New Players Are Not Stupid

The original polemic against fighting game design that talks down to people. This is maybe best described as the bargaining phase of my descent into haterdom.

The year is 2020. You’re a major game developer with a storied and prestigious history as a creator of quality fighting games, and zero accountability to the people that play them. You have a few disparate games and maybe even a couple of franchises under your belt, but one in particular has an immense pedigree. People have been playing it for years, and probably will play it for years to come. There’s also a lot going on in this game, owing to the fact that you’ve been building on a singular mechanical foundation for the past decade or so. At this point, you’ve decided that you want to broaden your audience, so you boldly declare that the next game in this particular franchise will make a few mechanical simplifications in order to make the game more inviting to new players. Your legacy fans are… apprehensive, to be sure, but they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You’ve been at this for long enough, you probably know what you’re doing by now.

You make a game whose vision of “new player accessibility” means operating under the assumption that anyone who isn’t an experienced veteran is a bumbling moron. If you bothered to include a tutorial, it probably sucks.

Fighting games, like any other competitive multiplayer endeavour, are hard. There are a lot of different systems and concepts that dictate all sorts of interactions in any number of ways, each character has incredibly different move lists with different commands and often operate under their own rules that only vaguely line up with those set out by the game itself, and players are often challenged to balance situational awareness and tight execution, all while making snap decisions where 1/60th of a second can mean the difference between victory and defeat. This is a hard sell to people who aren’t necessarily invested in the genre already — unlike more popular team-based affairs, like Dota 2 or Valorant, fighting games don’t give you a team of other players to fall back on (or blame for your losses). And when you inevitably lose your first ranked match because you have no idea what you’re doing, your only recourse is to blame the game.

There are plenty of arguments to be had about whether or not fighting games should be appealing to these kinds of players that were arguably not going to stick to the game long enough to overcome these hurdles anyway (hint: they weren’t), but if we put that aside for a moment, we’re left with one pretty important question if you’re a developer: how do you get more people to play your game? How do you make it easier for new players to get into?

A smart person would probably come to the conclusion that you need to invest more effort in teaching players about your game. Depending on what sort of foundation you’re working from, you can maybe stand to streamline a few pieces here and there, but by and large, any means by which you make the game “easier” for new players will invariably just make experienced players expend even less energy wiping the floor with them on ranked. Thus, it only makes sense that you should, at the very least, include a tutorial mode for the game that teaches players about what sort of mechanics your game has to offer, and what you have designed them to be used for. If you’re able, you may try to make that experience more engaging than just slapping some text boxes on top of the training mode — turn individual tutorials into mini-games, integrate the tutorials into the story mode, explain a few core genre concepts — you’ve got room to work with here. You could even use your social media presence (if not the game itself) to boost player-made tutorial content. After all, you can’t pre-empt your game’s meta, and players will almost always find something that changes the game in ways you weren’t expecting. It all comes back to making sure new players are equipped with the tools they need to get started. They won’t start winning immediately, but they’ll know what it is they’re working with and maybe even begin experimenting with different options to use in different scenarios.

But you’re a major game developer (or are, at the very least, working for one), and you don’t care about that. You don’t want people leaving bad reviews on your game’s Steam page because they mistook a mixup sequence for an infinite combo. To you, accessibility isn’t about easing people into the learning curve — it’s about making it easy for people to win without needing to learn anything. This most often looks like making already strong tools insanely ignorant, limiting other tools that granted players flexibility in their playstyles, and removing depth from defensive interactions. Maybe you even experiment with removing the corner, who knows.

Astute readers may have already noticed that I’m kind of talking about Guilty Gear Strive in this piece’s introduction. I’m also just a little bit talking about Tekken 7, but Strive is really what got all of this in my head.
For what it’s worth, my stance on that particular game hasn’t changed — after all, as much as they are not really explaining themselves as it pertains to the game’s mechanical changes, the Guilty Gear dev team at Arc System Works are at least showing some accountability to their players by surveying them at every opportunity. I want the game to be good, and I think it can be made good. But I gotta tell ya, the new wall break system has really been getting to me.

Guilty Gear Strive‘s new mechanics surrounding the wall effectively force a reset to neutral that is often hidden behind a flashy stage transition. There are ways to get around it, but in all instances, either interacting with the wall or avoiding it results in the game’s stages effectively not having corners, at least for long. The game does try to sweeten the deal by applying a buff to your character’s meter gain if they initiate a stage transition, but this mechanic can really only exist because you want the corner to be less of a factor, and you can only want the corner to be less of a factor because you think new players are children who can’t possibly be capable of learning how to deal with corner pressure. It’s a similar situation with the significantly restricted gatling system, too. You would only implement those restrictions if you want to lessen the number of decision points in pressure strings, and you would only want to do that if you think new players all stare at their controllers in abject horror at the thought of having to press more than two buttons in sequence.

We all have to start somewhere. If you want to be good at a fighting game, you have to learn how it works. Wanting to lessen that burden for new players is hardly a bad thing, to be sure, but if you want your game to actually be inviting to those new players, then you need to make sure that your game isn’t talking down to them. If you do things like restrict chain combos, or remove the corner, or make entire movement options nearly worthless in the name of making your game more “accessible”, I can only assume you think that new players are fucking stupid.

Take your players seriously. If the god damn Power Rangers fighting game can meet this bare minimum standard, so can you.