I Need Backup! Tips for Reacting in Fighting Games
The core message of my Reacting in Fighting Games video— that good reaction times are mostly a product of experience, is the most important thing to focus on. Attention is a limited resource, and the more time you spend with the game, the more smartly you can allocate it. There are a few concrete ways to help quickly filter out the stuff that doesn’t actually matter.
First, you can ask yourself, “What moves can my opponent threaten me with right now?” Depending on the opposing character, they might literally only have one or two moves that can even reach you. Another useful filter is asking yourself “What moves has my opponent represented so far?" For example, if I’m playing against a Ryu who has never once jumped at me for 50 straight seconds, I can reallocate most of the “anti-air” part of my brain to focus on the ground game. In the opposite scenario (if someone is jumping every five seconds), I should focus 95% of my attention on anti-airing and practically ignore everything else. Of course, this can be exploited by a smart opponent, since when they finally do jump, it might catch me off-guard. Regardless, this is still an important and useful heuristic.
Other Random Tips
Narrowing Your Focus
In my video, I show Chun-li going through a projectile with her super to punish it. How do you pull this off in an actual match? Let’s math out a scenario where we're dealing with Guile's light punch sonic boom (we all love math, right guys? …..guys?).
The facts:
The light punch version of Guile’s sonic boom has 10 frames of startup and 28 frames of recovery. This means he’s committed and vulnerable for 38 frames.
Chun-li’s critical art has 5 frames of startup.
The input for Chun-li’s critical art is:
The math:
38 frames - 15 frames (human reaction time) - 5 frames (startup of the move I’m trying to react with) = 18 frames to play with
After everything is taken into account, you’ve 18 frames to recognize that Guile is doing a sonic boom, gauge the situation (determine whether you’re in range, have enough meter, etc.), and then do the double quarter forward + kick input. This can be pretty tough! The most difficult version of that sequence looks like this:
“Alright, I’m playing against Guile.”
“Ooh, he threw a sonic boom. What can I do about those?
“I know! I can use my critical art to go through projectiles!”
“Do I have enough meter to do it?”
“I do!”
“Am I even in range for my critical art?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m in range!”
“What’s the input again?”
“Oh yeah, double quarter circle forward plus kick.”
*do the input*
...meanwhile, Chun got hit by the sonic boom eight or nine years ago. Let’s clean this up a bit. By planning in advance and recognizing the scenario you’re in before the sonic boom is even thrown, things get a lot easier:
“Alright, I’m playing against Guile. I have enough meter to do my critical art, and I’m going to space myself so I’m in range for it to connect.”
“Oh, he threw a sonic boom.”
*do the input*
Through planning and experience, this goes from impossible to pretty straightforward. This is the power of the mental stack concept that I focused on in the video. How can we make this even easier?
Enter Input Buffering
I allude to this in the video (and in my blog post about hit confirming). Lots of fighting game inputs involve more than a simple button press. The more involved the input, the tougher it is to react with the move in question. One trick you can use is input buffering. This means doing most of a move’s input before anything even happens. It's a lot easier to explain through a concrete example. Let’s stick with the same Chun-li scenario we’ve been using. With input buffering, it would look like this:
“Alright, I’m playing against Guile. I have enough meter to my critical art and I’m going to stand at a distance where I know I’m in range for it to hit. I’m going to continuously do quarter circle forward motions.”
“Oh, he threw a sonic boom.”
*just press kick*
The double quarter circle motion on its own doesn’t do anything. If you’re continuously doing that, you no longer have to do the full input on reaction— you’ve already done the majority of it before reaction even entered the equation. Through input buffering, you can react to the sonic boom with a single button press, which is a lot easier than the full input.
"What if the Guile player notices what I’m up to? they might stop throwing sonic booms!" This is fine! If they recognize what you’re doing and they don’t want to risk eating the critical art, they can stop throwing booms entirely. This might mean you won't land that critical art, but it also means you’ve convinced the Guile player to stop using their single most important tool. You’ll have a much easier time fighting a Guile who doesn’t throw sonic booms anymore.
On Lag
There are different sources of lag which can make reacting to things tougher. One big one which you do have control over is display lag. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m going to quote an earlier post where I addressed this topic:
...doing it well requires reacting quickly to audiovisual queues. This becomes a lot harder if the TV or monitor you’re playing on is laggy. What this means is when your console or PC sends a video signal to your display, there is some amount of delay before it’s shown on your screen. Some amount of lag is inevitable, but for some displays, the lag can be bad enough that you have noticeably less time to react to things. Luckily, these days there are places like displaylag.com where you can do research and make sure your display is suitable for fighting games. If you’re on a budget, monitors (as opposed to TVs) are less likely to have tons of lag, since they don’t have the same image processing/enhancing “features” as TVs.
The laggiest displays out there have 5 or 6 frames(!) of latency. This means you have 5 or 6 fewer frames to react to things. A 20 frame move goes from “easily blocked on reaction” to “time to guess!” If you’re playing on a laggy display, you’re artificially handicapping yourself.
Whether or not you have a local fighting game scene, online play is super helpful (arguably essential) for leveling up your game. The better you can make your online experience (i.e., the more closely it approximates offline play), the more useful it is for improvement. This is a huge topic, and a lot (most?) of how well a game plays online is in the developer’s hands rather than yours, but the bottom line is:
Don’t play on wifi.
Get the best internet you can afford.
All things being equal, set up matches with people geographically close to you to increase the odds of a decent connection.
If a connection isn’t good enough, you’re not learning anything useful, so don’t waste your time fighting laggy opponents. Some games with delay-based netcode show the exact amount of lag, like Guilty Gear Xrd. I think anything beyond 3 or 4 frames of lag is basically unplayable. If the connection is bad, find somebody else to play.
Seriously, for the love of god, don’t play on wifi.
On Sound
If you look at scientific studies on reaction time, there’s always (small amounts) of disagreement over exactly how fast we can react to things. However, no matter where you look, there’s one constant: reactions to audio queues are consistently faster than reactions to visual queues. This is really straightforward— play with the sound on, damn it!
In Conclusion
Reacting quickly in fighting games is primarily a product of experience and knowing where to focus. That being said, hopefully the tips in this post can help make that process a little bit easier.