and it ultimately has all put a very strange idea into my head: if things like overpowered strategies, exploits, bad balance, bugs, etc. really are what make a fighting game "bad"... then the act of playing and learning a fighting game will, frequently, make it "worse"! - ThreadSky

armormodekeeg.bsky.social • 90 days ago

and it ultimately has all put a very strange idea into my head:

if things like overpowered strategies, exploits, bad balance, bugs, etc. really are what make a fighting game "bad"...

then the act of playing and learning a fighting game will, frequently, make it "worse"!

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midori-ryuu.bsky.social•90 days ago

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

playing fighters at a high level brings strange, edge-case interactions to the forefront. stuff that nobody thought to try becomes stuff you'll see in every tournament. if we players truly felt that every game needed to follow rules to be good, we'd have dropped so many games as we learned them.

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

so, clearly, we as a whole don't love fighting games just for their potential as perfectly fair & balanced competitive experiences, nor do we prioritize games doing "nothing wrong" over "something right".

what truly makes fighting games "good" is just such an odd thing to define. and that's neat.

armormodekeeg.bsky.social•90 days ago

thanks for reading my brain mush. go eat somethin' good it'll help

yeetkunedo.bsky.social•90 days ago

Fantastic thread.

I think we see this far more post-SF4 because I think circa 2008-2010 is when we saw developers begin to patch out anything remotely obscene, which reduced any and all need to adapt around obscenity, which then skewed the pH jank balance the FGC was growing tolerant to.

yeetkunedo.bsky.social•90 days ago

I also think “kusoge” in the modern lexicon is a spectrum range more than a hard-set threshold or definition. Something can be called kusoge because it’s adorably janky enough to count (Waku Waku 7), or awesomely broken enough to endure the cruel passage of time (Hokuto no Ken).

yeetkunedo.bsky.social•90 days ago

You can also have kusoge like Dino Rex, which is sheer unadulterated suffering that people play as a meme and nothing more. You can also have kusoge like Street Fighter: The Movie, which people long assume are a meme and nothing more, only for the cruel passage of time to travel in reverse for it.

jenalysis.bsky.social•90 days ago

We did. A good thing overall but led to this gen issues

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

I view this as true of all fighting games. Viable complexity and diversity of strategy is what makes a good fighting game, and every serious player is an optimizer trying to win more, to reduce the state space by making themself more likely to win. The game designer is in this way opposed to players

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

It's why I think it's a philosophical impossibility to design a "simplified" competitive game that's also enduringly competitively interesting. The combination of designed and emergent complexity is the only thing standing between the players and the game being "broken." You /need/ complexity

yeetkunedo.bsky.social•90 days ago

I disagree. We need depth.

We conflate complexity with depth far too often. One is a strong pathway to the other, no matter the direction you’re traveling in, but they are fundamentally different things in and of themselves.

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

I think people have some pretty weird definitions of "complexity", and it's likely that we mean the same thing here. Specifically, I operationally define viable strategic complexity as a measure of how many different approaches can work in a living competitive meta

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

However, this is dependent on the broader notion of complexity in the sense of "having many variables" exactly because every competitor acts as an optimizer whose function over time is to winnow the viable space of options in their favor

yeetkunedo.bsky.social•90 days ago

For instance, SoulCalibur 1 is simple.

Horizontal (A) stops sidestep walking.
Vertical (B) reaches laterally.
Kick (K) fires quickly at close range.
Guard (G) blocks damage.
Guard impact (6G) parries for advantage.
Throw (A+G / B+G) breaks standing guard, press same attack button to break (50/50).

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

Being able to explain something is sometimes a property of low complexity in the sense I'm talking about, but that's not the only route. A good model can make something with high emergent compexity like soul calibur 1 relatively digestible

yeetkunedo.bsky.social•90 days ago

The complexity shows up when you tie that to 8 way run and how you can use 3D movement to position yourself for offense, defense, or plain old spatial advantage. And even now, that game is an ocean.

grumace.bsky.social•90 days ago

I’m all over the place on this because yes a simple game can be near-endlessly deep, but the simplicity of its systems can also make that depth more apparent in ways more complex games don’t make as apparent but also the more systems a game has the more likely tuning is a problem and ruins the depth

digitalwatches.bsky.social•90 days ago

Yea, so the distinction you're referring to is what I'm calling "emergent" rather than "designed" or "explicit" complexity, and I think we're just using different terms and don't have any disagreement here

yeetkunedo.bsky.social•90 days ago

Meanwhile, we have UNI’s GRD system tied to its movement, its combo system, its metered tools, & funky button utilities, & that shit is…still an absolute ocean, lol. Some games nail depth via complexity in a fun an interesting way, but you also have to personally find labyrinthine things appealing.

justvine.bsky.social•90 days ago

I agree with a lot of what you have to say here but this is where my own philosophical understanding diverges. I think fundamentally what makes a kusoge is the lack of definition if it's core gameplay relative to the mechanics in it. This is what often leads to exploit and bad balance. (1/3)

justvine.bsky.social•90 days ago

There are many great games that have strong definitions for what their core gamplay that fall into kusoge because they either push that definition to an unblanceable extreme which narrows the gameplay loop at high levels of gameplay, or that 'missed something fundamental' when balancing (2/3)

justvine.bsky.social•90 days ago

Ultimately I think finding these types of exploits is more of a snapshot of the developing team. In an era of live service we have the blessing of 'fully baking' a game over time rather than leaving many gems half baked. The joy of discovering this stuff is what makes a true kusoge gamer.

jenalysis.bsky.social•90 days ago

This is surprisingly true. The games that do best against this are the ones that allow the most intacharacter expression

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