The Future of Fighting Games?
One Button Special Moves and the Controller Arms Race
As I write this up before releasing the video, I have no idea if the video will go over well, or if it will crash and burn pretty damn hard. Go watch it before reading on! This writeup is mostly going to be a postmortem where I expand on some of its ideas and hopefully clear up some possible misunderstandings.
I feel like this video will probably make a few people mad who prefer traditional motion inputs. For the past two years or so, I haven’t really been playing any modern fighting games at all. I’ve instead been playing Vampire Savior nonstop—a game from 1997 with a ton of weird inputs and a lot of design sensibilities that you don’t see in recent games. I love it.
At this point, I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever seriously play a modern fighting game again. This doesn’t really have anything to do with traditional vs. simplified special move inputs—it’s mostly about the direction the genre has taken in recent years (a topic for another day). The point is that while I still pay attention to recent trends and make these kinds of video essays (it’s fun!), I'm having a great time playing old-timey games, and that’s probably going to continue for the foreseeable future. The video is not me trying to say what should be happening. I’m just trying to explore what is happening (and why).
I absolutely stand behind the why of the video—I really do think the two primary driving forces behind simplified inputs are perceived accessibility and making games controller-agnostic. The word perceived plays an important role here. I allude to it in the video when I talk about Smash being weirdly hard to control despite it having the reputation for being approachable. Making inputs simpler mostly matters because people believe it matters (and not necessarily because it actually does). The controller-agnostic thing is more based in dollars and cents. If your game plays fine on a computer keyboard and you make it free to play, your potential audience is massive.
One thing I didn’t have room to address was that I believe this trend is going to force certain types of design decisions and push the genre in a certain direction. I pointed to Street Fighter 6’s modern controls being an issue because one button fast invincible moves are problematic in the context of Street Fighter specifically. Street Fighter neutral is deliberate and slower paced (compared with most other fighting games). Balancing the startup and invulnerability frames to make reversals strong (but not too strong) is tough in this type of game.
However, this sort of thing is way less of an issue in some other fighting games. In Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Spencer’s bionic arm super (I know it’s called bionic lancer, go away) is invulnerable, has just 7 frames of startup, and the input a simple quarter circle back. It has a massive hitbox that hits all the way up near the peak of normal jump height, and it goes nearly full screen. Depending on available resources, if you hit somebody with bionic arm, you can kill the character. You can even use the team hyper combo mechanic to do bionic arm by just pressing your two assist buttons at the same time, ignoring the normal motion input and essentially making it a one button move. Despite all of that, bionic arm is pretty well balanced, and Spencer is generally considered an upper mid tier character at best. How is that possible? It’s a combination of factors:
Moving your character around in marvel is pretty safe. If you dash on the ground, and Spencer does bionic arm, you can just hold up back to cancel the dash into a jump to block it (and punish).
Lots of stuff is more invincible than bionic arm. These other moves aren’t as quite as quick to startup, but you can easily react to the super flash and beat bionic arm if you’re in position and have the resources to answer back with your own invulnerable move.
In an assist-based game like marvel, you protect your assists and your assists protect you. You can confirm that Spencer is blocking your assist before approaching to keep yourself safe from bionic arm.
Most importantly, marvel is an extremely fast paced game. You can’t just sit there and look for stuff to react to. Bionic arm is also only available on the ground, so Spencer committing to staying on the ground is a death sentence. Aerial combat is really important in marvel and you’re going to spend a lot of the match airborne.
If you put bionic arm in Street Fighter, it’d be busted as hell, but the core design of marvel makes bionic arm a pretty reasonable move. I think this is a big reason why 2XKO ended up being a marvel-inspired tag fighter—if you’re going to commit one button special moves, emulating a game where you already know they work makes a lot of sense. It’s kind of interesting or paradoxical or something that one-button specials are forcing them to make a game like marvel (a series not known for being super approachable).
I don’t know that this mini essay has any kind of grand thesis that I’m working toward, and I’m out of things to say for now. Come play Vampire Savior with me sometime!