09 to '19: A Decade of Approachability in Fighting Games

[Music] hello everybody thanks for coming I know there's a lot of exciting things happening right now outside of this talk and even outside of GDC so thanks for coming and hanging out talk about fighting games for an hour this is a kind of a dense talk so I'm gonna move a little bit quickly I'm going to start my music is still no I'm sorry yeah so this talk is called oh nine twenty nine a decade of approachability and fighting games real quick kind of about myself I you know I've always been that kind of a casual smash brothers street fighter player my first job kind of adjacent to the gaming industry was at major league gaming after that I got involved with a project called Sports friends worked on a game called barabara ball more recently I've been working at the mighty iron galaxy I kind of hired got hired on there to work on Killer Instinct there's my two favorite characters in the bottom Agnes

and cinder were really fun to work on yes we worked on seasons two and three of killer instincts a couple notes about terms I am using like the terms approachability and accessibility interchangeably I know like colloquially we we talk about accessibility and fighting a and as in terms of like it'll make them easier to play and so on I wanted to avoid suggesting this talk was about designing for disabilities which is important but that's not what we're talking about today although if you are interested there was some great work done on the audio side of killer instinct and you can read about that I was to recommend game accessible accessibility guidelines calm a few other notes I have like a big tents for fighting games so in my mind like Street Fighter Soul Calibur Smash Brothers even like nidhogg and divekick they all have it like enough in common that we can kind of talk about them in the same breath I'm also kind of in the unusual position of talking mostly about games I haven't worked on so you know if you see something you've worked on here and maybe I say something critical about of it today know that you know this is coming from a place of love and respect

and like I spent a lot of time thinking about these games and you know think about how to make them better so I want to start by talking about a period of time that's generally roughly between like 1999 and 2009 if you read a lot about fighting games or talk to a lot of people who play a lot of fighting games you can maybe hear this term like the Dark Ages right so this is like the period of time between roughly the final version of Street Fighter 3 and like the console release of Street Fighter 4 in the US its total misnomer there's actually a ton of interesting games released during this period of time it's really more of a Street Fighter Dark Age but you know since Capcom was and kind of is still like a symbolic genre leader the story that often gets told is that Street Fighter 3 was like a very demanding game with like a you know new mechanics like the difficult parry system and so on and it was inaccessible so it kind of didn't retain the massive Street Fighter 2 audience that Capcom you know expected and desired and you know around that time fighters kind of like fell out of mainstream consciousness until 2009 Street Fighter 4 came along and that

like felt and still feels kind of significant like kind of the closing of one door and the opening of another like the beginning of a new era so if we call that time between Troubadour three and four the Dark Age I want to suggest that the time after it we call the expansion age so shrew Fighter 4 is a perfect example of like how this was kind of kicked off right this is a game that had more approachable mechanics and kind of online play for the first time and colorful 3d graphics and you know highlighting the original cast so this is all to me seems like a deliberate attempt that kind of appealing to a larger audience like a broader audience not just people who had been playing and continued to play fighting games but people may be nostalgic for Street Fighter 2 or people who maybe never played Street Fighter but just know like I kind of characters like chun-li and guile and so on so yeah so this expansion agent that's like the period of time we're in now and we've been in for a while the defining characteristic to me of this time is developers kind of putting priority on making their games easier to play easier to understand more accessible more approachable and you know we see this through how developers

communicate with players if you've read any interview with with almost any fighting game studio you'll often hear things like oh the game is that deep as ever but it's easier to play it regardless though this doesn't really seem at to have been as successful as many people might have hoped it's still common to even see players talk about being intimidated even players that lead you know play a lot of games players that consider themselves hardcore gamers it kind of reminds me growing up something that a lot of people you know music fans would say oh I listen to everything but not right it's like almost like fighting it's our kind of the country in rap it's maybe even worse because there are people who want to play these games and want to get into them but just can't figure out how before we talk about why that is I want to kind of make something that's make the case kind of against this process like a case a critique maybe of the expansion age but I think is a little unusual especially from the developer but I think it's worth articulating I think the like the first thing is there's kind of like a romance of about difficult art right there's a infighting specifically that kind of mass manifests itself in a fear of like diminishing or like removing the value

of skill like feats of skill Tom cannon one of the founders of evoke calls this the drama of humans under pressure and I can relate to this like as a player and as a spectator I think part of what is so great about fighting games is how they're so expressive and like allow for so much variety and reward skill like their games that don't come to you in the way that a lot of games now do and I don't think that's like in validating I don't think that's bad I think difficult art is great I think composers like Shirin Berg and Ornette Coleman and you know performers like lightning bolt or sunny sunny sherek are all examples of kind of art that you need to you kind of need to work a little bit to appreciate it right I don't think that's that's bad there's also a fear of kind of becoming to eSports which to me means a little too mainstream or like too dry and too commercial and I can relate to this also like I think there's this desire to emulate professional sports that's a little off-putting for one thing like there's this emphasis on work organizing around spectatorship versus participation which just is a little less interesting to me personally then there's the question like do we even know how to do this like so as a

developer I don't know that we actually know how to make these games more accessible and there's a sense in which kind of tackling a problem that you don't understand yet is like experimental surgery like it's unpredictable and weird my friend and collaborator Richard Terrell has a great example of this process where he kind of likens it to attempting to like kind of squeeze a balloon in your hands and when you try to do that like you know the air escapes between your fingers and then you kind of patch that up and then it just moves and escapes somewhere else it's like not solvable and I think we'll see a running theme of this talk is going to be unintended consequences and like weird side effects and then finally like well maybe they're already accessible and people just don't like them which we'll come back to there's also a case for accessibility of course you know most prominently it's possible design of fighting games has just become over complicated and confusing over time you know many modern fighting games are the result of like a very long tradition of building on existing work and kind of piling on prior knowledge that it kind of makes it difficult for players and developers who are like steeped in this stuff to kind of understand how complicated is how it looks to a

newcomer there's also the fact that games are expensive if you make a fighting game and you want to make another game afterward that game has to make money right they have to recoup especially as like games become more online and more games of a service model kind of become more expected this just gets harder and harder then there's the fact that games kind of are a little bit unique to me and that they kind of need to be activated by their players in the sense there's a there's a sense in which when more people play a game they kind of reveal all the weird cool fun aspects of it that are you know they're they're in the code as like potentialities but you kind of need people to care about them and play them and kind of put pressure on them to kind of help discover like the cool truths about the games right like seeing people do crazy things like this tool-assisted combo is kind of just inspiring and awesome like as a value into that to me just in and of itself and then finally you know developers love fighting games like we do this stuff because we care about and we find something valuable in it and we actually do want to share them with the world so more access more people is kind of is

good just for that you know you want to see more of the stuff that you like so if it's not clear I land on like the four side of this argument but I think the concerns on the against side are pretty serious and if this talk has a thesis it's that I think this is a more difficult or like at least a different process than most people appreciate this talk is gonna try to help understand what developers have tried what works and what doesn't work and then at the end I'm gonna try to offer some thoughts about maybe what the next 10 years could look like we're gonna talk about design kind of rules and features in a game and then input specifically the stuff between the player and the characters so design there's a lot of stress around fighting games about like how to learn how to play or or the right way to play right so I want to start by asking like is there actually just something inherently and accessible about the design or the nature of fighting games in other words like are these questions the stress is actually really more intense than in other games and you know maybe they are fighting games are head-to-head they're zero-sum meaning if

I'm going to lose you win actually in Killer Instinct there was a brief period of time where there was a bug where the you know people playing online their inputs would get it go out of sync so both players could win kill interesting it was briefly the perfect fighting game but you know usually it is zero-sum so when you do lose there's no one to blame which is which can be stressful obviously in order to improve you have to interact with strangers which is even more stressful and then you know you also need to kind of examine your own behavior which is maybe supremely stressful but you know that's all true of all the most popular enduring 1v1 games none of that is unique but fine aims do kind of have on top of this what I consider like a pretty unique set of features for the one thing obviously they're real-time so this is an action game or execution end strategy or but what's important there's no randomness generally like we know that randomness kind of has the effects of like softening the effects of skill it kind of brings players closer together at disparate skill levels and so you know fighting games don't have very much of

this and maybe as a result they're more stark and like a little bit tougher than then a lot of people are used to fighting games also have perfect information meaning there's nothing that you know one player has access to that another player doesn't I can see everything on screen there's not really anything that you're hiding from me for pedantic people to go out in something to fix this a little bit yes like there are characters like Game & Watch and peach that have random properties and you know you can think of like charged characters like guile as having information if you can't see what I'm doing with my stick maybe I'm charging maybe I'm not so if we look again at like our top games none of them really have this competition of properties right at chess go all these classic games are not real time hearthstone magic also not real time and then they are on top of that heavily random with tons of hidden information clash royale is real time but it's kind of random and there's a little bit hid information and then weirdly to me Starcraft 2 is actually the closest we get it is real time it's not random but you know because there's separate screens and cuz there's fog of war there is a lot of hidden information so I don't think this means like the

design of fighters is inherently flawed or limited but maybe they cut a little closer to the bone than a lot of other games um so unless you're especially gifted you're gonna lose a lot before you become decent these games and when you do lose it can hurt quite a bit I think maybe this is the biggest impediment towards kind of mainstream embrace of these games now but you know at the same time maybe the biggest gift these games to have and kind of the reason why there's so much what seems to me to be like unique passion kind of energy around people who do play these games I know me personally like I kind of think of fighting games as a reality check versus opposed like a power fantasy right so many games now are kind of about empowering the player and making them feel like something maybe they're not whereas like fighting games will very quickly show you exactly what you are like where you where you sit there was a couple of things I was gonna stay here but Patrick Miller actually just wrote a great article about what he gets about these out of these games and I just suggest people will read that instead because he's much more articulate than I am so first first thing I want to talk about is like training modes trial story these are

generally single-player activities intended to help people learn into play so training modes for example like in theory these are like a safe space for players to kind of experiment and train and not have to worry about what other people are thinking or doing and they're very very good now we have replays in savestates and high settings and recording and lag settings and all sorts of great features there's a couple issues like learning how to use a good training mode is actually more involved and learning many other single player games entirely they're also entirely self-directed so there's no real motivation to use something like this unless you already care about getting good at the game and they're also not very effective unless you know how why when the train and so on there's also an interesting unexpected side effect of these modes in that like in a game that has a good training mode the people who want to get good and know how to good get good can get good very very quickly which can kind of separate the you know the skills of the player based in a surprising way I think you know we also have trials so these are more directed classic examples Street Fighter 4 has you know combo challenges for each character Dragon Ball fighters has a series of kind of tutorials but mechanics on the extreme side of things

under night in birth has this amazing massive interactive manual then we have you know more interactive tutorials so guilty cured and skull girls did an excellent job in this these kind of go beyond just telling you how the game works and kind of start teaching you concepts so in this skullgirls example the player needs to block a series of attacks from the computer and then when they block it successfully three times they can move on to the next lesson so this is cool because it's like it's actually just teaching concepts right it's kind of repeating and confirming knowledge and can be very effective and then on the story mode like single player side of things we have a lot of single player non competitive modes typically these are kind of kind of perfunctory like a series of fights against AI you know traditionally you you go through the whole mode and at the end you get a bit of dialogue or a bit of story modern games have like taken this to an extreme obviously in just as serious as you know lavish cutscenes and like amazing voice acting between each battle we've seen a lot of focus on kind of character customization character creation lots of

things for players to unlock and purchase kind of be creative with so there's a bit of a pragmatic problem here in just that these are all costly to developed and maintained so it's easy to understand why like Mortal Kombat or injustice cutscenes are expensive but even just a training tutorial interactive tutorial mode they're not trivial features right they take effort from the design team and they also take sustain kind of repeated effort because you know these are games that change they get patched and you know you can either leave it alone and maybe teach people obsolete or bad information or go back and actually touch it up then you kind of have to question if these modes are actually effective or try that at teaching or even attracting people in the first place it's possible that it barely matters because most people don't actually do them you can kind of see a very similar curve and a lot of other games this is the dojo mode and killer instinct in people drop off very quickly it's also possible that you know games that kind of put pressure like in their you know in their menus and their

feature set if they communicate to you that you need to research and study to play this game it's possible that this is actually worse than doing nothing and it's like intimidating if you look at some of the biggest fighters right now Smash Brothers Mortal Kombat Tekken Street Fighter 5 these aren't simple games at all but they kind of put less emphasis on learning they don't they don't tell you that you need to train which maybe makes them more appealing like a lot of people don't like school I know act anecdotally I've seen people fall in it's like a training trap where they maybe feel like they can't play online or can't play with their friends until they get through the combo mode for their character and sometimes that can be very difficult on the killer instinct dojo one thing I really like that we did what actually encourage people to go away and stop using the dojo after four lessons and go play some matches and come back there's also you know a ton of resources for learning outside of the game now you don't mean the games to teach you necessarily because you can go to youtube with a lot of very talented people spend a lot of time making information easy to digest then as far as story modes go I think there's a lot of room to disagree about how kind of important and expected these kinds of features are but it's not clear to me that they're like actually appealing to

people who don't already care about these games necessarily I don't know if they solve an accessibility problem beyond does this game have enough bullet points on the side of the box to like seem like a good purchase right like I said these are typically just a series of fights against AI which is repetitive a common way people have been obscuring this recently is by putting players on a map so they can kind of self direct and move around and kind of feel like they have more agency over what's happening but you know then it becomes harder to kind of create a difficulty curve that makes sense or teach players because you know they can go or they want encounters become either way too easy or way too difficult there's also a trend towards adding modifiers and RPG mechanics to kind of add variety to fight it to the fights and maybe allow grinding to help players that are struggling you know personally this is always frustrating to me because I end up spending all our time in menus in this kind of game and I when I pick up a Smash Brothers or or Marvis capcom I don't expect to you know be navigating menus for for most of my time so as like a design challenge I think there's something really alluring about the idea of like the great single-player fighting game that maybe will like immediately teach people how

the games work by having fun while they're doing it I am still a little skeptical you know unless you're working on a project that already kind of has a massive built-in fan base like a Smash Brothers Brawl or injustice you know if your solution to a design problem like this is just make another game and put it in your game I think it's a difficult path right that's a very expensive pursuit next up is kind of pacing mechanics so this is kind of like mechanics and rules that attempt to influence or color the flow of a game the thinking here is generally well what a players hate they hate getting steamrolled and losing badly and what a players love they'll have tension they look like close matches and kind of upsets obviously competitors would not prefer close matches and upsets they prefer just to win and but you know generally players and spectators actually do prefer uncertainty in their games right none of these mechanics are specially new but they're kind of more ubiquitous nonlinear health bars kind of deceptive health bars is a classic example and more vers Capcom 3 for example the health bar kind of extends beyond the X there so but who's hidden health you can't actually see blazblue Street Fighter 5 do something

kind of similar where once your health is below a certain percentage all incoming damage is reduced you know this is kind of cool like it kind of obscures the true game state so that it appears that the players are closer to losing than they actually are which you know maybe if you don't know what's happening it kind of create tension so that's kind of cool there's also comeback mechanics class example of our vs. Capcom 3 x factor also draggable fighters has sparking these are kind of mechanics that become more powerful the longer you wait to use them Tekken 7 has something similar with rage art it's like a super move that becomes available when you're low on health killing instinct instinct mode again a meteor that fills as you take damage and then once it's full you can activate it and you know really get access to like new exciting mechanics so yet so this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently even just outside of the context of fighting games I think when done well like these kinds of like rules on top of the game can give a game like a heartbeat or a pulse like an arc that's really nice if done poorly though it can be very predictable or you know even worse exploitable if it feels like a lot of gameplay kind of

revolves around this mechanic it's probably too impactful like I think it's easy for these things to become a little too important and then you know of course there's an obvious cost just piling on meters and mechanics and like extra rules that are outside the basic gameplay you know for a lot of people just the punches and kicks are enough you know it's easy to see why this might be over complicated for some people so then finally we have rewards right so we live in a time where it feels like we are most games are bending over backwards to reward players for playing right that's that's very much the time that we're in right now and a lot of fighting games are doing this as well there's a lot of mechanics kind of borrowed from mobile games you see in Street Fighter 5 killer instinct you get a daily login bonus when you play the game you have in-game missions that you can use to win currency here's me playing Final Fantasy the city are getting rewarded for jumping three times and using a special move ten times and killer instinct we also have unlocks so there's like aesthetic unlocks like the gacha gacha game in guilty gear where you can kind of unlock costumes and colors and avatars and so on then we

have kind of more catechol unlocks of famously Smash Brothers has you unlock 70 some different characters and arms for example has you unlock arms that you attach to your fighters to try to change their properties obviously it's probably more exciting to like unlock King day-to-day than a color for a character you might not even use but there's a cost you kind of like delay the player having access to the full game you make your tournament organizers miserable that's definitely a balance there and then there's the most meaningful rewards right so cash and clout a lot of developers have been organizing their own tours their own tournaments and you know obviously most people will never get to stand on that stage but the idea that you could or the idea that it's warded to like be that good is definitely appealing to a certain type of player so I think if you believe complexity is any barrier to accessibility these are not solutions to the accessibility problem they may aid retention but I think as these kind of mechanics become more and more ubiquitous and I think we're at that point now basically I think they probably will start to become a lot less effective and you know there's kind of

an air of pandering and maybe it makes it feel like your game is isn't confidence like has a lack of confidence for the compelling on its own when you overdo this like you can shower rewards on players and it can actually be quite risky like this is a little outside of the scope of this talk but there's been a lot of talk at GDC in the past of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation and you know long story short we there's a lot of research suggesting that when rewards are contingent and expected meaning you know how and when you'll get them they can actually damage players motivation like pretty severely so next up is input this is notoriously like the most intimidating aspect of the genre the idea that execution is a barrier to entry that you might need to like if you can't throw a fireball you might need to practice before you can do that is a tough sell to a lot of people it's possible these games just ask for too much precision like too much dexterity this is also not a new concern like the original Street Fighter cabinets you can see on the right there they experimented with like the six button layout we know and also this kind of weird pressure-sensitive thing we can I hit the button really hard to get a heavy kick and tap it to get a light kick a

lot of mechanics that kind of we consider mainstays of the genre now like cancels like input buffer windows and so on these all come out of like really attempts at making the games easier to play moves more reliable so this is definitely not a new thing we also have kind of hardware and cost as a barrier to entry what kind of controller should you use like that can be a big question especially in a game like Smash Brothers you have a lot of options do I need a stick what kind of stick do I need and we have kind of experimental controllers and you know issues around like modding hardware and measuring latency and kind of input lag there's a lot of kind of overhead to kind of playing these games you know the right way so it seems like an area where there's a lot that could be done to help newcomers there's kind of two dominant approaches that I've seen recently to helping players out that I think are new and interesting assist modes our first example these are just like simply control options that if you turn it on they kind of simplify the input requirements for various moves there's a lot of examples of this in a lot of games guilty gear for example stylish mode will change the input

system dramatically it's a dedicated special move button you get and simplify blocking and much more then we have Auto combos so these are like series of moves linked together by a single button press that you press repeatedly so you know if a combo is a series of moves that connect without the attacker having a chance to react this is literally an automatic combo you get a combo just by mashing so these are often like reduced or kind of non optimal damage compared to other combos and games and they often end in a super move that like uses a resource a meter so yeah so assist modes are like kind of generally considered train wheels or like a crutch there's a lot of kind of stigma around these and it makes sense like the idea of you know you on a bicycle using training wheels just some stigma to that as well and as a result like a lot of people avoid using them even people who actually should use them you know and you can try to avoid this by naming them something nice like smart mode or stylish mode and I don't think it really helps I think people know what these are there's also I call them perverse training wheels like one reason they is that they're

very predictable right you kind of limit your options so it's easier for a more seasoned player to kind of know what you're doing which kind of has the perverse effect of making you easier to fight instead of the opposite which might be more desirable and you know maybe they're even worse than training wheels like they make it easier to do stuff like stuff that looks cool but because it's kind of cordoned off for the rest of the game there's no graceful way to kind of grow into understanding like the rest of the game I think looking at Tekken 7 is kind of an interesting example of this they have both assist modes and Auto combos in a sense so yeah the typical Tekken 7 input controls simple one you know each arm has a button each leg is a button there is a assist mode where if you hold down a new input the shoulder button each of those kind of gets remapped to a predetermined special move so this is fine like this is kind of just on top of the gameplay of Tekken 7 I think it's harmless then we have basic combos which this is a toggle where you turn this on and it kind of replaces two of the buttons with Auto combos so you kind of lose access

obviously to a lot of what your character is a lot of important options so this is to me it's kind of perverse right it kind of helps you do stuff but like the stuff you're doing is not really playing the game it's like being able to do short combos or even specific special moves isn't really playing Tekken it's like maybe even worse because suggesting that it is might actually make learning how to play Tekken harder not easier one thing that I actually like about the combo system killer instinct is that it doesn't doesn't walk off the normal ways to perform moves and actually you can kind of enable and disable each component of it the combo system in ki is kind of Baroque and not really gonna get into it here but it is nice you can kind of easy and we're out of this at any points so like assist modes like the motivation behind implementing something like Auto combos can sometimes feel like it's less about actually helping people to understand or play the game and more about wanting players to kind of see cool stuff happen often and early so a common criticism that these systems kind of encourage and reward mashing and

claim like the mindless pressing of buttons and in some cases I think this is true like Marvel's Capcom 3 King of Fighters 14 have Auto combos that are kind of just a series of almost identical normal attacks if one hits they all hate if one is blocked they'll all kind of be blocked easily there's not a lot going on there but there's a couple nice examples I think if we could take a closer look at Lynnae and under nitin birth you can see her first two hits are blocked the third hit gets through somehow that's because no that is a low so there's a very basic mix up right the defender would need to crouch block this is an AI so it's not doing anything but you can kind of see how there's a little bit more going on here than just kind of mindless mashing another example is in beerus and dragon ball fighters his auto combo kind of has a built-in gap and like a built-in left/right mix-up you can see again his first two hits are block he kind of skates underneath Frieza because this is a traditional 2d fighting game you know you need to hold a way to block incoming attacks but now he's on the other side so the defender would have to change the direction they're blocking so it's kind of this is nice like they're not optional right these are a part of the game they're not something you turn on or off you can't decide that you're that you're opting

out of this cuz you're embarrassed by it or whatever they're also integrated into the game context they're made up of you know cancels and they use hit stun and they kind of have mix up some gaps and so on they almost kind of become like a character balance tool at low level play and maybe a teaching tool if you are just someone who's mashing or you're playing against someone who's mashing you'll see kind of important concepts like this over and over again just because they're built into your toolkit you'll like start to understand oh why did I get hit there why do I always get hit by that move and maybe you'll discover well it's because you need to block certain moves low so next is the idea that fewer buttons is more friendly like less intimidating a lot of new games have relatively simple controls of course the number of buttons that a game uses doesn't actually really tell you much how a game is played there's long games with fewer than six attack buttons for example Virtua Fighter 5 has very few buttons right it's a three button game but has a reputation for being difficult to play and that's because they're used in like complicated series's and they're kind of requiring member station like the functionality of these moves is unclear I don't want to

overstate this like I think everyone in this room could learn to play Virtua Fighter 5 with a little effort but just from a kind of casual perspective it's easy to understand why you might look at this and be more intimidated than looking at something like Street Fighter 5 which yeah it has twice as many buttons but like it has way less kind of kind of moves and rules right this is looks like the Chicago train system that's the CTA there's actually four SOTA for arena this is an interesting example because it kind of just demonstrates how complicated this all is like there's a ton of combinations in this game despite only having four buttons and a lot of like contextual inputs kind of overlapping inputs like ABC is an input and also ACD is an input which looks kind of miserable especially considering most people play this game on a pad but you know actually when you play on a pad those are mapped to I think the shoulder buttons are the trigger buttons so maybe it makes more sense to think about this as a six button game it's it's it's unclear so I think number buttons is an income metric it's really more of a the beginning of a conversation at the end

of one you need to consider how they're used how combination of inputs and sequences special move commands and so on they kind of need to take that all into account like the number buttons can actually just obscure the real demands of a games mechanics we also know like learning a game is not as simple as just memorizing what a button does and pressing it at the right time there's there's a lot more going on there as well so if that's all true I think it's good to know when you actually should add more inputs right like trust that the ease of use for mid-level players should actually take priority over this questionable idea that less is always more guilty here a great example they added the dust button on the sequel to the original guilty you're headed this it was formerly a combined inputs with a slash and heavy slash I believe this isn't just an accessibility issue I know in this case like this was a way to resolve certain like option selects kind of complexities that are like maybe undesirable and difficult to resolve when you have kind of combined inputs like that but I think it's interesting for our purposes because it kind of calls out the functionality of the dust

bun to the player it's like this is so important that it deserves its own button and it is important it's like a big part of how guilty your combos are built Smash Brothers ultimate also did something great with one of the aspects that was my least favorite part of the game right like tilts and Smash Brothers are a button combination where instead of smashing the stick and pressing attack you kind of gently nudge it like half way between neutral in the direction a lot of people don't even know that these are moves because they're kind of hard to discover and they're small and fast and like in the heat of battle it's really hard at least for me personally it's like do these when I want to and not not mess them up like thirty percent of the time or whatever in Smash Brothers ultimate they allowed you to map the tilts to the right stick and you know this is great like this adds a new whole new stick for a lot for players maybe but the game is genuinely easier to play with this so I think it's a win overall and then finally for input there's this idea that like a lot of fun and depth in these games comes from the way that the characters are different but like what if they were less different Smash Brothers again is a classic example of

this you don't have to learn different inputs for every character everyone once you kind of internalized the fact there's a special button attack button you combine those directions you can kind of pick up most most characters pretty easily more traditional fighters have been doing this as well a lot of like the tougher Special Move inputs like 360s half circles even dragon punches are kind of starting to fade away in a lot of games pocket rumble has done some interesting stuff with like diagonal inputs and diagonal inputs with holds rising thunder and upcoming granblue fantasy versus put special moves on individual buttons while it's on the screen I just want to highlight rising Thunder is actually an eight button game but it's probably as far as like traditional fighters go easier to play than almost anything we've talked about so far like every button has a very deliberate distinct purpose and it's not a lot of overlap a lot a lot of combinations there's also kind of a trend towards what I'm calling a dedicated functionality we mentioned famous trick Reds under they put specials and buttons but like if we look at the kind of in a bridge history of

the Marvis Capcom series I think it shows something interesting as well so like all three these games use six buttons marvelous Capcom two kind of started introducing to assist buttons and made the medium jacks a little bit more difficult to do as a result and then Marvel vs. Capcom 3 heavy TV this added a launcher button which just like we were talking about with guilty gear it's a great way to like highlight that this is something importantly something to pay attention to it kind of reveals it you know at the cost of another normal attack button but there's so much else going on in these games that it's that I think that worked out fine for them and then finally like what if we did the same thing with combos so what if most characters could kind of string together moves with the same inputs we see this in a lot of older games also so x-men children the atom and Darkstalkers kind of introduced this concept as the magic series but a lot of more modern games or even more freeform Street Fighter cross Tekken you can go from any button to like a higher strength button Dragon Ball Fighter is very similar you can kind of end it with key attacks or supers on earth you can press pretty much any button in any order as long as

you don't repeat when you can mix in kind of crouching to get even more variety there so these aren't the only combos available in these games obviously they're just combos that are available to like most characters and they're usually very easy to perform so they have generous buffer windows and so on it's also interesting to note that Dragon Ball fighters and under Knight have Auto combos in addition to this you can kind of like start integrating you know magic series into your auto combo or vice versa you can also mix in special moves like it's a very like open-ended system that kind of creates a lot of ways for players to kind of optimize their combos at their own speed right and so I think I think this is can be really effective I think the best thing about these trends is that they make it easier to kind of try different characters they reduce the overhead of kind of figuring out how to do stuff I think that's like a real underappreciated difficulty in appreciating these games for new players especially in a game that might have you know 20 40 60 characters finding and like learning a character you like especially if you maybe you don't even know what you like yet can be really

daunting and this may be one of the most powerful aspects the smash brothers success I'm kind of calling this like knowledge portability and yeah I really like it I think it's a great way for low level players to kind of graduate to mid-level players flip side of this for me personally is something like the moral Kombat series where commands can almost feel arbitrary and inconsistent like they don't teach me really and it almost feels like the game is difficult to learn for no reason or it's like the part of the game that I dislike most it's kind of memorization just takes longer than maybe it could and yes so again buttons can kind of signpost important mechanics as we talked about dust button and launcher button it's just a great way to tell players that this part of your game is important and then finally like just the idea that exceptions are okay I think is important so like even if you have this broad outline like a skeleton of a rule set for your game if it's not always true that's fine some of my favorite characters and Dragon Ball fighters that I play as don't obey their magic series rule and that's okay like maybe if that's your first character that's a little bit of a steeper learning curve

than it could have been but just having that kind of rule that you can kind of point to I think can be really helpful regardless so to conclude input I think we can kind of like look at to kind of opposing motivations or ways of thinking about action game design in the expansion age and I think there's a lot of truth to both the first is kind of trying to strip away the other stuff to like get to the strategy or mind games right and the other is that maybe players just want to see awesome things happen when they push buttons you know I think there's there's truth there right like is great trailer moments these are like fatalities and you know flashy super moves and environmental effects and destruction like this stuff is all really cool spectacle is awesome and like a large part of kind of the day-to-day work I think I'm making a game like this is actually making the stuff that the players doing feel really impactful and kind of feel good right and cool I think it's a little more complicated obviously I think seeing awesome stuff happen as a motivation for

why players play games I think is kind of patronizing and like oversimplified obviously like things like this are cool they're really cool the first time you see them they're pretty cool the twelfth time you see of them they're not that cool like one hundred and twentieth time you see them and I think you know if we look at tennis right like imagine tennis with cutscenes like that's not obviously a better game to me that's probably a worse game and it's ridiculous and it's obviously ridiculous because we know that sports kind of thrive on like more organic spectacle I'm not even play this video cuz it's so ubiquitous but you know the official evil moment 37 probably did more to attract people to fighting games than any individual cutscene did because you know you watch this and you can see you see the people you see how they react you know the players and you know the stakes you can kind of see the health bar like the rules of the game kind of create the drama and you know that's why these games are cool like the spectacle is awesome but like genuine tension is maybe more awesome I mean it is more awesome it's not maybe more awesome so then there's the idea of the real there's like a real game right like if

we could only get rid of all this unnecessary redundant execution all this hard unpleasant stuff just learning maybe there's like an idealized version of Street Fighter where it's just like two mines at battle and if we can just take that and get it out of this hard stuff the masses will finally understand like what we love about these games we see this like really explicitly and a lot of messaging from developers phrases like we want to get you to the fun decision-making part as quickly as possible or we want the game to be out knowing what to do and when to do something rather than how you do it ignoring the fact that doing something in a specific land is not necessarily a trivial how you know we see a lot of games kind of trying increasingly radical and dramatic attempts that parry back there controls a blaze blue cross tag took away walk which actually worked out much better than I expected but you know we also see games like SNK heroines fantasy strike upcoming metal revolution we moving the crouch input allegedly because it's unnecessary but you know crouching like isn't really an input I have to deal with like it's a part of a stick or it's part of a d-pad like just from a raw kind of quantity of inputs

perspective it doesn't really simplify much from that perspective and also I'm not convinced it's actually unnecessary like despite the fact that there's unexpected consequences like in fantasy strike for example you can't Crouch block so you can't guard in place you need to be walking back if you're trying to guard which you know I'm perfectly willing to accept that maybe competitively viable and like a balanced like well you know competitive game but like games themselves are kind of unnecessary they're not really all about function they're not really all about results not really all about outcomes there's a sense in which I think removing something that's like so fundamental kind of changes the experience right it's just different it's there's a cost and flow and engagement and familiarity I'm definitely not arguing against making these games were playable I think anyone who knows me knows I'm not somebody fetishizes execution at all but I just want to push back a little bit against this idea that there's a real game and that someone gets to decide what it is I I think we another way to think about this like about what gets lost maybe when we reduce or remove execution like too much magical gathering for example

is that it would magic be a better game if you didn't have to remember what cards were in your deck like if you had a spreadsheet and you could check them off when you draw them so you know exactly what's coming like how many lands are left like we could do that we can make magic easier to play like who's to say that it's not fair that I have to let you know that it's fair that I should have to memorize that stuff members memorizing stuff is hard but you know people don't play match with a guy like magic is what it is like the tension with the stresses and the pressures are there clash royale right like should that game show me what cards my opponent could be playing and like there what's our current energy is like I can derive that stuff if I pay attention and think about it but like you know expending that mental energy is part of what the game is that's kind of the cost of playing that game and you know removing it isn't obviously better to me at least finally I just want kind of on to be the case for like responsive real-time games there's like a certain joy in like motion control just for their own sake right like what I use to play a lot of Smash Brothers I would kind of close my eyes and see the way the characters moves when I tried to sleep and that's because like those arcs are beautiful think there's something cool about that like this is what dance is anyways played an instrument or you

know a rhythm game knows that it's just like certain kind of combos and actions that just feel good to do on your hands and there's some other ones that just don't like there's an aesthetic quality to the stuff that's really important then you know there's live kick right so it's hard to imagine a simpler game that we recognize as a fighting game and you know in a lot of ways dive kick is supremely approachable but it's also true that playing someone who's better than you at divekick feels maybe less accessible than many other games like when you strip down things so thoroughly it's almost it's almost becomes more likely that like fewer options leads to more oppressive gameplay like gameplay that's more dominated by skill less room for the kind of like messy uncertainty that we kind of get for free in real time games that are fast another way to think about is like yeah being able to hold the whole game in your head or like hold it in your hands like not being able to do that I think is actually good right that's that's not bad that's kind of what's great about these like we're like kind of wrestling with something that's much bigger than any of us that none of us can ever master that's a that's actually need to be valued I think not tried to eliminated yeah so

this has been a look at several trends we've seen develop over the course of the expansion era if the question is are these games easier to play I think the answer in most cases is yes absolutely but I think there's also like this other question kind of lurking behind all of this like this whole pursuit for increased access and increased ease of use is maybe as much about it's getting more people to play these games and maybe more bluntly like how to make more money off these games so in the beginning of the talk I mentioned have Street Fighter three kind of preceded the Dark Ages because it was difficult to play and punishing and you know maybe that's true there's another version of that story though that might be more true and that's that story goes in the u.s. at that time kind of arcades were declining and consoles were rising and his change in context right this may be had as much to do with Capcom strategy at that time as anything else and just like the context changed kind of in 1999 the context of the expansion era has had

its own unique unique set of like pressures on developers right we've had the rise of online gaming the rise of eSports and streaming this all means there's a lot more money and there's a lot more on players even competitive gaming now than there used to be it's a lot more visible at the same time fighting games have fewer players than a lot of other genres like I can kind of feel like a niche sometimes audience like games audience for games like League of Legends or fortnight it just kind of makes it feel like there's a big piece of pie that fighting games don't get to eat like we're missing out on something so I think what developers a lot of the time are chase chasing is not really just accessibility or maybe not accessible to all but just this kind of like broad mainstream appeal so one path in the next 10 years is this we just closed the book on the expansion age and we start thinking about appeal as much as we do accessibility we can take what we know and love about these games kind of experiment with new ways of making them appealing to more different players I think it's very common to see developers like more concerns that a game is easy to play then concerned about who might want to play it or why they might want to play

it in the first place and I think this is backwards you give people a reason to want to see and play your game I think you know it ideally you can trust that it's appealing enough to actually have them come to you and kind of put in that effort so I don't really know what this is going to look like I don't know the expansion experimental age will look like but you know it might include further attempts at bringing like form and function together like making these games a little less abstract and more effective at communicating the rules and their behavior it might include more attempts that kind of increasing access not just in terms of making sure people are able to play but making where people feel welcome kind of reducing the stigma of being new and bad we know that no one wants to play if a game if they feel like they're not welcome it can include working with players right so initiatives like the XO academy a training program that supports women competitors started by longtime player and commentator Persia ah it could also include just kind of rediscovering the value of strange unique settings characters concepts kind of the value of creating work that is just unfamiliar and new or continuing to like explore

new goals and wind conditions beyond simply reducing the player's health so to me what the experimental age looks like is devoting resources to features that are interesting new or effective while avoiding repeating mistakes or leaning on like ill supported or unsupported truisms this absolutely is also not a call for leaving traditional Fighting's behind there's nothing wrong with developing games for an existing audience or a nice audience and there's especially nothing wrong with making things just because you like them and want to play them but I don't think our attempts that kind of expanding audience can be effective unless they're a little bit more clear-eyed in a little bit deliberate the expansion error produced a lot of excellent work and made a lot of important progress but if our real goal is to kind of broaden the audience and find new players it's kind of a narrow perspective on its own it's incomplete and it might not be even the most important one so thank you very much so we're getting kicked out of here

exactly at 3:00 but I guess we have time for a couple questions if anyone hasn't he yeah thanks for the talk so you had mentioned that it's experimentally potentially coming up is involve a lot of risk-taking and I feel like fighting games as a genre more often than others value a lot of tradition you know adding a new mechanic or new feature to a fighting game tends to bring a lot of backlash with it but on top of that games you know the higher fidelity we're reaching as we're developing new titles the more expensive they're getting and adding these experimental features are you know it's a like you said a risk do you see the Titans like you know Street fires and the techeuns taking these types of risk or just going with the same formula not like now they have a working formula yeah I mean I'm probably not the one to answer that question but like I mean games like Street Fighter and Tekken have I got there and they're kind of the tough spot right because they have a built-in fan base that if you do make those kind of changes they'll understandably be upset and I don't you know but they're also in a great position where they get to make more of these games right so I think I

wouldn't be you know I'd be pretty surprised if the next Street Fighter game played like Smash Brothers or something but it's I think there's definitely room for both you know traditional stuff and kind of more attempts at you know more experimental work alright thanks I yeah so I think that you know the route of sort of this problem is that important mechanics that affect whether or not you win are difficult right I mean that's this talk and I think from what I've seen most attempts have been to try and reduce the difficulty rather than alter the importance do you think there's any room for like you know okay like combos right you need combos you're gonna get beat up if someone can do them and you can't do you think there's room and can you think of any example to you know have any examples of people shifting the significance in mechanics rather than their difficulty if that makes it um that's an interesting question I mean I think there's long been games

that aren't you know just about combos right like games like samurai shodown or you know much more high damage and not about really memorizing like specific inputs and then you have games like ki which have like a pretty unique combo system that you know it's it's got its own challenges a but like it's it's definitely very different than a lot of other games I mean I think Smash Bros was a good example of that right like games that have a different wind condition is maybe the most like fruitful thing to explore in my opinion just cuz it totally like changes the focus of what the players are looking at and like how what you even need like to make a game like that work so yeah I hope so I hope we see more interesting things like that thank you I you spoke about the the difficulty graph between you know trying to get new players into the game and rng has helped doing that in other genres in fighting games how much are fighting it's looking towards that or are they shifting towards that or have you seen such things happen in fighting it with that RNG soar to play a basic attacks or

stuff like that yeah not really I mean Smash Brothers is the classic example of this as well right like that game you can put on crazy items and Christian levels and anything happens and I mean I think it works really well for them in some cases yeah I'm struggling to think of other recent examples I'm sure there are some but you know nothing is during a rhyming base like you just at the right time then you match otherwise it's an rng based on your punch yeah I mean I think I don't think we've seen like the the great kind of way to add random lists like a more traditional fighting game yet I mean I'd be very interested to see what that looks like I think SNK heroines has like random item drops or something I honestly I'm not totally sure how that game works but you may see a little bit of it there okay sounds good thank you thanks how do you see the resurgence of the arcade because I knows like you know where I'm from North Carolina I can just drive within like an hour and be it four or five different arcades and they keep on popping up how do you see our Cades

impacting the future of fighting games in the future as there is they tend to be a social game well you know as part of sports friends actually like our big kind of motivating factor behind that was kind of to kind of emphasize how great it is to play local multiplayer games together right like playing something in person with with someone else is way more exciting for a variety of reasons maybe more stressful too I think like we still you know Killer Queen is like another interesting example right this is like a game that's kind of taken over a lot of arcades and kind of really like spread pretty far around the country so I mean I think there's definitely like an opportunity I think again like Killer Queen is a really unique case because it requires so many players like almost like a built-in spectacle for it to work so I think there's a lot that could be done there I don't know if we've yeah beyond that I don't know if we've seen the the great local fighting game yet either but that's something I personally like would really look forward to yeah thank you hey I wanted to ask about non fighting game franchises crossing over to

fighting games how much of a factor do you think that would be for the future because I got some fighting games because persona 4 arena and then by extension under night and birth and then BlazBlue and I played Soul Calibur because to be was in it but do you see that being like a very important thing for like sustainability of fighting games oh yeah definitely I mean I have a whole section of the talk that I cut about that but like I think I think we're already there right like you basically it's very difficult to find a fighting game that has no guest characters in it right now so yeah I mean I think that's kind of like been something we've kind of seen last you know five six years kind of become almost ubiquitous I think it's great I mean it's one of the great things about fighting games is like there's no character focus and you kind of are looking at beautiful animations for most of the time you're playing the game so an obvious fit you want to see persona characters like in a whole new light maybe it'll be a fire element fighting game sometime that would be coming yeah I'm definitely that's a good point Patrick says it's called smash stand corrected Hey look sorry it's hard to

see even though games have been getting more and more tutorials I feel that people this most learning material is still acquired outside the game do you see a possibility of a trend of the games themselves providing players the tools to create and share tutorials for other players we've seen some games that have kind of like in-game examples of ways to like share replays and kind of like talk to people about them but I mean it's just so expensive like to do this stuff well it's really adding a lot to your development cost and that you know is of questionable value in terms of making the game actually attractive to people like so so I wonder I mean there's an interesting company now that's doing like overwatch video analysis right so you send them

your gameplay and has some tools that'll like point out things you could be doing better and then you'll have people will kind of analyze it and kind of report back and say here's the stuff you should focus on I'd love to see something like that like a lot of people suggest a clippie for fighting games like I've heard many developers say that something like that would be really interesting I mean personally I think something that you know Clippy doesn't really work so I don't know if like the fighting version that would work but I'd love to see it yeah I just think it's tough to like justify sometimes but that is definitely something I'd love to kind of see develops further alright thank you hey it's a bit about like how like arcade games arcade fighting games has always been a big thing and how like losing to someone they were sitting next to is very different to losing someone the internet do you think they're like online fighting games do you feel like that's changed the way people go about designing fighting games maybe I should have won it hasn't so that in terms of just like how they're yeah I do have a little design watchman ship kind of comes yeah yeah yeah I mean there's

another slide that got cut like there's a kind of interesting thing I think that killer instinct and I believe more where's Capcom 3 borrowed from League of Legends which is like if you have a player that's ragequitting a lot or maybe that gets reported they go into this like jail now where they're they're only able to matchmake against other players that are also kind of in that punishment zone which is kind of interesting I don't know I mean a solution that kind of makes you like a lot of these games struggle with having enough players that you can even like get a good connection against someone is like roughly your skill level in the first place so kind of like segmenting that even further is tricky but um yeah we've seen a little bit I mean it's you're always in the context of like an Xbox Live or a ps4 or someone can just kind of send you a nasty message anyway so unless you disable that which I guess I recommend then it's hard to say how effective it can really be thanks thanks cool thank you for a great talk I know a lot of the examples you went we should work on soul fighting games I was curious she had any thoughts on a lot of mobile fighting games especially major IPs that have brought their games to mobile and touch skin boots and things like that in terms of more accessible ways for people to go through

and get into fighting games as a whole I don't really I that's like kind of an area where the kind of input production stuff kind of gets so far that it like I kind of just as a player just lose interest like I don't really want to play an action game on my phone much less a fighting a very simplified fighting game so it's just yeah I don't I guess I don't have much to say cuz I don't know too much about them and well thank you hey this is a great talk we as a genre and an industry really need to kind of band together to kind of figure this stuff out so I really appreciate this talk my question is so for injustice to post-launch we kind of redid the whole tutorial and sorry which which game for injustice 2 so for post-launch for the game of the year edition Ultimate Edition whatever we called it right like a year after launch we redid everything and made it all like a la carte and let it make it feel a lot less linear and trying to give players what they want and kind of break down that barrier a bit where players would be leaving the game to go to youtube to learn a little bit and just trying to

make it a bit more accessible one thing that we really wanted to do was create all those tutorials within the context of the game so something our designers were less interested in was the kind of guilty gear style of like here's these balloons popping out and you you know low medium high that kind of stuff I was just kind of curious on what your thoughts are with like teaching within context versus like these kind of mini game more fun so style of wait yeah when you say in the game you mean like as part of the story mode like you kind of build it oh well no I mean our tutorial star are in the story mode itself I just more mean like within the context of the fight we're not adding these extra like fun minigames to help teach you what a mixup is versus like no here's a character that is blocking Kai like hit them low versus the more mini game aspect great you think the mini games help are they better I think they're

probably better if you're like actually genuinely trying to learn because they you know you can kind of repeat them and do them over and like like the skullgirls example I like a lot because you're not gonna get past that until you like kind of internalize what you need to know to like block that properly or than I think from a perspective maybe they're more effective but I mean given that so few people use it then it makes me wonder you maybe it almost doesn't matter right you like you know the answer you need is the one that gets people to actually engage with it so interested you know if you add you have any like metrics about how how it went I mean I'm sure RBI team does talk next year yeah yeah I don't know it's it's just an interesting thing to be dealing with like the context of like hey you're in a fight this is the more strategy component of it it's not as simple in black and white as like do these things like you need to be in the context of the situation and yeah art like I said our designers were a little

bit less interested in the more mini-game aspect to keep you grounded and teach you the actual situation that we're trying to put you in yeah I was actually just talking to my friend and co-worker Isaac Torres about this similar issue like I think it's a lot of room for kind of using what we you know what little we know that like cognitive psychology so like help people you know help build these things in a way that like actually reflects how people learn like you know a lot of the problems you go through these modes and okay here's like 60 bits of information that I kind of just swallow in an hour and then I play the game and I forgotten it already so why do you go back and do it again it kind of sucks there's probably a better way yeah and there's also I guess a little bit of the added extra layer of like creating these mini games is more assets it's more resources it's more costly and you know it's certainly something I think we could have overcome if our designers had chosen to go that route but it's also really hard to develop a tutorial for a game that's not complete yet - that's that's a really good point you always do this at the end yeah thanks thank you dude what was that

three more questions so it talked about the obvious issue of great complexity and a whole lot of decision depth but being unapproachable to newcomers but divekick is the obvious problem where the decision space is small enough that an expert can retain and think ahead much more easily do you think there's a happy medium on that or the solution has to be orthogonal to that decision complexity that's a good question I think there's probably a happy medium I mean it's probably but you know it's like it's all aesthetic also like there's games I like because they make sense to me and there's games that like I just don't play you know they maybe regains but they're just not for me so it's like hard there's no like objective answer so I kind of don't even want to try thinking about something I think about a lot that like I had to cut unfortunately because this talk went a little long was um this kind of property of like having a real time game like

creates uncertainty in that leg it's so fast right I'm pressing like punch you're pressing like kick like I can't react to you're like kick because this moves so quickly that it's like it's not random but it kind of has a lot of the same stuff that randomness gets us which is but you know meaning like I yeah it's uncertainty right which is yeah there's there there's there's no we can point to exactly why you're like it came out but I don't know that it was gonna come out so we kind of get just by virtue of being like a complicated real-time game we get a lot of that messiness that's what I was trying to get with like the divekick example like it has a little bit less of that and so that's why maybe playing that game again something's very good might be like more punishing right there's something to like be aware of as we like strip things away til I get to this idealized point where it's like all mental there's maybe an unexpected consequence which is that we lose like the the mess and like the mess does a job thank you thanks thanks for the talk it was excellent okay when it comes to fighting games I'm always particularly interested in how they kind of tax the human brain right and a lot of stuff you just

mentioned it right like we know is as experienced fighting game players we get to understand the limitations of our brain by trying to do things and failing and then eventually realizing that this thing is actually not possible to do on reaction it has to be a read etc etc and I'm wondering have you encountered other activities like not fighting games where you see similar kinds of lemons like mental limitations essentially that the players have to learn how to negotiate that's interesting I mean I'm not much of a chess player but I imagine like playing chess on a clock it's probably similar right like you don't have time to you know calculate everything so you kind of have to like find shortcuts I don't know giving a talk can kind of be like that like it would be easy to you know write an email and kind of respond to like everything really thoughtfully but like in the heat of the moment you need to really kind of think on your feet which is obviously hard I think

sorry yeah yeah I think I mean that just made me think of like oh shoot and I guess we're over time but also real quick it makes me think of you know we kind of like valorize depth right there's a lot of players like this game is great because it's very deep but it's like at the same time when you're actually engaging with it like so much of what playing easy as well is like finding shortcuts and workarounds like I don't want to do the hard thing like even if the hard thing gets me 10% more value like I'm not gonna do it because I might screw up and also like I don't really like doing things that are hard when I'm playing a game like you kind of finding your comfort zone like whether it's like you know mental or physical I think it's kind of interesting counterpoint like that like these games are good because they are they're deep which is also true but like it's not the whole story was that three one more let's talk after talk to you after oh yes sir okay yeah thanks so much everybody [Applause]