gamedesign.dev: Controls

So, I don't really play fighting games a lot. I do on occasion, but they require way too much technical fiddling with the system to eke out every last advantage in order to win, and the setting of the games is all but a placeholder for the gameplay itself. "But hey, that's the same thing you say about roguelikes, and you won't shut up about those!" Well, there's two key differences between roguelikes and fighting games. The first of these, and the one central to this post, is that of the controls for the game. Every game has controls to them, otherwise you can't interact with the game, and then it's not a game at all (it's Metal Gear Solid).

Ideally, the controls of a game should be simple and intuitive enough that the player never has to take a break from immersion in the gameplay to go "okay, what button is the one to cling to walls?" The more often a player has to do this, the less likely that they'll want to keep playing, especially if they have no easy recourse for learning the controls for what they are trying to do. In, for example, a simple platformer, you'll probably have one button dedicated to doing just that, and so figuring it out is a matter of mashing all the buttons at random until you get it right. The scientific approach, if you're in a light-hearted mood.

In a roguelike, which still has considerably difficult controls (especially with cases like NetHack, having a command for every letter on the keyboard and then some), you can usually access a help menu at any moment with the ? key, which is natural enough that even a player who doesn't know for sure how to get help can figure it out. Better yet, roguelikes don't have time pass at all until you make a move, meaning you're at little risk of simply trying things until one works (or reading the help menu).

Compare this with fighting games. These also have a help menu, more often than not, and you usually only have a few buttons to deal with, so these shouldn't be the source of much trouble, right? Well, that's where the second issue comes in. In fighting games, every split second you have is to be used to gaining or keeping the upper hand. There's a big difference between learning how to perform an action and doing so with no pressure, but doing so when you have someone else, presumably a competent player, bearing down on you ready to punish any mistake, you have very little opportunity to learn how something works.

But hey, that's what the tutorial or practice modes are for, right? You can pick a character and learn all of their moves without risk. Unfortunately, it's not always as easy as that. Take the iconic Street Fighter series, for example. If you ask someone what a Hadoken is, they can probably tell you just how to perform it. It's considerably more complex than a single button press, and even more complex than, say, timing two button presses together. The motion is something of a shift from down to forwards on the directional pad or joystick, with a button press at the end of this motion. This is not the kind of thing someone would discover by accident.

"But that's not a big deal, since the game tells you in the help menu how to do it, and you can practice it. Quit making a fuss!" There is a huge difference to performing that kind of motion in a practice room, and performing it, when you have to (and not any other time) while being pressured by another player. And this Hadoken motion is only the tip of the iceberg. The Shoryuken move has an incredibly similar way it is performed, but the two are used in drastically different situations, and using one in place of the other will pretty much guarantee you take a hit. Even outside of the Shoryuken, moves that are even less intuitive, like holding one direction for an extended amount of time, or the absolute nightmare that is Guile's Ultra Combo in Street Fighter IV, are not the kind of thing you can reasonably expect to perform under duress unless you invest a stupidly high amount of time into the game.

I guess you can claim that perfecting these moves is the hallmark of an accomplished fighting gamer, but like I said earlier, every moment you spend figuring out how to do a move is a moment where you are not immersed in the game. I might just have a drastically different opinion of immersion than your average fighting gamer. You could claim that mastering the way your character controls improves the immersion more, but I would simply have to agree and play a game where I don't need to worry about needless complexity to get that immersion.