Sero’s tweet was so funny, because the moment it left her usual sphere and reached the greater FGC, a solid 70% of our community made it their sole mission to prove she was right, by arguing she was wrong. Bonus points to the people who carried that energy to her follow-up tweet pointing out how people agree when Maximilian says it, but not her. No solid reason to behave that way, just a moron for the sport, the passion, the love of the game
Me? For my money? I'd say she's 100% correct with the financial barrier, I mostly disagree with the statement that there's a lack of new player friendly resources, and I'd say the elitism is there, but is more situational. Although, the elitism might be more obvious and blatant to her, since being a streamer means those types of people are going to get magnetized to her.
The resources part definitely depends on the game, honestly resources for the popular games like Tekken and Street Fighter especially just fucking suck. But for any anime game there's a wiki page with 100 combos and general gameplan for every character. Like look at MBAACC's wiki man, 93 chars and almost all of them have novel-length guides.
@@pokecole37that's... completely irrelevant to the new player experience? beginners will tend to gravitate towards TH-cam for beginner resources and that's there in abundance for modern games. wikis and resources like dustloop and supercombo are very much more for intermediate+ players that are at the stage to start worrying about frame data and higher level strategy. too much depth all at once is very much detrimental to the new player experience and the way that the fgc constantly pushes those types of resources towards people just starting out is one of the reasons why new players think it's so hard to get started.
@@pokecole37 And the amount of assumed knowledge/skill level in those popular franchises can be kinda insane. I remember trying to look up a BNB for a character in Strive and most videos showed, like, combos with 7, 8 steps or even more. My brother in christ I couldn't even do a quarter circle half the time, there's no way this is my "Bread and Butter". Same thing with SF6 now that I'm learning it, though I am getting better at doing the funny motions over time. But to give the anime game folks praise where it's due, Dustloop is a GODSEND of a site that not only has several combos at different difficulty levels, it also has tons and tons of guidance explaining what each move's function is, not to mention all the other info in there. Sometimes it's genuinely better than the ingame tutorials for me.
I'll say this about motion inputs. I have TPS, meaning my tendons are naturally shorter than they should be, not to the point where I can't walk but it has caused me problems before and I had to spend years of my life doing yoga and physiotherapy and whatnot. This also ruins me when I play games, I can't go too hard and I ended up quitting League because of the strain it caused on my hands. No other game genre has caused me more hand pain than fighting games. After I reached Master with AKI, I just had to take a month-long break from how much my hands would hurt. Stick causes me the most pain, pad is bearable and also what Iam used to and I haven't tried a hitbox yet. But when it comes to physical pain from playing games, performing motion inputs is never any less painful. I'm never gonna quit over that (unless I'm forced to), but it definitely makes it difficult to enjoy these games long-term. I just got Granblue, and it feels amazing to not feel like my finger joints are about to lock after an hour-long session.
It’s def a big accessibility thing but that’s why alternate controllers are awesome Getting rid of motions entirely also isn’t really an option, since a lot of moves just can’t happen without them, or become utterly broken Not saying you’re saying they should be abolished, just hoping nobody sees your post and decides motions are ableist
(commenting mid-video): One thing you gotta understand about MOBAs and accessibility is that team based games are always gonna be more accessible as a social experience because your friend who's into it is playing it with you and often taking decisions for their beginner buddies mid-match. It actually turns the complexity into a positive on the onboarding experience, as long as the game surpasses a minimum level of general interest and playerbase size. edit: HOLY SHIT it's his EXACT NEXT SENTENCE im gonna kill myself
it's literally harder and more complicated even if you have 4 skilled friends to play with, you have even more pressure then to not feel like you're baggage to them, in fighters it's 1v1 and you are the ONLY person you're responsible for, i will never ever understand this argument, it's objectively many times harder and more stressful to git gud at a moba thana fighting game 100% of the time in any way shape or form with any example vs. any other example
@@koopakape That sounds like it depends on you as a person and the people you play with on personal levels. I'm far and away the weakest among my friend group when we play League of Legends together, but they never treat me like a burden when I make mistakes and I don't let said mistakes or my inexperience put unhelpful pressure on.
@@koopakape definitely not, when teaching new players you essentially play 2 games at once. I think it’s fun, especially if we’re both bot lane, to build two characters to support the others in the team. New players don’t need to be killing people out the gate they just need to not have a bad time. It’s mostly up to whoever is teaching you that will dictate your experience though. The person could be a dickhead who’s mad that you don’t know how to play the game you don’t play but I feel like that’s not the games fault.
My opinion is that the main reason that Fighting Games are perceived as harder is because it makes it incredibly obvious what you did wrong, even if the best way to solve that problem isn't obvious. Other games you can shrug off a couple losses but in fighting games you know it was your fault, you feel why you lost. Nothing stomps on an ego more than FGs. And people just have fragile egos.
i'd also argue that because most folks don't play arcade fighters these days you're starting even lower below the floor than usual. In other notably difficult games like moba's most of the new player difficulty if you aren't completely new to video games is based on knowledge rather than manual dexterity i can practice for hours and still struggle to do consistent combos and overdrive inputs in guilty gear whereas i had done little other than occasionally watch League of Legends and had an easier time playing a moba like Smite or DOTA.
On top of that it's really hard to play with buddies in fighting games as it's a 1v1 game. And the perceived barrier of "i have to sit in a padded room for hours and hours until i can do special moves and combos" not only makes it hard to get other people to play with you but magnifies every mistake and doesn't let you know how to fix it. I can do QC inputs pretty easily in lots of modern fighting games. I still don't know what is making my fireball inputs so inconsistent in Blazblue. Or how to consistently do a super in Guilty Gear and the only way i have to learn since none of my friends play is to bang my head against the wall in training mode until Either i break or the wall holding me back does
My two cents: I seriously could not have gotten into FGs when I did if I didn't have a decent, steady stream of income for the first time in my life. I guess between 2XKO, Granblue etc this might not be the case for much longer, but as it currently stands these games are HELLA expensive, there's a BUNCH of DLC you have to get if you're commited to learning the matchups, and god help you if you live in a 3rd world country and want to get a stick or leverless - even the cheapest haute I could find still ended up eating 1/3 of my salary. I literally do not earn enough to import a Razer Kitsune. If you want to get into the games that actually have a large population of players, the financial barrier is absolutely real.
7:10 The moment I heard that complaint I knew Sajam was going to consolidate himself as a Deadlock content creator with the cleanest movement tutorial.
I think hearing Sajam talk about Deadlock's movement made me understand why people feel like fighting games are harder to get in to. I haven't touched Deadlock much, but I have played countless games where you move a character around a 3D space, and I think that experience would help me intuit a lot of what was shown. Not all of it of course, but a lot of what was shown feels familiar to other fps/platformer/action/etc games that I've played. Fighting games are very unique in how they want you to control a character in a 2D space, like you aren't gonna play Mega Man and then carry any of that over to Street Fighter. Fighting game tech isn't actually harder to understand, its that people don't have a frame of reference when they're just starting out in the genre.
@lobbynotlob add on to that for a lot of people (myself included) getting that frame of reference isn't doing the fun part of the game. Playing matches with people. It's sitting in training mode trying and failing to do the stuff you want to do and not knowing exactly why the game won't read your Overdrive input or an SPD. or why you can't get the combo or whatever. The expectation is that you reach this bare minimum competence before you get to have fun. Whereas in other games the expectation is you learn by playing the game. noob tubing and Spray in pray in cod. Or ARAM in League or what have you
@@jmanwild87 You don't *have* to sit in training mode when you just pick up a fighting game, though. You literally can just go and start hitting buttons against players of roughly your skill level, as long as the playerbase is big enough and the matchmaking works, which applies to shooters too. The expectation that you have to "reach this bare minimum competence before you get to have fun" exists, but it's wrong.
@Ketsuekisan it's the reason I don't really play Fighting Games. Button mashing just feels boring (doesn't help I know what i should do) and when I can't do more than that it just feels frustrating particularly when I can't do basic half circles. And often end up accidentally doing stuff i don't want for reasons i don't know
@@jmanwild87frankly i gotta ask atp if you dont care for fighting games why are you all over this comment section lmfao you been yapping on damn near every single reply thread on here. but to answer your question, the equivalent of being unable to do half circles properly in something like an fps is just having bad recoil control, or in a moba not knowing your character's trading pattern or whatever. the whole point of the video is that execution barriers exist in literally every genre but for some reason people like you make it sound like fighting game execution is a massive unscalable wall in comparison that cant be solved the same way as other execution barriers in other genres. its just not. if you have a problem with half circles, just practice them while in queue, most modern games let you queue while in training mode right? and unless youre named street fighter, most games combo system is lenient enough that you can just do abc special with no timing or tricks and thats a decent enough starting combo. if youre playing a game that has a big enough playerbase, most likely the people youre fighting will be just as clueless as you. thats how you learn. beat up other people that are the same skill level as you until you figure out the game. not by sitting in training and grinding hard combos. nobody is forcing you to do the stuff you dont know how to do, just ignore that for now and stick to the simple stuff. nobody expects a new valorant player to know every line up, nobody expects a new league player to know every champ match up, why do you expect to be a new player that knows how to do hard combos and tech? just shut that shit out and focus on the easy shit first thats how you gain the frame of reference. its literally that simple. stop worrying about being unable to do half circles or whatever, just do your basic abc fireball combo and remember to block and you'll get there eventually man. this is not a fighting game problem, its a you problem for putting your own expectations too high.
@Ixs4i i want to learn the damn game i paid money for is why I'm always frustrated and i pay attention to high level stuff because that's fun to see and interesting. And it's not an insurmountable wall of course but it sure as hell feels that way when you know what you should be doing but it feels like your controller is fighting you. If it's any indication of the kind of problems new players run into i can't even do strive's whiff punish tutorial with any consistency and that's demoralizing because I've never had a game seemingly fight me on what buttons I've pressed before i started playing fighting games
I don't think many people really understand how big of a financial investment needed to get into fighting games, especially for those in developing countries like me. Not only SF6 cost more than my monthly electricity and water bills combined, but the hardware I need to play on is also expensive. Compare that to League that only requires any decently modern work laptop to run and about 5 mins to set up an account.
Nailed it lmao. So many people millennial-ish age and younger especially (said as one of them) look for any reason or excuse to like, explain to people why we can't do a thing that's hard, when at the end of the day it's really just a matter of doing it and learning it like anything else and we don't feel like it lmao
That's not the issue at all. I gladly put in hundreds of hours into DBFZ, getting my ass kicked repeatedly because it has universal controls that are intuitive and make sense once you get the hang of them. But turn on classic controls in SF6, and every character suddenly has such random and arbitrary input sequences that none of it sticks in my head. The time investment to even learn how to simply *execute* a character's moves is already so steep, let alone figuring out how to properly implement them in a real match to see if you even enjoy a given character's playstyle! I never hear or say such complaints for literally any other genre of game. It is exclusively fighting games that have such arbitrary control schemes.
@@koopakape You're older then millenial-ish age? It's always fancinating finding people like that who are into videogames online because I know ONE person like that in real life.
@@RacingSnails64 "The time investment to even learn how to simply execute a character's moves is already so steep" I put my 9 year old son in front of a fighting stick and had him throwing pretty consistent fireballs in less than 5 minutes. The shit is really not complicated.
To me fighting games and shooters generally have the same learning curve. We dont really think about it because the concept of aiming the camera has been more popular in games. But learning to do fighting game inputs is just as difficult as learning to aim at an enemy if you have never picked up a controller. And both of these skills carry over between games
Aiming is easier to stumble into in a non-required context too, which can get people used to it. A lot of 3D games have a controllable camera that is managed and turned automatically and you can move it too if you stop and want to look around. Looking around with no time pressure and no tiny thing you have to hit is pretty easy to learn. Not to mention minecraft being so ubiquitous as a first person thing with shooter-adjacent mechanics, bulldozing through accessibility by sheer popularity. There's little easy "keyboard-like" controls to stumble into because games that target non-gamers or uhhh "low-gamers" (kill me) usually want to make buttons easy to use and with single functions.
I made my gf play cod once and she got a kill literally with the camera facing the ground the entire time. Also id argue fighting games are closer to rhythm games like guitar hero. I've had friends that could do the inputs, understood the concept, but just didn't want to or feel they had the capacity to learn and remember long strings.
@@TheNewblade1 hell i'd keep it to those "Emulate the instrument" style ones too or DDR. (Playing something like OSU! at a very basic level is incredibly easy if you've played mouse and keyboard). It's the fact you're learning a control method that is likely entirely foreign to you combined with the fact that for most people. Learning fighting games isn't fooling around flubbing it with buddies and chatting it up but instead sitting in what amounts to a padded room for hours and hours sitting through tutorials and trying to do inputs and basic combos. once you learned one fighting game you probably have basic competency in all of the traditional ones but getting to the bare minimum is a bit of work if you're brand spanking new. It's like me who's played on gamepad since i was 4 years old playing gamecube trying to learn how to play mouse and keyboard in a fps at 24. Hell, the fact that Smash Bros's inputs are simple and the avenue for learning the game is partying it up with items with your buddies is what probably gets it such a massive casual fanbase despite its complexities at a high level.
I have been saying this for a while, but there has been a reason a lot of games have been taking cues from the tower, and it's because underneath all the jank and questionable decisions the core idea is very strong. Like other games have died for less than what Strive did, but it still has a strong player base despite all these competitors coming out with better QOL, and better features. Of course you can argue it has to do with the gameplay but I think there's more to it than just that. There's a lot of moaning and groaning about it, but I bet you there's probably a lot of data out there about people who tend to like what the tower does. I mean, only in Strive can I come onto the tower, and just play a long set with someone in the ranked equivalent, that's just not something you do in pretty much anything else. And afterward, as Sajam said, I can talk to the person I played about the set, or just move onto the next person. It's also very fun recognizing people you played before, and having stories or experiences with them. There's a lot about the tower system that gets buried underneath the lack of a ranked system, and largely people ignore because it doesn't really function well.
The tower system is the single worst thing Guilty gear strive has. I don't like it for a lot of reasons but wanting to ever come back and play it and I see that shyt I usually just ignore that I own for another couple of months. To me the system really is that shyt But the game itself is decent for what it is.
I dunno if I fully agree on the way you framed the Deadlock comparison. The fact of the matter is that the number of controls you need to memorize to be able to play your character, using all of their abilities at a basic level, is far lower in mobas compared to fighting games. Setting aside Deadlock with its shooter mechanics, all you need to know to play a traditional moba is how to click around to move, 4-6 ability keys, and 0-6 item hotkeys. That's it. Those are all the controls you need to learn, and (barring some of DotA's more unique designs), they will carry over between every character in the game. Compare that to a fighting game where you need to learn normals, command normals, specials, supers, system-mechanic-button-combinations, AND movement commands. Is there a wide variety of other stuff you need to learn/memorize to play a moba correctly? Of course. But fighting games have a uniquely high number of inputs that need to be memorized compared to almost every other genre. Forgetting which direction and button combo makes your guy do the overhead punch (no, not that overhead punch, the other one) is a different kind of frustration than not knowing optimal movement tech in Deadlock.
All the controls you need to play a fighting game are how to move a joystick in a circle and 4-8 buttons. That's it, those are all the controls you need to learn, and (barring some more unique characters), they will carry over between every character in most fighting games. Compare that to a MOBA where you need to learn abilities, the layout of a map, the NPCs on a map, an entire shop's worth of items, what those items upgrade into or combo with, last hitting, AND aiming and character and/or map movement. If command normals(direction + button) are enough to set them apart from direction and button separately, then clicking targets and doing skillshots in normal MOBAs or aiming, moving, and pressing abilities together or separately should also be set apart from each other. You say the buttons in MOBAs carry over between characters, but so do the buttons in fighting games. Yes, the effects of pressing the buttons are different, but so are the effects of pressing the "4-6 ability keys" in MOBAs. In fighting games you have 8 directions and 4-8 buttons. That's less than the infinite directions of a mouse + 4 movement buttons + 4-12 ability/item buttons. Not knowing the optimal movement tech in Deadlock can get you killed for being too slow just as easily as pressing the wrong overhead can get you killed for being too slow. When people say "fighting games are held to a higher standard," this is what they mean. You let Deadlock, and MOBAs in general, get away with things that you hold against fighting games. If you can predict an opponent's movement to land a skillshot, or headshot them while you're both moving in Deadlock, you can do a quarter-circle and press a button.
None of the shown deadlock examples really impact the fun of playing the game if you don't do them. Not being able to do the special moves you want when you want in a fighting game is very not fun.
Honestly, i think the things we can do to get people in to the general start with us as players getting our friends in. Added functionality like modem controls help a lot, but we need to start appealing to the personality seeds that make people pay attention. You know someone who likes action/superhero movies? Dope, here's a character who will ignite that same spark. You know someone who likes rhythm games? Guess what combos can feel like to you bud! You like outwitting or confusing the hell out of people? Let me introduce you to the left-right mix-up, friend. I've been teaching my gf how to play sf6, and she has never played and fg before. Now we're 1.3 years deep into playing sf6 multiple times a week, and she's a chun li lover. Things is when I'm teaching her, I'm not afraid to be as patient as it takes, break things down to the basics we take for granted, I'm not afraid to take "L" after "L" because I'm letting her get and feel success from the complicated techniques she just spent irl time learning with me in training mode. There are barriers we won't be able to over come as individual players, like the dlc fighters, lack of customization outside of Tekken and soul Calibur. But those can be ameliorated at least a little bit if we gift newer players a character the same way we buy a friend a drink. These aren't perfect, and certainly aren't catch all, but I'm just speaking from my personal experiences recently.
Glad Ryan hart is fully committed to the engagement farming shit or people might not realize what he's doing when he, oh idk, tweets a tokido quote where the source(I think? If not, idk what it's supposed to be) is an interview that he still hasn't released months later. Still waiting for context on that quote but he damn sure got the clicks. I still find it tedious when it's a legendary player, personally.
I want to point out with this deadlock example with all this complex decision making and interesting movement tech, that this is what makes video games fun. It feels rewarding to learn how to have more smooth movement and optimise your character, but because of this weird stigma fighting games have of being too hard, developers are trying to take that stuff away.
In Strive you can matchmake in training mode, you don't need to run around the lobby. And it lets you finish the set before changing floors. But it wasn't like that at launch.
I think the comparisons are very shallow: Deadlock's movement tech is not an integral part of the game and people can play just fine without using them. In FGs, motion inputs practically gatekeep half, likely even more, of the genre's gameplay and joy. It's not just a matter of optimization. Not to mention that the example movement tech will be easier to a lot of people than being consistent with even a 5f-link, which can get you killed if you drop and go unsafe ob. You can also research what to buy or straight-up copy others' builds in other genres. In FGs, copying even the most basic tech comes with execution homework. There's alao the matter of decision-making. In other competitive games, macro decisions come into play far after beginner levels. In FGs, the very first moment you have in a match might be knowledge check or perhaps youtry to do a combo but whoops you suck at neutral or you have some neuch tech but the oponent does not move in the way you need and now you need to determine wtf to do. You don't have minions or jungle or any other opponent-agnostic strat to rely on--you need to adapt. Mathematical FG play doesn't exist because in the end, we all go gambling. In short, as a beginner, you have no choice but to get bodied to learn FGs.
I know you kind of touched on it, but when it comes down to "look up someone else playing it", there is just so many flaws in that, usually anyways. What if the person sucks, what if you're watching the literal best player in the world pull off some tech, and trying to replicate it within minutes of picking up a game. Hell there's even stuff like misinformation, whether directly or indirectly, as more things are "figured out" that may date a video hard. At the end of the day, you're also just using someone else's ideas, or opinions, to form how you play or think. Reminds me of gacha games, where every banner that'll get posted, there will be tons of "should I pull x" "is x a must pull" etc. Also if you're trying to play the way someone else does, it can be hard to form your own style, or again if you can't replicate it, then it is kind of a feelsbad. People will be quick to doubt their ability to play it, whether cause they think it is too hard, or they think they suck too much, but like anything else, you gotta give it a little bit of time.
People's perspective on this is skewed, I see people saying that what sajam did is advanced tech not comparable to motion inputs which is a basic necessary mechanic and I agree. A better comparison for motion input is AIMING. If you've ever seen a person who've never played a 1st or 3rd person game try it for the first time its a similar frustration you will see when people get into a fighting game and can't do motion inputs. Its not a perfect analogy cause nothing will be perfect these are two entirely different genres but I works well to illustrate my point motion inputs aren't extraordinarily harder than any other way of controlling your character you're just not used to them.
Ok but shooters and MOBAs have a lot more in common with singleplayer, even casual, games in terms of controls. First-person camera control is ubiquitous, lots of point-and-click movement in isometric stuff especially... Literally the only game, not even genre, that is somewhat similar in controls to FGs is DMC (also notorious for having difficult controls lol), and even FGs with simple control schemes like Granblue or 2XKO are closer to DMC than the bazillion more popular singleplayer games. The sad truth of the matter is that FGs are actually harder to get into than the FGC thinks--perhaps not in isolation but in the wider context of gaming by virtue of playing like no other genre. (I'll also add that whole hand movement is a lot easier and intuitive to most people than complex individual-finger movement, especially for middle and ring.) Edit: I forgot that there are some sick side-scrollers with FG-like controls but considering they are hidden indie gems, I think the point still stands :D
All i know is that i got good at overwatch by playing with friends but to learn sf6 i started by watching a characters guide for the character i wanted to play next, played combo trials alone, did reaction and combo drills and find solutions to situations alone in training mode, while also having to regularly hop back into training mode after sets to look for solutions again. i have 4 characters in masters in sf6 so far and got to masters in overwatch, but in one game i was constantly just playing with friends and only went into the practice range for 5 minutse when a new hero dropped and in the other i was in my secluded training chamber for probably 100 hours. Im the only one of my friends who plays fighting games but i dont deny that the barrier to entry to actually start playing the real game is higher than other games. you always use deadlock as an example cuz its so complicated, but there are many games out there you can absolutely learn while playing with friend without watching guides.
I think the one major differences between the types of knowledge and mechanical checks mentioned for something like Deadlock vs a fighting game is whether they are what I'll call explicit or emergent. In fighting games, almost all of the major mechanics, inputs, moves, tech, etc. are explicitly programmed into the game, or are otherwise bugs or other unintended stuff (like infinites) that will likely be patched out. Most of the tech you showed off in Deadlock is just the consequence of it's particular physics system; those techniques emerged from the interactions of other systems, like friction and momentum. Many of these emergent techniques even end up being "canonized" later on as explicit techniques in later games. I think a better comparison of an explicit mechanical skill check in Deadlock would be the dash jump. Like a quarter-circle input, it has a fairly unique and somewhat precise timing coordinated across different buttons that makes it not that intuitive when you first start, but it's easy enough that you do get used to it pretty quickly. The best example of an emergent fighting game mechanic I can think of is Melee wave-dashing. As an accidental consequence of the air-dodge physics, they created one of the most iconic techniques in all of competitive gaming. Traditional FGC games also have some examples though, like combos originally being an accident or the way that motion inputs influence how you play and position (I think there's a Core-A video about that). I think in general, players tend to not view emergent mechanics as being as difficult, and they tend to be less impactful at low level. I assume this is partially because games are more likely to teach the basic inputs but not emergent techniques (often because those techniques weren't known about at launch). But also, the fact that they emerge from other systems means they are effectively hidden from new players until they learn the base systems first, then the new technique just feels like doing what they were already doing, but better. And those base systems tend to be VERY simple and accessible, like moving, shooting, and controlling the camera; all certainly skills that take a long time to master, but which can be learned in seconds (with the notable exception of the camera which is not easy for complete beginners).
I'd argue option selects are still mostly emergent system consequences rather than something explicitly built in, ditto some categories of fuzzy-whatever. And then like you mention some stuff was unintentional 30 years ago but was intentionally codified sometime between then and now. But you have a point broadly about how a lot of other genres have a higher incidence of just throwing a million things out there and seeing what people make of it. SF6 was likely a lot more planned and controlled at release than a thing with functionally unlimited item combos is or even could want to be
I honestly think it might at least partially also come down to movement or sense of control (whether real or imagined). Controlling your character at a very very basic and baseline level in Mobas and Shooters is a lot easier than in Fighting Games. Yes moving left and right in a fighting game isn't hard, but actually moving your character to the part of the screen you want them to at the speed you want them to or moving away from your opponent fast enough to actually create distance etc is finicky at a beginner level (especially in an actual match where your opponent comes right out of the gate swinging), where as WASD or mouse click to move is fairly straight forward and you usually have a grace period or safe zone at the beginning of a match before you encounter other players. You'll still get your ass handed to you in Mobas and shooters when new don't get me wrong, and many of the times you die it can still feel very frustrating and confusing as to what happened. But it doesn't feel like you're fighting the game in order to move or control your character (Street Fighter especially can feel very stiff because of how many moves you can't cancel out of which can momentarily lock you out of moving or taking other actions which feels very weird and arbitrary to newer players). You get overwhelmed by other factors in these other genres which for whatever reason don't bother people as much.
It's just because people got used to WASD movement. You take someone who only play phone game to try shooter, they struggled extremely hard with mouse and WASD movement, especially the diagonal movement or aiming while jumping. On the other hand, telling a kid who has been playing game like metroidvania to try fighting game, he grasp the control instantly.
@DuoMaxwellDS i played gamepad games all my life i still can't consistently do half circle or dp motions or really do combos outside of Games with simplified controls lik Power Rangers battle for the grid and every time i try to learn i get put off because simply making my character do what i want it to do is a frustrating test of do i do the input well enough that the game thinks i did the input i wanted. Same reason i don't play fps's on mouse and keyboard. simply controlling my character is an awkward and sometimes even painful affair that doesn't lend itself well to beginners. At least with a game similarly considered complex like a moba most of that initial difficulty isn't routed in the basic controls but instead based in knowledge about the game. In a shooter shooting in the direction of your crosshair isn't hard and while aim can be difficult there's resources for practice. in fighting games it's got the knowledge gap but also learning manual dexterity because the control scheme is wholly unique to fighting games. And really there's no way to sort of get good at motion inputs without just sitting in the padded room or having a friend teach you. the only thing that comes close when it comes to motion inputs being something like Skate
Also it's really difficult to learn these games when you don't have friends to either teach you or who are similarly unskilled that you can play with. For lots of people learning a fighting game isn't playing the tutorial then immediately getting into the game like in something like CoD but playing the tutorial and then practicing for hours and hours in training mode so they're somewhat consistent at things before they get to the actual fun part of playing against other people because just flailing loses its luster very quickly
I think the issue with fighting game execution isn't that it's harder or easier than other games, it's that's it's just so unintuitive. Specials are all a bunch of nonsense direction inputs combined with arbitrary button presses, until you get used to them it feels super awkward to execute. Lots of shooter have super cool movement tech that's just as technically challenging to execute as fighting game combos, but understanding the basics of manipulating momentum feels a lot more intuitive than input Konami code to do cool move.
People seem to misunderstand difficulty of grasping in FG vs other genres. The amount of layers behind a moba or team FPS can be a laundry list but those first couple ones are so much easier than a fighting games. Layer 1 and 2 of a shooter and moba is so simple it takes no work. Move mouse to target and click until HP0, press WASD to move. Deeper layers are simple shit like if you're looking around a corner just stand further back, spam crouch, etc. Fighting games layer 1 is more than walk and press the button, you need to space a bit(may not by much but spacing is harder in fgs), know a bnb which can take minutes or ages depending on game and if you click with fireball vs charge, tell when a move is probably unsafe even if eyeballing it is difficult. You can't just mash a button and get a quick dopamine fix for low effort. The TTK in a shooter on average isn't higher that 1.5 seconds! Like you said tekken and soulcal have that figured out.
I think you misunderstand the difficulty. Layer 1 of a fighting game is just "walk to target and press buttons until they die. Use joystick/WASD to move." You do not need a BNB when you first pick up a fighting game for the first, you do not need to know when your moves are unsafe. Not when you're that early and your opponent most likely also doesn't know. Those things are the equivalent to your "stand further back and spam crouch when looking around a corner." That's literally all spacing in fighting games is. When people say "fighting games are held to a higher standard," this is what they mean. You're letting shooters get away with something you hold against fighting games.
Did u perform any actual user studies or did u just base it off ur own experience and that of those who are passionate in the genre? Fighting games are objectively harder than most games
@@derpaboopderp1286 They are not "objectively harder" They are simply different. Some fighting games of the past are very very strict but that is only if you're trying to do the best things your character can do. See the 1frame links in SF4. They aren't necessary for every beginner to learn and aren't needed with 2 beginners anyway. Games of a long running genre, believe it or not, are made intuitively so that they aren't far removed from the past iterations. Every fighting game has the same core principles it never changed and it in fact got much more accessible for people who actually have conditions preventing them from doing motion inputs comfortably.
If u only use someone elses build in deadlock chances are you dont even know why ur buying them and might not even know what they do. Learning how to build on the fly was a huge game changer at least in terms of enjoying the game
Price is a weird one. I think that's one of the last issues until more recent where the FTP has skyrocketed very casual genres. SF4 did not have this issue, Tekken didn't, and neither soulcal until recently. One of the biggest issues for so long was actually the online experience. You couldn't play with randoms from across the country or play with your homie who moved away cause delay made the game frustrating. Devs took so long to address that even when rollback was launched.
@muckdriver i feel like part of it is almost a self perpetuating cycle. Fighting Games have a reputation for being hard to get into and that you need to spend hours or days on a character to see any kind of success. People don't play against other people to learn but instead sit in training room getting increasingly frustrated when they attempt something and it's not working and just hitting a dummy for hours and hours isn't fun as a noob. Eventually bounce off and go back to playing games where your skills learned in other games transfer and make onboarding easier. Gaming with friends is fun but now you gotta get someone else to play with who is either also a noob or willing to put up with noobs and most people don't want to spend on a fighting game because spending 60 bucks on a game you might bounce off of after two hours feels terrible. The reputation that fighting games are hard means that noobs aren't really joining which means most of the content you see is high level which can perpetuate the reputation because "you'll never be able to do that." The hardest fighting game to get into is the first one because you're starting at the ground floor and think you need to get to floor 5 before you start having fun
ok but i feel like this defense is always a little bad faith - yes deadlock is objectively way harder to learn, but all of the tricks he showed were optional, you can control your character and start playing the game without them. With fighting games, if you can't do your special moves, it is completely disingenuous to say that you are playing the game. It is not fun or satisfying in any way to play most fgs with just normals, and wanting to do a move but physically not being able to do it is way more frustrating than having to do things inefficiently and losing, because at least in the latter you have agency over what your guy does on screen. I definitely agree that fighting games are judged as impossible to play unfairly but motion inputs is a VERY LEGIT barrier to entry that is worth solving with stuff like modern controls
He always compares tech to base character control and it's definitely not the same thing. Not just that but everything he showed was more knowledge checks than mechanic checks. They are like 1-2 button things as opposed to motion inputs. Then fighting games still have knowledge checks on top of the mechanic checks like motion inputs.
"yes deadlock is objectively way harder to learn" And that's really all anyone is trying to say. This is why fighting games are "held to a higher standard." You admit that Deadlock is harder, but then immediately try to "um ackshually" it away. As an aside, if being able to do special moves without motion inputs is all it takes, then why isn't Granblue Versus far and away the most popular fighting game of all time?
@Ketsuekisan Granblue can just be unpopular. Also you ignored the actual point. Type of difficulty matters. Fighting games are hard mechanically at an entry level. Deadlock is not hard mechanically at an entry level. You can do things with very simple button presses as opposed to doing a dp. Even other games that have mechanical difficulty usually put it somewhere other than controlling your character. Think of souls games, nioh, GoW or Musou games. They are hard but doing your own moves isn't hard.
you've been able to queue up in strive while in training since day 1 idk why i see so many people complain about running around in the tower ive never done that in 3 years lol
Rivals 2 was the first time I ever put time into learning a plat fighter in a competitive aspect and while it was tough I was able to pick it up. Just like SF4 was the first time I competitively learned traditional fighters, and Strive was my first anime fighter I took seriously. Sure each of these games have a learning curve but its honestly not that crazy to put effort into. If you can learn deadlock you can learn any of these games.
You do damage and such in Deadlock without having to get into advanced movement tech. Fighting game combos are all or nothing. You get the combo perfect, or you get a worse result than if you hadn't done it at all. In Deadlock, if your movement sucks, you lose to better players (as you should), but there's no "this guy can't do the 4-frame link so his character falls apart completely". You might die because you did something suboptimal in both games, which is fine, but having 10% less distance or 10% less damage in something like Deadlock is not going to destroy you consistently, especially versus other suboptimal play. The closest thing I can think of in a moba that hits that point is knowledge checks that turn into snowball scenarios - guy doesn't know to buy the item that counters the other guy's ult or something. This is still a matter of just getting informed or looking it up. This is usually the case with Tekken as well - I don't think it took me longer than 30 minutes to lab a decent combo I could hit every time in that game, thanks to its input buffer and on average easier inputs. With a traditional fighting game however, it's not just the knowledge check. You're also hitting up the lab for possibly hours to build muscle memory to hit super specific timings. The only thing I can think of remotely that demanding in Deadlock is corner boosting, and that doesn't stop your hero from doing anything fun if you can't do it. Not to mention the actual wrist pain involved with some traditional fighting games - again, not an issue I run into outside of them.
yeah I keep thinking of how the common knowledge for sf4 sakura was "if you can't do 1 frame links then don't even play her" because simple bnbs wouldn't function. I'd argue what fighting games have a skill *floor* problem. I think this is why so many people take to things like soul calibur so well, since you're playing a physically intuitive game with fun moves and real decisions even before you get into combos. a casual is going to be rightly unsatisfied if all they can manage in street fighter is a stiff basic punch and they can't access any of the character's signature techniques which are all over the promo material.
"You do damage and such in Deadlock without having to get into advanced movement tech. Fighting game combos are all or nothing. You get the combo perfect, or you get a worse result than if you hadn't done it at all." Wrong. When you're just starting out, you don't need all that, not against opponents of a similar skill level. "In Deadlock, if your movement sucks, you lose to better players (as you should), but there's no "this guy can't do the 4-frame link so his character falls apart completely"." No, instead there's "this guy aims and reacts faster than me, so I get shot before I can do anything, and now my currency situation is so bad and my build so far behind that fighting other players is actively detrimental to my team because I'm feeding and causing us to spiral further and further into being mathematically unable to win."
@@Ketsuekisanbut in deadlock you have the option to go just hang back and farm up or gank people in deadlock if your being out meched you have option in a fighting game if your oponent can do specials and you cant its gg
I like fighting games because they aren't filled with whatever is going on with Deadlock cause that looks legitimately awful, confusing and very frustrating to learn and play right lol
I nearly bounced off of strive because the region i play in has literally zero players in the towers. Going into your first fighting game online and getting double perfected by celestial players in open park is not a good way to start. Thankfully the netcode is good enough I could play tower in a different region with bad connections and still have fun when actually fighting people closer to my skill level, win or lose.
"team games are more accessible because you can blame your losses on other people" is an insane take to me. Whenever I play team games I despise every single one of my teammates, the fact that I lose games through no fault of my own is MADDENING to me. It's the most frustrating thing in the world to play good but still lose. How on earth do people have that experience and go "eh, not my fault! :)" and feel encouraged to keep playing? How do you not want to destroy the entire concept of teamwork itself???
you are the perfect example of it. You say the game is super frustrating but since you can blame your team for your losses so you keep playing. You can't do this in fighting games
I totally agree with you and that's why I like fighting games and RTSs but most people don't which is why those genres are comparatively less popular to mobas and shooters.
It's also why for example so many shooter players, especially call of duty, just care about their individual K/D ratio and not actually playing objectives to win matches.
Am I in the minority for not really being into deadlock? This is like, onboarding behavior, where you expect players to stick around for a long time, a la league, but holy crap dude informational complexity is REAL af in that game!
I think an issue with fighting game mechanical execution is that it often feels like you NEED all of it at once. You can reach a tower a little bit slower, or free-form remove a couple pieces of tech you aren't comfortable with, but often in a fighting game you feel like you NEED to do several different things fast, and there's no halfway state, either you do everything right or you flub the combo and get next to zero reward. Because you can lose a round in only a couple mistakes, every tech flub feels magnified instead of hundreds of small pieces of movement across a longer game.
@@dominicjannazo7144 yeah. You can walk up to tower normally as ho shown in the video but you need to do a motion input to get a projectile with almost every character.
Exactly. Also the execution barrier feels way more _annoying_ compared to stuff like movement tech or itemization knowledge because it's a barrier to "use your character". People get very attached to who they are playing and if they feel like their hands are failing to use a character's basic moves, the "this game isn't for me" feeling goes super hard. Also also a reminder about the execution requirement argument: Moba players often consider characters that chain skills into each other "not for beginners". Like even for basic ass 4 hit combos that are just pressing buttons and clicking the mouse in between. People who don't play demanding videogames and don't play instruments and don't type fast on actual keyboards 6 hours a day are plentiful and they are VERY BAD at pressing buttons. You put collectible card game timmy in front of an arcade stick and he's gonna get mad at the inputs at least once.
That's more of matchmaking problem than execution problem. I've seen low level players that finished their match without using a single DP. It also has way more back and forth than high level match where you can usually see a one side beating because people made one single mistake. Giving players simpler execution didn't save GBVSR. The people advocated for it didn't stick around at all.
Yeah, like. It's all well and good to say 'other games are hard too! look at this du duh duh duh duh see isnt that complicated' and its like yeah sure. So why do people keep bouncing off fighting games. Are they just dumb morons? Ontologically evil? Sun got in their eyes? They don't know video games are hard? Did RNGesus roll at the beginning of time and say 'people in this universe are more likely to bounce off fighting games'? No. Clearly something is different. I think your explanation is a pretty good one. I mess up the movement tech in deadlock, I still get there. I mess up anti-air in SF6, I eat absolute shit in the game. It's an ego thing, but video games aren't real so it's kinda important in context.
@@nonuvurbeeznus795 Fighting games were far and away the most popular genre for a whole decade, and they remain the most popular game genre played primarily in-person. Fighting game culture has always been about taking your wins and losses with equal grace, and having to socialize with other people in order to improve as a player. The difference between then and now is that online gaming lets people blame teammates, disconnect, ragequit, and talk endless amounts of trash totally anonymously. Most other competitive gaming genres have had all those things baked into them since their inception, but FGC culture predates all that. Skill issues are nothing but a scapegoat for people who never had to learn to work on themselves.
To the cost thing, i know its hard to imagine, but especially with the advent of smart phones, black people generally dont have 500$ gameing pcs. So to them its not 60 vs f2p game its, 60 vs 500$ walmart pc thats overpriced and trash.
While we're repeating the discourse, I will repeat my opinion that we need to stop worrying about why not everyone plays fighting games and let people that aren't interested do something else without us feeling insecure about it.
I would say the difference between motion inputs and other knowledge/input checks is sure, you don't know how to do crazy movement tech in a shooter game, but motion inputs are closer to just... normal abilities than extra tech. Fighting games also have extra tech that require hard inputs, but normal regular moves/abilities are harder to use, and it's an all or nothing thing that feels frustrating to mess up even if it's not more difficult than other game's inputs. I agree the difficulty standard is still not applied fairly, but it's just something to consider.
Doesn't the Deadlock example prove the opposite though? You showed some very very high level Deadlock optimizations, dashing sidewise rather than forward, crouching off the rail rather than jumping etc. These are not moves that a new Deadlock player needs to know and in fact you mention a lot of players in chat didn't know these techniques exist. The comparison that the non-FGC public at large love to complain about again and again is motion controls, which is table stakes in a fighting game without simple inputs.
idk if Sajam hasn't played Strive in a while or Celestial specifically is different, but as a 8-10 floor gamer, I can just press Quick Match and never interact with lobbies at all
The thing that I like about the Floor system vs Ranked is the ability to punch way above my weight, and the breadth of skill levels I get to experience
Quick match just places your avatar in a lobby. That means you are still constrained by the amount of people in whatever tower lobby you are placed in. Part of the issue with strive lobbies isn’t just how ass they are to use, but also that your matchmaking pool is limited to the amount of people in the lobby, you can’t get matched with anyone else unlike other games.
I can largely agree with Sajam's points here, though I think his comparison of special moves being an execution check vs. Deadlock movement isn't really a great comparison at all. Sure, the overall point that you don't NEED to know all the optimal stuff to play the game is valid and I agree with that, but there is a big difference between being super optimal with movement and...doing a singular move. I don't consider doing a Shoryuken input advanced or me playing optimally. It's a basic move in my toolkit and having to do these extra steps to execute it is weird. A better example would have been comparing a super easy bread and butter combo like a simple target combo in SF6 or something like Close Slash -> Far Slash - Heavy Slash in Strive to the more optimal combos that use all your resources. You don't NEED to know your wall break combos to play Strive, but you should probably know how to actually do half of your character's movelist. For the record, I don't hate motion inputs and think they have a place, but also there's plenty of games that clearly don't need them and I don't see why people can't admit that they're some of the least intuitive, alien concepts in fighting games that are in literally no other genre. If I want to shoot a gun in an FPS I hit the trigger. If I want to accelerate in a racing game I hit the gas. If I want to use my fireball I must perform a ritual with my d-pad or stick before it comes out. It's an extra step; not a super challenging step relatively speaking, but when you're starting out you're more likely to trip on that step.
I think the perfect system is sf6 so the choice between lobby and ranked from menu, but with an added way to text and an optional voice option in ranked matches
I think the idea thag most people have with fighting games being more difficult comes from them being way more unconventional than a lot of other game genres. More difficult to learn a game when youre brand new to everything about it.
Bro there's a special layer of hell reserved for the dude who thought that a third person shooter with momentum-based movement should be a MOBA It's like if someone made a plate of chicken stroganoff (my favorite dish) and then took a giant dump on top of it
It's not the first time, and there has been a game that did it better imo. Monday Night Combat. But I have a feeling the moment is a lot better in Deadlock, having not played Monday Night Combat in around 10 years
Even going to simplified games from “complex” genres specifically pokemon unite because it’s the only thing I’m good at Setting up a good build in unite to actually begin playing the game is so much harder than figuring out even a basic BNB, and unite is “simple” you gotta figure out which type your pokemon is, what items are good for it, if it’s a jungler or bot or top lane because the actual category doesn’t mean anything (jungler Aegislash on top) and you have to build for that specific lane in the most esoteric ways imaginable, why does attack weight work when I’m playing bot lane Ceruledge, but it doesn’t do anything when I’m in top, I genuinely still don’t know if that’s skill issue or not, game is fucked Imagine this in a fighting game, pick your character, figure out on your own if they’re a zoner or rushdown or grappler or whatever with zero guidance and the actual differences are pretty slim but snowball into huge gaps in playstyle, then learn your combos based on which version you want to play, keeping alternates in mind in case your teammate decides to not call their lane and just do whatever, and there’s alternate objectives like hitting 2k2d at 30 seconds in and if you don’t you lose in 5 minutes for reasons beyond your comprehension until you’re at least 20 hours in, and this is just the basic issues with trying to get into the SIMPLEST, WORST MOBA It is genuinely INSANE how much higher the standard for fighting games is, TLDR: ask a gamer to play jungler crit aegidlash focusing on objectives and they’ll spend 509 hours min maxing it, ask them to hit a quarter circle punch a single time and they’ll spend 5 seconds, give up, call you an elitist, and then break your controller
Never played Deadlock, but I would assume that those momentum tricks might work BECAUSE those are similar momentum mechanics to Doom/ultrakill/arena shooters. (Note the fact arena shooters is a dead genre does not help the argument) I don’t like getting rid of motion inputs because I already speak the SF style language the same way. If my reversal isn’t a shoryuken motion or flash kick, I absolutely hate it, because I fumble over my words unless I spend hours learning the new language.
I would say it is more likely that people are likely to have experience with First person, third person and top down point and click games in single or co-op games. Meanwhile you are lucky to find many games that share fighting game fundamentals. Hell literally the games that got closet were things like Ninja Gaiden, Urban Reign or God Hand and they literally don't make games like that anymore. So for many it is like the first time they played a video game with no idea wtf they are doing except this time they have a real thinking breathing human caving in their skull. Edit: basically it isn't that fighting games are actually harder naturally, rather people collective are worse at them due to less experience
@boredomkiller99 they also feel a lot harder because of that. Sure my aim my suck in an fps but I can still shoot in the general direction of my target reticle. In fighting games there's a not insignificant chance if you're brand new that you can't do like half your character's moveset with any consistency such that you actually feel in control of them. In strive's whiff punish tutorial I've accidentally gotten fafnir with some consistency and still can't actually clear it and that's just back walking into a command normal. Don't think I've ever felt like a Game is literally fighting me on what my character gets to do.
The Deadlock comment is some weird FGC bubble stuff. First and third person shooters are easy to jump into and do stuff, fighting games aren’t. Even if you have a bunch of items, (which no doubt probably just do some simple thing) on a basic gameplay level the gameplay those items are in-service of is simpler than even a simpler fighting game that doesn’t have a bunch of different systems like modern fighting games do. One of the reasons I think Marvel vs Capcom 2 was so popular is because you could do Super moves by just pressing two buttons. Forget getting rid of double motions to do Super moves, you can do your Hyper Combo move by just pressing the two assist buttons. It was kind of perfect for that time, you had a ton of people that grew up playing the first few versions of Street Fighter 2 and the first three Mortal Kombat games in arcades, and they might be able to do some Special moves, but maybe they couldn’t do double motion inputs. But they could do the Hyper moves in Capcom’s Marvel stuff, and even if they had a hard time doing normal Special move inputs they could definitely press two button consistently. You don’t access to all of a character’s Hyper moves that way, but you’re still able to throw about a big flashy move. There’s something interesting about the fact the biggest fighting games ever were Street Fighter 2 before Super Combo moves, and Virtua Fighter 1 which only had three buttons. Also Smash Bros. has consistently been the best selling fighting game on consoles since it debuted on the N64...which is kind of crazy when you remember that the GameCube was the worst selling console of its generation but still managed to have a Smash Bros. game that outsold fighting games on the PS2, and PS2 is the best selling console.
Are people really giving Deadlock a pass as an easy game to learn? I have over 1k hours in Overwatch and Dota 2, and countless more in Tekken and other fighting games... I put maybe 10 hours into Deadlock and I'm like, this game is WAY too complicated. lol
"fighting games are held to a higher standard" BY WHOM? Are they in the room with us right now? Are these 99% of players present? Also, FGC is banned from comparisons until people learn the difference between "most successful team games in the world" and "niche 1v1 game"
People who glaze fighting games to be sophisticated or hard just want to feel special about playing a niche genre and want to come off as smart or whatever when in reality who cares it's a video game
Fighting games have always been harder, possibly the hardest of all pvp games. It's most of the reason why I don't like them. I don't want to do a thousand inputs in a minute and have to be right about 900 of them to win. I want it to be slower paced than that. That's all mobas are. You have more information to process and at an infinitely slower pace, with more avenues of counterplay(most of the time). It's still about getting the right input off the information you see. Fighting games are just that on crack. And that's fine, it's, fine for games that technical to exist, but not all games have to go down that avenue to be better, I'd argue most games are made worse by adding more and quicker reflex based combat.
Honestly this isn't even just true for video games. Half the reason yugioh is hard to learn is because it requires so much knowledge going in. Its kinda a new player who's never heard of a hadouken before hopping into a fighting game, except if you can't do one you get touch of deathed. Which I'm sure is true in some game, but i can't think of one off the top of my head.
Man, as someone that plays deadlock i can tell you it's ez pz compared to sf6. I don't need to know frame data in deadlock, I don't need to be confused why I died ( deadlock tells you, sf6. No idea why blocking a combo just did not work) ect
I'm waiting for the general public to complain the Mario needs to hit 2 buttons to Ground Pound if Quarter Circles are still the arguing point. Heck, I started with Guile and other Charge Characters because I felt they were easier and more enjoyable and learned traditional motions later. There's no reason they can't try a Charge Character aside from "I'm complaining about the game/genre I don't even play.".
See, as someone who has hundreds of hours in DBFZ but can't use classic controls in SF6, I would argue that Mario's ground pound is simple, intuitive, and easy to remember. It makes sense to hit the crouch button in midair to drop back down to the ground. Many games do this. It's a pretty universal concept. But open up a move list in a traditional fighter? It is completely random and arbitrary what sequence of inputs does what move. That's the problem. Sometimes it's just a quarter circle, but sometimes it can be something like "back back forward down back forward punch." Why not just "forward punch" or "back punch?" The learning curve for simply *executing* a fighting game character's moves is already so steep, and we haven't even gotten to committing all those moves to memory and trying the character out in a real match, only to realize you don't even enjoy their playstyle!
I mean if you're just not really interested in a game(that doesn't have Modern Controls) then you won't have the want to try different characters and see what works for you. If you thought Mario was cool but something like the Mini Mushroom was confusing or frustrating to use you'd choose another Power Up. I was like a preteen when I was playing SF2 against the CPU with no one to help me besides Googling "SF2 character moves" and seeing that Guile, Vega, Balrog, M. Bison, etc. have moves that don't use the Quarter Circles and DP motions that I had trouble with at the time with Ryu the "starter character". I gave Guile a try and it immediately clicked. If you wanna try Classic Controls then I suggest that you try a Charge Character that you like. Modern Controls and Classic Controls are 2 different games, I personally know from having to use Modern Controls for a while because my left stick was drifting and I don't use the Dpad, but playing Modern Controls is perfectly valid.
Strives tower system is great and why I play it more then other fighting games in my collection. It makes finding matches easy and, I don't have to endlessly fight the flavor of the patch characters if I don't want to.
Strive's tower is how I quit the game despite buying all season passes. The 10th floor isn't at the skill level I want, but Celestial had all those absurd people gatekeeping the entrance. The progression in that system is among the worst I've seen.
Maaaaan you can make any genre of game difficult because they all have little intricacies and nuances. You can play classic Mega Man games as easy as jump and shoot. But you can also make it look flashy with ceiling zips and screen rolling. Or knowing really niche` stuff like in Mega Man 6, you can't directly jump out of a slide, you have to come to a full stop and release the jump button. You can make any game hard.
i mean the floor of basic stuff isn't that hard. simply moving and shooting megaman isn't that hard if you played games before. learning a fighting game for the first time is like learning to play on mouse and keyboard when you've been playing on controller your whole life on top of all the mental complexity and mind games because there's not much transfer between fighting games and other genres of games. not many games have motion inputs and add on that it can feel like you need to sit in a padded room for hours to learn to do inputs for your character and that it's very easy to see when you're doing something wrong but very difficult to fix it and well Fighting games seem very difficult to approach compared to even Mobas as well a lot of the difficulty there is knowledge.if you played mouse and keyboard at all before you probably have some skill transfer to easily make it so you can move buy items and Use Abilities Is it telling that the most fun i've had at least was in stuff like Power Rangers battle for the Grid and more normals centric games like Soul Caliber?
Yay....while I agree with the premise I think your example this time was off. Would have been better explaining how just aiming in first person shooters if someone has zero experience with it can actually be a struggle or even just being in first person in general. Watching someone who has never played a FPS is like watching a rookie in SF6 or low rank floors in Strive hilarious bad to the point you have to question if it is intentional
As much as people can (rightfully) hate on league of legend, the pace of Riot adding change to a live service game to make it better is quite unmatched and if they handle 2XKO in the same way, other fighting game going to have to follow the new standard or just stay behind
Shit as much as you want on riot having a "bad game" with balance issues inherently consequential to their content pipeline. Their team is absolutely fucking cracked at making it like even bearable. They are the absolute pioneers of making everchanging games of that scale and speed and they've got the secret sauce that keeps them together.
Its extremely dishonest to compare motion inputs to game complexity. Each of the actions you discribed is accessible by one button. Motion inputs make people feel shot because they need to spend hours to get their fighting game brain before they even can *input* something. Thats just not the case for any of those actions
Ranking the difficulty of games by the amount of knowledge you need to play them is kinda stupid. If any genre comes close gameplay-wise to fighting games it's shooters. Reading opponents, reacting to adjustments, the 1v1 aspect, accessibility to learning mayerials, mental stack, muscle memory, legacy skill and knowledge and partially the execution in older FGs is what we actually need to talk about.
Personally I love the Strive tower cause its extremely unclear what specific rank I'm at, and that's just how I like it. Watching the number go up and down as I play is demotivating, I'd much rather not know. I mod other games to get the same effect. You can go up and down on floors of course but that can vary every which way several times in a single night, so I know I can make it back up 2 floors if I just win 10 times, which is pretty realistic. I only play ranked to get even matches anyways, not to grind it.
I agree up until Celestial. Being consistently better than F10 players then gambling for two sets in a row on whether you get someone you can beat is a horrible experience.
I don't understand the difference between one number going up and down versus the other. It's literally the same thing, I don't know why you can't just not care about being Gold 2 vs Gold 3, just like being on whatever floor.
@@Boyzby Three reasons: 1) I can get back to the floor I was at in half an hour of play pretty reliably 2) I can't fall too far from my highest-reached floor 3) I don't actually mean Gold 2 vs Gold 3, I mean your granular meter like League Points and Master Rank. I wish the game let you natively turn that off tbh. My actual rank doesn't matter to me, I just hate watching the thing go down when I lost. If I get my ass beat then fair enough, they got me, but the bar going empty and the numbers showing specifics and the little sound you can't rematch fast enough to avoid make it real hard to ignore that I did lose something. I'd just as easily play casual instead but that has a wider player pool. Plus it feels way worse losing 80 of something every lost set than losing 1 of something every few lost sets.
The thing that bugs me about motion inputs is that there's no incremental success, either I do the input correctly and get the move I want, or else my character does something random that's probably not at all applicable to the situation. In the Deadlock example, all that movement tech is cool, but if you don't know it you're still moving towards your target. Maybe you'll be too late to be tactically useful sometimes, but the better you get at all the movement stuff, the better off you are. It's not all or nothing, and if you mess it up you're just a little slower. You don't, say, set off your ult by accident for failing the tech.
Those goals are completely different, the objective "do a motion input" vs "move from point a to point b" are on completely different levels. One has only one way to do it while the other has a lot, if it was "move from point a to point b in the fastest way possible to save your team" then it's now a "win or fail" condition like the first. If you just want to beat your opponent in a fighting game, messing up a combo still does damage, it's not gonna win you evo, but you've made progress on beating your opponent regardless.
@medevilwori4 I feel this, when I pick up a new fighting game I start by literally just hitting my opponent. I don't worry about combos, except maybe the most basic ones, I never worry about specials. I literally just use normals until I'm comfortable.
@@LazurBeemz Against an opponent of a similar skill level, who's just as bad/good at combos as you? Or are you assuming the opponent is always Justin Wong, Mena, or Tokido level?
I get so annoyed by the Deadlock comparison and motion inputs. Let me know if you think deadlock is a good shooter when you need to draw a circle on screen before firing each shot. Fighting game players should not be dictating on how their own genre they've been playing for decades are to those on the outside. It's pretentious as hell.
Hey sajam my son is autistic and we really want to play online on a team on the same console plz tell advocate for this so I can bond with my son and get him some wins
I think this would only be a fair comparison if in deadlock these multi button combos were way way stricter, there was 10-100x as many of them, and you couldn't use any of your abilities without them.
Fighting games are more difficult than other genres because of the time sink they require to learn, even more casual fighting games like platformer or arena fighters take more time to learn than other genre’s of games
![[#2024MAMA] G-DRAGON - 무제(Untitled, 2014)+POWER+HOME SWEET HOME+뱅뱅뱅+FANTASTIC BABY | Mnet 241123 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ox29z5Nf1Uk/mqdefault.jpg)
Yearly video of "Fighting games are not harder than other genres"
It’s like every other month these days
More like biweekly
And we love it every time don't we folks.
And I'll be here every time.
Talk about a bad take
"im fighting like a faceless void" i wasnt paying attention and i thought sajam was talking about dota
Waiting for dota fighting game, level 3 super chronosphere
@@nyga-s4u "Za Warudo! Muda Muda Muda Muda!"
Sero’s tweet was so funny, because the moment it left her usual sphere and reached the greater FGC, a solid 70% of our community made it their sole mission to prove she was right, by arguing she was wrong. Bonus points to the people who carried that energy to her follow-up tweet pointing out how people agree when Maximilian says it, but not her. No solid reason to behave that way, just a moron for the sport, the passion, the love of the game
Vast amounts of people agree with max regardless of how hot his take is.
Me? For my money? I'd say she's 100% correct with the financial barrier, I mostly disagree with the statement that there's a lack of new player friendly resources, and I'd say the elitism is there, but is more situational. Although, the elitism might be more obvious and blatant to her, since being a streamer means those types of people are going to get magnetized to her.
The resources part definitely depends on the game, honestly resources for the popular games like Tekken and Street Fighter especially just fucking suck. But for any anime game there's a wiki page with 100 combos and general gameplan for every character. Like look at MBAACC's wiki man, 93 chars and almost all of them have novel-length guides.
@@pokecole37that's... completely irrelevant to the new player experience? beginners will tend to gravitate towards TH-cam for beginner resources and that's there in abundance for modern games. wikis and resources like dustloop and supercombo are very much more for intermediate+ players that are at the stage to start worrying about frame data and higher level strategy. too much depth all at once is very much detrimental to the new player experience and the way that the fgc constantly pushes those types of resources towards people just starting out is one of the reasons why new players think it's so hard to get started.
@@pokecole37 And the amount of assumed knowledge/skill level in those popular franchises can be kinda insane. I remember trying to look up a BNB for a character in Strive and most videos showed, like, combos with 7, 8 steps or even more. My brother in christ I couldn't even do a quarter circle half the time, there's no way this is my "Bread and Butter". Same thing with SF6 now that I'm learning it, though I am getting better at doing the funny motions over time.
But to give the anime game folks praise where it's due, Dustloop is a GODSEND of a site that not only has several combos at different difficulty levels, it also has tons and tons of guidance explaining what each move's function is, not to mention all the other info in there. Sometimes it's genuinely better than the ingame tutorials for me.
I'll say this about motion inputs.
I have TPS, meaning my tendons are naturally shorter than they should be, not to the point where I can't walk but it has caused me problems before and I had to spend years of my life doing yoga and physiotherapy and whatnot. This also ruins me when I play games, I can't go too hard and I ended up quitting League because of the strain it caused on my hands.
No other game genre has caused me more hand pain than fighting games. After I reached Master with AKI, I just had to take a month-long break from how much my hands would hurt. Stick causes me the most pain, pad is bearable and also what Iam used to and I haven't tried a hitbox yet. But when it comes to physical pain from playing games, performing motion inputs is never any less painful.
I'm never gonna quit over that (unless I'm forced to), but it definitely makes it difficult to enjoy these games long-term. I just got Granblue, and it feels amazing to not feel like my finger joints are about to lock after an hour-long session.
It’s def a big accessibility thing but that’s why alternate controllers are awesome
Getting rid of motions entirely also isn’t really an option, since a lot of moves just can’t happen without them, or become utterly broken
Not saying you’re saying they should be abolished, just hoping nobody sees your post and decides motions are ableist
I really believe you should give hitbox a shot. Most people say it causes less strain, and as a stick and hitbox user, I agree.
(commenting mid-video): One thing you gotta understand about MOBAs and accessibility is that team based games are always gonna be more accessible as a social experience because your friend who's into it is playing it with you and often taking decisions for their beginner buddies mid-match. It actually turns the complexity into a positive on the onboarding experience, as long as the game surpasses a minimum level of general interest and playerbase size.
edit: HOLY SHIT it's his EXACT NEXT SENTENCE im gonna kill myself
I mean what are Crews for in the fgc,
it's literally harder and more complicated even if you have 4 skilled friends to play with, you have even more pressure then to not feel like you're baggage to them, in fighters it's 1v1 and you are the ONLY person you're responsible for, i will never ever understand this argument, it's objectively many times harder and more stressful to git gud at a moba thana fighting game 100% of the time in any way shape or form with any example vs. any other example
@@koopakape That sounds like it depends on you as a person and the people you play with on personal levels. I'm far and away the weakest among my friend group when we play League of Legends together, but they never treat me like a burden when I make mistakes and I don't let said mistakes or my inexperience put unhelpful pressure on.
@@koopakape definitely not, when teaching new players you essentially play 2 games at once. I think it’s fun, especially if we’re both bot lane, to build two characters to support the others in the team. New players don’t need to be killing people out the gate they just need to not have a bad time. It’s mostly up to whoever is teaching you that will dictate your experience though. The person could be a dickhead who’s mad that you don’t know how to play the game you don’t play but I feel like that’s not the games fault.
@@koopakapefind better friends dude
"Scroll up a little" bro chat is fuckin MESSY! 😂
Trying to see receipts before the purchase even been made man
LOL
My opinion is that the main reason that Fighting Games are perceived as harder is because it makes it incredibly obvious what you did wrong, even if the best way to solve that problem isn't obvious.
Other games you can shrug off a couple losses but in fighting games you know it was your fault, you feel why you lost.
Nothing stomps on an ego more than FGs. And people just have fragile egos.
i'd also argue that because most folks don't play arcade fighters these days you're starting even lower below the floor than usual. In other notably difficult games like moba's most of the new player difficulty if you aren't completely new to video games is based on knowledge rather than manual dexterity i can practice for hours and still struggle to do consistent combos and overdrive inputs in guilty gear whereas i had done little other than occasionally watch League of Legends and had an easier time playing a moba like Smite or DOTA.
On top of that it's really hard to play with buddies in fighting games as it's a 1v1 game. And the perceived barrier of "i have to sit in a padded room for hours and hours until i can do special moves and combos" not only makes it hard to get other people to play with you but magnifies every mistake and doesn't let you know how to fix it. I can do QC inputs pretty easily in lots of modern fighting games. I still don't know what is making my fireball inputs so inconsistent in Blazblue. Or how to consistently do a super in Guilty Gear and the only way i have to learn since none of my friends play is to bang my head against the wall in training mode until Either i break or the wall holding me back does
Fckin nailed it
My two cents:
I seriously could not have gotten into FGs when I did if I didn't have a decent, steady stream of income for the first time in my life. I guess between 2XKO, Granblue etc this might not be the case for much longer, but as it currently stands these games are HELLA expensive, there's a BUNCH of DLC you have to get if you're commited to learning the matchups, and god help you if you live in a 3rd world country and want to get a stick or leverless - even the cheapest haute I could find still ended up eating 1/3 of my salary. I literally do not earn enough to import a Razer Kitsune. If you want to get into the games that actually have a large population of players, the financial barrier is absolutely real.
7:10 The moment I heard that complaint I knew Sajam was going to consolidate himself as a Deadlock content creator with the cleanest movement tutorial.
Shoutout to the thumbnail maker as always
Thumbnail creator has it all. Who even thinks to use a frame from an old Busta Rhymes MV..
I think hearing Sajam talk about Deadlock's movement made me understand why people feel like fighting games are harder to get in to. I haven't touched Deadlock much, but I have played countless games where you move a character around a 3D space, and I think that experience would help me intuit a lot of what was shown. Not all of it of course, but a lot of what was shown feels familiar to other fps/platformer/action/etc games that I've played. Fighting games are very unique in how they want you to control a character in a 2D space, like you aren't gonna play Mega Man and then carry any of that over to Street Fighter. Fighting game tech isn't actually harder to understand, its that people don't have a frame of reference when they're just starting out in the genre.
@lobbynotlob add on to that for a lot of people (myself included) getting that frame of reference isn't doing the fun part of the game. Playing matches with people. It's sitting in training mode trying and failing to do the stuff you want to do and not knowing exactly why the game won't read your Overdrive input or an SPD. or why you can't get the combo or whatever. The expectation is that you reach this bare minimum competence before you get to have fun. Whereas in other games the expectation is you learn by playing the game. noob tubing and Spray in pray in cod. Or ARAM in League or what have you
@@jmanwild87 You don't *have* to sit in training mode when you just pick up a fighting game, though. You literally can just go and start hitting buttons against players of roughly your skill level, as long as the playerbase is big enough and the matchmaking works, which applies to shooters too. The expectation that you have to "reach this bare minimum competence before you get to have fun" exists, but it's wrong.
@Ketsuekisan it's the reason I don't really play Fighting Games. Button mashing just feels boring (doesn't help I know what i should do) and when I can't do more than that it just feels frustrating particularly when I can't do basic half circles. And often end up accidentally doing stuff i don't want for reasons i don't know
@@jmanwild87frankly i gotta ask atp if you dont care for fighting games why are you all over this comment section lmfao you been yapping on damn near every single reply thread on here.
but to answer your question, the equivalent of being unable to do half circles properly in something like an fps is just having bad recoil control, or in a moba not knowing your character's trading pattern or whatever. the whole point of the video is that execution barriers exist in literally every genre but for some reason people like you make it sound like fighting game execution is a massive unscalable wall in comparison that cant be solved the same way as other execution barriers in other genres. its just not. if you have a problem with half circles, just practice them while in queue, most modern games let you queue while in training mode right? and unless youre named street fighter, most games combo system is lenient enough that you can just do abc special with no timing or tricks and thats a decent enough starting combo. if youre playing a game that has a big enough playerbase, most likely the people youre fighting will be just as clueless as you. thats how you learn. beat up other people that are the same skill level as you until you figure out the game. not by sitting in training and grinding hard combos. nobody is forcing you to do the stuff you dont know how to do, just ignore that for now and stick to the simple stuff. nobody expects a new valorant player to know every line up, nobody expects a new league player to know every champ match up, why do you expect to be a new player that knows how to do hard combos and tech? just shut that shit out and focus on the easy shit first thats how you gain the frame of reference. its literally that simple. stop worrying about being unable to do half circles or whatever, just do your basic abc fireball combo and remember to block and you'll get there eventually man. this is not a fighting game problem, its a you problem for putting your own expectations too high.
@Ixs4i i want to learn the damn game i paid money for is why I'm always frustrated and i pay attention to high level stuff because that's fun to see and interesting. And it's not an insurmountable wall of course but it sure as hell feels that way when you know what you should be doing but it feels like your controller is fighting you. If it's any indication of the kind of problems new players run into i can't even do strive's whiff punish tutorial with any consistency and that's demoralizing because I've never had a game seemingly fight me on what buttons I've pressed before i started playing fighting games
I don't think many people really understand how big of a financial investment needed to get into fighting games, especially for those in developing countries like me. Not only SF6 cost more than my monthly electricity and water bills combined, but the hardware I need to play on is also expensive. Compare that to League that only requires any decently modern work laptop to run and about 5 mins to set up an account.
Sajam truly is the Ouroboros of the FGC
"I don't want to learn fighting games and I need to justify it with some excuse about how it's hard to learn."
Nailed it lmao. So many people millennial-ish age and younger especially (said as one of them) look for any reason or excuse to like, explain to people why we can't do a thing that's hard, when at the end of the day it's really just a matter of doing it and learning it like anything else and we don't feel like it lmao
That's not the issue at all. I gladly put in hundreds of hours into DBFZ, getting my ass kicked repeatedly because it has universal controls that are intuitive and make sense once you get the hang of them.
But turn on classic controls in SF6, and every character suddenly has such random and arbitrary input sequences that none of it sticks in my head. The time investment to even learn how to simply *execute* a character's moves is already so steep, let alone figuring out how to properly implement them in a real match to see if you even enjoy a given character's playstyle!
I never hear or say such complaints for literally any other genre of game. It is exclusively fighting games that have such arbitrary control schemes.
@RacingSnails64 Man, sf6 only has qcf, half circles, and dp motions. It really isnt that hard.
@@koopakape You're older then millenial-ish age? It's always fancinating finding people like that who are into videogames online because I know ONE person like that in real life.
@@RacingSnails64 "The time investment to even learn how to simply execute a character's moves is already so steep"
I put my 9 year old son in front of a fighting stick and had him throwing pretty consistent fireballs in less than 5 minutes. The shit is really not complicated.
To me fighting games and shooters generally have the same learning curve. We dont really think about it because the concept of aiming the camera has been more popular in games. But learning to do fighting game inputs is just as difficult as learning to aim at an enemy if you have never picked up a controller. And both of these skills carry over between games
Aiming is easier to stumble into in a non-required context too, which can get people used to it. A lot of 3D games have a controllable camera that is managed and turned automatically and you can move it too if you stop and want to look around. Looking around with no time pressure and no tiny thing you have to hit is pretty easy to learn. Not to mention minecraft being so ubiquitous as a first person thing with shooter-adjacent mechanics, bulldozing through accessibility by sheer popularity. There's little easy "keyboard-like" controls to stumble into because games that target non-gamers or uhhh "low-gamers" (kill me) usually want to make buttons easy to use and with single functions.
I made my gf play cod once and she got a kill literally with the camera facing the ground the entire time.
Also id argue fighting games are closer to rhythm games like guitar hero. I've had friends that could do the inputs, understood the concept, but just didn't want to or feel they had the capacity to learn and remember long strings.
@@TheNewblade1 hell i'd keep it to those "Emulate the instrument" style ones too or DDR. (Playing something like OSU! at a very basic level is incredibly easy if you've played mouse and keyboard). It's the fact you're learning a control method that is likely entirely foreign to you combined with the fact that for most people. Learning fighting games isn't fooling around flubbing it with buddies and chatting it up but instead sitting in what amounts to a padded room for hours and hours sitting through tutorials and trying to do inputs and basic combos. once you learned one fighting game you probably have basic competency in all of the traditional ones but getting to the bare minimum is a bit of work if you're brand spanking new. It's like me who's played on gamepad since i was 4 years old playing gamecube trying to learn how to play mouse and keyboard in a fps at 24. Hell, the fact that Smash Bros's inputs are simple and the avenue for learning the game is partying it up with items with your buddies is what probably gets it such a massive casual fanbase despite its complexities at a high level.
im 300 hours in deadlock wtf i always wondered how players kept their momentum off the zipline ive been jumping this whole time 😭
I have been saying this for a while, but there has been a reason a lot of games have been taking cues from the tower, and it's because underneath all the jank and questionable decisions the core idea is very strong. Like other games have died for less than what Strive did, but it still has a strong player base despite all these competitors coming out with better QOL, and better features. Of course you can argue it has to do with the gameplay but I think there's more to it than just that.
There's a lot of moaning and groaning about it, but I bet you there's probably a lot of data out there about people who tend to like what the tower does. I mean, only in Strive can I come onto the tower, and just play a long set with someone in the ranked equivalent, that's just not something you do in pretty much anything else. And afterward, as Sajam said, I can talk to the person I played about the set, or just move onto the next person. It's also very fun recognizing people you played before, and having stories or experiences with them.
There's a lot about the tower system that gets buried underneath the lack of a ranked system, and largely people ignore because it doesn't really function well.
The tower system is the single worst thing Guilty gear strive has. I don't like it for a lot of reasons but wanting to ever come back and play it and I see that shyt I usually just ignore that I own for another couple of months. To me the system really is that shyt But the game itself is decent for what it is.
I dunno if I fully agree on the way you framed the Deadlock comparison. The fact of the matter is that the number of controls you need to memorize to be able to play your character, using all of their abilities at a basic level, is far lower in mobas compared to fighting games.
Setting aside Deadlock with its shooter mechanics, all you need to know to play a traditional moba is how to click around to move, 4-6 ability keys, and 0-6 item hotkeys. That's it. Those are all the controls you need to learn, and (barring some of DotA's more unique designs), they will carry over between every character in the game. Compare that to a fighting game where you need to learn normals, command normals, specials, supers, system-mechanic-button-combinations, AND movement commands.
Is there a wide variety of other stuff you need to learn/memorize to play a moba correctly? Of course. But fighting games have a uniquely high number of inputs that need to be memorized compared to almost every other genre. Forgetting which direction and button combo makes your guy do the overhead punch (no, not that overhead punch, the other one) is a different kind of frustration than not knowing optimal movement tech in Deadlock.
All the controls you need to play a fighting game are how to move a joystick in a circle and 4-8 buttons. That's it, those are all the controls you need to learn, and (barring some more unique characters), they will carry over between every character in most fighting games. Compare that to a MOBA where you need to learn abilities, the layout of a map, the NPCs on a map, an entire shop's worth of items, what those items upgrade into or combo with, last hitting, AND aiming and character and/or map movement.
If command normals(direction + button) are enough to set them apart from direction and button separately, then clicking targets and doing skillshots in normal MOBAs or aiming, moving, and pressing abilities together or separately should also be set apart from each other. You say the buttons in MOBAs carry over between characters, but so do the buttons in fighting games. Yes, the effects of pressing the buttons are different, but so are the effects of pressing the "4-6 ability keys" in MOBAs.
In fighting games you have 8 directions and 4-8 buttons. That's less than the infinite directions of a mouse + 4 movement buttons + 4-12 ability/item buttons. Not knowing the optimal movement tech in Deadlock can get you killed for being too slow just as easily as pressing the wrong overhead can get you killed for being too slow. When people say "fighting games are held to a higher standard," this is what they mean. You let Deadlock, and MOBAs in general, get away with things that you hold against fighting games. If you can predict an opponent's movement to land a skillshot, or headshot them while you're both moving in Deadlock, you can do a quarter-circle and press a button.
None of the shown deadlock examples really impact the fun of playing the game if you don't do them. Not being able to do the special moves you want when you want in a fighting game is very not fun.
Honestly, i think the things we can do to get people in to the general start with us as players getting our friends in. Added functionality like modem controls help a lot, but we need to start appealing to the personality seeds that make people pay attention. You know someone who likes action/superhero movies? Dope, here's a character who will ignite that same spark. You know someone who likes rhythm games? Guess what combos can feel like to you bud! You like outwitting or confusing the hell out of people? Let me introduce you to the left-right mix-up, friend.
I've been teaching my gf how to play sf6, and she has never played and fg before. Now we're 1.3 years deep into playing sf6 multiple times a week, and she's a chun li lover. Things is when I'm teaching her, I'm not afraid to be as patient as it takes, break things down to the basics we take for granted, I'm not afraid to take "L" after "L" because I'm letting her get and feel success from the complicated techniques she just spent irl time learning with me in training mode.
There are barriers we won't be able to over come as individual players, like the dlc fighters, lack of customization outside of Tekken and soul Calibur. But those can be ameliorated at least a little bit if we gift newer players a character the same way we buy a friend a drink.
These aren't perfect, and certainly aren't catch all, but I'm just speaking from my personal experiences recently.
Glad Ryan hart is fully committed to the engagement farming shit or people might not realize what he's doing when he, oh idk, tweets a tokido quote where the source(I think? If not, idk what it's supposed to be) is an interview that he still hasn't released months later. Still waiting for context on that quote but he damn sure got the clicks.
I still find it tedious when it's a legendary player, personally.
I want to point out with this deadlock example with all this complex decision making and interesting movement tech, that this is what makes video games fun. It feels rewarding to learn how to have more smooth movement and optimise your character, but because of this weird stigma fighting games have of being too hard, developers are trying to take that stuff away.
thanks for the Deadlock Movement tutorial, I didn't know half this shit
Bruh, I heard a LOTTA things, but no one told me that Deadlock moves like Warframe.
idc if sajam makes the same video. ill keep watching them
In Strive you can matchmake in training mode, you don't need to run around the lobby. And it lets you finish the set before changing floors. But it wasn't like that at launch.
I think the comparisons are very shallow: Deadlock's movement tech is not an integral part of the game and people can play just fine without using them. In FGs, motion inputs practically gatekeep half, likely even more, of the genre's gameplay and joy. It's not just a matter of optimization. Not to mention that the example movement tech will be easier to a lot of people than being consistent with even a 5f-link, which can get you killed if you drop and go unsafe ob.
You can also research what to buy or straight-up copy others' builds in other genres. In FGs, copying even the most basic tech comes with execution homework.
There's alao the matter of decision-making. In other competitive games, macro decisions come into play far after beginner levels. In FGs, the very first moment you have in a match might be knowledge check or perhaps youtry to do a combo but whoops you suck at neutral or you have some neuch tech but the oponent does not move in the way you need and now you need to determine wtf to do. You don't have minions or jungle or any other opponent-agnostic strat to rely on--you need to adapt. Mathematical FG play doesn't exist because in the end, we all go gambling.
In short, as a beginner, you have no choice but to get bodied to learn FGs.
Didn't expect to get sold on Deadlock clicking on this video 😅
deadlock is very good
I know you kind of touched on it, but when it comes down to "look up someone else playing it", there is just so many flaws in that, usually anyways. What if the person sucks, what if you're watching the literal best player in the world pull off some tech, and trying to replicate it within minutes of picking up a game. Hell there's even stuff like misinformation, whether directly or indirectly, as more things are "figured out" that may date a video hard. At the end of the day, you're also just using someone else's ideas, or opinions, to form how you play or think. Reminds me of gacha games, where every banner that'll get posted, there will be tons of "should I pull x" "is x a must pull" etc.
Also if you're trying to play the way someone else does, it can be hard to form your own style, or again if you can't replicate it, then it is kind of a feelsbad. People will be quick to doubt their ability to play it, whether cause they think it is too hard, or they think they suck too much, but like anything else, you gotta give it a little bit of time.
People's perspective on this is skewed, I see people saying that what sajam did is advanced tech not comparable to motion inputs which is a basic necessary mechanic and I agree. A better comparison for motion input is AIMING. If you've ever seen a person who've never played a 1st or 3rd person game try it for the first time its a similar frustration you will see when people get into a fighting game and can't do motion inputs. Its not a perfect analogy cause nothing will be perfect these are two entirely different genres but I works well to illustrate my point motion inputs aren't extraordinarily harder than any other way of controlling your character you're just not used to them.
Ok but shooters and MOBAs have a lot more in common with singleplayer, even casual, games in terms of controls. First-person camera control is ubiquitous, lots of point-and-click movement in isometric stuff especially... Literally the only game, not even genre, that is somewhat similar in controls to FGs is DMC (also notorious for having difficult controls lol), and even FGs with simple control schemes like Granblue or 2XKO are closer to DMC than the bazillion more popular singleplayer games.
The sad truth of the matter is that FGs are actually harder to get into than the FGC thinks--perhaps not in isolation but in the wider context of gaming by virtue of playing like no other genre.
(I'll also add that whole hand movement is a lot easier and intuitive to most people than complex individual-finger movement, especially for middle and ring.)
Edit: I forgot that there are some sick side-scrollers with FG-like controls but considering they are hidden indie gems, I think the point still stands :D
All i know is that i got good at overwatch by playing with friends but to learn sf6 i started by watching a characters guide for the character i wanted to play next, played combo trials alone, did reaction and combo drills and find solutions to situations alone in training mode, while also having to regularly hop back into training mode after sets to look for solutions again. i have 4 characters in masters in sf6 so far and got to masters in overwatch, but in one game i was constantly just playing with friends and only went into the practice range for 5 minutse when a new hero dropped and in the other i was in my secluded training chamber for probably 100 hours. Im the only one of my friends who plays fighting games but i dont deny that the barrier to entry to actually start playing the real game is higher than other games. you always use deadlock as an example cuz its so complicated, but there are many games out there you can absolutely learn while playing with friend without watching guides.
I think the one major differences between the types of knowledge and mechanical checks mentioned for something like Deadlock vs a fighting game is whether they are what I'll call explicit or emergent.
In fighting games, almost all of the major mechanics, inputs, moves, tech, etc. are explicitly programmed into the game, or are otherwise bugs or other unintended stuff (like infinites) that will likely be patched out. Most of the tech you showed off in Deadlock is just the consequence of it's particular physics system; those techniques emerged from the interactions of other systems, like friction and momentum. Many of these emergent techniques even end up being "canonized" later on as explicit techniques in later games.
I think a better comparison of an explicit mechanical skill check in Deadlock would be the dash jump. Like a quarter-circle input, it has a fairly unique and somewhat precise timing coordinated across different buttons that makes it not that intuitive when you first start, but it's easy enough that you do get used to it pretty quickly.
The best example of an emergent fighting game mechanic I can think of is Melee wave-dashing. As an accidental consequence of the air-dodge physics, they created one of the most iconic techniques in all of competitive gaming. Traditional FGC games also have some examples though, like combos originally being an accident or the way that motion inputs influence how you play and position (I think there's a Core-A video about that).
I think in general, players tend to not view emergent mechanics as being as difficult, and they tend to be less impactful at low level. I assume this is partially because games are more likely to teach the basic inputs but not emergent techniques (often because those techniques weren't known about at launch). But also, the fact that they emerge from other systems means they are effectively hidden from new players until they learn the base systems first, then the new technique just feels like doing what they were already doing, but better. And those base systems tend to be VERY simple and accessible, like moving, shooting, and controlling the camera; all certainly skills that take a long time to master, but which can be learned in seconds (with the notable exception of the camera which is not easy for complete beginners).
I'd argue option selects are still mostly emergent system consequences rather than something explicitly built in, ditto some categories of fuzzy-whatever. And then like you mention some stuff was unintentional 30 years ago but was intentionally codified sometime between then and now. But you have a point broadly about how a lot of other genres have a higher incidence of just throwing a million things out there and seeing what people make of it. SF6 was likely a lot more planned and controlled at release than a thing with functionally unlimited item combos is or even could want to be
I honestly think it might at least partially also come down to movement or sense of control (whether real or imagined). Controlling your character at a very very basic and baseline level in Mobas and Shooters is a lot easier than in Fighting Games. Yes moving left and right in a fighting game isn't hard, but actually moving your character to the part of the screen you want them to at the speed you want them to or moving away from your opponent fast enough to actually create distance etc is finicky at a beginner level (especially in an actual match where your opponent comes right out of the gate swinging), where as WASD or mouse click to move is fairly straight forward and you usually have a grace period or safe zone at the beginning of a match before you encounter other players.
You'll still get your ass handed to you in Mobas and shooters when new don't get me wrong, and many of the times you die it can still feel very frustrating and confusing as to what happened. But it doesn't feel like you're fighting the game in order to move or control your character (Street Fighter especially can feel very stiff because of how many moves you can't cancel out of which can momentarily lock you out of moving or taking other actions which feels very weird and arbitrary to newer players). You get overwhelmed by other factors in these other genres which for whatever reason don't bother people as much.
It's just because people got used to WASD movement. You take someone who only play phone game to try shooter, they struggled extremely hard with mouse and WASD movement, especially the diagonal movement or aiming while jumping.
On the other hand, telling a kid who has been playing game like metroidvania to try fighting game, he grasp the control instantly.
@DuoMaxwellDS i played gamepad games all my life i still can't consistently do half circle or dp motions or really do combos outside of Games with simplified controls lik Power Rangers battle for the grid and every time i try to learn i get put off because simply making my character do what i want it to do is a frustrating test of do i do the input well enough that the game thinks i did the input i wanted. Same reason i don't play fps's on mouse and keyboard. simply controlling my character is an awkward and sometimes even painful affair that doesn't lend itself well to beginners. At least with a game similarly considered complex like a moba most of that initial difficulty isn't routed in the basic controls but instead based in knowledge about the game. In a shooter shooting in the direction of your crosshair isn't hard and while aim can be difficult there's resources for practice. in fighting games it's got the knowledge gap but also learning manual dexterity because the control scheme is wholly unique to fighting games. And really there's no way to sort of get good at motion inputs without just sitting in the padded room or having a friend teach you. the only thing that comes close when it comes to motion inputs being something like Skate
Also it's really difficult to learn these games when you don't have friends to either teach you or who are similarly unskilled that you can play with. For lots of people learning a fighting game isn't playing the tutorial then immediately getting into the game like in something like CoD but playing the tutorial and then practicing for hours and hours in training mode so they're somewhat consistent at things before they get to the actual fun part of playing against other people because just flailing loses its luster very quickly
I think the issue with fighting game execution isn't that it's harder or easier than other games, it's that's it's just so unintuitive. Specials are all a bunch of nonsense direction inputs combined with arbitrary button presses, until you get used to them it feels super awkward to execute. Lots of shooter have super cool movement tech that's just as technically challenging to execute as fighting game combos, but understanding the basics of manipulating momentum feels a lot more intuitive than input Konami code to do cool move.
People seem to misunderstand difficulty of grasping in FG vs other genres. The amount of layers behind a moba or team FPS can be a laundry list but those first couple ones are so much easier than a fighting games. Layer 1 and 2 of a shooter and moba is so simple it takes no work. Move mouse to target and click until HP0, press WASD to move. Deeper layers are simple shit like if you're looking around a corner just stand further back, spam crouch, etc.
Fighting games layer 1 is more than walk and press the button, you need to space a bit(may not by much but spacing is harder in fgs), know a bnb which can take minutes or ages depending on game and if you click with fireball vs charge, tell when a move is probably unsafe even if eyeballing it is difficult. You can't just mash a button and get a quick dopamine fix for low effort. The TTK in a shooter on average isn't higher that 1.5 seconds!
Like you said tekken and soulcal have that figured out.
I think you misunderstand the difficulty. Layer 1 of a fighting game is just "walk to target and press buttons until they die. Use joystick/WASD to move." You do not need a BNB when you first pick up a fighting game for the first, you do not need to know when your moves are unsafe. Not when you're that early and your opponent most likely also doesn't know. Those things are the equivalent to your "stand further back and spam crouch when looking around a corner." That's literally all spacing in fighting games is.
When people say "fighting games are held to a higher standard," this is what they mean. You're letting shooters get away with something you hold against fighting games.
it's funny actually i wrote an essay on fighting games not actually being that hard for my game studies class and cited you and core-a as sources lol
Did u perform any actual user studies or did u just base it off ur own experience and that of those who are passionate in the genre? Fighting games are objectively harder than most games
@@derpaboopderp1286 They are not "objectively harder" They are simply different. Some fighting games of the past are very very strict but that is only if you're trying to do the best things your character can do. See the 1frame links in SF4. They aren't necessary for every beginner to learn and aren't needed with 2 beginners anyway. Games of a long running genre, believe it or not, are made intuitively so that they aren't far removed from the past iterations. Every fighting game has the same core principles it never changed and it in fact got much more accessible for people who actually have conditions preventing them from doing motion inputs comfortably.
If u only use someone elses build in deadlock chances are you dont even know why ur buying them and might not even know what they do. Learning how to build on the fly was a huge game changer at least in terms of enjoying the game
Price is a weird one. I think that's one of the last issues until more recent where the FTP has skyrocketed very casual genres. SF4 did not have this issue, Tekken didn't, and neither soulcal until recently.
One of the biggest issues for so long was actually the online experience. You couldn't play with randoms from across the country or play with your homie who moved away cause delay made the game frustrating. Devs took so long to address that even when rollback was launched.
@muckdriver i feel like part of it is almost a self perpetuating cycle. Fighting Games have a reputation for being hard to get into and that you need to spend hours or days on a character to see any kind of success. People don't play against other people to learn but instead sit in training room getting increasingly frustrated when they attempt something and it's not working and just hitting a dummy for hours and hours isn't fun as a noob. Eventually bounce off and go back to playing games where your skills learned in other games transfer and make onboarding easier. Gaming with friends is fun but now you gotta get someone else to play with who is either also a noob or willing to put up with noobs and most people don't want to spend on a fighting game because spending 60 bucks on a game you might bounce off of after two hours feels terrible. The reputation that fighting games are hard means that noobs aren't really joining which means most of the content you see is high level which can perpetuate the reputation because "you'll never be able to do that."
The hardest fighting game to get into is the first one because you're starting at the ground floor and think you need to get to floor 5 before you start having fun
ok but i feel like this defense is always a little bad faith - yes deadlock is objectively way harder to learn, but all of the tricks he showed were optional, you can control your character and start playing the game without them. With fighting games, if you can't do your special moves, it is completely disingenuous to say that you are playing the game. It is not fun or satisfying in any way to play most fgs with just normals, and wanting to do a move but physically not being able to do it is way more frustrating than having to do things inefficiently and losing, because at least in the latter you have agency over what your guy does on screen. I definitely agree that fighting games are judged as impossible to play unfairly but motion inputs is a VERY LEGIT barrier to entry that is worth solving with stuff like modern controls
He always compares tech to base character control and it's definitely not the same thing. Not just that but everything he showed was more knowledge checks than mechanic checks. They are like 1-2 button things as opposed to motion inputs. Then fighting games still have knowledge checks on top of the mechanic checks like motion inputs.
"yes deadlock is objectively way harder to learn"
And that's really all anyone is trying to say. This is why fighting games are "held to a higher standard." You admit that Deadlock is harder, but then immediately try to "um ackshually" it away.
As an aside, if being able to do special moves without motion inputs is all it takes, then why isn't Granblue Versus far and away the most popular fighting game of all time?
@Ketsuekisan Granblue can just be unpopular. Also you ignored the actual point. Type of difficulty matters. Fighting games are hard mechanically at an entry level. Deadlock is not hard mechanically at an entry level. You can do things with very simple button presses as opposed to doing a dp. Even other games that have mechanical difficulty usually put it somewhere other than controlling your character. Think of souls games, nioh, GoW or Musou games. They are hard but doing your own moves isn't hard.
you've been able to queue up in strive while in training since day 1 idk why i see so many people complain about running around in the tower ive never done that in 3 years lol
Rivals 2 was the first time I ever put time into learning a plat fighter in a competitive aspect and while it was tough I was able to pick it up. Just like SF4 was the first time I competitively learned traditional fighters, and Strive was my first anime fighter I took seriously.
Sure each of these games have a learning curve but its honestly not that crazy to put effort into. If you can learn deadlock you can learn any of these games.
You do damage and such in Deadlock without having to get into advanced movement tech. Fighting game combos are all or nothing. You get the combo perfect, or you get a worse result than if you hadn't done it at all. In Deadlock, if your movement sucks, you lose to better players (as you should), but there's no "this guy can't do the 4-frame link so his character falls apart completely". You might die because you did something suboptimal in both games, which is fine, but having 10% less distance or 10% less damage in something like Deadlock is not going to destroy you consistently, especially versus other suboptimal play.
The closest thing I can think of in a moba that hits that point is knowledge checks that turn into snowball scenarios - guy doesn't know to buy the item that counters the other guy's ult or something. This is still a matter of just getting informed or looking it up. This is usually the case with Tekken as well - I don't think it took me longer than 30 minutes to lab a decent combo I could hit every time in that game, thanks to its input buffer and on average easier inputs. With a traditional fighting game however, it's not just the knowledge check. You're also hitting up the lab for possibly hours to build muscle memory to hit super specific timings. The only thing I can think of remotely that demanding in Deadlock is corner boosting, and that doesn't stop your hero from doing anything fun if you can't do it. Not to mention the actual wrist pain involved with some traditional fighting games - again, not an issue I run into outside of them.
yeah I keep thinking of how the common knowledge for sf4 sakura was "if you can't do 1 frame links then don't even play her" because simple bnbs wouldn't function. I'd argue what fighting games have a skill *floor* problem. I think this is why so many people take to things like soul calibur so well, since you're playing a physically intuitive game with fun moves and real decisions even before you get into combos. a casual is going to be rightly unsatisfied if all they can manage in street fighter is a stiff basic punch and they can't access any of the character's signature techniques which are all over the promo material.
"You do damage and such in Deadlock without having to get into advanced movement tech. Fighting game combos are all or nothing. You get the combo perfect, or you get a worse result than if you hadn't done it at all."
Wrong. When you're just starting out, you don't need all that, not against opponents of a similar skill level.
"In Deadlock, if your movement sucks, you lose to better players (as you should), but there's no "this guy can't do the 4-frame link so his character falls apart completely"."
No, instead there's "this guy aims and reacts faster than me, so I get shot before I can do anything, and now my currency situation is so bad and my build so far behind that fighting other players is actively detrimental to my team because I'm feeding and causing us to spiral further and further into being mathematically unable to win."
@@Ketsuekisanbut in deadlock you have the option to go just hang back and farm up or gank people in deadlock if your being out meched you have option in a fighting game if your oponent can do specials and you cant its gg
You can do damage without combos, or advanced combos.
I like fighting games because they aren't filled with whatever is going on with Deadlock cause that looks legitimately awful, confusing and very frustrating to learn and play right lol
I nearly bounced off of strive because the region i play in has literally zero players in the towers. Going into your first fighting game online and getting double perfected by celestial players in open park is not a good way to start. Thankfully the netcode is good enough I could play tower in a different region with bad connections and still have fun when actually fighting people closer to my skill level, win or lose.
"Drip-less Queue"
I know Sajam said it as a joke, but I would honestly love that in some games.
Rainbow Six Siege would look pure tacticool again
"team games are more accessible because you can blame your losses on other people" is an insane take to me. Whenever I play team games I despise every single one of my teammates, the fact that I lose games through no fault of my own is MADDENING to me. It's the most frustrating thing in the world to play good but still lose. How on earth do people have that experience and go "eh, not my fault! :)" and feel encouraged to keep playing? How do you not want to destroy the entire concept of teamwork itself???
you are the perfect example of it. You say the game is super frustrating but since you can blame your team for your losses so you keep playing. You can't do this in fighting games
The theory is that thinking you lost despite playing well is still less painful that realizing you aren't actually playing well
I totally agree with you and that's why I like fighting games and RTSs but most people don't which is why those genres are comparatively less popular to mobas and shooters.
It's also why for example so many shooter players, especially call of duty, just care about their individual K/D ratio and not actually playing objectives to win matches.
Tbh I think we just need more games with motion inputs
Am I in the minority for not really being into deadlock? This is like, onboarding behavior, where you expect players to stick around for a long time, a la league, but holy crap dude informational complexity is REAL af in that game!
My favorite repeating topic along with the “sbmm boogeyman”
Thanks for the Lash tech my dude.
I think an issue with fighting game mechanical execution is that it often feels like you NEED all of it at once. You can reach a tower a little bit slower, or free-form remove a couple pieces of tech you aren't comfortable with, but often in a fighting game you feel like you NEED to do several different things fast, and there's no halfway state, either you do everything right or you flub the combo and get next to zero reward. Because you can lose a round in only a couple mistakes, every tech flub feels magnified instead of hundreds of small pieces of movement across a longer game.
@@dominicjannazo7144 yeah. You can walk up to tower normally as ho shown in the video but you need to do a motion input to get a projectile with almost every character.
Exactly. Also the execution barrier feels way more _annoying_ compared to stuff like movement tech or itemization knowledge because it's a barrier to "use your character". People get very attached to who they are playing and if they feel like their hands are failing to use a character's basic moves, the "this game isn't for me" feeling goes super hard.
Also also a reminder about the execution requirement argument: Moba players often consider characters that chain skills into each other "not for beginners". Like even for basic ass 4 hit combos that are just pressing buttons and clicking the mouse in between. People who don't play demanding videogames and don't play instruments and don't type fast on actual keyboards 6 hours a day are plentiful and they are VERY BAD at pressing buttons. You put collectible card game timmy in front of an arcade stick and he's gonna get mad at the inputs at least once.
That's more of matchmaking problem than execution problem. I've seen low level players that finished their match without using a single DP. It also has way more back and forth than high level match where you can usually see a one side beating because people made one single mistake.
Giving players simpler execution didn't save GBVSR. The people advocated for it didn't stick around at all.
Yeah, like. It's all well and good to say 'other games are hard too! look at this du duh duh duh duh see isnt that complicated' and its like yeah sure. So why do people keep bouncing off fighting games. Are they just dumb morons? Ontologically evil? Sun got in their eyes? They don't know video games are hard? Did RNGesus roll at the beginning of time and say 'people in this universe are more likely to bounce off fighting games'? No. Clearly something is different. I think your explanation is a pretty good one.
I mess up the movement tech in deadlock, I still get there. I mess up anti-air in SF6, I eat absolute shit in the game. It's an ego thing, but video games aren't real so it's kinda important in context.
@@nonuvurbeeznus795 Fighting games were far and away the most popular genre for a whole decade, and they remain the most popular game genre played primarily in-person. Fighting game culture has always been about taking your wins and losses with equal grace, and having to socialize with other people in order to improve as a player. The difference between then and now is that online gaming lets people blame teammates, disconnect, ragequit, and talk endless amounts of trash totally anonymously. Most other competitive gaming genres have had all those things baked into them since their inception, but FGC culture predates all that. Skill issues are nothing but a scapegoat for people who never had to learn to work on themselves.
To the cost thing, i know its hard to imagine, but especially with the advent of smart phones, black people generally dont have 500$ gameing pcs.
So to them its not 60 vs f2p game its, 60 vs 500$ walmart pc thats overpriced and trash.
While we're repeating the discourse, I will repeat my opinion that we need to stop worrying about why not everyone plays fighting games and let people that aren't interested do something else without us feeling insecure about it.
3:56 Someone gotta clip this with no context lmao
I would say the difference between motion inputs and other knowledge/input checks is sure, you don't know how to do crazy movement tech in a shooter game, but motion inputs are closer to just... normal abilities than extra tech. Fighting games also have extra tech that require hard inputs, but normal regular moves/abilities are harder to use, and it's an all or nothing thing that feels frustrating to mess up even if it's not more difficult than other game's inputs. I agree the difficulty standard is still not applied fairly, but it's just something to consider.
Doesn't the Deadlock example prove the opposite though?
You showed some very very high level Deadlock optimizations, dashing sidewise rather than forward, crouching off the rail rather than jumping etc. These are not moves that a new Deadlock player needs to know and in fact you mention a lot of players in chat didn't know these techniques exist. The comparison that the non-FGC public at large love to complain about again and again is motion controls, which is table stakes in a fighting game without simple inputs.
I like when people who don't play fighting games say this so sajam can recycle this video concept over and over and every other FG content creator
idk if Sajam hasn't played Strive in a while or Celestial specifically is different, but as a 8-10 floor gamer, I can just press Quick Match and never interact with lobbies at all
The thing that I like about the Floor system vs Ranked is the ability to punch way above my weight, and the breadth of skill levels I get to experience
Quick match just places your avatar in a lobby. That means you are still constrained by the amount of people in whatever tower lobby you are placed in.
Part of the issue with strive lobbies isn’t just how ass they are to use, but also that your matchmaking pool is limited to the amount of people in the lobby, you can’t get matched with anyone else unlike other games.
If your new and struggling in the fgc, Find a crew for your game!
I can largely agree with Sajam's points here, though I think his comparison of special moves being an execution check vs. Deadlock movement isn't really a great comparison at all. Sure, the overall point that you don't NEED to know all the optimal stuff to play the game is valid and I agree with that, but there is a big difference between being super optimal with movement and...doing a singular move. I don't consider doing a Shoryuken input advanced or me playing optimally. It's a basic move in my toolkit and having to do these extra steps to execute it is weird. A better example would have been comparing a super easy bread and butter combo like a simple target combo in SF6 or something like Close Slash -> Far Slash - Heavy Slash in Strive to the more optimal combos that use all your resources. You don't NEED to know your wall break combos to play Strive, but you should probably know how to actually do half of your character's movelist.
For the record, I don't hate motion inputs and think they have a place, but also there's plenty of games that clearly don't need them and I don't see why people can't admit that they're some of the least intuitive, alien concepts in fighting games that are in literally no other genre. If I want to shoot a gun in an FPS I hit the trigger. If I want to accelerate in a racing game I hit the gas. If I want to use my fireball I must perform a ritual with my d-pad or stick before it comes out. It's an extra step; not a super challenging step relatively speaking, but when you're starting out you're more likely to trip on that step.
I think the perfect system is sf6 so the choice between lobby and ranked from menu, but with an added way to text and an optional voice option in ranked matches
We really gotta stop using "motion inputs" as the big bugbear of fighting games that is not the part people struggle with
Exactly. People just don’t listen and would rather keep saying “fgs aren’t hard”
I think the idea thag most people have with fighting games being more difficult comes from them being way more unconventional than a lot of other game genres. More difficult to learn a game when youre brand new to everything about it.
Bro there's a special layer of hell reserved for the dude who thought that a third person shooter with momentum-based movement should be a MOBA
It's like if someone made a plate of chicken stroganoff (my favorite dish) and then took a giant dump on top of it
It's not the first time, and there has been a game that did it better imo. Monday Night Combat. But I have a feeling the moment is a lot better in Deadlock, having not played Monday Night Combat in around 10 years
Thumbnail is fuckin craaaazy, good shit editor
God I hate lobbies. just let me queue like tekken7 where im just in
Damn, i now wish i had a pc to play Deadlock because i wanna try that sick tech he just showed! It looks like learning to rocket jump again
Boy I think this video single-handledly sold me on never playing Deadlock LMAO
Even going to simplified games from “complex” genres specifically pokemon unite because it’s the only thing I’m good at
Setting up a good build in unite to actually begin playing the game is so much harder than figuring out even a basic BNB, and unite is “simple” you gotta figure out which type your pokemon is, what items are good for it, if it’s a jungler or bot or top lane because the actual category doesn’t mean anything (jungler Aegislash on top) and you have to build for that specific lane in the most esoteric ways imaginable, why does attack weight work when I’m playing bot lane Ceruledge, but it doesn’t do anything when I’m in top, I genuinely still don’t know if that’s skill issue or not, game is fucked
Imagine this in a fighting game, pick your character, figure out on your own if they’re a zoner or rushdown or grappler or whatever with zero guidance and the actual differences are pretty slim but snowball into huge gaps in playstyle, then learn your combos based on which version you want to play, keeping alternates in mind in case your teammate decides to not call their lane and just do whatever, and there’s alternate objectives like hitting 2k2d at 30 seconds in and if you don’t you lose in 5 minutes for reasons beyond your comprehension until you’re at least 20 hours in, and this is just the basic issues with trying to get into the SIMPLEST, WORST MOBA
It is genuinely INSANE how much higher the standard for fighting games is,
TLDR: ask a gamer to play jungler crit aegidlash focusing on objectives and they’ll spend 509 hours min maxing it, ask them to hit a quarter circle punch a single time and they’ll spend 5 seconds, give up, call you an elitist, and then break your controller
Playing strive rn while watching this video and the servers crashed again lmao
Never played Deadlock, but I would assume that those momentum tricks might work BECAUSE those are similar momentum mechanics to Doom/ultrakill/arena shooters. (Note the fact arena shooters is a dead genre does not help the argument)
I don’t like getting rid of motion inputs because I already speak the SF style language the same way. If my reversal isn’t a shoryuken motion or flash kick, I absolutely hate it, because I fumble over my words unless I spend hours learning the new language.
holy bot comments batman!
amazing thumbnail
With how complicated everything else is in Deadlock, why shouldn't we put motion inputs in there? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would say it is more likely that people are likely to have experience with First person, third person and top down point and click games in single or co-op games.
Meanwhile you are lucky to find many games that share fighting game fundamentals. Hell literally the games that got closet were things like Ninja Gaiden, Urban Reign or God Hand and they literally don't make games like that anymore.
So for many it is like the first time they played a video game with no idea wtf they are doing except this time they have a real thinking breathing human caving in their skull.
Edit: basically it isn't that fighting games are actually harder naturally, rather people collective are worse at them due to less experience
@boredomkiller99 they also feel a lot harder because of that. Sure my aim my suck in an fps but I can still shoot in the general direction of my target reticle. In fighting games there's a not insignificant chance if you're brand new that you can't do like half your character's moveset with any consistency such that you actually feel in control of them. In strive's whiff punish tutorial I've accidentally gotten fafnir with some consistency and still can't actually clear it and that's just back walking into a command normal.
Don't think I've ever felt like a Game is literally fighting me on what my character gets to do.
The Deadlock comment is some weird FGC bubble stuff. First and third person shooters are easy to jump into and do stuff, fighting games aren’t. Even if you have a bunch of items, (which no doubt probably just do some simple thing) on a basic gameplay level the gameplay those items are in-service of is simpler than even a simpler fighting game that doesn’t have a bunch of different systems like modern fighting games do.
One of the reasons I think Marvel vs Capcom 2 was so popular is because you could do Super moves by just pressing two buttons. Forget getting rid of double motions to do Super moves, you can do your Hyper Combo move by just pressing the two assist buttons. It was kind of perfect for that time, you had a ton of people that grew up playing the first few versions of Street Fighter 2 and the first three Mortal Kombat games in arcades, and they might be able to do some Special moves, but maybe they couldn’t do double motion inputs. But they could do the Hyper moves in Capcom’s Marvel stuff, and even if they had a hard time doing normal Special move inputs they could definitely press two button consistently. You don’t access to all of a character’s Hyper moves that way, but you’re still able to throw about a big flashy move.
There’s something interesting about the fact the biggest fighting games ever were Street Fighter 2 before Super Combo moves, and Virtua Fighter 1 which only had three buttons. Also Smash Bros. has consistently been the best selling fighting game on consoles since it debuted on the N64...which is kind of crazy when you remember that the GameCube was the worst selling console of its generation but still managed to have a Smash Bros. game that outsold fighting games on the PS2, and PS2 is the best selling console.
Busta Rhymes
Is the 🐐
Are people really giving Deadlock a pass as an easy game to learn? I have over 1k hours in Overwatch and Dota 2, and countless more in Tekken and other fighting games... I put maybe 10 hours into Deadlock and I'm like, this game is WAY too complicated. lol
"fighting games are held to a higher standard" BY WHOM? Are they in the room with us right now? Are these 99% of players present? Also, FGC is banned from comparisons until people learn the difference between "most successful team games in the world" and "niche 1v1 game"
People who glaze fighting games to be sophisticated or hard just want to feel special about playing a niche genre and want to come off as smart or whatever when in reality who cares it's a video game
Fighting games have always been harder, possibly the hardest of all pvp games. It's most of the reason why I don't like them. I don't want to do a thousand inputs in a minute and have to be right about 900 of them to win. I want it to be slower paced than that. That's all mobas are. You have more information to process and at an infinitely slower pace, with more avenues of counterplay(most of the time).
It's still about getting the right input off the information you see. Fighting games are just that on crack. And that's fine, it's, fine for games that technical to exist, but not all games have to go down that avenue to be better, I'd argue most games are made worse by adding more and quicker reflex based combat.
Honestly this isn't even just true for video games. Half the reason yugioh is hard to learn is because it requires so much knowledge going in. Its kinda a new player who's never heard of a hadouken before hopping into a fighting game, except if you can't do one you get touch of deathed. Which I'm sure is true in some game, but i can't think of one off the top of my head.
Now if we wanna talk about financial barriers... lol
@@StarWagi HnK
Man, as someone that plays deadlock i can tell you it's ez pz compared to sf6. I don't need to know frame data in deadlock, I don't need to be confused why I died ( deadlock tells you, sf6. No idea why blocking a combo just did not work) ect
I'm waiting for the general public to complain the Mario needs to hit 2 buttons to Ground Pound if Quarter Circles are still the arguing point.
Heck, I started with Guile and other Charge Characters because I felt they were easier and more enjoyable and learned traditional motions later. There's no reason they can't try a Charge Character aside from "I'm complaining about the game/genre I don't even play.".
the games in question will rarely even make that choice apparent. you have to already have genre knowledge to understand what a charge character is.
See, as someone who has hundreds of hours in DBFZ but can't use classic controls in SF6, I would argue that Mario's ground pound is simple, intuitive, and easy to remember. It makes sense to hit the crouch button in midair to drop back down to the ground. Many games do this. It's a pretty universal concept.
But open up a move list in a traditional fighter? It is completely random and arbitrary what sequence of inputs does what move. That's the problem. Sometimes it's just a quarter circle, but sometimes it can be something like "back back forward down back forward punch." Why not just "forward punch" or "back punch?" The learning curve for simply *executing* a fighting game character's moves is already so steep, and we haven't even gotten to committing all those moves to memory and trying the character out in a real match, only to realize you don't even enjoy their playstyle!
I mean if you're just not really interested in a game(that doesn't have Modern Controls) then you won't have the want to try different characters and see what works for you. If you thought Mario was cool but something like the Mini Mushroom was confusing or frustrating to use you'd choose another Power Up.
I was like a preteen when I was playing SF2 against the CPU with no one to help me besides Googling "SF2 character moves" and seeing that Guile, Vega, Balrog, M. Bison, etc. have moves that don't use the Quarter Circles and DP motions that I had trouble with at the time with Ryu the "starter character". I gave Guile a try and it immediately clicked.
If you wanna try Classic Controls then I suggest that you try a Charge Character that you like. Modern Controls and Classic Controls are 2 different games, I personally know from having to use Modern Controls for a while because my left stick was drifting and I don't use the Dpad, but playing Modern Controls is perfectly valid.
@@SFtheWolf If you can read an ability list in a MOBA, you can read a special move list in a fighting game.
@SFtheWolf ....Mt first fighting game was SFII on the SNES.
All you needed to do was read the instruction manuel to learn that...
i love deadlock propaganda i will eat it up every time
Strives tower system is great and why I play it more then other fighting games in my collection. It makes finding matches easy and, I don't have to endlessly fight the flavor of the patch characters if I don't want to.
Strive's tower is how I quit the game despite buying all season passes. The 10th floor isn't at the skill level I want, but Celestial had all those absurd people gatekeeping the entrance. The progression in that system is among the worst I've seen.
Maaaaan you can make any genre of game difficult because they all have little intricacies and nuances. You can play classic Mega Man games as easy as jump and shoot. But you can also make it look flashy with ceiling zips and screen rolling. Or knowing really niche` stuff like in Mega Man 6, you can't directly jump out of a slide, you have to come to a full stop and release the jump button.
You can make any game hard.
i mean the floor of basic stuff isn't that hard. simply moving and shooting megaman isn't that hard if you played games before. learning a fighting game for the first time is like learning to play on mouse and keyboard when you've been playing on controller your whole life on top of all the mental complexity and mind games because there's not much transfer between fighting games and other genres of games. not many games have motion inputs and add on that it can feel like you need to sit in a padded room for hours to learn to do inputs for your character and that it's very easy to see when you're doing something wrong but very difficult to fix it and well Fighting games seem very difficult to approach compared to even Mobas as well a lot of the difficulty there is knowledge.if you played mouse and keyboard at all before you probably have some skill transfer to easily make it so you can move buy items and Use Abilities
Is it telling that the most fun i've had at least was in stuff like Power Rangers battle for the Grid and more normals centric games like Soul Caliber?
Yay....while I agree with the premise I think your example this time was off.
Would have been better explaining how just aiming in first person shooters if someone has zero experience with it can actually be a struggle or even just being in first person in general.
Watching someone who has never played a FPS is like watching a rookie in SF6 or low rank floors in Strive hilarious bad to the point you have to question if it is intentional
As much as people can (rightfully) hate on league of legend, the pace of Riot adding change to a live service game to make it better is quite unmatched and if they handle 2XKO in the same way, other fighting game going to have to follow the new standard or just stay behind
Shit as much as you want on riot having a "bad game" with balance issues inherently consequential to their content pipeline. Their team is absolutely fucking cracked at making it like even bearable. They are the absolute pioneers of making everchanging games of that scale and speed and they've got the secret sauce that keeps them together.
Its extremely dishonest to compare motion inputs to game complexity. Each of the actions you discribed is accessible by one button. Motion inputs make people feel shot because they need to spend hours to get their fighting game brain before they even can *input* something. Thats just not the case for any of those actions
Ranking the difficulty of games by the amount of knowledge you need to play them is kinda stupid. If any genre comes close gameplay-wise to fighting games it's shooters. Reading opponents, reacting to adjustments, the 1v1 aspect, accessibility to learning mayerials, mental stack, muscle memory, legacy skill and knowledge and partially the execution in older FGs is what we actually need to talk about.
Personally I love the Strive tower cause its extremely unclear what specific rank I'm at, and that's just how I like it. Watching the number go up and down as I play is demotivating, I'd much rather not know. I mod other games to get the same effect. You can go up and down on floors of course but that can vary every which way several times in a single night, so I know I can make it back up 2 floors if I just win 10 times, which is pretty realistic. I only play ranked to get even matches anyways, not to grind it.
I agree up until Celestial. Being consistently better than F10 players then gambling for two sets in a row on whether you get someone you can beat is a horrible experience.
I don't understand the difference between one number going up and down versus the other. It's literally the same thing, I don't know why you can't just not care about being Gold 2 vs Gold 3, just like being on whatever floor.
@@Boyzby Three reasons:
1) I can get back to the floor I was at in half an hour of play pretty reliably
2) I can't fall too far from my highest-reached floor
3) I don't actually mean Gold 2 vs Gold 3, I mean your granular meter like League Points and Master Rank. I wish the game let you natively turn that off tbh. My actual rank doesn't matter to me, I just hate watching the thing go down when I lost. If I get my ass beat then fair enough, they got me, but the bar going empty and the numbers showing specifics and the little sound you can't rematch fast enough to avoid make it real hard to ignore that I did lose something. I'd just as easily play casual instead but that has a wider player pool. Plus it feels way worse losing 80 of something every lost set than losing 1 of something every few lost sets.
@@Blustride Fair enough tbh, I'm consistently floor 10 so I just don't tend to leave it.
10:48 yo is this true? what item is it? i will auto lock if i see an enemy haze on the team but im just using community builds rn lol
The thing that bugs me about motion inputs is that there's no incremental success, either I do the input correctly and get the move I want, or else my character does something random that's probably not at all applicable to the situation. In the Deadlock example, all that movement tech is cool, but if you don't know it you're still moving towards your target. Maybe you'll be too late to be tactically useful sometimes, but the better you get at all the movement stuff, the better off you are. It's not all or nothing, and if you mess it up you're just a little slower. You don't, say, set off your ult by accident for failing the tech.
Those goals are completely different, the objective "do a motion input" vs "move from point a to point b" are on completely different levels. One has only one way to do it while the other has a lot, if it was "move from point a to point b in the fastest way possible to save your team" then it's now a "win or fail" condition like the first. If you just want to beat your opponent in a fighting game, messing up a combo still does damage, it's not gonna win you evo, but you've made progress on beating your opponent regardless.
@medevilwori4 I feel this, when I pick up a new fighting game I start by literally just hitting my opponent.
I don't worry about combos, except maybe the most basic ones, I never worry about specials. I literally just use normals until I'm comfortable.
@@medevilwori4 thing is, messing up a combo often straight-up loses you the game, it doesn't "progress towards beating the opponent".
@@LazurBeemz Against an opponent of a similar skill level, who's just as bad/good at combos as you? Or are you assuming the opponent is always Justin Wong, Mena, or Tokido level?
@@Ketsuekisanthey dont have to be droping your combo is usualy still and auto loss
I get so annoyed by the Deadlock comparison and motion inputs. Let me know if you think deadlock is a good shooter when you need to draw a circle on screen before firing each shot. Fighting game players should not be dictating on how their own genre they've been playing for decades are to those on the outside. It's pretentious as hell.
Hey sajam my son is autistic and we really want to play online on a team on the same console plz tell advocate for this so I can bond with my son and get him some wins
Is making fun of people for not having a skin really a thing?
Yeah. They call you "default" and then do Fortnite dances.
If they want to, people will make fun of you for any reason they can find.
I think this would only be a fair comparison if in deadlock these multi button combos were way way stricter, there was 10-100x as many of them, and you couldn't use any of your abilities without them.
buh
Fighting games are more difficult than other genres because of the time sink they require to learn, even more casual fighting games like platformer or arena fighters take more time to learn than other genre’s of games