The Shrine

First of all, let me say that I am not really interested in competitive fighting games where you have to figure out the counter-counter-counter-counter-counter move of your opponent. My favorite fighting game is the Soul Calibur series because it's the game where you can fight and do things that actually look pretty cool by just hitting buttons at random. So I'm not terribly concerned about balancing.

I always wonder why you can't make a fighting game where people with like say having 2 characters in Soul Calibur's demonstration theatre, or the Soul Calibur 3's Nightmare vs Seigfried fight where two guys swing for a bit and ends with one falling down. A game where people are actually fighting each other at the same time, not this I do one combo on you, and then you do a combo on me, and then someone eventually dies.

I believe the root of this is that all fighting game really are turn based. If it's my turn to attack you can only defend or get hit. Now if you do the right counter that swaps the role around. You can have counter of a counter and then swap that around yet again. But in the end only one person can be attacking at once. This is because there can only be one winner when both people attacking. If you're using Bison and do a psycho crusher, and I'm Chun Li doing a kick, my kick always has priority over your psycho crusher (at least in the original SF2) so your psycho crusher is always stopped. In most fighting games an attack, no matter how weak, invariably puts the enemy in some kind of hit-shock animation. Therefore it is not possible for both characters to attack each other at the same time minus the cases where both attacks have the exact same priority.

It should be a valid option to attack as a counter to being hit, even at the expense of continue to being hit. Bison's psycho crusher should hit Chun Li attempting to kick into a human torpedo and still do damage (he'd take some damage too). If someone's going to poke you 10 times you should be able to just counter with a big move. Fighting games just won't look very cool if there can only be one person attacking at any given time of the match. Yes this likely to cause some balance problems, but I don't think it's be any harder to balance than a whole mess of imbalanced fighting game there. And it's not like having a balanced game is a necessary criteria for success (for example, MvC2).

bah...whatever the game I'll kick anyones ass with Dan......Dan rules.....

Don Wang wrote:First of all, let me say that I am not really interested in competitive fighting games where you have to figure out the counter-counter-counter-counter-counter move of your opponent.

Just as an FYI, from my small amount of fighting experience, in a real fight you *do* have to figure out the counter-counter-etc. move of your opponent.

I'm not saying it's an invalid discussion, but just be aware that you're getting further away from reality, not further into it.

That's what I was thinking too, but in Don's third paragraph, I understood him to mean he just wants less pre-determined priority. If someone throws a leg kick with their hands down, an effective counter is an over-hand right. Don was saying that in most fighting games, this isn't possible because once the opponent throws the leg kick, the victim is in the defending state.

I think.

3D fighting games are actually doing real physics-like collisions and priority like that to a large extent. If you get cocked by an accidental right on your way to a kick in Tekken 5, you're gonna eat knuckles. Once the kick *connects*, the other character goes to damage or defending, but that's pretty realistic.

That kind of interplay would be fun in a 2D fighter, and quite possible, but it's true I haven't seen that yet. I've been working on a demo for one myself - and thinking about how to introduce things like that, and things like real throws, where you actually have to perform a sequence in order to get the person off balance, instead of just "glom".

Simultaneous attacks usually favor the stronger party, as I know from sparring with my 250-lb ex-vato friend...

I think he's saying that every game needs more Dan

Any knowledge or intuition for how they handle simultaneous strikes? It happens in reality more often than you might think; people trading jabs, or even absorbing that leg kick but getting in the overhand right.

Oh, and simultaneous attacks favor the <i>faster</i> party. And speed depends on your entire central nervous system, not just your muscles. If you look at Olympic lifter, they are very strong, but their lifts require an enormous amount of <i>power</i>, which is an applied force over a particular time. With a given force, if the time is decreased, there's more power. That's how a 165 lbs. lifter can Clean & Jerk 400+ lbs.; he's trained his central nervous system to fire particular muscles at exactly the right time to generate as much power as possible.

I'm not really concerned about reality. If you throw a jab and I throw an upper cut, it should not be the case that just because your jab has high priority, my uppercut is unconditionally nullified. A weak move should not be a strong counter to a strong move, because if you take a typical fighting game engine, you usually have some variant of the following:

attacking > throwing > blocking > attacking

The problem is within the subset of the 'attack' moves, the weak attack usually dominates most attack moves. In a game with combo, the weak attack has no drawback in power because you can chain it into a combo. Generally speaking weak attacks have the best recovery time and this makes blocking a difficult counter to weak attack, so you get into a degenerate situation where one attack clearly dominates. An extreme example would be the Rival Schools line where there is no real effective counter to the jab/weak kick so that opening up with 2 weak kicks or a jump kick is an extremely safe move with the lowest recovery time but can do maximum damage whenever it connects via a combo. This is an extreme example but in any combo-based fighting games, you'll definitely see weak attacks tend to be the preferred move of choice.

Aside from being stupid as a style of fighting, I think a game plain looks dumb when you end up using the weakest move most of the whole time. The 'play safe' move should have very strong counters in the same way blocking all the time is punished. I understand if you want to make some ultimate fighter's dream game maybe that's the way you want to go, but the best selling fighting games are hardly the most balanced or complicated ones. Most people would just like something that looks cool and plays fine.

The closest thing I can think of that matches what I'm thinking is the counter breaker in Killer Instinct. If you do a 5 hit combo but the other guy combo breaker it, you usually lose more health from the counter than the damage you dish out. Parry in Street Fighter 3 is similar too. In those cases both the parry and the combo breaker are more like unconditional reactive counters to any attack, so there is really nothing strategic about them (if you could parry every hit in SF3, you would).

I'd like to see a game where you have more proactive counters to an aggressor. In most fighting games I'm aware of, your only recourse against an agressor is either:

1. Block
2. Movement
3. Do some game specific thing to reverse the situation so you become the aggressor (parry, combo breaker, guard cancel, whatever you want to call it)

All these choices are reactive in nature, and the proactive counter, which is attacking, is rarely the right answer (the guy who attacks first typically has priority), and if you do have an attack that will beat the enemy's attack, again due to the nature of the how priority works out it becomes an unconditional counter with no risk. I'd like something like say you jab me, I counter with a fierce while I'm still being hit, knowing I'll win if you get greedy with your combo (you connect some jabs but I land a fierce in retaliation), but then maybe you back out of your combo early too to fake me into doing a fierce, and then someone who actually knows how to balance this stuff can figure out the counter to that (maybe I can have a fake fierce counter or whatever).

I don't know if adding this dimension would make a game better, and the actual mechanism can be figured out by someone who actually designs/balances a fighting game for a living, but I think it'd make a game look a lot better if you actually have ability for both characters to hit each other at the same time, as opposed to the my turn your turn fighting style in most fighting games I'm aware of where only one person can be attacking at any given time (since the person with lower priority tends to have his attacks unconditionally canceled).

It's a tough balance between reality and making the game interesting and require some subset of skill. If you threw a fierce to counter a weak attack and it connected after the fact, it seems like combos wouldn't really have any point.

I agree with Kupek in that the faster attack is key. When somebody is hit, the reaction turns from focusing on an attack to focusing on how to defend oneself, instinctively. However, there should be more attacks that hit at the same time. Taking Don's example again, a jab and a fierce both connect at about the same time, and both take damage, though the fierce is only half as effective (because of the change in reaction and potential hesitation), but a combo of punches from the faster of the two would still prevent the other guy from throwing any more attacks until he properly defended himself and/or the attacker finishes his combo.

Then you're looking at something like Juggernaut from the MvC series who has 'Super Armor' that prevents stunning from the first hit. Problem is that you just do a combo and it bypasses that aspect completely. I always thought the point of such skills is that if you always hit them with weak attack then you end up taking more damage because they can just hit back through your weak attacks while taking the damage. An extreme example would be one of the special version of Zangief who cannot block but also cannot be stunned, so you can't just do your standard jab combos because he'll just walk through it and do a spinning piledriver.

I'm not saying you can just push fierce as you're getting hit to get out of it, but let's say you think someone is going to just come up and try to do some combo on you, it should be a valid counter to just hit fierce as he's coming through, and hit through his small hits and counter it. In most current fighting games I'm aware of, this doesn't work because quick attacks tend to have better priority, especially since most games tend to give the advantage to the aggressor. Now if you read wrong that's your problem. The counters for using big moves are well established (avoid/block).

That's not always true. There is usually a counter that hits even outside of a jab, such as Ken/Ryu's Dragon Punch, Yoshi's Knee, Guile's Flash Kick, MK's Uppercut, etc. However, these moves are usually combo enders, so you can't use them to start a combo, unlike a faster move.

Well the problem with those counters is that the risk is very high. They could either block it before they attack, hit you out of your special move, or possibly block your special move after you blocked their jab. In a combo based system a move like dragon punch is also not the most powerful move because you can almost always combo a weak hit into some kind of special move anyway. Therefore even if you countered correctly the damage you do to them is still lower than they would've done to you.

Again the balance isn't really the part I'm interested here. I think a fighting game will look better and more fluid if you're allowed to exchange hits simultaneously. It just happens if you allow people to hit through weak attacks, it'd get rid of the probing attacks as some kind of offensive turtling. I think it just looks dumb when the offense is still essentially blocking the whole time via doing the lowest risk moves that allows you to block quickly even if countered. It should be a valid strategy but it should not this difficult to counter. It's sort of like MvC2 where you can call for help which puts you at no disadvantage but if the helper connects you can instantly combo into something else, so you see MvC2 games where two guys just call their helpers at every opportunity because there is almost no risk (very low chance for helper to die if low on health, but backup guys take nearly no permanent damage from being hit anyway).

Well, balance is everything in a fighter. If you want fierce to be the most powerful move ever, so be it, but not very many people would play a game like that.

Counter to strong moves have been well established, namely blocking or move away. Strong moves should counter weak moves.

my qualm with fighting games is as follows:

Sweep kicks/trips do way too much damage. It should simply be an undamaging opening to an avenue that hasn't really been touched on in most fighting games.... Beating fellows while they are on the ground. Where's that at?

(haha, I like Don's tagline)

Sorry if this has been covered, but why would you use weak moves if they're countered by both blocking and strong moves?

It depends on the fighting game but blocking really doesn't counter weak attacks in many games due to their low recovery time. That's okay except in some games the weak moves also counter strong moves which means there's no good counter to them. Look at a game like MvC in general you'll find everyone opens up with a dashing weak attack because it's extremely difficult to counter it. Yes you can try to do a strong move or a super right as they charge in, but that puts you at a severe risk if they're blocking as they charge in.

Chris Hansbrough wrote:I think he's saying that every game needs more Dan

I will end your "dan skillz" with any character. Hell, I'll even let you pick.

Oracle wrote:

Chris Hansbrough wrote:I think he's saying that every game needs more Dan

I will end your "dan skillz" with any character. Hell, I'll even let you pick.

heh. I actually learned to use his goes nowwhere fireball as a defensive tactic. and his jump kick is far superior to the whirlwind kick.for some reson he's the only character I ever play as nowdays....and he sucks more than a vegas hooker

Kupek wrote:Any knowledge or intuition for how they handle simultaneous strikes? It happens in reality more often than you might think; people trading jabs, or even absorbing that leg kick but getting in the overhand right.

Oh, and simultaneous attacks favor the <i>faster</i> party. And speed depends on your entire central nervous system, not just your muscles. If you look at Olympic lifter, they are very strong, but their lifts require an enormous amount of <i>power</i>, which is an applied force over a particular time. With a given force, if the time is decreased, there's more power. That's how a 165 lbs. lifter can Clean & Jerk 400+ lbs.; he's trained his central nervous system to fire particular muscles at exactly the right time to generate as much power as possible.

You may be right. "Stronger" might be a subjective experience of one of my friends' fist strength based on the three punches that it took for him to drop me like a sack of hops. But then again, recalling it, that wasn't really simultaneous, it was me getting my ass beaten by a large Mexican.

It literally took me about a minute and a half just to pull myself together enough to move around reasonably. I'm just glad this guy has my back at parties and clubs.

On the subject of Dan, it's fun to do a Super Taunt and the other guy just blocks it all the time because he's never seen it before.

Andrew, Killer Bee wrote:(haha, I like Don's tagline)

If you mean his forum title, I agree and am glad someone finally noticed it

Don Wang wrote:On the subject of Dan, it's fun to do a Super Taunt and the other guy just blocks it all the time because he's never seen it before.

I'm sorry....did I just see a post from Don with only one sentance? GOOD LORD tHE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END! :p

kali o. wrote:

Andrew, Killer Bee wrote:(haha, I like Don's tagline)

If you mean his forum title, I agree and am glad someone finally noticed it

Damn, I just noticed that too. Where the fuck is the clapping happy face emoticon!?!? I CAN'T EXPRESS MYSELF NOW.