Diversify tech options?

[Droß]

Something I have been thinking about as I've gotten to learn the ins and outs of Project M is how linear the wall jumps and tech situations can be. The latter is in a better spot, but options off walls are severely limited, and I think there's room to add more to the game there.

To start, the current usual tech/knockdown options are as follows:

• Do nothing.
• Get up in place
• Roll left/right
• Get up attack

Most of these can be chased or shielded upon reaction, and although it requires practice, I often wonder why there is only one fixed distance to which a character can roll / tech. Why not allow characters to have variable tech roll distance (within a certain reasonable range, maybe 1-2 character lengths)?

The input to stop a tech roll early or extend it farther than the default could be based on how long the control stick is held in the direction of the roll, which would extend the current functionality without complicating it needlessly, and integrate with the current control style.

Making these hypothetical changes would make tech reads even more impressive than they already are, allow a few vicious throw setups to have a small bit of further counter play, and allow characters to be further diversified in subtle ways in order to better support archetypes (such as lightning bruisers, tanks, etc). One of the strengths of Project M is in how many different aspects of the physics engine exist, and how many interactions these aspects often have with one another. Implementing our own natural extensions to it would allow the game to become even more refined, and further increase the possible level of play, which produces better espots and gameplay for all.

Let me know what you guys think!

 

[Binary Clone]

First of all, I think you're confusing or misusing terminology a bit.

There are 4 tech options:

• Tech in place
• Tech roll right
• Tech roll left
• No tech

From "no tech" you are prone, at which point you also have 4 options:

• Get up in place
• Roll right
• Roll left
• Get up attack

I think these options are fine as they are. When you have been put into one of these states, you are at a disadvantage. You have made a mistake or series of mistakes that have resulted you in hitting the ground in a tech situation. Adding more mixups serves no practical purpose in the game but to increase the potency of defensive options, which in turn decreases the potency of punishes, particularly with regards to characters who depend heavily on tech chasing.

Even shortening tech rolls/getup rolls pushes this too far, in my opinion. Consider a tech chase situation in which a character is attempting a regrab. They have positioned themselves so that they can reach their opponent regardless of the option they take, but they need to react well to do so. At present, tech chasing on reaction consistently is quite difficult. Recently we've seen DruggedFox take Sheik techchases on Fox very far, but you also have to note that he was still not perfect, and Fox still had sufficient mixups to be able to escape a decent amount of the time.

Now, you don't need to react once, to the option they take, but twice - direction and length. Tech in place and no tech are unchanged, but tech rolls suddenly become very formidable, and also unreactable. Unless rolls start to take much longer, it would not be possible to react to differing distances in rolls. For most characters, a regrab would then rely on a reaction to direction of roll, followed by a 50/50 as to the roll distance, since it would be too subtle and late difference to react to.

This would also serve to skew tech chases much farther in favor of characters with long grab ranges, like Marth, who could very feasibly position themselves after the first reaction to be able to grab multiple lengths of a roll. It would just require greater precision.

In the end, I think this is unnecessary and would be a detriment. The addition of defensive options would just serve to skew many matchups in favor of some characters, while severely hurting a handful of techchase-heavy characters. It would also mitigate punishes, and make resetting to neutral easier, without adding a whole lot of "true" depth, instead just adding 50/50 situations to many interactions, which just boil down to guesswork.