Tekken 8

[LikeAStone 2.0]

Harada would rather kill himself than try and patch Tekken 8 and I honestly respect that a lot

 

[ñññ]

RIP Tekken 9. RIP season 4. Enjoy T8 while the servers are up.

Isn't dead after 5?

Compretery ded!

 

[Paul-Denton]

I never bought T8, but I thoroughly enjoyed 7 and Harada was always great to see or hear from at a tournament. Same for Ono to be honest, though Ono didn't have the pure swag of Harada. I wonder if Itagaki's death influenced his decision at all.

 

[Tanner Glass]

No fighting game has been able to make this genre fun for casuals, and nobody is attempting to rectify that. So we are stuck in an endless cycle of dumbing down, more crutch mechanics, vain attempts to grab and hold the attention of none fighting game players (character customization for example), shit tutorials, bad onboarding and so on. Just so we get more people to buy a game and immediately drop it, and the remainder of the game's lifespan is spent to backpedal on all those decision because the players that are left didn't like those things to begin with.

I disagree - I think the entire genre has massively worsened for casuals and chasing esports was the cause.

I think that even at the "peak" of the FGC (SF3s, MVC2, SC2, Tekken 3, etc) that those games were much more casual friendly then the current generation and that the larger FC has been trying to layer on mechanics on top of mechanics in order to make the games "deeper" doesn't really change the dynamic of the games, hurts the player pool, and is less accessible and watchable as a result.

E-sports (and e-sports money) was like cocaine through a bad neighborhood and the price has been paid. Fighting Games are essentially dead and the community helped the games kill themselves. Tekken's future is up in the air, Street Fighter is fine (? I have no idea, 6 looks like garbage to me), Soul Calibur is dead, Mortal Kombat is super dead, Mvc is hyper dead, and most other games generally failed to launch (Granblue, DBZf, etc) and won't be the next big thing.

The only innovation the genre really has came from Nintendo (Smash) and the community largely hates it and doesn't consider it to be a real fighting game. The developer in turn hates the community so much they don't support them either.

There are a lot of very cool things video games have done over the years but a Fighting Game from 2000 and one in 2025 don't feel drastically different from one another (except the one in 2025 costs much more money and has 1-6 season passes). The fact that MVC2 and SF3S have to keep being brought into Evo should really tell these companies the general feeling about their games.

The second pro players started rocking up to tournies with these

should have been a huge wakeup call about the abilities of casuals to engage with the genre. Not only are the games harder to read and participate in, but now there's an optimal $250 controller too.

Fighting Games need a lot of changes to be viable and I don't think any company is going to want to invest in it conceptually. They need to start innovating instead of just adding more bloat and going "real players will tough it out" because they won't, it shouldn't be a chore to play a game.

 

[Problematic User Forever]

Did they ever get a Waffle House stage in?

 

[Billy the Adult]

I never bought T8, but I thoroughly enjoyed 7 and Harada was always great to see or hear from at a tournament. Same for Ono to be honest, though Ono didn't have the pure swag of Harada. I wonder if Itagaki's death influenced his decision at all.
View attachment 8263594

I wouldn't be surprised if it made him realize he's getting old.

should have been a huge wakeup call about the abilities of casuals to engage with the genre. Not only are the games harder to read and participate in, but now there's an optimal $250 controller too.

If anything, newer hitbox controllers have made competitive fighting games easier to afford, being around $70-100. Your talking about a genre that has people bring in arcade sticks, which cost plenty. Everything else seems fair enough. I don't know why so many fighters are out right now (Avatar, Tokon, 2XKO, Nen Impact, VF6, Invincible) with the genre being in the state it is, though.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I wouldn't be surprised if it made him realize he's getting old.

If anything, newer hitbox controllers have made competitive fighting games easier to afford, being around $70-100. Your talking about a genre that has people bring in arcade sticks, which cost plenty. Everything else seems fair enough. I don't know why so many fighters are out right now (Avatar, Tokon, 2XKO, Nen Impact, VF6, Invincible) with the genre being in the state it is, though.

An arcade stick has the same physical limitations as a standard controller (as in, one directional gate at a time) - which the Hitbox improves by having the directional gates as buttons instead.

Arcade sticks are fine (if that's your jam) but a hitbox is technically better, doubly so for charge characters or characters with complicated moves (like rekkas, full circles, double circles, special dashes, etc) in a genre that's already leaning harder into complicated and detailed execution year over year.

If your genre is leaning into precise and detailed execution to a point where your community builds an even more precise controller to deal with the precision requirements and represents an advantage over someone without one - it might be a sign that you're leaning too hard into precision and alienating chunks of your community as a result (which they did).

I'm just pointing out that a great way to alienate a potential audience is by introducing things like this (see also Music Games) which is part of the reason that Fighting Games are dying. I get why they exist and the problems that they solve, but their existence simply means that the Developers never actually solved the problems though things like "magic buttons", autocombos, "Modern Controls", etc.

 

[I Know 孤独のせい]

I disagree - I think the entire genre has massively worsened for casuals and chasing esports was the cause.

I think that even at the "peak" of the FGC (SF3s, MVC2, SC2, Tekken 3, etc) that those games were much more casual friendly then the current generation and that the larger FC has been trying to layer on mechanics on top of mechanics in order to make the games "deeper" doesn't really change the dynamic of the games, hurts the player pool, and is less accessible and watchable as a result.

E-sports (and e-sports money) was like cocaine through a bad neighborhood and the price has been paid. Fighting Games are essentially dead and the community helped the games kill themselves. Tekken's future is up in the air, Street Fighter is fine (? I have no idea, 6 looks like garbage to me), Soul Calibur is dead, Mortal Kombat is super dead, Mvc is hyper dead, and most other games generally failed to launch (Granblue, DBZf, etc) and won't be the next big thing.

The current state of the E-Sports scene for fighting games certainly is more or less the worst case scenario we could have got and unfortunately gotten, and I will agree that it is detrimental to fighting games as a whole. But I think you came to the wrong conclusion. E-Sports wasn't the catalyst for the downfall of fighting games but continues to be a compounding factor in the decline. It is most likely that the massive growth of the video games industry as a whole sent a ripple effect across every studio and genre, and fighting games didn't get spared. Publishers and investors came to the rational conclusion that they will earn more will more people buy into something. Which, in conjunction with the proliferation of the internet and a bigger emphasis on online, resulted in the current business model that all "live service" games follow. Which also lead into the eternal cycle of "hype" announcements at Evo for broken characters that Pros and Casuals will pick up to win, which in turns incentivizes for more of the same to be released. Not to mention the sales of stages, costumes and whatever bullshit some Mr moneybags can think of.

Again, I have to mostly disagree here. The peak of the FGC might have had fewer systems to worry about, but the execution was much higher and demanding. The parry from SF3 or the 1/2 frame links from SF4 made the games also less accessible as modern games and their billion systems.

Now, this might be a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, but a lot of modern mechanics were implemented for the casuals either as to "help" them or make watching the games more interesting. And with the constant growth of the E-Sports scene, just looking at sales and attendance, this resulted in a feedback loop which feeds itself. More people means more money, which incentivizes to keep adding mechanics, among other things to entice more people to buy into it.

I don't think they are dead, again, especially if you look at it from a financial standpoint, but I will agree that community and integrity were cast aside in pursuit of those big events and corporate takeover.

The only innovation the genre really has came from Nintendo (Smash) and the community largely hates it and doesn't consider it to be a real fighting game. The developer in turn hates the community so much they don't support them either.

I know that Nintendo wants nothing to do with the Smash community, but I have to ask what innovation do you mean that players rejected ?

There are a lot of very cool things video games have done over the years but a Fighting Game from 2000 and one in 2025 don't feel drastically different from one another (except the one in 2025 costs much more money and has 1-6 season passes). The fact that MVC2 and SF3S have to keep being brought into Evo should really tell these companies the general feeling about their games.

True, but most of the shitty things are developed throughout the past decade and especially AAA has been at a standstill for years now. The unfortunate monetization has infested most if not all corners, fighting games are not the bad exception. Celebrating the past is a good thing, I think you are a bit too grumpy here. Especially since a lot of the older games either get relegated to side tournaments and the big leagues like SF3 are the result of the still massive amount for veterans. I don't think this is an attempt to placate people, and it remains to be seen if those games will still be around in decades or will be replaced by something that massively influenced younger player DBFZ, for example.

The second pro players started rocking up to tournies with these

should have been a huge wakeup call about the abilities of casuals to engage with the genre. Not only are the games harder to read and participate in, but now there's an optimal $250 controller too.

I am a bit conflicted here. You are right, that leverless has an advantage, especially over stick. I have both and even though I prefer my arcade stick, leverless is better. But the difference comes to play in the higher echelons, if these things were a barrier to entry Evo and so on had lost a lot of attendance, but number are going up. And a lot of new and upcoming games are designed with controllers in mind, and leverless and stick with their button layouts are at a disadvantage.

Fighting Games need a lot of changes to be viable and I don't think any company is going to want to invest in it conceptually. They need to start innovating instead of just adding more bloat and going "real players will tough it out" because they won't, it shouldn't be a chore to play a game.

I would like to see a lot of changes, though we both will disagree in which direction fighting games should go. But innovation is difficult if not outright impossible, fighting games still need to remain fighting games at the core. And with most things in life, it is fundamentally something that requires a time investment and the ambition and perseverance to learn and become good at it.

 

[Tanner Glass]

It is most likely that the massive growth of the video games industry as a whole sent a ripple effect across every studio and genre, and fighting games didn't get spared. Publishers and investors came to the rational conclusion that they will earn more will more people buy into something. Which, in conjunction with the proliferation of the internet and a bigger emphasis on online, resulted in the current business model that all "live service" games follow. Which also lead into the eternal cycle of "hype" announcements at Evo for broken characters that Pros and Casuals will pick up to win, which in turns incentivizes for more of the same to be released. Not to mention the sales of stages, costumes and whatever bullshit some Mr moneybags can think of.

But most other genres are thriving in the same environment and now more then ever people are empowered to make their own games.

For all the talk of money - they don't generate that much money. We'll never know the real and true numbers, but it's very telling that something like DOTA can generate a $2,500,000 prize pool for their big tournament but Tekken at Evo is at the minimum $30,000. It's also telling that each Fighting Game have to come heavily monetized - from $$$ skins, stages, music tracks, characters, and multiple season passes.

One thing that I think would unironically help Fighting Games would be some level of a free-to-play model, because they clearly benefitted from a time where Video Game Rentals and Arcades were a low-risk option to try out new games and it's fairly obvious that as those went away, the genre suffered.

Again, I have to mostly disagree here. The peak of the FGC might have had fewer systems to worry about, but the execution was much higher and demanding. The parry from SF3 or the 1/2 frame links from SF4 made the games also less accessible as modern games and their billion systems.

SF3 and MVC2 have a certain amount of execution to them, but the actual gameplay systems are very (in a good way) barebones. You can explain very easily to someone what a SF3 parry is and why it's good (It's a better defensive option then blocking that's also higher risk) vs something like Drive Parry being designed in a specific way to force a specific playstyle and outcome (the game punishing you for blocking).

It's more about how much the systems get in the way of the actual game and how offputting they are the new players (and how not having new players is bad for the FGC).

I know that Nintendo wants nothing to do with the Smash community, but I have to ask what innovation do you mean that players rejected ?

Smash is ostensibly a fighting game but happens in a much larger space and doesn't (by default) have health bars, with the goal to control your opponent off the stage. It was the first massively popular "platform fighter" (that spawned it's own spinoffs and such) that was an evolution of the default fighting game format of 1v1 in a very tight and controlled space.

It was (imo) much more important that it was newbie friendly. Each character had like ~12 moves and they all controlled very similarly and had the same goal (ex - 4 special moves, 3 smash moves, and like 6 normals). It was a game you could literally give to a small child or disinterested girlfriend and they could learn it and have some fun with it.

 

[stonegalaxy]

Can we toss out Murray before Harada leaves? A man can only dream...

 

[SauceRyuKen]

Ah, man. Itagaki died, now Harada quits. I too worry about the state of S3. It seems like there's at least another year of TWT. Harada himself said that when a game underperforms, at Namco, they typically give it a ten year waiting period before trying a new release. I'm seriously thinking Tekken's on the chopping block now. Tekken 7 sold 3 million during it's first year. 8 has sold 2 million going into year 3, according to what data I found, though it might be wrong. I figure the cosmetics are making bank, but is it enough to keep the franchise alive?

Talk on the thread is dead on. Yes, the older games are ABSOLUTELY more casual friendly. Sure, the timing on some combos was a little tight, but you didn't have to practice just the combos for days, and you didn't get launched off of absolutely everything, using launchers was a serious risk that you couldn't go fishing with 24/7 unless you were a Mishima (Which is why they were so good) and playing like that would often get you absolutely dustbinned and laughed at by the rest of online dudes and dudettes.

It feels like Soulcalibur VI. Soulcal had all these bullshit changes to movement that made it REALLY DUMB to even try to move at all: Homing verticals, step counters, super high tracking on everything. Not to mention the myriad cutscenes. I think at some point Namco lost track of what made Tekken great. It was breakneck speed fighting, moving, evading, pretty much the closest thing to a real fight between super skilled fighters in videogame form. It wasn't realistic but it translated supremely well. The grounded approach and based on real life characters only cemented that. Not to mention it was undeniably cool.

Fortnite zoomers have told me that Tekken may have been a martial arts tournament in the past, but now it's just a fighting game. I think they're right, but also, it's terribly sad that we're literally just throwing hyper powerful anime archetypes into the mix and all they did was bring the fight level from the biggest brains on fighting games, piloting Jackie Chan fighting Chuck Norris, trying to outmaneuver one another down to 'tarded kids windmill punching at the schoolyard.

It makes pros look like idiots, and I feel like people in reddit and so would call me a raycees for saying this, but it's tailor-made for the pakis to play. Pakis don't even fucking KBD, let alone schmoove. Their most advanced guys can MAYBE ladderstep. Oh, simple solution: Just make movement completely irrelevant to the game.

Nowadays RANDOM LAUNCHER IN NEUTRAL LOL is literally meta. Which is how pakis prefer to play. And it makes the game boring as shit. Tekken 8 is the most similar to Tekken 1 and 2 in this regard: Get touched once, your ass is on the floor for ten years, and it guarantees followups for 50% HP at the least. Matter of fact your ass is up in the air now, getting juggled and watching a cutscene which is somehow even worse.

Really weird to essentially see fighting games die twice, but I guess that's where we're at now. Hopefully VF6 will be the martial arts tournament that hardcore players really want. Hell, I know that game's largely a casino, but at least it's built around being a casino from the ground up, you ain't evading shit with movement there, it's all a very layered RPS deal.

 

[Birthday Cat]

I disagree - I think the entire genre has massively worsened for casuals and chasing esports was the cause.

this shit, i can sperg about all day. no, not esports. majority of fighting games fundamentally are anti normie. the only fighting game series i've played that was normie approachable is soul calibur.

1., over 75% of the roster is easy to learn, any that aren't have a few easy combos that keep you competitive so long as you can block ok. there's some characters like astaroth (grappler) that just requires a chill teacher and someone willing to listen and you can make them feel like a complete god within 30 minutes. every other damn game it's "oh, ok you have .2s that, after you explicitly hit someone, you can enter a complicated input. soul calibur it's "ok this guy got countered and is stunned now for like a comfortable full .75-1s for you to combo in something". all the moves and combos also follow a pattern, every single character's diagonal y is some form of uppercut etc so you can be forced to random and not feel like a complete retard. 90%+ normie base does not have literally-on-speed reflexes to do the frame sensitive moves in tekken, not including the anime fighters where you have to have both the speed reflexes AND keep up with sprites flying at 900mph.

2., it had a character creation that fully covered the range from gooner to funny to cool etc. if someone hated the game they may still like the creation, if they lose like every match they may still get joy out of running around as "Epstein" slapping peoples asses etc. you can share creations with other people and easily make friends with different skill ranges. it also helps reduce the shit feeling from losing if someone uses a retarded looking mfer with a squeaky hammer etc. tekken has a baby ver of it, not the same. mk etc just have "give us 30 dollars for costumes from a game ago".

without making a REAL wall though, the other biggest issue is fighting game communities are the worst fucking thing on the planet. i've played every genre, i've played mobas etc, but one-on-one games, fighting games kind of in particular, is not indirect. it's not like you're on a team even on a moba, where someone can say you're a fuckin faggot shitter healer/dps/tank then have someone pop up "tf you on about you're fuckin trash leave the fkn jg" or whatever, it's just upwards of 10 minutes of one on one with some multiverse variant of low tier god. literally. everybody laughs at that motherfucker but damn near everybody is either him or like Darkviper au, Shift etc. so you have to practice, alone, reading this move bible, on just one character, for one move, for like 30 minutes to successfully pull off, and then you have to learn majority of your other moves to know how to pull off (if (x) happens, i can (a)(b) or (c)), and you have to remember all of that, you have to be able to pull it off during some form of permanent minor online delay and occasional variable major delay. if you get in on launch, you might have some fun, you might win some. after the first pop burst though, you're on a timer; as soon as the global pop starts compressing, you ought as well just fuck off, and will be told to do so by 900 hr kazuya user 34. very similar thing with rts; a new player just doesn't get to do anything, and is either cat toyed and/or insulted and humiliated, and then you just have a ring of people with 4000 hours going "gosh guys, i wish more people played. i guess the rts/fighting genre is just dying ;l" and then they'll turn around and do a frame perfect zerg rush and tell their vs what a pathetic faggot they are and precisely how meaningless their life is because they couldn't stop it, and that they're so shit they should do something else and fuck off

and then, surprise, they fucking do

 

[斯尼 德之王]

Harada is a manlet, hack.

Niggers and trannies ruined fighting games.

Maximillian Dood deserves to choke on soy.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

if you get in on launch, you might have some fun, you might win some. after the first pop burst though, you're on a timer; as soon as the global pop starts compressing, you ought as well just fuck off, and will be told to do so by 900 hr kazuya user 34. very similar thing with rts; a new player just doesn't get to do anything, and is either cat toyed and/or insulted and humiliated, and then you just have a ring of people with 4000 hours going "gosh guys, i wish more people played. i guess the rts/fighting genre is just dying ;l" and then they'll turn around and do a frame perfect zerg rush and tell their vs what a pathetic faggot they are and precisely how meaningless their life is because they couldn't stop it, and that they're so shit they should do something else and fuck off

and then, surprise, they fucking do

Couldn't have explained it better myself.

The worst part... even if this was brought up in a concise constructive way, you're just told to "git gud", as if that's the be-all end-all argument you can just handwave to anyone that has a legit complaint. That's not even getting into other bullshit like where pros will pretend to be noobs so they can get easy wins and purposely fuck with beginner/casuals that just want to have fun.

 

[ñññ]

if you get in on launch, you might have some fun, you might win some. after the first pop burst though, you're on a timer; as soon as the global pop starts compressing, you ought as well just fuck off, and will be told to do so by 900 hr kazuya user 34. very similar thing with rts; a new player just doesn't get to do anything, and is either cat toyed and/or insulted and humiliated, and then you just have a ring of people with 4000 hours going "gosh guys, i wish more people played. i guess the rts/fighting genre is just dying ;l"

Maybe I just play shitty toxic multiplayer games only, but isn't that the experience for every competitive game at some level? Sure, the amount of newbs to learn the game with as a newb gets shorter as time passes and players leave, but people that liked the game at any level (execution, combos, framedata, trolling, customization, blah blah blah) play the game either way and learn slowly, maybe more slowly than usual as Tekken is huge on knowledge checks. As far as the toxic attitude of experienced players towards newbs, it used to be common Internet wisdom to tell everyone to fuck off and just keep doing your thing, it's not like there's zero, newb friendly learning places and resources around.
FGs, Tekken more so than others, have always had learning curves: you enjoy the game in a carefree monkey way at first -> you choose to get better at it if you like it enough -> you get frustrated at first cuz nothing you do seems to work and everyone else bitches you around -> you get good slowly (could take years) if you choose to stay around -> you start to bitch around newbs. FGs (all FGs imo) are only fun-fun pick and play at first, everything else after that is too frustrating for most people, but definitely doable.

 

[Level99Manchild]

As much as I disliked Harada, I got a very bad feeling about season 3 (we're getting it, but I think it's gonna have more woke shit and worse monetization). Dei-Ogre is a red flag.

No fighting game has been able to make this genre fun for casuals, and nobody is attempting to rectify that. So we are stuck in an endless cycle of dumbing down, more crutch mechanics, vain attempts to grab and hold the attention of none fighting game players (character customization for example), shit tutorials, bad onboarding and so on. Just so we get more people to buy a game and immediately drop it, and the remainder of the game's lifespan is spent to backpedal on all those decision because the players that are left didn't like those things to begin with.

It's been like that since 2012 with SFxT being the first game to have content, and focus on competitive stuff.

I never bought T8, but I thoroughly enjoyed 7 and Harada was always great to see or hear from at a tournament. Same for Ono to be honest, though Ono didn't have the pure swag of Harada. I wonder if Itagaki's death influenced his decision at all.

I doubt he cared for Itagaki that much. I could be wrong, but I think it's more that Tekken is beyond fucked, and since Harada is the face of the series he willingly or unwillingly stepped down.

E-sports (and e-sports money) was like cocaine through a bad neighborhood and the price has been paid. Fighting Games are essentially dead and the community helped the games kill themselves. Tekken's future is up in the air, Street Fighter is fine (? I have no idea, 6 looks like garbage to me), Soul Calibur is dead, Mortal Kombat is super dead, Mvc is hyper dead, and most other games generally failed to launch (Granblue, DBZf, etc) and won't be the next big thing.

They're bitching about SF6, and now that they're trying to make people spend money to watch loop throws and a shitty meta, people are starting to criticize Blackrock Fighter 6. The meta is still shitty from what I'm hearing. Mainstream e-sports pretty much ruined fighting games with help from Max, Sonicfox, and Justin. 2xko might last in its little Riot circle, but out of fighting games, I doubt it. The game looks super shitty.

I don't know why so many fighters are out right now (Avatar, Tokon, 2XKO, Nen Impact, VF6, Invincible) with the genre being in the state it is, though.

Cash grabs and trying to milk the fgc cow before it dies from exhaustion and fatigue from illness (illnesses being slimy monetization, woke shit). 2xko has been in develpment for years.

It makes pros look like idiots, and I feel like people in reddit and so would call me a raycees for saying this, but it's tailor-made for the pakis to play. Pakis don't even fucking KBD, let alone schmoove. Their most advanced guys can MAYBE ladderstep. Oh, simple solution: Just make movement completely irrelevant to the game.

Nowadays RANDOM LAUNCHER IN NEUTRAL LOL is literally meta. Which is how pakis prefer to play. And it makes the game boring as shit. Tekken 8 is the most similar to Tekken 1 and 2 in this regard: Get touched once, your ass is on the floor for ten years, and it guarantees followups for 50% HP at the least. Matter of fact your ass is up in the air now, getting juggled and watching a cutscene which is somehow even worse.

If you think about it, it was made for Pakis and Jeets since 7. Didn't Arslan get big during 7? Most of the time you would hear about Knee, Anakin, Aris, or JDCR.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Maybe I just play shitty toxic multiplayer games only, but isn't that the experience for every competitive game at some level? Sure, the amount of newbs to learn the game with as a newb gets shorter as time passes and players leave, but people that liked the game at any level (execution, combos, framedata, trolling, customization, blah blah blah) play the game either way and learn slowly, maybe more slowly than usual as Tekken is huge on knowledge checks. As far as the toxic attitude of experienced players towards newbs, it used to be common Internet wisdom to tell everyone to fuck off and just keep doing your thing, it's not like there's zero, newb friendly learning places and resources around.
FGs, Tekken more so than others, have always had learning curves: you enjoy the game in a carefree monkey way at first -> you choose to get better at it if you like it enough -> you get frustrated at first cuz nothing you do seems to work and everyone else bitches you around -> you get good slowly (could take years) if you choose to stay around -> you start to bitch around newbs. FGs (all FGs imo) are only fun-fun pick and play at first, everything else after that is too frustrating for most people, but definitely doable.

The issue is largely that Fighting Games are unique that by being new/bad at the game - you actually get to play the game less then you normally would and it's less engaging as a result. There's a layer of expected learning that isn't tutorialized or even explained all that well that isn't present in other games. The skill gap between an actual new player, a FGC player new to a specific game/genre, and someone who is good at a game is massive and generally unsurmountable.

Even in toxic multiplayer games - you can understand 90% of what you need to know right from the start, doubly so for shooters (Team A, Team B - shoot each other) and get to participate in the game and learn as you play and are exposed to things. You can get some small wins vs a better player, but it's basically impossible in a fighting game - much more so in a modern one where being defensive/not knowing how to be offensive is already putting you at a disadvantage.

Going 6 kill / 14 deaths in a Call of Duty/Moba game still feels much better then getting perfected 10 times in a row in a fighting game and you come away from other games having learned something or done something.

if you get in on launch, you might have some fun, you might win some. after the first pop burst though, you're on a timer; as soon as the global pop starts compressing, you ought as well just fuck off, and will be told to do so by 900 hr kazuya user 34. very similar thing with rts; a new player just doesn't get to do anything, and is either cat toyed and/or insulted and humiliated, and then you just have a ring of people with 4000 hours going "gosh guys, i wish more people played. i guess the rts/fighting genre is just dying ;l" and then they'll turn around and do a frame perfect zerg rush and tell their vs what a pathetic faggot they are and precisely how meaningless their life is because they couldn't stop it, and that they're so shit they should do something else and fuck off

There's also the issue that even if you get in on the pop rush, Fighting Games are a fucking massive grind for some reason. The online rankings take a huge time investment even if you maintain a solid win rate for a long while and all for virtually no reward (plus the general lack of penalties for disconnecting and bad manners).

And once a meta forms/popular strategy emerges - get ready to see a whole fucking lot of it and it's not fun to play against, get ready to suffer.

this shit, i can sperg about all day. no, not esports. majority of fighting games fundamentally are anti normie. the only fighting game series i've played that was normie approachable is soul calibur.

also 3. It used to have a lot of actually fun single player content that you could casually play as you liked.

I think that most of the 2000s era Fighting Games were semi-approachable, but the Soul series was on a whole different higher level until Soul Calibur 3 (and then Lolcalibur 4).

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

The second pro players started rocking up to tournies with these

should have been a huge wakeup call about the abilities of casuals to engage with the genre. Not only are the games harder to read and participate in, but now there's an optimal $250 controller too.

At least it went from "pay $300 to have a dogshit fightstick someone told you was slightly better once you're 500 hours into it", to "$120 for a controller thatll immediately make you perform better".

 

[ñññ]

At least it went from "pay $300 to have a dogshit fightstick someone told you was slightly better once you're 500 hours into it", to "$120 for a controller thatll immediately make you perform better".

Unless you got a PS5 for whatever reason, DIYing a hitbox/mixbox won't cost more than 40$ at most (30$ for some basic Sanwas and 10$ for a Pico board) + whatever kind of box like thing you have at hand. Maybe throw in some extra 30$ for a PS5 dongle for the ocasional tourney but that's about it. Hitbox truly is the way to go for Mishimas as once you can reliably ewgf in neutral and punish -17ish with ewgfs you can mostly focus on the rest of the shit people throw at you. For most of the roster outside Mishimas a Hitbox is no better than a controller or boomer stick imo, hell, qcf, qcb or any kind of circle motion is 100 times more reliable to do on an arcade stick than a controller or hitbox.

 

[I Know 孤独のせい]

But most other genres are thriving in the same environment and now more then ever people are empowered to make their own games.

For all the talk of money - they don't generate that much money. We'll never know the real and true numbers, but it's very telling that something like DOTA can generate a $2,500,000 prize pool for their big tournament but Tekken at Evo is at the minimum $30,000. It's also telling that each Fighting Game have to come heavily monetized - from $$$ skins, stages, music tracks, characters, and multiple season passes.

One thing that I think would unironically help Fighting Games would be some level of a free-to-play model, because they clearly benefitted from a time where Video Game Rentals and Arcades were a low-risk option to try out new games and it's fairly obvious that as those went away, the genre suffered.

It's strange, isn't it. The money must be somewhere, otherwise the heavy monetization wouldn't be so prevalent and the corporate takeover wouldn't have happened to such a massive degree. I'm also going to go out on a limb and assume that Valve care more about its game and esport scene than any fighting game developer. Or, at least, to some extent, the revelation a couple of months ago that the staff working on SF6 had nothing to do with the esports division was quite interesting. Which might also explain to some extent the state of the scene.

We will see with 2XKO how a big F2P fighting game will perform. It certainly would make sense, we are getting squeezed for every penny already, might as well drop the initial price.

SF3 and MVC2 have a certain amount of execution to them, but the actual gameplay systems are very (in a good way) barebones. You can explain very easily to someone what a SF3 parry is and why it's good (It's a better defensive option then blocking that's also higher risk) vs something like Drive Parry being designed in a specific way to force a specific playstyle and outcome (the game punishing you for blocking).

It's more about how much the systems get in the way of the actual game and how offputting they are the new players (and how not having new players is bad for the FGC).

Sure fair enough. I can agree to a certain degree. Someone is implementing all that stuff for the new players. That at least that the justification. I think VF6 could be an interesting turning point. If they keep it really basic without succumbing to the "need" to throw stuff in there to attract new players, and the game becomes a massive success, we will have some real tangible evidence that every publisher and developer was wrong.

Smash is ostensibly a fighting game but happens in a much larger space and doesn't (by default) have health bars, with the goal to control your opponent off the stage. It was the first massively popular "platform fighter" (that spawned it's own spinoffs and such) that was an evolution of the default fighting game format of 1v1 in a very tight and controlled space.

It was (imo) much more important that it was newbie friendly. Each character had like ~12 moves and they all controlled very similarly and had the same goal (ex - 4 special moves, 3 smash moves, and like 6 normals). It was a game you could literally give to a small child or disinterested girlfriend and they could learn it and have some fun with it.

I see it rather as a subgenre than an innovation but okay. The problem I have here is that Smash never managed to become "the" fighting game esport. It could have established itself as an entry game and staple at major events for over two decades now. Not to mention the "lack " of influence on the genre. It might have spawned its own spinoffs, but the core idea of casual simplicity doesn't seem to have played a major role for fighting games. Of course, the Smash community has an awful reputation which probably scared off casuals and Nintendo, but if this was the gateway to fighting games the question is why it or its ideas never managed to be a major influence ? Too early to benefit from the massive scale of the FGC ? No arcade scene ? Nintendo exclusive ?