Digital Watches

Agreed. The guard gauge may be a counterintuitive mechanic, but it works really well for what it's supposed to do. I have yet to see a guard break mechanic that's implemented in a way that doesn't punish good defense more than the guard gauge does, and frankly I've also never seen a guard break mechanic that didn't feel like a bad thing to have in a game, and make the game it's in worse for it.

:V indeed. Probably not making it to evo this year, though I haven't been in a while. Maybe next year.

Maaaan, do I have to go buy a vita? Stupid arc and their late patches. Can you no longer get a simple 5D->j.D->j.D->TKB into the corner? I'm curious about whether 5D->Kokuu as a launch is more damage.

Has this topic looped back around again? Does anyone think anyone's going to change their mind? Has anything new been said? Let's say we're in some platonic ideal of a fighting game. Assume everyone had perfect execution, never dropped a combo, jump installed when they wanted to, hit their 1F links, could do every move and every cancel consistently. I'm not talking perfect reaction time, or perfect knowledge, just the ability to do the thing they thought they should do at any given time. Let's say you know nothing about your opponents' experience. How much they've practiced to get to this point, what their character in particular requires them to do, how they go about learning. Let's further say that you know nothing about what the game requires to execute. You somehow have selective amnesia, where you can execute perfectly, but you don't remember the steps it took to get there. Maybe this has happened because the controls have become perfect. The game plugs directly into your brain, and your character is just an extension of your body. Maybe the game is controlled normally, but you and your opponent have both spent an ungodly amount of hours, and now execute perfectly. The details don't matter. The point is you will never drop something you meant to do. Neither will the person you're playing. So you have these fast decisions to make. You must block mixups, you must escape pressure, you must confirm hits into combos, you must control space with movement and hitboxes, you must try to discern whether you're at advantage and can attack, or should keep blocking, or need to bait something. If it's a complicated game like Guilty Gear, you must decide how to block a given attack, how to spend your meter, whether it's worth it to burst. When you're on offense, you must come up with ways to get around your opponent's blocking. Force them to react quickly. Trick them into reacting wrong. Maybe even confound their timing such that, despite doing exactly what they wanted to do, they still executed wrong, because they were crossed up, or the situation changed for some other reason. You must also weight attacking unpredictably versus attacking such that your confirms can be done on reaction or with a sufficiently good guess, and will net you good damage and an advantageous position. Do you still feel that you are playing a fighting game? Do you find the game exciting, interesting, sufficiently fast-paced? Do you feel that every match will look different, even between the same players? I personally would say yes. Some people would say no. On the flip side, do you feel you've accomplished something when your opponent accidentally taps up and gets hit when they meant to block? When you win because they dropped a combo? When you punish them for a move they wanted to, and could have FRCed if they had practiced more? I don't. That seems like a worse match, and a win I don't deserve. It feels better to win than to lose, but it feels better to outsmart or out-react or trick someone than to win by their failure to use the controls. It is not significantly different to me than winning because someone walked into the room and cut the cord to their controller at a critical moment. I don't care about what the other person has practiced in the past, that's a black box of no interest to me. I care about what is happening now, in the match itself. I care about having more and better people to play against. There's a difference between saying "That's how the game is, deal with it or play something else" and saying "That's how the game should be, I like that as a feature." There's no point in pining and wishing that any particular game you want to play were easier, and that you didn't have to work as hard. We deal with the game the way it is, and we do what has to be done to play it at as high a level as we can. But when we talk about what should be the case, the status quo is irrelevant. Saying we should deal with what we have is not the same as saying we should never try to improve it as new games come out. And demanding an entry barrier to the game is demanding that there be less competent competition. The highest level of challenge a competitive game can offer is the strongest players. The people you actually have to beat to win. If a game is harder to just make the dude on the screen do a thing, less people will get to that highest level. Predictably. Inevitably. Unnecessary entry barriers allow people to be big fish in small ponds. I'm not saying everyone who wants them is thinking that way, but I am saying that that's all it will ever accomplish. Consider what you actually want to get out of fighting games. Or don't. Like I said, people's opinions on this seem to be set in stone. I'm sure we'll have the exact same conversation again in another week. I might have written this post before already, for all I know.

Oh, and Shoutouts to pedro for stealth running all the things, and shoutouts to SHTKN for still having a cool hat and being a pro.

Yo that was mad fun. Shoutouts to Kirbster and Foonzo and turtles for being a super chill guy, being the sickest venue, and having a very relaxed lifestyle generally. Shoutouts to Rahnmah and Kaeru and Brice and other people whose names escape me for making Montreal GG a thing and repping it like bosses. Shoutouts to Toronto guys for being like what the fuck way too good. Shoutouts to DerQ for godlike hosting skills and being a goddamn bear who skis. Shoutouts to Ryan Ken for being a gentleman and a scholar. Shoutouts to Lord Knight for being too good at every game ever including marrying strippers. Shoutouts to Stickbug for calling out all my fraudulent shit and generally being the best kind of salty guy. Monopoly shoutouts for Circ and Amadeous. Almost as good as real shoutouts, you can spend them in the same places and everything. Shoutouts to people I forgot. Sorry about that. Shoutouts to me for being bad at shoutouts.

Works for me.

I wouldn't say it's particularly toxic to make some suggestions for ways to make playing on a pad more effective, nor is it toxic to be honest and frank about the fact that a stick is going to be easier to use. Sometimes it's worth it to change methodologies to something that will produce more consistent results more quickly than to just say "keep doing what you're doing but practice harder, you'll get it down eventually." As for the topic at hand, I'd argue the hard FRCs are the ones with different timings depending on what happens. There are a few where the timing is different if the move connects. Everything else is just muscle memory. Well that and the robo-ky one. That thing is bullshit.

Motion blur effects are a thing that's easy to do with sampling, and freestyle is a good example of a way a post-processing step can draw clean-looking lines in a procedural way. Toon shading can have a really nice aesthetic and largely is going to depend on the shaders you're using and the way you make your color ramps. I don't have any reason to believe they couldn't do anything shown in the trailer in-engine. Taking the time to design the aesthetic well goes a long way, and technology is improving rapidly.

A better trick is to macro P+K to a trigger button and FRC with P+K->H fairly easily. This also gives you easier access to FDCing your dash, something pad players mess up a lot. Also reasonable is just playing "claw-style," using your right hand to push the buttons as though it were a stick, and mapping D to left trigger. If these all seem like interim solutions that aren't worth trying, you really ought to consider getting a stick.

Right, that makes a lot more sense. Durr.

Well yes, but what I'm unclear on is whether that actually works. Does the hit register stay big when you cancel into SB? I think I'll test this when I get the chance.

This is in fact the idea behind a lot of theoretical slashback tech. I've also heard of people trying to kara->slashback with moves that quickly expand your hit register, and am unsure if they work. However: If you're doing SB from blockstun, you will probably not be able to do this, because of the same issue that causes "Fuzzy guard": Your hit register stays the same until you're either out of blockstun or take another hit.

Man, it's a good thing reaver's here to make sure no one who isn't "decent" says anything about being "decent."

Meh. Neutral throwbreaks are a better resolution than hardslashes, but late throwbreaks I could take or leave.

Fighting games, starcraft, DotA, whatever. Any sufficiently complex competitive game is going to be hard to master compared to other things, because the upper echelons of difficulty are people, not game mechanics. Saying "fighting games are harder than starcraft" is comparing apples to fish, and so far as I know there's not good research to base an epistemically rational comparison of "difficulty" on. Nonetheless, remembering this is important for anyone who wants to play a competitive game.

Well, that and option-selecting it (for forward throws), though that's still important in AC.

Honestly if you're going to have a guard crush system, it should just be a finite resource that every hit depletes to some extent and that refills while not blocking. Having it be tied to specific moves gets rid of the versatility of strings that can lead to a guard crush, while also adding an imbalanced aspect to the game by virtue of some characters' guard-crush moves being safer and easier to string into than others, and there being no alternative way to do it, meaning if you got a bad one you're out of luck. If everything does it to some extent, it means that while some characters will inevitably be better at crushing guard than others, there are at least ways to get around it if your kit is versatile enough, even if it means playing a bit suboptimally. If you're playing a strong pressure game as certain characters, you can stay pretty safe while still working toward an inevitable guard crush, forcing the opponent to either play stupidly and try to break out of solid pressure, or sit there and take a combo because they could do nothing about it. It's not like a mixup, because there's not really a way out of it that doesn't involve playing more stupidly (trying to break safe pressure), and it rewards persistence on the part of certain players, rather than being a mental game. It also just straight up means that in some matches, a guard crush will happen more often than a guard crush really should happen. Having the resource not replenish means that you can do your safe pressure into your guard-breaking move, then back off and be safe again, knowing that if you just get them to block that every time you have the time to get your string started, eventually you will inevitably get a solid hit from the guard crush. It's really a lot like having an unblockable move that isn't slow enough that it really leaves a gap, has a respectable range, leads to a ton of damage, and basically doesn't really have the drawbacks we associate with unblockable moves. It feels like the designers were thinking "Well they can block it, that makes it okay!" But if that kind of move can have those properties, it can be part of a safe game, and thus is essentially a low-risk mechanism for getting (eventually) close-to-guaranteed damage. I dislike guard crush systems in general. It's a way for rewarding offense that can take the onus off of the offense player to actually confuse the opponent in cases where it's safe to bring down the crush bar (even in games like MBAA, which I argue has a much better guard crush system). It may be hype when one player's blocking gets beaten and the other player gets their damage, but it's not that interesting as a game event as compared to them actually getting mixed up, like with a throw, or by getting baited into swinging, or with high-low game, or something like that, and the more the mechanic matters, the more it leads to a lot of pretty repetitive and nash-play situations in my opinion, especially among players who know what they're doing. I'm not saying games with guard crush systems are bad games, but it doesn't strike me as an interesting mechanic, and seems more like a way to artificially make matches seem more exciting to crowds.

Hopefully that will come in the form of patches, since it's 20-fucking-13. Also: BB is a completely different game with different mechanics and different choices a player has to make and a very different metagame from GG. While they're both airdash fighters and have a similar aesthetic, beyond that, the way the games are played are apples and oranges. Comparing them as though they are both apples or both oranges will only lead to frustration and divisive nonsense.

It's always interesting to see the wildly different assumptions that form from the same complete lack of information. For all we know they could be doing anything from making an entirely different game to just having to reimplement GG in a new engine (Thus "from the ground up.") I don't think a translation-partied interview that says some vague things should be a reason to be worried.

The only bad news would be if the game turns out bad. Players who are truly strong can learn new things, and stop relying on things that are no longer relevant.

As long as we're just spitballin' here, why not a move that costs full meter, does a big chunk of life, and kills you (The one who used it) if you don't win with it. :V

Hectacom, I have never clicked the link in your sig before today. SO GOOD.

He's right guys, either everything about GG1's system was good or everything about GG1's system was bad. Besides, fighting games could use more quicktime events that can decide the whole match. Maybe this guy's on to something.

One day, ice will cover these lands, and it will be as if this war never happened.