Harada needs to be brave and introduce

skyrax posted...

Azuma_NarooN posted...

I also don't see why people always say that juggle damage has been scaled down over time. Well...thanks for stating the obvious. The only reason the lifebars were slightly increased, and why juggle damage was scaled down in Tag 2, is because of the fact that it's usually 2v2, and they want you to do Tag combos more often to maximize your damage output. That's just common sense really, and I find it redundant for people to point it out continuously. Just my 2 cents there, lol.

People keep talking about the incredible damage that juggles do, and how 2 juggles end a match or something along those lines. Because of scaled down damage that is almost never the case.

Maximizing damage output seems to run counter to giving people more health to withstand damage. If anything, they'd scale up damage for juggles and just make people fall faster. More damage, less hits.

More damage, less hits = Less combo creativity = Going backwards from what the series has been evolving to. Every game is going for more compex combos, that give more freedom and are more diverse and varied. See UMVC3, Blazblue, Mortal Kombat 9, KOFXIII etc. These games all have long and varied combos.

Soul Calibur, Virtua Fighter and Dead or Alive are all still like old school Tekken, where there are fewer hits and more damage in combos. Yet, Tekken is a more popular fighting game in the fighting game community than any of these other 3D games.

So, really, why would Tekken wanna do it? Because casual console players or online players want to have more fun while messing around with the game before throwing it out and playing the next new thing? Namco Bandai have their eyes on the Arcade scene, and they put in the game what Arcade players want. Arcade players like flashy combos, they like impressing their opponent and their viewers with skillful execution, expectators find it hype when someone actually manages to pull off awesome combos that use tag buffered launchers, walls, balcony breaks, tag assault all at the same time.

No one wants to see just players trading pokes and evading stuff or doing 5 hit combos most. That's exactly why Virtua Fighter, which is an incredibly technical game, doesn't get that much love from viewers... because people find it boring to watch. Western players who are spoonfed on Capcom games also find anything non-capcom or 3D boring to watch, but anyone else would find Tekken, and especially TTT2, a much more hype game to watch than any of the other 3D fighting games, just because of the variety, the longer combos, the tag stuff, the stage stuff etc. And that's why Tekken is such a huge success on asian arcades... because people look at it, they see the enormous roster and all the flashy stuff, pro players destroying other players hitting them non-stop in combos... it's very attractive,

New players start playing the game with the hopes of doing that absurd combo they saw someone do in the Arcades the other day. They want to have that superhuman feeling of power. Most new players, at least the ones which are drawn by the competitive aspect of the game (which is what happens for most arcade gamers), learn juggles before they learn any other fundamental of the game. They don't know anything about spacing or movement at the beginning, they just wanna land that devastating combo they've learned. It's a sort of knowledge that feels very empowering, but is actually easy to acquire without a lot of "experience".

At the beginning it feels like a shortcut to victory, but soon enough, they realize it's not reliable to depend that much on launchers, especially when someone win "out-fundamenting" them. So, believe it or not, the focus on combos in fighting games actually draw new players, or at least new players with the drive to win (which are the ones that are here to stay).

Marvel nowadays is one of the, if not THE most popular fighting game in the west when it comes to the western competitive scene. What's the recipe for success? Balance? Short combos? Fundamentals? Wrong.

It's the illusion of power that draws players into Marvel. Every character feels overpowered in one way or another, there is a lot of bulls**t everywhere: touch of death combos, x-factor, loops... people initially look at the game, and they think: "hey, everyone is playing this, and there is that death combo... so all I gotta do is learn the combo, play the high tier characters and I'll win!"

People like things that look like shortcuts for wins. But there's no shortcut for victory in any fighting game. They're just illusions, but they help getting players eager to win into the game. The mindset of "Learning and practicing a godlike combo = victory" feels comforting to new players... at least more comforting than the thought of having to actually play more and get more experience than someone who is already playing the game for years in order to win.

The reason why many players outside of the competitive circle don't get such mechanics, is because they play for different reasons. They got into the game for what they call "fun". They have notions of what the game should and shouldn't be in order to be more fun.

Most competitive gamers already have a estabilished mindset that "fun = winning". Some, already more evolved in that regard, see it as "fun = winning AND learning (aka getting better at winning by losing)". Everything surrounds the win. Everything else is just a means to getting to the win.

As an Arcade game, Tekken is aimed at that competitive mindset, and what people with that competitive mindset have to say about how the game should be. That's also why the games are so conservative when it comes to changes: people that are already winning because they have acquired experience don't want their experience to go to waste. Knowledge involed in gaming is, for the most part, arbitrary, and only serves the purpose of playing that game. The time you spend into mastering backdash cancel is only helpful for, well, playing Tekken and doing backdash cancel. The effort you put into that is good for nothing else. If they just remove such mechanic, that's a profound disrespect for competitive players, who put their time and effort into mastering a technique that is part of the series since... ever.

Juggles and bound, as they are right now, are the same thing. Sure, one thing is to change the optimal combos for each character, but throwing away the bound system, for example, means throwing away a lot of effort and experience on the part of players dedicated to that game. When the series first introduced the bound system, it was a NEW THING, that was ADDED ON TOP OF EXISTING FEATURES. If you were already good at juggling without bound, all you had to do was implement bounds on top of your prior knowledge, not just throw it away. Same with Tag Assault, for example.

The same applies for characters, and why they are not removed for the most part (and when they are, they usually come back). Investing a lot of time and effort into learning a character only to have it removed from the game is very frustrating for experienced players. It's just a lot of time of your life being turned completely pointless. If, for example, they remove a clone, it's not that big of a deal, because you can still play with its clone and most of your experience still applies and is helpful. But not if you have to play a completely different character.

In that regard, even though juggle breaker is a bad idea, it's still better than removing bound, or toning down the juggles, because at least it's a mechanic on top of existing mechanics, not just cutting things that are already in the game, and making the knowledge and experience related to them pointless.

236P posted...

Juggles are fine in theory, the risk reward is about balanced out, slightly in favour of launch spam. My only objections are:

- They take way too damn long
- The wall carry can be silly

I think more of the typical launchers (like df2 or hopkick) should just result in a knockback leading to a quick simple 2 hit combo for like 60 damage.

If they just did that, such launchers would be beyond pointless. Most characters have NCs or even single hit moves that deal almost 60 and come out sometimes even faster than hopkick or generic df+2, and have better range. Why risk throwing out something that is punishable, only hits at point blank range, is linear and sidestepable etc... if you can only get 60 damage with it at most? There are better options.

Unless you nerf everything else, until the point at which people will only jab each other to death.