- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
Dream Logic
An offseason swallow
- Location
- In transit
Warning For Marginal Behavior - Breach of Posted Thread Policy
Dark souls shouldnt have an easy mode or any out of game difficulty modifiers. It just wouldn't be the same(not to mention there's a lot of ways in game to affect difficulty).
However...
If there are difficulty levels all content should be able to be reached unless otherwise noted at start. I absolutely loathe games like cuphead where you can go through the game and find you can't face the end boss unless you do it all again on a harder difficulty.
Oh and Hollow Knight should really tone down the hit flash, it makes it hard for me not to lose a second trying to figure out where everyone is again.
And I should really be able to have the map out when falling. It'd be convenient and hilarious.
However...
If there are difficulty levels all content should be able to be reached unless otherwise noted at start. I absolutely loathe games like cuphead where you can go through the game and find you can't face the end boss unless you do it all again on a harder difficulty.
Oh and Hollow Knight should really tone down the hit flash, it makes it hard for me not to lose a second trying to figure out where everyone is again.
And I should really be able to have the map out when falling. It'd be convenient and hilarious.
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
Tbh I think that:
1. Any game which wants 'realistic' long-distance combat should model suppression;
2. The benefit of snipers should not be dealing high damage, but suppressing the fuck out of people.
Make the sniper an explicit support class, where it's not about aiming, but about knowing when to take your shot, because you're generally only going to land shots near someone, and your goal is to make it impossible for them to get out of a killzone or do anything but crawl to cover, rather than actually get kills. That would make 'scout-sniper' actually meaningful-as a sniper, if you are ending the match with a KDR above 1, before counting assists, you are either doing something very very wrong or very, very good.
Dakkaface
Extra Shooty Wordsmith
Dream Logic
An offseason swallow
- Location
- In transit
I'm sheltered? Yeah, definitely sheltered.
(Looks at the bottom banner, oh, I'm just kind'a an idiot today).
Dark souls 2 was a solid entry(and Vendrick is a better Gwyn analogue then Gwynn) and 3's constant callbacks to the first game make me sick and I feel that the dlc's cheapened the story by making the most significant confrontation take place in the Ringed City rather then at the games end(though I am alright with ashes of Ariandel).
Oh and usurping the fire is the absolute worst thing you can possibly do. Seriously.
There's not enough fuel left to keep the Age of Fire going and going into the Age of Darkness with no protection is a fool's gamble. Based on every case study in the games, humanity can't survive in the darkness. Fusing Light and Darkness together is the last, best chance at survival. We can all wait out the Age of Darkness together, and when the sun returns we can jump out at whoever was meant to replace us before they expect it.
Warning: PAY ATTENTION
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
The Thread Policy Box said:
pay attention
Two Weeks Threadban for breaking posted thread policy. Pay attention. Those warnings are right above the posting box for a reason. The reason here is 'Dark Souls GIT GUD' arguments have roiled this thread badly and often.
Mechasaurian
Big Bossu
- Location
- Lost among fields of history
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I'm a big fan of the Ash Seeketh Embers ending myself. 
It just feels so...chillingly awesome. I get to grab all the power for myself without facing the danger of being a mere pawn for the Primordial Serpents and/or the Sable Church.
(The bit where my character stomps on the Fire Keeper's face is strange, because it assumes a certain vindictiveness rather than cold opportunism. But I can deal with it, given that the Fire Keeper turned out to be a complete nothing of a level-up waifu.)
It just feels so...chillingly awesome. I get to grab all the power for myself without facing the danger of being a mere pawn for the Primordial Serpents and/or the Sable Church.
(The bit where my character stomps on the Fire Keeper's face is strange, because it assumes a certain vindictiveness rather than cold opportunism. But I can deal with it, given that the Fire Keeper turned out to be a complete nothing of a level-up waifu.)
You're kinda conflating the role of a designated marksman with that of a sniper, though?
But even then, designated marksmen aren't there to suppress enemies at long ranges. Not entirely. They're there to extend the reach of an infantry platoon, pick off stragglers, disrupt enemies trying to flank, ambush, or rally, or deny the enemy movement across a kill zone by making the enemy keep their heads down after they pick off targets of opportunity, which is the closest they get to actually "suppress" an enemy. But they don't have the ammunition capacity to lay down fully effective suppressive fire -- in the infantry platoon, that's always been the task of the automatic gunner, who can lay down bursts of fire at quite significant ranges (up to seven to eight hundred meters aiming at barrel-sized targets is the effective range of the M249, for example), allowing the riflemen to move in for a flank.
The designated marksman is still doing their thing properly if they're picking off enemies -- if you want to properly model suppression, you need to give automatic gunners more weight.
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Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
For games this is kind of tricky, because they lack the immediacy of "If I get shot, I am going to die.". It only really works for hardcore games like Squad or ARMA where bullets are realistically deadly and getting killed might have immediately bad consequences for a match and you might not even be allowed to respawn.
Planetside (since it's the only competitive shooter I've played a good deal of in years lol) kind of has suppression sort of, you bullet trails linger and are color coded to faction so you can see where people have been shooting and obviously it would be a bad idea to wander into that area. But it still doesn't work consistently as a tactic because you can soak up a bit of damage and death is a total slap on the wrist unless you give a shit about your K/D ratio, which for that game is dumb because dying over and over is basically inevitable.
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Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
You say this as if people don't obsess over KD:R even if it's immaterial to victory in the game.
- Location
- Massholistan
That is called Metro...and no one likes playing on Metro (well, except for those weird people who only play metro, but they are a strange and unknowable breed )
- Location
- Illinois
I can confirm. I ended up getting the highest score while getting killed all the time. Mainly it was because I gave out a lot of sandwiches to everyone, I think.
The_Reptile_
Jolly Good
- Location
- THE PITS OF HELL. Also known as Connecticut.
Probably not all that controversial but it needs to be said anyway.
Personally I feel the main reason why Fighting Games are such a niche within a niche genre is because of the terrible precedent Street Fighter II established by releasing like 10 bajillion 'updates' to the original game almost yearly to the point where it's now almost an industry standard, and even when it's not as bad as it was in SFII's case when speaking to other casual fighting game fans about it their response is always some form of 'Why should I buy this game when some incompatible updated version is gonna get released in, like, six months and everyone goes to that' which then usually leads to 'Why should I buy this 'ultimate edition' of this game when the straight up new game is gonna get released in like six months and everyone goes to that', which ultimately contributes to Fighting Games's legendarily terrible player retention.
Personally I feel the main reason why Fighting Games are such a niche within a niche genre is because of the terrible precedent Street Fighter II established by releasing like 10 bajillion 'updates' to the original game almost yearly to the point where it's now almost an industry standard, and even when it's not as bad as it was in SFII's case when speaking to other casual fighting game fans about it their response is always some form of 'Why should I buy this game when some incompatible updated version is gonna get released in, like, six months and everyone goes to that' which then usually leads to 'Why should I buy this 'ultimate edition' of this game when the straight up new game is gonna get released in like six months and everyone goes to that', which ultimately contributes to Fighting Games's legendarily terrible player retention.
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stormbringer951
Against Eternity
The actual useful metric in Battlefield is probably score per minute, but it's nice to float a good KDR as well.
I dunno about the newer games, but back in the old Battlefields (2/2142) where games were on community servers and not using a ranked lobby, most players were pretty bad at wining matches on even the linear attack/defend maps like Camp Gib or Strike at Karkand because a couple of enemies would ignore the entire battle, speed past the frontline and start capping all the capture points from the rearmost forwards. The attackers usually had an uncappable base, unlike the defenders, and the closest capture points to them would be hard to defend for the defenders, the middle ones about even and the rear capture points were hell on wheels to grind through as an attacker.
If you just raced past the combat, you'd be able to cap all the points from the rearmost forwards with just one man on each cap point, and you'd also be able to trash all their commander's assets (UAV/artillery/supply drop/etc) into the bargain and probably dogtag their commander (if they're using scan and assets probably, they're probably hiding under cover in a corner on the rearmost base) if he was bad. If you outfragged the 2-3 guys who usually noticed they were losing all their rear caps and ran back to defend them, you could leave the enemy stranded on their second most forward cap point (the first usually having fallen by then) by the time most of their team actually had to look at the map on the respawn screen.
This feels like it should make sense but the actual games don't really have it hold true. Blazblue is a huge offender here yet continues to constantly push product while SFV's "never have to make another purchase" barely moved. Tekken and Soul Calibur never did the yearly update thing either.
The problem is that fighting games are hard. They're hard to get into due to how weird you move and general execution requirements, they're hard to get good at because they actually want you to practice and learn, and they're hard to play if you didn't have a scene before the late 2000s because you couldn't really play them online. There's no team to blame for your failures, no one easy trick to overcoming obstacles, just a long grind of getting better. It's about a billion times easier to teach someone Starcraft tactics that'll get them midway up the ladder than it is to even get the basics of footsies to sink in.
Plus it's not like this really matters much for casual players; they don't need the updated version because they're just mashing it out, and any value they get out of said update is going to come from it being a sequel; you don't just skip the 2nd game in a series because the third is out after all, you'd miss out on all the story and single player content that won't be in the next one!
- Location
- Washington DC, United States
They also don't have progression systems. All of a character's moves start unlocked, so you can't start people on the simple stuff and have them work their way up like rts or rpgs do. Even in MOBAs laning is pretty simple.
I mean, there's often characters who power up throughout the fight and there's tutorial modes that slowly teach you the game?
- Location
- Russia
...
Baaang bang bang ba~a~ang
Baa~ningu ta~ma~shi~i~i~i
ahem
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Dakkaface
Extra Shooty Wordsmith
EC did an episode on Fighting Games that lays it out pretty well.
If you want the short version; Fighting games are designed by and for a specific kind of high level play that most casuals never see because it requires you to memorize the moves of every fighter in the game and know the execution and limits of at least one fighter intimately. This is made worse by the fact that fighting game tutorials are famously awful things that don't teach you anything so much as put you in a classroom with no teacher and a few things written on the board.
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No, that's a bad show and spreads all sorts of terrible ideas. It's too focused on specifics and misses out on how fighters actually work (such as the entire concept of footsies), probably because the people doing it have no clue in the first place. Most of the ideas they put up are awful and build bad habits as well; you want a solid learning mode, go with a GG Mission Mode which is "here's a bunch of skills and techniques. Here's a common situation. Figure out a way to use them to win with your character" and then hints if you keep failing because it's actively trying to teach you how to think about fighters.
And you cannot teach someone how to do more than what is basically a few recorded situations and maybe hit confirming via single player because AIs do not play at all like a human.
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Dakkaface
Extra Shooty Wordsmith
This post is frustrating me because there is so little substance in it. It's a more verbose 'they r wrong' with not much elaboration. I looked up footsies and it's apparently midrange ground play? No idea how that disproves their core assumption on the nature of fighting game difficulty. If they are wrong, how are they wrong? I'm genuinely curious because I'm not part of that niche, so I'm taking what they say at face value.
Alternately, it might be your opinion is that the EC crew are terribad and should never give games advice ever, which works as controversial I guess, though I disagree. EC is aimed at devs, not players. I mean, this dude partly disagrees with EC because he thinks getting to high level play is entirely a player side issue about dedication vs. salt, but EC is mostly dev advice and discussion, so it's not really surprising that they're only looking at or proposing solutions from that angle.
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Footsies are the entire core functionality of fighting games, the meat of the game, how to get and avoid damage. They're one of those lifetime to master issues and teaching just the very basics of them is absolutely required to progress beyond entry level. Everyone thinks of fighting games as big combos or mixups, but the question of how you get to that point is the important bit. And any "how to make fighting games work for new players" which doesn't cover "how to teach footsies" ain't worth the space it was recorded on.
But they're wrong because they don't actually understand the way that learning a fighting game works. You cannot teach it as a series of situations because fighting games have far, far too many individual situations to teach; fighting game characters are a toolbox, and introducing each tool and giving open ended situations is going to be far more useful than the opposite approach that EC proposes.
But that's all besides the point; EC doesn't understand why fighting games are hard. The absolute killer issue that they don't even touch on is that movement is tough. Nothing controls like a fighter these days, the left and right shuffle from holding the stick, having to tap for a dash, fixed arc jumps; back in the days of 2D platforms it was just kind of awkward, now it's completely alien. It takes a lot of determination to get past that hurdle and internalize how you move around. Hence why Smash had a lot easier time getting people involved, because platform fighters have much softer controls; all the air control in the world, a button to jump, press in the direction you want to attack, so on and so forth. This isn't execution, it's basic mechanical design. You can see how games that want to attract more casual players adapt to this; DBFZ has the super dash which homes in on the opponent which is amazing for a new player because it's a one button approach (which then gets blown up by a 2H, but that's how your RPS game works).
The second issue is matchmaking. In the land of the online community, not having a good skill based matchmaker is poison to new players, as they get matched up against people who have been playing for aeons, lose horribly, and forsake the genre. You 100% need to be able to get newer players matched together for casual matches to keep them interested. This is a major issue with more niche entries to the genre because you generally don't have that huge of a casual playerbase, but that arguably makes it all the more important.
That's just for getting the casuals in the door to do more than the basic arcade mode. The issue of being willing to put in the time and effort to really learn the game is covered in Core-A's video, but I think he's slightly off with Execution. Having a potential high execution ceiling with a low floor to actually feeling like you accomplish something is huge for converting players because chasing that one combo will keep people interested and give them something to blame other than themselves when they lose. I've seen a lot of people quit SFV because they lost the ability to chase the execution dragon for bigger and cooler combos after all.
So from the dev side of things, there are some reasonably easy changes to make that have games be more user friendly. Adding a bad block icon, such as ArcSys' ! or SFV's Crossup indicator goes a long way towards helping people realize when they blocked wrong. A "late tech" indicator on throws would also be useful. There's all sorts of stuff you can add to training mode, from GG's myriad of options to SFV's guard and knockdown reversals or Uni's button press indicators; these are all extremely useful to a player about what is happening, but you run into the issue that Core-A has which is that you need a player who is willing to go into training mode in the first place.
Really, if you want to truly teach new players you need to write up how the game's footsie and then mixup game plays and do a guided lecture series which is teaching the fundamentals. Get something like Avoiding the Puddle's Basics of Tekken series going where you're exposing the players to how a strategy or tactic is formed; this is how you use a backdash to whiff punish, this is how you sidestep when you think a straight poke is coming, so on and so forth. That's the hard bit right there, getting the right mindset for proper learning because it's teaching the ways that a seasoned gamer goes about experimenting with a movelist. "What do I have that's plus on block and can frametrap, what do I have which counters low pokes," that sort of thing. Imparting that mindset is going to do wonders compared to trying to teach via a few situations.
But in order to actually get people to learn here you have to get them playing against other players, not against an AI. With the way fighting game AI works (and that's not going to change soon) you cannot bait an AI, you cannot condition an AI, you cannot even learn the habits and blow through the blockstrings of AI because they're running off a script while reading your buttons; even the sickest of mixups working is out of your hands because the AI has to choose whether it blocks or gets hit by it. Playing against an AI can function more in a game where it's primarily about the player getting better at doing a single task, be it lining up headshots or farming creeps (and even then you hit a wall right fast), but in a game where the interaction is all it simply does not function well in terms of teaching the player.
Basically if you want new players to not just buy the game (which expansive single player content and mashable gameplay will do) but actually keep playing you need some combination of more normalized movement, solid matchmaking, and something to blame other than themselves with it all goes pear shaped. Then to actually teach them the game instead of letting them run into wild youtube videos or written guides you should have some sort of series which goes through how to look at moves, put them together with movement, and how getting damage actually works. Is this a game or character about conversions from neutral pokes? How does that happen. Is this about using movement to force whiffs and punishing? Go into detail there. Maybe it's a heavily knockdown focused game? Well, spend some time on creating oki setups for knockdowns or getting out of them.
That's how you teach a fighter, not through a pen and paper exam. It's about learning how to think, not dealing with "which button to press here" because not only are there a billion different "heres" but getting people to understand how they get into situations and how to create their own is the true core of the gameplay.
(Also, I don't think I've ever met a new player who I had to tell to use their reversal; the moment someone knows they have a dragon punch expect that to fly every damn time they get put into block stun)