Darlos9D

What could? GF x N? BEST COMBO EDIT: Oh you mean just to pull them, not actually catch them with it while they're standing.

I'm really hoping that OD alters moves and extends combos for everyone. So everyone can just flip the fuck out if they land a hit in the last round and still have burst, and do crazy stuff to the opponent. I hate to bring him back up again, but I'm kinda afraid for Tager on that front. If all it does is give him mag... sure that's useful, but it doesn't really make his combos better than what he could do with mag outside of OD. Hopefully OD buffs his D moves too, or something. Is there any other character who might end up in that situation? Characters like Arakune, Rachel, Valk. If all OD does is given them instant/infinite resource until OD runs out, they'll be in the same boat.

Anti-air spark will be pretty bitchin', I have to admit. Only problem is that once the opponent gets in, Tager probably still has shit in the way of anti-airs, which has always been a major problem for him. I doubt anything will be done about it. Oh also all of my years of Tager pain leaves me fearing that even AA spark will eventually see people adjusting to it and figuring out just the right maneuvering and placement to make it less effective than you'd expect. I'm still imagining Haz finding just the right place in the air to not get hit by it but still be able to shoot a chain at Tager, or Valk still getting a life lead and then flying all over your head for the rest of the match because he can still block it in time even after flying around as a wolf. Hopefully I'm being pessimistic.

You mean, Core Accent?

Yeah... let's not have this whole argument about Japanese vs English voices. It's one of those arguments where certain people are dug in with their opinions to an incredibly inflexible degree, for whatever reason. Arguments will change no minds. Still, I think we can agree that more options are always better.

Ishiwatarigasm EDIT: Something else I'm liking? The new "punch" hit sound effects, heh. The old ones always sounded pretty weak to me.

Gah. Why the shit did they give him a cat face. Or at least it looks like a cat face when it's that blurry.

Soooo... anybody else noticing one of the Amane astral victim images looks like a cat with a sword on its back?

Then it takes too much time away from talking about her small breasts. BlazBlue really enjoys that subject.

Yeah, I kinda ran this off the rails a bit. Sorry.

I personally don't consider "explaining game mechanics" as "hand holding." Just because they CAN potentially reason it out over time doesn't mean it has to be that way. There's actually no reason to do it, aside from just wanting to force people to experience things the same way you did. Which is meaningless in the long run. If reasoning out rules was the actual goal of the game, that'd be fine. But it isn't. Going back to my mushroom example: sure, the player, after going at it for a while, could reason out through random experience that getting a mushroom lets Mario take an extra hit and makes fire flowers appear. I'm sure plenty of people are smart enough to do that, eventually. But does that enhance the game? Not really. Because figuring out what a mushroom does isn't what the game is about. To me, hand holding is stuff like giving the player a powerup after they do badly for too long. Or context sensitive QTE style stuff where you're just doing what the screen tells you to, rather than having to actively apply things you learned earlier to new situations.

Well you don't have to throw exact frame data at them. You just have to say that you can't be thrown from the very moment you press up and start jumping, no matter how things may look.

Expanding upon this: there is that little bit of startup on jumps where you're still on or close to the ground. The key is the fact that people don't understand that even THAT part is throw invulnerable. You might think its intuitive, but every newbie ever proves otherwise. (shit, I didn't know when I started either) Obviously once you're way in the air it's a bit more intuitive to say that a ground throw won't throw you, if not simply because you can't even reach them with it. But at the two ends of the jump arc? Not intuitive.

I thought I did a good job with my Mario mushrooms example, where if Mario didn't actually visibly change or get bigger when he got a mushroom, even though all the same changes (can take a hit and can get other powerups) were applied to him system-wise. And nothing explained those changes either in the game or the manual. Well, that's fine. I'm just trying to go for the idea of "easy to learn, hard to master." FGs definitely succeed at the second part, as your example proves, and that's okay. It's just the first part that needs work.

You assume there's a manual to read. I guess I figure that the internet doesn't count as "a manual."

Yeah, I had a guy who I was just recently explaining basic things to like "dps are good for getting out of shit" or "jumps get out of throws!" and he was like "oooooooooh!" and immediately got more interested in the game because he could actually start seeing the action-and-counteraction aspect of it. Sometimes those basic game elements are the thing that can get people interested enough to dig deeper. The problem is that FGs hardly even go so far as to explain even some of the most basic shit. So saying "people who care enough will dig deeper" isn't a good argument because the game doesn't even try to get people to want to. And then FGs get this notoriety for being really obnoxiously enigmatic and arcane, which scares people from even picking one up to begin with. Honestly, the genre deserves that notoriety since it does, in fact, hide important pivotal game features. Shit like reversals and jumping out of throws aren't funny little details. Literally entire chunks of game strategy are based around shit like that. It NEEDS to be explained. Let's do a mental experiment. Imagine you're playing super mario brothers for the very first time. You run forward and stop on a goomba, and then hit a question mark block. All good so far, since you're acts of randomly slamming yourself into things has already taught you two game elements. Then you hit a question mark block and a mushroom comes out. You think "oh that must be a good thing!" and you touch it. It disappears, you get 1000, a sound effect plays... and nothing else happens. You don't get bigger or visibly change in any way. You're still little short mario. Sure, the game itself knows you can take an extra hit or get a fire flower, but since you've never played the game before and know nothing about it, how are you supposed to know that mushrooms do anything besides give you 1000 points? You can't, unless something explains it to you. Now imagine if nothing in the game or the instruction manual even bothers to explain the benefits of a mushroom. They might not even mention mushrooms at all! You have to go online to some specific forums to get people to explain the benefits of a mushroom. Is that good game design? Hell no. But that's fighting games.

Yeah. Another idea I had was challenge mode challenges that aren't combos. Like, challenges for doing proper blockstrings, or weathering opponent blockstrings and offense.

Basically, imagine Double Dragon with Guilty Gear characters. You can not only move left/right, but also towards and away from the screen. Then you move right and beat up waves of generic mooks. And beat an actual character at the end of a level as a boss. I'd like to see that formula actually applied to story mode.

Yeah basically. Just give story mode some blatant brawler segments. But make it so every character can progress their moves gradually, instead of just one guy like robo ky 2. Shit would be so boss.

You joke, but that's a perfectly good idea. That or NOL soldiers. Or generic vigilantes. Or even just some weird creatures. The BB universe has options.

Does the game itself ever bother explaining that though? That's half the problem. Plus I'm not too keen on the idea of the effect only happening when you get "hit." Then you'd only ever find out if somebody was actually attacking you when you used the move, which seems like a more restrictive way to learn things. Yeah, pretty much this. Now, work these ideas into an actual story mode and you'd have fighting game gold. Like, replace "barrels" with "random stupid thugs you have to beat up for story reasons."

Well I mean, the game would have to explain what's good about a DP when DPs are introduced properly, since it's not something you can really intuit by just looking at the move. But after that proper introduction, the game can then proceed to throw you into situations in story mode that specifically test your ability to use it, so it doesn't blatantly feel like JUST a tutorial. Actually, RPG-ifying story mode a bit would help with this. Like, you'd start with characters that only have some normals, and then they gradually get the rest of their moves as you progress. Then players would get accustomed to each move individually. It'd be a lot like how Blizzard handles a lot of its single player experiences. Now something you COULD do to actually make it a visually obvious thing is have some kind of graphical effect that ALWAYS accompanies invulnerable frames, and then just explain to the player that that effect always means invulnerability. It'd be kinda like how in some games super armor is represented by yellow flashing or something. Then you could have other graphics for anti-airs, overheads, lows, super armor, etc. That could get busy though, so maybe such things could be turned off in the options for advanced players. I dunno. SOMEthing could be done to make things more obvious to newbies. I feel like "dragon punch has startup invuln and that lets you counter incoming assaults" should be just as well-known of a piece of information to all gamers as "mushrooms make mario bigger and let him take and extra hit and get other powerups." But it isn't and that makes me a sad panda. The genre HAS been working on its accessibility in recent years, I'll admit. But it could still do better.

I assume by "smart AI" you mean something more clever than just "they read all your inputs and block/counter everything automagically."

From a raw game design standpoint, if you want to teach players how to play without making them feel like they're slogging through tutorials, you need to make the learning part of the actual gameplay. For instance, rather than story mode being just a progression of various regular fights, instead design the fights to gradually introduce and demand the usage of more game concepts as the player progresses. For instance, early on the player might be playing as Ragna, and get introduced to the fact that ID has invulnerable startup and is good for using if you have time to act while a close-range attack is coming at you. Then the next fight in the story pits you against an AI that just blockstrings continuously until you DP out of it. Or you learn that you can jump out of throws, and then you have to fight AI Tager. Or you learn about anti-airs and then have to fight somebody that does a lot of jump-ins. Or you learn about overheads and have to fight somebody that mostly blocks low, or tries to use overheads on you a lot. And then as you get later into the game, the opponents start combining these things, demanding you apply more and more of what you've learned simultaneously. Casual players - and often even ones that are interested in getting better but are still new - are invariably going to go through story mode if they pick up the game, so that's probably where the teaching needs to really happen.

I wish they'd merge some aspects of abyss mode with story mode to actually give it more progression than a visual novel. I was kinda thinking about that when you guys were talking about story mode following groups of characters rather than individuals. I guess part of me still would like to see the RPG that BB could have been...