Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer, and do not reflect Shoryuken.com as a whole.
We’re fighting game players. No matter the game we play, how skilled we are, or how much time we spend playing, one thing we all want is for more people to play our games. More money goes into the pot at our tournaments, more friends come with us when we travel to majors, and more people are supporting our favorite developers. I think at some point, we’ve probably all made an effort to get some of our friends into the games we love. Almost without fail however, a new player’s first try with a fighter ends up looking like a whole lot of mashing buttons and jumping around. That’s natural, and there’s nothing wrong with it–the problem is how many players fail to ever move past that stage, which is where a great tutorial comes in.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying it’s just up to developers to keep people engaged. Developers and players alike should be doing all they can to get people interested in their game. The players primarily do this by word-of-mouth: telling their friends, hosting and attending tournaments, and offering guides and other content to ease new players in. For the most part, players are doing their bit, with tournaments and tournament attendance seeing all-time highs.
But what does any of that matter if fighting game developers aren’t making games that new players want to play? Is the answer to make execution for special moves and combos more simple? Should the rules of our games be stripped down for the sake of more people being able to understand them? Maybe there’s merit to both of these approaches, but what if we didn’t have to take them? What if we taught new players how to play our games, as convoluted as they may be, within the games themselves?
I don’t mean to lump every fighting game together (games like Skullgirls and Killer Instinct offer thorough and helpful tutorials for players of all levels), but it’s pretty astounding how much work a player has to do on their own to learn how to play the game. Capcom had great success last-gen with Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but step back and imagine you’re playing them for the first time. You’re not part of the FGC, you didn’t buy a strategy guide, and all you have is an instruction book that explains the essential mechanics and a combo trial mode that asks you to perform some impractical links. I mean, in Marvel, characters like Frank West and Phoenix Wright are built entirely around unique mechanics that aren’t so much as mentioned in the game’s manual or in the game itself. Someone could spend hours playing as them without realizing they’re missing the entire point of these characters! Where do you even begin? If you don’t know anyone who plays locally, your only option is to play online.
Neither of these two games were known for having stellar netcode. That’s not to say you can’t improve by playing them online–you can learn a lot about things like hitbox properties and certain character match-up knowledge playing from your own home. Even so, you’re going to drop inputs, you’re going to get hit by things you swear you blocked, and a lot of the time you’re going to come away from games with no idea what you did to cost yourself the match. Playing against strangers on the internet is no way to teach a brand new player fundamentals. With SFIV or MvC3, you could only learn these skills if someone taught you. If someone has no real experience with a fighting game, no friends who can teach them how to play, and isn’t prepared to do hours of searching online and watching YouTube tutorials, they’re in for a rude awakening when they play a human opponent, offline or otherwise. And that rude awakening is often enough to get a player to give up.
Instruction manuals are becoming a thing of the past, so most developers are at least including some kind of basic rundown on the game’s mechanics these days. More often than not these are barebones and usually don’t teach a whole lot that the player couldn’t find out themselves just by trying each of the buttons. What’s more important is that we teach new players just how exactly these buttons should be used. It seems like common sense that a quick, short-ranged jab should be used up-close while a slow, long-ranged roundhouse should be used from a bit further back, but you have to remember just how many options we’re giving the players here to begin with. Taking 6 buttons with jumping and crouching variations plus throws, blocking, walking and dashing, jumping, ducking, special moves, EX moves, V-skills, V-reversals, V-triggers, and super moves all in at the same time is a lot, and Street Fighter V is considered one of the most accessible games in the series. I don’t think there’s any way to teach the most optimal way to use all of these techniques at once but, at the same time, we can’t keep letting developers get away with inadvertently leaving beginners in the dark every time a game comes out.
Look at Street Fighter’s anti-airs, for example. It’s not a difficult concept at all–most characters have a move or two designed to hit their opponent out of the air, deterring them from blindly jumping at them the whole match. Even basic footsies aren’t hard to teach a new player as long as something in your game is there to tell them “you put yourself at the least risk by using your slower moves from as far away as you can.” These are two very simple concepts that anyone who picks up the controller should be taught, but instead they have come to separate the beginners from the more seasoned players. You’ve got players thinking “my sweep knocks the other guy down, so I should use that whenever he’s standing up” or “jumping around the stage is the fastest way to get around, so I should do that when I want to move” and they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong simply because no one ever tells them. The community has done so much to cultivate a new generation of players, but we could easily bring in even more just by encouraging developers to implement some basic pointers to get beginners started. I’m not talking strategy guide levels of depth or comprehensive lists of frame data–just tell them things like “these moves leave you wide-open if they’re blocked” or “you can’t block any attacks when you’re in the air”.
One of my biggest disappointments with Street Fighter V came with the Demonstrations mode patch, which was said to come with character-specific guides. Imagine how helpful having that knowledge in-game would be–not necessarily the most advanced tactics, but what that character’s best pokes are, some basic combos, or what options they have to move around the screen. Instead, these demonstrations give rudimentary explanations of a few of each characters’ special moves and a couple of sentences explaining their V-skills and V-triggers. One of my worst habits when I was first trying to get into fighting games–and one that I see countless newcomers repeat–is being tricked into thinking “my special moves require precise inputs and do more damage than my normal attacks, so they’re the attacks I should be using the most.” This is obviously incorrect, but in the early ranks of SFV online you’ll see people thinking that their hurricane kick is a good way to travel across the stage, their Shoryuken is their strongest option to wake up with, and that they should have a fireball on-screen at all times. Having your only character-specific in-game guides mention nothing but these attacks is a huge mistake, and I can’t see them doing anything but enforcing more bad habits on new players. I was especially disappointed since Capcom’s Street Fighter YouTube channel has been putting out these fantastic little character guides since the game’s launch. Just including these videos in the game itself would do a lot more to encourage beginners to do more thinking about what attacks they’re using.
The phenomenal thing about including more thorough tutorials is it’s a win-win. If you’re content with mashing buttons, cool, you do you. If you already know what you’re doing, awesome, see ya online. But if you’re a new player who really wants to learn how to beat his friends at Street Fighter, being told “this attack beats jump-ins, try to keep your opponent in the corner, waking up with your shoryuken is a big risk” makes all the difference. Naturally players are going to find more tech, learn more optimal combos, and generally evolve the game (it might have been a little bit unreasonable to have expected vanilla MvC3 to ship with a tutorial on how to pull off Morrigan/Dr. Doom’s bullet hell), so these tutorials wouldn’t be all a player would need to become the next Justin Wong. But that isn’t what these tutorials would be there to do. Just having a mode available that teaches them some fundamental skills, for their character or for the game in general, could make all the difference between a player staying invested or trading it in to GameStop for something easier to understand.
Sources: Street Fighter