Opinion: Where Do Fighting Games Go From Here?
[In this personal opinion piece, Japan-based journalist Nayan Ramachandran considers Capcom's challenges with making Street Fighter IV more approachable for casual gamers, and why fighting game enthusiasts often reject those accessibility efforts.]
My head hurts, and my stomach is empty. It’s nine o’ clock in the morning and everyone seems a lot more awake than me. I finally get to the front of the line for the play I wanted to see, only to find out it has been sold out for almost two months.
My friend and I walk to Denny’s for a pick-me-up breakfast, both of us despondent and still feeling the effects of the party the night before.
When I finally finish my grilled cheese sandwich and scrambled eggs, I mutter to myself "Well, at least Street Fighter IV comes out tomorrow." My friend says nothing, and we continue eating. It was not a great start to the day.
On the way to the train station, my friend peels off down another street for a separate engagement, and I take the train one stop back to my neighborhood, my belly full but my head still throbbing.
Instead of taking the usual walking route from the station back to my apartment, I decided to swing by a tiny game and DVD store in the open air mall close by to have a see what they had in stock.
To my surprise, they had Street Fighter IV in stock, but it was selling for ¥1000 more than the store I had the game reserved at nearly five blocks away. I walk to the other store, past my apartment, in hopes they might be holding my copy, ready to buy a day early.
When I realized they were going to stick strictly to the street date for the game, I walked back another five blocks to the first store and snapped Street Fighter IV up, aware that plenty of people in the neighborhood would want a copy just as badly if they knew it was already available.
This was the real start of the day: my re-introduction to the world of Street Fighter, and my re-activated status in the secret club of fighting game players.
The Velvet Rope
That’s what it is, after all. Fighting games are hugely exclusive. Since Street Fighter IV was announced, I and many other people have been inundated with questions, all with a similar theme: accessibility.
From "How easy is it to pick up and play?" to "What game should I practice with to get ready?", questions and worries have been pouring down.
Street Fighter IV might seem too accessible to avid series fans, and may even feel like a step back to those who lived off Street Fighter III over its various incarnations, but Capcom and other fighting game developers might have no choice. Alienation is a very real problem.
Fighting games are inherently competitive, and while they may seem pick-up-and-play friendly at first sight, the amount of dexterity required to perform regularly used actions is almost completely out of grasp for the average gamer not used to fighting games as a genre. On top of that, the fighting game community has become far more insular than others.
Online first-person shooters are also a fairly competitive and difficult arena to enter, but their popularity has spawned a large community of varying ability, forcing developers to form viable matchmaking systems.
Even without these systems, first-person shooters have become largely team based, allowing new players to play with veterans on their team who can protect and teach them as they play the game.
As the mainstream popularity of fighting games has waned over the years, communities have become far more entrenched, developing and using lingo and strategy that the average player would never be able to decipher on their own.
The Smash Bros Effect
Many gamers that played fighting games as kids only played Street Fighter II, and after the series took a huge departure with Street Fighter III, many decided to stay away.
Increasingly technical fighting games like Virtua Fighter often led to incorrect generalizations about the entire fighting game catalog, most people considering them to be inaccessible for newbies and impossible to enjoy.
When Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series started to gain a large following after the release of its Gamecube incarnation, many within its ranks considered it a fresh new look at fighters, and a fresh take on the genre. It’s departure was grand, and its gameplay was vastly different.
Super Smash Bros. Melee seemed to skew more towards the idea of a party game than a traditional fighting game because of its gameplay types and its concentration on four-player matches. Much of its resemblance was to Power Stone, rather than Street Fighter.
The problem, though, was that many did not even consider it to be a fresh fighter that could bring new gamers into the community. In fact, many today still do not think it is a fighting game at all.
Arguments on semantics seem to flare up on message boards even now, its very existence seemingly an insult to the sensibilities of the hardcore fighting fan.
Increasing Accessibility
But then, what needs to be done to make fighting games more accessible to new gamers, and still appease the hardcore? I love Street Fighter and have played it for years, but as long as new 2D fighters follow the conventions of special attack joystick movements and conventional 1-on-1 play, new players will not come in droves.
The likes of Smash Bros. attracted a whole new generation of fighting game fans, but the very same lack of adherence that made the series so popular with its community was the same element that drove purists halfway to their grave.
Street Fighter IV is a surprisingly accessible fighting game, and seems designed to bring back those who fell off the bandwagon years ago, but throwing a simple hadouken or shoryuken -- both of which must be mastered to be of any use when playing -- takes more practice than most new gamers are honestly willing to put in.
It’s a dichotomy that unfortunately may be its undoing. Fighting game specific forums are confusing to read, even for me, a gamer that has been playing fighting games casually for over 10 years.
The amount of acronyms and colloquialisms that litter their conversations makes for smoother communication between veterans, no doubt, but it makes it overwhelming and impenetrable to outsiders.
At the same time, the approachable fighting games are either lacking in the depth required to attract the enthusiast audience, such as Dead or Alive, or so far removed from the norm that their existence does not register, and enthusiast skills cannot be transposed without a steep learning curve.
With the growing cost of game development and the higher technical expectations with each future iteration, it is no surprise that Capcom took the safe route with Street Fighter IV, mirroring Street Fighter II’s roster and shedding a lot of the systems from Street Fighter III that made the game unpopular with casual players.
Street Fighter IV seems to be successfully straddling that bridge between casual and enthusiast for now, but it is hard to tell if it will have the staying power that past titles had.
Hopefully, companies like Capcom, SNK, and even Rare can see that there’s some room for more casual titles. Releases like Tatsunoko vs. Capcom (released for Arcade and Wii only in Japan) show that Capcom knows how to make a more casual fighter and is willing to, but there needs to be bigger strides. Hopefully, the fans won’t sneer when that happens.
Comments
It's a nice idea, bringing in the casual and the uninitiated back into the niche of fighting games. Many of the hardcore players would establish themselves here, more so than other genres because of the required dexterity and technique involved to be successful.
No one wants to lose, and unfortunately in fighting games that dichotomy will always exist. There's no team in I, here.
You do bring up a good point: what do companies need to do to bring in casual players and increase the audience of an ever diminishing genre?
The best example would be Super Street Fighter II: HD Remix. Many of the characters were balanced to fix match ups that were previously uneven. Also, the most notable example of reaching out to the casual base was the elimination of complex moves in an effort to ease in western gameplay that focuses on controllers rather than arcade joysticks. That made complex inputs that only seasoned professionals were used to accessible to the average gamer, changing the playing field and encouraging people to test their limits.
Fighting games are stale. They have to be in order to survive in this market where new ideas will alienate old players. Street Fighter 4, for all its blessings, really does move a step backwards from the previous title in an effort to reach out to casual players. It's not the jewel that was Street Fighter III, not in its depth or its demand for strict attention to detail.
Something's got to give.
Either the casual players will win out in the long run, or the hardcore fans who desperately long for something deep and challenging will lose.
Posted by: patapete | February 24, 2009 1:09 PM
Frankly, I've been playing 2D fighters casually since I was a kid and I really think Smash Bros. is the future of the fighting genre. I love Street Fighter 4 for the polish of the thing at the very least.
But fighting games need to learn to either drop their practically superficial walls of dexterity or actually become willing to nurture new players past them. There's no reason whatsoever any 2D fighter nowadays, be it KoF or SF or the upcoming BlazBlue or lord knows, can't have a comprehensive tutorial system that could teach even your grandma to play.
From a game design and interaction standpoint, the idea that a $60 game is dropped into your lap with a movelist (that would take a brand new player weeks to feel comfortable with, and good luck with even the most steadfast of new players staying interested that long if they don't have a circle of friends to play with already) and a series of broken computer opponents is purely archaic.
While, on the side, exists Smash Bros., a series that exemplifies purity and competition. The entry barrier is low, only a few actions up from your standard platformer, and players who practice can get into mindgaming (the most important part of any fighting game,) within weeks, not months or more than a year.
The future of the fighting genre, if it should continue to thrive in any way, is increased accessibility coupled with deep fighting systems that encourage wits and outright skill at the game.
I hate to be blunt, but if the 'hardcore' players can't keep up with the trend, then they only have themselves to blame.
Posted by: P.F. | February 24, 2009 1:54 PM
What made SF3 so unpopular with casual players? The parrying system? Gimme a break. Even on the highest setting, the computer hardly ever parried. And if you played against someone who parried every single frame of your super, I can only imagine that being an outlier. if anything, the pacing and damage in 3 is much more forgiving than the pre-Alphas.
Posted by: GimmeCookies | February 24, 2009 4:10 PM
If there were a fighting game that could teach me how to play and which is no more likely to give me carpal tunnel than an ordinary game, I would be interested in the genre.
Posted by: Mark | February 24, 2009 4:45 PM
I'm not sure I completely agree that Smash Bros has an easier learning curve. The inputs themselves are easier for sure, but the basics of attack and defense revolving around knocking people off the stage and the absolute necessity of understanding and utilizing smashes to be effective at all are a steep initial barrier. Much steeper than Street Fighter and the idea that you just pummel the other guy till he falls over. Past that, very technical games like Virtua Fighter do end up with a steeper learning curve, but they're still easier to get if you just hop into the ring with another newbie.
I think there are various other factors that help people overcome the initial hump for SSB. Familiar popular characters certainly helps, people will buy anything if you brand it right. And look at the success of Marvel vs. Capcom among more casual players. Also, the "party" atmosphere and four-player free-for-alls help take the sting out of defeat, encouraging people to stick with it longer, and encouraging ganging up and teamwork if one player has vastly greater skill. Also, the presence of extremely powerful items helps even newbies rack up a couple kills once in a while.
My point is that it's not the actual difficulty curve of SSB compared to other fighting games that made it resonate well with fighting newbies, because, while it require a much lower overall investment to get decent, it requires a much greater initial investment to get out of the gutter. It's a bunch of very savvy choices to invest players in the game, and dole out encouragement to get new players over the hump.
I think one way to get some fresh blood into fighters is to look at these other things that made SSB successful. We need a new fighting game with characters people are already invested in, we need a system that gives plentiful rewards to newbies to help them over the hump. We need excellent training modes that make the mechanics of the game understandable to new players, and minigame-like training exercises to encourage them to practice those skills. We need to find a way to take the sting out of defeat, so players don't get frustrated and give up. These are things that can be applied to a game that hardcore players will be interested in as well, so we don't fracture the community, or ghettoize players that cut their teeth on the game (as happened with SSB).
Posted by: Julian | February 25, 2009 9:45 AM
I'd disagree that those things about Smash create any sort of barrier for beginners, as the mechanics of the knock-back system and how to return to the stage are rather simple (and ingenious from a game design standpoint, but I'll get to that in a minute). For a player to have his foot in the door and feel good about his progress, he only needs to be able to pull off the basic set of moves, (which are essentially directions with one of two buttons and a few tap-presses for smashing,) and know the basic win/lose condition of the game; hit eachother, try to jump back on the stage when knocked back, when a player can no longer recover from a hit properly, they've been bested. A few button presses and an admittedly foreign (but still simple,) concept of being knocked away and a player is on a plateau and ready for advancement. Of course, proper Smash use, proper...throw use, proper dodging...these are all complexities to tackle. But they're issues of skill and experience and not dexterity or sheer memorization.
Which is a stark contrast to a game like Street Fighter, wherein a new player honestly is incapable of hitting a 'decent' plateau until they're capable of doing hadouken and shoryuken motions at an impulse. No offense to present company (and I don't know who here considers them a 'hardcore' fighter player), but it seems to me that 'hardcore' gamers seem to be completely unaware of the fact that it can take weeks for a newcomer to the genre to be able to do a quarter circle on command. And that's where the salt is in the wound, and where these classic fighting games simply are too stubborn for newcomers; being able to counter a player jumping towards you with a shoryuken/flying uppercut on command is one of the hallmarks of being on the plateau to actually start playing the game and getting better at it and not just learning the basics.
With Mario that same attack is Up+B.
And though the flying system present in Smash Brothers might seem unnatural, I'll defend it tooth and nail as I think it's got a number of brilliant things going for it. For one, the system is much better at leaving control in players hands in my opinion. Directional input and a large room for recovery means that a player is only out of control for a very brief period of time after being hit. After a skirmish, players have a large distance and it's up to them how to return and reengage. This is something of the opposite of what I consider to be one of the biggest weaknesses of the traditional fighting genre: In Street Fighter the amount of time a player spends helpless after being hit can be a bit large on its own, but is also further determined by the skill of the attacker. Your opponents skill with combos will directly hamper your ability to play the game, as you watch a variable amount of health simply disappear. There's also the fact that, post attack/on-recovery, your options and amount of control and ability to exercise your skill is still very variable. If you've been hit into a corner, well, hell, you'd better know which one of your few options for escaping to use if your opponent should try and box you in there. In that way I make the argument that Smash Bros' ingenious system encourages more competition and emphasizes the important of your own actions and skill level.
The damage system is also an incredibly potent indicator of a raising sense of urgency. It's a much more physical display of damage, and as a match goes on it becomes more and more apparent just how dangerous continued risks will be as you see your character venture closer to the edge of the arena. From 0% to 200%, there generally is a noticeable difference in how players will handle risk. In traditional life-bar games, the effects of taking a fireball at full health and quarter health are identical, and the player will only become aware of risk when he breaks flow to look at his life bar and his opponents and process the situation as a whole.
In any case, I do also argue that a large part of Smash's appeal is the approachable nature of the gameplay. Quite simply non-fighting-gamers can actually pick up a controller and grasp the nature of "jump, shield, physical or special button + direction" in a very short span of time. On the contrary, Street Fighter isn't a game that can be picked up by a newcomer inside an hour.
Not that Smash's freewheeling nature, friendly face, and licensed characters don't help. Honestly, the characters are somewhat the biggest part of the appeal, even though the underlying system is shockingly solid and intelligent.
I'm not saying, despite all of this, that traditional 2D fighters should cease to exist. There is something rewarding about these old fashioned, high-dexterity systems. That isn't to say they're better, or really in any way more fostering of enjoyable competition than more modern alternatives, but they do have both their place and their audience. But there's still no reason they can't at least have activities like the ones you mentioned that make them easier to get into.
But again, those are simply my thoughts on why Smash or games like it will be the future of the genre; game design that is entirely focused on a smooth yet challenging skill curve, that enables players and puts more of the experience in their hands, that reinforces the fun parts of competitive gaming, and that offers consistently rewarding tiers of skill advancement.
Posted by: P.F. | February 25, 2009 11:23 AM
Don't get me wrong, I got no beef with Smash Bros. I think it's an interesting take on the genre, and I respect the elegance of the design, and depth afforded by the game. I'm not one of those people who think Smash Bros isn't really a fighting game, or deserves less respect than more traditional fighting games.
This is purely anecdotal, but observing people's first experiences with Smash Bros compared to Marvel vs. Capcom or Soul Calibur leads me to believe that, without a nurturing environment and explicit instruction people generally have a harder time getting basic strategy in Smash Bros. I've handed the controller off and watched too many people languish against the low-level AI, completely unable to recover or knock enemies off. I explain smashes and the basic moves etc. but the things you have to do to get back from even a minor hit are far less intuitive than simply blocking is a traditional fighter. I can pass off the controller on Street Fighter and they can button mash their way to a couple victories against low-level AI. Also, it requires some instruction and coordination to pull off smashes (most players won't even know they exist unless you tell them). Newbs in general aren't able to pull them off consistently without some amount of practice. it's much less practice than it takes to be able to reliably input SF moves, but pinning the only way to succeed on these moves presents a barrier to entry, even on the easiest settings. In SF, it is possible to kill somebody without ever doing a super move.
Street Fighter isn't a game that can be picked up by a rank newcomer in an hour if you're pitting them against people who know what they're doing, but neither is SSB. Pit a newbie 1-on-1 against an experienced and unsympathetic player for an hour in SSB and they'll think the other player is cheating and give up. In some ways it's even worse than getting your moves parried, because you feel like no matter how much damage you post on you opponent, you'll never actually be able to get them to die.
I'll be honest and say that this is based in part in my experience with the game. I tried the original N64 Smash Bros well after it was released and absolutely hated it. I had no idea what I was doing, the people I was playing against were very good and very competitive, and I felt like nothing I did mattered because they'd magically come back from every hit, and I couldn't recover from a tap. It was frustrating and I gave up. I got back into it a little while after Melee came out, and after a couple hours practicing it kinda clicked. Compare this to my first experiences with SF2 when I was much younger. I could never do shoryuken reliably, and was pretty hit-and-miss with hadoken, but I didn't care. Nobody I knew could do it well, so we plinked at each other with fierce attacks and still had a good time.
I think some of what made SSB accessible is that is is so different from other fighting games. The hardcore fighters didn't have skills that could transfer to it, so everybody was learning it together, making a more welcoming and understanding atmosphere around the game, and almost entirely sidestepping the discouraging nature of expert-vs-newb matchups. Fewer people find SSB as accessible now as they did when the original came out, and SSBB had a big initial launch similar to a more traditional fighting franchise like SF4.
Posted by: Julian | February 25, 2009 4:11 PM
From this discourse, it seems to me that an accessible 2D fighter could be one that keeps the traditional life bar/KO win system of Street Fighter with a simple attack control system of Smash Brothers.
This might be obscure, but back when King of Fighters '95 first came out on the PS1, players had the options to map special moves to the shoulder buttons. Fast forward to KoF XI on the PS2, which did not have the mapping option. Trying to do those SNK 8-point moves on a d-pad or those little analog sticks is a recipe for disaster, especially against an SNK boss.
To summarize, give players the option to take the hadoken/shoryuken motions out of the equation and map the specials to the shoulder buttons. Keep the win conditions simple and the game can be good to go.
Posted by: Joe | February 25, 2009 5:25 PM
Speaking as someone who is very much inexperienced with fighting games, I'm surprised you didn't mention what is clearly the most accessible release in the genre in the past year: Mortal Kombat vs DC. Not only because the controls are easy to learn, but because making the DC characters pull off moves is so much more satisfying for those of us who aren't in awe of Ryu or Raiden.
On Saturday I had a casual gamer friend over and we played SF IV for 10 minutes and were quickly bored. I told him I had MK vs DC, we booted that up, and played for an hour. It's no contest in my book.
Posted by: Ben Fritz | March 2, 2009 10:49 PM
Street Fighter IV isn't as accessible as I had anticipated. The game requires too much timing and dexterity to appeal to those who are afraid of carpel tunnel. It's not the difficulty that bothers me, it's the difficulty curve. I always reach the line that that separates the regular from the diehard and can't overcome it. I do enjoy SSB, mainly because it's usually fun while other fighting games become hard work.
Posted by: Moosek | May 28, 2009 10:24 PM