Sajam: "Fighting Games Are Not Inherently Harder to Learn Than Other Competitive Games"
- Thread starter Chaos2Frozen
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Sajam is right about one thing... the perception that fighting games are super fucking hard and way harder than any other genre is real. This thread alone has proven that, and Era posters are more level headed than most gamers. Trust me. I at least don't see (too many) people complaining about how the opponent is being CHEAP and CAMPED THEM or SPAMMED THEM or any of that super scrubby shit... which is EVERYWHERE in the real world. I don't know how many times I've played fighting games irl against clearly casual players, threw like 3 fireballs as Ken before literally being told "yo stop fucking spamming that shit guy that's so cheap". They lose, say "fuck this" drop the controller and walk away.
I don't know if anything can be done to change those minds. There's just something about fighting games that just fucks with more casual players. They can't handle basic mechanics being used against them, and rage gets activated really quickly. Projectiles. Grabs. Combos. BLOCKING.
I grew up playing Street Fighter and Smash, getting my ass kicked in both games, but also realizing "huh, these games are pretty tough. If I want to get better, I should practice!" And that was that. I never really made excuses or blamed mechanics or characters or anything like that. In my mind, video games in general were just hard. Beating a single player game was a major accomplishment, so beating another human in a multiplayer game was like... a SUPER major accomplishment. It wouldn't come easy.
In conclusion, everyone is a baby and fighting games will probably be somewhat niche forever. I've accepted that.
Then again, the big fighting games still sell millions of copies and Evo gets bigger every year. I think maybe we're just being more and more exposed to the scrub mentality thanks to twitter/reddit/youtube comments, a mentality that has been there since Street Fighter II.
I don't know if anything can be done to change those minds. There's just something about fighting games that just fucks with more casual players. They can't handle basic mechanics being used against them, and rage gets activated really quickly. Projectiles. Grabs. Combos. BLOCKING.
I grew up playing Street Fighter and Smash, getting my ass kicked in both games, but also realizing "huh, these games are pretty tough. If I want to get better, I should practice!" And that was that. I never really made excuses or blamed mechanics or characters or anything like that. In my mind, video games in general were just hard. Beating a single player game was a major accomplishment, so beating another human in a multiplayer game was like... a SUPER major accomplishment. It wouldn't come easy.
In conclusion, everyone is a baby and fighting games will probably be somewhat niche forever. I've accepted that.
Then again, the big fighting games still sell millions of copies and Evo gets bigger every year. I think maybe we're just being more and more exposed to the scrub mentality thanks to twitter/reddit/youtube comments, a mentality that has been there since Street Fighter II.
Fun fact, getting to Silver rank in Street Fighter 5 puts you damn near in the top 10% of the online player population.
I agree. I think games could do a better job with tutorials and tools to teach new players. I think that for this specific issue, Street Fighter has had a low-key negative impact. It is the most popular fighting franchise but its gameplay is on the harder side imo, also its latest game is too focused on e-sports and lacking a lot on single player and that drives new players away.
Street Fighter V is not lacking in single player content. At launch, sure. Honestly, you should probably substitute it for tekken 7. That one has no tutorial, very little single player content, and is currently much more popular than street Fighter V.
now that I think of it having more for-fun modes that still draw on and improve fundamental skills could help maintain interest. if i start getting tired of serious smash I just open up 4-mans with more items and play casually. there's no real "downtime" in most fighting games i've played, if that makes sense.
this is one of the reasons why i miss Smash Run so much from the 3DS version
I guess they thought there wasn't enough of a perception of fighting games being impossible to get into. Maybe that's as good a sign as any that they really need to start caring more about the 90% of players who aren't in the top 10%
Man I'm jealous of you guys that can just jump into online. I suck at figuring shit out on my own and need to go into training mode for hours to figure stuff out. But then I get burnt out from being in training mode all day and get mad at myself and don't wanna play the game anymore.
I hate training mode. I rarely ever use it. I'll go through movelists a couple times, but playing against people is what I want to do. Jumping online or going to locals the second I get the game. But that's also why I'll remain around the platinum level in ever fighter I play. Just don't care to try any harder than I do now. I'm happy where I'm at. Maybe if I were younger and still had tons of free time, lol.
Literally every fighter does. But that 10% can keep people talking about a fighter for years after it comes out, buying things, supporting the franchise while a bigger team works on a new or different fighter.
That 90% is super important, but that 10% matters, too.
You're right. But that also means that single player was an afterthought to them and it is the medium that new players use to learn the game, so it should be very important.
I gotta admit I saw this shit happen all the time even back in the 90's. The real barrier for a lot of people seems to come once they figure out to jump over the fireballs and then get hit with shoryukens.
But again, the death of that arcade culture means you don't really see casuals just having fun against casuals, which is where the real fun should start. Back then when Street Fighter was more ubiquitous everybody started causal and got better together. Now it's a little bit of a walled garden of veterans that's hard to break into. Earlier this year I got a brief glimpse at two total noobs playing CvS2. They didn't even know what the game was called or how to do anything, but to be honest the match was actually still kind of exciting.
This is true, but also you can play Lee Sin in low ranks and do well without being able to insec
I think the thing that made me give up on fighting games was my experience with Soulcalibur. I played starting with SC2. For years, I practiced combos and getting good with as much of the roster as I could. I would try to do complicated stuff in practice mode, and playing casually with my friends, I'd win basically every game. Then, when SC5 came out I finally tried the online mode. Got stomped in almost every single one of the 50+ matches I played for the first couple of weeks. I practiced constantly at that point, because I figured my years of experience would give me the backbone I needed to be competitive. Still got stomped. I won maybe 10% of the matches, and that's a generous guess. It just completely sucked the fun out for me, because I thought I was good at the game. It was enough that I didn't even bother with SC6, and am probably done with the series at this point.
And this is why we say combos are not important when it comes to getting good at fighting games.
If you don't understand the fundamentals - the basics - such as blocking, spacing, movement, positioning, poking/footsies/ "the neutral game" etc etc, combos won't get you anywhere. You basically learned backwards.
I remember the first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought. I played Alpha 2 on PSX all the time. Beat all my friends. Was one of the only people that knew how to do fireballs and supers. Thought I was dope af. Went to a tournament and got devastated 0-2. Watched the entire tournament and was like...yeah, I want to be able to do this.
Beating friends doesn't mean much. You're not getting prepared to fight better players if you're learning bad lessons from your wins.
You don't need combos in SC. SC6 has a lot of combos (more than I like in SC, tbh), but I've been beaten by people who spaced me out and beat me with BB, BB, AA. I've done this as practice myself, and received a lot of hate mail from people because they assume I'm just taunting them instead of working on my spacing and whiff punishing. Sounds like you weren't looking at your actual matches to find why you were losing, but just what you thought you needed to learn.
I should have gone into more detail. I actually basically re-learned fron scratch. I was watching YouTube videos about strategies and the fundamentals. I grinded at this game every day for months because I desparately didn't want to give it up.
I'd have to agree with this. I'm not a world-beater by any means at Mortal Kombat but literally no one I know will play me because it's just a relentless ass beating - even if I go easy. People I try to get to play with me just check out no matter how easy I go - starting to think it's because the concept just doesn't click for a lot of people.
On the flip-side, going online, I can barely maintain a 60-40 W/L ratio.
OK I get you.
I remember starting Ranked in DBFZ. I went something like 17 games in a row without a win. And this is after following every bit of info about the game and characters etc etc pre-release. After taking a step back and looking at my game more closely, I now have a win rate of something like 76%. Sometimes it's just one simple change that you need to make.
And I'll repeat what others have said: it really does help if you have at least one other person who you can play with consistently who is at least somewhat close in skill level to you.
I may pick it back up someday, but it just wasn't fun losing 100+ matches in the span of a couple of weeks. I might just not be cut out for fighting games.
lol, DBFZ gave me hella problems, too. Game just didn't make sense to me at all. Took me several months, lots of characters, and hella matches before it "clicked."
In the end, I still don't like the game very much, but at least playing it and breaking through my block lets me express it more than, "Game sucks."
As someone who likes fighting games a lot in theory, but doesn't play a ton of them anymore, I've been thinking about this for a bit. I do think the genre as a whole has a pretty bad onboarding problem. I've never managed to successfully drag people into fighting games the same way I dragged friends into League of Legends when we all lived in the same dorm, and I think a lot of it comes down to that 1v1 setting. MOBAs are their own beast and their own tangle of nightmares (I eventually quit League because a lot of those friends moved on and I was tired of dealing with that game's absolutely toxic playerbase) but having teammates to rely upon (and blame) shoulders a lot of the psychological burden.
At this point my aversion to getting better at fighting games has way more to do with anxiety (and time commitment) than anything else. I'd like to think I understand the fundamentals alright, and I can do some of the ridiculous SNK pretzel motions fairly consistently, but I mostly just play with the same (equally unskilled) friends who I played Street Fighter IV with a decade ago (which, given that I don't live in the same city as most of them anymore, isn't all that often.) Even in the Street Fighter IV days, playing with strangers was never the appeal, and as a broken adult I've reached a point with myself where playing fighting games online gives me literal anxiety in a way no other genre really matches. There's this underlying fear that I don't know my character well enough, or don't know the matchups, or that it doesn't actually matter because anyone playing a fighting game after the first week launch is better than me, and when I inevitably get stomped into the ground by someone who clearly knows what they're doing it can be... discouraging.
It probably doesn't help that the games that have grabbed me in recent years are the weirdo niche ones less likely to have total beginners. I bounced off Street Fighter V pretty hard, but I discovered UNIST last year and really enjoyed goofing around with my fighting game friends. However, it will be a cold day in hell when I want to get online with an anime fighter just so I can lose 20 matches in a row. I fully acknowledge this has more to do with me than the games in question, but I hardly think I'm alone in this respect. At some point I'd rather just play something that doesn't make me feel like garbage for 10 hours than grind out the time (and mindset) necessary to ever get beyond my current level of scrubbishness.
At this point my aversion to getting better at fighting games has way more to do with anxiety (and time commitment) than anything else. I'd like to think I understand the fundamentals alright, and I can do some of the ridiculous SNK pretzel motions fairly consistently, but I mostly just play with the same (equally unskilled) friends who I played Street Fighter IV with a decade ago (which, given that I don't live in the same city as most of them anymore, isn't all that often.) Even in the Street Fighter IV days, playing with strangers was never the appeal, and as a broken adult I've reached a point with myself where playing fighting games online gives me literal anxiety in a way no other genre really matches. There's this underlying fear that I don't know my character well enough, or don't know the matchups, or that it doesn't actually matter because anyone playing a fighting game after the first week launch is better than me, and when I inevitably get stomped into the ground by someone who clearly knows what they're doing it can be... discouraging.
It probably doesn't help that the games that have grabbed me in recent years are the weirdo niche ones less likely to have total beginners. I bounced off Street Fighter V pretty hard, but I discovered UNIST last year and really enjoyed goofing around with my fighting game friends. However, it will be a cold day in hell when I want to get online with an anime fighter just so I can lose 20 matches in a row. I fully acknowledge this has more to do with me than the games in question, but I hardly think I'm alone in this respect. At some point I'd rather just play something that doesn't make me feel like garbage for 10 hours than grind out the time (and mindset) necessary to ever get beyond my current level of scrubbishness.
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I think the scrub mentality has always been there. There is way more avenues to express it now of course. And some arcades were shady back in the day, and some scrubs would get in your face with threats for being "cheap", but I think alot of these dudes just held the salt inside and bitched to their friends on how cheap you were and it ended there.
There was a shred of social etiquette (or fear of what the other guy would do in response to your outburst), as you were face to face in person. Online? It's all let loose.
Not a lot of people are, but that's not really a bad thing (and I'm also not trying to look down on anyone either). Just like plenty of people aren't cut out for MOBAs, FPS games, etc. What's important is that you did the work before coming to that decision. I hope you do decide to get back in there, because even over the summer I was watching my roommate play SC6 and noticed him slowly go from mashing to trying to pick his spots to strike. Watching that happen in real-time made me go back and remember when SF2 started to click for me when I was a kid playing on my SNES.
Nah. Everyone starts where you started. I played SF2 back in the 90s and thought I was hot shit because I could beat my friends locally. And then I hit arcades for third strike and online started becoming a thing and I got absolutely obliterated. You start to learn that there's a whole suite of fundamentals that new players overlook because specials and combos are so much more attractive when you start.
The good news is that, at some point, it just all clicks and you begin to be able to 'see the code', as it were. Most of the basic skills and mechanics transfer between fighters and, no matter what you're playing, average opponents act the same way and make the same exploitable mistakes. If you can play SF, you can probably learn to play KoF or an anime fighter to a basic level of competency in a relatively short amount of time.
Plus, the amount of information out there for new players right now is unparalleled. The FGC is at its peak, especially for games like Tekken, and there are tons and tons of resources for learning the popular games.
60-40 W/L will propel you to the highest ranks in every fighting game.
Controversial opinion, but I always think that when most people say Smash is easy to learn, they are basing that largely due to them being able to beat their friends. They have no proper frame of reference most of the time.
I don't think Smash is easy to learn. Not 1v1 played like a fighting game not a party game Smash. Simple inputs doesn't make it easy (many other FGs have simple inputs), especially when there are a whole host of other things to consider.
I don't think Smash is easy to learn. Not 1v1 played like a fighting game not a party game Smash. Simple inputs doesn't make it easy (many other FGs have simple inputs), especially when there are a whole host of other things to consider.
I know the pathetic "Smash is not a fighting game" meme is still alive, but Smash actually gives you info about the match in the results screen. Melee used to be a lot more in-depth, it told you if you used a lot of projectiles, if you used the same move a lot of times repeatedly, if you rolled too much, etc. Too bad it was given with such cryptic names.
Guilty Gear XRD does something similar, it sucks that it only gives you that info when you play against the CPU instead of human opponents.
If I am not 70% win rate in DOA I have failed.
But real talk Sajam is missing the forest for the trees in his whole discussion. For many people perception is reality. How human beings are wiered how fighting games currently are will always have a cap on who will play it. Now I find the drive to make Fighting games out to be something where you can win a million bucks in a season as sheer fantasy and lunacy because of the limiting factor.
But real talk Sajam is missing the forest for the trees in his whole discussion. For many people perception is reality. How human beings are wiered how fighting games currently are will always have a cap on who will play it. Now I find the drive to make Fighting games out to be something where you can win a million bucks in a season as sheer fantasy and lunacy because of the limiting factor.
Ultimate was my first Smash and even having played fighting games in the past it took me at least a week to feel like I truly had control of my character and stop firing off moves in the wrong direction
I agree. Smash is hard as shit imo. I have a much easier time in basically any other fighting game.
he says a lot of it's perception. in an activity like gaming, there's no real difference between perception and reality. if people think your game is hard to get into, that means your game is hard to get into.
he says you're more likely to play with friends in a MOBA and have them teach you. that's an aspect of game design that makes MOBAs easier to get into, plus even if you have a friend teaching you a fighting game they're doing it by beating your ass until you learn what to do rather than being on your team and directly assisting you.
he says someone who's never played a shooter won't have an easier time learning shooters than they will learning a fighting game but that seems unambiguously wrong to me, just given that shooters are orders of magnitude more popular and nobody is born with FPS muscle memory. there have to be aspects of shooter design that either make it easier to learn or inherently more appealing compared to fighter design, and saying the controls aren't part of either is wrong.
he says that a lot of it comes down to a false perception of confidence where people don't know how bad they are, but if fighting games make people realize they suck more quickly and put people off compared to other genres then that's another aspect of game design that means fighting games are harder to get into.
i also disagree with him when he says most of this perception comes from fighting game players who think other genres are easier to learn. i think people bounce off of fighting games super fucking hard in a way that doesn't happen with other games. every time i see a discussion like this the people who say "oh it's not that hard everyone makes too big a deal out of it" are the guys with 2000 hours in SF or tekken or whatever.
i mean ultimately a lot of the individual points he makes are technically correct but none of them really mean anything. fighting games are definitely harder to get into compared to some other genres of competitive games, i don't think there can be any reasonable disagreement there. when it comes down to talking about what it means to get into a game, where you're setting the competence bar, simple taste vs mechanics and controls, all that's debatable. but the overwhelming popularity of other competitive games that no fighting game has ever come close to reaching means there's something there.
he says you're more likely to play with friends in a MOBA and have them teach you. that's an aspect of game design that makes MOBAs easier to get into, plus even if you have a friend teaching you a fighting game they're doing it by beating your ass until you learn what to do rather than being on your team and directly assisting you.
he says someone who's never played a shooter won't have an easier time learning shooters than they will learning a fighting game but that seems unambiguously wrong to me, just given that shooters are orders of magnitude more popular and nobody is born with FPS muscle memory. there have to be aspects of shooter design that either make it easier to learn or inherently more appealing compared to fighter design, and saying the controls aren't part of either is wrong.
he says that a lot of it comes down to a false perception of confidence where people don't know how bad they are, but if fighting games make people realize they suck more quickly and put people off compared to other genres then that's another aspect of game design that means fighting games are harder to get into.
i also disagree with him when he says most of this perception comes from fighting game players who think other genres are easier to learn. i think people bounce off of fighting games super fucking hard in a way that doesn't happen with other games. every time i see a discussion like this the people who say "oh it's not that hard everyone makes too big a deal out of it" are the guys with 2000 hours in SF or tekken or whatever.
i mean ultimately a lot of the individual points he makes are technically correct but none of them really mean anything. fighting games are definitely harder to get into compared to some other genres of competitive games, i don't think there can be any reasonable disagreement there. when it comes down to talking about what it means to get into a game, where you're setting the competence bar, simple taste vs mechanics and controls, all that's debatable. but the overwhelming popularity of other competitive games that no fighting game has ever come close to reaching means there's something there.
The only thing here that really gives me hope is the fact that I went from being okay at Smash Bros. to being able to consistently win against most people I play, locally and online. I'm not necessarily tournament-level, but I know I could be if I practiced.
I feel this is true as well. We usually host our locals on board game shops or on other spots where random people can sit down and play friendlies with us and Smash has always been the one beginners just can't grasp. Stuff like using a double jump + up B is hard for them, or using any move that's not a dash attack, special or side smash. Or even just getting the % mechanic.
I've gotten total beginners hooked on Guilty Gear of all games but Smash always gives them trouble.
It's the same learning curve as other fighting games. Smash Ultimate was my first Smash:
1. I was clumsy initially and the controls felt arbitrary and awkward.
2. After some hours I felt like I understood the game and had a grasp on the basics.
3. It's abundantly clear I am months, if not years, of regular practice away from high level play.
A lot of people see #3 with fighting games and get scared away, but there's a lot of fun to be had at #2. #2 is where most Smash players are, and that's fine.
I wonder if people would be interested in a ResetEra ladder?
It could be a hub for enthusiasts and newbies to talk to each other, have some fiery rivalries and post replays so we could learn from each other. It'd be a way to bridge the gap and make the experience more fun and engaging I think.
Hmm
It could be a hub for enthusiasts and newbies to talk to each other, have some fiery rivalries and post replays so we could learn from each other. It'd be a way to bridge the gap and make the experience more fun and engaging I think.
Hmm
To be honest, if you're just playing with your friends and winning against your friends, you're still playing. That's still a legitimate level of playing fighting games.
Part of the perception problem is the idea that in order to be "playing right" or enjoying a fighting game, you have to be winning a lot against random people online. No you don't. If you're finding some way to play and enjoy the game, that's good enough. Everybody doesn't need to be pro, just like everybody who plays football in their backyard or local park or something doesn't need to be pro.
And this is exactly what most fighting games don't teach.
Part of the perception problem is the idea that in order to be "playing right" or enjoying a fighting game, you have to be winning a lot against random people online. No you don't. If you're finding some way to play and enjoy the game, that's good enough. Everybody doesn't need to be pro, just like everybody who plays football in their backyard or local park or something doesn't need to be pro.
And this is exactly what most fighting games don't teach.
I don't say this to deter you, but only to share my own experience. I was involved in running two ladders for two separate games back on GAF. It was fun at first since everyone was hungry, but interest quickly dropped off each time (the second one almost in record time).
I think it could be great if it was limited to novices or something, to kinda help give them practice, but you have to be prepared for that inevitable drop-off.
it's what he said at the end of the video - netcode, ui/ux features, singleplayer content etc...
If all you need is just a solid core gameplay mechanic then Quake should've still been the most popular FPS out there
Thanks for the insight! And yeah, the dropoff effect is very real, even on local regional ladders. I'm mostly just wondering about it, seeing as interest in fighting games seem to be growing a lot over the last years.
I'll think about it a bit longer, maybe create a thread to check interest later. But it's nice to know it has at least been done before.
idk, i think the real issue with fighting games is that there isnt really anything you can change about the basic formula of 1 v 1 combat. Most other games can either attach their core gameplay loop to a gimmick or compartmentalize it to keep gameplay interesting but the variation in fighting games comes solely from pvp matchups, which on a surface level all seems fairly homogeneous in comparison. Anyone who actually plays games knows how differently even the same character can play but casual observers will just see 1 person beating up another and think thats the entire game. Fighting games really open up in variety when you start getting good and you start to figure out habits, which is something that new players can't always do.
OP
OP
It's a chicken and egg scenario.
Every other big budget game involves moving, aiming and shooting. Meaning anyone getting into video games would have to learn how to do those things. Meaning more people just naturally learns how to play shooters. A person might not like to play Gears of War PvP, but he can still move aim and shoot naturally from playing Uncharted or any countless other TPS.
As other posters brought up, back during the arcade era fighting games were the hottest shit and so everyone just naturally picks up how to do these things because that was what video games were. These days if you want to play "video games", you better learn how to shoot because all your friends are playing fortnite and you'll be the loser of the social hierarchy if you don't.
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Believe me when I say that I've been doing that in DBFZ. The thing is, when to start pushing your buttons isn't inherently obvious to beginners and learning that takes a long time since different characters and players factors into it.
I agree with this. But here's the thing, learning these takes much longer in FGs compared to some other genres like MOBAs and FPSs. I learned how to hold my own in MOBAs within a month compared to FGs.
For me, this is what it boils down to, learning FGs is much faster with guidance, i.e. playing with a mentor. Without this guidance, learning FGs is harder.
Not necessarily a mentor really, just someone who can give you feedback. They don't even have to be as good as you - just good enough to give you a challenge. You can learn the game together and get better together etc.
I think the bolded is kind of illusory. In a MOBA, you're 1/5th of the machine (or in Overwatch, you're one out of six), so it's a lot harder to tell how much your performance is helping or hurting your team. Those games also have a gigantic player base, so it's a lot easier to match up new people against others of comparable skill. Guilty Gear isn't harder in some objective sense- it's just that practically everybody still playing Xrd at this point is a solid player. The same isn't true of one of LoL, Overwatch, etc.
i also think the smaller player pools could be a feedback loop - not sure since i don't play any fighting games competitively, but if it's anything like some shooters then as the number of players shrinks the overall skill floor rises which makes things even more harsh for new/low tier players
Yeah, I guess it really doesn't have to be a mentor so I can agree with that.
Obviously MOBA is a team game and that team play will be a factor in winning or losing. What I meant is, you know how to do the basic fundamentals of playing a character in a MOBA where you won't feel lost then it's a matter of team playing. Whereas in FGs, learning how to do basic fundamentals and losing that feeling of getting lost takes longer.
I don't think this is a controversial opinion. People who say Smash is easier to learn most likely suck at the game. It's kinda same as people saying SF2 is easy because they remember playing against their friends and relatives who weren't any good either.
People who say shooters are easy to get into probably have over 2000 hours spent on the genre as a whole via multiple games.
I suppose it did help that I loved Half Life and Dark Forces before trying to get into Counterstrike. But I also love Netherrealm fighter single player modes and Blazblue's single player mode, and it certainly hasn't given me the grounding for fighting game multiplayer that I hoped it would.
Also reminds me how much it sucks that Arc Sys switched to making their story modes have no fights at all, treating it as more of a side thing that you might watch to get some background for when you go into the real mode of 2 player fighting. It's amazing how many decisions get made in this genre to screw over the newbie greatly for the tiniest benifit of the veteran.