What Is Difficult About Learning Fighting Games?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ต.ค. 2024
- Hint: It's the same thing that's difficult about every other competitive game.
also, most of the arguments that y'all are going to get into in the comments we've discussed in some older videos:
• Fighting Games Are Not...
• A Measured Response Ag...
• Fighting Game Difficul...
streamed Mar. 31, 2021
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Addendum: this mf sajam need to turn off auto-focus bruh im heated
#FGC
“Once you learn to Ex, then you have to learn to ex when she press”
-Sun Tzu
And then you have to learn what to do when she don't press.
And then you have to learn what to do whe she press differently.
Oh god why is this so accurate.
I feel like the moment after a player crosses the execution barrier is the moment most likely to lose people. It feels like you have access to all the answers, but you have no idea when to use them.
Wow I never thought about it like this but that's oddly very true. I remember spending a ton of time in the lab, going online and losing harder than when I just mashed at the start of my playtime
It's like knowing that the answer to the Great Question of Life is "42", but not knowing what the Great Question of Life itself is.
This is why I have always learned fighting games by playing matches (preferably with random character select). Learn the game, not the move list.
My MK11 online experience in a nutshell. Though I might've just chosen the wrong character
What if they never cross the execution barrier?
A good lesson in life is to just jump in & do stuff. Really hope to grow the scenes by getting more people in this relaxed mindset.
Facts. I was playing GranBlue and I was in the A ranks but I didn’t play for like 6 months and it was a new character and matchup. In order to solve my problem I said to myself “Bro just fucking jump it’ll work”................it did
yeah i used to spend hours in training mode but when the GGStrive beta dropped i decided that i was gonna mess around for a little bit in training to learn maybe one basic combo then straight into ranked.
honestly the most fun I've had in an FG in a long time.
@@GameOSaurusChaosC this was my exact experience, i was always too anxious to play fgs online so i just grinded training mode for years. then when the strive beta came out i was like fuck it let me just jump straight into ranked, and i learned infinitely more and had infinitely more fun in those couple hours playing the beta than the dozens i've spent in training mode.
@@pinkfloyd36123 I always wonder how people do it. I mean i did try to do that in strive and just hated every time i played with most players. I do find it great that people can just jump in and have fun.
True, when I pick up a new Fighting Game, I jump into training mode, get a feel of the movement and then jump into online and do whatever I think is good. THEN it's time to learn.
Fighting games aren't hard to play; they're just hard to beat people in.
Very true. Half of playing a fighting game is the mind games that not only against another person, but against themselves.
It took my gf, that never played a fg, all but 1 hour to figure out how to quarter circle consistently. And a bit longer than that to learn dp. What really intimidated her was not execution. It was knowing how to implement anything in an actual game.
@@leithazizpagy4699 That's an issue of not knowing notation. Not execution. I'm sure once you had it explained to you it didn't take much time to figure out how to do it consistently.
@@leithazizpagy4699 It’s usually because SF is a legacy title and assume you know what charge inputs are.
That's a valid point. My brother was playing Killer Instinct when he was 3 years old. The controller on the floor, his finger on Up, his thumb in his mouth, watching Fulgore neutral jump for minutes on end.
As a pilot, the last 2 minutes of this video hit me with so much truth lol
Commercial, military, or private?
Amazing anyway, I have a lot of respect for pilots.
@@spiritualopportunism4585 thank you! Private currently, working toward commercial right now
As a rocket scientist, I can say that fighting games are indeed not rocket science.
Except being a pilot is a job. Fighting Games are games. They are supposed to be fun.
Obviously losing is never going to be fun, but losing because there's a move you know how to do and you know is the right strategy for the moment but it's too difficult to execute? That's not fun.
@@Pxtl thats why training mode exists, to help you improve yourself in terms of gameplay, strategy and execution.
Damn Sol players, always talking down to the rest of us.
Yeah, who does he think he is lecturing us while playing such a brain dead gorilla character?! Anyways, back to my Leo tutorial.
BANDIT BRINGER!
@@meepmeep9943 lmao
I've been thinking recently about this and an idea I've had that maybe completely wrong is this :
Comparing fighting games to action games like Devil May Cry or God of War. In FGs you get the entire toolkit at the beginning which is super daunting, frustrating and confusing. A million mobility options plus a million moves in different situations. Conversely, you start with Kratos doing only a couple of basic attacks. Then you get one runic attack then later a second one. By the end of the game you're effortlessly switching between two weapons with two movesets and 4 runic attacks with different cooldowns plus a talisman cooldown plus giving orders to atreus and using a rage meter. But since you progress step by step you don't get overwhelmed, you learn how to incorporate new skills into new situations and you can always focus on the enemy ahead of you and the strategy to beat them. In fighting games you have to personally decide which tools to ignore which could vary from character to character and even based on who you're fighting.
I thought of this after enjoying learning Strive in the beta (game was simplified which ironically did help me grasp the gameplay quicker and focus on the matches). I then bought Xrd Rev2 and was too overwhelmed with the amount of options from the tutorials/sample combos/missions. Maybe a single player mode in fighting games where you slowly unlock skills could be beneficial. It's like how beginners in Tekken need someone to tell them to just hit up or back on knockdown and ignore the rest of the options until they're more comfortable learning the thousand other ways they can get off the ground (or not get off it even).
"Maybe a single player mode in fighting games where you slowly unlock skills could be beneficial."
This is the major issue with fighting games. It's not that they are harder to play, learning how to play them is WORK. It's not fun to be forced to book learn all this crazy shit just to be ok at a fighting game because the single player content teaches you nothing about how to play. Even Max has said that playing the single player can actually make you worse since strategies against input reading AI don't work against people.
Tutorials are a terrible solution since it is the equivalent of reading the entire textbook for the year in a week in school. You have been overwhelmed with information but you will forget damn near all of it and not know how to apply it. And yet for some reason fighting games still operate this way, it's no wonder some designers think they need to be dumbed down since it's less information to learn in a week. Egorapter's Sequilitis videos show how games are supposed to slowly introduce new mechanics to people, fighting games completely ignore this basic design principle. Razorfist said an interesting quote about Super Mario RPG that I'm paraphrasing "this game doesn't dumb itself down for new players, it brings them up to it's level". Fighting games stand on the top of the hill and just call you a scrub for not being able to climb the mountain.
I think fighting games need to embrace their beat em up roots and use them, and not arcade modes, as single player content with enemy types that train you for specific situations. For example, some of them have "armour" where they don't have hit stun until your combo is at least 3, some enemies block everything but lows, some enemies can only be hit at range with a projectile, some constantly jump around and you have to anti-air them and so on. If you implement mechanics like you mentioned in God of War or DMC where you slowly get new moves people will pick up the mechanics faster rather than being overwhelmed with too much info but no muscle memory.
This is a much more fun way to learn how to play, the current method most fighting games use just feels like a job. That's why the community is so niche compared to other games, video games are supposed to be fun.
That's a terrible idea because then players learn to use their skills in strategies that may work against the computer but will not work against a human. Playing against the computer may be good if you want to practice mechanical execution, but it doesn't work to learn strategy. I think the solution is tutorials like this: th-cam.com/video/9cwUGqHmeXM/w-d-xo.html that teach you what to do with your character instead of trying to learn all the possible options of a character.
@@gatocochino5594 "That's a terrible idea because then players learn to use their skills in strategies that may work against the computer but will not work against a human. "
Against regular fighting game AI that is a huge issue but with something like a Beat Em Up you can design specific enemies for certain skills and situations. You can do this to the point where players will instinctively know what to do in certain scenarios rather than being used to dealing with input reading AI that falls for Ken flowchart strategies.
It will never replicate playing against a real person, but the massive gaps in knowledge and the issue of information overload in panic situations that Sajam has mentioned many times is eliminated. It will just simply be about reading your opponent rather than being overwhelmed with what moves to use in a split second.
@@poonoo87 Beat em up gameplay introduces pretty significant issues like having multiple enemies to deal with at once, having them approach you from more than one side of the screen, whether or not you can simulate a corner environment like fighting games, and even more simple things like screen space and movement. It's not impossible to deal with those things in a smart way, but that's barely scratching the surface of the sort of design issues that would have to be considered.
You can't design enemies that play by a different ruleset than playable characters, else you'd just be having the player develop a different set of skills that wouldn't be relevant against another person. AI behavior in general is a big problem. It'd be awkward and weird if all of the other enemies on screen just decided to not attack you if you were in the middle of a combo or just scored a knockdown. Having some enemies only get hit by certain attacks isn't a good idea. If an enemy blocks everything that isn't a low that's not going to teach me how to do a mix up. If an enemy has super armor what am I supposed to learn? How to hit confirm? Is it meant to encourage combos in general? Can the enemies attack while absorbing hits or do they just stand there? Armored moves already exist in fighting games and mashing on those usually gets you blown up, so that would just teach people bad habits. Same issue with the projectiles thing. Instead of teaching players how to solve a problem you're having them play Simon Says. It's like the color coded enemies in DmC. The devs wanted to encourage you to cycle through all of your weapons, but what they did was completely counter productive. It invalidated at least 2/3 of your moveset when one of them was on screen. It was even worse when they had enemies of opposing types spawn at the same time. All of those enemies were anti-fun and the only alternative to suffering with a gimped moveset was popping DT to turn them into free kills.
Despite how this might come across I'm not trying to nitpick here. I actually think a beat em up with fighting game mechanics could be very good for streamlining the learning process of fighting games. Doing that is a lot harder than it sounds though. At least, if the aim is to teach basic fighting game fundamentals through single player content.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
I swear this is life advice over fighting game advice.
Fighting games ARE life advice.
You know what's hard about fighting games. Spending hours in the lab only to get demoralized online.
this is true, but only because you go online with the goal of winning, you gotta go in and have micro goals of making small improvements
@@AlucardVannaw i want to win, and it doesn’t make a difference when i’m still getting bodies everymatch
I think this question is answered very differently when you're a new player than when you are more experienced.
For me, it's basically a lot of what you said. Strategy, wondering what to do in a given moment, being aware of your options and your opponent's, realizing your mental state and the opponent's, etc, are some of the things I spent most time learning and practicing. It's what's most difficult for me and what I see when I watch better players play. But honestly, I love fighting games too much to step away from them no matter what comes out and what the new fighting games "meta" becomes. And yes, execution still takes some time getting used and consolidating, no matter how many previous fighting games you have played before and no matter how "dumb down" mechanics or inputs are.
For new players, it's hard to point one thing, but even learning a combo and realizing you can't do 2 or 3 specific notions in a row is enough to give up on a fighting game. Also, knowing one of your friends has been playing X game or X fighting games for over Y years discourages them to try getting better because "I've got a lot to catch on. I'll never beat this guy". Getting rekt without knowing what's going on while your friend seems to be in total control is very discouraging. Getting beat by this guy or seeing a match where you had the life lead go south seems to have too much mystery for some people. They simply feel they just can't win.
They start asking questions but, on my experience, is not strat questions, the questions are "wtf happened? How did I lose so bad? When I had a chance, how did I end up losing?" And they just don't know the answer, your friend beating you either doesn't wanna tell you or starts a long ass explanation with weird terms common in the FGC.
A lot of friends that I've talked to about fighting games get surprised when I tell them of "turns". It doesn't make any sense for them and for others, they just don't know when it's okay to press buttons
Yeah, I've run into this a lot while trying to get into this genre of game. It especially did not help when I ran into the more unlikeable parts of the FGC. I think that vets just need to be kinder to newer players. Don't destroy them immediately, practice on another character, pick random, just don't go 100% power on their ass. To use a poor analogy here, a lot of FGC people think they are like Yugi while they are definitely more like Kaiba.
The amount of people who treat my or anyone else's struggles with these games like "Everybody suffers, you will get used to it." is surprisingly high. Yes, I understand that in the grand scheme of things; execution is infinity easier than the strategy. However, if someone is struggling with the execution, it's frankly bad to just remind them how easy it is.
TL;DR: Just be nicer to newbies, it's good for you. (Check out pattheflip!)
This is such a good comment. I've played my dad in sf5 a few times just for fun. We both get upset cause we don't know what's going on or how someone did something. It is less I puts or strategy and more about the fact of what happened
Honestly it's exhausting trying to get my friends into fighting games.
Not because I'm constantly trying to get them to play, more like, I'm always playing Guilty Gear when I'm chatting with them and they think it looks interesting and whenever they ask I offer to show them the ropes. I think the execution barriers are part of it (I've heard some pretty choice tantrums over quarter circle moves), but definitely agree that the "basic strategy" barrier is generally more brutal once you actually start fighting humans.
It's really three things. First, they're not as uber-legendary hard as people say, but most fighting games do have an execution curve that will require solo training to get over, as well as a "strategy curve" that involves understanding positioning, defense, and universal mechanics. That's already a lot for some people. To feel like there are basic things their character needs to do to be effective that they physically can't recreate until they work for it. Second, fighting games are almost always 1v1 and there's little getting around it. Third, there's no "downtime," fit into fighting games like you might find in other games.
If there are major gaps in your strategy in like, a battle royale, you still spend a shit ton of time doing stuff in game that feels good, running around, looting, exploring. In a fighting game, if there are gaps in your play, and your opponent can find them, you will be reminded constantly. In some cases, you literally won't be able to advance until you fix the issue. I think there's a similar brutality in any 1v1 competitive game. I think one of the reasons I had an easier time getting into fighting games is that I was big into Starcraft II when I was younger. I'm used to it.
I think a lot of people are confused about why they want to get into fighting games. When someone's watching a fighting game, they see the beautiful style and self-expression in the play, and they think "I want that." They don't understand that that style is molded by countless losses and improvements. They don't see that the expression can only exist as a conversation with your opponent. Some people push through and eventually find that understanding, some people don't and blame the game.
Do we have the same friends? I, too have heard many, many, many complaints about "arcade motions" and how "outdated" they are, along with all the other stuff you said. Trying to get my friends into fighting games is nigh impossible.
Well said
"They don't see that the expression can only exist as a conversation with your opponent."
This and the whole paragraph were beautiful.
@@noboty4168because they are unnecessarily hard and outdated
As a person who has been studying to be a translator, fighting games are a new language. Saying what you want to say is great and all, but knowing how to apply it to any situation and understanding the true meaning behind people’s words is the hard part.
Actually, this is an interesting comparison.
The biggest problem I have with fighting games is that the things you need to start learning with, are not the things that you want to be doing. I DO want to hit those 1 frame link when I started cause trip > throw in oki > trip looks boring as hell to a new player. Just like in a language, you learn all these phrases and maybe even get some idiom taught to you, but you ain't ever using them. Instead, you keep saying stuff like "hello, yes, I speak this language a little. Nice to meet you. Hope we could be friends." Like dude, when the fuck can I start weaving "fuck" into my sentences?
In all fairness, most fighting games are simpler than some things like mobas. Becouse is very hard to have a game that has no frame data of some kind. Even if you call it delay or cooldown
From my experience, and from watching other people, the knowledge you need can seem very overwhelming, on top of that its kinda easy to get discouraged, especially when you are playing an opponent that that has set up shop in your head, and doesn’t plan on paying rent
Ihn my case that is every player. Honestly is why i dont play fighting games...well one of the many reasons.
"You learn all this stuff, you get into a game and it's BAIKEN. NO!"
*laughs in Baiken main*
mmmm bacon
Baiken mains exist everywhere except guilty gear.
as someone who doesn't play baiken l have one big question
*why the fuck do all of you have 20+ frames of delay*
@@thebokchoy6854 Sounds like a cope to me. xD
yyyyyYOU
I think one of the things that goes unexplored about the difficulty of learning fighting games is actually the combination of how little full sequence repetition may occur regarding a situation so you don't really get a chance to learn what to actually do in a match. For example, in a game like DBFZ, the what do I do if I block a vanish on the ground situation can go so many different ways against so many different characters that you really can get lost in how to actually deal with it and understanding the key elements of what to look for in that specific moment. One of the things I've noticed is that people who play single-player games predominately are used to a certain level of "certainty" regarding the games rules, but more importantly, how the AI will respond. Thus, there used to just building a simple algorithm and going with that and it working like 99% of the time whereas you can't really do that (easily at least) in a FG. When I talk to them about their frustration - it usually boils down to "I was doing something that worked before and I really have no idea why it doesn't work now"
The other thing that I think is very tough (but still universal to a lot ofmulti-player games) is that it can be very difficult to understand what is a bad habit because the only feedback you'll get about something being a bad habit is when it doesn't actually work anymore. For a lot of single-player games, if it works, it's probably a good habit *in all scenarios* because it won't be changed up OR if it doesn't work, there is a very easily identifiable reason and it's very easy to switch. The classic example would be using something like a Magic spell in a RPG to just kill enemies and then running into an enemy that is impervious to that magic spell. One or two interactions and you just switch. In a FG - losing those one or two interactions may mean your Bo3 set is over and you may have no way of really understanding what happened because then you're next game it works again. In addition, the more deeply ingrained a habit becomes, the more difficult it is to "break it" later on because it may set the foundation for all your decision making. With FGs, until you have *a lot* of experience, it's very difficult to really even understand what is a bad habit, good habit, or just a bad habit that is working because your opponent is either bad or just not capable of dealing with it. Part of what makes elite and mastery level players so good at a lot of FGs is that their skill set is predominately just super ingrained "good habits" that they usually aren't really going through a giant morass of bad habits and trying to break them and convert them. It doesn't help that most single-player games probably indirectly ingrain a lot of bad habits into people without them even realizing it.
It's crazy how much of this can be applied outside of fighting games, even games. Like with the example of wanting to fly a plane and getting there.... There's a LOT of lessons about fighting games that can be put through a psychological lenses... It's really cool.
There's alot of lessons to be learned getting good at everything, these lessons are very similar no matter what you do.
There's a lot of mental energy expenditure that I don't think people realize because they just wanna do the cool stuff. Thinking is hard, man.
That's what DOA is for
Intentionality. That's what's hard. Doing what you want to do. That's the first hurdle, the rest comes naturally because we all "know" how to fight. The concept is beating another person
Knowing is not that hard. Understanding is an entirely different beast.
I'd love for an established game designer to talk about this topic in depth.
Playing To Win by Dave Sirlin (Fantasy Strike)
@@eeveelilith After all, understanding fighting games and making fighting games are two different things.
@@eeveelilith
Too bad most fighting games suck while the ones that don’t only stopped sucking after making several years’ worth of patches based mainly on opinions and meta game established by pro players. Your point is worth about as much as your probable amount of fighting game skill, very little.
Programming a fighting game and playing a fighting game professionally require entirely different skill sets. The overlap starts and ends at knowledge of frame data, which is known by any fighting game player worth their salt to be almost entirely contextual rather than some bible that’ll automatically get you out of pools. This is especially true of older games like vanilla SFII since frame data wasn’t anywhere near as easily obtained from devs OR fans as in the present day.
It might be hard to accept, but dismissing superior opinions through the unsupported point that somebody on a platform with millions of users MIGHT agree with it isn’t a substitute for...you know...knowing what the fuck you’re talking about. Get your head out of your ass and you might actually learn something for a change.
Keits could probably talk about it.
@Super Mario Sorry , but I would take Daisuke opinion over someone like Justin wongs, but then again, why cant we have both be on a panel?
i think the hardest part is resisting the urge not to button mash
I struggle with that til this very day
I find this the number one issue for most beginners. And it’s the first thing I tell people to stop doing along with jumping constantly.
something i've been thinking about ever since watching folks play the Strive beta: it'd be neat to see tutorials for *training mode* in particular. something that goes over the extra tools available to the player (especially record/replay!) and some explanation of additional info shown (scaling, frame data, etc)
@@leithazizpagy4699 Have you seen the extent to which they emulate a situation? I think a tutorial wouldn't hurt. I deffo get what you mean but I think when a new player gets an idle space like this he can be like "Fuck am I supposed to do here?" and that practice mode is too good to pass up on.
@@leithazizpagy4699 +R funnily enough is way simpler but harder at the same time because of lack of specificity. It wouldn't be the same anyways because Strive also has a replay and a none replay feature to emulate a situation. D'jank (the junk) is crazy bro. All in all, a new player wouldn't visit the Training Grounds like you or me, they'd do it willy nilly to know what training is about. Then they'd check the menu to go back to the main menu and they'd be astounded by the amount of things you can suddenly do there. Too many options leads to more indecisiveness. Isn't it that in +R it's only one button press to replay? Anyways, if you play on PC in Steam I wouldn't mind losing some more agaisnt you bro.
I'm convinced that what makes fighting games hard for a complete beginner is how alien the games feel when you start. Little to no modern video games have the same feel as a fighting game (even something as small as you can't redirect yourself after you've jumped). It's like putting Super Mario 64 in front of someone who's only ever played Hearthstone. Few tutorials seem to prime you for adjusting for how a fighting feels and it means people jump in, feel a complete lack of control and then get shit on, then quit. Then throw in needing to learn motion inputs into the mix and it's no wonder people drop these games so easily.
Not saying I want the feel of the games to change or anything btw, because I don't. I just wish more would be done to put new players in the right mindset to start to learn these things, preferably by the devs themselves. The movement tutorial in Xrd is an excellent step in the right direction but arcsys bafflingly never did it again.
im so glad i grew up with smash so it wasnt COMPLETELY foreign when i jumped into melty blood
I think the day I stopped worrying about doing TODs or learning x combo was the start of me really learning them. Lab time is important, but experience with other people is what really improves your skills. Even if you eat shit half the time
Even if you eat shit 90% of the time*
100% of the time
*Especially if you eat shit.
@@CarbonRollerCaco I mean, it is true but you kind of need to learn how to eat shit.
I have never learned how to do that so that maybe the reason why i tend to not continue playing FG
@@minatoEd It takes a certain will to persist through hundreds of full-on shit meals.
As a +R pot player i never had to learn how to anything except run oki and do some combos, the real hard part was learning that against good players you just have to step up your pressure and neutral, cuz doing a bajillion damage from optimised combos doesnt matter if you dont catch them a single time lol
My experience going online in Blazblue Chronon Phantsma, picked Terumi so I can do stomp. Realized I didn't actually learn how to apply proper block strings. Immediately got Instant blocked into a Full screen Azrael combo and got destroyed, lesson was learned.
You lost every single new player before the first comma in your sentence. The absolute disconnect between what it's like being new and being experienced is why the fgc will never grow. You people literally don't even know what it's like being new to this genre.
I think the overall skill level of everyone has gone up significantly over the past decade mainly because of how much knowledge thats out there. What makes beginners feel like they need to spend 1000s of hours to practice is that OTHER beginners ARE grinding the shit out of games and memorizing frame data/hitboxes/hurtboxes.
This is an undervalued point. I played Melee casually for nearly a decade thinking I was hot stuff before seeing some tournament footage and realizing I was trash. My thousands of hours invested didn't even put me on a competitive radar, but it seemed like I could be a top-tier casual player and bottom-tier competitive player independently. Basically every modern fighting game wants you to be shooting for the competitive bracket and it raises the skill floor.
Yeah, this probably plays a role at least. Though I suppose a lot of it can apply to other competitive games too.
I think an issue is that training mode and combo trials are designed in weird ways. People go into combo trials and see some early stuff requiring things like corner only, full meter, counter hit, tight links, crouch-stand mixing, etc. combos and think that it'll be demanded of them in regular gameplay. A developer making character trials that just teach people the basics of the character such as their simple low-execution BNBs or character-specific tech that they might want to master (Sagat's karas, for instance).
Also I'd say there is a certain amount of benefit to letting players just piano their buttons and get a satisfying combo, and in a specific game giving a generic easy combo. Like MVC3 has the "L-M-H-S jump M-M-H-S" that is a decent combo which is next to impossible to drop and works with basically the entire cast. It gives players a comfort zone to give them a foundation on which they are comfortable enough to explore the game more and experiment around it, but if they ever get tilted then they can hit confirm the generic combo to give a couple seconds find their mental footing. Probably not something you'd want in Street Fighter but for more fast-paced or team games with high barrier to entry that are built around it then giving a simple gatling combo that works for the whole cast might be a design decision worth examining. I know that there are a lot of games that offer an autocombo mode but I don't know if even beginner players actually use it, if only because it feels dirty to do so. I know that even jumping into new games or series I've never started on easy mode.
The problem for me is that I can't play fighting games "casually" in the truest sense due to the sheer amount of commitment it requires to even get started. Ever since I learned the fundamentals of the genre (after years of being a clueless masher), I can no longer just "pick and play" a new fighting game.
I'm now aware that in order to get started, I first need to understand the system, pick a character to focus on, read up guides about this character's best moves for various ranges/situations and their bnb combos, practice all of that until I can pull it off at least semi-reliably and only THEN I can actually get started... and most likely get wrecked almost immediately anyway by unfamiliar "cheap" moves of other characters which I'll now have to learn to counter if I want to get a chance to actually "play".
All this commitment and effort just to get started and almost immediately hit a wall anyway and realize you have to keep learning that much more if you want to actually "play". And so, the amount of commitment just keeps growing and growing, to the point you no longer feel like you're playing "casually". No, at this point you're practically an athlete practicing a sport on a regular basis and tryharding to get wins, to justify all the time you've already invested into getting to this point.
While that's the fun journey of learning a fighting game, it's nonetheless a journey that you have to knowingly commit yourself to and that's no easy thing to do. Say, I'd like to support GG Strive as it's ArcSys' first rollback game, but I wouldn't buy a game unless I actually intended to play it. The problem is, "to play" GG Strive as someone who never played GG (and barely any 2D FGs at all) is such a huge commitment I can't imagine subjecting myself to...
Are you sure you're not putting too much pressure or expectation on yourself to win? Like the feeling I get from this post is that you're trying to play casually, but from a competitive mindset where you won't be comfortable unless you understand the matchup. My advice would be to relax and just enjoy learning the game, preferably with someone else or a community doing the same so you can be on relatively fair ground. During a new game's release is usually the best time to do this.
@@86chaz86 I went through this process with a few friends and the entire thing quickly dissolved into all of us being forced to extensively lab each others' characters to even stand a chance.
Since we weren't new to FGs as a whole, we were using decent moves/setups we learned from guides and many of them were borderline impossible to deal with for newbies without spending hours searching for answers. And, half the time we couldn't even really find any good answers because we weren't experienced enough with the game as a whole, which quite frustrated some of us.
I can't really imagine what it means to play an FG "casually". The moment you run into an opponent with a solid game plan that you have no answer to, you gonna have to start studying to find a counter, which is not exactly a "casual" experience at that point.
Something I've been doing over the last few days is just going on online and losing. Yeah, I said it. I'm losing.
But it's been fun, and I've been learning a lot very quickly. What moves let me low-profile, what characters I can't do it against cause they'll just punish me anyways, distances I can safely react to projectiles (with my crappy reflexes) that I can still get a jump-punish, stuff like that.
And it's been really fun. My execution still needs a ton of work- I have trouble wake-up DP'ing which usually ends up with me eating a meaty combo, but about 1 in 3 matches I can get it out, and I feel awesome when that happens. And I can win about 1 in 5.
It's an actually terrible win-rate, but every match is feeling like micro-wins to me.
There's nothing fun about losing fifty times in a row and having no idea what to do about it . Fighting games suck, flat out. Unfun. Unintuitive. Unable to teach you what to do differently. Incomprehensible.
When choosing our passions, it's important to understand that we're also choosing our pain at the same time. Even with mechanically simpler games, say card games, there are some aspects that'll require a lot of work to get good at. Inevitably, while trying to improve, brick walls will appear. How we deal with these brick walls is what ultimately shapes our perception of FGs (and any other endeavor, for that matter). Choosing to do something to bring them down will require work, failure, more work, more failure, rinse and repeat until success finally presents itself. Choosing not to do something will mean we abandon them or continue to bash our heads against the walls aimlessly.
I know this is an older comment, but holy shit you just inspired me.
That first line is quote-worthy. I couldn't agree more with this and the fact that this advice isnt more widespread is baffling.
I didn't even notice Moste has been editing out the stream alerts until just now. I do miss some of the funny segues but it's probably better this way. Great job
Learning and getting better at fighting games(or any competitive thing ever) is about learning to be your your coach. That is the most easier said than done thing about fighting games as no one expects to have to play a "video game" you have to have this crazy journey of self mastery. Well that's how it feel for me and what makes fighting games sick to me, but you can say that for getting better at anything. The problem for me about fighting games and why its hard for beginners is everyone looks up to the pros when they first start(since the pro scene is the fgc); there is no such thing as a casual audience for fighting games and that's what hurts it the most.
Everyone overestimates how good they are at fps games, but no one compares themselves to the pros in those games and never get that realization at how high the skill gap really is in most games. I love the pro scene but I want fighting games to grow to where the casual audience can thrive which is the most important thing we need. Thank you for my ted talk and thanks for keeping it cool Sajam
You have no idea how skilled I am at clicking on the cards in hearthstone
It’s on another level bro
I’m frame perfect at clicking on cards
I think you just touched on exactly why he's wrong. The only thing difficult in a card game is the mental aspect, and no one says they're the hardest genre to touch. But imagine if you had to wildly move your thumbs in a precise manner with a single frame of error in order to literally just draw a card. What is you had a fraction of a second to do a charge motion to just play a card. Suddenly the entire process becomes overwhelming, *because the execution makes the mental game ten times harder*.
@@17thknight exactly this right here. Best comment on the thread
What I think a lot of people like Sajam misunderstand is just how bad some people are at mechanical stuff. I have a friend that enjoys fighting games. He's spent hours trying to master basic inputs. He still can't manage to do a DP on command half the time. Like cool, you managed to master inputs and it didn't take that long. So did I. But there are a bunch of people that didn't, and then they get trapped in the mentality of "I know I should have DPed there and I tried but it didn't work" and just say fuck it.
Honestly, I feel like this mentality is a lot of the reason people feel put off about fighting games. There's this incredibly basic part of the game that everybody goes "Oh that's easy, you just need to practice!" and don't realize how demoralizing it is when they can't do it even when they do practice. This is especially true since people don't really hang out in arcades or at your buddy's house for this shit anymore.
Like, I learned competitive melee in person and competitive FGC games online. I had an easier time learning Melee, despite the fact that learning the execution for that game is a lot harder than in SFV, because there was an actual physical person there pushing me to be better, knowing that I'm just going to see him again tomorrow. Meanwhile I learned SFV by playing and getting information online, all the while being told how braindead easy SFV is and how I should be embarassed for struggling with it.
This this this this. Oh my lord, this. I think there is a weird empathy gap when it comes to beginners in fgs. Sure, some people will respond well with "oh it just takes practice, it's easy." But I know I don't, it is like telling someone who has depression to "not be sad 4head" It's why I stopped trying to learn +R, all the people around me could actually do inputs like 80% of the time and they never went easy on me, only swapped characters. My execution is bad and does not help with the fact that my brain and my mental game are further ahead than my execution. Exactly like you said, "I know I should have DPed there and I tried but it didn't work."
I feel like if long-time players just show a little more empathy and do not obliterate beginners you would start to see an uptick of people staying with the games.
Haha the flying analogy was so on point. Kinda the same with learning how to play an instrument.
If you cant punch someone who is across the room, you need more Hamon.
Zoom Punch!
Need the gum gum fruit
I've made enough posts about how I feel about getting into the fighting games as a newcomer and what they need to grab people, so I'll just say that I hit Carnage Scissors with its wonky hitbox at 12 years old and I never went back.
Do you have a link? I would like to read your posts. As a new player, I question myself daily if I'm cut out for the genre or not.
My first experience with fighting games was having fun playing Ryu in Smash 4 and deciding to pick up USF4. I booted up the game and didn't know what to do, so I figured "I guess the combo trials will teach me what I'm supposed to do. When I can beat all of those for my character, I'll know I'm good enough to try going online."
That turned me off of fighting games for a long time.
I think the problems that new players have are even more basic than some people realise. I started playing fighting games last year and I had read that new players often don't block, but that blocking is extremely important. I play SFV and I knew that standing block would stop overhead and high attacks and that blocking low would stop high and crouching attacks. The problem was that I never knew when my opponent would do an overhead or a low attack. It felt like a guessing game and I always guessed incorrectly. I felt like I would have to learn all the moves of all the characters just to be able to defend myself. Eventually I realised that most of the time I should be blocking low as only air attacks and some very slow moves were overhead attacks and the rest weren't. I had almost given up on fighting games (again), because I wasn't having any fun getting combo-ed every round when all I was trying to do was block.
To me, it felt like getting spawn-camped in a shooter. I had felt completely helpless and I didn't understand how I was supposed to get better if I couldn't even play the game.
Another problem is that blocking is just "boring". Why'd a new player want to learn blocking when they can fly around and throw fireballs or do piledrivers? It's a "chore" skill.
My Asian neighbour showed me your other channel Anime illuminati
I then showed him Maximillian and he said "oh he have three, very nice!"
I've begun teaching someone fighting games and it was alot of fun.
Sheerly anxiety inducing but alot of fun.
Taught them block strings and how to combo with assists in DBFZ.
Now I'm learning the characters they like playing to be a better teacher.
I made it fun for them somehow and I was just doing stuff like a training mode where do it three times in a row and you have the option to move on with some practice sparring. It felt weird in a good way playing differently for another person but very challenging to not default to muscle memory.
So even teaching someone who isn't as good as you is certainly a good way to improve imo. If it's easy to teach you understand it through and through. If you're scratching your head at some stuff hit the lab for a bit or do some research into it.
Having another person be with you to help you learn can be very valuable and alot of fun.
Charge characters are the bane of my existence.
@darknight94ful it’s funny you mention that because I said the same thing about myself before picking up SFV this past winter. I ended choosing Chun-Li as my main, knowing that she was a charge character lol.
Now that I’m more comfortable doing SBK combos and Fireball -> V-trigger extensions, I don’t feel like charge characters are all that bad. They just require a different form of thinking that we need to get used to, especially after playing motion characters.
Moral of story, don’t be afraid to try a charge character especially if they look really cool and really fun to play! Or if they’re waifu like Chun lol 😂
@@LuisJimenez-yx1er Definitely, I felt the same way and now I find them easier than charge characters
That was me as a kid back in the SF2 days, lol. I avoided playing Guile, Bison, Balrog, etc because charge characters just made no sense to me, but nowadays playing them are second nature to me and isn't hard at all. It just takes practice man, be uncomfortable, get frustrated, it's ok. Just as long as you keep trying. One day it'll suddenly just click for you.
I feel like that's mostly because of poor onboarding. Most charge characters don't have a good way to tell whether they have a charge yet or not, you just kind of have to feel out the timer for it.
@@HighLanderPonyYT that’s a big reason I don’t like charge characters for sure. I really like being able to know exactly when I can use my moves.
good point. i'm an FPS player who just started playing fighting games and i don't want to rush learning combos bcs i know they won't matter if i don't know when/how to properly use them. it's pretty much the same as in FPS games. i barely trained my aim and mostly tried to learn the game instead (watching pro games, trying stuff out for different scenarios, etc) which made me quite good at it
The biggest issue in my opinion is that the games give absolutely nothing in terms of extrinsic rewards for learning, meaning that you can only get into a game once you’re either already in the genre, near a local scene, being mentored by someone in the genre, or have multiple weeks of time to kill hitting your head against a wall.
Fighting games are a lot like real fighting. You spent doing drills, doing spats, getting into shape...but once you step into the ring your mind blanks out, or you start thinking too much, or you are doing both at the same time.
At which point you pray to God your muscle memory is enough to keep your head out of the water,or you have a coach that pull you out of that mental death spiral.
Do other competitive games give you extrinsic rewards besides an experience bar that doesn't mean anything? I hear this argument a lot but I can't really think of any awards most of the time.
@@Fatboyftw32
Cs:go will give you money for kills or planting the bomb even when you die or lose the round
MOBAS and Strategy games give you resources so you have something more tangible than positional advantage (which new players won’t appreciate until they’re already a few hours into the genre)
Shooters generally reward you for kills, assists, being there for the objective, and healing allies
Racing games let everybody but last place feel a personal victory.
Fighting games by comparison rarely give you anything more than a victory screen when you win a round or the game.
Fighting games aren't much harder than other types of games. But getting into them is like relearning how to play video games, which feels awful for anyone who already play video games. Someone completely new to video games would probably have an easier time getting into fighting games than a lot of other genres. Execution is hard to learn, but learning to moving in a 3d space from scratch is even harder and way more fundamental.
this, this so much
the execution requirement to play fighting games isn't even that hard to start off with but its so unlike anything else you do in other video games
I'm so glad DiveKick, Lethal League, Fantasy Strike (Rising Thunder) - exist!
In a world where a video, explaining what roman cancel in GG is - 20 minutes long, and you could write a paper on King's grab strings in tekken.
It's just simply an execution wall you have to climb, eventually. Or you just can't play the game 'properly'
in fighting games, the ability to have reliable inputs just takes time
I was always put off by that huge hump, and last year I just took the leap and accepted that this will take a while...
in low ranks, nobody has good execution or a real idea what they are doing, so you can win without needing those either
the first few hundred matches I just used normals, no specials or combos, and I had fun!
today I hit gold (in sfV) for the first time, and there are still a lot of things I can't do
but I found the fun for me in learning, so that's that
what imo is most annoying as new player is when you ask for advice (and also include your rank) and you get advice that's true, but requires very high levels of execution.
this achieves nothing and leads only to frustration. I had to learn to ignore such advice
I don't think execution is the most important or hardest thing to learn, but I do think that it's what scares people away. It's the most visible part of the game, and it's the part that seems the most intimidating to new players when they first load up the combo trials and realize they can barely do any of them. One key is letting new players understand this as early as possible.
This is one of my favorite videos of yours, great topic and great discussion points! That analogy about pilots towards the end feels like most people's college experience. I definitely lost the passion I had for my major by the time I graduated.
4:02 to 4:23
I feel like this is true in Fighting games, where the high level is out strategizing. At a low level you can dominate weaker players mechanically.
RTS is kinda the opposite, where tactics dominate low level play, but at a high level the tactics have been thoroughly studied and you have to out-mechanics your opponent, keep the APM up. Kinda like how Chess openings have been analyzed.
I think when you talk about how there isn't *that* much you need to learn before you can play, I think whats missing is that for like 95% of players, if you give them two games, one they can just pick up and play and have fun with and will teach them during their play, and one where they have to do some kind of homework or training first before they can get to the fun bit, they'll go for the former. I've finished/100%ed some games that are pretty hard and i had to beat my head against a wall for hours sometimes to beat a single challenge, mostly platformers like cuphead and supermeatboy, and I've played plently of complex multiplayer games like DOTA and lol. But I can't seem to get into fighting games because its pretty dn hard to get invested when everyone says oh just doo all this training stuff first for like 30hrs and youll get to the point you can feel like you're actually playing and making decisions, and even then 80% of your matches will feel like you have 0 agency.
It doesn't make fighting games bad or difficult, but it does make them require a lot more investment before you get reward and that makes them far more niche.
Yeah, starting out can be scary, but whoever told you to jump into training mode for 30 hours is just wrong, as a new player you should maybe spend 20 minutes going through the cast to see who you like. Maybe learn a really simple combo like a 3 hit combo of link into special cancel or a short Gatling into sweep/a special move. Once you have that that's all you really need to start playing
Well said.
I just don't agree with this based on my own experience. I'm a new player and the vast majority of my time learning fighting games comes from actually playing the game. My match time to training time ratio is probably something like 90 : 10. You won't learn anything just sitting in training mode pressing buttons. It doesn't take the amount of investment that you say in order to just have fun and play the game. Quite a few other comments on this video say that the most enjoyment they get out of fighting games is when they just hop in and play them. This is just my opinion though, so it might not mirror your experience.
The reason people don't like comparing the learning curve of things like shooters to fighting games is that fighting games have arguably the highest barrier of entry to just make your character do the most fundamental actions.
If I watch someone play a shooter I can boot it up and start shooting. I'm functionally playing the same game as them basically right away even if there are obviously things I can improve on. In a fighting game someone will boot it up, find a character they like (which is already an issue unto itself for many) and then they have to look at the Command List and figure out how to consistently do the motions required to make their character do the basic moves, let alone combos or anything else they have to learn.
If someone wants to pick up a shooter they thought looked cool they just point and click on heads, its straightforward. If someone wants to pick up a fighting game and they're new to the genre, they might not be able to consistently perform the most basic actions with their character for hours upon starting their journey. No other genre (except for maybe RTS) has that kind of initial barrier to entry.
Yes, new players psych themselves out a lot by assuming they need to know all the advanced combos and study frame data just to start playing the game proper, but its silly to ignore that fighting games absolutely have a higher barrier for basic fundamental gameplay actions than almost any other genre in gaming.
Most of my friends and the people I've met throughout the years that don't connect with fighting games that much outside of maybe a franchise they're nostalgic for (or Smash) are in situations where the simple act of doing a target combo trips them up for minutes at a time. Shooters, MOBAs, racing games etc don't have that kind of issue. We can (and should) try to encourage these new players to try being patient and engage with the game in ways that make sense while they grasp the fundamentals but the honest answer is most people don't want to put in a large initial time investment just to make the character move and attack the way they want them to on a basic level in a genre/game they might not end up enjoying.
I would genuinely argue that getting someone into Street Fighter V could potentially be more difficult than getting someone into Quake
That's not true at all though. the most fundamental action in a fighting game is literally one button. Any idiot can sit down with SFV and start punching and kicking. Cr.+HP is a direction and a button, and it's a powerful highly effective anti-air. THAT'S the basics.
Chains and motion inputs and target combos aren't basic at all, you just think they are because you have a warped perception of the genre. You're just mislabelling advanced mechanics as "basics", and of course a beginner is gonna be confused/frustrated if you do that. Street Fighter 2 was Capcom's best-selling game for over 2 decades, you're crazy if you think Quake is easier to get into lmao.
The difficult part for me is muscle memory. It really does take me hours and hours to get the muscle memory for a combo consistent, often because I form bad or inefficient muscle memory in my early play which I then have to break. Obviously if you’re playing on a controller you’re familiar with it’s easier, but still fighting games do not play like any other genre. Your muscle memory has to be totally different.
As an example, I bought my first fightstick last week because it looked fun and I’ve wanted one for a while. I have played on pad for a long time, and while I was never great or practiced too much, I had just about 100 hours on UNI and felt like was growing out of the beginner phase. Switching to fightstick, I am able to learn much faster than I would’ve initially, but it took me a week of practicing 1-3 hours a day to get my BnB down, mainly because I for the life of me couldn’t do 3C into 236A, which is a crucial sequence to end Gordeaus easy combos. I can do it now, but maybe only 70% of the time. And that’s just a combo, that has nothing to do with actually PLAYING the game, playing neutral and moving around. If I’m facing right I can kinda play competently but still am not able to easily respond to situations I’ve trained to recognize, and when I face left im basically flailing around. So my current goal is to go back into training, practice a bit more on the left side, THEN I will finally feel comfortable to start going online.
Fortunately I’m used to FG’s enough that I actually kinda like training mode, and learning this new control method quickly has been really energizing and encouraging. But it’s still been just over a week now and I don’t feel comfortable going online. My muscle memory is just not there yet to the point where I can play with intentionality.
And obviously if I was BRAND NEW, I never would’ve done all this. I would’ve just wanted to play a while with a friend so we can both flail around together and eventually figure out who I wanna play and then maybe watch a tutorial or train or something. But go online when I was brand new? What, are you crazy? I only started going online like 50-60 hours into UNIST. I don’t wanna deal with playing online when i still don’t feel good at the game at all, I wanna play with friends around my skill level. And if I don’t have those friends... I probably wouldn’t have gotten into fighting games.
I know this is very long, but basically here’s what I mean: it took me hours and hours and hours until I got to a point where I would comfortable playing online casually in the way you would do so when playing any other competitive multiplayer game.
So like, I realized what fighting games are:
Half of them (or some percentage) is execution based, compare it to learning a musical instrument. You’re gonna build up muscle memory for songs just like you do for combos, etc.
The other half (or some percentage) is mental games, compare it to learning a card game like yugioh or magic. You see your opponent play a card that sets up into their endgame, and you have a few possible choices of things you can do: play your endgame setup card, destroy theirs, hold on to resources to deal with their future win condition pieces, etc. just like pressuring with oki guessing if they’re gonna wake up super or normal get up etc.
Fighting games ask these skills of you in rapid succession. Anyone learning an instrument will struggle playing a full song perfectly just like you’ll mess up combos, and anyone learning a card game will make the wrong choice of not dealing with their opponent’s threat just like people new to fighting games have prolly tried to learn oki but ate a super instead, and this is SUPER frustrating. You spend any amount of time learning one and completely fail at learning the other, it’s a slow deliberate process
So let me end it off with this
Why are fighting games hard? For the same reason learning to play an instrument is hard, and for the same reason learning a card game is hard
The reality is: just, fucking, practice.
Learning "hard" skills are the most flashy and easy to track progress: BnB's, aiming projectiles, twisting your car to the right angle, etc. Learning "soft" skills are the more time-consuming and difficult to track progress: footsies, respawn patterns, positioning yourself in relation to your teammate on the ball, etc. Ultimately, THAT'S what makes learning new game types difficult, struggling to recognize soft skills and understanding how to improve them.
It feels like you've made this video 20x
It’s important to realise that spending a bit of time to understand what kind of thought processes people use in different situations.
And it’s also important to realise that a lot of it will be quasi-instinctual at the highest levels.
A good player can figure out how an opponent likes to play in a set or two.
An great player can figure out how an opponent likes to play in just a single match.
That is because they have understood how to keep this information and use it efficiently and effectively. This is always on a scale, never black or white.
Most good fighting games have a variety of different characters with a variety of different execution requirements anyway so you don't even have to do quarter circles or DPs all the time. Try a charge character instead. Don't want to do combos? Try a zoner or maybe a grappler or a guy who just hits really freaking hard.
Those are what helped me get in until I built up execution to something playable. (My execution still kinda ass though)
Street Fighter is the prime example of this. Dhalsim and Zangief do not rely heavily on combos in their respective playstyles, yet they require vastly different strategies to use effectively.
That's kind of the other problem with fighting games though. You've got FGC people saying "Oh you suck, don't play that character. You should play Ryu for 100 hours first!" which really puts off anybody that just wants to jump in and play that flashy high execution character.
@@Aerowind that's not really a problem though. I'm just giving an option. Some people don't like to learn by just grinding an executionally hard character to do their cool stuff so it wouldn't hurt to try more characters and see if they find another one that they like.
Like, I'd love to play Yuzuriha in Undernight but I'm not willing to grind for that so I tried other characters that looked appealing and found that I like Waldenstein and Merkava. Now I'm happy with Undernight.
Like, you can either choose to grind the coolest character, or you can maybe look around and find someone else you like to have fun.
I mean there's just a disconnect in other things too. I don't know how to acquire "skills". Like when I watched Sajam learning Battle for the Grid, he was just picking a character, and then figured out how to do combos like nothing. "This links into that" "that goes to this" like.... I can't do that. I play Strive and don't understand how to make the moves go together just by doing them.
And then you look at combo lists, and they're these long convoluted button orders, and you have to do all these mechanical things in between, like RC drift. That shit is not easy to do. I can drop combos all day long and just lose all desire to keep trying.
I always see people struggle with the abstract concepts of fighting games, it's this huge wall they hit and they can't seem to figure out what is holding them back.
So they start blaming balance or execution or going as far as calling their opponent a cheater.
It's tough to grasp the abstracts of fighting games as they more than other popular genres entice people to go no brain and just mash.
As there is a much more direct feedback to simple button presses than in a fps game for example, where there is the basic requirement of atleast aiming your gun.
Mashing is a rewarding strategy in the short term, but it breeds bad habits in the long run and creates warped expectations.
Something I think that is specifically difficult about fighting games and real time strategy games, but not other genres is: their title tends to lie about about what youre doing.
If I play a platformer, I'm going to be platforming at every single level of gameplay, because its intrinsic to the genre. If it starts to lump in other ideas, the genre gets tweeked, maybe its a metroidvania, or a collectathon
If I play a shooter, im trying to blow a guys face off. Games that are shooters that focus on movement ahead of shooting tend to die off pretty quick. ex: Lawbreakers, Brink. The ones that do become successful because of their movement still have movement be contentious. ex: fortnite building gets called out as a reason to not play a game. Some of the movement of "future" theme'd modern warfare games gets shunned regularly for "not being what the game is about"
RPGs when they're narrowed down into an actual genre like turned based rpg, or open world exploration for the most part just do exactly what their genre asks of them with very little outside of it. Sports games are sport related, racing games, can get weird, but they're pretty much always about racing.
Fighting games are different because even if you get beyond the technical requirement to play the game, it suddenly becomes a chess match at 100 miles an hour, and if you signed up to watch ryu hayabusa pile driver someone into the ground from 20 feet in the air, and suddenly you have to be conscious of the opponent thats keeping you from doing the thing you're trying to do by just kicking you in your chest
RTS's have the opposite problem where strategy is absolutely not necessary at low levels of play. The barrier to entry for RTS games is executing the primary build order to a high enough degree that the opponents "Strategy" of making guys four times faster than you won't immediately net them a win. You might know what every single units damage is, how it counters each enemy unit, and what situations to use it for, but having your opponent just send 10 units your way before you've ever really finished making your first production build doesn't feel like strategy, it feels like execution.
So what im trying to say is fighting games don't actually have people considering the other person involved in "fighting" very often.
I looked up what lawbreakers was and feel kind of sad that the game had to shut down now
I think I remember seeing some footage of it actively back then
When I first started playing Hazama 15 years ago in Blazblue Continuum Shift, I literally just did 3/4 hit combos: 2A, 5B, 3C special. Hazama in that game had infinite loops, microdash confirms and some of the craziest combo variety in the game... but I couldn't do any of it at first.
So... I went to meetups with other BB players and played in tournaments just using what I knew I COULD do, spending time now and again improving on what I couldn't do.
Now I'm playing BBCF and I only have 600 games online on Hazama, partly due to rollback being a late implementation and partly due to playing other games.
HOWEVER, I can reliably and consistently beat other players with over 1000-5000 games on their character. Why? Because I spent the time over the years simply getting the feel of Hazama down, understanding what was good and what was bad in certain kinds of matchups, what moves prompted what response.
There's always a reward for effort, even if you can't see it straightaway.
Every player is like a separate dark souls boss
the hardest part for me is dealing with the skill gap, as a brand new player in fighting games . about 80% of the matches are just a 1 sided rofl stomp in their favor
For me what is hard is knowing where to start for learning, knowing what to do and how in the training mode, knowing how to distinguish a bnb from a normal combo, finding blockstrings (new players don't even know it exist) and training defense.
Execution and muscle memory and practicing inputs and combos to the point that they are second nature is hugely important though because you need your brain to get to the point where it can stop thinking about execution and start thinking about where to stand on the screen, whiff punishing, reactions, and the other weird little nuances. Like doing the half circle back forward supers in Plus R. It took me a few weeks to get to the point where my input was correct and it was coming out and now I don't have to think about making sure it's right I can think about the best places and times and moments to use it.
i think the bigger problem isnt that people have realize that there is more to a fighting game than combos, its that people DONT know theres more. for a very long time i thought fighting games were just button mashers and as a person who plays alot of games competively i had no real reason to get into or play fighting games because there was hardly any drive to do so, but when i started watching channels like core a gaming thats the kinda stuff that made me wanna play. and i think if more people were exposed to that fact there would be alot more interest in fighting games. there are both players who want to just get into a fighting game because they wanna do the cool combo and players than wanna get into the mind games but dont want to have to learn combos.
You make great points, but the one thing I think you missed that adds to frustration is fighting games don't have transferable skill from other games which makes the barrier to entry that much more frustrating. But after I could get my quarter circles and such to go off atleast most of the time, I had a blast playing guilty gear and fighterZ and playing vs people around my level!
100% agree that people who act like other genres don't have a tonne of required learning have no idea what they're talking about. You look at a game like Overwatch and it has many of the same things as a fighting game like character-specific abilities, character matchups, and then has map layouts as well as that stuff. However I do think that the learning in FPSs tends to be more intuitive than in fighting games. You can learn a map by just walking around it, and vague things like 'avoid this area' can still be very helpful, and are concepts that are shared between genres.
Something like 'plus frames on block' on the other hand is such a foreign concept to any other genre, and I'm not sure how you'd even realise it's a thing without someone mentioning it to you. And even once you know it's a thing it's less useful to simply know you're plus on block, you'd usually have to know by how much, and the startup of enemy attacks etc to make much use of that info.
That said, games like DOTA are just like a brick wall of incomprehensible nonsense to me, and those are extremely popular, so I don't really know what's going on...
The thing that made me want to give fighting games a shot was a strange one. I was BURNED OUT with team games like LoL, Valorant, and Overwatch. I was sick of having to rely on teammates to win anything, and while I understand that you CAN win with shit teammates if you're good enough, that just wasn't an appealing challenge to me at the end of the day. I sat down, and I had 2 options narrowed down. Starcraft, or find a fighting game. I wasn't in the mood to figure out starcraft, so I searched for a fighting game. After finding Brian_F and watching a bunch of his videos, SFV looked fun. I found the champion edition on sale for 20 bucks, and started playing. SFV isn't my favorite fighter, but it was the hook that helped me find a new passion in life. Here I am , almost 2 years later LOVING life playing guilty gear, blazblue, street fighter, and whatever other game catches my eye.
My wife says to clean out your closet. Or at least close the door. Lol.
I can attest this SUPER applies to other genres. I used to be top 20 in the world in an FPS game. My aim, (compared to everyone else at that level,) was trash. My snapshots, awful. But my strategy, movement, etc were on another level that it offset my comparatively bad aim.
I do think there are things legitimately more difficult about fighting games.
Playing something like Overwatch, even without a particularly disciplined or competitive mindset, I've found it pretty easy to learn the ins and outs of how the game works by just playing and having fun.
In fighting games (particularly tekken), I've found that it requires a lot more concerted effort to not feel like I'm constantly getting beaten up by things I legitimately don't understand. This doesn't make it "harder" to win. Both games have matchmaking and will put you against other scrubs, but its only fighting games where you can put in so many hours and still feel completely ignorant.
Fps are like go
There is only one move but there are many ways to apply
It skill is a wide gradient that forms a bigger picture
Fighting games are like chess tons of individual pieces with their own properties that you have to learn but that also interact in ways that will catch you of guard and cause you to be significantly behind
May I ask how much experience with other shooters you had before playing Overwatch and how much experience with other fighting games you had before playing Tekken? Past experience is a huge factor in how quickly you can learn something.
I've been playing shooters my whole life, so learning a new one is borderline trivial (at least to achieve a basic understanding of the game). I've been playing fighting games for about 8 months, so comparatively I'm going to have a lot more trouble getting used to them because they're so different from what I've experienced before. If it was the other way around I'd find shooters incredibly difficult instead.
For example, I've been playing guitar for a good 8 years. If I wanted to learn bass, I probably could pick it up pretty quickly compared to something like trombone.
@@bhx6252 pretty similar actually. Growing up I played a lot of Mortal Kombat, Soul Calibur, etc. Not with a very serious mindset, like I tried to take to Tekken, but plenty of experience.
Same deal with FPS. Played them growing up all the time but never with a very serious "I'm going to be really git gud" mindset. It wasn't until Overwatch when I got into ranked and trying to excel.
With Overwatch, it feels like you very quickly learn the basics of dealing with characters and then its just a matter of dealing with them more efficiently as you go against more skilled players. In fighting games its more common to run into situations that you genuinely don't understand, and if an opponent notices your lack of understanding then they will make the entire game about that scenario if they can.
@@lucaswilliams7280 I see what you're saying, but for me personally I think that's more of a testament to the comparative ease of learning Overwatch specifically rather than the grander scope of competitive FPS games. I used to play it a lot and I wouldn't say that it is as difficult to learn as most other competitive FPS games (that doesn't mean I was super good at it, but compared to other FPS games I play I felt I made the most progress in the least amount of time). Using OW as a counter example for the difficulty of learning fighting games seems kind of similar to using Fantasy Strike as a representative of the difficulty/complexity of fighting games as a whole. That's probably a bad comparison, but it's my initial reaction.
@@bhx6252 eh, since Tekken and Overwatch I've gotten into other fighters and shooters, and I've consistently found fighters to require more work.
The only exception I've found was Smash and I think that's largely because of how much less important frame data is. Most fighting games put you into pressure scenarios where frame data is really important. Learning what moves will let you get out of a particular pressure sequence (nevermind the range of options and RPS situations that arise when your opponents start to vary that pressure sequence) is more stressful and less intuitive than anything I've had to learn in other genres.
I'm just posting a comment for the engagement because the comments in that reddit thread annoyed me so much that I hope the *actual* video goes viral
Fantasy Strike and Tough Love Arena are interesting in taking away most of the need for execution (didn't watch or play Divekick).
Good point on the focus of everything else being important.
For me, you kinda nailed it with the whole, "the fighting part is not the hard part" line. As someone who has been eating a steady diet of RPGs and MMORPGs for almost 2 decades, coming to fighting games is so fucking weird because of frame data and the idea of "turns". What's happening on screen is barely a 1/3rd of the real game happening in the players' heads. I'm trying MK11 as my first fighter I stick with to break through the noob barrier and this messes me up all the time where my mashing (doing a dps rotation) that serves me well In MMOs gets me punished because I'm disrespecting plus frames. It's almost like my brain has an ingrained assumption of, "oh, that didn't work? Well of course I can just try to hit them again..ow! ow! ow! Stop I'm joking!"
In MMOs we have an acronym called ABC (Always Be Casting) if you stop performing your optimal sequence of buttons, if you don't use an ability when you could have while also avoiding that patch of fire on the ground, then you are losing damage which isn't good. It's actually a skill that players have to learn and you can always tell the better player by just their APM (actions per minute) usually.
What is difficult about learning fighting games?
The fact that every single fucking frame is a different situation with different decisions that need to be made. My biggest problem is developing the discipline to accept when a situation, an opportunity has passed and that I need to adapt...and that you can't just force it back by mashing. Almost like how a boxer also needs to learn how to TAKE a hit as well as dish one out.
It's a slow process I'm taking your advice and appreciating the little victories:
I lost but:
I read and teched that throw.
I read that low special and punished it.
I landed my optimal combo online in a real match.
I learned the habits of players who use X character.
etc. etc.
Neva give up!
The most difficult thing is finding a good controller, or one that you can perform well with. Without being able to effortlessly, accurately pull off the special moves and combos you are SCREWED..
Alternate title: "sajam talks about learning nootral without actually saying the word"
One thing that makes fighting games hard: You can't acknowledge what you don't know.
When you think you know everything, you think your good until that overhead breaks your crouch block and you don't know why.
Thankfully most new fighting games explain what an overhead is, but this is a good point in that fighting games are a lot more complex to play than what a layman might expect so you get a lot of "When's my turn to press buttons?" "How could they attack before me?" "How did they avoid my grab?". I think that because the majority of these games are 2D with limited controls that folk expect these answers to be simple.
As a platform fighter player learning his first traditional fighter (Them’s Fighting Herds) I could not agree more. I do think execution is the easiest skill to hone as a beginner and all of Rivals of Aether’s movement tech definitely helped me not view training mode as scary.
In the first season of SFV, both Jwong and Mago was using. Justin being Justin, was using easier stuff while Mago even had a combo named after him. In the end, in S1 Justin ranked higher in the tourneys most of the time.
anything pretty much. the games tuts are usually not detailed enough and just like any form of guides on the internet need you to know the lingu/basics that are absolutely specificly made for fighting games. so you cant use any of your knowledge/skills from other genres. then theres so many mechanics that pretty much are also only important for fighting games like frames etc.
ive been playing some fighters on and off for a long time now and ive tried digging in deeper a couple times. in tekken, mk, street fighter, blaz blue...
even those play so different from each other that for me as a (still pretty much) rookie, its hard to adapt and i almost have to relearn each one.
its tough and the learning curve is frustrating as hell. when you are trying to get better you sit in a training arena against AI for plenty of hours/days which is really just not fun compared to other games where you just train while playing.
i love fighting games but i feel like ill never really break through the "being kinda above average"
Before watching your videos, I always thought top level fighting game players were intellectual gods, that processed 100 things going on at once, and coming up with a solution in a fraction of a second. Now I realize that they just went through a flowchart hundreds, thousands of times, and found everything that doesn't work, and only implements things that do work, leaving more room for them to think. It's a huge shift in mindset for me, because although I know I'll never be a pro, it makes the gap seem much easier to close.
if the game's not fun, why bother?
Indeed
This comment right here pretty much answer the questions: "Why do so many don't like fighting games?"
I immediately thought of Viscant's mvc3 Evo win. Execution is so low on the 'how to get good at fighters' totem pole. In SF4 I played Viper until I realized my inputs were never going to be clean enough to not accidentally cancel her specials. I switched to Ibuki and it wasn't the 1frame links that turned me way, it was how many of her specials overlapped each other when missinputting. I finally settled on Rose because she had only a few special moves that didn't overlap, strong single buttons, and even her most difficult combos only took moderate execution.
smoothing moustache is the new adjusting hair
In my case as someone who only recently managed to get into fighting games after years of orbiting, I can say the greatest barrier of entry for me was the controller. I didn't want to spend hundreds of eurobucks on a full fighting game controller because I didn't know if I would stick with the genre, and trying to play with a regular console pad felt like I was handicapping myself by only twiddling my thumbs and index fingers on the controller, plus my thumbs would physically begin to hurt after playing for a while. People told me that the controller doesn't matter and that you can win EVO on a PS1 pad, but that didn't make the pad any less uncomfortable, so it never stuck.
It wasn't until years later, when I discovered that it's perfectly alright to play fighting games using a computer keyboard, that I managed to get into the genre and realized that I actually enjoy it. Even then playing on a keyboard had its issues; it was not the most comfortable thing in the world, the big travel distance of the buttons bothered me, and many games had (and still have) pretty bad support for keyboard controls and eg. don't let you bind some keys. But playing on a keyboard assured me that I would enjoy the genre enough to justify spending a lot of money on a fighting game controller.
And it really was a lot of money, and a lot of work. I knew I wanted a hitbox style controller (especially after getting used to playing on a keyboard), but the official Hitbox was out of stock and shipping to my country of residence would've cost over $100 in shipping and duties on top of the $200 controller. I could not find any pre-built copycats either, so I decided to build my own, which amounted to like 150 eurobucks in materials (of which ~100€ was buttons and electronics and the rest was the plywood and acrylic I used for the box), a membership to a local hacklab and like 20 hours of labour. In my case the act of building the controller was its own reward which helped justify the costs, but to any normal gamer who just wanted to enjoy fighting games "as intended" this would be a *steep* barrier of entry.
I use an xbox one controller. Cant really use it for characters with phantom edge mechanics but it feels great for me.
Just recently got back into Dota and quickly realize how much harder it was due to the toxic community. Constant flaming in pubs games where I'm just trying to have some fun and learn the game. At least in fighting games no matter how badly I get my ass beat, we can have a decent discussion about things afterwards to help me improve (anti-air this, unsafe move here, etc etc) not just you fed mid, GTFO play bot games.
If you are trying to learn GGXr2 M.O.M. Mode has been very helpful to me the past week. It’s a gradual increase of challenge and the entire point of that mode is to be as aggressive and efficient as possible.
i was having trouble explaining this to someone the other day, as always you break it down so well!
they're hard to learn, because with the exception of 3~4 games, they're all dead and need to be played through discord against the same 10 guys who have been playing since the game came out
I can't remember which video, but Sajam said "start off with some pokes and an anti-air". I got MK11 for $15, saw that Jade had an absolutely ludicrous d2 anti-air, and haven't turned back (:
LOL. Girl has the best uppercut in the game.
@@Jonkin715 that pole will swat an airplane out the air it's madness :D
Glad to know Kamone finally got rid of your squirrel problem boss. Cheers
I love fighting games. I love fighting games and I'm absolutely awful at them. So awful that I can't recall a single game I've played in which I ever got past the execution barrier. I'm talking complex combos that demand consistent frame-perfect transitions. I have a basic understanding of the fundamentals, but putting them in practice is a whole different story.
I think one of the reasons people get disheartened trying to get past the execution barrier is because they watch professionals play these games competitively and find themselves in total awe of how the players who compete can pull off those combos and then some. So to new players, they convince themselves that unless they're a Jack-of-all-Trades for every possible technique, they can't proceed past the execution barrier to learn the other aspects of a fighting game.
Another motivation behind getting through the execution barrier is the desire to be able to perform flashy combos in a crowd one day, like it's a huge deal, and I'm of the opinion that simplifying combo structures in modern fighting games only makes the problem worse. Don't make it easy for them and me. I don't care if I suck at fighting games. I want the combos to feel earned.
Even I'm guilty of that, but I still enjoy fighting games so I'm not turned away by them at all. Just self-aware at my general slowness, incompetence, and inability to get any better. Eventually, life takes over, but I definitely recommend people giving fighting games a _try_ and putting time into them.
TL;DR: Fighting games are hard, but still fun and well worth getting into. It's just that some people (like me) think execution is the bare minimum/true starting point _before_ learning all of the essentials.
Definitely. For a lot of other competitive games, doing something visually impressive usually isn't a hard execution barrier (such as multi kills and headshots) and could also be achieved with enough luck.
3:14 It is important to avoid ableist presumptions. Some people have physical characteristics which increase the practice necessary to improve execution, and some inputs may be truly impossible for a given player. This is akin to the elitist presumption which goes something like: "no one is too poor for X; if you love X enough, then you will find a way to afford it."
FGC isn't ready for this conversation. Too much survivorship bias and stockholm syndrome that tunnels their thinking when it comes to execution in fighting games
For me starting I was just scared of messing up. Online just stressed me out
Understandable. remember it's just a game though
Yeah, it can be really scary to go online and mess up, I mean I've been playing fighting games for over a year now and I still screw up, but at least to me I find it helps to go in with a goal in mind since even if I screw up everything else if I see that I'm improving in that one area it feels like you accomplished something.
@@arcfieri5965 yea now I get shit on proudly
Nice Gears kung fu flip reference lol, that shit was wild back in the day
The opponent is usually a significant source of difficulty in my experience.
Haven't watched the video but I watched the video on how people commented on this video before watching it
What i think the problem is is that I haven't watched the video yet
You need to make this your permament home page vid AT LEAST 10 years ago.
I feel like this title applies to 80% of your videos.