Street Fighter 4 is finally here, with several perfect 100/100 reviews. Here's a few things I noticed about the game.
In ranked matches, you can see the opponent's name before the match
and kick them or reject the challenge. This allows you to cherry pick
who you fight and negates the entire purpose of a ranked match.
In ranked matches (well, all matches there is no double blind
character select. This means the optimum strategy is often to wait
until the opponent chooses first so you can counter-pick.
This is avery annoying situation.
When lag inevitably happens in an online fighting game, there are
different ways to handle it. Some SF4 matches I played had large input
delay, maybe as high as 15 frames. This is the time between your button
press and seeing the effect happen. Adding input delay is really the
worst way to handle lag. GGPO's amazing netcode shows that avoiding
input delay and hiding lag in other ways is the way to go. That
technology has been readily available for years, so it's disappointing
to feel input delay in an online match.
The button config screen is "the wrong way." The right way is for
the screen to list functions, then you press the buttons you want to
assign. The wrong way is to list buttons, then you scroll through lists
of functions to assign. The reason that one way is right and the other
way is wrong is pretty clear when you watch people try to configure
buttons. I've had to watch what must be thousands of people do this
over the years in all the tournaments I've helped run (not to mention
local gatherings).
When the config screen says "Jab" and requires you
to press the button you want, you just press the upper left button on
your stick (or whatever button on your gamepad). This is a one-step
process. But if the screen lists "X" and then requires you to scroll
through functions until you find jab, it requires a two step process.
You have to know which button on your controller is labeled "X." When
this screen is the right way, no one has to know if the upper left
button happens to be X or A or B or whatever else.
If you think this is negligible, you have never seen people set
buttons. The wrong way turns what should be a 3 second task into a
fairly confusing affair. Yes I know the wrong way allows you to have
lots of functions in your list, but this can be done the right way also.
On to gameplay issues. The jumps have strange acceleration to them.
While that's subjective, look at Zangief's jump that seems to have the
acceleration of a flea. (Incidentally, why does his splash not stay out
the whole time in the air?). Also, getting hit out of the air is
extremely floaty, which means it takes unusually long to get back to a
state where you can actually move again. This "moving in jello" feel is
reinforced by many throws that have dead time at the end when it seems
like you should be able to move (see Vega's for example).
The size of the stages is extremely large relative to the size of the characters. This helps runaway tactics.
Optimizing for the 1% rather than the 99% case.
There's two examples, the first is tech recover (quick get up from a knock down).
99% of the time, I want to get up fast, but this is the action that
requires button presses. Why not admit that getting up fast is the
intent and make it default, unless the player holds down some buttons
to get up slow? That's how it works for Robo-Ky in Guilty Gear, by the
way. Incidentally, don't the two kinds of get up timing only lessen the
importance of knockdown by allowing you mess up the attacker's timing a
bit? Like the decision to have large stages, this seems not to favor
offense.
Next is the 2-button throw, a bad idea in fighting games with 2D
gameplay. 3D Fighting games are different beasts, so they are excused
here, but note that even Dead or Alive offers a macro to turn its 2
button throw into a 1 button throw...and maps that macro to a face
button by default. Anyway, 2 button throws solve a non-problem that no
one has ever actually had. That's the problem of accidentally throwing
and being sad about it. Street Fighter 2, Guilty Gear series, and
Street Fighter Alpha 2 all demonstrated that 1 button throws work just
fine and don't actually create any problems. Adding a second button
press just adds complexity where it's not necessary, and helps nothing.
(Edit: it does add a throw whiff which could be a good thing, but
simpler is still better...)
Other non-problems we might solve in 2D fighting games would be to
make blocking 1 button and jumping 1 button (each are traditionally
zero buttons). We certainly could add those button presses, but it
would make more sense to reduce the button presses to as few as
possible: zero to jump, zero to block, and one to throw.
It's especially unfortunate that Cammy's hooligan throw requires a
2-button throw in the middle to complete it.
Why exactly is this necessary, rather than one button?
2 button throws actually introduce the problem of kara-throws, a bug
from SF3 that we now have again in SF4.
This is when you cancel a forward moving attack a frame or two into it with a throw command in
order to greatly extend your throw range. Do the designers want a long
throw range or do they not? If they don't kara throws shouldn't be in
the game. If they do, then base throw ranges should be extended for all
players, not just the ones who input a difficult command.
Another similar bug is the chain combo cancel bug. As an example,
consider Sakura. Low short does cancel into special moves. But if you
rapid fire the low short (do it 2 or 3 times quickly each one cancels
the last) then you CANNOT cancel the last hit into a special. I'm not
saying this is a problem at all, necessarily. This restriction is there
for good reason: to prevent the game from degenerating into low short
-> big damage stuff. It would make more sense to give players a
reason to start combos with bigger moves sometimes. Guilty Gear does a
great job of this by reducing your entire combo's damage by 20% for
each low short. (Hey Guilty Gear players, I know I'm simplifying there.)
Ok so what's the problem, sounds good that you can't do low short,
low short, special move, right? But you can do it. If you make the last
short a link rather than a chain (do it slowly, but not so slow that it
doesn't combo) then you can cancel it into a special move.
So really, you can get around this restriction if only you have high dexterity
skills. Now, this is also true in ST and SF HD Remix, but that's not so
much intent as what we were stuck with. For an entirely new game, I'm
surprised to see this still there. I'm even more surprised to see
combos that use this in the challenge mode, meaning the developers know
about it and accept that low short is really this powerful. SF4 Sakura,
for example, can low short, (link), low short, ex shoryken, ultra. She
can do a lot more than that, but you get the idea.
This issue of rapid fire moves using a bug to cancel into specials
is actually minor compared to the next topic though, a topic that will
dominate much of the game: link combos in general. The game is filled
with difficult 1-frame links. These are moves that just barely combo
into each other with 1/60th of a second timing. In high level play,
players will master these and they become common. So Sakura doing low
jab, (link), low fierce, short helicopter kick, (link) low short, ex
shoryuken, ultra for 50% will be common. One friend of mine already
does this combo in real matches after only 2 days of playing, as well
as other scarily damaging combos off low short that involve hard links.
Other examples, Ryu can now link low short, low jab, low forward. He
can also link low strong, low strong, low roundhouse. Linking is the
name of the game, which actually makes the game closer to CvS2 than to
3s or ST. The effect of all these links is to hide the actual game
behind an impenetrable wall of execution. If you practice (ie, develop
1p skills unrelated to strategy and unrelated to interaction with the
opponent) then you gain access to the real game, a game of high damage
off small hits, but only for the dexterous.
Of course some level of this is inherent in just about every
fighting game. It's a question of how far to turn the knob towards 1p
activities and away from strategy. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo has
dexterity requirements of course, but winning tournaments while using
zero or very few link combos is entirely possible. That simply isn't
the main focus of the game. The existence of many, many new links in
SF4 shifts the focus toward that though.
Next up, we have ultras. All I'll really say here is that in real
matches I find myself having to pump qcf x 2 over and over looking for
the right moment to do the ultra. When I find that moment, I have to
complete the qcf x 2 command with PPP. Let's hope I don't press PP in
those moments, because that command gives me a super, which is an
entirely different move. I'm not sure what qcf x 2 + PPP is doing in a
"casual friendly game" in the first place.
Then there's focus canceling. The idea of paying half your meter to
cancel a move is taken from Guilty Gear where it was called roman
canceling. It's a wonderful mechanic in Guilty Gear, by the way. The
command in that game is press any three buttons--I use PPP. This is
actually pretty natural because when using a joystick, your right
hand's natural resting position is on those PPP buttons usually. In
SF4, the roman cancel command is medium punch + medium kick, then tap
forward, forward. This is really awkward and a whole lot of inputs for
one decision (the decision to roman cancel). I wish I could map this
command to PPP or something, rather than having to do button presses
AND double taps. There's many combos involving this that you'll need to
be able to do to be competitive, so I'm not sure why this ended up
requiring so many extraneous inputs.
When I read about the 100/100 scores, I see again and again how
"simple and elegant" the game is. Two super meters, a 3-tier focus
attack system, and all the complications above seem to fly in the face
of that. Even more though, I hear how "casual friendly" it is. This is
deeply mysterious and I'm not sure why this so often claimed. Not every
game has to be casual friendly, so it would seem more honest to just
explain how casual unfriendly all these things are. Qcf x 2 +PPP all
the time, extra button presses to throw, extra button presses to roman
cancel, and many, many extremely difficult link combos work in concert
to create that impenetrable wall of execution between you and the
actual game (the interaction between you and your opponent). I wish we
could get rid of all this stuff and focus more on the gameplay itself.
Edit: I forgot to mention two more things.
First, the unlocks. I'm very surprised to see basic functionality of the multiplayer game--the
characters--locked behind tedious 1p tasks. I had to pay a tax of
fighting the computer on easiest for long time just to get the core
features of the game. (I did this picture-in-picture while watching
episodes of Frasier.) I'm fully aware that casual players love unlocks,
and that's why non-essential content like costumes, movies, icons, and
titles are all perfectly fine to give as rewards for playing 1p
content. But the *characters*? This steps on the toes of those wanting
to play the multiplayer game by making our first experience with the
game a very boring one. I wanted to hire a MMO gold farmer to do this
for me.
And the last thing I should have mentioned here is that despite all these many problems, there is fun to be had in the game...
em: http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2009/2/22/a-few-things-about-street-fighter-4.html#comment3260089
por FILIP_FB Qua Dez 05, 2012 11:20 am
