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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts.

Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.

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Fencing is the same way, especially foil. I personally find the lower levels of olympic play the most interesting, because by the time you get to the semifinals and finals, most of the competitors have surpassed human reaction speed. At that point, the game boils down to a lightning fast game of rock-paper-scissors.

Each fencer basically decides whether they're going to make a straight lunge, a parry-riposte, or a disengage-lunge. A straight attack loses to a parry, a parry loses to a disengage, a disengage will lose to a straight attach due to right-of-way.

> once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do

This reads a little like saying "you are competent at chess when you know all the moves the pieces can make"

In Chess, knowing your opponent's available moves might make the difference between an absolute beginner and a 300 rated player

Knowing some opening theory might make the difference between 300 rating and 1000 rating

But I don't know that I'd call a 300 rated player 'competent', or even say that they 'know how to play' versus 'know the rules of Chess'

It's consistency in knowing what are good options and what are likely choices that makes a competent/good/great player in any game (most fighting games are perfect information, too!)

No, it’s not like chess. Chess has much more entropy. Moves are made one at a time. There’s much, much more stateful considerations to the game.

In fighting games only a handful of options are particularly relevant at any time. often times characters’ entire thing revolve around one move, like a fireball. It’s not to say that spamming fireball is a viable strategy, but all decisions need to be made in the context of remembering that they have a fireball more than anything.

>often times characters’ entire thing revolve around one move, like a fireball

People absolutely hate when a character's entire thing revolves around one move. They're usually a low-tier character, and when they aren't low-tier they are just annoying to play against.

Only beginners tends to complain about that. It's usually extremely easy to deal with people who spam a single move.

one notable exception to this is the grappler archetype, where their 'close proximity command grab' is a massive tool which you always need to respect

the mere presence of the grappler causes a pressure on your decision-making process, since you always have to respect this option from them

but even here, the grappler has more tools than just 'grab you', they have an entire neutral kit still, as well as specials oriented around space control and 'trapping you' in the range where their grab is effective

You didn’t read what I wrote

This makes no sense. For one, a large component of real-time games is mechanics and execution. Also, the idea of being able to mindlessly "flowchart" a real-time game at a competitive level is absurd. It assumes a non-interactive opponent. If it was true there would be no such thing as yomi.

There are also a lot of other fundamental differences around resource management, opponent interaction, etc. They are only similar on the most basic level.

What level have you played card games and fighting games or another real-time game at?

Oh please. You can absolutely flow chart fighting games. That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics.

Yeah there’s niche dynamic considerations for making these combos work for slightly different distances and weights and heights and power meters and whatever. But for 99% of the player base you’re going to be best off learning a few bread and butter ideas and then executing on them without much variation.

> That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics.

You can flow chart combos, sure, but that's not the whole fighting game; most people who play fighting games competitively will tell you that knowledge of combo theory is maybe 20% of what makes you good at a game

The rest is a dance of turn-taking, knowing when you are in advantage or disadvantage state and behaving accordingly, and 'neutral' - your behavior during the times where you aren't performing a combo or being pressured by your opponent

Outside of advantage and disadvantage and neutral lies 'oki' - your behavior during the period where you have finished a combo, aimed at gaining advantage or at the very least, preventing disadvantage (by returning to neutral in a controlled form)

Samurai Showdown is an example of a fighting game with extremely limited combo/oki mechanics and a heavy emphasis on neutral play -- most characters have only 2 or 3 hit combos which anyone can perform and the entirety of the depth in its gameplay is inside 'neutral' - the spacing between characters, the choice of when to attack and when to defend, when to throw, when to parry, etc.

Blazblue is an example of a fighting game with an extremely deep combo system, every character has a unique archetype and mechanic, and combos can last tens of seconds, and set-ups to turn 'lost neutral' into 'lost neutral again' are abundant

The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Samurai Showdown can be like 5% of your life bar, meaning if you don't have 'good combos' then you might need to 'win neutral' 1 more time to win the match (compared to if you could perform good combos)

The difference between a good combo and bad combo in Blazblue is maybe 50% damage (2500 vs 4500) meaning you need to 'win neutral' maybe 3 more times than if you did a 'good combo' every time you 'won neutral'

> But for 99% of the player base you’re going to be best off learning a few bread and butter ideas and then executing on them without much variation

Yes, this is why it's not at all interesting to talk about things that apply to 99% of the playerbase. Because mindlessly spamming one thing really, really well is an effective strategy against the vast majority of the playerbase in any game.

If this is the level that you think about games at then yes, all games are very similar. The nuances in shape and feel of a game's meta are what make it different and interesting, but those only start coming into play at a pretty high level of competence relative to the rest of the playerbase. At least top 20%, probably more like top 5-10% or higher.

Shrug. Watch the finals of different game tourneys and see the best of the best and tell me it’s not bread dripping with butter still.

There are interesting edge cases that only the pros can make use of, but it’s still samey.

MtG, mentioned earlier, tournament play is very similar. Unless they're draft, they usually devolve into all the decks everyone knew about on Top8 several weeks before release. People can say there's very conscious strategy or tactics, except there's not. Because of the mass share, aggregate reviews, and mob think, it all homogenizes quickly each season.

4 of with 36 non-land, and 24 land in mid-range, means you're really only choosing 9 cards unless its a weird deck. Often the whole season devolves into something like "[Delver's the best/Sword Crow's the best/ect...], all other choices are failure." Hasbro doesn't really care unless sales go down. Hasbro's only motivation is selling cards. If humans buy, Hasbro sells.

Standard Draft still tends to devolve into most pursuing 1st strat, 2nd strat, ect... depending on what gets grabbed nearby.

EDH or Commander is usually viewed as the most variety, simply because there's far too many combinations with only 1 of each among 100.

You can flow chart chess games as well. It's just reductive to think that's all there is to it.

People absolutely flowchart fighting games at a high level. Combos are, unsurprisingly, completely non-interactive in most games, but there's also a term specifically for non-interactive offense: setplay https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Set%20Play

The goal of an optimal strategy in fighting games is generally to reduce the amount that you have to read your opponent as much as possible, ideally to zero. Obviously the developers don't want this to be fully possible, but players generally try to get as close as they can. Even at the highest levels, you can have rounds that go like: canned opening -> combo -> setplay -> combo -> setplay -> combo.

>once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts

This can be applied to any high-skill competition, basically - from FPS to F-1.

Inevitably true on some level. Although I think card games and FGC share a deeper similarity on the number of discrete steps that one player will plan to execute ahead of time as a sequence.

I’ve long imagined a fighting game where rather than combos, the receiving player has an array of defensive options that vary from trying to mitigate the damage, roll out, or seize the initiative back after each hit more like a kind fu cinema fight. Make the whole damn thing a constant mind gamr

You're imagining the Guilty Gear series, which gives you a variety of defensive options in the system - you can jump, double jump, or super jump to avoid something with different take-off timings, jump arcs, and speeds; you can block, instant block, or faultless defend to change the amount of chip damage, block stun, and pushback in an effort to throw off your opponent's timing; you can dead angle while blocking to try and recover initiative; you can backdash or throw out a move that's invulnerable on startup in an attempt to get your opponent to whiff.

Nah. Guilty Gear is cool but I mean fundamentally a fighting game with no hitstun.

That's not something unique to fighting games. That's the concept of playing the metagame.

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