Zi^
Smash Cadet
This is the second time that I say it, but I'm really sorry for you.
:C
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Discussing game design: Things I learned from Project M 24/03/2016 update
- Thread starter Vigilante
- Start date
:C
Zi^
Smash Cadet
Happy to know that you appreciate it c:Thanks, I appreciate it
A defense for offense.
Whenever I hear friends of mine talk about League of Legends, they often come to me stating that a given match had “frustrated” them.. When I ask them to elaborate on the matter, they most often respond something along the lines of: “It was dragging on forever”. Either they were losing badly and on a long but futile struggle to make a comeback, or they were winning, but the enemy simply refused to relent and pushed back against their inevitable demise. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I feel that this particular feeling that the players were having is a very important consideration for game design.
If I compare League of Legends (yes, I will eventually tie this to Smash) to Heroes of the Storm, both play similarly at a very basic level, yet I rarely hear complaints about games being a drag for the later. Now, this is not a jab at League of Legends. It is a very deep game with great mechanics, but Heroes of the Storm matches on average takes less time to finish. A League of Legends game take son average above 30 minutes, whereas Heroes of the Storm matches take around 21 minutes depending on the stage. It’s around a 10-12 minutes difference. Why is it that people complain much more about the length of League but not for Heroes?
The length of a match in a competitive game is a very important consideration that is inherently tied to the player’s enjoyment of the experience. As much as losing can still be a fun experience, most people prefer winning to losing. In games that drag on, the losing party will experience struggle for an extended period, which in turn may let frustration build up over time. In their experience playing League of Legends (which they enjoy apart from that), my friend described it best: “I felt as if I was trying to climb out of a hole while someone kept grabbing my leg and pulling me back in”. An analogue situation can often be seen in Smash titles. Most of the experiences that people describe as being frustrating and with a hint of sodium chloride are those that deliver slow, grueling defeats. At times, those situations have the victims feel like they have no control over the situation. Chains grabs are commonly mentioned because it allows the user to slowly rack up considerable amounts of damage on their opponent while the victim may be virtually powerless to escape this situation. The player is trapped in a losing position with no sense of agency. Because it takes a while, frustration builds up. The same can be said about the experience of being camped by projectiles. The player’s progress is impeded; the damage meter is slowly rising. In many cases, characters don’t have many options available to them except a slow, careful approach where they might get hit a few times.
On the other hand, the winning party of a match that drags on may also be affected by the slow pace of the game. Early on in Project M’s development cycle, the team kept receiving complaints that many characters could recover from unreasonably long distances and kept coming back over and over again. That is because going from a dominant position into a kill was often too lengthy as a process. Whenever Brawl just released and I tried to get into it for a year, I would often find myself shouting “Why won’t you die, already!?”. In those scenarios, I was winning, yet I was the most frustrated party. If felt as if I was trying to finish off a crawling zombie but couldn’t quite hit it hard enough to break its skull. The experience was much more tedious. Those victories felt very hollow. I was too annoyed to celebrate them. Whenever changes were made to characters in Project M to neuter some of the more potent recoveries, we faced many complaints initially, because nerfs always receive complaints, but in the end, the complaints we used to receive about the matches dragging on went down significantly. In fact, the characters we’ve received the most complaints about were characters that extended the length of matches one way or the other. Early versions of Pit were a shining example of a character that could play keep-away with his arrows of light and recover from a very long distance with his glide. Early versions of Zelda were often criticized for her more defensive combat style, with a common example being how Nayru’s love provided too much invincibility. Characters like Wario and Jigglypuff who have a lot of aerial mobility can use hit-and-run tactics, which annoy some people at times depending on the player’s style of play. Those are only a few examples of issues that came up, especially earlier in the development cycle.
In all events, there are many ways to make matches shorter and sweeter. Guilty Gear for example has many examples of mechanics that encourage quicker and sweeter matches. On one hand, while you guard against attacks, you still take chip damage from it. You therefore cannot be stuck in a situation where one player is wailing at his foe and no progress is being done due to no damage being dished out on either side. While it is possible to achieve a perfect guard, it is very difficult and its function is to give an opportunity to strike back and go back into an offensive combat stance. Anything below a perfect guard punished the player with a slight loss of their precious health. Furthermore, if you spend too much time being passive, the game inflicts you with a tension debuff, as if to coax you into making a move. These mechanics contribute to making a defensive position undesirable. You don’t defend because you want to. You defend because that is all you could do at the moment. Of course, high level players deliberately guard, but they would much rather be attacking.
Guilty Gear characters have very deliberate health limits and damage outputs. No character, even Potemkin, has so much health that is become a significant hurdle to take them down. It you dominate a Potemkin player, you will easily defeat it well within the allotted time limit. Quick characters that do little damage like Chipp Zanuff make up for that low damage input by being able to link impressive combo strings. He has low health due to being harder to hit than other characters. Similarly, Ragna from Blazblue can drain the health of his enemies, but he is a bit on the frail side to compensate. Tager is a slow-moving tank, but he can use magnetism to force characters who may be tempted to zone him out to get closer. In fact, the clock on top of the screen serves the function to stop a drawn-out match before it becomes too bothersome on the players. These design decisions positively affect the game’s pacing.
In Smash, the more offense-oriented game sin the series allow dominant players to deliver swift, but satisfying combos. One can quickly go form a combo starter to a kill. For this particular kind of flow to be possible, just as with the health in traditional fighters, smash characters must be able to be killed at a fairly early percentage. For the losing party, characters getting KOed early means that stocks in which they are being thoroughly beaten will end quicker, and the start of a new set will somewhat put the fighters in a more neutral position much quicker. In traditional fighters, burst attacks that knock foes away from you (and usually limited to only once in a set) are also a means to reset everything to a more neutral dominance status. Your respawn is your “burst attack”, with the only difference that you cannot control when it comes out. Furthermore, having more movement options like wavedashing can (but not always) mitigate the effects of keep-away tactics.
Just like in traditional fighters like Guilty Gear, defense needs to be limited. While in traditional fighters, you take chip damage from guarding, in Smash, you do not. However, your shield gets damaged and if it takes too much of it, it will break. It regenerates over time, but a well-balanced shield recharges slowly enough so that when you are being pressured, you will eventually be forced to stop using it or pay the consequences. In other words, the fear of your shield breaking on you would be the detractor that prevents you from using it too much. Another important limit that would be rather important is dodging. In some Smash games, you can air-dodge indefinitely and rolling / sidestepping is very potent. The negative effect of that is that you might spend some time in a fight where no one is actually trying to fight because it is simply more advantageous to let the other make the first move. In such an ecosystem, it stands to reason that if waiting for the other to approach is the optimal strategy, those with ways to force enemies to approach (such as projectiles) will be encouraged to spam them repeatedly.
Furthermore, projectiles must be carefully balanced. In Smash, and most other fighters, projectiles are not supposed to be something you can throw out at random. It’s supposed to be something that it used to complement you fighting style. Your enemy is off stage and you use Sheik’s needles to prevent their recovery. You want to approach a shield-happy player, you shoot a fire ball to make him either shield it or try to avoid it. You shoot Fox’s laser to get a few extra percents off the enemy, but quickly switch to melee combat when it dashes at you. Most of it is fairly elementary to understand at a basic level. Fox’s laser does not and should never stun. It is far too quick. Link’s boomerang can be thrown at many angles and stays out there for a while, so it would be a balance disaster if he could throw another before the one he threw came back to him. He could create a wall of boomerangs.
Limiting recoveries is likely the most important consideration in this case. If people can recover from far away, then they can survive a lot of abuse. In martial arts terms, being off stage is like being prone. You are overpowered, and you therefore need to work much harder to overcome that struggle. Coming back should not be easy and the recovery game should be weighted in favour of the person who is guarding the edge. Not only is it fair, it speeds up matches considerably. I find that early in development, people often mentioned that the recoveries being too good was a prime factor why certain people believed that Melee was more fun for them. When I look back, I feel that this was a fairly valid reason. However, with the latest builds, this has mostly become a non-issue.
It becomes clear to me that having moderated the recoveries of characters and focused more on offensive options in later builds of Project M was in many instances, a good choice. I never thought that I could link League of Legends to Super Smash Bros., what a day.
---
---
A little news on the brother front:
The doctors found that the tumour is attached to the skull, but not the brain like they first thought. That means they can safely try chemotherapy. Now, it doesn't mean he's out of the woodworks, but he's got a chance. He's reacting the chemotherapy well. Here's hoping it continues to go well.
Whenever I hear friends of mine talk about League of Legends, they often come to me stating that a given match had “frustrated” them.. When I ask them to elaborate on the matter, they most often respond something along the lines of: “It was dragging on forever”. Either they were losing badly and on a long but futile struggle to make a comeback, or they were winning, but the enemy simply refused to relent and pushed back against their inevitable demise. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I feel that this particular feeling that the players were having is a very important consideration for game design.
If I compare League of Legends (yes, I will eventually tie this to Smash) to Heroes of the Storm, both play similarly at a very basic level, yet I rarely hear complaints about games being a drag for the later. Now, this is not a jab at League of Legends. It is a very deep game with great mechanics, but Heroes of the Storm matches on average takes less time to finish. A League of Legends game take son average above 30 minutes, whereas Heroes of the Storm matches take around 21 minutes depending on the stage. It’s around a 10-12 minutes difference. Why is it that people complain much more about the length of League but not for Heroes?
The length of a match in a competitive game is a very important consideration that is inherently tied to the player’s enjoyment of the experience. As much as losing can still be a fun experience, most people prefer winning to losing. In games that drag on, the losing party will experience struggle for an extended period, which in turn may let frustration build up over time. In their experience playing League of Legends (which they enjoy apart from that), my friend described it best: “I felt as if I was trying to climb out of a hole while someone kept grabbing my leg and pulling me back in”. An analogue situation can often be seen in Smash titles. Most of the experiences that people describe as being frustrating and with a hint of sodium chloride are those that deliver slow, grueling defeats. At times, those situations have the victims feel like they have no control over the situation. Chains grabs are commonly mentioned because it allows the user to slowly rack up considerable amounts of damage on their opponent while the victim may be virtually powerless to escape this situation. The player is trapped in a losing position with no sense of agency. Because it takes a while, frustration builds up. The same can be said about the experience of being camped by projectiles. The player’s progress is impeded; the damage meter is slowly rising. In many cases, characters don’t have many options available to them except a slow, careful approach where they might get hit a few times.
On the other hand, the winning party of a match that drags on may also be affected by the slow pace of the game. Early on in Project M’s development cycle, the team kept receiving complaints that many characters could recover from unreasonably long distances and kept coming back over and over again. That is because going from a dominant position into a kill was often too lengthy as a process. Whenever Brawl just released and I tried to get into it for a year, I would often find myself shouting “Why won’t you die, already!?”. In those scenarios, I was winning, yet I was the most frustrated party. If felt as if I was trying to finish off a crawling zombie but couldn’t quite hit it hard enough to break its skull. The experience was much more tedious. Those victories felt very hollow. I was too annoyed to celebrate them. Whenever changes were made to characters in Project M to neuter some of the more potent recoveries, we faced many complaints initially, because nerfs always receive complaints, but in the end, the complaints we used to receive about the matches dragging on went down significantly. In fact, the characters we’ve received the most complaints about were characters that extended the length of matches one way or the other. Early versions of Pit were a shining example of a character that could play keep-away with his arrows of light and recover from a very long distance with his glide. Early versions of Zelda were often criticized for her more defensive combat style, with a common example being how Nayru’s love provided too much invincibility. Characters like Wario and Jigglypuff who have a lot of aerial mobility can use hit-and-run tactics, which annoy some people at times depending on the player’s style of play. Those are only a few examples of issues that came up, especially earlier in the development cycle.
In all events, there are many ways to make matches shorter and sweeter. Guilty Gear for example has many examples of mechanics that encourage quicker and sweeter matches. On one hand, while you guard against attacks, you still take chip damage from it. You therefore cannot be stuck in a situation where one player is wailing at his foe and no progress is being done due to no damage being dished out on either side. While it is possible to achieve a perfect guard, it is very difficult and its function is to give an opportunity to strike back and go back into an offensive combat stance. Anything below a perfect guard punished the player with a slight loss of their precious health. Furthermore, if you spend too much time being passive, the game inflicts you with a tension debuff, as if to coax you into making a move. These mechanics contribute to making a defensive position undesirable. You don’t defend because you want to. You defend because that is all you could do at the moment. Of course, high level players deliberately guard, but they would much rather be attacking.
Guilty Gear characters have very deliberate health limits and damage outputs. No character, even Potemkin, has so much health that is become a significant hurdle to take them down. It you dominate a Potemkin player, you will easily defeat it well within the allotted time limit. Quick characters that do little damage like Chipp Zanuff make up for that low damage input by being able to link impressive combo strings. He has low health due to being harder to hit than other characters. Similarly, Ragna from Blazblue can drain the health of his enemies, but he is a bit on the frail side to compensate. Tager is a slow-moving tank, but he can use magnetism to force characters who may be tempted to zone him out to get closer. In fact, the clock on top of the screen serves the function to stop a drawn-out match before it becomes too bothersome on the players. These design decisions positively affect the game’s pacing.
In Smash, the more offense-oriented game sin the series allow dominant players to deliver swift, but satisfying combos. One can quickly go form a combo starter to a kill. For this particular kind of flow to be possible, just as with the health in traditional fighters, smash characters must be able to be killed at a fairly early percentage. For the losing party, characters getting KOed early means that stocks in which they are being thoroughly beaten will end quicker, and the start of a new set will somewhat put the fighters in a more neutral position much quicker. In traditional fighters, burst attacks that knock foes away from you (and usually limited to only once in a set) are also a means to reset everything to a more neutral dominance status. Your respawn is your “burst attack”, with the only difference that you cannot control when it comes out. Furthermore, having more movement options like wavedashing can (but not always) mitigate the effects of keep-away tactics.
Just like in traditional fighters like Guilty Gear, defense needs to be limited. While in traditional fighters, you take chip damage from guarding, in Smash, you do not. However, your shield gets damaged and if it takes too much of it, it will break. It regenerates over time, but a well-balanced shield recharges slowly enough so that when you are being pressured, you will eventually be forced to stop using it or pay the consequences. In other words, the fear of your shield breaking on you would be the detractor that prevents you from using it too much. Another important limit that would be rather important is dodging. In some Smash games, you can air-dodge indefinitely and rolling / sidestepping is very potent. The negative effect of that is that you might spend some time in a fight where no one is actually trying to fight because it is simply more advantageous to let the other make the first move. In such an ecosystem, it stands to reason that if waiting for the other to approach is the optimal strategy, those with ways to force enemies to approach (such as projectiles) will be encouraged to spam them repeatedly.
Furthermore, projectiles must be carefully balanced. In Smash, and most other fighters, projectiles are not supposed to be something you can throw out at random. It’s supposed to be something that it used to complement you fighting style. Your enemy is off stage and you use Sheik’s needles to prevent their recovery. You want to approach a shield-happy player, you shoot a fire ball to make him either shield it or try to avoid it. You shoot Fox’s laser to get a few extra percents off the enemy, but quickly switch to melee combat when it dashes at you. Most of it is fairly elementary to understand at a basic level. Fox’s laser does not and should never stun. It is far too quick. Link’s boomerang can be thrown at many angles and stays out there for a while, so it would be a balance disaster if he could throw another before the one he threw came back to him. He could create a wall of boomerangs.
Limiting recoveries is likely the most important consideration in this case. If people can recover from far away, then they can survive a lot of abuse. In martial arts terms, being off stage is like being prone. You are overpowered, and you therefore need to work much harder to overcome that struggle. Coming back should not be easy and the recovery game should be weighted in favour of the person who is guarding the edge. Not only is it fair, it speeds up matches considerably. I find that early in development, people often mentioned that the recoveries being too good was a prime factor why certain people believed that Melee was more fun for them. When I look back, I feel that this was a fairly valid reason. However, with the latest builds, this has mostly become a non-issue.
It becomes clear to me that having moderated the recoveries of characters and focused more on offensive options in later builds of Project M was in many instances, a good choice. I never thought that I could link League of Legends to Super Smash Bros., what a day.
---
---
A little news on the brother front:
The doctors found that the tumour is attached to the skull, but not the brain like they first thought. That means they can safely try chemotherapy. Now, it doesn't mean he's out of the woodworks, but he's got a chance. He's reacting the chemotherapy well. Here's hoping it continues to go well.
I didn't like how the dev team kept all the BS from Melee. Why does Peach's down smash do 70+ if you happen to be under a platform? Cuz melee. Why do the melee top tiers get a slap on the wrist even through everyone else below them gets the nerf bat? Cuz melee. Why can you crouch cancel wolf's shine but not fox or falco? Cuz melee
HermitHelmet
Smash Journeyman
When did everyone else below the Melee Top Tiers get the nerf bat? Reminder that most of the nerfed top tiers by this point have been characters like Mewtwo, Lucario, Ike, Ivysaur, Wolf, Game and Watch, Lucas, Mario - The list goes on. Peach's D-Smash should not hit you from above a platform unless you're like Snake on Yoshi's lmfao
You mean like how Falco's down air, blaster and shine were nerfed and how Fox's shine and up smash were nerfed? And these are only the obvious nerfs. Nobody got a free pass. While one could potentially disagree with how we went about it, no character was shielded from scrutiny.
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Falco's down air nerf is the only significant one you mentioned. Their shine got nerfed by losing the ONE frame invincibility. That's 1/60th of a second. No one who doesn't play the space animals wouldn't notice
Believe me, evne one frame is quite significant.
And I think we did a good job keeping the feel of spacies by making them more reasonable. They're still real good mind you. But it's innacurate to say they were beyond scrutiny.