The Fighting Game Thread

[Maf]

They've just stopped and got their top 8. GGS is one of the most exciting games ever. It's so fast, it's so dangerous. At this level the crazy reads, interactions and plays that happen. It makes me wish I could learn every character. 

 

I really want to learn Baiken and Ram. I've played the game like twice since the patch came out. I need to get back to this, it's so fun (When it's not a rage/depression fest) 

[one-armed dwarf]

You can learn Baiken against my bad testament

 

But I refuse to support Ram shenanigans, fuck off with that if that's the way things go

[one-armed dwarf]

Apparently capcom's latest classic fighting game collection has really bad input latency on PS5 as well, in comparison to other platforms

 

So it's not just an unreal engine thing then, which is what Strive, KoF and DNF were built on. Almost twice as much as Xbox

 

 

 

Will make things a bit awkward for the Sony owned EVO, and maybe xbox should be the platform to get SF6 on (if it has crossplay at least)

 

Wonder what's wrong

[Maf]

 

[OCH]

^You want to look like Goku, @Maf? This is how you do it!

[Maf]

DBFZ top 8 World Championship live right now. Can Wawa go 1st place in 4 tournaments in a row?

 

 

[Maf]

Wawa didn’t lose a game in the whole top 8. In the grand final he went 3-0 and didn’t even lose a character. Pure fucking dominance. He beat the top JPN player, he beat the top US player. He is the best player in the world. If he wins Evo he must be the best DBFZ player ever. 

[Nag]

Button mashing scrub.

[Maf]

Whoa shit Evo is next week. How did that get here so fast? I’m looking forward to some crazy Guilty Gear and I want to see Wawa win DBFZ and cement himself as the best DBFZ player ever. 

[Maf]

Challenge accepted 

[Maf]

Wawa won DBFZ Evo in both an impressive but also scrappy display. First he got pushed down to losers so had to work all the way through that and then got to final where he has to win 6 games. Starts by going down 2, wins the next 3 to reset the bracket and then I think he won 3-1 or something. Ridiculously tense and was so much fun to watch.

 

However I think by the time they got to the finals it was 2am, he fought all the way through losers and I think the nerves got to both him and Nitro (The other guy in the finals) and both of them were dropping easy (easy for them) combos and all sorts. It got really scrappy. 
 

But he still did it. I think that means Wawa has won every major tournament at DBFZ this year.

[Maf]

Why in fighting games does block low cover both mids and lows and yet overheads are still kind of rubbish? Is blocking considered just that hard by game designers? Not only does one option cover 2 attacks but the 3rd attack also has to be handicapped? 
 

Maybe I haven’t played the right game or the right players but generally I think blocking is easier than pressuring someone blocking. It’s much harder to learn block strings than it is to sit there holding down/back 

 

Except for grabs I can’t tech a grab to save my life but I’m leaving those out  for the minute 

[one-armed dwarf]

Technically with fuzzy guard you can cover all 3.

 

Of course building pressure concepts out and bridging them together is hard though, it's really hard cause it's partly reactive and partly a pre-planned flowchart. But you gots to do it, and figure out how to handle branching outcomes from it.

 

When I was learning Testament I did this, I put a bunch of notes together. No idea if any of it is actually good or not but I had to use a structure to figure out the gameplan of a character that doesn't have easy automatic high/low/grab/safejump setup pressure like I-No

 

also I have to be honest reading it back I only half remember what I was going for there and don't know how accurate or relevant it is, but the point I reckon is to build out a gameplan from pressure.

[Maf]

How insanely detailed are your notes. I’m still a year in to trying to remember to do 214S if 6H is blocked lol. Cool shit.

 

But yeah I was less talking about pressure being difficult and why blocking is “easy” (Not easy, but relatively speaking)

 

Would blocking just be too hard if overheads were good, or if back/down didn’t cover mids?

[one-armed dwarf]

If you're talking about GG, blocking isn't remotely easy in that game except for FD-ing. But being put on the defense in that game feels hopeless against a lot of the cast.

[OCH]

I tend to find (from the fighters I've played) only the fighters with a dedicated block button put that much thought into multi-angle blocking. The rest place more emphasis on attack than defence anyway.

[Maf]

2 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

If you're talking about GG, blocking isn't remotely easy in that game except for FD-ing. But being put on the defense in that game feels hopeless against a lot of the cast.

Well, in terms of Strive I think certain characters are just nightmare fuel when applying pressure. But most of it is due to guard crush or visual confusion. I still think for the most part you can get away with holding back/low and just looking for grabs and dust. 
 

Not trying to say that’s easy but I don’t really fear overheads in that game (Unless they got meter)

 

But it seems to be the same in all fighting games that overheads are weak. Slowest moves that rarely combo. Yet the more dangerous moves are blocked by the same position. 
 

Since all the games I’ve seen work like this it makes me wonder would it really be that much harder to defend?

 

I remember something about Tetris where someone said that game is perfect because if you took away one type of block it would be too easy, but if you added another type of block it would be too hard. 
 

Similarly would that be the same for fighting games. If you added one more thing the defender had to do like block mids and lows separate or worry about overheads more would it just make it too difficult? 
 

I dunno. I just wonder why all fighting games seemed to have settled on this game balance of back/low beats mids and lows and overheads are weak.

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't know why you don't fear overheads when there's characters with ambiguous high/low and can get degenerate pressure off hitting you with one of them.

 

If you were to fight an I-No who could actually handle Millia in neutral, which I'm not, you would see. But also Baiken has tk youhanzen. The reason people learn fuzzy guard is cause it's the only safe way to deal with a blockstring that can high/low.

 

Fight some better players, stop declining the celestial challenge.

[Maf]

I don’t know Baiken’s instant overhead that well but isn’t it like Millia’s where you only get a combo with meter? In this case yes but that’s half the time, less than half the time someone has meter? 
 

From what I can tell overheads are like soft punishes for someone just sitting there. But generally they don’t seem to do much beyond that. 
 

Seems like all fighting games follow this balance, and I don’t doubt it’s the best way to go. I just don’t understand why it is that way

[Maryokutai]

The only way to make overheads better (outside of specific setups with instant overheads) is making them so fast you can't react to them. But if you do that, blocking in itself becomes a 50:50 guessing game for the defender, which messes up the RPS logic because there's already a built-in attack in every fighting game that beats blocking: the grab. If you had to guess between high and low all the time and be weary of grabs, defense would be borderline impossible and extremely frustrating and result in a game that feels like a single-player combo-showcase as soon as the first player lands a hit. If you ever want to experience how guessing on defense feels like*, go play Marvel vs. Capcom. In that game it works because you get three chances (= characters) to reverse momentum, but in a 1:1 fighter it would be horrible.

 

*and yes, there's always a bit of guessing involving on defense, but this would definitely tip the scales very heavily in favour of the aggressor.

 

Also, mids come from 3D fighters where you have to block them standing. I don't know why developers apply the terminology to 2D fighters as well. Maybe to differentiate between attacks that can ducked and those that cannot.