Game Balance, Part 2: A Detailed Example
I'd like to take an in-depth look at an example of designing balance into a game. Although I'm choosing a fighting game (surprise!), the lessons should apply to many types of games. I'll go into some excruciating, genre-heavy details, but I think that's necessary to give the full force of what's really going on here.
Some games end up balanced through sheer coincidence, such as the fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which is "accidentally a very good game." Somewhere in Japan, there is a very lucky stable of monkeys who managed to type up Hamlet, or perhaps a screenplay to The Seven Samurai. The game featured a huge assortment of varied moves and 56(!) characters inside the most chaotic fighting game engine ever created, and it somehow happened to all work out. I will not be able to help you reproduce that. (Was there brilliant forethought involved, and I'm just unaware?)
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| Welcome to MvC2. Don't even ask. |
The hero of our story, the oddly named Guilty Gear XX (ggxx), had quite a different genesis. It's obvious that a great deal of design went into the creation of the overall game system and into the design of each of the 20 characters. I suspected that a separate designer was assigned to each character, and from the look of the game's credits this is mostly true.
Each character in Guilty Gear XX plays very differently. I think it's easy to just read over that sentence, so I want to make it clear: compared to other fighting games, Guilty Gear XX has significantly more diversity in the gameplay each character allows than any other fighting game I have ever played, and that is saying a lot. So the game has more gameplay diversity than its peers, yet it is also one of the most balanced games in its genre. Diversity and Balance are natural enemies, so how is this possible? The solution is that Guilty Gear XX 1) has a game system that gives all characters equal access to an unusually large number of safeguards and abilities and 2) each character has some set of unique abilities that stray further from the standard template than they would in most other fighting games.
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| Faust and Dizzy of ggxx. If you'd like to play a Japanese doctor with a huge scalpel who wears a bag over his head with one eye-hole, this is the game you've been waiting for. If that's not for you, try the half-angel, half-devil, half-naked girl who throws bubbles, homing arrows, and laser-beam-shooting chomping mouths. |
Basically, there is a "design skeleton" shared by all the characters, with each character having his own unique "meat on the bones." Since the designer can count on all characters having so many ways to get out of trouble, he can then give each character an unusual amount of "unique unfairness."
Let's look at the "skeleton" of features common to all characters. I'll start with boring stuff and work my way up. I will spare you the exact definitions of these first items, but with only a few exceptions, all characters have access to this suite of movement abilities and basic attacks:
- Double Jump
- Ground and Air Dash
- Sweep Attack
- Overhead Attack that Launches
- Ground Throw and Air Throw
- Air Recovery (aka "tech recovery")
- A silly Instant Kill mode
"f+p" invulnerability. Every character has a move performed by holding forward on the joystick and pressing the punch button. For every character except Testament, this move grants some invulnerability to the upper body. This means that if an enemy jumps in at you, a f+p move is very good "anti-air." That is, it works well against attacks coming from above (unless the enemy expected it, and double jumped…).
Super Meter. Lots of fighting games have a meter (other than your health meter) that gives you limited access to certain moves. In this game it's called the "tension meter" but we all know it's a "super meter." In ggxx, the meter charges up whenever you do anything offensive, such as attack, air dash forward, or even walk or run forward! All characters share the same mechanics for charging and expending super meter.
Green Blocking (aka "faultless defense"). While you are blocking, if you hold two buttons down, your character becomes surrounded by green rings. During this time, your super meter depletes, but you will take no "block damage" as you normally would from projectiles and other special attacks. Also, when you green block an attack, your defender will be pushed farther away than normal. This allows you to loosen up your opponent's traps pushing him too far away. You can also use green blocking while you are in the air to block attacks from an opponent on the ground (you can't block those types of attacks without green blocking).
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| Slayer (left), a vampire with many invulnerable moves(!), has his kick "green blocked" (aka "faultless defense") by Baiken (right), a cheap character who I hate playing against. ;) |
Super Moves (aka "overdrive attacks"). Each character has a few big moves that require half of a full super meter to use. Very standard in fighting games.
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| Bridget (left), the transvestite nurse who fights with a yo-yo (yes, I'm serious), performs a super move on Ino (right), a guitar playing chick who fights with...music. |
Alpha Counter/Guard Reversal (aka "dead angle" attacks). All those confusing terms mean the same thing: while you are blocking an attack, you can perform this maneuver to cancel your blockstun (the time you are stuck blocking an attack) with an attack of your own, for the cost of half of a full super meter. This means that if you are being overwhelmed by attacks, you can block and use this maneuver to get the opponent off of you.
Roman Cancel (rc). Now we're getting to the wacky stuff. Almost every attack in the game can be "roman cancelled," which means cancelled instantly in a flash of red. This is performed by pressing three buttons during the course of almost any move, and it costs one half of a full super meter. There are numerous uses for this. You can do an "unsafe move" with very bad recovery, then roman cancel the move when the opponent tries to hit you back. You can do a combo, then roman cancel what would normally be the last hit, which usually allows you to continue the combo.
False Roman Cancel (frc). We are deep in the dangerous territory of poorly translated Japanese terms. Perhaps this is intended to be a "force" rather than a "false" cancel. "Roman" seems to be short for "romantic," by the way, which makes no sense either. Anyway, an frc is very similar to an rc. Each character has a few moves that have a small window of frames where an frc is possible. If you attempt to do a normal rc (press 3 buttons) during one of these special windows, you get a blue flash rather than red, and you spend only half as much super meter as a normal roman cancel costs. What's the point? Most frc's are associated with moves that allow you to keep up pressure in your attacks. You might throw a projectile, frc (so you have no recovery at all), dash in and do a few normal attacks, then do the projectile again and frc it, repeat. Without frc's, you have to do the normal red roman cancel which takes half your super meter. That means you'd have only two repetitions of a trap at most, rather than four frc's before your suepr meter runs out.
Infinite Combo Safeguards
These next several features all contribute to preventing "infinite combos." An infinite combo is a situation where once the opponent lands the first hit of the combo (in the right situation), then he can continue the combo forever until he wins. The more complicated a fighting game is, the more likely it is to have unwanted infinite combos. The designers of ggxx put many systems in place to reduce the likelihood that such combos could exist.
Burst. This is the most blatant solution: a move that lets you break out of a combo. This taboo concept is very rare in fighting games, after the semi-fiasco of the "c-c-c-combo breaker!" in the game Killer Instinct. That game allowed the victim of a combo (who usually cannot do anything at all until the combo ends) to input a paper/rock/scissors guess that would allow him to escape the combo. This guess had no cost, so it was extremely common (too common) to break out of combos in that game.
In ggxx, there is an entirely separate meter (the burst meter) that keeps track of how often you are allowed to burst (about once per round). You always start the first round of a game with a full burst meter. Once you use the burst (it's the only move you are allowed to do while you are in hitstun, by the way), you can't use it again until your burst meter refills. The burst meter refills slowly over time, and it also increases the more you get hit. Getting hit by some moves (moves more likely to create infinite combos) fills your burst meter faster than others.
The burst is like a "get out of jail free card." It lets every character get out of trouble once, "for free." Of course, a clever opponent can expect the moment you will burst and simply voluntarily stop attacking right before your burst, then punish the recovery of your burst with an even bigger combo, so you have to be careful.
I should also note that there is an alternate use of the burst, a use often called a "gold burst" or "offensive burst." So far, I have only talked about activating the burst while you are in hitstun (the brief period of time where you are reeling back after getting hit by an attack during which you can perform no moves except a burst). But you are allowed to perform a burst almost any other time as well. You can burst at the first moment of the round if you want to. If you perform a burst when you are NOT in hitstun and the very beginning of the burst actually hits the opponent, then you instantly get a full super meter (aka "tension meter".) So what's the significance of that? If you are getting rushed down and overwhelmed by attacks, you should use the first type of burst to get out of trouble. But if you are the one doing the attacking, you don't need to get out of trouble. You want to cause even more trouble. So you can attack the enemy and use lots of rc's and frc's (those use up your super meter), then you can "gold burst" suddenly as they try to get you off them, and if that burst connects, you will have a newly full super meter to perform even more rc's, frc's and supers in your attack pattern.
Guard Meter. Yes, there are a lot of meters in this game. Right under your health meter is a little red meter called the guard meter. It starts at 50% full, and naturally tends to wander back to 50% over time. The more attacks you block, the higher that meter gets. The more attacks you get hit by, the lower that meter gets. The higher the meter is (the more attacks you recently blocked) the less you benefit from the game's normal system of damage scaling. Usually, when you get hit by a combo, each successive hit is "scaled" down in damage more and more. But when your guard meter is high, even an ordinary combo can do massive damage to you because you are not being protected by the usual damage scaling. This is meant to punish overly defensive players.
On the flipside, the lower your guard meter is (meaning you got hit by a lot of attacks in a short period of time), the more damage scaling you benefit from. A very, very long combo will eventually do only one pixel of damage per hit because of this feature. So even if an infinite combo did exist, it would take an incredibly large number of hits to actually kill you. Furthermore, you receive another even more important protection when your guard meter is low: reduced hitstun. Every time you get hit by a move, you are briefly stuck in a reeling animation where you can't do anything (except burst). This is the basic concept that allows combos to exist at all, since the opponent can often hit you again before your hitstun ends. But in ggxx, the more you get hit, the shorter your guard meter becomes, and the shorter your hitstun becomes. So if there exists a combo that is a "loop" of repeated moves, it may be possible to do 3 or 4 repetitions of the loop, but eventually the opponent's hitstun becomes so short that the combo simply stops working.
Increased Gravity. Another safeguard against infinite combos. The longer your character is being juggled by a combo in the air, the greater the force of gravity on your character becomes. Many infinite combos in fighting games involve "juggling" a character in the air with attacks. Much like with actual juggling, it is a fight against gravity to keep it all going. While it might be possible to do 3 or 4 repetitions of a juggle loop, eventually the victim's body falls so fast to the ground that the juggle is no longer possible.
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| Potemkin no fast. Potemkin smash. |
Phew, some of you might have even made it through reading all that! Let's do a short recap, just the broad strokes of it all. If you want to attack, ggxx gives you super meter, and gives you several options to spend that meter to enhance your attack (rc's, frc's, and super moves). The guard meter system allows you to punish opponents who block too much. Those opponents are being somewhat punished by the game system in general anyway, since blocking doesn't build super meter but attacking does.
More important, I think, are the game systems that help you when you are BEING attacked. Every character has upper body invulnerability with their f+p move (except Testament). That alone is a great help in stopping attackers. If you want to spend super meter as a defender, you can green block or alpha counter. Green blocking will protect you from all damage while you block (except throws) and it will push that nasty attacker away from you. Alpha countering is another method to get the attacker off of you, and it can be performed while you are in blockstun.
That's a lot right there, but there's plenty more. If you actually get hit by an attacker, you have all sorts of things going for you. Your guard meter will eventually reduce the damage you take by the combo and shorten your hitstun allowing you to escape. Increased gravity will also eventually thwart their combo. You can nip it all in the bud, though, by simply bursting right at the very start of their combo, avoiding almost all damage. And don't forget that a great way to nullify attacks is simply not to be in the way of them. Every character can double jump, and every character but one can air dash.
Now that see how much EVERY character has to work with when it comes to getting out of trouble, it becomes more clear how it's possible that ggxx has more diversity in gameplay amongst its characters than most (if not all) other fighting games. Character designers know that they can go in some really extreme directions with each character design because they know that the game system shared by all characters probably lets just about any character eventually get out of just about any trouble thrown their way.
So we have one character who can alpha counter as much as she wants (not limited by super meter). Another that can create pool balls on the screen, control their formations, and bounce them off each other, allowing seemingly infinite variations of attack patterns and setups. Another character can summon a "shadow" who acts as a completely separate character. The player's joystick inputs and button PRESSES apply to both characters at once, but his button RELEASES apply to the shadow character only. The point is, it's an incredibly different endeavor to play any given character in ggxx, yet the gameplay skeleton (mostly of defensive features) ensures that all this craziness will at least mostly work out in the end.
I think that's the secret of capturing both diversity and balance, or at least one effective method of reaching the holy grail: a robust, shared system of defense with diverse and unique attacks for each character/race/side.
Part 1 | Part 2
March 1st, 2006 at 6:31 am
Is the balance in MvC2 really an accident? You could make the case that it is balanced for pretty much the same reason that GGXX is. But whereas GGXX has a shared system of defence, MvC2 has a shared system of offence, including standard chain combos, knock-up attacks, and very similar super combos. Plus, the tag-team feature tends to smooth out the weaknesses in individual characters.
Now I have got to go get me a copy of GGXX; it sounds like I’ve been missing out.
March 2nd, 2006 at 8:59 am
i have #r and its one of the best fighting games out there. great gameplay like sirlin mentioned and killer hi- res graphics and not too bad rock soundtrack.
March 3rd, 2006 at 2:41 am
Deeper Thought, I think the balance of MvC2 is simply balance of horrors. You have an incredible roster of characters which can do some terribly absuive stuff. But in the end, over 10 extremely, varied, viable teams simply cristallized from that mass. You could say that not the characters are balanced but the concept itself gives a helping hand to meta-blance by simply offering an insane amount of cominations from which the top came out fairly even.
I’m likening it to the meta-balance of T1 Magic the Gathering, there’s some incredibly broken stuff in there but because it’s so much of it, a couple of super-dangerous decks arose and now all have a fairly equal fighting chance against each other, while obliterating anything that you’d normally consider excellent in T2 or even 1.5 .
Oh, and thanks Sirlin, that article and the one on slippery slope had me rethink my opinion on ramping cost in RTS games :)
March 5th, 2006 at 6:27 am
By the way FoxSpirit, what do people mean when they apply the term “meta” to video game concepts, as you did? Literally, the term means “about”. I understand its application in philosophy and logic. For example, in logic, we talk about “metatheoretical proofs” which are arguments that prove something about a system of logic, rather than being proofs within that theory. But I have no idea what “meta-balance” is supposed to be. I mean, either the game is balanced, or it isn’t. Where does the “meta” come in?
March 8th, 2006 at 6:18 am
Sorry for the late reply, Deeper Thought.
The word meta in terms of abalnce refers to a balance that was never designed. It rather arose from within the parameters the game plays in, effectively balancing itself.
Meta-game often is used to refer to gameplay mechanisms that you won’t find in any manual because they aren’t built in but rather mechanisms that arise from the design choices itself.
If you know the Japanese game of Go, that’s almost pure meta-game. The 2 basic rules suggest a pretty shallow capture game but what stems from it is the most complex game known to man.
In case of MvC2 I meant that the game isn’t balanced at all. It just happens there are so many imbalances that, they all together, balance themselves out. Of course, guys like the Samba de Amigo Mascot don’t really feature in any setup, they have no exploitable feature.
And that’s the true Marvel of this game, if you allow me the pun ;)
March 8th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
I understand now, and that is helpful to know. “meta” in this sense turns out to be an important concept, though I wish there was a different term for it. One thing that we should keep in mind is that while some meta is unplanned by the designers (e.g. the balance in MvC2) other meta is very much planned (e.g. the strategic possibilites in Go, or Chess for that matter).
Another good example: In the original Street Fighter II, combos were not coded into the game as such. They were a consequence of the fact that characters would be stunned for various lengths of time by various moves. Were they an accident, or did the game designers realize that combos would result from the game mechanics? Either way, those first combos were “meta combos”.
March 9th, 2006 at 3:23 am
Actually, the very first combo was the fierce punch into fireball combo.
And it was not due to the length of the stun from the fierce but because the fireball animation cancelled the fierce animation and the first two-in-one was born :)
As for meta, think metaphysics, metamorph.
And concerning Go, it wasn’t designed with the tactical situations in mind. There are only 2 rules and they tell nothing of the game really. Contrary to chess in which you know from the get go that you have to kill the king and that a pawn simply isn’t worth as much as a dame. In Go, things like seiki, semai, ladders etc all simply came into existance as you play the game. I’m sure at first those phenomena didn’t even have names :)
I liken Go more to a natural law which takes shape on the board ^^
March 9th, 2006 at 6:59 am
I don’t mean to split hairs here, but SFII had a number of combos, including some that did depend on the stun time…since these are all part of the same game, why would you say that one of them is “first”?
‘meta’ as it occurs in ‘metaphysics’ means ‘about’. Aristotle’s metaphysics was literally supposed to be about physics: i.e. the general truths that underly physics. Many philosophers still think of it this way. ‘meta’ in metamorph seems to have yet another meaning, and neither of these seem relevant to understanding what it means as applied to games. I guess the moral is that ‘meta’ is used to mean many different things depending on the context, and there is no obvious relation between them.
As for Go…it may be true that people came up with names for the various phenomena later on, but it is totally implausible to suppose that the inventor(s) of this strategy game didn’t design the rules with tactical situations in mind. Of course, they couldn’t anticipate everything, but surely they knew of some of the strategy that would result from the simple rules (they played the game, didn’t they?). But, as I was pointing out earlier, what results from the rules would still be meta, whether it was anticipated or not (as a designer, you can anticipate that a certain strategy will be useful, but that doesn’t make it officially part of the rules of the game). Thanks again for answering my original question.
March 10th, 2006 at 4:01 am
Ah, sorry, it actually was the first two-in-one, the first move cancel in modern fighting games.
And it’s like any game, you have an idea, cook up a rule and see what comes. The best games kept rules to a minimum, I even know some pretty fun African games that are pretty complex yet all you need is beans and bowls ^^
March 10th, 2006 at 10:46 am
This article inspired me to go out and get a GG game. I got myself a copy of GG Isuka, the latest in the series. From what I have read, it is similar to GGXX, but has more modes (including a side-scrolling beat ‘em up mode). So far I like the game, but one thing that annoys me is that the arcade mode includes “Daredevil” battles, where you have to fight 2 opponents at once. I have yet to win one of these, despite the fact that I have no trouble beating single CPU opponents. It’s a serious flaw in the arcade mode, imo, and would frustrate many a casual player trying to learn the game (such as myself). They should have made it so that the “Daredevil” matches (which interrupt a normal 1 on 1 fight) do not have to be won — win or lose, you should be able to continue with the original fight afterwards.
March 10th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Deeper Thought, I feel guilty that you somehow ended up buying GG Isuka. It’s riddled with problems, most notably the horrible turn around mechanic that’s tied to a button. Even I–a huge proponent of Guilty Gear–cannot play that game worth anything. GGXX, GGXX#Reload, or GGXX Slash are where it’s at.
–Sirlin
March 15th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Sirlin, I do see your point about the turning button. On the other hand, they had to do something like that to accomodate the new game modes. I’m determined to make the best of it, despite the flaws. Isuka does have more characters, including EX versons of all the characters, and a color edit mode, among other things. If I can just get the hand of the turning button and fighting two opponents at once, it will be a very enjoyable game.
March 25th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Deeper Thought, another way of thinking of meta is like the game outside the game. Whereas Sirlin mentions in another article that games can be simply a medium through which one player plays each other, everything developed outside the original game mechanics become the “metagame”. In collectable card games like Magic or L5R, meta has come to represent steps taken to safeguard against decktypes you know are popular and likely to be played in a tournament, even though they might not be the strongest cards by themselves. In other words, they become strong because you have outside-the-game knowledge of the player.
I’m not sure if everyone would agree with me, but I think ‘meta’ could be turning into something similar to the term ‘yomi’ that Sirlin uses, which is to say meta could also refer to the mind-game between you and your opponent.
March 27th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Marvel isn’t balanced there is a tier just like every other fighting game, just because it shares a common system that fighters must abide by doesn’t mean it’s automatically balanced.
The open system of MvsC2 allows for a lot of unintentional exploits. leaving some characters completely unusable not through design but possibly the lack of design. 10 characters which have a possible chance of a fairly even fight not in terms of the actual ‘rules’ set by the designers but system exploits can’t really be called a balanced game. Wether you find it fun or not is another matter.
March 27th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
That IS meta-balance. And you can’t think in individuals in MvC2, rather think in exploitable teams.
And there are about 10 team-setups which are equally “broken”.
Just like Magic the Gathering T1: the decks competing there exploit card functions in a way the designers didn’t originally think of. They never thought of first or second round kills. Yet it’s a very thrilling format with unmkatched depth in the decks. Currently around 5 deck setups can go toe to toe with 5 others also being very strong contenders. The trick lies in the variety within the basic mechanisms of those decks. I’d play, were it not for the exorbitant cards prices if you want to get into it as a new player. Black Lotus $3000, sheesh -.-
March 27th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
okay so to have a balanced fight you have to pick from a tried and tested formula/team but if you pick outside of that you have no chance? how can you still call a game balanced? out of the 56 characters playable if your team is not made up from the top 10 (sentinel, magneto,storm etc.) than you have no chance. Still want to call this game balanced?
So what would you call balanced? how about if marvel only had 2 teams that gave a balanced fight? out of the thousands of possibilties available in character setups 10 have emerged, I don’t know about Magic the gathering but if I had been buying cards which the designers are selling and can’t use them because they are totally redundant, the last thing i’m gona call it is balanced.
Maybe i’m gettng confused, The game isn’t balanced but there is a small pocket of balance, the ‘meta-balance’ you talk of?
Fox Spirit says: “And you can’t think in individuals in MvC2, rather think in exploitable teams.”
Yes at the end of the day it is about the team since that is the format you fight in, but individul properties are just as importnat as the whole team since the team consists of 3 individuals.
March 29th, 2006 at 6:00 am
Well, simply imagine now the designers simply cutting all characters that you can’t really use.
You’d be left with about 10 “balanced” characters.
But I actually call MvC2 a sucess because in the end there are enough balanced characters and teams to pass as a whole balanced game. Balance in non-PC games is always fickle because you can’t simply patch so I critically eye fighting games for the amount of useable characters the are left over with.
And in this respect, MvC2 shines ^^
Imagine being able to patch such a game, then insanity would ensure. The good kind. But it will also take some willingness from the community to adapt to a possible future patch system just like RTS games are currently using. Only time will tell.
March 29th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Interesting, you should keep an eye on Dead or Alive 4 that seems to be a first for console fighetrs as that has had the gameplay patched.
A majority of console fighters have an arcade heritage where they have already been tweaked with in the arcade enviroment (location tests etc). so games ported have already been patched in some way.
So you (foxspirit) look for a game with a fair amount of balanced characters in order to call it ‘balanced’? just out of intrest what is a fighter with a low amount of balanced characters that you would class as ‘unbalanced’?
I love my fighting games, experienced quite a few, the fighter I have spent the most time with is Streetfighter3: 3rd Strike, a game which I consider to be balanced compared to other 2d games but my experience with all fighters is that a ‘true’ balanced fighting game doesn’t exist, unless all characters are the same (therefore the properties of individuals never deviate from the rock, paper, scissors formula that underlies most fighting games)
you can only hope for a system(design skeleton) such as the guilty gear, 3rd strike etc that stops abuse and doesn’t destroy what the original designers intended and let the individual character properties dictate it’s own tier. Usually at competition level most players will chose from the top tier, this is in all major fighting games (tekken5 before 5.1/dark resurection where, Nina and Steve. Sf3 3rd strike is Chun li, Ken and Yun, Cvs2 I THINK are Blanka and Sagat)
The most ‘balanced’ fighter in both 2D and 3D styles is considerd to be the Virtuafighter series. Having bought vf4 and vf4 evolution but not having enough time to spend with it’s deep sytem I have noticed that in the character select screen there is a description of the required level of skill needed to use a character, seems that the designers have embraced the fact that a true balnced fighter can’t exist and have instead balanced it in terms of difficulty of use versus reward.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:16 am
While I find the difficulty vs reward approach an interesting idea, it means you’ll lock out a lot of characters for a decently skilled player: the master class characters because you can’t really tap into their potential correctly and the easy characters because the reward you get from characters corresponding to your skill is so much better. So I am kinda weary of that concept.
I also miss the “old” spirit of fighting games somehow: Street Fighter 2 Super Turbo is by many considered the finest 2d fighter in existance, and I agree not solely on the terms of balance. It was simply controlable. Even with medium dexeterity, you could always pull off what you wanted. You could play out exactly what you had in mind and what was possible. It became a true battle of wits and tactics.
Now with a fighter like GGGXX, it’s become very hard. To properly perform you gattling-blue-cacel-full cacel relaunch combo, you need a very high amount of dexterity. Fo all that I love this game for, that is not it. And when I see Japanese-sami cup videos, they are impressive but I don’t feel the same tight sort of pressure I feel when seeing pre-alpha SF playing vids. In some way, it’s too loose cannon for it to become such an intricate mindgame and rather a wild fest of reflexes and dexterity -.-
Oh, SF3, brilliant game, but I hate parry with a passion. I hate anything that could be executed by the computer perfectly and simply beat you into submission. And parry is such a super-mechanical skill. There is no thought behind parry, you ALWAYS want to parry. Contrary to a fireball to which there a lot of occasions when I don’t want to throw one.
Okay, a slight off-topic rant but when you brought up 3rd Strike it simply struck my “dumb-parry” nerve ^^
March 31st, 2006 at 10:33 am
:D sf3 is great, been a while since I could play through single player and not get incredibly bored, buying a fighter for it’s single player is completely alien to me. It’s all about the multiplayer, always more satisfying playing a human player and in my opinion the only reason to play fighting games. The parry is great it adds another slice of strategy to the fight mechanics, parrying everything is a bad habit, players new to the system love parrying and often fall in obvious traps like dudleys rose taunt (for those that don’t know the rose does 1 point of damage which is nothing) they see this slow rose falling at them and think thats easy to parry but then are left shocked when dudley rushes in and they haven’t predicted it.
Something I love is the red parry, anybody with fight experince know when players are low on health they’l throw out projectiles to chip away or throw out a super that is only avoidable with blocking, normally if you blocked it the block damage will kill you, but the red parry is a technique (it is normally a high risk, low reward technique, you miss and you have no guard) that allows you to fight and comeback if your skill is highly tuned enough.
Really looking forward towards vf5, I promised to actually give it some play this time, afraid it’s gona swallow me up! Shame capcom japan don’t see 2D fighters as wothwhile anymore.
(I dread to see a street fighter4 E3 capcom USA anouncment)
April 2nd, 2006 at 5:02 am
“I also miss the “old” spirit of fighting games somehow: Street Fighter 2 Super Turbo is by many considered the finest 2d fighter in existance, and I agree not solely on the terms of balance. It was simply controlable. Even with medium dexeterity, you could always pull off what you wanted. You could play out exactly what you had in mind and what was possible. It became a true battle of wits and tactics.”
you understand and support your general point, but i play both ST and GGXX/R and i gotta tell you, ST is the harder one. sure some bnb combos in #R are really hard to perform but the basics are easy. which is something you can’t say about ST basics. dragon punches are really harder there, and some of the supers omg i can’t perform honda style supers when i want to, not to mention guile/vega that’s just crazy!
and 3s parry is great because: 1. it’s pure fun to parry stuff. 2. it’s really hard to parry vs a good human player. watch vids and see ppl can’t parry all the time.
May 3rd, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Not very adept at GG yet, but i’m getting there. Like stated, the ’skeleton’ of certain universal maneuvers is very beneficial. My game of choice at the moment is Mark of the Wolves. Like GG there is a technique with everyone to evade highs. What I’ve discovered recently is that those moves only cancel on hit. That means it hit confirms for you. Something I’d never seen before in a fighting game and adds a lot. This game is one of the most balanced fighters I’ve ever played especially considering there were very few tweaks after the initial release. Everyone can also backdash which has invulnerability on startup and most of the frames. This is a bit abusable and I think faultless defense is probably a better way of dealing with that. MotW also has Just Defend which is like a lame 3s parry. Speaking of parries… I wish Jam’s was easy like in 3s.
May 4th, 2006 at 6:28 am
The way that some people have been referring to the design of Go is extremely puzzling.
These are the basic rules
Go is played on a 19 by 19 grid, with two players alternating play. Black begins the game.
A piece (stone) may be placed on any unoccupied grid intersection.
Pieces of the same color that are connected by the grid lines are a group of stones.
Each empty space next to or sourrounded by a group or stone is called a liberty, or sometimes breath.
When all the empty space next to or sourrounded by a group is occupied the group or stone is captured.
In all the different variations of overlayed rules, there is some sort of rule that prevents a board position that is the exact some a previous one from being played.
In Japanese rules this is only true for a position that existed on your last turn.
In Chinese rules this is true for any position that existed previously.
Placing a stone in a location where it is immediately captured( as in it takes up the last availible liberty of a group or has no liberties when placed) is illegal under japanese rules.
Thats it. The people arguing that this gameplay that occurs in this game is entirely emergent are correct. Those arguing against them seem to have never playe the game.
www.kiseido.com for a free java applet to play this game against people. They’ll be happy to help you become as good as you have motivation to be.
May 4th, 2006 at 6:33 am
I wanted to edit my post but couldn’t.
Backdashing in Guilty Gear has invulnerability for all characters.
For more system information go here
http://www.shoryuken.com/wiki/index.php/Guilty_Gear_XX_Slash
or here
www.dustloop.com
May 23rd, 2006 at 5:10 am
I don’t think you can catagorize MVC2 as balanced. There are 6 or 7 characters that make up 99% of tournament teams. The same could be said of alot of games (SSF2T, 3S, GG, Tekken, VF). The difference is those games have around 20 characters or less, give or take a couple. Marvel has like 60. 10% of the cast being playable in tournies isn’t balanced.
That being said I think GG has characters that are certainly way better than others (Slash Sol and Ky come to mind) but its overall system mechanics make it more balanced.
June 7th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
First off, neither of your examples are balanced. Both MvC2 and GGXX have their share of broken-ness.
MvC2 has maybe (at most) 10 characters that reign supreme over all other combatants. Anyone who has played against a well used team made up of Cable, Sentinel, and Ironman knows that there is no fun in the game anymore. If you can’t enjoy the game due to broken problems like these characters exhibit - then it’s not balanced.
GGXX is the same way. The series has gotten better, but if you were going to use an example, use GGXX/ (Guilty Gear XX Slash). Most of the balance problems have been worked out of this version. The initial release of XX was riddled with problems allowing Ky, Eddie, and Slayer to abuse EVERYONE.
That being said, there hasn’t been a well balanced fighter in years. Every game has its exploits. It’s merely a matter of which game has LESS exploits. You want decent balanced games, try 3rd Strike - the console version (ie, Dreamcast) or CvS Pro (another Dreamcast game - the fixed version with Dan and Joe). Too many fans griped about the changes in 3rd strike, so both versions were included in the Anniversary release. Also, MvC2 has had its share of fixes over the years. You can break it down as so:
MvC2 DC JPN and Arcade
MvC2 DC USA/Europe
MvC2 PS2
MvC2 Xbox (most recent and most fixed - still has balance issues, but not as many as the initial release.)
Not to sound elite-est or whatever, but it’s not False Roman Cancel - it’s Force Roman Cancel. I love GGXX and if you spend 5 minutes talking to some players of the game - you’ll find out that there are plenty of problems with it.
If you want a balanced game, try some of the recent Capcom Re-Releases on PS2 - the Vampire Collection and the Street Fighter Zero Collection. Both have been tweaked over the past 10 years to give optimal play and balance.
June 10th, 2006 at 1:57 am
This website definitely deserves recognition.
June 11th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
To all the people who complaing about the tier problem in marvel are stupid. Look at CvS2 and the grooves as well as the tiers. Only grooves really used are A, C, (A used the most) and many teams are consisted of the same characters. Bison, Blanka, Sagat, Rolento etc. I dont think everyone is used the same in CvS2. Stop looking at only marvel and realize pretty much every game has tier problems. There are people who can work you with lower tier teams in marvel.
June 22nd, 2006 at 2:03 am
SSB is almost perfectly balanced, at high levels, GGXX…
also, to back someone else, SFII did NOT have built in combos (think KI for representation of built combos… or SC, if you’ve ever played the original), but rather they were Meta-combos (unintentional… the word Meta is generally used for “outside of intent”… Meta game is the game that exists in the ideal, and is a show of all thoughts currently used for the game, rather than just those things built into the game…)
also, has anyone noticed that several games become “broken” due to a glitch that is due to bad programming or lack of testing?
The Aitamen
July 25th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
It seems most of you didn’t read Sirlin’s first article on balance. There, he defines it as “having a reasonably large number of choices available to you in tournament [i.e. high - level] play,” and he explicitly states it to be opposed to the percentage of available options - that is, while ideally every single option would be a viable one, even if a large enough absolute number were available, that’s still fine. So that’s why it doesn’t matter how many characters MvC2 has, as long as a reasonably large number of teams are viable, that’s good to say that it is balanced. I suspect the reason many of you disagree with this is because you have not played in tournaments with true high-level play.
For example, First-Person Shooters, strictly speaking, have only ONE available character choice. RTS Games have TWO to THREE. Thus, for a fighting game to have even five viable character choices is a lot.
And yes, you do have to think of MvC2 in terms of teams. For example: MSP (magneto-storm-psylocke), Scrub (Cable-Sentinel-Captain Commando), MST (magneto-storm-tron bonne), Matrix (storm-sentinel-cyclops), Santhrax (sentinel-storm-captian commando), and Clockwork (sentinel-strider-dr doom) all have as the third character listed “assist only” characters who absolutely suck when they are “at point” (being controlled) - if you watch tournament videos, they always snapback to force the assist character to come out, and tag out whenever the assist character is on point. Furthermore, these assist characters work well only with certain characters - psylocke gives crazy wicked combo possibilities to magneto, and that is why no top-tier team has psylocke without magneto. Furthermore, the DHC (cancelling/comboing one character’s super into another) between the first two “point” characters listed for each team is the key to most of the team’s successes - for instance, in teams Matrix and Santhrax, Storm’s air lightining storm DHC into Sentinel’s Hyper Sentinel Force can do 50%-100% damage. Thus, a thrown-together geam of “god tiers” e.g. cable, magneto, storm just won’t cut it, even though those three characters are the best (along with sent) for being “on point” in the game.
And finally, of course every fighting game has tiers - it’s essentially inevitable. The question is, can you still play as a reasonably (absolute, not percentage) number of characters, and use a reasonable number of tactics within those characters? For Tekken 4 and Tekken 5.0, the answer was no. For most of the other games still played in tournaments today, the answer is yes. Simply look at the results of tournaments - is their character diversity in the results page? And remember, even 5 roughly equally viable characters is plenty for balance.
October 9th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
I’m afraid you guys are misunderstanding meta- entirely. First of all, it has nothing to do with “undesigned.” Though meta- traditionally means “about,” when applied to gaming, it more accurately means “around.” Meta- strategies involve choices that you make before the game starts. In a fighting game, this is what character you want to play. In Magic, it is building your deck. Some characters/decks are better against others, even if they are worse against the average field. If you want to say that Type 1 Magic is meta-balanced, I agree. But that means that it is balanced because the players know what to expect from others, and build decks to attack each others strategies. Some of these decks (especially UW Fish, for those Magic players out there) would be bad choices of decks to bring to a field of random-quality decks. But when going to a tournament, one can expect top tier decks. Thus, a meta-game deck, or one that beats a certain percentage of the top tier decks, but loses to most other stuff has a chance of success if the player has correctly guessed what decks other people will play. On the other hand, Go has no meta-game. You can practice before the game, but there are no choices to be made outside the game.
As a side note, this argument about Go is absurd. I know the rules, and I play regularly. I understand that none of the strategy is in the rules. But I also am sure that at least SOME of the strategy was intended by the designers. Why is it a game for only two players? Why does each location have 4 liberties (barring the edges and corners)? Why is the board sqaure? Why is it 19×19? All of these are choices that were deliberately made, and they seriously influence the strategy (P.S. Go on wacky boards is really fun if you’re up for a fun diversion, but it definitely lacks the complex strategies of regular Go). Equating rules with “strategies intended” is a serious flaw. The rules of baseball don’t mention that if you hit the ball farther, it will be harder for the fielders to get it back to the infield quickly. Don’t try to claim that was unintended. Game designers are smarter than you think.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:25 am
Magic: The Gathering is much easier than you guys seem to think. Black Lotus and other broken cards that cost triple digits yet are essential to competetive decks are only legal in the most insanely overcosted superbroken format. Most tournaments I know of are Type 2, and what I call a “Tier 1.5″ deck can be made from two copies of a starter deck, total of about $20-$25. Add a few in-print commons and uncommons and you can play in a local casual tournament and have a good chance. This works best if you get an aggro preconstructed, like Boros or Azorious. Starters don’t have enough to get a combo through and control usually requires some of the more efficent (and costly) rares, so aggro is the most viable option here. Even against a strong deck you can sometimes pull off a fast enough start to kill them off before they start firing, and the randomness of draws means they can certainly draw enough irrelevant cards, not enough mana, or too much mana, that your early attacks can force through enough damage for the win. Aggro is the most fun to play IMO, but a good combo deck, though sometimes tough to piece together esp. for newer players, is definately a blast if you can pull it off consistantly.
End of ramble.
November 8th, 2006 at 2:13 am
I don’t know what kind of place you usually play Magic at Tyrael, and if that way of playing works for you, fine. But to think you could show up with two starters at a place with serious competition (Grand Prix or Pro Tour level) would definitely be way too optimistic. You’ve chosen av weird place to exhibit what can only be described as “scrubness” since Sirlin has written a book on the subject. If you show up with a finely tuned deck, instead of 2 starters mashed together you’ll find you’ll have a much bigger chance of winning and you’ll probably have more fun as a result.
I also think that the reason these guys were talking about Black Lotus is because they were discussing the fact that even places were a lot of game mechanics appear completely broken will sometimes balance themselves out, just because of the vast number of tools and mechanics at the players’ disposal. You’re right about the fact that Type 2 tournaments, at least nowadays are, a LOT less degenerate and very diverse but you don’t have to go further back than Mirrodin a couple of years ago to find a standard metagame where there was one dominant deck, and the success of any other decks were based almost solely on their ability to beat it. This eventually led to the banning of the 5 artifact lands and some of the key cards that made this deck degenerate in the first place.
End rant. :P
November 25th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Erm… META MEANS BEYOND.
from M-W:
1 a : occurring later than or in succession to : after b : situated behind or beyond c : later or more highly organized or specialized form of
2 : change : transformation
3 [metaphysics] : more comprehensive : transcending — usually used with the name of a discipline to designate a new but related discipline designed to deal critically with the original one
4 a : involving substitution at or characterized by two positions in the benzene ring that are separated by one carbon atom b : derived from by loss of water
Btw it ALSO means beyond in spanish.
Instead of Saying Greek Guy wrote something than means blah. (which btw also means beyond/transcending-physics/the real world not about) You should try using a dictionary.
Metagame is transcending/beyond the game in the sense that what is good and bad in relation to all the games being played. (as said by the guy before me, the ability to win the most commonly picked game.)
November 30th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Guilty Gear has definitely been improving in balance thoughout the years. My only real gripe w/ Slash is that Sol and Ky have become the best, and are very easy to play as.
Isuka is fun provided you have a large enough group of people. Not really for serious play, but I imagine if people tried, they could find a 2v2 tourny level game there.
As far as glitches changing/breaking gameplay, haven’t some glitches propelled fighting game evolution? If I recall, things like buffering weren’t initially intended, but now are intentionally added. Even so, FDC changed GGX, didn’t?
January 16th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Yes, there are tiers in ggxx. However, it’s something that naturally appears in any fighting game. It’s the degree of separation between the tiers that divides characters into the playables and unplayables. I think Sirlin is correct in choosing ggxx in that the degree of separation between character tiers is so small that it’s easily overcome by player skill. For case in point, look at the past Tougeki GGXSlash tournament. Ka2 managed to go 17-1 and win the championship match without any assistance from his teammates with Jam, a supposedly mid-tier character.
February 24th, 2007 at 6:22 am
While no fighting game is perfectly balanced, games like 3S, MvC2, and CvS2 are lacking in game balance. Of all the possibilities in each game, you are pretty much severely limited in your choices. 10 teams out of 175,616 possible teams in MvC2 is not good balance. 3 characters out of 12 is not very good, but the balance is considerably better.
Out of more than 48 characters in CvS2, from teams of 1-3 characters with 6 grooves to choose from… That’s 636480 combinations. The upper 2 tiers are considered the large majority of “competitive” character/groove combinations for high-end tournament play (though some teams consist of middle tier characters as second and third characters on some teams). There are 16 characters (with grooves taken into consideration, some characters are repeats) aside from Blanka in the top 2 tiers. So let’s figure Blanka is competitive in all 4 (competitive) Grooves, just to give us the best case scenario. There are 7 characters in C Groove, so the combinations are (single character) 7 + (two characters) 7*6 + (three characters) 7*6*5 = 259 combinations for C Groove. In A Groove, we have potentially 5 candidates, so 5 + 5*4 + 5*4*3 = 85 combinations for A Groove. We have 3 characters for N Groove, so that is 3 + 3*2 + 3*2*1 = 15 “competitive” combinations. Finally, K Groove… We also have 3 characters in the top 2 tiers, which makes for another 15 competitive combinations. Let’s add that all up and we get 15 + 15 + 85 + 259 = 374 combinations. Let’s multiply that by 4 just to be safe (so there are 4x as many combinations in each groove as I considered, which is being very generous), we still only get 1496 out of 636,480 combinations. That is 0.2% of the possible combinations.
So as you move over to GGXX/, you see that game balance is actually pretty darn good, as you can choose from over half the cast and play competitively in high-end tournaments. That is AMAZING. Do you guys understand how balanced Guilty Gear is in comparison to several of the other fighting games? The next closest game is 3S with 1/4 the cast being competitive in high-end play.
As to the person who mentioned SSB… SSB and SSBM are NOT the most balanced fighting games ever, but the only game listed in my post that beats it in terms of game balance is GGXX/. SF:3S is very close, in terms of ratio of possibilities, though.
As for meta-game, someone already posted what I was going to say. Meta = beyond. The meta-game is the part of the game that is handled outside the scope of the game itself, but manifests through the rules, glitches, and other nuances that develop from the environment within the game. For example, SSBM’s Meta-game developed at a fairly quick rate over several years, constantly changing. First, shield grabbing was discovered (something that didn’t work very well in the original SSB, but you grab an attacker after you shield their attack), and made attacking the front of a shielding opponent almost impossible to do without being punished. The biggest part of the meta-game at that point was trying to get around shield grabbing, then various effective methods were discovered. Then the meta-game shifted to how to punish the attackers who were getting around the shield grabbing, where people learned how to jump cancel their shields, resulting in up+B moves and short hop aerial attacks canceling shield frames while the attacker was still in lag from their initial attack. It is probably still developing today, but I left the community several years back.
Anyway, while the game’s mechanics and characters did not change much (the different versions and balance issues are an entirely different topic), the way it was played changed due to the development of effective tactics that could be used within the game’s environment, which made other tactics obsolete. So essentially, the meta-game is the current development of tactics/mind-games/combos that can be used effectively in high-end tournament play within the game’s environment given the current competition present in the tournament scene. Sure, it may encompass character choice and/or deck building, but a lot more of it has to do with the development of the tournament play and what.
Another way to look at it is this. The game is capable of everything in the meta-game, but it is also capable of a lot more than that. You can string together every possible move combination you want, but not all of them will be viable, and most of them will not be safe to use. However, the meta-game develops through players (who are beyond the scope of the game) sifting through all the possibilities and settling on characters/decks, strategies, etc. that will work in high-end tournament play. You can build a Magic deck out of any cards, but if you build a deck out of randomly selected card, you will probably be discarding a large portion that you cannot use, and will undoubtedly lose to a player who has constructed a deck that is competitive (I know there are competitive decks that are constructed as anti- decks, but I can’t think of a single deck that has thought put into it that would lose to 60 randomly selected cards).
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:55 pm
I think it’s silly to calculate the total number of teams possible in a game before deciding that it’s balanced. MVC2 only has around 10 playable teams at top level, it doesn’t matter that theres X total teams, it doesn’t hurt the competitive gaming scene if there are a bunch of garbage characters, and it’s surely not uncommon. As long as there’s enough diversity in high level competition so that it doesn’t get stale, I’d called it balanced.
SF:3S is hard to call balanced because there are a clear top 3 characters, yun chun and ken. Ken beats yun, yun beats chun, chun beats ken. (of course not 100%, but its probably above 60-40 for each matchup). I have been out of the scene for a while, so this all might have changed, but very few other chars will even have a chance against a finely tuned one of these.
‘Top X’ surfaces in many games, SSBM has marth/shiek/fox, MVC2 has mag/storm/cable/sent, MVC1 has wm/gwm/strider, etc. Other characters are playable and often competitive, but there are still mainly these ‘powerhouse’ characters. If there’s enough diversity, and at least a handful of teams/chars can compete with each other, I think it’s fair to say the competitive scene is balanced. Unlike, say, Tekken 4, where I don’t believe any non-jin hit any semifinals after the game evolved a bit.
The idea of saying “You can just get 2 starters in MTG and do pretty good in local tourneys” is like saying “you can just mash P with e-honda and do pretty good in the arcades”. You are a scrub, sorry.
August 5th, 2007 at 7:58 am
You have a valid point, Siyko. When there is enough variety, the % of viable teams doesn’t really matter, I guess. However, when the variety is just a mix and match of mostly the same characters, that does sort of put a damper on things. Maybe I’m just a bit biased against MvC2, but the variety in that game isn’t to my liking. While you can play as 10 different teams, most consist of combinations of the best with usually one, maybe two variant support characters. I’m not saying it’s a bad game, just that I personally find there are balance issues that aren’t appealing to me (so I choose not to play it). There is a large enough crowd that thinks otherwise to keep the game afloat and it’s still one of the largest tournament communities in the US, so my opinion isn’t really relevant.
I agree that 3S is hardly balanced since only three characters are really playable, but when you look at it from a % the game suddenly doesn’t appear _as_ unbalanced. Still, Capcom didn’t have enough variety in there for that % to really make up for the fact that only three characters are competitive. You have a very valid point there.
Any game will have a top # of characters, one of the nice things about SSBM and GG are that tournaments aren’t dominated by just those characters. Plenty of other characters from all across the tier lists (more so in GG, SSBM generally only has tournament winners from upper/high tier and above) in those games will place well, and sometimes even win, in fairly large and well-renowned tournaments.
Some things to take into consideration about tier lists are whether it is possible for a lower tier character to beat higher tier characters, or whether there are fundamental elements of move sets that make it impossible for lower tier characters to win, or whether there is a collection of abilities that each specifically give an upper hand to a character in individual matchups (and hence a tier list using this type of ranking might just be an arrangement of characters with the highest number of overall advantageous character matchups). Because of the way certain tier lists are structured, some may restrict competitive options you have to a select few, while others are more just a guideline to which characters have the greatest overall chance of winning (but do not make it impossible for a larger cast of characters to be competitive).
As was seen in Evo West, Sirlin used three separate characters. I’m not too familiar with ST, but I imagine his character choice was probably to maximize his chances of winning in specific character matchups. In fact, sometimes it might be smarter to choose a lower tier or less popular character that has an overall advantage against a higher tier character in a tournament for one match. There are generally a lot less videos and information of lower tiered characters floating around (ST has been around for so long that this probably isn’t the case for Sirlin at Evo West), and therefore it’s harder to find information on how to deal with them. You’ll have to be careful and not rely solely on a single tactics, though, because if the opponent is extremely skilled, experienced, and/or patient, they might just find a way around your advantage and cost you the match.
August 5th, 2007 at 8:03 am
In my last paragraph, I meant that Sirlin probably wasn’t using the lack of information about a character to his advantage. ST has been around for so long that he probably was very familiar with character specific advantages in matchups and used that knowledge along with his experience playing those characters to put him at 4th place in the ST tourney.
August 6th, 2007 at 9:49 am
To Aitamen:
SSBM isn’t really that balanced. Well, I guess you could say it it, going by quantity over percentage. Out of 26 characters in the game, about 8 are tournament viable. The top five of course are Fox , Falco, Marth, Sheik, and Peach. Other characters that probably could go into a tournament are Falcon, Samus, and Ice Climbers. The other characters are a bit iffy, and you probably have to have some more skill to make up for their disadvantages. Not to mention almost every low tier character gets destroyed by Sheik.
Well, 8 characters isn’t THAT bad, it’s not exactly good either. especially out of 26. You could probably take a good Doc, Mario, or Ganon to a tournament, but they’re not common.
August 26th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
SSBM may not be perfectly balanced, but I’d say it’s up there with some of the highest balanced games, or at least fighters.
Even Bowser, commonly considered one of the, or the absolute, worst characters in the game has a few players that play him professionally. Of course he doesn’t win major tournaments, but one of the things he has going for him is surprise.
You’re right about those top five, but Chu’s ICs are amazing, and there are of course other good players of characters that are not top five. You can’t forget Jigglypuff, either. Jigglypuff is definitely one of the top, though not as high as the fox/marth/sheik thing, of course.
I sort of lost my train of thought here. I think that many of the characters (not pichu… or donkey kong, really, or zelda…) can make it into a tournament and do well, though maybe not first, but perhaps that’s because no player has mained that character long enough. I don’t know a lot of players that play ICs, but Chu does and he does really well. Who thought of them before Chu? I honestly don’t know the answer to that, but I bet they weren’t seen as good.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Mystic:
http://www.smashwiki.com/wiki/List_of_previous_tier_lists
There you go. Pretty interesting to see the progression of the community, don’t you think?
Melee is actually surprising in how balanced it is. Characters as low as Jigglypuff have won recent major tournaments (Mango, HugS), and characters as low as Donkey Kong, Roy, and Link have won large regional tournaments (Bum, Sethlon, and Aniki respectively).
December 6th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Who cares about percentage of “tournament playable” characters in a competitive game? The concern should be with the absolute (as opposed to relative) amount, since that determines the amount of variety in match-ups.
You can say that Puzzle Fighter has 18% tournament viable characters, which is close to SSBM’s 20% or so, but in actuality PF only amounts to having two viable characters, which means you’ll only ever see one actual match-up. Alternatively, a game could have only 10% of the characters be viable, but if the game had 100 characters, that would mean it has as many or more top tier characters than SSF2T.
December 7th, 2007 at 1:14 am
Saying “who cares about percentages?” leads to a somehwat lazy design system. If you were only supposed to care about the actual number of tourney-playable characters…then why not just pull a MUGEN and throw in 200 characters? Would CTRLALTDEL be a better game for tourneys than a real fighting game? I mean, it has 200 characters. So if even 5% of the characters are good in it (that’s 10 total, for all you math-impaired Smash players) would it be a better game because you can play as any of the 10 high-tier Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Naruto and Ghostbusters characters? Clearly not.
Sure, that’s twice as many as there are in Smash, and more than three times as many as there are in 3S (that’s Street Fighter 3: Third Strike for all you ig’nant Smash players) but clearly, that’s just not a good way to design a game.
Compare this with Garou: Mark of the Wolves where you have a relatively slim cast of 12 (or 14 if you play bosses) characters where 12 (or 14 if you play bosses) are great at tourney play.
As for SSBM…it isn’t especially well-balanced, but it isn’t poorly balanced. But you can’t say that just because a Jigglypuff player won a tourney this one time that it’s got GREAT balance. This, of course, ignores the dozen other shortcomings that mount up to be far worse than balance issues found in Smash.
December 7th, 2007 at 2:50 am
Spud kinda got it, but to be more clear… The issue with percentage is more about how many non-usable characters there are. If you have 10 good characters, and 2 useless ones… well, that’s not too bad, players don’t really mind avoiding just 2 choices.
But, in a game like Smash, or MvC2, where there’s a huge cast, and all the characters are being borrowed from other sources already… it’s really not a good move to be telling 75% your fans that their favorite character was included, but they can’t play as them if they want to actually win. Just makes you wonder, when there’s 40+ useless characters, why the designers couldn’t cut out half, or something, and spend their time making 20 useful ones.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:04 am
I wasn’t really talking from a game design standpoint but more from a “this makes a good, varied high-level competitive game” standpoint.
Obviously, designers should strive for character balance, but the realities of development schedules and the gradual evolution of high-level gameplay make the 100% viable character mark rather unrealistic.
There’s also the consideration of audience. Sure, the SSBM team probably <i>could</i> have been able to balance, say, 10 characters for tournament play if they had only created 10 characters and focused their effort on balancing them for tournaments, but part of the appeal of the game is the large roster of varied characters. The team realized more people will play and enjoy the game if they put in 26 (or however many it is) characters. So I wouldn’t classify SSBM’s limited tournament roster as a result of lazy design, but rather design intentionally focused on making an incredibly popular casual brawler that still manages not to degenerate in high-level tournaments.
Anyway, I guess my point wasn’t that more tournament viable characters is necessarily better, but that the ratio of viable to nonviable characters is a similarly meaningless metric. The absolute number of top-tier characters has no real bearing on the quality of the game, but I don’t believe that the ratio of good to not good characters does either. Puzzle Fighter seems to make a good case for both statements (despite not being a fighting game). More viable characters simply lends to more variety in tournament match-ups, which may or may not matter to any given person.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:17 am
Claytus: “But, in a game like Smash, or MvC2, where there’s a huge cast, and all the characters are being borrowed from other sources already… it’s really not a good move to be telling 75% your fans that their favorite character was included, but they can’t play as them if they want to actually win. Just makes you wonder, when there’s 40+ useless characters, why the designers couldn’t cut out half, or something, and spend their time making 20 useful ones.”
This was kind of addressed in my third paragraph, but I could elaborate. Considering the small amount of tournament players compared to the amount of total purchases of SSBM, the vast majority of people playing the game play or played it casually. That said, the statement becomes something more like this:
“… telling 75% of your high caliber players that their favorite character was included, but they can’t play as them if they want to actually win. For the 95%+ of your total fans, you can tell them that they can play and enjoy their favorite character since they’ll never be playing at the tournament level.”
Millions of people who bought SSBM don’t care or don’t have any idea that someone playing Marth well would crush them playing Pikachu.
As noted above, the designers didn’t set out to create “Super Smash Brothers: Playing to Win Tournament Edition.” They set out to create an insanely high-selling “fighting game” that most Gamecube owners enjoy and obviously succeeded. That the game manages to hold up in the tournament scene with a few viable characters was likely not a primary concern.
December 7th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Once again, you shouldn’t even mention “Smash Bros” and the phrase “not having lazy design” within the same sentence. Because Smash Bros was, in fact, fairly lazily designed. It’s rife with glitches, and the thing that makes Guilty Gear balanced, if you read this artcile, is a unanimously held set of attributes. Guilty Gear has this intentionally. Smash Bros has this, to a significantly lesser extent, through glitches and oversights (most notably, L-Cancels and wave dashing).
And you can quite easily get around losing while playing as your favorite character. Simply press left, right, down or up on the control stick and press A, and you’ll pick a new character. There are lots of Ryu players out there in the Street Fighter World, and in most games, he isn’t so hot (specifically 3S and CvS2). So guess what all those Ryu players do? They pick up Ken or some other high-tier character. Cmon, Claytus. Certainly you knew this.
And having a near-completely tourney-viable cast of characters is by no means unachievable. Garou did it 8 years ago. Guilty Gear Accent Core did it a year ago. Virtua Fighter has done this most of the time. Dead or Alive is pretty close to doing this.
If a company is willing to put in the time and effort, like SNK, Sammy, Sega and Itagaki are, then they can put out a pretty well-balanced game. Nintendo, however, is not a company I’d trust to really puit any effort into anything outside of making something relatively low-glitch.
December 8th, 2007 at 6:29 am
That still doesn’t address:
“… but the realities of development schedules …”
December 8th, 2007 at 7:54 am
There’s a couple sides to this… first, spud is right, Smash was created as a party game, not a competitive game. They weren’t setting out to make proper balance for high level play, and it shows. That said, wave dashing is a *bug*, plain and simple… they should have noticed it, and fixed it. But given that they obviously didn’t, for whatever reason, it made balancing the game essentially impossible, since no amount of design work will fix balance problems caused by bugs that weren’t intended in the design anyway.
MvC2 is a slightly better example… they really were trying to make a standard fighting game, with high level play. I once heard someone say about MvC2: “How did the designers not realize that an 8-way air dash is completely overpowered, and makes any character without that ability useless?” Now… I don’t know whether the implication is strictly true or not… offhand I think there’s at least one or two characters considered top tier without an 8-way air dash. But, as an example, it makes for a good question. Things like that are just a complete oversight by the designers… when clearly overpowered abilities are present in the game, they should notice, and do something to fix it. It’s pretty obvious given current tierlists in MvC2, that there were many unbalancing elements, and the designers did nothing.
(That example is particularly telling because air dashing is one of the “basic” techniques, common to all characters. GGXX proves that with proper balancing and standardization of all the “basic” stuff, you can do really crazy character design without running into any problems.)
(P.S. why are you picking on me here too, spudly? I was agreeing with you. Obviously, anyone who likes ryu can pick ken instead… but what if ST didn’t contain so many similar characters… imagine what GGXX would be like with horrible balance… if the character you want to play was broken, there’s noone similar in the cast that you could possibly choose… obviously, players tend to migrate to the higher tiers in any game with poor balance, but they have the right to be unhappy about it, which is all I was saying.)
December 9th, 2007 at 1:52 am
I hate to tell you, Forty, but pretty much all real fighting games have relatively lenient development schedules. Itagaki pulled Dead or Alive 4 out of the 360’s launch lineup for a long time. Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting was delayed for months on end. STHDR was supposed to be brought out before the holidays, but it’s now bumped back to 2008. Virtua Fighter 5 was supposed to come out on the 360 a while ago, and instead they wait so they can put out ver. C instead of ver. A. Forty, when it comes to real fighting games, most of the time it doesn’t come out until it’s done. Smash Bros isn’t a real fighting game.
Wave Dashing is more of an “oversight” than a bug. It’s using something that’s meant to be in the game in a way that wasn’t intended. It’s not a complete failure in the programming. And Smash Bros. could be balanced. It just isn’t. And there’s really no reason the game SHOULD be balanced. Nintendo wants you to play the game as a party game. It takes place on a level where a bunch of random crap happens, and random items randomly drop near random players.
And you’re missing the point on the “bugs.” Like Sirlin said, the variety of the characters in GGXX is made possible in a substantial way by the shared “design skeleton” that all characters have. The cast of SSBM is, too, THANKS to the glitches. Before L-Cancelling and Wave Dashing were discovered, there were only three things that all characters had: Dashing, rolling and shields. That’s it. When L-Cancels and Wave Dashing were discovered, they now had five things between them. Without those five things, you’d probably just see one playable character in SSBM, rather than the three, four or five, depending on the tier list.
MVC2, as Sirlin said, ended up becoming a halfway decent game entirely through chance. MvC2 was just a compilation of every character from Marvel vs. Capcom 1, X-Men vs. Street Fighter, X-men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Superheroes vs. Street Fighter. They, probably, didn’t put any time into balancing or any real gameplay tweaks. As said in the article, it was a bunch of monkeys who got Shakespeare (though Shakespeare was good, MvC2 was not). The flight isn’t quite that dominant. Storm and Sentinel are dominant, in part, because of flight, but you don’t see many people building their team around, say, Iron Man. And the simple fact that Cable and Spiral both lack dashing but are fairly widely-used says something.
A technique like flying in MvC2 wouldn’t be an oversight, though. It’s just that they didn’t balance it into the game properly. And even so, as was said, MvC2 was “balanced” through chance. And air dashing in GGXX is NOTHING like the air dashing in MvC2. Go watch some match videos.
And why am I “picking on you?” I’m not. It’s just that I’m correcting you when you’re wrong. It just so happens that you’re constantly wrong, and don’t know anything about the techniques you’re trying to make a coherent argument about.
..seriously. Comparing the air dashing in GGXX to the air dash in MvC2? Come on. Learn what you’re talking about.
December 9th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Um… I never mentioned GGXX’s air dash, nor was I making a comparison between the two games outside of the “design skeleton” argument you made… we just said exactly the same thing.
December 9th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Oh, and for the record, wave-dashing is the exact definition of a bug. It’s forcing the game to cause an state change in regards to inputs (allowing you to input standing attacks), while skipping the animation state change (you’re character never actually leaves the air and starts standing). It was a programming error, not an element of game design that went awry, which seems to be what you’re implying.
December 11th, 2007 at 12:27 am
“There’s a couple sides to this… first, spud is right, Smash was created as a party game, not a competitive game.”
Uh, didn’t I post that?
December 11th, 2007 at 2:01 am
I’m not really implying it, I’m flat-out stating it. Wave dashing, I don’t think, is something along the lines of roll cancels (that was a bug in Capcom vs SNK 2 you can read about somewhere on this site), where you could go into a roll, then cancel out of the roll into an attack while still maintaining the invincibility of the roll.
Are you talking about L-cancelling?
December 11th, 2007 at 3:34 am
What are you talking about… they’re both the exact same issue, which is incorrect syncing of game states.
Roll cancelling = the invincibility of a roll isn’t properly removed while entering an attack animation
wavedashing = the forward momentum of an air dodge isn’t properly removed when touching the ground
Are you trying to argue severity (i.e. keeping invincibility is “worse” than keeping momentum?), cause that’s not part of the definition of a bug.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:16 am
No, Roll cancelling actually ends a roll. You cut off the roll mid-way into an attack. Stopping a roll mid-way wasn’t intended by the game designers, and is done through a glitch.
Wave dashing is different in how it retains the properties of a dodge by landing. Landing is not a glitch. It was just poorly designed, and the result was the properties not being cancelled by the game itself.
Think of how this would be fixed, and the difference becomes apparent.
December 13th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
You’re wrong… but I expected you to say that, because of the way I wrote my explanation. I would have been equally correct to have said it this way:
Roll cancelling = an attack animation is incorrectly initiated before the roll has naturally completed
wave dashing = your character is incorrectly counted as having landed from his jump before the air dodge section of the jump has naturally completed.
That is, what you’re saying is that roll cancelling ends the roll early, while wave dashing ends the air dodge late. But, that doesn’t matter… the problem is that the *transition* between rolling/air dodging and attacking is happening at an incorrect time. It doesn’t matter whether the correct time was originally intended to be earlier or later, and it could potentially be fixed in either way in both games. But, we don’t know which solution the designers intended (and they can’t/won’t fix it anyway), so it’s irrelevant.
December 13th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I guess I technically said that wrong too… the attack shouldn’t be *earlier or later*… it should either occur later, or happen at the current time but have the invincibity/forward momentum properties removed.
December 14th, 2007 at 5:41 am
(sigh)
The difference between Roll Cancelling and Wave dashing is that you were never meant to be able to get out of the roll. You were meant to be able to land after a dodge.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:00 am
You’re correct… you were meant to land *AFTER* the dodge, as you said… but in the game you actually land during the dodge, which is the same incorrect behavior as a roll cancel… it’s really not that complicated.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:01 am
I think the disparity between our difference in thinking lies in how I believe that a dodge was supposed to be able to let you land if you do it barely off the ground, while you believe that you were supposed to move down, and hover off the ground until after the dodge ends. If I’m correct (on this), then we’re both wrong. Or right, if you’re an optimist.
But yeah, if air dodges were indeed NOT meant to let you land during the animation AT ALL, then yeah, you’d be right. I believe, though, you were meant to be able to dodge and end up in a standing position.
December 20th, 2007 at 4:30 am
I believe you were not meant to be able to start a standing attack until the dodge had ended. I don’t care whether that means the properties of the dodge are cancelled when you attack (i.e. the forward momentum), or whether it prevents landing entirely until the dodge animation completes (i.e. attacking from air dodge gives air attacks even when near the ground), which is the disparity you’re talking about. My point is that both of the cases you mentioned are completely valid interpretations, and without asking the developers there’s no way to know which is “right”.
That is… it doesn’t matter how the move was “suppose” to work. All we know is that it currently works incorrectly, and descriptions of *why* it works incorrectly are easiest to create when we describe an alternate “correct” behavior… but there are a number of possible correct behaviors that we have no way of judging between. This is why I’m equating roll-cancelling and wave-dashing… it’s the same incorrect behavior, but you’re arguing that the correct behavior in each case was different. I don’t disagree with you, but it’s mostly irrelevant to the problem.
December 21st, 2007 at 2:50 am
Considering the behavior of air-dodging diagonally into the ground is being “fixed” in SSBB, I would think that means it was not truly intended behavior in SSBM.
December 21st, 2007 at 10:38 am
Well, obviously the only proper stance on a glitch is to use it or lose to it (assuming it’s good, which it is). And yeah, we can’t be sure which of us is right unless we asked the developers, and I just don’t know Japanese.
Anyway, this particular line of conversation lies in one of those “differences of opinion” areas which are made pointless by a lack of adequate knowledge to determine who is correct through factual evidence. Or something.
Bad grammar on my part there, I think.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
And funny enough, after a very brief search we find on Youtube a video of Infinite Combos. Some of the combos if you watch run into the 900s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjHsT4nTigA&feature=related
April 14th, 2008 at 1:38 am
PLG:
1) Are you answering someone in particular?
2) Do you know that those infinite comobs, are not technically infinite? Even in the very first one in the video you can see the safe-guard where the victim flips out of the combo after a lot of hits. These infinites are merely “very long and damaging combos” as opposed to infinites. If you know all that, then it’s ok to go back to calling them infinites, since that’s the accepted slang.
3) Do you know that the original article is about a different game entirely? (GGXX, not MvC2.) Maybe you know this, but just checking.
July 21st, 2008 at 12:14 am
Well even though ggxx is good balanced, its kinda bad for players ’cause its so overcomplicated that alot of players would avoid that. It is quite interesting, I admit. But I like Fighting games with easier systems more.