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Can Injustice appeal to casuals?

TectonicSuperPlates

Learn to draw the Rob Liefeld way
I find myself asking this question every time I start up a game of Injustice.

Analyzing the game, it's a very zoning heavy type of fighter. Almost 1/3 of the cast are heavy zoning characters(already we have a problem. Spammers galore. But I digress. That's not the main focus of this topic). And with that, learning to defeat zoners(or learning to beat anyone really), comes strategy.

Devising strategy requires time and effort spent in learning the game. That's not a problem. We all want to learn how to play the game.

But the problem comes in at the games focus on heavy combos. I would say that this makes the game much more appealing to competitive players and less to casuals.

Jumping into a game, you get swarmed by a 15 hit combo from Batman doing 40% damage, and you just sit there in awe of how can this person perform these moves. And you, as a casual player, are seeking just to enjoy this game for fun. A DC superheroes game with a fun story and exciting characters.

But you can't do that, because if you don't learn how to juggle into a 12 hit combo, you are screwed. And learning how to juggle a 12 hit combo comes in part with learning strategies on how to beat your opponent and maximize the abilities of the character you are playing as.

And that is where you definitively set the bar too high for casuals, who have no interest in learning 12 hit combos, to reach.

King of Fighters 13 and Injustice seem to fall in the "if you don't know how to combo, you aren't going to enjoy this game" demographic, and I feel as though that's where fighters like Street Fighter shine. With a much more solid focus on the fundamentals, you don't need to know how to combo 12 hits to win, or more importantly have fun. In Injustice, you do. And I find myself enjoying the game less and less in online ranked play because, quite frankly, I find the time spent on learning combos and specific timing of those combos quite tedious. I want to just go in there, play the game, and have fun.

I enjoy this game. It's a very fun game. But perhaps it's major flaw is keeping the casual player out of the equation and having a much stronger bias towards the competitive gamer.

I could be wrong. And I am open highly to criticism.

Are the problems stemming from this game having a "I pick one character, you pick a counter character to mine" feel? That you just can't pick any character and have the same effectiveness with one as you do another?

I really could rant on how zoning makes this game seem less and less fun, especially in online play with the level of spammers, and you have to devise strategies on how to combat those spammers, but that's irrelevant considering melee characters like Grundy dominate with a 15 hit combo for 50% damage.

Heavy focus on big time combos, and frankly, a casual like me has no response to stuff like that. I'm here doing a 1, 2, 3 hit combo and then getting wrecked in the face in response by Batman mixing it up with juggles and his trait, hitting for a solid 12 or more hit combo.

"Quit the game" is probably one of the responses expected from elitists. But we all know they are scum who live in their mother's basement, so I won't pay any mind to those. "Just learn to do 15 hit combos" is another. Quite frankly, we all don't have that competitive bone in our bodies, especially with fighters. Some of us just want to sit back, chill, play a game with our friends and have fun(although when your friend knows how to perform 15 hit combos...yeah...it sucks as well. Lol.).

I won't stop playing Injustice. I love the game and I love fighting games in general too much for that. Just a note to those throwing the "quit the game" response.
 

EGGXI

Scary Bat
Superman has like 8 special moves. That's all casuals really need right?

On a more serious note I'm not exactly wundabar at this game and it appeals to me massively. I might be the closest thing to a casual on the site....
 

Limelights

"The smart stuff"
Well maybe we can look at it the other way and say that spamming is good for casuals because it's an easy way to get some wins online.
 

miloPKL

soundcloud.com/pukelization
i dunno op, i feel like you wrote a lot of nonsense for a simple question. of course this game appeals to casuals, DC characters, batman, super easy cool special moves. even the combos in this game are far simpler than a street fighter or marvel bnb. this game certainly appeals to casuals at an aesthetic level. millions of players will enjoy 3 hit strings and flashy special moves and 2 button super combos from space. get outta here dude this game is casual paradise!

of course it has every deep level you expect from competitive fighters as well.
 

VGB Joe Kerr

Insane Brilliance
If you want to have fun don't play ranked, where competitive people will go. That's why they have rooms, that's why you can meet other "casuals" to play with on this board. "Spammer" is a derogatory word for those who use a strong tool that you refuse to play the game in depth enough to beat. There's plenty room for those not interested in being the best. Call your friends over, meet some guys here, start up a non competitive(wut?) room online. Don't try to point fingers at a community of people that play to get better and win because that's not fun to you. Playing for the sake of playing is not fun to us either. I don't understand. "Casuals" don't want to take the game seriously, yet reprimand anyone who plays for the sake of competition and come on a message board mostly dedicated to competition to complain about gameplay. If you play for fun why do you care? I play marvel for fun, I haven't won a game since MvC 1 either and I don't really care about that.
 

TectonicSuperPlates

Learn to draw the Rob Liefeld way
I find it funny how people seem to think sitting in the corner spamming projectiles and using interactables has any affect on players who actually know how to play the game and perform big time combos.
 

shaowebb

Get your guns on. Sheriff is back.
tectonicsuperplates said:
King of Fighters 13 and Injustice seem to fall in the "if you don't know how to combo, you aren't going to enjoy this game" demographic,
Thats a BAD comparison. I see what you were getting at is that fear of overwhelming zoning or combos will make them feel overwhelmed but thats every fighter. Even if IGAU is zoning heavy thats actually a bonus for casuals as its easy to do themselves.

Still though...BAD comparison. KoF XIII has some of the highest level combo difficulty I have ever encountered due to its inputs and ultra strict timing requirements. Have you seen Vice's inputs to do some of her grab loop HD combos? That game has one of the highest entry level barriers of any fighting game. Its insanely balanced, good, and hype as hell but even its most dedicated pros drop the soap and its a regular thing.

Combos in IGAU are super easy to learn. String linking is very easy. It lets folks memorize combos in small consumable bites easily without having to figure them out from scratch and even casuals can easily guess and figure out how to link some of those given the B3 and F3 stuff and all the supers they have. They may not be godlike but they wont struggle to learn this game like others. Even if they dont try to learn and just mash around they can still get decent off of interactibles and zoning which is SUPER easy to learn.

This game is casual friendly in a ton of ways and KoF XIII is a horrible thing to compare it to for combos if you want to talk combo barriers. They'll do fine.
 
Maybe you should stop fishing for combos and you won't get spammed, FGs are more than doing big combos or let alone just "combos", and are more than "spam", it involves a lot of things and strategy for every type of situation, there isn't one way to play the game, it isn't you either "spam" or you either "do flashy combos".
 

shaowebb

Get your guns on. Sheriff is back.
90% of good play is in my opinion based on knowing how to move and punish. Combo length is based on comfort level. TOD characters that dont go top tier have existed before and always will. Its all about how good people are at knowing when they can hit you and when they can get in or need to block.

Get good at that and your regular combos will happen more frequently than theirs and you'll take the lead and eventually the match. Dont believe me? Play an Aquaman match on full defense and see what he can do. Those punish trident into MB tridents add up.
 
I feel like I'm sort of in the same boat as you. I like playing fighting games, but whenever I see giant dial-a-combos I just get intimidated and say "Eh, I could be doing better things with my time." And that's just a personal choice. I used to get really pissed at people who could do the crazy combos because I felt like I couldn't do anything. But that's the way these games work. And that goes for Street Fighter or any fighter (or life). There's always people putting in more work and that's fine. They just have different standards.

Maybe it's because I love zoning, but I think this game is perfect for casuals. I mean, all you need to learn is a simple b3 combo and you should at least hold your own somewhat.

It all stems from what you want out of a game and how much you enjoy it. The more I like a game, the harder I'll try because I want to improve. Same goes for something like learning an instrument. You don't just learn two songs and say "All right, I'm done." If you love playing, you'll be spending more time learning play styles, new songs, chord structure, theory, etc. That's how fighting games are.

For instance, all the shenanigans and crazy combos and OTG and X-Factor mechanics made me have to give up on UMVC3 because I just couldn't handle it. If you ask the Capcom community, they say it's one of the simplest, but in terms of memorization, I thought it was bananas. So I sold the game because I knew I would never get the enjoyment out of it I wanted. On the flipside, I'm a big DC fan, so just spending time with the roster is cool to me. Yeah, I get bodied if I jump into Hard mode or certain battles, but my online record is fairly even, and I think the gameplay is a lot of fun to watch and be a part of so I stick with it and do what I can.



tldr - You'll only have as much fun as you're willing to put into it. Don't be upset if competitive people beat you. That's going to happen. Just hope you can luck out and find the casuals that you can play with and adapt. If you can't, maybe this isn't the game for you and something like Street Fighter is. Just because you like fighters (and this was a harsh realization I came to) doesn't mean you should play them all.
 

JLU51306

Bzzzt *Paging Doctor Fate*
From what I've seen, this game is very appealing to casuals. Tons of people I know at work bought the game, of course 9/10 don't understand a thing (one friend even said to me "This game is awesome, just wish it had a block button,"). Quite a few people on my PSN friend list (which is mostly comprised of COD players), also bought the game. My local Walmart was low on copies, to boot.

I'd say not only is this game easily accessible to casuals, but it seems to me at least, that they like the game and it is selling well.
 
These types of competitive games can never appeal to casuals... UNLESS there is a seriously good matching system ala SC2. The casuals there can hang out in bronze league and play other bronze league players to the end of eternity. You'll probably get better in a few months naturally, but you'll always play people at your skill level.

If there isn't a solid matchmaking system, casuals shouldn't even bother.

The lack of a good matchmaking system in this game actually pisses me off.
 

TectonicSuperPlates

Learn to draw the Rob Liefeld way
Again, sitting in the corner and spamming the same attack over and over does nothing for casuals when competitive players destroy you. Spamming does nothing against people who know what they are doing. I can show you video proof of this.

These types of competitive games can never appeal to casuals... UNLESS there is a seriously good matching system ala SC2. The casuals there can hang out in bronze league and play other bronze league players to the end of eternity. You'll probably get better in a few months naturally, but you'll always play people at your skill level.

If there isn't a solid matchmaking system, casuals shouldn't even bother.

The lack of a good matchmaking system in this game actually pisses me off.
Oh yes. You jump into a ranked game, and you maybe only played like 20 games, and you get paired with someone who has played well over 200 games.

...what? What kind of balance is that? There is none.
 
Oh yes. You jump into a ranked game, and you maybe only played like 20 games, and you get paired with someone who has played well over 200 games.

...what? What kind of balance is that? There is none.
Might be better to stick with player matches then? You can choose who you play against and if you find someone on your level, you can rematch them and have good sessions to improve that way. There's lobbies specifically labeled for beginners. Granted, those are mostly KOTH so you have to wait awhile to play, but it could provide an option to watch and learn from other folks.
 
I don't even have the game yet and it's pretty casual(along with mk9) compared to kof or street fighter. I haven't played online so I don't really know how big zoning is in the game. But yeah my friends 10 year old brother can do 10 hit combos with flash, sooooo it's as casual as a fighting game can be but still deep enough to appeal to pros(again much like mk).
 

PANDEMlC

El Psy Congroo
How casual a game has to be? To appeal? Auto combos? It's pretty casual compared to the rest of the FG market.
Actually that would probably help, hit 1111 to get a shitty easy mode combo that looks cool and it makes people happy. Persona did it well imo, only use it had in competitive play was for building meter.
 

Drumslinger

XBL: drumgeek77
I see where the OP is coming from. I grew up playing SF2 and the original MK and MK II in my local arcade. Once fighting games became more and more focused on combos I had less and less interest in playing them. Not because I didn't want to take the time to learn the combos, but because I didn't philosophically agree with a string of moves that took away half my health bar in 5 seconds.

Meters filling up in order to do crazy mega-super moves? What kind of crazy world was I living in?

Suddenly this was the way of every new fighting game. Learn these moves that would utterly dominate you, unless you did a special block, that was a special move on its own... and time it perfectly. I suddenly found myself with less and less interest in fighting games and quit playing them all together, picking up a few here and there to see if anything had changed. It hadn't.

Then I started reading about IGAU and hoped it wouldn't be the same. Unfortunately it pretty much is. One thing I do like about it is that some of the characters seem not to rwly on combos as much. Most Doomsdays or Shazams or Deathstrokes I play against rely mainly on their specials. But I love comics, and deep down I still love fighting games. That's what drew me, a casual, to IGAU. The DC lineup. So I picked a main, and I've spent hours with him in practice. I've gone from not knowing what "cancelling" meant to being able to perform a 2 MB 40+% combo. I even made 3 people rage quit today.

Do I enjoy the game more now? Not really. I kind of hate myself a little for doing it. But like I said, deep down there's a part of me that has missed these games, and I love comics.

In the end, for better or for worse, this is the state of the genre. I had to accept that and either learn to roll with it or never play another fighter in my life. So I picked up Superman and learned how to juggle in corners and dial in the combos. Then I learned Sinestro, because I think he's the most fun when I'm zoning and keeping people away. Find a character that can be effective without combos and get used to the clash system.

This game may draw casuals for the roster, but I don't know how many it will keep. Even if the combo system is simpler, it's still, fundamentally the same type game that pushes people like me away. I believe myself to be an exception to this.

It's just the way these games are now, like it or not. Personally I don't, but Street Fighter II isn't coming back.
 

Hellion_96

xX_Hellion96_Xx
Is this thread serious? It's not about what you do when you open your opponent up (combos) it's about how you open them up (reads,footsies, ect) The fun of the game is out thinking your opponent by making reads and conditioning your opponent combos are just the reward for out playing the other player.