In the video, I said that DBFZ doesn't tell you about the universal overhead. This is incorrect, it does in the FighterZ Dojo (which had been added after release), along with some additional tutorials on various aspects of the game. While it suffers from the usual pitfalls of fighting games tutorials discussed in the video, and the devs made the questionable decision of adding this in a location completely different from the base tutorial (hence how I missed it), it's an example that devs can do this stuff after the fact if the game didn't ship with it.
Love the Gio avatar. I'm subbing just for that. The great observation of the state of fighting games. People talking about the "second golden age" need to check their hype. But I have hope that the next generation of games this year will push the bar a little higher and maybe the dudes at Project L will watch this.
I want to personally add on to this, I don't think DBFZ teaches you about how to DHC from any move in any tutorials (41236/63214 + Assist, I checked the dojo just in case I missed something) and the only reason I now know how to do it is because of an external wiki. Regardless, sometimes even with my current experience there are many things in this video which I have gripes with or am struggling with at the moment. My friends who aren't as involved in these games would likely also agree with a lot said in here. I feel that ultimately if fighting games are able to move towards a more dynamic and transparent form of teaching their players as well as touching on concepts outside of casual play without lowering skill ceilings, it might be the thing that prevents skill floors from being too daunting. I do apologise if I wasn't able to explain my point in the best way, but I hope it did make sense.
One really cool thing I've seen is how Fantasy Strike uses colored particles to show frame advantage. If your opponent blocks your attack, a blue spark indicates your attack was plus on block. If the spark is red, it's minus on block. The size of the spark shows how plus or minus it was. This shows players an whether it's still their turn, or whether a move is punishable, without needing to know frame data. Fantasy Strike also has some other cool stuff, like characters flashing certain colors to indicate things like armor or invincibility.
Oh nice, I missed the frame advantage thing in Fantasy Strike. A number of games indicate armor/invincibility, but when it comes to in-match feedback, it's not just about having it, but actively telling players it's a thing.
I didn't know that, thats really sick actually. Ive heard some speculation that tekken 8 might be doing this as the times when jin is plus in one of the gameplay footages, kazuya's blocks are red so I pray they might just implement that in the game.
love the super armor/invincibility indicators, I know like in strive they flash red after you hit them and anji just freezes you, I've been playing strive since day 1 and I didn't know until a few months ago that when you hit anji's spin you miss and it freezes you makes you vulnerable I just thought his attack had some wonky ass porperties
The one thing I wish from a training mode is simply a slow mo option to help learn timing on harder combos and learn animations of characters. Also a way to upload custom combos in game so your not stuck only able to practice the same terrible combos with the exclusive ability to have shown commands
I think street fighter 6 looks to have lots of side things that make it fun to learn fundamentals and different game mechanics for beginners and new players to the genre
That’s back when fighting games were technical marvels. Now they don’t have the visual or immersion inducing fidelity that the average person will be instantly drawn to.
Great video. This reminds me when Woolie (from WoolieVS channel) was talking about fighting games having a post match summary: your character reflecting on his win/loss, with thought bubbles around him "you only anti air-ed 2/10 times, wanna train ?" "I dropped that corner combo, maybe I used the wrong move ?", and clicking on those would bring you to the tutorial/training mode to train those specific situations. I thought that would be a cool way of teaching players how to get better by doing, but in the reverse order.
The worst thing is, games have been tracking stuff like that for ages, but when they do present it to the player, it's often in the form of obscure charts (like the spider charts in SF V and Strive).
I think the point about more interactive learning is key - no one really wants to play a tutorial, so you kinda have to trick people into learning by making it a fun obstacle to overcome in the first place. About where to draw the line: it's impossible to teach everything as i'm still learning stuff after playing the genre for over 10+ years. But at the beginning, I think its about fostering a culture that improving is fun, and reaching the flashpoint where players are excited to seek out answers on their own. I think providing helpful feedback to players over time, rather than all upfront (like a tutorial does) would be part of that
There's something to be said about how FG's in the last decade are trying so hard to give better tools and tutorials for newcomers to learn (hell, some games even butchered their mechanics and movesets to see if it was more beginner friendly), yet games like League of Legends, Dota2, COD Warzone, Fortnite, and even Magic the Gathering attract millions of players while having pretty much no tutorials and tools to help newcomers. 90% of what me and my friends learned for LoL, D2 or Fortnite came from internet guides or youtube videos. Most importantly, actually playing the game, too. In short, while I believe companies should make better tutorials and better tools for their FG's, none of that would help if the game itself doesn't attract newcomers. We got some promising titles coming in the future who shall help understand how to tackle some of FG's retention problems. SF6 will answer the question of "putting more Single Player content in your FG equals more sales" (something that has been a topic of discussion ever since MK11 and SF5). On the other hand, Project L will answer the question of "it's possible to make a viable and competitive F2P traditional FG".
i think one of the reason is alot of fighting games are too similar to each other. Its basically the same as most of the old generic 1st person shooter like half life, call of duty, modern warfare,... you played 3 -5 games and you feel like you already play every single games in the genre; cause most company barely stray away from the established formula. Sure its not 100% copy-paste, but most of them are still like highly similar in certain core mechanics and as much as everyone hate on Fortnite, you do have to admit that it actually did try to make itself different from most other shooter games by constantly changing map layout, guns, item,... and sometimes even add new mechanics
The thing is, in LoL, DotA 2, Fortnite, CoD, or even Magic the Gathering you're not starting out in 1v1 matches. Yeah, you're still being knowledge checked and the games do a horrible job of teaching you, but you're still goofing around with your friends
I mean you can see bralwhalla for example, besides part of his players getting into game cuz is free to play, theres a decent number of tutorials and character strategy guides out there for people interested into getting good at the game Certain fg's could get more popularity if theres more experienced players out there willing to teach stuff to newbies, it also gives a good impression of the community and that can be the thing to make more people hooked into keep playing a game
@@VernulaUtUmbra I think your point makes sense. All those titles still provide some social aspect to them, while FG's are mostly a singleplayer endeavor online (as paradoxical as it may seem). I can definitely state that I get more motivated whenever I'm playing with my friends.
@@VernulaUtUmbra I played all of them, and tbh I disagree. Any game is easier and more enjoyable with friends, and fighting games are no different. It's how me and my friends got into the genre, we're all trash AF but still have fun playing each other. Most sane people without experience with competitive games or even games at all arent willing to play league, dota, cs or r6 for the same reasons people say that FGs are supposedly impossible for new comers. They can feel frustrating as fuck if you don't have the right mindset and are playing alone, which is why league is so popular, people get hooked up and try to get everyone to play, and since (atleast a few years ago) most people didn't have a experience with mobad, do they're willing to try it out. FGs on the other hand, almost eveyone has some experience because of the olden days, even though the experience of ranked in the games with healthy population is no different that the ranked experience in other competitive games, besides grouping with your buddies. i would even argue the experience is better, since you don't have to deal with the absurd amount of toxicity newcomers get in competitive games
An indicator of how true this video's general thesis statement is: I'm a super novice fighting game player who recently spent a few hours playing Strive. I am not plugged into the FGC at all. Despite hearing the game yell **COUNTER** at me a hundred times, I didn't realize until you mentioned it in this video just now that I should have been learning that I was using the wrong move in those situations. I just thought "oh no, I fucked up in some unspecified way, no idea what else I should have done differently". I just never learned what Counter actually means, because the game never explained it.
It’s also normal for people to missunderstand counters cuz it just feels random when you just mash buttons and see what happens, once you know exactly what move you are doing and see the other guy interrupt it and the counter sound plays it finally sinks in that counters are not just fancy crits XD
Have a single player (story?) mode that serves as an extended tutorial. This area can teach new players counter hit, reversal, and punishes by doing the thing that ExtraCredits suggested by having the game freeze when it happens or something. Or if the player fails enough times in a specific part, the character will make some kind of dialogue about it. For concepts like anti airs vs jump ins, low attacks and mixups, they should have a character ask themselves in game (ie ask the player) if they have some kind of tool to deal with it without giving a straight answer. When the player employs the tool and succeeds or fails, the character can make a comment about it. For such things, dialogue should be subtitled and appear above the player character's head rather than on the bottom middle of the screen or in some kind of generic window. New players look at their own character moreso than they look at their opponent, so feedback should appear in that general location. The best version of this will have non playable characters as learning tools (much like what Them Fighting Herd does), but because these are basically entire characters that they have to design, make assets, code in, etc, but because the player will not be playing as them, it's a difficult thing to convince the dev team to make. Combo trials should have their command list be dynamically positioned based on which side of the screen the opponent is on. That way, the player look at both the opponent and the script at the same time.
In my opinion, fighting game tutorials needs more fundamental stuff, like a movement, footsies, neutral, pressure, mixups, etc. Teaching core mechanics is good, but fighting game newcomers usually struggling trying to utilize it properly
Use motion blur lines on character animations to denote invul and the parts of the character's body that gain that invul, whether it's the high or low parts. Make overheads and lows universally visible through the animation, so an arking kick or punch should always be OH, crouching lights should generally hit low. Make it consistent. Also I wanna see attack hitsparks be used to show different info. In a combo they could have raising numbers shown in hitsparks, same for counterhits, punishes, throws, clashes etc. Consider where you want the players to be looking during a match. Ideally, it should only be you and the opponent. Try to make unique mechanics not be shown as just bars all over, but graphics in the best places in the UI and ideally on the character itself. Stuff like auras, additional items floating around or being used by the characters, stuff like that.
A video I would love to see is one to send to those friends who love 1v1 PvP but won’t give fighting games a true start. How to get into them, why they should and the mindset to approach the game with
I feel the first two have been well covered by other people (check the playlist in talked about in my previous video, you might find something that works), and I have plans for a video that might address the third one.
Fantastic video Mougli. I'm so happy to see AAA fighting games finally moving forward with helping new players get into fighters...it's far from perfect but i'm just happy to see some real momentum forward. SF6's is looking really promising in this aspect.
From my brief experience (1/4 of the tutorial [because I couldn't progress] and a few matches in free for all in SkullGirls 2nd Encore) I can say that a combination of possible moves in real time combined with a markers for low/mid/overhead like in Fighting Herds would've been great. Especially if it stays a bit on a screen so when I got punished I caould see what I was doing and while I'd be getting up I could at least make a mental note to myself to look at that moment. Idk how much that would've helped me since my recations and fine motor skills (I literally couldn't beat the turorial as I mentioned) were so terrible I quit...for now at least. Maybe when I have a ton of time next time....
What about a training mode that still matches you with another player, Neither player can die but you can still lose hp to see how much damage combos can do. It would also have the same tools from your normal training mode. Also, I would like the feature in training modes where you can slow down the game speed to understand combos or reads better to be more commonplace
I used to play a lot of fighting games when younger, like 20 years ago. But today frankly I feel like they are too much of an investment on experiences that are to some degree doing the same things over and over again on exactly the same screen. With the amount of games that now offer more varied and even deeper experiences that go way beyond mechanical mastery, but instead to even philosophical, social, and artistic aspects. At my age Im finding it hard to justify the investment. Besides I already play LOL which also requires a ridiculous amount of knowledge about every single match-up on a grotesque combination on 5v5. There is only so much one can be willing to sacrifice other experiences in the name of mastery.
Great video - I enjoyed this and I have to say Dead or Alive 5, Mortal Kombat 11 and Skull Girls have the best teaching tools I've found in fighting games.
I know that Skullgirls is considered to have one of the best tutorials in the genre, and from what I've played I agree, it's my favorite FG for that reason , as well as it's tendancy towards feeling very accessible with clear feedback, easy to remember inputs, and VFX that don't feel overwhelming (The story, art and characters are another reason I love the game). I still think it has issues though, it took me ages for me to realize that I shouldn't ONLY use light attacks in neutral because of how things were explained, I feel it can be overwhelming, and doesn't feel like it has good tools to teach people how to see mistakes, which is one of my biggest hurdles. I also feel character tutorials should teach about normals rather than just specials, and have more practical demonstrations of them, instead of just explaining how they work, especially since said explainations may not make sense to a newer player. Another kind of stupid Idea I had while playing against CPUs and noticing how the AI, similarly to a player, can get tripped up to certain strategies, and I thought it could be really interesting to have story mode CPUs have their AI programmed with specific strategies that the character struggles with that you need to figure out how to exploit, maybe make it specific to the player character, like in SG an AI in Painwheel's story mode that doesn't respond well to her flight to teach the benefits of using it, but another that focuses hard on preventing it to show where its weaknesses lie, similarly to how a lot of more traditional games teach you their systems. I think a good example of how this could adapt is how Dark Souls has enemies that are basically AI controlled players, and while they're less intelligent than most opponents, the techniques from dealing with them, and other enemies in the game can act as a springboard for better understanding PvP interactions. I think this kind of just boils down to having tutorials assume the player is very new and explaining as much as they can in as many ways as possible, since often these games feel like jumping into the deep end of the pool without any swimming lessons first. The more I learn about the genre, the more I realize just how heavily based in knowledge a lot of it is and I think these games would benefit a lot from teaching this kind of thing. This comment was way too long but I hope my idea got across here, as someone who has a more casual interest in these games but does love them, I've always felt the main thing keeping me from getting more into them is poor onboarding, and teaching tools are one of the biggest hurdles IMO so I have a lot of thoughts on them.
Agreed. AI programming in fighting games is ABYSMAL and it's never tuned on an individual character basis. You'd think given how popular the genre is, they'd try to make the opponents interesting and diverse instead of just play more perfectly the higher the "difficulty"
I still distinctly remember xrd's gamey tutorial mode, give us more of that with a muse dash twist to teach people about combos and timing, so you're hitting minions/objects as they come while learning what can chain into what
My first real look into fighting games was Skull girls and it was so demotivating to see how far the skill gap was, even playing against other beginners. The game never clicked for me, the visuals and sheer volume of information was a distraction, and I wanted to play something more my speed. Street Fighter 5 is a game that I've gotten some satisfaction out of and I want to get to a point where the fundamentals aren't even something I have to worry about.
@@chrismanuel9768 Soul Calibur V has a really good mode with lots of cpu opponents with their own tendencies programmed in. It feels a lot more like actually fighting random humans than the usual arcade mode cpus (especially the ones that just spam one or two moves, haha)
Honestly, I've been having this complaint about games not even limited to the fighting game genre. The thing that really bothers me about the SMT series is that they give very vague descriptions for the strength of moves instead of any actual numbers to work with and I just feel like giving more information to the player even if it's in a index buried in a menu is something almost every game regardless of genre struggles with
Fighting games in general just need to teach you more visually. New players get destroyed constantly because the game doesn't visually tell them what they did wrong, so they just eat the same attacks over and over. The frame data and everything can stay the same, but the moves need to pop out more somehow to convey the idea that a certain attack is coming. Tekken (the fighting game I'm most knowledgeable in) has a lot of moves where the animation goes low, looks like a low attack, but then the hitbox turns out to be a mid and you eat shit for blocking wrong. It's the same situation for highs: you go to high-crush an attack and then end up eating a full combo from the mid that hit you. Throws are even worse: if you're not paying attention to way the opposing characters uses their hands to grab you'll end up eating massive damage if you don't break that throw within a 15-20 frame window. A lot of people (myself included!) can't visually identify what throw is coming at that speed, so instead we just guess if it's a 1, 2, or 1+2 throw. Maybe have a subtle hint of what is coming through the uses of some particle effects? High attacks have a red spark, low attacks have a yellow spark, etc. Having something to visually identify a move at a glance would allow the player to learn mid-match without having to head to practice mode to find out why they lost. I'm not sure if this would be popular as it may potentially lower the skill ceiling, but the skill floor would be lowered drastically and would visually teach players why they got hit by a certain move.
For my game, I am trying to make a guidebook with tips on how to use every move in the game. Unfortunately, I have to rewrite stuff when a move get reworked...
Where is the line that shouldn't be crossed? I don't think there is one. Holding back information hurts your bottom line. Period. Getting knowledge checked causes players to quit and play something else. Period. As you said, keeping the game a secret so people spend more money is a vestige from the arcade days. Not only are there no secrets anymore because of the internet, but if you continue to keep secrets, your newer, casual players (you know, the ones more likely to tell their friends and drum up more sales) will just go spend their money somewhere else.
One of my favourite things about GG Strive is that the game will teach you how to do everything and it will actually check your technique to make sure you’re doing it right. I always tell people to do like the first two tutorial zones and then go play online for awhile. Then when they get floor stuck go play the others because it’s only worth knowing anything else if you can use the basic tools good enough
Fire video. I'm learning Melty Blood right now and it really helped to hear someone tell me "just because a game is easy to play doesn't mean it's easy to learn." I've played 80 matches and won like 4, but I don't let losing discourage me. If I'm being honest, I think there's only so many ways you can teach someone without them learning directly from battle experience. I think more games should encourage play time rather than encouraging wins. These games need to tell you that you will play a lot and lose a lot but that's a normal thing. I genuinely thought I was a really shitty MB player until I realized people are so selective with their ranked matches it's almost comical, while I prefer to just fight everyone until they give up. I feel like while trainning and CPU vs modes can sorta give you a rough estimate of what you'll deal with during actual gameplay, the only way to truly gain skill is to just be ridiculously, unrealistically persistent. I appreciate you for having the best Strive character in the thumbnail btw.
I've seen SF6 has a mode where the health bars are replaced by a number of objectives for each player (e.g. "do 3 fireballs, 2 throws, 1 reversal, etc..."), that could be interesting to play against more experienced players.
VF4:Evo has the greatest training mode ever. It teaches you your characters BnBs, punishes, set ups, unsafe moves, how to take advantage of frame data, strategy, and even teaches you defensive option selects and what to do at frame disadvantage. It's amazing. All you have to do is go through your move list, then complete training, and bam, you're ready to go. It's so good, it will make you better at all FGs, because it teaches you important fundamentals.
Great Video!! I happy that fighting games are becoming more thoughtful when teaching new players. I wish I had most of these tools when I first started playing.
The best feature I can think of would be something like sports games have - a Your Highlights feature after each match. Essentially, having the post-match screen have 3-5 clickable clips that are a few seconds each, generated similarly to how highlights and instant-replays are generated in a game like Rocket League or Madden. The game uses criteria to determine what situations in the match had clear examples of something the game's programmed to highlight (since it knows your inputs, it knows what your 'intent' was, which gives it a leg up on just analyzing the video itself - the game knows that you kept holding crouch block even after the overhead hit, meaning it can tell the difference between a 'slow' reaction to an overhead and NOT KNOWING something was an overhead, and choose the right thing to EXPLAIN based on the content of the clip). In this way, the game could show you several good and bad things you did in the previous match, and explain what parts of them MADE them that way - 'good pressure! These moves you used had a small gap that caught the opponent's attempt to interrupt you, that's called a Frame Trap', 'you tried to stop your opponent's air approach with this move, but it doesn't reach high enough. Here's what would have happened if at that moment, you had pressed THIS move instead'. Stuff like that. Examples of positive encouragement (while explaining what to actually VALUE in one's play), and feedback on negative situations (while explaining what the other choices were and what would have resulted from them). To some extent, I believe that a large part of how a human teaches someone fighting games, can be automated by smartly designing this kind of system - since the game knows the exact inputs, it can estimate intent, to make up for its lack of human 'intuition' about intent.
This is a really cool idea, but I know from experience that accurately analysing player behaviour from inputs/outcomes is extremely hard to get right. That's the same reason why ranked is a bit broken in many games, because it's super hard to figure out how good a player really is, when the win rate only paints part of the picture. Like I've heard several stories of people in GGST piling up the losses as they're stuck on a tower floor they don't really belong in, but the game thinks they're too good to be deranked.
I'm very new, got in through Tough Love Arena. Something I wish all games had is character specific tutorials that take you through their movelist, and combos(or make the combos separate), that teach you 'Alright, this is your easy anti-air, this is your easy BnB, this is your reversal', and after you beat those, maybe with a boss fight checking those three concepts, IT _THROWS YOU OUT of the tutorial and tells you to go fight actual players_ There's a lot of information in fighting games, and I am someone who tends to get caught in the info vortex so much that I don't remember the most basic things. Teach me the barebones basics, then throw me against players. I'll come back to the tutorial if I feel I need Anti-Airs with better follow ups, a chunkier combo, or help with dealing with a specific situation. Don't let newbies trap themselves in training mode before they even know what the fuck to train.
Killer Instinct actually explicitly tells you to go play some matches after the first chunk of the tutorial. I think the issue with that approach is that there's nothing steering the players back to the tutorial when they need to, because it can be hard for the game to know when that should happen, and which part of the tutorial to guide them to.
They should tell you upfront that your main is a "joke character" and will never be strong and if they are strong nerfed immediately. Hopefully Honda is not a joke in SF6.
While this is not really applicable to every game (like strive, lol), BB's whiffing due to a invul animation is an incredibly helpful thing to have, even tho it's a bit too unnoticeable. I have no clue how you would implement something like that for strive's hurtbox-based "invul", but i believe it would totally be a great thing. This one i can't stress enough - it should be as close to WYSIWYG as humanly possible. For example you don't need to reach far - Nago's 2H looks like a wide sweep able to reach right above you and near your knee, but surprise - it's hitbox is nowhere near how the move is animated. It is incredibly misleading and it simply should not be like that. And yes, if the hitbox changes due to balance patch, the animation should do the same (Nago's 2H again comes here). And while this isn't really applicable to the new players, but it follows the previous point - FG should not have hidden values/bars on any sort, period. Are you close to wallsplatting your opponent? How much Tager's magnetism is left on you? Is anyone close to the Active Flow? Who knows, and you certainly shouldn't know too, for sure. *sarcasm*
Knowledge checks are often the only thing that stops ppl from winning against players not as good as them, it’s a crutch, break the crutch and the rest of the play comes down.
>TFH The snakes are evil. I quickly figured out they wanted you to check your toes. I hate the bear grab with a passion... I will say that we need more like that given it really helps me learn to play other games.
if it were up to me, I'd use the single player campaign to explore everything about the game's mechanics, even going so far as to introduce exclusive modifiers and plot scenarios that will force you to make use of said mechanic, but only for that fight. probably the only game I know of that did this was Soul Calibur 2 on consoles (I had the GCN version). the Weapon Master mode was a lengthy solo campaign that more or less told a self-insert sort of story, but the various scenarios the story provided gave a fairly solid explanation as to the modifiers you needed to do. for instance, the first two stages were strictly a tutorial for the game itself, done in the context of you being given some training from a combat instructor (played by Mitsurugi) before you begin your journey. a later stage has you face a novice guardswoman (played by Cassandra) who assumes you're trouble and won't listen to you saying otherwise, and you can't bring yourself to fight her seriously... the modifiers have you dealing damage by using Guard Impact parries, and you use that to win. one of my favorites has you partaking in an illegal gambling match in an arena covered in landmines, where the modifier causes whoever falls down to get launched by an explosion, encouraging you to trip them often and to do a quick recovery to avoid it yourself. there's loads more scenarios in SC2's Weapon Master mode, and I think you could get a lot of mileage in teaching the mechanics through specific scenarios that encourage you to use them.
The issue is that every fighting game tells you some of these, but to do everything would be an exhaustive undertaking. This is especially true because some games only barely implement concepts that, while maybe important to maximizing gameplay, don't really matter until you're at the stage where you'd be wiki researching and getting community help anyways. I still remember being like a decade into the hobby before someone explained that some moves "force crouch" and the follow up explanation for why that mattered. Does that require a tutorial or extensive breakdown in the game, or are we okay with some of that falling to the community instead of the game providing literally every tool and writeup a player should ever need?
There's always going to be some community-provided stuff, primarily because devs usually don't know what's meta until the community shows it to them. I don't necessarily believe that they should provide EVERYTHING, but it's clear that they currently aren't providing enough. Gotta find that line.
Similar thoughts here, as a DOA fan it's always great seeing it get acknowledged in a positive light rather than the "lOl BoObY gAmE" memes you usually see.
I think something great that SF6 could bring is limiting the player's move list from the get go in the story mode so he can get use to his moveset gradually.
I personally don't like the look of all the pop-ups in GBFV and DNF (they look like popup phone notifications), but I do like them giving clear knowledge that helps parse what's going on so I wouldn't just want an option to turn them off(though I wouldn't be against that as more ui options like that are always welcome). What SF6 is doing with accessibility features to have different sounds play for cross-ups, bighs, and lows is neat, and I think you can see how many people want something like that by how many people were saying they would probably turn that on when learning the game even without sight disabilities. However, you can also tell that wasn't meant to be there as a learning tool due to the sounds being so unstylized (and they probably shouldn't be if they are just acting as accessibility features so that they can stand out more from the games other sounds). I hope some mods make use of those being coded into the game and let us replace the sounds if we want to use them. Another way of doing it could be having some consistent aspect of the game's animations that shows the moves properties. For example, in Strive you can tell which of Ky's moves apply shock state by the color of lighting that he uses, with yellow lightning applying shock state. Or something like seeing the orange glow around 5D and knowing that it's an overhead, though maybe not to that extent visually. Though this obviously has issues with possibly making visual's even busier if done too much, so idk.
Cool video with interesting remarks! As I recall, the BlazBlue series (specifically Continuum Shift) had some really good tutorials which explained basic and general fighting (game) knowledge, such as "spacing" (range for attacking and defending) and space control.
Man, this an amazing analysis on Fighting games. Good work, I didn't know about some of the features like the Combo display in DOA, that is super helpful, I wish more games have that. I actually used Pure Ref to kinda get the same effect.
0:08 okay so I immediately get blindsighted by the difference in definition of Knowledge check. I usually use it when *a move* requires specific knowledge to get around. The way this definition is worded means its something a player is doing to another rather than just a move that, in itself, has specific counterplay or knowledge needed to beat it. 8:20 I actually dont think this is as important as you're making it out. Every move, at least at the basic level, should have some level of counterplay that applies regardless of character. It might not be the most optimal, or some characters might be worse at it than others, but knowing the counterplay is whats important for building the knowledge up. Specific character-to-character match-up knowledge being in tutorials would be cool, but it could be overwhelming, or even downright pointless, if you dont understand the basics of counterplay first.
I mean, the "official" definition is on screen. It's ok if you have a different perspective on it, but I believe that the majority of the FGC uses Infil's glossary as the source of truth (whether that's good or bad I don't know). As for matchup knowledge, maybe you're right.
Fighting games also make a big chunk of their roster DLC, so you will have even less matchup knowledge unless you shell out more money. Devs should at least allow players to train against DLC characters that aren't bought. I think James Stephanie Sterling made a video about this many years ago.
In Short: Learn has you need, is more fun that way and doesnt feel like a grind. In Long: I just take the laid back approach, check all chars quickly on the arcade mode and survival modes. Once I grasp which character I wanna play I move to the online lobbies, if I start losing more than I win, I try see why that's happening and if I see my opponent do something I'm not using (ex: roman cancel). This is when I will go lab and learn about it for a few minutes and hit the online lobbies again until I start making that thing part of my arsenal. Same with combos, if I see I'm losing cause I don't have enough big combos, learn a few until I need more specific ones. (This strat works best when getting a fighting game on Release date, like any member of FGC should do.) PS: Winning is not the only sign of progression... Losing, *but you are able to tell why you lost,* it shows you have improved too.
I think the best single player experienceI've seen in a fighting game to teach the player is probably the souls series. By the time you can do PvP, you are proefficient at its mechanics and you will be equipped to parse what the other player did. But there's a lot of design choices that didn't aim for it to be engaging the same way fighting games do and in a way I'm not sure it can be replicated. Even if GBVS story mode doesn't help you parse a matchup, the rules of how you control your character makes the beat em up a good choice. Time spent handling your character with the same controls is time spent practicing. The mode also forces the player to block to beat it as bosses are full of armo. Beginners tend to not want to block. Much like dark souls kills you for running in swinging without a plan. That leaves me unconvinced on how much you can accomplish from a beat em up single player, but also that'd you need ro change the rules of the PvP fighting game to make an engaging PvE one. I remember juggling enemies to infinity in a beat em up, lots of fun. But you couldn't convince me to play a PvP bersion of them.
Some people argue that this would be a step too far. I don't really have strong feelings either way, but as frame data isn't everything, I could see this being counter-productive in normal matches without the appropriate mindset. I think the ability to use training mode online with someone else, where this can be enabled, is being slept on, though.
To this day I don't know why they don't put a numerical value on the health bar. How would anyone know that Zangief has more health than Akuma without trial and error.
I didn't even consider that different characters could have different amounts of health until I started watching FGC videos. The NRS games let you display numbers on the bars, and some other games do show the difference (e.g. Fantasy Strike), but yeah, it's much less frequent than I'd like.
Normal attacks (normals) are the attacks that require nothing more than a single button press. DNF Duel is the name of the game being shown when I say it.
Didnt watch the whole thing. But it feels like u just want games to tell you every little thing with no room for basic discovery. Like i dont see how the game is obligated to tell u how to use every move and their specific purpose as that takes wway from discovery or finding iut how to use things ureself from new players.
This video was... It feels like you said too much without saying anything. Sure people have trouble learning fighting games and there are better ways of doing it, but in the end of the day we still have to apply that knowledge in a real match and no amount of training punishes, throw techs, anti airs and etc will save you against a human opponent no matter how good the resources are, however here's the catch, if the game were to have it's knowledge displayed, this means the game would already be completely figured out and cut and dry. Let alone, this means the *developers* would have done so, which leaves little room to developing new tech, and imo that looks like a really bleak future for the game So to answer your question, and this is something some games already do pretty well, but sound and visual cues. Have you heard the SFX from the XX series? They're gorgeous, and you always can identify very well a hit and block sound, the blazblue exclamation marks are also an excellent example of that, but still, there will be the human factor. Fighting games are a genre that you need 2 players at the very least, so yeah, talking to people is ultimately going to be the best way to learn
"Tekken 7 unexpectedly shines" despite the fact that most of what you mentioned regarding it were nothing more than series staples aside from framedata information; I do not understand this notion that Tekken 7 -or Tekken- has bad training modes that obscure mechanics. Tekken has had the best movelists among its peers since the first one; every other fighting game have just been catching up for decades now.
I never said Tekken has bad training modes. The "unexpectedly" comes from the perception by non Tekken fans that the game is unfriendly to beginners. I call out 7 specifically rather than whole series because it's the only one I own and because new people tend to be more interested in the latest entry in the series.
I really do feel like having an acceptable single player would be the best solution - and heck, maybe then I could get a video game with my $60 ranked mode
Some games are subtle about it, guilty gear: COUNTER You would think it's obvious, but you'll genuinely hear new players be like"why does the game yell counter everytime someone gets hit?"
@Mougli tbh that's something a game shouldn't have to tell you. A counter? You should know what that is being that we all either do it in real life in various ways often, see it on TV often or both. Maybe not actual fights but certainly other things like sports, arguments, etc.
As a fighting game veteran, I say this video is naive. It is true that fighting games are opaque, but that opacity was originally to make the game seem more abstract and free-flowing. EG things like random damage, random stun, and different wakeup animations on every character. The problem is that fighting games are mostly pretty simple, predictable, and deterministic, but very fast paced. That means theoretically you can get a huge advantage just by reading a little bit about the game... but ONLY IF you are already very fluent at handling yourself in the game. Indeed, one of the reasons that I say smash, especially melee, is successful in this regard is the fact that the underlying mechanics are more difficult to control, less predictable, more complex, and less deterministic. The consequence being that getting additional facts and information about the game's implementation will barely help you at all. Indeed, many melee players in practice usually don't know shit about the game, especially before the modern wave of reverse engineering we've seen. of course, fighting games aren't so different. This is why I don't actually think its wise to try and prescribe strategic tutorials to players. Thats very subjective, and the best strategy available to you will depend on your specific set of experience. Many players are indeed better off doing one-hit combos all the way to victory. My main suggestion is to make it so that the learning curve is sufficiently gradual, and to say that adding nuance can often actually improve the new player experience.
In the end, the best way to practice is to find people to play with very often. For me that is the way to learn more about the game and although you can play online it's never going to be the same as offline.
Unfortunately, offline might just not be an option for some people, cause their friends aren't interested or there's no offline community within X miles (where X is the distance beyond which the inconvenience of travelling outweighs the downsides of online play). Watching Core-A's latest video on the Pakistani Tekken scene, it made me realise that in countries where internet is fast and PC/consoles more easily accessible/affordable, offline communities just aren't going to be as big of a thing.
@@MougliFGC That's why new fighting games are coming out with good netcode, so that you can alleviate the lack of offline players in the community by giving you online ones. My country has a total of around 50 players, but the offline meetings happen only in the capital, which I'm lucky to be living in, so most of us play online with each other and Discord to talk strategies.
*"If you're playing to win, this is a fight to the metophorical death, not a courteous duel"* So me modding the game to buff my character's hitboxes and frame data when playing from a specific controller port is fair game, right?
i watched this video and that the editing or the production of it was really good and when i was done i wanted to watch more but you only had 2 videos i thought you would have way more keep up the good work
Frame data. Memorizing this stuff holds a lot of people from ever getting into the genre. Learning a fighting game is like picking up an instrument. This is like then explaining how to play the notes barely, and then not including the sheet music. Characters rule but damn their animations are pretty much just show and beyond simple state machines don't indicate enough about enemy state which players basically have to intuit blind.
@@MougliFGC I'm talking about why people don't stick around: Having some basic understanding of windup, attack frames and cooldown and how to take advantage of those systems is not something most people coming in have any understanding of, nor where the striking parts actually are. It just is not very well telegraphed. Most people come in thinking with what they know about fighting (which isn't much) and beyond pretty animations are largely pushed away from seeing the game's actual underlying systems which are hidden behind dazzling art. That art should be representing the underlying systems better. Once people who do understand those things get them, games become too competitive for relaxed play, mistakes aren't clear enough to most players (so they don't learn from their mistakes and get better) and as a result they gravitate towards other games or other hobbies because all entertainment is in competition with all other entertainment for human time and if players don't get a sense of community or progression from something, people are way less likely to stick around until it "clicks" because there is no shortage of shit to do in current year. The reason help systems have to be good and games have to be clear is because you aren't just competing with other fighting games, you're trying to validate your use of a player's time with your game in the first place.
One thing I wish these games taught me is a lot of fighting games are just shitty rhythm games, they depend so much on a vague timing that has barely any attachment to what's actually going on in the game that without a system that explains the combo timing new players are just thrown aside for all the people enjoying the rhythm aspect to play by themselves. In other words, I just wish fighting games would just be clear that they're a kind of game I have little respect for. It's a bad mechanic that they've stagnated with because the playerbase thinks it's fine when it's literally the basis for the problem this video is discussing. It's needlessly obfuscated to create skill gaps in a game genre with very little apparent skill in the competitions. Fighting games are shit, and the sad part is the community around them want to keep them being shit because making them better requires all the idiots that grew up playing them to have to relearn to play them. The community is holding back their own genre for self gratification and it's sad... cause fighting games _could_ be fun.
@@MougliFGC inputs should correspond with onscreen actions, timing should be intuitive and not obfuscated, multiple inputs for a single action should not be a part of the system. Tutorials should be a huge part of the game, sure, but I shouldn't need to "practice" 3 lights and a heavy attack combo to be able to pull it off. The problem I've always had with these games is that it balances moves by being hard to input. To put that into perspective for like a first person shooter it's like balancing a gun by having to tap the P, ctrl and mouse buttons at the same time to fire it. "His special is just tap the button over and over again so he's classified as 'easy' and the special isn't that strong but that guy's special requires you to lick the touch pad on a PS5 controller while massaging the buttons just right so he's classified as 'hard' and his special will one shot if it connects." Making the controls harder to balance the game is bad design, but most fighting games choose to do it this way. Basically if I can't rebind moves to a single button because it's "OP" then the game is designed poorly. I've got controllers with extra buttons that I can't use because "balance" and they expect me to believe this is good and fun game design? It's actually got a term for it that we all know, artificial difficulty, and most games follow this dead ideal. Artificially inflate the difficulty so the "hardcore" players like it.
Givup, accept fg's are niche. Fight games will never bring new people, so much system and stuff to learn, even the most detailed tutorial would never be enuff, most people have no time for this shiet.
@@MougliFGC It is not like i want to bash your video, it's just that after all this year, i lost hope. It is so much easier to bring people to play stuff like Fortnite and MOBA cause how this games are made to actually addict people, fight games are not designed like that, and even then they try to (A.K.A, FighterZ and MK11), they're still to complex for most to enjoy.
@@JohnVmc2 I don't expect fighting games to become mainstream. But I do believe with some myth busting and some effort from the devs, a lot more people would be willing to give them a fair try.
Clear. I'm in a period where i'm thinking a lot about what makes a game "beginner friendly", and where i analyse the game i enjoy, how did i feel when i started versus now, what do i wish i knew sooner, because i've been recently confronted to introduce some friends to some games, some i'm always "oh yeah, there's that, i forgot to tell you.." where in reality, the game failed to tell them. The concepts you're talking about can be applied to other genre. I hope we see more investment in "beginner friendly" feature, i'de love people to massively start playing fighting game lol, like how many new player elden ring attracted to the soulsborne franchise.
Well I did figure out a method on paper that I’m using for a game I’m developing. It actually doesn’t require a menu to look up moves and I’m planning to have no move list on purpose. Essentially instead of just having the player pause and look at their moves, they have an interface on screen and if you hold a button, some of there interface will light up indicating that a move can be executed this way. I’m hoping this encourages players to explore and memorize the moves instead of just looking at the menu again. It also seems to be a good way to catch people off guard if they feel like they need look away from the match instead of just memorizing the move they want to execute without having to look for the glowing lights on their interface.
Every fighter needs: -Ability to take control during a replay -Ability to put combo routes on screen -Link/cancel time window -Ability to reduce speed -Combo maker mode (check gg strive)
I’ve found that since playing MK11 a lot I’ve become more accustomed to looking for opportunities to punish and do reversals and have started to see the significance of matchup knowledge. A big part of that is them simply showing “punish” or “counter” or “reversal” when you do a move that fits the bill. It’s very clear, but also elegant in how it shows up, just like the combo counter. Seeing that more and more prompts me to actually look for those opportunities in a more deliberate manner and remember the things opponents do that provide me with those chances. It’s a mentality that’s being forged that stays with me when I move to different games. Very simple addition that I feel goes a long way. It’s like having a coach point out helpful things while you play….
Literally the most important thing in my opinion would be taking over control during replays, so that you dont have to learn the opponent's combo. Then also adding tips into said replay. If you got countered where you took control the game will tell you what that means and how to best avoid it etc. To me those are the two things every FG can do that will drastically improve the learning curve. Other than that, I wish every game had a framebar option like SF6 has, because I can't tell you how many times I struggled with timing my moves in Strive. Though there's a mod for that (however only for offline training). Still that's less important.
When I was trying to learn GG-Strive at launch (my 1st FG): Past me: I'm going to complete the tutorial, practice combos and then go on-line. Present me: LOL, you got it backwards, noob.
Coming from an Arena FPS background, it's always been the case that a game NEEDS new player accessibility and not just the ones who are willing to suffer. And wouldn't you know it, my entire genre got bodied by shitty Call of Duty and other slow games with bad movement. I'm glad the FGC might manage to avoid this fate (narrowly. If Smash hadn't gotten so... the way it is... well, you can imagine.)
While it has a lot of overall problems, including some of the problems mentioned here, MK1 does a really good job on letting you practice freely in the tutorial mode. I really appreciate the way it handles that particular idea.
My ideal fighting game: - Is slow. Very slow. I think I might like the mind games and the real-time navigation of a moderately complex decision tree of fake-outs, attacks, counters and counter-counters, but I'm old and don't go so fast no more. - Is clear. No cluttering up the screen with a zillion particles. The cute animal one with very few colors looked visually clean. Also a bit plain, but if I'm ever to be able to think my way through a game, I must be able to compute the actual game state in my head based on the screen image. - Is relatively simple. I don't want to learn a large-ass move set. Make the big thing happen in the combinations and responses. - A youtube colleague of yours praised a feature whereby you can take control of a character in the middle of a replay. Sounds legit, then you can practice execution of a response to a particular move in the middle of a real fight. - In terms of on-screen data: some representation of the decision tree going forward from each point. For example, given that my opponent is stuck doing whatever it is they'll be doing for X frames, I can do A, B and C before they can react. If I do A then I can also do D, E and/or F, giving my opponent a reaction window only long enough to block, not punish. If they block, they [and so on...]. - Maybe combine this with the option to step through the game one frame at a time, combined with the resume replay function. That way, my slow ass brain can get enough time to think through the possibilities. TL;DR: ya can't git gud with no homework, so help me do the homework. Give me every tool that helps me do the homework. My assumption is that fighting games factor relatively neatly into two components: planning and execution. Planning is all about knowing which actions are good in which situations; execution is recognizing the situations and firing off the good responses. The homework is then (a) studying the decision space one frame at a time to plan better; and (b) practice recognition and response in a live fire exercise. Or maybe a live fire non-exercise.
I'm not totally sure why but I appreciate the Notifications when playing a fast paced fighter like SF but I've never missed it playing Tekken. Maybe there's one or two things that aren't clear? But you pretty much realise everything that's happened in Tekken just by watching it occur. Maybe hearing sound effects Like being countered or punished. It just feels self evident through playing I find and doesn't really need text popping up in the screen telling you their sweep kick bear your High Attack and put you in a juggle state. Is it cause its a slower game overall? Because its also a 3D game? Not sure.
I consider myself a casual veteran, as I've been playing fighting games casually since I first touched a console, but I haven't played ranked more than 5 hours. I think that games should let you customize how much information is displayed. At first you would like the game to tell you everything, the counters, the invincibility, etc. But as you keep playing, you would just turn it off because it's no longer something you don't know. Kind of like training wheels.
With GG Strive's newish mode that lets you create and share combo trials online, I think a lot of other training features could have a focus on user creation as well. For example, AC+R's replay takeover feature could be used not only to teach how to react to specific situations, but could also allow skilled players to design puzzle-like challenges, show off fun moments from online matches, or even showcase highlights from recent tournaments. At that point, some other smaller tidbits could be added to encourage players to come back regularly, such as rewards and featured challenges.
Some more advanced things that might help without needing a replay viewer would be putting the frame advantage of moves and how much frame advantage you need to guarantee a punish in the move list rather than just on-screen when they come out (for games that have frame data), and with this maybe letting you look up a move and the game spits back every move your character has that will punish it on block. Instead of needing to trial and error to find an answer you can just auto-search when you notice a move is giving you too much trouble. Maybe even do the inverse where if you look up your own character's attack it would show all the ways that the opponent could punish it to help learn matchups and to some extent teach block strings since people would see "If I end on this they can punish with a combo starter but if I end with this instead all they can do is jab." On that note, maybe also something that tracks when you're getting hit and by what. Something that would say like what state your character was in (neutral, attacking, crouch blocking, jumping, dashing, etc.) and what classification of move was hitting you (moves within an opponent's combo wouldn't add to this, it would just be the initial hits). If you are jumping too much and getting anti-aired, instead of needing to manually recognize that during a match or watch a replay you could simply look at your recent match data and say, "Oh wow I got hit by like 20 anti-airs in one game." or "The game is saying 70% of the hits I was taking were counter hits, that's a big problem for me." It would be an in-depth teaching tool that wouldn't do much more than a replay viewer could but it would give people way more visible and accessible feedback on bad habits in the play style.
I'm not an absolute beginner, but I'm not what I'd call well practiced in anything in the fighting game genre. But one thing I personally found helpful was the story mod in DBZ Budokai 1, where the game doesn't expect you to memorize entire combos and movelists right away. It teaches you one, then has a battle that mechanically directs you to it. Or it adds a limited number of techniques to the move list, so you're not looking at a wall of text. It has its own flaws (like changing the character around on you), but at least I knew what was going on and why certain things weren't triggering.
I think part of what makes this so infuriating is that different games have different rules, and players often expect games to behave similarly. Things like being able to block in mid air are obvious, but how many times are you going to get hit before you realize this game treats cross up protection differently than the last one you played? I've seen multiple people *confidently* tell me that grabs beat strikes in Street Fighter 6... They don't. But they did in every single Street Fighter before 6.
Tekken 7 was my first traditional fighting game. I literally didn't even know how to block, or even that you were even able to, until I looked up a tutorial online. It provides genuinely *zero* resources for new-to-fighting-game players; I assume it's a bit easier if you're coming to it from another traditional fighting game. Needless to say, I quit within a few days. While I respect the skill and complexity once you've invested the time into it, the game is borderline unplayable as a complete beginner in the absence of online resources. This experience isn't particularly unique to Tekken, most older fighting games had this problem, either because of financial incentive or just a lack of teaching tools. I think the Extra Credits video mentioned here does a really good job explaining this problem. There is simply too much to learn and little fun to be had until you've learned a lot of it. Strive was the first fighting game I was actually able to get into simply because of how good the tutorial is. It does a really good job breaking down the fundamentals of fighting games, both the inputs as well as basic concepts like anti-airs and the attack/grab/block RPS, which is basically all you need to know before you can spend some time messing around in online or single player for a bit, actually playing the game with some minimal level of competence and actually having fun. It gets bonus points for splitting it's tutorials into various groups of lessons, between each of which provides good stopping point to switch to playing the real game so you can actually apply what you just learned. It would be nice though if it had better character specific lessons and if it did a better job of explaining the intended usage of various mechanics, but it's still amongst the best. I'd also give a shoutout to Rivals of Aether, a plat fighter (the best one imo) which has a similarly exceptional tutorial, albeit not quite as in-depth and lengthy as Strive. It similarly splits it's tutorial so that you can learn and then go play between each one. It's split into 3 a beginner, intermediate, and advanced tutorial for universal concepts/mechanics as well as separate dedicated tutorials for each character, teaching you all of the moves and special mechanics that each character has as well as a number of their situational usages. I do think plat-fighters are, in general, a lot easier and less opaque than traditional fighting games for beginners, mostly due to their vastly simpler control scheme and lack of character specific input commands, but Rivals goes above and beyond when it comes to teaching beginners, especially when compared to its main competitor, and original inspiration, Smash.
This video is brilliant! I shocked that is your only second ever on channel, you rocks, already subscribed! About topick: triple yes, fighting games hides its interesting strategic parts and fundamentals behind lack of information. Ofc its all cos of budget economy, but i hope in the future devs put more effort to speak with newcomers and show how game works inside the game itself in specific modes.
Unless I've missed an option to do so I wish Guilty Gear strive let me slow down the speed at which I'm shown the combo done by the CPU because even though it's probably done at a realistic speed it doesn't help me with understanding or being able to follow it and that's with me already having a list of what i'm supposed to be doing. For some of them I also just switched from missions to training mode just to practice without only having 5 short tries. There's also a bit of a lack in clarity about what I'm supposed to do it took me a while (and some outside sources) to figure out what a Z-looking formation is supposed to be or how to do May's charged attack despite it being kind of straight forward and simple in retrospect (but also not being told that I can charge it wile I'm doing a different hit). One one hand the more I find out the more appreciation I have for all of it but on the other hand I whish the bar of entry didn't feel so high.
i think a story where you unlock your moves for your character little by little and you have to use it on what do the next boss and enemy you encounter (and at the end boss you will have to use every move at least one for each situation it required)for the line i would say they can stop after stuff like anti air,why the invicible reversal work and knowing that theire is move faster than others, and that it exist some move that you can't mash after without risk (+ on block, minus on block)
As somebody that plays a lot of Tekken and streams it if I didn't have a chat with some really good players telling me what I'm doing wrong I wouldn't learn anything honestly It would be really handy if every post-match screen had some sort of summary that was like "you got hit by this specific move a lot" or "you have a habit of getting counterhit" When I'm in the match and trying to fight my opponent/learn what their patterns are it's really hard to figure out which move is what, what it does, whether it's safe or not. It's a bit of a drag having to watch replays or lab something after almost every match if you want to definitively know how to beat a certain move or strategy, y'know?
To answer your question properly: Its being able to play with people and communicate while you played. Even if you were getting 0-2 in the arcade often the guy beating the shit out you might toss you some wisdom.The social element is the most important part of learning. Devs need to get people into training room-like battles that allow them to change aspects but still have a competitive feel that is so essential to create a desire for learning. Something built in, and yeah youll get the screamers and the racists, etc But underneath the filth is a community being built. Also hiding the elements when not needed so they can also just enjoy beating the crap out of each other. Finally I would love for them to hire an actual pro who can do voice overs for the movesets and tutorials. Maybe implement a type of KI shadow AI copy of certain styles. Put you in situations that you have to figured out. I feel alot of other software like music and video editing could use alot better in package tutorials.
As a beginner I think clean UI that gets across what it is you need to convey is really important. How good your training mode is doesn't matter if I can't find it, etc. A thing I've never seen but would love to see is a very specific training mode feature, only let me perform the selected actions. So blocking out any inputs that would cause it not to go through, this way I could find out exactly why I keep messing up something I'm certain I'm inputting correctly, to go with this. Next to moves in a move list I think it could be nice to show the exact time window I have between one part of an action to another for it to come out, it's always difficult for me at least to understand if I'm messing up the input itself or just performing it too slowly.
It's like mobas lol, there is some arcane knmowledge in them. Hell the considered best guide of Dota 2 straight up tells you that playing the game for 1000h to begin understanding wtf is going on is a prerequisite lmao
They need to take the word "training" literally. when practising a move Kinesthetic learners would learn much better if (for example) a voiceover said "ah, your second input there needs to come a touch sooner - or on screen for those that don't like the sounds)
You can add more informational info for casual play and remove it for tournament play. If you really wanna get casuals into fighting games, find ways tk make the game as visually clear as possible. It will probably lower the skill differentiation between players so baiting your opponent, mind games, etc will be more viable strategies than being the best at learning the moveset of a single character. What a boring way to play a game. I always wanna play as someone new. I should be able to quickly figure out that character.
I think the biggest problem with tutorials is that the don’t emphasize information that is most important. For a new player it’s impossible to know what will actually help you learn vs what is to advanced or specific to be taking up your mental stack.
As a total beginner and rookie to fighting games, the biggest thing that I really need better feedback on is button inputs. It is so frustrating trying to input the same combo or move 30 times and not being able to figure out whether something is wrong with my inputs or my timing, if my inputs are too slow, too fast etc. Getting visual feedback on what I'm doing wrong in situations outside of the lab would be so useful
something I don't like is when fighting games just decide that something that's extremely important is actually an "advanced mechanic" and it doesn't have to be in the initial tutorial one that comes to mind that is still just absurd to me is throw escaping in sfv
I wish games had so much better ways to actually 'decode' a character roster. Even games with very clear cut character gimmicks, such as the BlazBlue series, aren't the greatest at introducing and demonstrating what a character is capable of and why you might want to play them; nevermind games where the differences can be a lot more subtle, especially when 'clone' characters come into the picture and make it even harder.
I started playing ggst a few days ago and one of the things that would be rlly handy to know is which moves are plus on block so u can know which moves are good for approaching your opponent and stuff, idk how u would put that in a tutorial tho
I think getting the knowledge to the player when it's relevant to them is important. someone won't go into the game knowing how to punish certain moves and won't bother looking at frame data at all. however, if the player loses to balrogs dash punches over and over again, and the game has a match review option in the post-match screen that tells them what moves can punish that move seconds after the match is over. the player will be more inclined to look into it because they know what being hit with that move is like. having fast access to information is great, but having fast access to information that's relevant to you is better
While a bunch of text in Team Blue and French Bread games are not very good tutorials, compared to literally nothing in Street Fighter 4 it was like fresh water in the desert.
In the video, I said that DBFZ doesn't tell you about the universal overhead. This is incorrect, it does in the FighterZ Dojo (which had been added after release), along with some additional tutorials on various aspects of the game. While it suffers from the usual pitfalls of fighting games tutorials discussed in the video, and the devs made the questionable decision of adding this in a location completely different from the base tutorial (hence how I missed it), it's an example that devs can do this stuff after the fact if the game didn't ship with it.
Love the Gio avatar. I'm subbing just for that. The great observation of the state of fighting games. People talking about the "second golden age" need to check their hype. But I have hope that the next generation of games this year will push the bar a little higher and maybe the dudes at Project L will watch this.
If you don't mind me asking: are you from Europe? cus no one plays Gio in the State but Europe has some great Gios. Arakein and Acno
@@billyscenic5610 You should watch my first video to get the answer to that question ;)
I want to personally add on to this, I don't think DBFZ teaches you about how to DHC from any move in any tutorials (41236/63214 + Assist, I checked the dojo just in case I missed something) and the only reason I now know how to do it is because of an external wiki. Regardless, sometimes even with my current experience there are many things in this video which I have gripes with or am struggling with at the moment. My friends who aren't as involved in these games would likely also agree with a lot said in here. I feel that ultimately if fighting games are able to move towards a more dynamic and transparent form of teaching their players as well as touching on concepts outside of casual play without lowering skill ceilings, it might be the thing that prevents skill floors from being too daunting. I do apologise if I wasn't able to explain my point in the best way, but I hope it did make sense.
One really cool thing I've seen is how Fantasy Strike uses colored particles to show frame advantage. If your opponent blocks your attack, a blue spark indicates your attack was plus on block. If the spark is red, it's minus on block. The size of the spark shows how plus or minus it was.
This shows players an whether it's still their turn, or whether a move is punishable, without needing to know frame data. Fantasy Strike also has some other cool stuff, like characters flashing certain colors to indicate things like armor or invincibility.
Oh nice, I missed the frame advantage thing in Fantasy Strike. A number of games indicate armor/invincibility, but when it comes to in-match feedback, it's not just about having it, but actively telling players it's a thing.
@@MougliFGC Absolutely!
I didn't know that, thats really sick actually. Ive heard some speculation that tekken 8 might be doing this as the times when jin is plus in one of the gameplay footages, kazuya's blocks are red so I pray they might just implement that in the game.
love the super armor/invincibility indicators, I know like in strive they flash red after you hit them and anji just freezes you, I've been playing strive since day 1 and I didn't know until a few months ago that when you hit anji's spin you miss and it freezes you makes you vulnerable I just thought his attack had some wonky ass porperties
I'm not sure if this would work in other games because of visual clarity.
The one thing I wish from a training mode is simply a slow mo option to help learn timing on harder combos and learn animations of characters. Also a way to upload custom combos in game so your not stuck only able to practice the same terrible combos with the exclusive ability to have shown commands
Good points. You can find the former in Skullgirls, and the latter in Strive and TFH.
Slow motion is in Super Smash Bros, it's a great thing they have for them.
Slow mo helped me a lot in learning combos in Under-Night
@@OccuredJakub12 ah, who do you main, I don't have it personally but plan to when the new one comes out, already got a main set in stone
@@dragonmaster3030 Nanase, but I trained other characters like Hyde, Linne and Carmine
Fighting games are like 30 years from being inviting and interactive enough to have new players feel like they can learn the fundamentals.
Hopefully not.
Play street fighter 2 because that made more than a billion all off of newcomers and filthy casuals
I think street fighter 6 looks to have lots of side things that make it fun to learn fundamentals and different game mechanics for beginners and new players to the genre
That’s back when fighting games were technical marvels. Now they don’t have the visual or immersion inducing fidelity that the average person will be instantly drawn to.
@@BigDaddyCola street fighter 2 sucks. he should play third strike.
Great video.
This reminds me when Woolie (from WoolieVS channel) was talking about fighting games having a post match summary: your character reflecting on his win/loss, with thought bubbles around him "you only anti air-ed 2/10 times, wanna train ?" "I dropped that corner combo, maybe I used the wrong move ?", and clicking on those would bring you to the tutorial/training mode to train those specific situations.
I thought that would be a cool way of teaching players how to get better by doing, but in the reverse order.
The worst thing is, games have been tracking stuff like that for ages, but when they do present it to the player, it's often in the form of obscure charts (like the spider charts in SF V and Strive).
@@MougliFGC what are all the fighting games shown in the video?
@@josephoyek6574 I'll work on getting a list along with future videos, is there a specific one you're interested in?
I think the point about more interactive learning is key - no one really wants to play a tutorial, so you kinda have to trick people into learning by making it a fun obstacle to overcome in the first place.
About where to draw the line: it's impossible to teach everything as i'm still learning stuff after playing the genre for over 10+ years. But at the beginning, I think its about fostering a culture that improving is fun, and reaching the flashpoint where players are excited to seek out answers on their own. I think providing helpful feedback to players over time, rather than all upfront (like a tutorial does) would be part of that
There's something to be said about how FG's in the last decade are trying so hard to give better tools and tutorials for newcomers to learn (hell, some games even butchered their mechanics and movesets to see if it was more beginner friendly), yet games like League of Legends, Dota2, COD Warzone, Fortnite, and even Magic the Gathering attract millions of players while having pretty much no tutorials and tools to help newcomers.
90% of what me and my friends learned for LoL, D2 or Fortnite came from internet guides or youtube videos. Most importantly, actually playing the game, too.
In short, while I believe companies should make better tutorials and better tools for their FG's, none of that would help if the game itself doesn't attract newcomers. We got some promising titles coming in the future who shall help understand how to tackle some of FG's retention problems.
SF6 will answer the question of "putting more Single Player content in your FG equals more sales" (something that has been a topic of discussion ever since MK11 and SF5). On the other hand, Project L will answer the question of "it's possible to make a viable and competitive F2P traditional FG".
i think one of the reason is alot of fighting games are too similar to each other. Its basically the same as most of the old generic 1st person shooter like half life, call of duty, modern warfare,...
you played 3 -5 games and you feel like you already play every single games in the genre; cause most company barely stray away from the established formula. Sure its not 100% copy-paste, but most of them are still like highly similar in certain core mechanics
and as much as everyone hate on Fortnite, you do have to admit that it actually did try to make itself different from most other shooter games by constantly changing map layout, guns, item,... and sometimes even add new mechanics
The thing is, in LoL, DotA 2, Fortnite, CoD, or even Magic the Gathering you're not starting out in 1v1 matches. Yeah, you're still being knowledge checked and the games do a horrible job of teaching you, but you're still goofing around with your friends
I mean you can see bralwhalla for example, besides part of his players getting into game cuz is free to play, theres a decent number of tutorials and character strategy guides out there for people interested into getting good at the game
Certain fg's could get more popularity if theres more experienced players out there willing to teach stuff to newbies, it also gives a good impression of the community and that can be the thing to make more people hooked into keep playing a game
@@VernulaUtUmbra I think your point makes sense. All those titles still provide some social aspect to them, while FG's are mostly a singleplayer endeavor online (as paradoxical as it may seem). I can definitely state that I get more motivated whenever I'm playing with my friends.
@@VernulaUtUmbra I played all of them, and tbh I disagree. Any game is easier and more enjoyable with friends, and fighting games are no different. It's how me and my friends got into the genre, we're all trash AF but still have fun playing each other. Most sane people without experience with competitive games or even games at all arent willing to play league, dota, cs or r6 for the same reasons people say that FGs are supposedly impossible for new comers. They can feel frustrating as fuck if you don't have the right mindset and are playing alone, which is why league is so popular, people get hooked up and try to get everyone to play, and since (atleast a few years ago) most people didn't have a experience with mobad, do they're willing to try it out. FGs on the other hand, almost eveyone has some experience because of the olden days, even though the experience of ranked in the games with healthy population is no different that the ranked experience in other competitive games, besides grouping with your buddies. i would even argue the experience is better, since you don't have to deal with the absurd amount of toxicity newcomers get in competitive games
An indicator of how true this video's general thesis statement is: I'm a super novice fighting game player who recently spent a few hours playing Strive. I am not plugged into the FGC at all. Despite hearing the game yell **COUNTER** at me a hundred times, I didn't realize until you mentioned it in this video just now that I should have been learning that I was using the wrong move in those situations. I just thought "oh no, I fucked up in some unspecified way, no idea what else I should have done differently". I just never learned what Counter actually means, because the game never explained it.
It’s also normal for people to missunderstand counters cuz it just feels random when you just mash buttons and see what happens, once you know exactly what move you are doing and see the other guy interrupt it and the counter sound plays it finally sinks in that counters are not just fancy crits XD
Have a single player (story?) mode that serves as an extended tutorial. This area can teach new players counter hit, reversal, and punishes by doing the thing that ExtraCredits suggested by having the game freeze when it happens or something. Or if the player fails enough times in a specific part, the character will make some kind of dialogue about it.
For concepts like anti airs vs jump ins, low attacks and mixups, they should have a character ask themselves in game (ie ask the player) if they have some kind of tool to deal with it without giving a straight answer. When the player employs the tool and succeeds or fails, the character can make a comment about it.
For such things, dialogue should be subtitled and appear above the player character's head rather than on the bottom middle of the screen or in some kind of generic window. New players look at their own character moreso than they look at their opponent, so feedback should appear in that general location.
The best version of this will have non playable characters as learning tools (much like what Them Fighting Herd does), but because these are basically entire characters that they have to design, make assets, code in, etc, but because the player will not be playing as them, it's a difficult thing to convince the dev team to make.
Combo trials should have their command list be dynamically positioned based on which side of the screen the opponent is on. That way, the player look at both the opponent and the script at the same time.
Great suggestions!
In my opinion, fighting game tutorials needs more fundamental stuff, like a movement, footsies, neutral, pressure, mixups, etc. Teaching core mechanics is good, but fighting game newcomers usually struggling trying to utilize it properly
That's why I love the Virtua Fighter series. Vf4 and 5 teach you fundamentals, and tourney level info. Wish more people played vf5.
Use motion blur lines on character animations to denote invul and the parts of the character's body that gain that invul, whether it's the high or low parts. Make overheads and lows universally visible through the animation, so an arking kick or punch should always be OH, crouching lights should generally hit low. Make it consistent.
Also I wanna see attack hitsparks be used to show different info. In a combo they could have raising numbers shown in hitsparks, same for counterhits, punishes, throws, clashes etc. Consider where you want the players to be looking during a match. Ideally, it should only be you and the opponent. Try to make unique mechanics not be shown as just bars all over, but graphics in the best places in the UI and ideally on the character itself. Stuff like auras, additional items floating around or being used by the characters, stuff like that.
A video I would love to see is one to send to those friends who love 1v1 PvP but won’t give fighting games a true start. How to get into them, why they should and the mindset to approach the game with
I feel the first two have been well covered by other people (check the playlist in talked about in my previous video, you might find something that works), and I have plans for a video that might address the third one.
Fantastic video Mougli. I'm so happy to see AAA fighting games finally moving forward with helping new players get into fighters...it's far from perfect but i'm just happy to see some real momentum forward. SF6's is looking really promising in this aspect.
From my brief experience (1/4 of the tutorial [because I couldn't progress] and a few matches in free for all in SkullGirls 2nd Encore) I can say that a combination of possible moves in real time combined with a markers for low/mid/overhead like in Fighting Herds would've been great. Especially if it stays a bit on a screen so when I got punished I caould see what I was doing and while I'd be getting up I could at least make a mental note to myself to look at that moment.
Idk how much that would've helped me since my recations and fine motor skills (I literally couldn't beat the turorial as I mentioned) were so terrible I quit...for now at least. Maybe when I have a ton of time next time....
the amount of spelling errors w/ swaped letters in this comment should give the idea how bad things readlly are lol...
What about a training mode that still matches you with another player, Neither player can die but you can still lose hp to see how much damage combos can do. It would also have the same tools from your normal training mode. Also, I would like the feature in training modes where you can slow down the game speed to understand combos or reads better to be more commonplace
Skullgirls training mode can slow the game down, and TFH has online training mode (and I think a few others do, but it's much rarer than I'd like)
BlazBlue Central Fiction has an online training mode
I used to play a lot of fighting games when younger, like 20 years ago. But today frankly I feel like they are too much of an investment on experiences that are to some degree doing the same things over and over again on exactly the same screen. With the amount of games that now offer more varied and even deeper experiences that go way beyond mechanical mastery, but instead to even philosophical, social, and artistic aspects. At my age Im finding it hard to justify the investment. Besides I already play LOL which also requires a ridiculous amount of knowledge about every single match-up on a grotesque combination on 5v5. There is only so much one can be willing to sacrifice other experiences in the name of mastery.
This was an amazing write up, I hope that every fighting game developer gets a chance to watch this and take notes.
Not everything can be explained because there are many specific scenarios, but they'd help a lot having specialized uses for moves
Great video - I enjoyed this and I have to say Dead or Alive 5, Mortal Kombat 11 and Skull Girls have the best teaching tools I've found in fighting games.
skull girls has an insane tutorial not really beginner friendly at all
@@BETTERTHANYOULOLZ completely agree
I know that Skullgirls is considered to have one of the best tutorials in the genre, and from what I've played I agree, it's my favorite FG for that reason , as well as it's tendancy towards feeling very accessible with clear feedback, easy to remember inputs, and VFX that don't feel overwhelming (The story, art and characters are another reason I love the game). I still think it has issues though, it took me ages for me to realize that I shouldn't ONLY use light attacks in neutral because of how things were explained, I feel it can be overwhelming, and doesn't feel like it has good tools to teach people how to see mistakes, which is one of my biggest hurdles. I also feel character tutorials should teach about normals rather than just specials, and have more practical demonstrations of them, instead of just explaining how they work, especially since said explainations may not make sense to a newer player. Another kind of stupid Idea I had while playing against CPUs and noticing how the AI, similarly to a player, can get tripped up to certain strategies, and I thought it could be really interesting to have story mode CPUs have their AI programmed with specific strategies that the character struggles with that you need to figure out how to exploit, maybe make it specific to the player character, like in SG an AI in Painwheel's story mode that doesn't respond well to her flight to teach the benefits of using it, but another that focuses hard on preventing it to show where its weaknesses lie, similarly to how a lot of more traditional games teach you their systems. I think a good example of how this could adapt is how Dark Souls has enemies that are basically AI controlled players, and while they're less intelligent than most opponents, the techniques from dealing with them, and other enemies in the game can act as a springboard for better understanding PvP interactions.
I think this kind of just boils down to having tutorials assume the player is very new and explaining as much as they can in as many ways as possible, since often these games feel like jumping into the deep end of the pool without any swimming lessons first. The more I learn about the genre, the more I realize just how heavily based in knowledge a lot of it is and I think these games would benefit a lot from teaching this kind of thing.
This comment was way too long but I hope my idea got across here, as someone who has a more casual interest in these games but does love them, I've always felt the main thing keeping me from getting more into them is poor onboarding, and teaching tools are one of the biggest hurdles IMO so I have a lot of thoughts on them.
Thank you for taking the time to write a long comment :) You should give TFH a try. It's not perfect either, but it addresses some of your points.
Agreed. AI programming in fighting games is ABYSMAL and it's never tuned on an individual character basis. You'd think given how popular the genre is, they'd try to make the opponents interesting and diverse instead of just play more perfectly the higher the "difficulty"
I still distinctly remember xrd's gamey tutorial mode, give us more of that with a muse dash twist to teach people about combos and timing, so you're hitting minions/objects as they come while learning what can chain into what
My first real look into fighting games was Skull girls and it was so demotivating to see how far the skill gap was, even playing against other beginners. The game never clicked for me, the visuals and sheer volume of information was a distraction, and I wanted to play something more my speed. Street Fighter 5 is a game that I've gotten some satisfaction out of and I want to get to a point where the fundamentals aren't even something I have to worry about.
@@chrismanuel9768 Soul Calibur V has a really good mode with lots of cpu opponents with their own tendencies programmed in. It feels a lot more like actually fighting random humans than the usual arcade mode cpus (especially the ones that just spam one or two moves, haha)
good video
Honestly, I've been having this complaint about games not even limited to the fighting game genre. The thing that really bothers me about the SMT series is that they give very vague descriptions for the strength of moves instead of any actual numbers to work with and I just feel like giving more information to the player even if it's in a index buried in a menu is something almost every game regardless of genre struggles with
Fighting games in general just need to teach you more visually. New players get destroyed constantly because the game doesn't visually tell them what they did wrong, so they just eat the same attacks over and over. The frame data and everything can stay the same, but the moves need to pop out more somehow to convey the idea that a certain attack is coming.
Tekken (the fighting game I'm most knowledgeable in) has a lot of moves where the animation goes low, looks like a low attack, but then the hitbox turns out to be a mid and you eat shit for blocking wrong. It's the same situation for highs: you go to high-crush an attack and then end up eating a full combo from the mid that hit you. Throws are even worse: if you're not paying attention to way the opposing characters uses their hands to grab you'll end up eating massive damage if you don't break that throw within a 15-20 frame window. A lot of people (myself included!) can't visually identify what throw is coming at that speed, so instead we just guess if it's a 1, 2, or 1+2 throw.
Maybe have a subtle hint of what is coming through the uses of some particle effects? High attacks have a red spark, low attacks have a yellow spark, etc. Having something to visually identify a move at a glance would allow the player to learn mid-match without having to head to practice mode to find out why they lost. I'm not sure if this would be popular as it may potentially lower the skill ceiling, but the skill floor would be lowered drastically and would visually teach players why they got hit by a certain move.
For my game, I am trying to make a guidebook with tips on how to use every move in the game. Unfortunately, I have to rewrite stuff when a move get reworked...
Where is the line that shouldn't be crossed? I don't think there is one. Holding back information hurts your bottom line. Period. Getting knowledge checked causes players to quit and play something else. Period.
As you said, keeping the game a secret so people spend more money is a vestige from the arcade days. Not only are there no secrets anymore because of the internet, but if you continue to keep secrets, your newer, casual players (you know, the ones more likely to tell their friends and drum up more sales) will just go spend their money somewhere else.
One of my favourite things about GG Strive is that the game will teach you how to do everything and it will actually check your technique to make sure you’re doing it right. I always tell people to do like the first two tutorial zones and then go play online for awhile. Then when they get floor stuck go play the others because it’s only worth knowing anything else if you can use the basic tools good enough
Fire video. I'm learning Melty Blood right now and it really helped to hear someone tell me "just because a game is easy to play doesn't mean it's easy to learn." I've played 80 matches and won like 4, but I don't let losing discourage me. If I'm being honest, I think there's only so many ways you can teach someone without them learning directly from battle experience. I think more games should encourage play time rather than encouraging wins. These games need to tell you that you will play a lot and lose a lot but that's a normal thing. I genuinely thought I was a really shitty MB player until I realized people are so selective with their ranked matches it's almost comical, while I prefer to just fight everyone until they give up. I feel like while trainning and CPU vs modes can sorta give you a rough estimate of what you'll deal with during actual gameplay, the only way to truly gain skill is to just be ridiculously, unrealistically persistent. I appreciate you for having the best Strive character in the thumbnail btw.
I've seen SF6 has a mode where the health bars are replaced by a number of objectives for each player (e.g. "do 3 fireballs, 2 throws, 1 reversal, etc..."), that could be interesting to play against more experienced players.
VF4:Evo has the greatest training mode ever. It teaches you your characters BnBs, punishes, set ups, unsafe moves, how to take advantage of frame data, strategy, and even teaches you defensive option selects and what to do at frame disadvantage. It's amazing. All you have to do is go through your move list, then complete training, and bam, you're ready to go. It's so good, it will make you better at all FGs, because it teaches you important fundamentals.
Ah cool, I don't have access to that game, or I would probably have included it.
Vf4 Evo is the holy grail when it comes to teaching fighters. Vf5 is pretty decent with its training mode too. Wish more people played it.
Great Video!! I happy that fighting games are becoming more thoughtful when teaching new players. I wish I had most of these tools when I first started playing.
The best feature I can think of would be something like sports games have - a Your Highlights feature after each match. Essentially, having the post-match screen have 3-5 clickable clips that are a few seconds each, generated similarly to how highlights and instant-replays are generated in a game like Rocket League or Madden. The game uses criteria to determine what situations in the match had clear examples of something the game's programmed to highlight (since it knows your inputs, it knows what your 'intent' was, which gives it a leg up on just analyzing the video itself - the game knows that you kept holding crouch block even after the overhead hit, meaning it can tell the difference between a 'slow' reaction to an overhead and NOT KNOWING something was an overhead, and choose the right thing to EXPLAIN based on the content of the clip). In this way, the game could show you several good and bad things you did in the previous match, and explain what parts of them MADE them that way - 'good pressure! These moves you used had a small gap that caught the opponent's attempt to interrupt you, that's called a Frame Trap', 'you tried to stop your opponent's air approach with this move, but it doesn't reach high enough. Here's what would have happened if at that moment, you had pressed THIS move instead'. Stuff like that. Examples of positive encouragement (while explaining what to actually VALUE in one's play), and feedback on negative situations (while explaining what the other choices were and what would have resulted from them). To some extent, I believe that a large part of how a human teaches someone fighting games, can be automated by smartly designing this kind of system - since the game knows the exact inputs, it can estimate intent, to make up for its lack of human 'intuition' about intent.
This is a really cool idea, but I know from experience that accurately analysing player behaviour from inputs/outcomes is extremely hard to get right. That's the same reason why ranked is a bit broken in many games, because it's super hard to figure out how good a player really is, when the win rate only paints part of the picture.
Like I've heard several stories of people in GGST piling up the losses as they're stuck on a tower floor they don't really belong in, but the game thinks they're too good to be deranked.
I'm very new, got in through Tough Love Arena.
Something I wish all games had is character specific tutorials that take you through their movelist, and combos(or make the combos separate), that teach you 'Alright, this is your easy anti-air, this is your easy BnB, this is your reversal', and after you beat those, maybe with a boss fight checking those three concepts, IT _THROWS YOU OUT of the tutorial and tells you to go fight actual players_
There's a lot of information in fighting games, and I am someone who tends to get caught in the info vortex so much that I don't remember the most basic things.
Teach me the barebones basics, then throw me against players.
I'll come back to the tutorial if I feel I need Anti-Airs with better follow ups, a chunkier combo, or help with dealing with a specific situation.
Don't let newbies trap themselves in training mode before they even know what the fuck to train.
Killer Instinct actually explicitly tells you to go play some matches after the first chunk of the tutorial.
I think the issue with that approach is that there's nothing steering the players back to the tutorial when they need to, because it can be hard for the game to know when that should happen, and which part of the tutorial to guide them to.
Another important tool to make FGs more accessible: make low-level play fun
They should tell you upfront that your main is a "joke character" and will never be strong and if they are strong nerfed immediately. Hopefully Honda is not a joke in SF6.
While this is not really applicable to every game (like strive, lol), BB's whiffing due to a invul animation is an incredibly helpful thing to have, even tho it's a bit too unnoticeable. I have no clue how you would implement something like that for strive's hurtbox-based "invul", but i believe it would totally be a great thing.
This one i can't stress enough - it should be as close to WYSIWYG as humanly possible. For example you don't need to reach far - Nago's 2H looks like a wide sweep able to reach right above you and near your knee, but surprise - it's hitbox is nowhere near how the move is animated. It is incredibly misleading and it simply should not be like that. And yes, if the hitbox changes due to balance patch, the animation should do the same (Nago's 2H again comes here).
And while this isn't really applicable to the new players, but it follows the previous point - FG should not have hidden values/bars on any sort, period. Are you close to wallsplatting your opponent? How much Tager's magnetism is left on you? Is anyone close to the Active Flow? Who knows, and you certainly shouldn't know too, for sure. *sarcasm*
Knowledge checks are often the only thing that stops ppl from winning against players not as good as them, it’s a crutch, break the crutch and the rest of the play comes down.
>TFH
The snakes are evil. I quickly figured out they wanted you to check your toes.
I hate the bear grab with a passion...
I will say that we need more like that given it really helps me learn to play other games.
if it were up to me, I'd use the single player campaign to explore everything about the game's mechanics, even going so far as to introduce exclusive modifiers and plot scenarios that will force you to make use of said mechanic, but only for that fight.
probably the only game I know of that did this was Soul Calibur 2 on consoles (I had the GCN version). the Weapon Master mode was a lengthy solo campaign that more or less told a self-insert sort of story, but the various scenarios the story provided gave a fairly solid explanation as to the modifiers you needed to do.
for instance, the first two stages were strictly a tutorial for the game itself, done in the context of you being given some training from a combat instructor (played by Mitsurugi) before you begin your journey. a later stage has you face a novice guardswoman (played by Cassandra) who assumes you're trouble and won't listen to you saying otherwise, and you can't bring yourself to fight her seriously... the modifiers have you dealing damage by using Guard Impact parries, and you use that to win. one of my favorites has you partaking in an illegal gambling match in an arena covered in landmines, where the modifier causes whoever falls down to get launched by an explosion, encouraging you to trip them often and to do a quick recovery to avoid it yourself.
there's loads more scenarios in SC2's Weapon Master mode, and I think you could get a lot of mileage in teaching the mechanics through specific scenarios that encourage you to use them.
The issue is that every fighting game tells you some of these, but to do everything would be an exhaustive undertaking. This is especially true because some games only barely implement concepts that, while maybe important to maximizing gameplay, don't really matter until you're at the stage where you'd be wiki researching and getting community help anyways. I still remember being like a decade into the hobby before someone explained that some moves "force crouch" and the follow up explanation for why that mattered. Does that require a tutorial or extensive breakdown in the game, or are we okay with some of that falling to the community instead of the game providing literally every tool and writeup a player should ever need?
There's always going to be some community-provided stuff, primarily because devs usually don't know what's meta until the community shows it to them. I don't necessarily believe that they should provide EVERYTHING, but it's clear that they currently aren't providing enough. Gotta find that line.
Excellent work! Nice to see so many examples from so many games (a rare example of Soulcalibur NOT being ignored in a fighting game video).
Similar thoughts here, as a DOA fan it's always great seeing it get acknowledged in a positive light rather than the "lOl BoObY gAmE" memes you usually see.
I think something great that SF6 could bring is limiting the player's move list from the get go in the story mode so he can get use to his moveset gradually.
I personally don't like the look of all the pop-ups in GBFV and DNF (they look like popup phone notifications), but I do like them giving clear knowledge that helps parse what's going on so I wouldn't just want an option to turn them off(though I wouldn't be against that as more ui options like that are always welcome).
What SF6 is doing with accessibility features to have different sounds play for cross-ups, bighs, and lows is neat, and I think you can see how many people want something like that by how many people were saying they would probably turn that on when learning the game even without sight disabilities. However, you can also tell that wasn't meant to be there as a learning tool due to the sounds being so unstylized (and they probably shouldn't be if they are just acting as accessibility features so that they can stand out more from the games other sounds). I hope some mods make use of those being coded into the game and let us replace the sounds if we want to use them.
Another way of doing it could be having some consistent aspect of the game's animations that shows the moves properties. For example, in Strive you can tell which of Ky's moves apply shock state by the color of lighting that he uses, with yellow lightning applying shock state. Or something like seeing the orange glow around 5D and knowing that it's an overhead, though maybe not to that extent visually. Though this obviously has issues with possibly making visual's even busier if done too much, so idk.
I can’t express how much I love your channel. It’s simply amazing to have this quality of work for your 2 first videos.
Thanks for the great work.
Cool video with interesting remarks! As I recall, the BlazBlue series (specifically Continuum Shift) had some really good tutorials which explained basic and general fighting (game) knowledge, such as "spacing" (range for attacking and defending) and space control.
Man, this an amazing analysis on Fighting games. Good work, I didn't know about some of the features like the Combo display in DOA, that is super helpful, I wish more games have that. I actually used Pure Ref to kinda get the same effect.
0:08 okay so I immediately get blindsighted by the difference in definition of Knowledge check. I usually use it when *a move* requires specific knowledge to get around. The way this definition is worded means its something a player is doing to another rather than just a move that, in itself, has specific counterplay or knowledge needed to beat it.
8:20 I actually dont think this is as important as you're making it out. Every move, at least at the basic level, should have some level of counterplay that applies regardless of character. It might not be the most optimal, or some characters might be worse at it than others, but knowing the counterplay is whats important for building the knowledge up. Specific character-to-character match-up knowledge being in tutorials would be cool, but it could be overwhelming, or even downright pointless, if you dont understand the basics of counterplay first.
I mean, the "official" definition is on screen. It's ok if you have a different perspective on it, but I believe that the majority of the FGC uses Infil's glossary as the source of truth (whether that's good or bad I don't know).
As for matchup knowledge, maybe you're right.
Fighting games also make a big chunk of their roster DLC, so you will have even less matchup knowledge unless you shell out more money. Devs should at least allow players to train against DLC characters that aren't bought. I think James Stephanie Sterling made a video about this many years ago.
Yeah, I agree :)
In Short: Learn has you need, is more fun that way and doesnt feel like a grind.
In Long:
I just take the laid back approach, check all chars quickly on the arcade mode and survival modes. Once I grasp which character I wanna play I move to the online lobbies, if I start losing more than I win, I try see why that's happening and if I see my opponent do something I'm not using (ex: roman cancel). This is when I will go lab and learn about it for a few minutes and hit the online lobbies again until I start making that thing part of my arsenal.
Same with combos, if I see I'm losing cause I don't have enough big combos, learn a few until I need more specific ones.
(This strat works best when getting a fighting game on Release date, like any member of FGC should do.)
PS: Winning is not the only sign of progression... Losing, *but you are able to tell why you lost,* it shows you have improved too.
I think the best single player experienceI've seen in a fighting game to teach the player is probably the souls series. By the time you can do PvP, you are proefficient at its mechanics and you will be equipped to parse what the other player did.
But there's a lot of design choices that didn't aim for it to be engaging the same way fighting games do and in a way I'm not sure it can be replicated.
Even if GBVS story mode doesn't help you parse a matchup, the rules of how you control your character makes the beat em up a good choice. Time spent handling your character with the same controls is time spent practicing. The mode also forces the player to block to beat it as bosses are full of armo. Beginners tend to not want to block. Much like dark souls kills you for running in swinging without a plan.
That leaves me unconvinced on how much you can accomplish from a beat em up single player, but also that'd you need ro change the rules of the PvP fighting game to make an engaging PvE one. I remember juggling enemies to infinity in a beat em up, lots of fun. But you couldn't convince me to play a PvP bersion of them.
Adding the SF6 frame replay frame counter into normal matches would teach frame data while playing which is a leap in accessibility
Some people argue that this would be a step too far. I don't really have strong feelings either way, but as frame data isn't everything, I could see this being counter-productive in normal matches without the appropriate mindset. I think the ability to use training mode online with someone else, where this can be enabled, is being slept on, though.
To this day I don't know why they don't put a numerical value on the health bar. How would anyone know that Zangief has more health than Akuma without trial and error.
I didn't even consider that different characters could have different amounts of health until I started watching FGC videos.
The NRS games let you display numbers on the bars, and some other games do show the difference (e.g. Fantasy Strike), but yeah, it's much less frequent than I'd like.
@Mougli To make it worse everyone has the same HP in Mortal Kombat, so it doesn’t even need it.
@@Beelzeboogie There are differences though, for instance Jacqui and Cassie have 950 while Shao Kahn has 1100 (at least according to Supercombo)
@@MougliFGC Ah didn't know that. Reddit thread I saw said they all have 1000.
Non-fighting game person here. What are normals? What's DNFQL? A lot of this video goes over my head.
Normal attacks (normals) are the attacks that require nothing more than a single button press. DNF Duel is the name of the game being shown when I say it.
Didnt watch the whole thing. But it feels like u just want games to tell you every little thing with no room for basic discovery. Like i dont see how the game is obligated to tell u how to use every move and their specific purpose as that takes wway from discovery or finding iut how to use things ureself from new players.
Thank you for watching at least some of it.
This video was... It feels like you said too much without saying anything.
Sure people have trouble learning fighting games and there are better ways of doing it, but in the end of the day we still have to apply that knowledge in a real match and no amount of training punishes, throw techs, anti airs and etc will save you against a human opponent no matter how good the resources are, however here's the catch, if the game were to have it's knowledge displayed, this means the game would already be completely figured out and cut and dry. Let alone, this means the *developers* would have done so, which leaves little room to developing new tech, and imo that looks like a really bleak future for the game
So to answer your question, and this is something some games already do pretty well, but sound and visual cues. Have you heard the SFX from the XX series? They're gorgeous, and you always can identify very well a hit and block sound, the blazblue exclamation marks are also an excellent example of that, but still, there will be the human factor. Fighting games are a genre that you need 2 players at the very least, so yeah, talking to people is ultimately going to be the best way to learn
Thank you for sharing your thoughts ☺️
"Tekken 7 unexpectedly shines" despite the fact that most of what you mentioned regarding it were nothing more than series staples aside from framedata information; I do not understand this notion that Tekken 7 -or Tekken- has bad training modes that obscure mechanics. Tekken has had the best movelists among its peers since the first one; every other fighting game have just been catching up for decades now.
I never said Tekken has bad training modes. The "unexpectedly" comes from the perception by non Tekken fans that the game is unfriendly to beginners. I call out 7 specifically rather than whole series because it's the only one I own and because new people tend to be more interested in the latest entry in the series.
Im 10000% sure, if you keep up your video quality like this, you will go to 100k in about a year. Safe. Excellent Video
I really do feel like having an acceptable single player would be the best solution - and heck, maybe then I could get a video game with my $60 ranked mode
Some games are subtle about it, guilty gear: COUNTER
You would think it's obvious, but you'll genuinely hear new players be like"why does the game yell counter everytime someone gets hit?"
That's because Strive doesn't explain what a counter hit is or why it happens.
@Mougli tbh that's something a game shouldn't have to tell you. A counter? You should know what that is being that we all either do it in real life in various ways often, see it on TV often or both. Maybe not actual fights but certainly other things like sports, arguments, etc.
As a fighting game veteran, I say this video is naive. It is true that fighting games are opaque, but that opacity was originally to make the game seem more abstract and free-flowing. EG things like random damage, random stun, and different wakeup animations on every character. The problem is that fighting games are mostly pretty simple, predictable, and deterministic, but very fast paced. That means theoretically you can get a huge advantage just by reading a little bit about the game... but ONLY IF you are already very fluent at handling yourself in the game.
Indeed, one of the reasons that I say smash, especially melee, is successful in this regard is the fact that the underlying mechanics are more difficult to control, less predictable, more complex, and less deterministic. The consequence being that getting additional facts and information about the game's implementation will barely help you at all. Indeed, many melee players in practice usually don't know shit about the game, especially before the modern wave of reverse engineering we've seen.
of course, fighting games aren't so different. This is why I don't actually think its wise to try and prescribe strategic tutorials to players. Thats very subjective, and the best strategy available to you will depend on your specific set of experience. Many players are indeed better off doing one-hit combos all the way to victory. My main suggestion is to make it so that the learning curve is sufficiently gradual, and to say that adding nuance can often actually improve the new player experience.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
@@MougliFGC and thanks for reading
In the end, the best way to practice is to find people to play with very often. For me that is the way to learn more about the game and although you can play online it's never going to be the same as offline.
Unfortunately, offline might just not be an option for some people, cause their friends aren't interested or there's no offline community within X miles (where X is the distance beyond which the inconvenience of travelling outweighs the downsides of online play).
Watching Core-A's latest video on the Pakistani Tekken scene, it made me realise that in countries where internet is fast and PC/consoles more easily accessible/affordable, offline communities just aren't going to be as big of a thing.
@@MougliFGC That's why new fighting games are coming out with good netcode, so that you can alleviate the lack of offline players in the community by giving you online ones. My country has a total of around 50 players, but the offline meetings happen only in the capital, which I'm lucky to be living in, so most of us play online with each other and Discord to talk strategies.
*"If you're playing to win, this is a fight to the metophorical death, not a courteous duel"*
So me modding the game to buff my character's hitboxes and frame data when playing from a specific controller port is fair game, right?
Good luck with that in online play (I know what you are referring to :) )
@@MougliFGC
Client-side modding :)
i watched this video and that the editing or the production of it was really good and when i was done i wanted to watch more but you only had 2 videos i thought you would have way more keep up the good work
Frame data. Memorizing this stuff holds a lot of people from ever getting into the genre. Learning a fighting game is like picking up an instrument. This is like then explaining how to play the notes barely, and then not including the sheet music. Characters rule but damn their animations are pretty much just show and beyond simple state machines don't indicate enough about enemy state which players basically have to intuit blind.
How many people really do memorise frame data, though?
@@MougliFGC I'm talking about why people don't stick around: Having some basic understanding of windup, attack frames and cooldown and how to take advantage of those systems is not something most people coming in have any understanding of, nor where the striking parts actually are. It just is not very well telegraphed. Most people come in thinking with what they know about fighting (which isn't much) and beyond pretty animations are largely pushed away from seeing the game's actual underlying systems which are hidden behind dazzling art. That art should be representing the underlying systems better. Once people who do understand those things get them, games become too competitive for relaxed play, mistakes aren't clear enough to most players (so they don't learn from their mistakes and get better) and as a result they gravitate towards other games or other hobbies because all entertainment is in competition with all other entertainment for human time and if players don't get a sense of community or progression from something, people are way less likely to stick around until it "clicks" because there is no shortage of shit to do in current year. The reason help systems have to be good and games have to be clear is because you aren't just competing with other fighting games, you're trying to validate your use of a player's time with your game in the first place.
One thing I wish these games taught me is a lot of fighting games are just shitty rhythm games, they depend so much on a vague timing that has barely any attachment to what's actually going on in the game that without a system that explains the combo timing new players are just thrown aside for all the people enjoying the rhythm aspect to play by themselves.
In other words, I just wish fighting games would just be clear that they're a kind of game I have little respect for. It's a bad mechanic that they've stagnated with because the playerbase thinks it's fine when it's literally the basis for the problem this video is discussing. It's needlessly obfuscated to create skill gaps in a game genre with very little apparent skill in the competitions.
Fighting games are shit, and the sad part is the community around them want to keep them being shit because making them better requires all the idiots that grew up playing them to have to relearn to play them. The community is holding back their own genre for self gratification and it's sad... cause fighting games _could_ be fun.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. How would you suggest fighting games should change that?
@@MougliFGC inputs should correspond with onscreen actions, timing should be intuitive and not obfuscated, multiple inputs for a single action should not be a part of the system. Tutorials should be a huge part of the game, sure, but I shouldn't need to "practice" 3 lights and a heavy attack combo to be able to pull it off.
The problem I've always had with these games is that it balances moves by being hard to input. To put that into perspective for like a first person shooter it's like balancing a gun by having to tap the P, ctrl and mouse buttons at the same time to fire it. "His special is just tap the button over and over again so he's classified as 'easy' and the special isn't that strong but that guy's special requires you to lick the touch pad on a PS5 controller while massaging the buttons just right so he's classified as 'hard' and his special will one shot if it connects."
Making the controls harder to balance the game is bad design, but most fighting games choose to do it this way.
Basically if I can't rebind moves to a single button because it's "OP" then the game is designed poorly. I've got controllers with extra buttons that I can't use because "balance" and they expect me to believe this is good and fun game design? It's actually got a term for it that we all know, artificial difficulty, and most games follow this dead ideal. Artificially inflate the difficulty so the "hardcore" players like it.
@@SherrifOfNottingham Then you should play one of the many games that don't rely on motion inputs and long strings.
Givup, accept fg's are niche. Fight games will never bring new people, so much system and stuff to learn, even the most detailed tutorial would never be enuff, most people have no time for this shiet.
Thank you for sharing your opinion :)
@@MougliFGC It is not like i want to bash your video, it's just that after all this year, i lost hope. It is so much easier to bring people to play stuff like Fortnite and MOBA cause how this games are made to actually addict people, fight games are not designed like that, and even then they try to (A.K.A, FighterZ and MK11), they're still to complex for most to enjoy.
@@JohnVmc2 I don't expect fighting games to become mainstream. But I do believe with some myth busting and some effort from the devs, a lot more people would be willing to give them a fair try.
Clear. I'm in a period where i'm thinking a lot about what makes a game "beginner friendly", and where i analyse the game i enjoy, how did i feel when i started versus now, what do i wish i knew sooner, because i've been recently confronted to introduce some friends to some games, some i'm always "oh yeah, there's that, i forgot to tell you.." where in reality, the game failed to tell them.
The concepts you're talking about can be applied to other genre. I hope we see more investment in "beginner friendly" feature, i'de love people to massively start playing fighting game lol, like how many new player elden ring attracted to the soulsborne franchise.
Well I did figure out a method on paper that I’m using for a game I’m developing. It actually doesn’t require a menu to look up moves and I’m planning to have no move list on purpose.
Essentially instead of just having the player pause and look at their moves, they have an interface on screen and if you hold a button, some of there interface will light up indicating that a move can be executed this way.
I’m hoping this encourages players to explore and memorize the moves instead of just looking at the menu again. It also seems to be a good way to catch people off guard if they feel like they need look away from the match instead of just memorizing the move they want to execute without having to look for the glowing lights on their interface.
Sounds interesting, looking forward to seeing it in action!
Every fighter needs:
-Ability to take control during a replay
-Ability to put combo routes on screen
-Link/cancel time window
-Ability to reduce speed
-Combo maker mode (check gg strive)
I’ve found that since playing MK11 a lot I’ve become more accustomed to looking for opportunities to punish and do reversals and have started to see the significance of matchup knowledge. A big part of that is them simply showing “punish” or “counter” or “reversal” when you do a move that fits the bill. It’s very clear, but also elegant in how it shows up, just like the combo counter. Seeing that more and more prompts me to actually look for those opportunities in a more deliberate manner and remember the things opponents do that provide me with those chances. It’s a mentality that’s being forged that stays with me when I move to different games. Very simple addition that I feel goes a long way. It’s like having a coach point out helpful things while you play….
Literally the most important thing in my opinion would be taking over control during replays, so that you dont have to learn the opponent's combo.
Then also adding tips into said replay. If you got countered where you took control the game will tell you what that means and how to best avoid it etc.
To me those are the two things every FG can do that will drastically improve the learning curve. Other than that, I wish every game had a framebar option like SF6 has, because I can't tell you how many times I struggled with timing my moves in Strive. Though there's a mod for that (however only for offline training). Still that's less important.
When I was trying to learn GG-Strive at launch (my 1st FG):
Past me: I'm going to complete the tutorial, practice combos and then go on-line.
Present me: LOL, you got it backwards, noob.
Coming from an Arena FPS background, it's always been the case that a game NEEDS new player accessibility and not just the ones who are willing to suffer. And wouldn't you know it, my entire genre got bodied by shitty Call of Duty and other slow games with bad movement.
I'm glad the FGC might manage to avoid this fate (narrowly. If Smash hadn't gotten so... the way it is... well, you can imagine.)
While it has a lot of overall problems, including some of the problems mentioned here, MK1 does a really good job on letting you practice freely in the tutorial mode. I really appreciate the way it handles that particular idea.
My ideal fighting game:
- Is slow. Very slow. I think I might like the mind games and the real-time navigation of a moderately complex decision tree of fake-outs, attacks, counters and counter-counters, but I'm old and don't go so fast no more.
- Is clear. No cluttering up the screen with a zillion particles. The cute animal one with very few colors looked visually clean. Also a bit plain, but if I'm ever to be able to think my way through a game, I must be able to compute the actual game state in my head based on the screen image.
- Is relatively simple. I don't want to learn a large-ass move set. Make the big thing happen in the combinations and responses.
- A youtube colleague of yours praised a feature whereby you can take control of a character in the middle of a replay. Sounds legit, then you can practice execution of a response to a particular move in the middle of a real fight.
- In terms of on-screen data: some representation of the decision tree going forward from each point. For example, given that my opponent is stuck doing whatever it is they'll be doing for X frames, I can do A, B and C before they can react. If I do A then I can also do D, E and/or F, giving my opponent a reaction window only long enough to block, not punish. If they block, they [and so on...].
- Maybe combine this with the option to step through the game one frame at a time, combined with the resume replay function. That way, my slow ass brain can get enough time to think through the possibilities.
TL;DR: ya can't git gud with no homework, so help me do the homework. Give me every tool that helps me do the homework.
My assumption is that fighting games factor relatively neatly into two components: planning and execution. Planning is all about knowing which actions are good in which situations; execution is recognizing the situations and firing off the good responses. The homework is then (a) studying the decision space one frame at a time to plan better; and (b) practice recognition and response in a live fire exercise. Or maybe a live fire non-exercise.
I'm not totally sure why but I appreciate the Notifications when playing a fast paced fighter like SF but I've never missed it playing Tekken.
Maybe there's one or two things that aren't clear? But you pretty much realise everything that's happened in Tekken just by watching it occur. Maybe hearing sound effects
Like being countered or punished. It just feels self evident through playing I find and doesn't really need text popping up in the screen telling you their sweep kick bear your High Attack and put you in a juggle state.
Is it cause its a slower game overall? Because its also a 3D game? Not sure.
I consider myself a casual veteran, as I've been playing fighting games casually since I first touched a console, but I haven't played ranked more than 5 hours.
I think that games should let you customize how much information is displayed. At first you would like the game to tell you everything, the counters, the invincibility, etc. But as you keep playing, you would just turn it off because it's no longer something you don't know. Kind of like training wheels.
With GG Strive's newish mode that lets you create and share combo trials online, I think a lot of other training features could have a focus on user creation as well. For example, AC+R's replay takeover feature could be used not only to teach how to react to specific situations, but could also allow skilled players to design puzzle-like challenges, show off fun moments from online matches, or even showcase highlights from recent tournaments. At that point, some other smaller tidbits could be added to encourage players to come back regularly, such as rewards and featured challenges.
Some more advanced things that might help without needing a replay viewer would be putting the frame advantage of moves and how much frame advantage you need to guarantee a punish in the move list rather than just on-screen when they come out (for games that have frame data), and with this maybe letting you look up a move and the game spits back every move your character has that will punish it on block. Instead of needing to trial and error to find an answer you can just auto-search when you notice a move is giving you too much trouble. Maybe even do the inverse where if you look up your own character's attack it would show all the ways that the opponent could punish it to help learn matchups and to some extent teach block strings since people would see "If I end on this they can punish with a combo starter but if I end with this instead all they can do is jab."
On that note, maybe also something that tracks when you're getting hit and by what. Something that would say like what state your character was in (neutral, attacking, crouch blocking, jumping, dashing, etc.) and what classification of move was hitting you (moves within an opponent's combo wouldn't add to this, it would just be the initial hits). If you are jumping too much and getting anti-aired, instead of needing to manually recognize that during a match or watch a replay you could simply look at your recent match data and say, "Oh wow I got hit by like 20 anti-airs in one game." or "The game is saying 70% of the hits I was taking were counter hits, that's a big problem for me." It would be an in-depth teaching tool that wouldn't do much more than a replay viewer could but it would give people way more visible and accessible feedback on bad habits in the play style.
I'm not an absolute beginner, but I'm not what I'd call well practiced in anything in the fighting game genre. But one thing I personally found helpful was the story mod in DBZ Budokai 1, where the game doesn't expect you to memorize entire combos and movelists right away. It teaches you one, then has a battle that mechanically directs you to it. Or it adds a limited number of techniques to the move list, so you're not looking at a wall of text.
It has its own flaws (like changing the character around on you), but at least I knew what was going on and why certain things weren't triggering.
I think part of what makes this so infuriating is that different games have different rules, and players often expect games to behave similarly. Things like being able to block in mid air are obvious, but how many times are you going to get hit before you realize this game treats cross up protection differently than the last one you played? I've seen multiple people *confidently* tell me that grabs beat strikes in Street Fighter 6... They don't. But they did in every single Street Fighter before 6.
Tekken 7 was my first traditional fighting game. I literally didn't even know how to block, or even that you were even able to, until I looked up a tutorial online. It provides genuinely *zero* resources for new-to-fighting-game players; I assume it's a bit easier if you're coming to it from another traditional fighting game. Needless to say, I quit within a few days. While I respect the skill and complexity once you've invested the time into it, the game is borderline unplayable as a complete beginner in the absence of online resources. This experience isn't particularly unique to Tekken, most older fighting games had this problem, either because of financial incentive or just a lack of teaching tools. I think the Extra Credits video mentioned here does a really good job explaining this problem. There is simply too much to learn and little fun to be had until you've learned a lot of it.
Strive was the first fighting game I was actually able to get into simply because of how good the tutorial is. It does a really good job breaking down the fundamentals of fighting games, both the inputs as well as basic concepts like anti-airs and the attack/grab/block RPS, which is basically all you need to know before you can spend some time messing around in online or single player for a bit, actually playing the game with some minimal level of competence and actually having fun. It gets bonus points for splitting it's tutorials into various groups of lessons, between each of which provides good stopping point to switch to playing the real game so you can actually apply what you just learned. It would be nice though if it had better character specific lessons and if it did a better job of explaining the intended usage of various mechanics, but it's still amongst the best.
I'd also give a shoutout to Rivals of Aether, a plat fighter (the best one imo) which has a similarly exceptional tutorial, albeit not quite as in-depth and lengthy as Strive. It similarly splits it's tutorial so that you can learn and then go play between each one. It's split into 3 a beginner, intermediate, and advanced tutorial for universal concepts/mechanics as well as separate dedicated tutorials for each character, teaching you all of the moves and special mechanics that each character has as well as a number of their situational usages. I do think plat-fighters are, in general, a lot easier and less opaque than traditional fighting games for beginners, mostly due to their vastly simpler control scheme and lack of character specific input commands, but Rivals goes above and beyond when it comes to teaching beginners, especially when compared to its main competitor, and original inspiration, Smash.
This video is brilliant! I shocked that is your only second ever on channel, you rocks, already subscribed!
About topick: triple yes, fighting games hides its interesting strategic parts and fundamentals behind lack of information. Ofc its all cos of budget economy, but i hope in the future devs put more effort to speak with newcomers and show how game works inside the game itself in specific modes.
Unless I've missed an option to do so I wish Guilty Gear strive let me slow down the speed at which I'm shown the combo done by the CPU because even though it's probably done at a realistic speed it doesn't help me with understanding or being able to follow it and that's with me already having a list of what i'm supposed to be doing. For some of them I also just switched from missions to training mode just to practice without only having 5 short tries.
There's also a bit of a lack in clarity about what I'm supposed to do it took me a while (and some outside sources) to figure out what a Z-looking formation is supposed to be or how to do May's charged attack despite it being kind of straight forward and simple in retrospect (but also not being told that I can charge it wile I'm doing a different hit).
One one hand the more I find out the more appreciation I have for all of it but on the other hand I whish the bar of entry didn't feel so high.
i think a story where you unlock your moves for your character little by little and you have to use it on what do the next boss and enemy you encounter (and at the end boss you will have to use every move at least one for each situation it required)for the line i would say they can stop after stuff like anti air,why the invicible reversal work and knowing that theire is move faster than others, and that it exist some move that you can't mash after without risk (+ on block, minus on block)
As somebody that plays a lot of Tekken and streams it
if I didn't have a chat with some really good players telling me what I'm doing wrong I wouldn't learn anything honestly
It would be really handy if every post-match screen had some sort of summary that was like "you got hit by this specific move a lot" or "you have a habit of getting counterhit"
When I'm in the match and trying to fight my opponent/learn what their patterns are it's really hard to figure out which move is what, what it does, whether it's safe or not. It's a bit of a drag having to watch replays or lab something after almost every match if you want to definitively know how to beat a certain move or strategy, y'know?
To answer your question properly: Its being able to play with people and communicate while you played. Even if you were getting 0-2 in the arcade often the guy beating the shit out you might toss you some wisdom.The social element is the most important part of learning. Devs need to get people into training room-like battles that allow them to change aspects but still have a competitive feel that is so essential to create a desire for learning. Something built in, and yeah youll get the screamers and the racists, etc
But underneath the filth is a community being built. Also hiding the elements when not needed so they can also just enjoy beating the crap out of each other.
Finally I would love for them to hire an actual pro who can do voice overs for the movesets and tutorials. Maybe implement a type of KI shadow AI copy of certain styles. Put you in situations that you have to figured out.
I feel alot of other software like music and video editing could use alot better in package tutorials.
As a beginner I think clean UI that gets across what it is you need to convey is really important. How good your training mode is doesn't matter if I can't find it, etc.
A thing I've never seen but would love to see is a very specific training mode feature, only let me perform the selected actions. So blocking out any inputs that would cause it not to go through, this way I could find out exactly why I keep messing up something I'm certain I'm inputting correctly, to go with this. Next to moves in a move list I think it could be nice to show the exact time window I have between one part of an action to another for it to come out, it's always difficult for me at least to understand if I'm messing up the input itself or just performing it too slowly.
It's like mobas lol, there is some arcane knmowledge in them. Hell the considered best guide of Dota 2 straight up tells you that playing the game for 1000h to begin understanding wtf is going on is a prerequisite lmao
They need to take the word "training" literally.
when practising a move Kinesthetic learners would learn much better if (for example) a voiceover said "ah, your second input there needs to come a touch sooner - or on screen for those that don't like the sounds)
You can add more informational info for casual play and remove it for tournament play. If you really wanna get casuals into fighting games, find ways tk make the game as visually clear as possible. It will probably lower the skill differentiation between players so baiting your opponent, mind games, etc will be more viable strategies than being the best at learning the moveset of a single character. What a boring way to play a game. I always wanna play as someone new. I should be able to quickly figure out that character.
man the guilty gear “COUNTER!” Is so good when playing
I think the biggest problem with tutorials is that the don’t emphasize information that is most important. For a new player it’s impossible to know what will actually help you learn vs what is to advanced or specific to be taking up your mental stack.
So much excellent info about so many fighting games here. Thanks much
As a total beginner and rookie to fighting games, the biggest thing that I really need better feedback on is button inputs. It is so frustrating trying to input the same combo or move 30 times and not being able to figure out whether something is wrong with my inputs or my timing, if my inputs are too slow, too fast etc. Getting visual feedback on what I'm doing wrong in situations outside of the lab would be so useful
something I don't like is when fighting games just decide that something that's extremely important is actually an "advanced mechanic" and it doesn't have to be in the initial tutorial
one that comes to mind that is still just absurd to me is throw escaping in sfv
knowledge check in ssbu online will get u banned lol coz u cant spam projectile coz ur opponent will cry coz of it XD
I wish games had so much better ways to actually 'decode' a character roster. Even games with very clear cut character gimmicks, such as the BlazBlue series, aren't the greatest at introducing and demonstrating what a character is capable of and why you might want to play them; nevermind games where the differences can be a lot more subtle, especially when 'clone' characters come into the picture and make it even harder.
I started playing ggst a few days ago and one of the things that would be rlly handy to know is which moves are plus on block so u can know which moves are good for approaching your opponent and stuff, idk how u would put that in a tutorial tho
I think getting the knowledge to the player when it's relevant to them is important. someone won't go into the game knowing how to punish certain moves and won't bother looking at frame data at all. however, if the player loses to balrogs dash punches over and over again, and the game has a match review option in the post-match screen that tells them what moves can punish that move seconds after the match is over. the player will be more inclined to look into it because they know what being hit with that move is like. having fast access to information is great, but having fast access to information that's relevant to you is better
While a bunch of text in Team Blue and French Bread games are not very good tutorials, compared to literally nothing in Street Fighter 4 it was like fresh water in the desert.