What button do I push to tag in my other fighter? =oP
@Mucky:
Mucky wrote:No, you're still oversimplifying fighting game mechanics.
I did indicate that was my intention:
"... were meant to be limited to ... some high concepts about system balance..."
"I was brief because I didn't want to get too deep into a tangent..."
Counters aren't dictated by abstract roles,
I didn't say they were. I understand why you think that, though. I referred to Rock-Paper-Scissors, which is a game of hard counters. They beat one another because that is the rule, rather than a natural result. I'm sorry for not clarifying. I was using it as an example of design where every move has an appropriate answer (eg. counter, or soft counter), not to conflate fighting games with hard countering.
it's all about frames and hitboxes.
I was avoiding genre-specific terminology. Frames fall under my usage of 'timing', and hitboxes are a part of 'range'.
Jump-in attacks can beat anti-air attacks, provided they have a large enough hitbox to be spaced outside of the anti-air's hitbox. A sweep refers to any kick that knocks the opponent down when it connects. They don't beat mid-punches as a rule, especially if the mid-punch has a hitbox extending to crouching characters. What kind of punch are we talking about, anyway? Light punch? Medium punch? Heavy punch? Those all have significant differences, despite all generally being "mid."
Mid-punch was just a generic example of countering (dealing damage while taking none in return) through height and reach (your attack hitbox reaches their body hitbox, while your own body hitbox avoids their attack hitbox or is currently invulnerable where their attack connects). The type of punch isn't relevant in this case. In terms of human anatomy, the legs have more reach than the arms, and a punch aimed at chest-level misses someone low to the ground. Specific games will of course change this interaction, and characters with gorilla arms or the ability to stretch obviously defy standard human anatomy.
"Grappling beats guarding" doesn't properly address the high/low mixup, which is the primary means of getting around someone's guard, since they can only block one way while leaving themselves open to the other way.
Different games handle guarding in different ways, sometimes subtly or overtly. I didn't want to add unnecessary complexity to my argument.
You are focusing on
what I said, rather than why. The details of the counters don't matter. I just needed readers to understand the concept for when I started talking about external balance.
I mean, if you're trying to claim fighting games don't have a self-contained balancing factor, I'm going to disagree. That's the exact purpose frames and hitboxes serve. Character balance is adjusted and re-adjusted based on these.
Let's say you have a fighting game with two boxers. One has a heavy punch, the other a light punch, and taking damage interrupts your action. That's it. The heavy punch takes longer for the character to draw back and strike, while the light punch is an immediate jab. Provided one player doesn't just stand there and do nothing, who would win? Every time, it would go to the light punch, because it hits first and interrupts the other boxer's attack. Despite doing much more damage, the heavy punch can never win.
You can't change the timing of the frames too much because it would ruin the identity of these two moves. You could alter the hitboxes, but they have to make sense with the visuals. These are two human boxers, so thematically you can't get too crazy. You could pad out the the number of buttons required to execute the attack, but that impacts game feel and isn't reliable in higher level play. If we introduce more fighters and light punch is in a good place against them, weakening light punch to help heavy punch would affect all other matchups.
What contains/limits the light punch? Nothing. So what's needed? A new move that can answer the light punch threat. We have to change our heavy punch guy in response to the design of the light punch guy.
This is external balancing. There's nothing wrong with it, just that it can be more complicated for the designer. My original argument was that the self-contained nature of Overwatch and MOBA characters offers more flexibility and control in its balance, because you have less dependencies.
To make an analogy to BW, lurkers are expected to counter marines, but it's hardly absolute, and the marines can win the engagement depending on how it goes down. The rock-paper-scissors relationship is circumstantial at best.
As I said earlier, this is what I've been referring to all along. For example, Archers, Cavalry, and Infantry form an RPS relationship, but it comes from their natural properties: Archers have range, Cavalry has speed, and Infantry has armor. Archers defeat Infantry before they reach the Archers. Cavalry closes the gap quickly and kills the Archers, who are weak in melee. Cavalry and Infantry are both melee, so speed doesn't matter and the heavily-armored Infantry beats Cavalry. Thus [Archers > Infantry > Cavalry > Archers]. We call this an RPS relationship, but it is not a purely hard counter relationship like the real Rock-Paper-Scissors. Terrain, vision, kiting, surrounding, and other factors and tactics can flip the advantage.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I take issue with the point-and-click design of stuns in MOBAs. It was acceptable in WC3, where your hero was one component of what you control. In MOBAs, they become an all-or-nothing thing, which is potentially unhealthy for the game even when factoring its cooldown.
Yeah, DOTA 2 has carried over much of its point-and-click roots, while LoL is reworking old champions to have "skill shots" as the new standard. Some, like Smite, had aiming as a core mechanic from the start.
Mucky wrote:Hercanic wrote:For me, I don't find map routines as interesting as 'adapting to the situation'.
Implying weapon and powerup spawns is exclusive with adaptation, hence my question.
You must memorize the map route in order to even get to the weapon spawn and have your conflict. If you don't memorize the route, it takes longer to get there (if at all), and by then the weapon is gone so you may not have any conflict there at all. Conflicts become hit-and-miss.
I suppose I should be glad that you realize this is subjective, since it flies in the face of games like Halo and UT, which ran entirely off maps.
Of course, though that is the assumed default when anyone is speaking.
Halo, UT, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, they were all great fun. But I'd say they were fun
in spite of map routes, rather than
because of them.
Hell, replace "weapon and powerup spawns" with "resources," and you get BW's gameplay. Balance in that game was as much about the races as it was about the maps.
No, not quite. A powerup is instantly yours and makes you stronger instantly, while an expansion takes time and is a huge cost and vulnerability. It's also not exactly hard to find your natural expo. Hell, Starcraft 2 doesn't even hide the terrain in multiplayer. That decision was probably made for this very reason, to level off map familiarity.
Imagine if Starcraft maps had a hidden BFUltralisk spawn where the first player to tag it gained ownership of it.
Mucky wrote:Hercanic wrote:Mucky wrote:Hercanic wrote:... weapon spawns, particularly if certain weapons are notably more powerful and spawn slowly, give an explicit reward for map knowledge. This heavily shifts the advantage toward veteran players who have grappled the rote memorization of map routes.
That's hardly enough to create huge disparity between player skill levels.
Pro players memorize spawn timings down to the second. Put a numerically better weapon in the hands of someone already more skilled, and the chasm widens.
Knowing the map better doesn't affect how skilled someone is with a certain weapon. Those two sentences have nothing to do with each other.
I didn't say "knowing the map makes someone more skilled with a weapon", though?
Between two players of equal skill, the player to first grab the Rocket Launcher, the BFG, the Redeemer, the Overshield, the Quad Damage, is going to be at an advantage.
It stands to reason that a good player will have also learned the map while becoming good. Bring in a lesser skilled player, who might win 3/10 engagements when the weapons are equal, will likely win no more than 1/20 of the time when the good player secures the better weapon. This is what I mean about an explicit reward widening the chasm between players of different skill levels. One player has more tools, more options, more power, and that tends to fall into the hands of the player who is already at a higher skill level. The greater the likelihood of blowout matches, the sooner the game becomes boring for both types of players.
@IskatuMesk:
I'll have to do yours next time. I try to answer as much as I can of what's addressed to me but, I gotta level with ya here, it took me a full day to finish my last message due to my daughter needing something every half-jotted sentence. There's certainly good discussion material in all that, but I hope you can understand it'll take me some time to respond, and why I'll need to limit myself to defending my original points.