Are Fighting Games Too Difficult?

It seemed too long for a title, but the question isn’t really “Are fighting games difficult?” but actually, “Are fighting games more difficult than other competitive videogame genres?” Some people in the fighting game community have kind of given up on the question at this point, but I can’t help but keep circling back to it. I want fighting games to be bigger. I want people to understand what’s great about them. 

The one certainty is that fighting games have a reputation for being especially hard. There are really just two possible reasons. Either:

• Fighting games are uniquely difficult. or

• Fighting games aren’t more difficult than other genres, but for whatever reason, people think they are.

The first reason would be tough to prove one way or the other. Speaking from personal experience, I can say that after playing League of Legends pretty intensely for around a year, it seemed at least as difficult to learn as any fighting game I’ve played (probably harder!) 

Some people will stay convinced that fighting games are crazy hard, but I don’t buy it. Difficulty in a game played against other humans ultimately stems from those opponents and not from the game itself. That leaves us with the other possibility— for some reason or combination of reasons, people mistakenly believe fighting games are harder than everything else out there. Let’s talk through some possibilities.

Game Mechanics 

1. Fighting games don’t have good in-game teaching tools. On one hand, I do absolutely think every fighting game tutorial I’ve ever seen is garbage (yes, including tutorials in games like Guilty Gear Xrd and Skullgirls). On the other hand, I think this reason falls pretty flat. It’s been a few years since my League of Legends days, but when I played it,  in-game tutorials basically didn’t exist. I was forced to go to sites like MOBAFire to learn the game. If League of Legends could see massive success without good in-game resources, I don’t think this explanation holds much water.

Even within fighting games, tutorial quality seems to have zero impact on popularity. At the moment, Tekken 7 is literally the only fighting game that’s had continuous year-over-year growth in tournament attendance. The game also notoriously doesn’t even have a tutorial.

2. It’s really hard to learn fighting games just through playing them. The best-case scenario is something like the original Super Mario Bros. or Portal, where the game teaches the player so elegantly and in such a fun way that players don’t even realize they’re playing through a tutorial. This still doesn’t really address the League of Legends comparison above— MOBAs like League are juggernauts yet they require that you use resources outside of the game to improve. Who knows— a completely invisible elegantly integrated tutorial might just not be possible with games beyond a certain level of complexity.

It’s also important to consider the history of the genre. Street Fighter II/Champion Edition sold over 200,000 cabinets, generating revenue (adjusted for inflation) of over $3.5 billion worldwide, and that’s a conservative estimate. The millions of people who played Street Fighter II in arcades seemed to enjoy the game just fine. Having been an extremely popular genre in the past doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but I think it’s important to keep in mind.

3. The fighting game genre lacks single player games to onboard people. First-person shooters (FPS) aren’t really that intuitive. Using two independent directional control methods (whether it’s dual analog sticks or a mouse and keyboard) to navigate and aim in three dimensions is pretty rough at first. The difference between shooters and fighting games is that people playing multiplayer shooters could’ve potentially spent hundreds of hours building genre literacy in safe single-player spaces. You can take your time playing through Bioshock or Doom on your own. Later, when you venture online to play Counter-Strike or Overwatch, you’re already pretty well-versed in the basics.

Fighting games don’t do a great job of this. They usually have pretty bare-bones single-player modes, and often you’re up against AI opponents which emulate human players so poorly they might actually do more harm than good. I’m not sure how much fixing this would help, but there’s definitely room for improvement here.

4. Traditional fighting game inputs and execution requirements are too difficult. In any discussion of fighting game accessibility, the inputs for moves are always going to be a point of contention. You’ll see words like “archaic” get thrown around a lot. Why do you have to do some complicated input just to chuck a fireball? One basic answer is pretty straightforward:  fighting game characters need more moves than there are buttons on a controller. To get around this, traditional fighting games use a combination of directional inputs plus a button press to execute certain moves. One of the most well-known examples is Ryu’s fireball, done by doing a quarter circle forward plus punch.

It’s an entry in this list, so that means some people see these kinds of inputs as a barrier of entry unique to fighting games. It’s completely understandable that if somebody picks up Ryu and can’t throw fireballs consistently right off the bat, they’ll be frustrated. Before they can fully participate in the real strategy of the game, they need to get past this. 

The Smash Bros. series inevitably gets brought up as proof that traditional fighting inputs are no longer needed. Smash is wildly popular and has a high skill ceiling- why can’t traditional fighting games borrow from Smash and have one button special moves too? 

I think Smash actually does have some pretty tough execution requirements at a beginner level— they just moved the tough stuff somewhere else. After all, Smash still has to solve the same problem as Street Fighter: a GameCube controller has seven buttons, but Mario has 28 moves.

In Smash, tilt attacks are performed by pressing the analog stick slightly in a given direction while pressing the attack button. On the ground, it’s really easy to accidentally get a dash attack instead if you press the stick just a bit too far to the left or right. It takes time to be able to deliberately do one or the other when you want to. Along those same lines, if you press and release the jump button super quickly, instead of a regular jump, you get a very low altitude jump called a short hop, which is something you’ll want to be doing a lot. Like tilt attacks, consistently getting short hops when you want them isn’t easy when you first start out. 

Why do people get mad about Ryu’s fireball input but not care that things like tilt attacks and short hops are tough in their own right? I think a big piece of this is perception. One of the things Ryu is known for is throwing fireballs, so if you struggle a bit with the input at first, it’s hard not to fixate on it. In Smash, beginners either don’t realize tilt attacks and short hops exist, or they do know about them and just don’t care that they’re tough to pull off. They play the game, enjoy themselves, and get on with their lives.

Even if you put Smash to the side and stay within traditional fighting games, people’s perception of execution barriers is often really far off the mark. Virtua Fighter has a reputation for difficulty despite having very forgiving execution requirements. Lots of people think Tekken is easy to pick up and play, but it has a bunch of important techniques that are extremely execution-heavy. 

There’s no doubt there are some tough things to execute in fighting games, but the same could be said for plenty of other popular genres. 

One-on-One Format

5. Fighting games focus entirely on whether you won or not, and they don’t give you a whole lot else to go off of. The only stat that the game ever shows you is wins and losses. This can be (understandably!) discouraging. Meanwhile, other competitive games give you much more comprehensive feedback. 

I’ve stopped playing Overwatch due to Blizzard’s recent behavior (the Hong Kong stuff), but the game is a great example of this. Overwatch was very deliberately designed to give every player positive feedback after each match. You get a medal if you were top three on your team at one of the five main stats. For these main stats and some other character-specific ones, you’re shown how your numbers stack up with your historical averages. Rather than compare you with other players, they focus on comparing you with your past self. The game encourages you to focus on personal improvement and gives you more to look at than just winning or losing. Fighting games give you none of that. It could be pretty tough to pull off, but I think it’d help people a lot if they had enough information to focus on more incremental goals. Most end-of-match screens look like this:

I don't’ know much it would ultimately help, but I’d like to see something like this:

Winning and losing will probably always be more salient in one-on-one games, but something like the above might be able to help. Fighting games can do better here.

6. Fighting games are one-on-one and have almost no randomness, so it’s almost impossible for a (significantly) weaker player to win. None of the most popular competitive videogames have both these characteristics. Many of the biggest games (and sports!) are team-based. When you’re on a team, you play a smaller role in whether you win or lose. If you lose, it gives you a psychological out: you have a bunch of teammates to blame! On the flipside, sometimes your team will carry you to victory, so you’re basically guaranteed to get wins here and there. These combine to make these games a lot less off-putting than they’d otherwise be.

What about games that aren’t team-based? If you look at popular competitive games where you’re on your own, there’s often some dynamic that helps weaker players see at least occasional success. For example, one-on-one card games like Hearthstone have an element of luck. The better players will win more over time, but the weaker play will see some wins too. It feels better to go 3-7 than it does to go 0-10.

Battle royale games are gigantic at the moment. If you choose to play on your own, you’re in a free-for-all against 99 other players and only one of you can win. Why are people OK with this? In battle royale games, losing is basically assumed. If you know that winning is incredibly rare, it’s easy to accept defeat. The assumption that you’ll lose also makes it natural to create smaller, more achievable goals for yourself (kill X number of people in a match, survive longer than you did before, etc.) 

Additionally, whether it’s team-based or free-for-all, games that have more than two players usually end up generating some random opportunities for easy success. If you’re playing Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, you can stumble across two other players duking it out, and you might be able to kill both of them before they realize you’re even there. These kinds of situations will let anybody have occasional mini-successes. 

I’m not sure that fighting games can do a whole lot about this. The stronger player (almost) always winning is more of a feature than a bug, but it’s undoubtedly a big psychological hurdle.

7. Fighting games are less inherently social than other genres. In addition to the reasons outlined above, team-based games have a social component that can be tough to replicate in one-on-one games. I got into League of Legends because a friend asked if I wanted to give it a shot. We queued up for some games together and he talked me through the basics. He was a lot better than me, but that was fine because we were on the same team, and even if I wasn’t amazing, I could still do small things to help. The fighting game version of this would look a lot different. If the veteran plays normally, they’ll destroy the other person. There’s no element of cooperation- one of you has to beat the other rather both of you winning or losing together. In the fighting game scenario, it’s also just tougher to talk and socialize while playing. Meanwhile, half the time I was playing League of Legends it was just an excuse to catch up with friends. The game was secondary.

Fighting games absolutely do have a social component, but it’s tougher to find. My fighting game version of that League of Legends anecdote above isn’t really that different. A friend and I both kind of casually played fighting games, but neither of us really knew what we were doing. When Marvel vs. Capcom 3 came out, we decided to try and actually learn how to play properly. We played against each other on a pretty regular basis at got decent at the game. That friend knew two other guys who played Street Fighter IV but were looking to get into Marvel. We started having weekly meet-ups where the four of us would play. We began going to some tournaments, and our weekly meet-ups ended up having eight or ten people on any given day. We became part of the fighting game scene in Osaka and had a blast.  Fighting games can have an amazing social/community aspect— it’s just more elusive. When talking about how I got into fighting games, I can’t deny that I was extremely fortunate to live in the right place at the right time and meet the right people. 

Luckily, these days, if you live near any kind of population center, there’s probably a fighting game community you can become a part of, if you want to. You can also become part of the community online. Being involved in the fighting game community can be unique and amazing, but it’s something you have to seek out. For other kinds of games, the social aspect is just naturally part of the experience, and that social element can be key to getting new players past those initial barriers to entry.

Other Theories

8. There’s just a lot of idea momentum— “fighting games are uniquely hard” is practically taken as indisputable fact. I think that even if all the reasons above mysteriously vanished one day, this thinking wouldn’t necessarily change. The belief that humans only use around 10% of their brain has persisted for a hundred years despite there being no evidence for it. Once something is accepted as true, it tends to stay that way until people make a concentrated effort to kill the idea.

This is a tricky one to correct. The “people only use 10% of their brains” idea might’ve stuck around because ultimately, it’s pretty harmless. After all, it’s a better use of your time to fight fallacies that cause actual harm, like fools thinking vaccines cause autism. The “fighting games are uniquely hard” idea is a weird one because many people from within the fighting game community promote the idea. This seems wildly counterintuitive at first. Isn’t the whole goal to get more people playing fighting games?!

Unfortunately, there are some existing fighting game players who like the idea that fighting games are uniquely challenging. If they subscribe to that theory, then they get to believe that as a fighting game player, they’re somehow uniquely amazing. I’m not saying that getting good at a fighting game isn’t an accomplishment or something to be proud of. I’m just saying it’s not somehow fundamentally different from becoming great at Dota 2 or bouldering or playing the piano.

9. Fighting games tend to have small playerbase of relatively dedicated strong players. There’s a bit of the introduction to this article which is especially relevant to this point:

Difficulty in a game played against other humans ultimately stems from those opponents and not from the game itself.

Difficulty comes from your opponents, so if all your opponents are strong, you will actually have more trouble winning. If you have a big enough playerbase, people can always be matched up with others of similar skill, which is the general goal of online matchmaking. As long as the matchmaking system is decent and the playerbase is big enough, everybody should end up with around a 50% win rate.  

The problem is that the playerbase of most fighting games just isn’t large enough. I talk about this in Think, Don’t Mash! Part 7. If you end up with a small dedicated online playerbase of strong players, a new player trying to learn the game will get absolutely destroyed. They might literally win 0% of their matches. This naturally becomes a vicious cycle. You scare off newcomers before they can stick around to play other newcomers, so the game can't grow. Only the biggest fighting games like Street Fighter V (for now, anyway) manage to avoid this pitfall.

Conclusion

For the third and final time, I want to reiterate: difficulty in a game played against other humans ultimately stems from those opponents and not from the game itself.

If I had to point to one entry as the single biggest issue, it would have to be number 9. If you have a large enough, diverse enough playerbase, most of the other issues become less of a problem (or go away entirely!) You would be able to fix:

1. Bad tutorials: more players equals more player-created tutorial content.

2. Hard to learn through playing: it’s easier to figure stuff out when you’re up against players of comparable skill level.

3. No single-player games to onboard people: see #2.

4. Inputs are hard: becomes less of a focus since there’s less of a need for technical stuff against other new players.

5. Winning is all that matters: everybody will get wins a good amount of the time.

6. Weaker players can’t win: See: #5.

7. Fighting games are less social: more players to socialize with.

8. “Fighting games are super duper hard” idea momentum: lots of beginners playing and enjoying fighting games helps dispel the myth.

Practically everything becomes easier/better with a larger playerbase. I think a fighting game that has the following could bust things wide open:

• Free-to-play from day one

• Available on all major platforms (especially PC) in all major regions from day one

• Good netcode from day one (after all, playerbase size/diversity only matter if online play functions)

• Based on an established popular IP (this one is debatable)

Free-to-play is practically the default economic model for online games at this point (League of Legends came out in 2009!) Fighting game developers have known about GGPO (a much better netcode solution than what most fighting games currently use) for over a decade. I’m honestly kind of baffled it hasn’t happened yet, but that’s a topic for another day.