I know I promised to continue the breakdown of fighting game design planning and the discussion on what makes a fighting game - both in balance and otherwise - but this topic has been scraping at the back of my head so I'll use my limited time to type this one out for now, instead.
Game1
Player1 is not a scrub. He's been playing games and reading forums and generally having fun, but being a casual gamer, he's never been that big on execution or knowing his frame data. He's an online warrior.
Logs on, goes online with this hype new fighting game. Starts a player match, there is the opponent, okay let's kick his ass. He picks the character he likes. He doesn't care about tier lists and he doesn't care about fundamentals either, he's a casual gamer who just wants to have fun.
Round one. Fight! - goes the announcer and off they go. Player1 tries his best to block and attack, but all that happens to him is the opponent simply stays back and throws vases at him. Not just any vase, big chinese vases that make no sense to fly as fast as they seem to, but oh hell this is what's going on, and he's read Sirlin's PlayToWin so he knows he gotta deal with it.
He tries to find a way around it. He distinguishes between several different vases he needs to deal with too: one coming from the front- the Frontal Vase. It's +40 on block. One coming from above: the Falling Vase. It has to be blocked standing. One coming from below - this is called the Sneaky Vase, have to block it crouching but not to mistake it for the Enhanced Sneaky Vase because once the opponent burns a bar of meter, the Sneaky Vase will become unblockable. Then there is the Teleport Vase coming from behind. And he's arguing with his wife so there is the Real Life Vase too. (Luckily there was only three of those, the last one might have been enhanced though. Ouch.)
Eventually he just gives up, picks the character Vason Vaseovski and spams vases himself. Which is when somebody picks Tippy the Teleport Whore. This young lady has several types of teleports: One coming from above, behind, below, across the screen and suddenly the wife appears in front of the screen wearing similar shorts as Tippy has on. "Does this make my butt big?"
Controller down. Time to tend to a real life match-up, might be favourable, who knows.
Game2
Player2 is a scrub. He doesn't care about playing to win. He calls throwing cheap and mashes buttons like no tomorrow - but truth be told Player2 only gets to play when mom and dad are discussing match-ups upstairs. He just saw dad get owned though, so he picks another game. While dad is inserting something else, he inserts the other game's disc and goes online with that one.
He picks the character that can shoot, 'cuz that's cool. He fires a fireball. Tries another, but he realises that he can only fire one fireball at a time: have to wait for that one to expire before he can use another. WTF. This game sucks.
What's more frustrating is the other person has a move that can simply go through the fireball and knock him over. WTF. This game sucks.
He tries his best to mash out those fireballs, but the opponent keeps jumping over the fireball and kicking his ass pretty badly. WTF. This game sucks.
He ejects the disc midfight - immediately receiving the message "lolragequitter" from his opponent. But he doesn't care. He just wants to shoot. So he puts in the previous game, goes online, and shoots. Shoots all day.
Player3 is a girl. She doesn't have a boyfriend only a gaming console, but she's generally good at games. Has a great manual dexterity that she could likely use for match-up discussions rather than pressing buttons but she either thinks guys are an unfavourable match-up or simply goes 5-5 with most of them and is too lazy to do work.
So, she logs on and meets Player2, the scrub.
She very soon realizes that Game1 is not fun to play because it takes more effort to take the game to a higher level and simple, easy-to-use mechanics make it feel cheap and it's just not worth playing that way. Why put in effort if you can win just shooting, right?
Well maybe because she wants a proper gaming experience where go-to mechanics do not stomp actual, global fighting-game fundamentals.
Which game would you play?
