at a fighter at least my character can walk around and throw punches, if I’m bad at a shooter I walk around a corner get instantly one shot by a person who’s been playing since I was 6 and have to sit out for the next 5 minutes or so till the next round starts. At least fighting games ur never literally just sitting there watching other people play instead of u.
its true that in fighting games a lot of the fun is less accessible though, although if you are fighting an equally skilled opponent it should still be fun assuming basic understanding of the game
I suspect one of the driving reasons behind this continuing to come up is how quickly fighting games will show you you suck if you suck. Like, even if you're losing the whole game in a strategy game, you might at least feel like you're executing your gameplan, you're doing your thing, you're getting production done, whatever, so even if you lose you might fool yourself into thinking you were doing well up until then.
If you get cornered and stomped and it's over in 20 seconds gg shake my hand, it's easy to walk away with that immediate "wow this is hard and sucks" reaction. You didn't accomplish anything during the match to assuage that feeling.
Even if you're dying a lot in an FPS like, say, Overwatch, as long as you get one kill here or there or push the cart or do *something* you might feel like you're getting better at it or at least like you contribute, even if you're basically dead weight in reality. Similar to that "why do I lose to scrubs" mentality where living longer against the better player felt good even though living longer was only a result of your opponent not choosing to go HAM and kill you immediately.
Thank you Sajam for the 321654 video on the matter, god bless
First of all, I love all of this kind of videos from you.
Second, from my perspective, I agree that fighting games are not inherently more difficult, but for me fightings are like a chore sometimes, that you don't usually needs to do with other games. Learning combos, tech, checking some frame data, asking for advice versus some hard matchup....
As a personal example with a background in SFV and LoL:
I'm learning Dota 2 a bit right now, and I only watched a few 5 min video series about the main things in the game and I can jump into the real matches while learning at the same time I spend hours playing.
If I just jump into a fighting game I can do somewhat fine if I had some experience (like SFV) and I'm learning Guilty Gear Strive right now, but as I said, when I need to go to the training to learn some combos I feel I'm doing a chore, because you can't learn that on the fly in a real match. Same for specific character tech for example
For me that's the worse about fighting games, I have to push myself doing chores that are very repetitive to improve in the game
I just went through this with a friend because he was in a position where he wanted to try fighting games and about 17 minutes in decided it was too hard so he refunded the game despite me holding his hand through it. He didn't understand the value in getting good at a fighting game (He chose BBCF). His excuse was that he couldn't see himself understanding what to do so I asked him what was so different about league (because he also just picked that up) and his response was, yeah but we're on the same team.
Money aside, it was easier for him to not be accountable in league than in BBCF and that progression was not obvious or didn't feel good. Other than league he doesn't play any competitive games without friends and is often the worst player on the team but he's hanging out with us so he's having fun learning. Additionally, it's easier to sell him a game that doesn't cost money. League, Omega Strikers, Valorant, etc.
I'll save this comment to copy/paste it next year when you make this video again
I do think it can be more confusing to learn fighting games from scratch since you have to learn many concepts and terms. Frame data, inputs, nomenclature, character movesets and combos to at least get you started. I think that once you have the basics fighting games are quite engaging in the sense that you will encounter issues that you can probably figure out or work around on your own with the tools that you have. But starting from scratch can be daunting
Learning tarkov from scratch was way harder than learning fighting games tbh.
@@Vsolid and that's fair, Tarkov is a game that requires a lot of game knowledge. It's not a question about which is more difficult because if you are passionate enough eventually you will learn any game as well as if you don't vibe with something it will feel like a drag to try and learn it. What I meant is that fighting games are a genre of their own and not a very big one at that (they might sell millions but not that many people actually play fighting games). With a game like Tarkov you most likely transferred some knowledge or skills from a number of other shooter games that are way more popular. Learning both games from absolute zero (you've never played a game like it in your life) is equally as hard but most "gamers" tend to have a background in genres like shooting games, action games, some sport games, etc so usually picking up a new one tends to be less challenging.
Learning that learning fighting games aren't inherently more difficult than other genre of games is inherently difficult apparently though.
fighting games rely much more on mechanical skill than most other genres, so you can watch as many videos as you want on fighting games as a noob none of those will help you do a combo unless you're watching a guide while sitting in the training mode doing what the guide tells you (not to mention how a lot of guides for fighting games are just worse in my experience then for say mobas, but i guess the nature of game is what causes this). For other genres if you just watch a ton of content of the game you'll have way more practical knowledge than with fighting games, for example with mobas you'll know loosly what to build, what your positioning should look like etc.
I agree to everything but to play some devils advocate. What makes some games seem more accessible "easy" is because there is a choice to play in an easier way that makes you feel useful. League - play malphite hit ult on this person, valorant - play sage and wall this every round, tft - pick up every sugarcraft unit. Now while these aren't optimal play styles they make it seem easier. Now fighting games have gotten better at this with integration of modern controls, and pulse fuse. But at the end of the day learning the game SYSTEM is very hard and will take years to master.
the biggest difference ive noticed is not just if its a team game or not but more specifically if the more experienced friend can actively help you. games like tf2/ow2 mean a friend is usually able to actively help with damage or some form of direct supporting ability or in the case of fighting games platform fighters doubles formats mean two friends can muck around and the more experienced one is able to quickly intervene at any given time whereas even something like 2xko is relatively limited to assists, tags, and bursts
Crofts is spitting about TFT being incomprehensible. I tried learning that for a month straight and just couldn't get into it. It's a game made for people who jerk it to excel spreadsheets.
I can confirm. I jerk it to excel spreadsheets and tableau reports for a living and I enjoy TFT.
EVE Online players feeling called out rn
I have my theory and what you was describing at like 1:45 is really good examples of it.
Theory is, FGs (and rts) lack timely feedback, in other games you either can judge by yourself why you died, either just raw mechanical skill, using kill cam, checking enemy items\stats, abilities (both in league or dota you can check it while you playing), spectating or asking a teammate.
But in FGs, when you getting beaten by something and you have no idea frames\hitboxes on that move and how to deal with it, you can't just check it mid match. If someone doesn't understand frame data yet, they don't have knowledge that they can't attack after certain moves and there is no feedback besides "you get hit even after you block it". There is no death recap, no kill and nobody to tell you what is the problem. So you have to stop playing, go to youtube to learn FGs basic knowledge, then go to training against one specific character and check how you could beat that move. And the more you know how your specific game works (universal mechanics) more answers you will find.
And when you do all that, you may not find that same character again for some time, or other opponent may not use that specific move. Repeating that for multiple characters will take a lot of time you could spent on playing other people.
I personally think the reason that people see them as harder, is because the controller is an active part of how the game functions, and doesnt just melt into your hands. It requires active thinking to do motion inputs.
You talking about updates to fighting games not being as frequent as other games, I've seriously been itching for another costume to buy for a year and Capcom won't fucking give it to me. Coming from SFV it's so bizarre, when they added outfits all the time and gave so many for free.
Because SFV was done in such a way that the costume were very much easier to make. Not only that, but some of theses costumes there were clearly hastily cobbled together on the cheap.
Compare that to the level of detail on SF6 costume, with stuff like Zangief glasses getting fogged when he blow steam from his nose.
SF5 costumes would be more comparable to the avatar costumes in SF6 (which do get updated a bit more frequently)
It's a shame it take that long to get more stuff, but it's explainable.
It's all marketing and popularity I think. When League was new I remember people talking about thsi shit being too complicated, but it got enough marketing that it didn't matter. Strive gets a lot of people but by most standards strive is real hard with a lot of incomprehensible mechanics to the outside observer - people play it because it's popular and it creates a virtuous cycle.
At some point when there's a critical mass of people playing a competitive game, it crosses over into "easy" territory even when they all have similarly heavy conceptual load.
Hopping in on the question asked around 4:20 (I know it's rhetorical but still). For games like league I feel like the "single player content" is stuff like RTS campaigns or ARPGs like Diablo. Games like that provide ego safe, fun spaces to learn the very basics of how to play isometric click to move games.
When I first started trying to play fighting games they at a base level felt a lot different to control from what I had experience with. I didn't have that core muscle memory for picking one up like I would XYZ new shooter or moba on the market. I think most people who play games got out of the "how do I even move my character phase" when they were young for genres like shooters or mobas, and are frustrated when they regress to that step trying out fighting games.
This is where stuff like world tour, or games like Slave Zero X, River City Girls, or Streets of Rage 4 slot in to on boarding people.
I really felt like I was missing something in my life recently, I'm glad sajam got to do his yearly learning fighting games is not inherently more difficult than other competitive games video
@sajam as soon as you compared it to learning siege, my brain clicked. It was so hard learning and teaching that game(especially during utility meta). I'm still not even good and I have 1700 hrs in it. I just have a lot of knowledge, like identifying every operator based on the sound of their gun or gadget.
I really just think it is that fighting games are very unique and require a unique skill set. You really need to play fighting games to get better at fighting games. However, there are translatable skills between FPS and TPS, between RTS and MOBAs, between different action games. It makes it feel more difficult because you're developing a new skillset, meanwhile nearly everyone has played an FPS or some kind of MOBA/Strategy game before.
People who say that fighting games are harder than other genres apparently forget when they were a kid and they were just mashing and having fun. It may be "hard" to get good at it but you can step into a fighting game and roll the controller on your face and have fun. I doubt mashing works as well in shooters or Dota or anything else.
See you guys at next year's video!
Fighting games are indeed more difficult to approach in a certain way. There are two distinct categories in the concept of difficulty - complexity (how much you need to know and how you make decisions) and execution.
As an example TCGs will have very high complexity and zero execution requirements - your effectiveness is almost entirely determined by how much you know. Fighting games have high execution requirements, require alot of knowledge, and require high speed of decision making. For example, you have to know what you can punish, react to an opponent's unsafe move, decide what kind of punishment you're going to use, and execute it. Mashing in fighting games is certainly easier than playing LoL even at silver-gold level, but midgame in fighting games is much harder.
0:08 the aegis emoji
i think fighting games do have one problem that some other genres don't that make them harder to learn which is how open ended they are. Your goal is "just" to beat your opponent but there's no one set way or path to achieve that goal, as the way to defeat your opponent also depends on how they play. This in my opinion is what makes it difficult for fighting games to teach new players how to get better and improve passively simply just through playing. While plenty of external resources exist to help people get better (and increasingly more internal resources) making the process happen naturally and gradually over time rather than requiring extensive effort and research or help from a knowledgable friend/coach is part of what makes it tough for new playeys to get into and stick with fighting games.
Team based games allow for people to sometimes hitch a free ride onto wins. League you can at least control your character for a bit. Maybe farm some.creeps before you bite it. In fight games when someone is new alot of times they will just get utterly dominated. Rushed down into oblivion or zoned completely out. Not to mention if you wanna play fighting games with friends who are new you have to play against them.
The first gaming company that finds a way to make fighting games a team game which allows for carries is going to be huge
I don't know, SF6 is my first fighting game and it felt like learning an instrument. Just using the pad to move and up to jump felt extra weird because no other game had ever ask me to do this.
In LoL even though there are a lot of informations to soak up at least moving the character and using a skill bar is common in other games like RTS and MMORPG.
I love seeing this discussion every year!
Fighting game players say fighting games aren't hard to learn. Shooter players say shooters aren't hard to learn. League/DOTA players say their games aren't hard to learn. Top end MMO raiders say raids aren't hard to learn. Just because something is not hard to learn for you personally, doesn't make it easy for someone else to pick up. If you play the genre as much as you do, of course it's not going to seem hard to learn. Sure, there are things that carry over between genres, such as reaction time and situational awareness, but once you start getting into things like frame data (which I know is not essential, but let's be real it's important to know) and whatever else, my eyes glaze over and I'm out.
I was super stoked for SF6, all over the internet the FGC was saying how good of an entry-level fighting game it would be for new players to the scene. I even bought a fight stick in anticipation, was planning to get into T8 it dropped, and I thought stuff like Strive and GBVS looked fun too. After a few weeks in SF6, trying various characters to see which fit my playstyle and in the end not even being able to manage combo trials, I just dropped it with a shrug. Playing with a pad felt terrible, modern controls felt awful to me, as well.
That talk about League resonated _hard_ with me. My partner's trying to get me into the game and I can't help but feel dumb even in practice mode. I mean... okay. Riven's hard, sure. She's combo-heavy, okay I can live with that... but what's her item build? Which spells should I pick? Splitpushing? What's that? _When_ do I get to do that? Actually, which lane should I be in when I pick Riven, or other characters? Am I allowed to leave my lane? So on and so forth.
Honestly seeing Sajam saying "I don't care if you throw insults at me, just play and don't bail the friggin game" is something that I need for a confidence boost to *_maybe_* start playing some games proper, instead of sticking to TFT.
league is a game where you have lots of ambiguity but its oke to be bad and make bad choices
you are supposed to be playing with other noobs who also are completely clueless, if you soloqueue you should be put against people of similar skill level, i would probably play some co op vs ai games first, and if someone is talking shit immediately mute them from the tab window
as for items and runes there is a recommended section in the game now that is quite reliable
as for splitpushing my impression is that its something you do if you are behind or if the champion you play isnt as valuable in teamfights but dont quote me on that
also riven should be in the top lane
@@dj_koen1265 Oh wow I didn't expect a reply for my comment at all
I've already gotten enough understanding on the basics of League by the time you told me all these, but I still appreciate it regardless; played a couple of vs. AI and Quickplay games as well, though the latter not enough to unlock Ranked as of yet (still 2 matches out of the required 10). Also, I _definitely_ need that "it's okay to be bad and make bad choices" thing.
Also also I swapped to Jax because good lord I had a rough time playing Riven lol
@@nellancaster np, and yeah riven is hard, i used to play riven back when i still played a lot of league but i would usually struggle to get things done with her
I had playback speed on .25 from a different vid when I clicked this. The slow mo "It's this man's fault, this seemingly innocent man" with the slow fade to JM's face absolutely killed me
You could really make a playlist out of all the topics that Sajam has to repeatedly make video about.
i think an argument against fighting games is that its much easier to reach intentionality in other competitive games while fighting games theres a much steeper curve before you stop mashing buttons and youre pressing the buttons you want to press. other competitive games dont have this issue or at least as much as fighting games, while you are still bad when you start any competitive game youre still likely controling your character enough to do what you want to do (badly)
Some friends of mine convinced me to play Omega Strikers last month. It is basically 3v3 Air hockey where you can ko the other team off the edges of the field, sounds easy right? Only if you never want to get past silver rank. You have to be constantly aware not only of your own position but of your teammates, opponents and the "core" (puck), in addition to ability cooldowns, various stage hazards, and more stuff I am probably forgetting. Plus there is equipment, two random items and a predetermined set depending on if you are goalie or forward before the game starts and more randomized to gear choose from between every round. Learning the basics is pretty intuitive though, just hit the "core" towards the other teams goal, but not straight towards their team members, and remember to pass if you can't get it past them..
I got into Dota 1 mostly because I could watch replays, which was huge at a time when youtube was barely a thing. It was groundbreaking for me to just be able to watch someone else play, see their strats, look at what they were doing, figure out why it was or wasn't working.
These days though that's just basic entry level. Shit's a lot easier to learn these days, the problem has always been a mixture of people not really trying to learn and games teaching poorly (mixed with gatekeepers all over the place making noise)
Sneaking that "FOLKS" into the Revolver Ocelot (Revolver Ocelot) clip got me good.
I feel like this video is a great example of how fighting game players usually don't understand fighting games compared to other genres, and how genuinely different they are. Fighting games are fundamentally rock paper scissors with an execution requirement. Until you've spent an enormous amount of time grinding execution, far more than any other genre requires, most strategies are negative value. For any other genre, new tech becomes useful anywhere from instantly useful to maybe needing up to half an hour of practice. You won't get the benefit a pro gets, but you will benefit rather than just guaranteeing losses for rarely tens but more typically hundreds or thousands of hours until you've downloaded the timing and the tech instantly swings from actively bad to amazingly good. It's an enormous difference that people who long ago spent those thousands of hours grinding out timing memorization usually don't grasp.
The other thing that's really telling is the mis-made analogy between being in a combo and being dead in a shooter. Being in a combo isn't like being dead, it's like being shot at. It's making one bad guess and being hard CC'd for 10 seconds. Combat is non-interactive when it's not your turn, which is fundamentally different from combat in other genres where CC is generally very limited and you still have most or all of your kit active to some extent through most of combat. It's more like being the target of an opponent's combo in a card game with no interrupt mechanics. Sure, some fighting games add bursts to crutch this (though that is ultimately just another RPS), and Smash has DI which is a good concept, but for mainstream fighting games the thing normal people are complaining about is that they're playing RPS with a stat disadvantage that also wastes their time when they guess wrong. That's fundamentally not fun, and you don't experience the other side unless you spend thousands of hours memorizing timing.
Deja vu, also i love that rant at the end lmao
I love how everything you said is everything that's in my head that I couldn't portray to others
In Dota 2, for a new player, they are bad and they don't know what deny is, so they get massive advantage because of that, but they don't know that they are losing because the game doesn't show it to them.
But in fighting games, when a new player is doing bad, the game makes sure they know it. Like in Strive, if you get counter hit, the announcer says "COUNTER" and the game slows down to make sure you know you fucked up.
For most of my lifes, almost no shooters appealed to me, they looked boring as fuck. Then I gave DOOM 2016 a chance because it has a great artistic direction, I swear to you, on a high DPI mouse I could not aim for MY LIFE, it was so scary because certain enemies would tank more if i did not aim for their head, I could not walk while shooting, I could not manage the other weapons and special weapons at first. I got better at it, even when I got to play DOOM Eternal, it was much more natural, even though anything I did on Eternal would seem so hard when I played 2016, it was so rewarding, so yeah, I do not think FGs are more difficult than any other genre
Also thanks for the reminder 13:00
The thing that makes any competitive game difficult is your opponent. If the mechanics are hard for you, then they're hard for them - and likewise if the mechanics are easy for your opponent then they're easy for you. The variable is always the opponent.
AaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAH I love these so much. Sajam channeling my eternal frustration.