Fighting Games Are Not Hard

Thanks for all the comments and likes guys, really appreciate it :)

Learning specials, supers, combos, counters, movement and a more and how to use it against multiple characters is a nope for me.

I tried getting into Rivals of Aether. I had over 150 hours played, had a miserable 13% winrate online and most of those games feel like you're just coping with the DI all the time and don't even get to play. Fighting game players are the reason I don't play fighting games anymore lol

The reason for fighting games’ reputation is literally control scheme, that’s it. You hit the nail on the head that they’re not necessarily any crazier in pure terms of difficulty than other multiplayer games, all that shit has the inherent problem of how walled out you’ll feel the first time you try to play by yourself and some motherfucker who hasn’t had a job since Bush was president breaks the game engine in half to beat your ass. But at the end of the day fighting games are the only genre where I’ve tried to move forward and couldn’t figure out how lmao. That’s the kind of thing that creates a perception you probably just straight up can’t ever get everyone past, at least not fully. I feel like the fight to battle that perception is already long lost atp.

But I think fighting games are at a good place right now to be honest where they don’t need to escape that perception in the first place. Those of us in the general population see how passionate you all get about them, and the FGC has the benefit of being undoubtedly the most spectator-friendly competitive genre. If it wasn’t for how much South Koreans love MOBAs you all would be the landslide kings of esports. So fighting games imo are in a good position to just lock in on the dedicated player base and rely on osmosis to pull in more players here and there.

Naah this video got me so annoyed somehow

Why lots of this videos fail to even mention Mortal Kombat which has all the stuff you said is missing?? Is there some f** agenda agains MK or what.. You even said Street Fighter became the biggest game in the world like MK doesn’t exist when it outsells every other fighting game every single time. I just don’t get it..

Well there is an answer to all that issues and it’s called - Mortal Kombat 11!
This game has got everything you said it’s missing here.
It has great tutorials with in-debt information about which moves are safe on block and how to defend and attack. It even has tutorial for each character.
It also has The Krypt which is single player mode that cankeep you busy from where you get your cool skins, brutalities and victory stances and so on.
It also has many different towers with bunch of modifiers.
I think the cross play was a bit of issue still though but otherwise the match making is pretty good.
The graphics are also absolutely amazing!

Fighting games get stale fast.
Depth is fighting games is just being more efficient at guessing. 🥱

I like soulcalibur music as well

all my friends who I asked to play fg, said "nah man to much work, i just wanna get in and play". Even when the tutorial was good, they wont.
Unlike battle royal, they can just play the game and without tutorial.

I'm surprised street fighter 6 fixes all these issues.

Fantasy Strike improved a lot on the info conveyance during a match of safe vs unsafe moves, the online quality, and matchmaking speed. Too bad Sirlin is sort of scummy and their RNG store offers suck.

Nailed it. I enjoyed this watch! My hope is in Project L. It's going to be F2P, have GGPO or better netcode, and have crossplay. I hope that will make the other fighting game dev teams get off their asses and try harder than giving people the bare minimum of features, or often less than that.

FG are hard, more hard than any other genre. i left them a long time ago, but after watching some videos i returned because, even if i´m terrible... i like them, a lot but well... learn to be decent, not even casual, just being decent, require a lot of work, almost like learning an musical instrument... just accept it, they are hard :/ .... but once you learn enough, the feeling of beating other players or just making them hard to beat you is great, because since this genre require you to learn a lot, you see your progress and how your hard work paid off at the end
FG are hard to learn, but once you learn them, you really really enjoy them
also the only reason i find acceptable of those 3 is N°2 , i mean, yeah, lag is terrible, but in other games you can deal with it and still enjoy the experience, but since FG require so much precision, is normally to see how lag affect the experience (also, another reason why they are hard Tw T); and about the content well... ppl usually dont buy FG for the story mode or some minecraft mode x´´d, ppl buy them because they want to fight other players and beat them, FG only require VS mode, Training mode and VS CPU, at least for me, with that you can learn how your character works, test against the CPU, and then test your progress against players.
Also, when ppl usually gets too good at anything they forget how hard was to learn it, other reason why we see so many ppl talking about how FG are not that hard, but i dont blame them, i mean, i also want more ppl to join that community, even if they are hard to learn i could say it´s worth the effort c:

The fun element is really dependent upon what you put in with fighting games - personally I see them as puzzle games in relation to learning combos, finding what moves link into another & seeing how far I can build that string, then putting that into practice.

The section about being expected what to do immediately is only somewhat true imo - surely that's down to the person putting pressure on themselves to immediately know what they should be doing instead of treating it like a game & actually just learning the mechanics.

Focusing on winning all the time ruins the fun I feel.

sf6 still laggy

The hardest mode you'll get owned
over an over again.

If you pick the fire dude from
Capcom fighting evolution Felicia
Will own you big time with specials.

As a new fighting game player, these are what I personally view as the biggest issue for fighting games.
- Needs more single player content. Virtua Fighter 5 has a mode where you travel to arcades to become the best player. At its core, its JUST MORE fighting, but "wrapped" in a way that it "feels" like content. More of that please.
- Dealing with Wake-UP should be a mandatory course in every fighting game.
- Rollback Netcode has fixed this, but any game without it is dead to me. Literally, In Canada any game without it IS NOT PLAYABLE.

"fighting games are not hard"
one second in: "fighting games are hard"
stop clickbaiting

Saying fighting games arent hard and comparing them to shooters is actually insane. They arent even in the same realm of difficult

T e k k e n

i tried playing guilty gear strive but i couldnt get through the tutorial, it was just a massive info dump that i had no idea how to really chain together

Man the real problem is that casual gamers are scared of motion inputs and combos, that’s literally it

Hey im from the future, and just about all games have rollback now

As someone who loved tekken 3 as a child: i played those extra modes exactly once, and the beat em up/streets of rage like mode, until i unlocked doctor B, then never touched them again. And i speak her "child" like "quick bored", and i spend most of my time fighting my best friend in VS matches and that's where we had the fun.

Fighting Games are only good when you face a human opponent, not the AI. I just think the people want more SP content, so they can avoid other people more. If people buy a FG and complain there is no SP stuff going on: you picked the wrong genre.

If you could unlock new chars that would be a different matter, but lol unlocking stuff yourself in 2023, we buy our rewards.

Just putting more filler trash in, does not make the game better.

Framedata, Negativ/Positiv on Block ect, is all nice and dandy but for someone who rly just plays for fun, that is stuff they don't have to learn to enjoy a FG. if they rly want to go further, the internet is full with videos of pro players that are happy to teach you the ABC. But otherwise i don't need a tutorial to explain to me what a punch/kick does.

Pick a Easy Char > Learn the Basics > Learn 1-2 Simple Combos (hell experiment yourself if the game is fresh and the people still figure things out) > Just Play.


As you go, you figure out if you are about that sh** and if you want to go the road to get better or not. Sorry nothing wrong with the "figure out myself" approach. Smash Melee Community did that themself just fine. When my 8y old self could figure out a combo or the idea behind a fighting game, im not sure why people double that age need excessive tutorials/hand holding.

And to all the "i payed 60 for this" people:

Tekken 3 when it was released costed in germany 120 DM (old german currency) which roughly translates to 60 Euros. So no the price is not a excuse that the developers HAVE to put in more content. The price never rly changed.


Short: Not every genre is for everyone, FG´s live and die by its multiplayer functions, not SP content. if you dont like competitiv, or the idea to put in some work to get better: its not for you

I reaaaally hope you didn't sell that CSGO "integrale" skin for the sg556 cuz it goes for a GOOD chunk of money.

The massive arcade profit motive of the big franchises gave them a ton of incentive NOT to invest in online gaming while other genres jumped into it wholeheartedly. I was playing near-seamless Unreal Tournament 99 matches decades ago, but only now in 2023 did we get the same experience in a fighting game.

The value proposition is extremely important. Holy shit, the fact they charge us $60 with a straight face while providing LESS content than pretty much any alternative genre on the market is wild.

i can't figure out how to be able to hit the other person because i get double perfected every time i play and none of my buttons do anything and i just feel like im worthless

The biggest problem with getting into a fighting game is that it's not interesting to play it if you don't have an opponent of your level who would be willing to let you test the game.
Beginners are not interested in getting completely fried, which often happens if you are playing in multiplayer or with a friend who has played fighting games more than you. Most of the time you won't even be able to tell what happened on the screen, not only because the abilities are hard to distinguish, but also because of the pace of the game. It is difficult to learn and understand what the buttons do while you smash them, and if you play slowly, the opponent will simply punish you and stun you, you may not press the buttons at all. How should you know how to perform combos when the opponent won't let you get up? Usually, there are training tools, but they are not fun. They are also not so useful, it is difficult to create the right battle scenario with them and implement right challenge.

The problem with fighting games are the focus on online and competitive play.

You should not have used Call of Duty as an example. You should have put Unreal Tournament 2004 in instead. Also, you should have put Soul Calibur 3. That game has a ton of single player modes.

Stop pretending smash is a fighting game

Yeah nahh, i used to think i was a god in fighting games with really only my brother being my perfect match ever since i got Tekken Tag and KoF 11. But then i had steam, played Mortal Kombat X, went through the story and then after finishing. Get combo'd to oblivion by a Sub Zero. Tried again, Kano stomped. Tried again, Reptile stomped. I tried and tried and tried. Even practiced my combos with my favorite character Mileena and tried a different character. No. All of them somehow managed to got me first then a cutscene plays where i see my health slowly dwindles.

After that. I just gave up and stopped playing Fighting games entirely.

Genuine question, what is the community of FGG's opinion on Mortal Kombat? Just got into mk11 recently and found it odd that that game franchise was unmentioned here

Come on man. Looking at rbnorway is like a rite of passage. And I'm sorta gate keeping here, but maybe I'm Stockholm syndromed into tekken with its shitty noob unfriendly design

Preach.

well...they are,indeed,more difficult like probably all majority of other multiplayer genres,specially more than FPS or moba,in fact,there are like...one or two genre more difficult than fighting games,probably dense RTS game,but in all the rest,i agree with you in the video,nice take

I just want to emphasize a comment I made a long time ago but a shorter fashion. There is no way for a game to properly teach the player how to beat "X" Player.

They’re not hard, they just take far more effort than any other genre in video games. There’s a reason is one of the least played genres. I grew up playing fighting games with my brother and my friends talking shit, that’s why I love them. 😂

want a fighting game that's unique and incomparable to any other game... FOR HONOR

i'm not even aware that nobody plays them. i like playing fighting games because it improves my reaction speed and strategy in real-time unlike in any other mind games like chess or checkers where it's purely strategy with almost no time limit.

It's weird how is acceptable to play rhythm games at super easy, and super hard seems imposible and there's no problem, but in fighting games people start on super easy, and feel ashamed and for some reason is expected to play on hard or win online matches against really good players. Of course you're not gonna win, you're just starting. You play Mario games starting on level 1-1 which are designed to be easy, not on the extra world that is super challenging. I don't get why only in fighting games is "bad" to not play on a high level immediately. Every genre you start sucking at the easiest bit, and end up beating the hardest level by the end of it. Take Celeste's last levels for example, or Hollow Knight pantheons, they seem hard af but people beat them, and when they started the game they probably died at the easiest platforming section. But on fighting games new players don't seem to put that much effort on getting better. They just go "oh I'm so bad at fighting games" and never play the game again 🫤

story mode is in MK,street fighter, MvC3, tekken etc. and as you mention soul caliber.

failed to mentions that MK series have frame data in its combos menu starting from mk x

The thing that i hate about some fighting games is the little z movement in the corner of the thumbstick area, they don't register half the time in some fighting games while at the same time being required to extend your combos.

These games are brutally difficult. Nothing really will ever be able to change my mind.

For me i liked the fighting games until i played online, first few matches were good and i felt im pretty good at the game, until i met some sweaty players that will KO me just like im llaying the game for the first time against some MLG player, plus the losing streaks and the bad connections. So im not interested anymore, they're good for the past and $60 is too much for just few single player modes, maybe if they'd improve further I'll get back to it