In 2022, I got into watching tournaments for fighting games broadcast live on Twitch, mostly as means of watching cool characters with crisp, detailed, and diverse designs (aka, those that inspire my own works) duke it out in a slugfest until one of them gets knocked out. It inspired me to attempt to write down concepts for a fighting game of my own design.
But there’s a problem. I don’t really play modern fighting games all that much, if ever. Sure I’ve dabbled in the occasional emulated fighter and a few towards the end of the 2000’s and the beginning of the 2010’s (in fact my first true fighter was… Sonic the Fighters) and I played plenty of Guilty Gear Xrd when it was new and made too many memes to count thanks to the Playstation 4’s sharing features. However, when it comes to the latest and greatest button bashers currently headlining tournaments across the globe, even those that I physically own, I’ve pretty much never laid a finger on them. And for the past few months, I was asking myself, why?
Growing up, I always leaned more towards games that revolved around offline, single-player experiences, and unlike with platformers, action games, racing games, and a few shooters, I didn’t really grow up with many traditional fighting games, with the ones I was most familiar with being the aforementioned Sonic the Fighters as well as Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I quickly learned of other fighting games as the years went on thanks to the internet, most notably Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken (in fact, there was a Tekken 5 cabinet in a local redemption arcade at one point), but never really came to play them myself until the 2010’s, some with my cousin in tow as a local VS. opponent in Street Fighter IV, Tekken 6, and Soulcalibur V.
As the push for more online modes began to take off in the late 2010’s and especially after the pandemic, I noticed that the fighters I was eyeing up and spectating tournaments of, aside from Smash Bros and Tekken, were not really giving those that didn’t like or were driven away from playing online much to offer when it came to game modes. Street Fighter V of course had a story mode, but it was kind of forgettable and linear and I never bothered to play it due to me not using my PS4 all that much and having never played SFV. Guilty Gear and King of Fighters are both kind of in the same boat—Xrd onwards dropped the interactive story mode that had been present in Guilty Gear for years and turned it into a 3D anime movie, and King of Fighters never really had a proper story mode (at least in the mainline entries; I think some of the spinoffs had something akin to a story mode but I can’t really be bothered to check right now). For a good example on how I always liked seeing variety offered in offline modes, most late 90’s and 2000’s fighters on 5th and 6th-generation consoles included an extra mode or two aside form the story/arcade modes to sink into—Time Attack, Survival modes, a mission mode, modes with RPG elements, or even modes where you would train or program an AI. And if you wanted to go further, even a mode that breaks away from the core fighting gameplay altogether would be an interesting experience. As for the story mode, I always thought Blazblue’s approach was a good example, as was, bizarrely enough, the two Bleach fighting games on the Nintendo DS developed by Treasure. And with the release of Street Fighter 6 and its World Tour mode, that'll be another fighting game with a good singleplayer story mode.
Furthermore, I also noticed that the latest entries in these long-running fighting games would launch with a starting roster in the mid-to-high teens and then use a rollout of DLC to bring in extra fighters (amongst other content). I get why, considering this is the age of DLC and all, but some games don’t always seem to get that kind of support right away to bring back fan favorites or get enough characters to surpass the roster count of the game’s predecesor until years later. I guess I had my brain tainted by fighters that give large rosters at the start like later Smash games and nearly every Tekken and KOF title from a certain point onwards. Heck, Smash outright spoils you with so many fan favorites and the roster only got bigger in each entry. For Guilty Gear Strive, it felt like there were lots of gaping holes in the starting roster and even the current DLC characters with certain notable omissions from the XX and Xrd eras not returning. And for Street Fighter 6, despite the starting roster having less “gaping holes” than Strive’s and a very solid collection of newcomers (including a much-improved Luke), I feel there should have been some Street Fighter III representation alongside the new faces and the entire roster of World Warriors from II in the characters available at launch and the first season of DLC. I’m not asking for a fighting game to have a gigantic roster, especially at launch, but I would love for fighting games developed by bigger studios, if they can afford it and if it doesn’t affect how the project turns out, to pack a slightly higher number of starter characters especially when DLC schedules/releases are at risk at becoming inconsistent during a season.
For the longest time, fighting games have always had this lingering issue of being tough to get into, and some fighting games have since been attempting to rectify the issue in one way or another. Though some have resorted to making fighters simpler by scaling back and removing mechanics or offering easier controls that are more accessible but nerf your damage and/or HP, I found this to be the wrong direction to try and attract new blood since it can alienate seasoned competitive players by taking away entire features people have been used to and took for granted or make people want to forego the easier control schemes in favor of playing with the standard controls to avoid the nerfs. And by this point, long-running fighting game franchises aside from platform fighters are pretty much stuck with these more complex control layouts created in the early days of the genre, meaning only new fighting games would be able to work with a completely new control scheme designed to be easy to learn and figure out, yet still give enough options for controlling a fighter to lead to highly fluid and diverse movement pro players can achieve
Personally, I always saw the lack of replay value aside from playing the arcade modes for each character’s ending and, while a minor point in comparison, the smaller character rosters before DLC as bigger contributions to me not wanting to pick up most modern fighters, though the controls being on the complex side and command/super inputs not always being the most easy thing in the world to figure out and memorize and pull off consistently is certainly a contributing factor. Of course there are also online modes to fix the limited replay value, but what drive me away from fighting random players online via matchmaking or ranked systems was that most fighters with online modes track win/loss records, and, depending on the game, lets other players view them if they see you in a lobby. If these stats weren’t a thing, I would probably be less reluctant to jump into online games, since the way Guilty Gear Xrd and even KOF XV presented their menus made me think that people would end up peeking at my versus records after matches or if I were to accidentally reveal them in a theoretical game stream.
Well that took me a little longer than I would have liked, but that should probably give an idea on what drives me away from modern fighters and what I would like to see in both new fighters and new entries in long-standing fighting game franchises. Hopefully I wasn’t too negative with expressing my thoughts that have been building up for a few months and I may revise this slightly later on should any part feel mean-spirited or wrongly written. And well, don’t get me started on the concept of free to play, live service fighting games…
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