DotoDoya Is Right About Fighting Games…

Let's go. Casuals don't like tag games. It's not true. Casuals don't like tag games until a tag game gives them what they want. That's all fighting games are. Just say you don't like it. Let's not bundle everybody else. Let's be honest. You might not like it, which is fine. lumping together that like a huge portion of the audience will never buy this because it's a tag game specifically is just untrue. Fighting games are have never become popular or sold specifically on mechanics. When I hear like the narrative that like tag games can never become popular because they're too complicated. They're asking you to play three characters, all that kind of [ __ ] But if the game has characters that people love and it looks great and they're doing really cool [ __ ] together, people won't give a [ __ ] There's a reason why like the MVC series back when it was at its like heyday became like really popular because it just had everything. It had all these characters, all this lovely stuff, all this insane [ __ ] that people just love. So, they just got into it. Dragon Ball Fighters was like a proof of concept of that that like, hey, if you just give people the game that they've always wanted, which is like a Capcom style Dragon Ball 2D game that isn't an arena fighter, and just have people go crazy with a ton of characters, even if you have to play three characters, people will buy the [ __ ] out of it. This came from a tweet that stemmed from Doto Doya. Generational talent dude gets it. Also like got into all this stuff right when Dragon Ball Fighters. He had a great tweet that I retweeted. A reminder that fighting games will never naturally be casually friendly. Change a million things about the game. Some better, some worse. Take out mechanics, lower the move set, make things easier, make things harder. The only sure way to make a fighting game grow with casuals is to make it so cool that they want to push through the pain. I'm telling you, chat, how many people do you think played Smash Brothers Ultimate online? Probably a lot. In fact, they invested probably a lot of their time and life into getting good at online Smash, right? Online Smash Brothers Ultimate is trash. Like, it's caked in nine frames of input delay. Plus, people dealt with it. Literally, YouTube careers out of going online in the [ __ ] ass online that is Smash Brothers. You know why? Cuz they love the game. Tekken 7 was also one of the most well-received Tekken games until the very end of it was absolute garbage online. People got what they wanted out of Tekken 7. They got Akuma and all these Tekken characters and they got Geese and they got Negan and all this [ __ ] I still don't understand that people were able to stomach the online of the game because it was awful. It was legit terrible. It's better if we have everything. It's better if we have good online, great characters, all that kind of [ __ ] right? But that those are literal examples of like this is bad. Like the online for this is bad. People are going ham on this [ __ ] They don't care. They love this [ __ ] so much that they're willing to put up with this garbage ass online. People are willing to put up with [ __ ] of funky mechanics of of even less content sometime in games of all this crap. People will justify it if it has the characters you love doing cool [ __ ] Doesn't matter, dude. Any game, if the game is like generationally, damn, I'm having a great time playing this, it doesn't matter. People will people will figure it out. Exactly what Doto is getting at here. We've had so many games that really try to completely re-evaluate the way the entire thing works. There have been some examples where this works. Like Guilty Gear Strive is a is a wonderful example of this. Like Guilty Gear found a completely new audience through Guilty Gear Strive that is almost I would say like 90 to 95% different than the people that enjoyed the franchise before because they made like a different game. But I just do not agree on any game's specific mechanics being the thing that brings you in. Mechanics and gameplay will keep people around. Honestly, is one of the biggest criticisms of 2X KO. A game that is like super mechanically dense and people are like, "Oh, it's the mechanics that people aren't getting into." [ __ ] the game had no characters. There's not enough roster for people to give a [ __ ] about. So, I had like a response to this and it just lines up with the stuff that I've been saying for quite a long time. If you simplify a game, you're making it a little bit easier for new players, but at the same point, you're making it astronomically easier for anybody else that is a veteran. What's the whole point of making fighting games more accessible specifically through gameplay mechanics? The idea is to even out the playing field of the player base so that the existing players or the people that have been doing this [ __ ] for a while don't have the massive leg up over brand new players. And maybe miss maybe, you know, we can we can even that player pool out now. It's a fallacy, dude. It's it's an insolvable problem to be like, "Okay, so we want to try to get new players away from existing players that are going to be naturally good at this. We're going to do that through gameplay specifically bringing things down or homogenizing the roster and all that kind of stuff like all the typical things we've seen over the past like 1015 years. It's a fallacy. It's an unsolvable problem. The only way we can do it is through like matchmaking and [ __ ] like that. There's an there's some ways you can tackle that. You're just making it way easier for highlevel players to effectively reach what is a meta to effectively get to a point where they are like, "Oh, so this is how the game is played. You just never get to play again." Cuz that's the goal of fighting game players is to remove every single option they possibly can from you. Again, we just make games that have really cool things, really fun stuff to do that's really sick. You see great characters doing really neat things together and then anybody at any level will justify playing it. Even if it has bad online and [ __ ] if you made a new Mortal Kombat right now and that [ __ ] had like all the characters you love and looked [ __ ] amazing and didn't have cameos and closer to MKX2 and but it had [ __ ] ass online, people would play it still and people wouldn't care if it didn't have good net code. Like if it had all these [ __ ] amazing characters doing all this really cool [ __ ] together, people would play it and it had all this content and stuff you could unlock for them and Barbie doll [ __ ] It wouldn't matter. People will justify if they like something. If something is that cool, people will justify a reason to love it and to keep playing it and to play more of it. In the case of Invincible Versus, like just as comparison here, yeah, there's a lot of really fun [ __ ] at low level that lets you just smash buttons and get cool things. I think a lot of fighting games should be designed that way, but at the same point, I found a lot of like interesting nuance to the top level where like, oh, people don't know how to actually play this. Like, we're still figuring it out. People literally will come in and tell you like games like Invincible Versus are about ABC launcher, ABC Super, and it's like there's no other things you can do. And it's like, yeah, at the beginning of the game that makes sense that you would think that way. That absolutely makes sense that you would be like, "Oh, there's actually not much I can do here until you start playing a little bit more and you watch other people playing it." Like, that's the whole point is that you have to evolve into this cool [ __ ] There's like a there's a reason for you to play it and get better, you know? You're not immediately doing all the cool [ __ ] within the first like hour or so. I think a lot of people found some really fun, crazy [ __ ] in Invincible, even though it's not like the most AAA game of all time ever. Um, it caused a lot of conversations that you're never going to get around people losing. People that are new to a game will lose. The only thing you can do is just make a game that's fun, that has cool characters that even if you're losing, you'll still have some resemblance of fun and people will stick around because they enjoy playing those characters so much. Do we realize how old the games are? Heat.