Fighting games are met with one of the biggest conundrums in gaming, and only a few developers are getting it right. The Big 3 of fighting games, namely Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1, and Tekken 8, have all made a comeback recently, each one with all the glitz and glamour of current-gen graphics and particle effects.
The flashier a fighting game gets, the easier it is to convince spectators to try and pick up the game, but often what they find is not what they expect. For new players, the supposedly satisfying difficulty of a fighting game becomes the very thing that scares them away. In this case, I don’t blame them at all because it’s less their fault and more the developers’ fault.
No Proper Training Mode
Instead of talking about myself, I’d like to talk about a friend of mine who recently picked up Tekken 8 because the characters, combos, and rage arts looked cool. So they boot up the game, do the most barebones tutorial found in Arcade Quest, and head straight into ranked using King (everyone’s favorite). As you can probably guess, he ran into some of the grimiest pubstompers and smurfs that immediately discouraged him from learning the game further than just a few combos. While I think Tekken 8 and other fighting games have done better at training tools for newbies, I still think they could be done better.
When I first started playing 2XKO and Street Fighter, as someone who has only ever played 3D fighters like Tekken and Soulcalibur, I found the tutorials to be very uninspired. I could learn the movements, defensive techniques, and tag mechanics, but I never found my footing because there were tons of other character-specific training I never could get through. All in all, I would just really enjoy it if all the fighting games gave us a rundown of every character’s top moves and their utility, including basic moves and terminology. The burden of a Tekken player learning what down-forward 1 is should not fall on them.
Legacy Skill
Fighting games have a rich history, each fighting game having specific mechanics that only legacy players would understand and can take from one game’s iteration to the next. This legacy skill is satisfying for the older generation of players, but can be horribly frustrating for newer players who have to look through an entire glossary of fighting game terms just to understand how a charge character works. It’s hard to find a balance between rewarding long-time players and satisfying newcomers, and this is the one thing that I think developers have done a great job with.
Let’s take Tekken and Street Fighter as examples, both games that have implemented simple-input modes that make the game easy to pick up and play for complete beginners looking to mash out. In fact, I’ve known people who just put Tekken on at parties and let complete randoms play pickup games on Special Style.
These simplified playstyles limited player moves to powerful attacks at the press of a button, making fighting games accessible, but don’t take away from legacy players who have taken the time to learn the game. In fact, a system like this rewards legacy players and showcases everything possible with newcomers. Special shoutout to Tekken 8 for simplifying motion inputs but rewarding legacy players who can perform the complicated motions.
Going Too Far
Perhaps one of the most controversial topics in the fighting game sphere is the exclusion of motion inputs in the recently released 2XKO. If you weren’t aware, motion inputs have become a staple of fighting games to the point where there’s a huge ongoing debate about how you describe the motions (I side with numpad notations), so the exclusion of motion inputs was weird. Personally, I don’t mind the change because it boils the game down to timing and playstyle, but I do wish it at least gave players the option to excel with motion inputs.
Then there’s the issue of balancing too far to appeal to a more casual audience. It’s easy to think a character is cheap if you haven’t labbed against them, and it’s even easier to go online and rave for buffs or nerfs for certain characters in the game. This specific phenomenon happened with Tekken 8, where the developers patched out some character-specific weaknesses in the game. Sure, this made each character easier to play and harder to master, but patching out character-identifying weaknesses just alienates legacy players prepared to exploit those weaknesses.
Overall, I’m glad that developers are making strides when it comes to making fighting games more accessible to new players. It just so happens there are deeper things to fighting games than just knowing what an overhead is.
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