Seth Explains the Use of Fan Feedback at Capcom

what he said.

“Some folks need to understand that “accessible” does not equal “dumbing down”.”

ST–SF4
MVC2–MVC3
GG–BB

Now I’m not saying you don’t have a point (somewhere in there….) but there is no question that in these cases “accessible” does equate to “dumbing down”. I’m all for a bigger “scene” but facts are facts.

I agree with you 100%, but with modern tech, we have the space for the easy to learn to play and the very hard to learn to play. I was in my early 20′s when the Street Fighter 3 series came out. I never got good at it because I couldn’t afford to at the time. Plunking in 50 cents to just have my ass handed to  in a few seconds emptied my pockets very quickly. Now years later I can pay $15 to not only get the game but have it teach me how to play it is awesome. The only thing those who want the harder to play games are going to have to realize is that less people will play those so it will cost more to buy the game unless the company is using sales from a blockbuster to subsidize the more expert game.

Wanna hear a dirty little secret no one wants to talk about?

Guilty Gear and Mvc3 are exactly as accessible at a beginner level.

Yes you heard me. For all people who go ON AND ON AND ON about what an ocean of depth Guilty Gear has, the fact of the matter is, IT’S NO HARDER TO PICK UP AND PLAY THEN ANY OTHER AIR DASH FIGHTER EVER MADE. Does it have a whole lot of depth that takes insane skill to access? Yes. But if you know how to do light medium heavy into special, and jump around and do overheads and sweeps, you’ll do JUST as well in Guilty Gear at a beginner level as you would in mvc3.

The problem with Mvc3 vs Guilty Gear, is that gg actually begins rewarding players with superior skills with a plethora of options and mix ups. Mvc3 just gives you slightly better mix ups…and then that’s it.

Now obviously, the superior player still wins in mvc3, but high level play more or less ends up the same as mid level play but with more finesse. And the question becomes, why play this game when I can go play Mvc2/Guilty Gear/Sf3 where my dedication and skill will be rewarded with more variety and options? Not to mention all 3 of those games are way faster then mvc3.

Dumbing down fighting games accomplishes nothing. It does not draw in new players, it only manages to alienate existing players.

TL;DR

The problem isn’t that games today are more accessible or less. That’s not the issue here. As I said before, Mvc3, Guilty Gear, Mvc2, and pretty much every air dash fighter ever made are exactly as easy to play at a beginner level. All you need to know is how to block, how to do high and low attacks, and how to do abc combos and your set to play at an “accessible” beginner level.

You can’t really do anything to make the game any more accessible. The problem is, capcoms idea is “oh let’s lower the skill ceiling”. As a result you end up with stuff like mvc3 where the most easy, mashable beginner combos do 50% freakin percent damage. Then they slow the game down and take out 2/3rds of the input. And then they nerf the assists to the point that the brilliant risk/reward gameplay of Mvc2 is lost forever, all so that people won’t complain about “psyblade spam” which never really worked in the first place.

Let me restate: Capcom isn’t making beginner level play more accessible. They are making mid to high level play shallower.

You’re barking up the wrong tree. First, number of buttons has zero ultimate impact on the depth or complexity of the game. Virtua Fighter would like to have a word about that.

Second, for all the complaining that everyone “plays the same” in say, MVC3, there’s some merit to the criticism but it’s also overblown. There is, in fact, a great amount of variety in strategy and mind games and lots of high level play has been very entertaining in spite of that game’s first-edition issues. Ultimate MVC3 is squarely addressing it by toning down or removing elements that resulted in everyone depending on the same basic bread-and-butter combos or traps without variation.

I think you’re overrating the diversity in play in older games. At the highest levels, with min-maxed strategies, a match in Super Turbo for example, could be commented on and predicted off a single hit. That’s the nature of a game being played out to its final potential. Historically, the only fighting game from the 90s that seems to offer true variety of play styles at a very high level is Third Strike, due to the fundamental nature of the parry system being able to offer free form surprise upsets off any attack in the game. Even then, Third Strike’s notorious balance issues (remember kids, it was going to get another update but it was canceled – don’t blindly worship that game) still cause a lot of games to boil down to the exact same Chun and Yun behavior. No worse in any way than a game like SF4 at high levels.

This is actually one of the most valid criticisms I think, of how developers are behaving currently. To be fair, almost nobody does this – not just Capcom. While new editions of Blazblue do have more training information, it’s still not nearly as useful as VF4:Evo’s training suite.

I’d have to chalk it up to the amount of work involved. It’s not necessarily developers being “lazy” (the favorite comment of folks who have no clue how games are made), but more than a true, interactive, comprehensive training mode for a game like MVC3 would be a massive undertaking if one was to give each character a proper overview. Developers may believe that the return value just isn’t there. I can’t say I agree or disagree on that yet.