How could Wavedashing be made into an official technique?

[Snakeyes]

Let's suppose that the Melee variant of the wavedash is not coming back in Smash 4. How could a "new" technique replicate it without interfering with things like rolling, dashing and spot-dodging?

 

[[Corn]]

Replicate is a very bad choice of words on this matter.

 

[XavierSylfaen]

I don't understand. Wouldn't it be as simple as mapping directional airdodge to a button? It's not like they have to write any physics for it, recovery moves already conserve momentum on landing if put into a helpless state.

 

[TreK]

Dashing out of a crouch/crawl maybe ? Then again, it wouldn't give a replacement for the waveland/platform cancel, and I'd much rather have that than the wavedash.
Fighting games all have the wavedash, except they call it a back dash. There's indeed got to be a way to fit it in a system where you can turn around freely, but it's not an easy task.

 

[smashbrolink]

Best way I can think of is allowing us to tap the block button, or the direction we're dodging, a second time when a dodge animation is in its opening frames, to make us do a dash forward or backwards as opposed to a dodge, which would require only a single tap of either stick or button.
We'd lose the invulnerability frames in the middle and the beginning might be a slight bit slower since it would switch up the animation a bit to transition into a slide, but we'd gain more distance and our recovery lag would be dramatically less than after a normal dodge roll, and it would be easier to do than the traditional variety we've grown used to in Melee.

 

[BluePikmin11]

If you wanna go faster, maybe your speed in attacks and start-up will go faster the better you combo.

 

[Eternal phoenix Fire]

Maybe a Quarter Circle Forward/Backward on the stick.

 

[[Corn]]

Maybe a Quarter Circle Forward/Backward on the stick.

No

We dont need any of those in this game.

 

[Eternal phoenix Fire]

No

We dont need any of those in this game.

Why not? I mean you have a down imput, you have diagonal inputs and you have forward imputs. Maybe it could even be down then diagonal down-forward/backward. It's 2 imputs, not that much different then doing a tilt.

 

[XavierSylfaen]

Why not? I mean you have a down imput, you have diagonal inputs and you have forward imputs. Maybe it could even be down then diagonal down-forward/backward. It's 2 imputs, not that much different then doing a tilt.

SF-esque inputs are what turned me off from traditional fighters competitively. I can still have fun button-mashing with friends but having to practice inputs is stupid. Having any sort of technical barrier beyond what's absolutely necessary to have the game recognize your desire to utilize a move is artificial difficulty.

 

[[Corn]]

Why not? I mean you have a down imput, you have diagonal inputs and you have forward imputs. Maybe it could even be down then diagonal down-forward/backward. It's 2 imputs, not that much different then doing a tilt.

The smash series has never used quarter circle/shoryuken commands ever, and no one has ever needed a reason as to why, its one of the things that makes it unique. No reason to stray from that formula at all.

 

[grizby2]

if you air dodge too close to the ground in brawl, the remaining dodge time completely goes away.
what if it kept its dodge time when you landed? or maybe go into a "half" dodge roll to whatever direction your control stick is pointing in when you land? or both?
I dunno.

 

[Eternal phoenix Fire]

SF-esque inputs are what turned me off from traditional fighters competitively. I can still have fun button-mashing with friends but having to practice inputs is stupid. Having any sort of technical barrier beyond what's absolutely necessary to have the game recognize your desire to utilize a move is artificial difficulty.

I don't see that as artificially difficult, it just makes the most logical sense imput wise. Down is a crouch, diagonal would be a crawl, and forward would be the forward movement. Even in 3D fighters that don't use these imputs this is the typical input for a wavedash

And just because you yourself can't imput the command doesn't make it arbitrary, it just makes sense. This imputs allow characters to chain and cancel moves effectively. for example: if you do a crouching medium kick > Hadouken you are already hitting down so if you just continue to rotate your thumb from down to diagonal then forward the kick will cancel and you'll do the fireball; it's actually pretty brilliant. Street Fighter imputs have short cuts and are buffered all the time, and most fighting games have these. NOt that smash needs it but I don't think it would kill you.

I mean if you can't do a fire ball can you do a diagonal tilt/smash effectively in smash? it 's almost the smash thing since you are most like imputing forward then diagonal. Same applies to the crawl, you hit down and diagonal, and yet smash is still unique. You've been doing it the whole time.

 

[XavierSylfaen]

I don't see that as artificially difficult, it just makes the most logical sense imput wise. Down is a crouch, diagonal would be a crawl, and forward would be the forward movement. Even in 3D fighters that don't use these imputs this is the typical input for a wavedash

And just because you yourself can't imput the command doesn't make it arbitrary, it just makes sense. This imputs allow characters to chain and cancel moves effectively. for example: if you do a crouching medium kick > Hadouken you are already hitting down so if you just continue to rotate your thumb from down to diagonal then forward the kick will cancel and you'll do the fireball; it's actually pretty brilliant. Street Fighter imputs have short cuts and are buffered all the time, and most fighting games have these. NOt that smash needs it but I don't think it would kill you.

I mean if you can't do a fire ball can you do a diagonal tilt/smash effectively in smash? it 's almost the smash thing since you are most like imputing forward then diagonal.

I can execute most SF moves fine, except every 1/1000 times when I do a right punch instead of a hadouken. But every player will falter occasionally, especially on the higher level moves, even if they're great at the game. Even great players will mess up on an ultra combo very occasionally. This is a problem.

You should never have to battle against the controls, only against your opponent. This is why Smash is great, every input is as simple as it could possibly be. Someone said a couple days ago some words that I thought were smart. In an ideal world the game could read your mind and the best player would be the one with the best strategy in their head. That's not the case, so we have to settle with the simplest inputs possible.

 

[[Corn]]

I don't see that as artificially difficult, it just makes the most logical sense imput wise. Down is a crouch, diagonal would be a crawl, and forward would be the forward movement. Even in 3D fighters that don't use these imputs this is the typical input for a wavedash

And just because you yourself can't imput the command doesn't make it arbitrary, it just makes sense. This imputs allow characters to chain and cancel moves effectively. for example: if you do a crouching medium kick > Hadouken you are already hitting down so if you just continue to rotate your thumb from down to diagonal then forward the kick will cancel and you'll do the fireball; it's actually pretty brilliant. Street Fighter imputs have short cuts and are buffered all the time, and most fighting games have these. NOt that smash needs it but I don't think it would kill you.

I mean if you can't do a fire ball can you do a diagonal tilt/smash effectively in smash? it 's almost the smash thing since you are most like imputing forward then diagonal. Same applies to the crawl, you hit down and diagonal, and yet smash is still unique. You've been doing it the whole time.

As a long time Smash Fan, I would hate for any controls to change like that. Smash is a game based on 2 attack inputs and 1 directional one. Its simplicity is why people like it. One of the reasons I play smash is because I dont like any of those inputs. So many games use those inputs that we simply call it the Hadoken motion.

 

[Diddy Kong]

Introduce it on the Dojo, or in the intruction manual. Problem solved.

Though, it'll never happen.

 

[Eternal phoenix Fire]

I can execute most SF moves fine, except every 1/1000 times when I do a right punch instead of a hadouken. But every player will falter occasionally, especially on the higher level moves, even if they're great at the game. Even great players will mess up on an ultra combo very occasionally. This is a problem.

You should never have to battle against the controls, only against your opponent. This is why Smash is great, every input is as simple as it could possibly be. Someone said a couple days ago some words that I thought were smart. In an ideal world the game could read your mind and the best player would be the one with the best strategy in their head. That's not the case, so we have to settle with the simplest inputs possible.

True, but even with simple controls, you are still prone to error, it's an inevitability, reducing a technical barrier isn't going to really change anything. My years of playing Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Tekken, Marvel vs Capcom etc has made smash an easy game, but i'm still prone to execution error. Because it'f a different STYLE of execution doesn't decrease the room for marginal error. Missing a short hop, a tech or even miscalculating an attempt to recover still happen. I believe that you can only battle against controls if you are unable to distinguish yourself from one game to another.

Also, i'm not proposing to change the game like that all together, just proposing something similar to the wavedash only; an optional technique.

 

[`dazrin]

just map "wavedash" to the fourth facebutton, and it moves forward, backward, or in place depending on the direction of ur control stick when u push the button. thats all they would need to do.

but they could always just make airdodges directional and stuff like melee lol

 

[Diddy Kong]

Replace wavedash with the roll, and replace the roll with wavedash.

 

[XavierSylfaen]

True, but even with simple controls, you are still prone to error, it's an inevitability, reducing a technical barrier isn't going to really change anything. My years of playing Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Tekken, Marvel vs Capcom etc has made smash an easy game, but i'm still prone to execution error. Because it'f a different STYLE of execution doesn't decrease the room for marginal error. Missing a short hop, a tech or even miscalculating an attempt to recover still happen. I believe that you can only battle against controls if you are unable to distinguish yourself from one game to another.

Also, i'm not proposing to change the game like that all together, just proposing something similar to the wavedash only; an optional technique.

Error in execution is bound to happen once in a while, but I disagree with this:

Because it'f a different STYLE of execution doesn't decrease the room for marginal error.

Because it absolutely does. Here is how you activate a Final Smash in Brawl:

Here is how you activate Chun-Li's Ultra 1 in SF4:

There is absolutely more room for error in the latter. And that's stupid. If having that complicated of an input was really necessary, they could have just made every character have the same input for an ultra, but they didn't. They instead have hugely different movesets for each character to such a degree that you never learn how to play the game, just how to play the character. And why did they have people memorize all this crap when they could have just had it all be universal? To appeal to "hardcore" fans. But in reality it's just artificial difficulty.

 

[smashbrolink]

The smash series has never used quarter circle/shoryuken commands ever, and no one has ever needed a reason as to why, its one of the things that makes it unique. No reason to stray from that formula at all.

In this, I am in complete agreement with you, for once.

It's probably one of the biggest reasons why I switched from traditional fighters over to what I'm now referring to as "Power" fighters like Smash.[I relate Smash to Power Stone, for reasons even I can't fully put into words....]

 

[Sasser]

They could just say 'Air dodging into the ground results in a [official term for wavedash]' because that is all it is. Giving it a different input wouldn't feel natural (not in the sense that it would be weird to change the way a wavedash is done, but in terms of continuity)

This is if they return directional air dodging anyway, isnt that confirmed not to return?

 

[[Corn]]

They could just say 'Air dodging into the ground results in a [official term for wavedash]' because that is all it is

This is if they return directional air dodging anyway, isnt that confirmed not to return?

No, but the current system of airdodges is Brawl Style.

 

[Eternal phoenix Fire]

@Xavier: Well I can see how an input like that would be discouraging, and as far as I ca remember I believe the rectified the issue you are talking about in 3rd strike, where basically everyone's super is a a double quarter circle input. However, I believe these inputs exist because they coincide with how the character functions and uses moves in General. The example in this case would be Chun-Li's charge moves. To use her fireball you charge back then hit forward and Punch, if you were to say, do it in a combo you would simply do the fireball then hit back forward and the 3 kicks (which are usually just assigned to 1 button) since you already buffered in the previous commands, this is a super cancel.. these types of i puts offer players a different type of character to play with, each with their own risks and rewards. The input is far from ridiculous if you understand the basic mechanics of the game and the character. I guarantee if you look at the rest of Chun-Li's moves you would then understand why an input like that would be preferred.

The reason why there is more room for error in these moves is to prevent a blatant misuse and to level the risk and rewards for executing such a move. In a game like smash where character movement is abundant, simple inputs are needed since there is missing a move in such a vast space isn't a big deal. Street Fighter takes place in a finite area, so having these moves with tighter execution prevents a player from absolutely dominating an opponent when given an advantageous position. if a shoryuken was just one button, anti air game would be incredibly broken. If supers were just one button then it would be easy to accidentally waste them and get punished.

The finals smash isn't as brilliant a mechanic as you think, as it restricts the use of one of your characters moves. If it were something like pressing A+B simultaneously, it would be a much better mechanic, but judging from what you're saying that would just be an additional arbitrary mechanic meant to raise difficulty since it does require an additional input.

 

[XavierSylfaen]

The reason why there is more room for error in these moves is to prevent a blatant misuse and to level the risk and rewards for executing such a move

if a shoryuken was just one button, anti air game would be incredibly broken.

Difficulty in move execution should be part of the metagame as little as possible. If shoryuken-type moves would break aerial characters then nerf the shoryuken, don't make it more difficult to execute.

The finals smash isn't as brilliant a mechanic as you think, as it restricts the use of one of your characters moves. If it were something like pressing A+B simultaneously, it would be a much better mechanic, but judging from what you're saying that would just be an additional arbitrary mechanic meant to raise difficulty since it does require an additional input.

That would not be arbitrary as the current setup restricts neutral-b usage and A+B would be the best way to rectify this save mapping it to the fourth face button. I'm not claiming Final Smashes are brilliant, especially with they way they're obtained via Smash Balls. I'm just saying that SF's setup is needlessly complicated.

I understand why the input is that way, although I think it could still be a lot simpler. But the fact that you have to learn so many moves for so many characters just to know how to play them is ridiculous. It's fine if someone wants to devote such a huge amount of time to learning how to play all the characters in a single game, but that knowledge needed to start is often a giant turnoff for newcomers, including me. If I could pick it up, be told "this is how you do X, this is how you do Y, and this is how you can do Z, now you know how to play the game" and all I had to do was refine my X, Y, and Z skills, I'd be down. But that's not the case.

 

[DakotaBonez]

Double tap a direction with the joystick while blocking.

 

[[Corn]]

Double tap a direction with the joystick while blocking.

Whilst rolling?

 

[DakotaBonez]

It would start as a roll but then they'd do a sort of jumping animation.

 

[Eternal phoenix Fire]

maybe if it was some kind of perfect roll or a smash roll. A regular roll you hold L or R and tilt the stick, a wavedash would be when you smash the stick while holding L or R.

 

[Jack Kieser]

This is how I've always thought of it when thinking of how an "official wavedash" would work.

So, the roll in this game is, let's be honest, pretty trash. Sure, SOME characters have alright rolls, but in general, rolling is a bad idea; it's slow, it's predictable, the invincibility isn't long enough to compensate for how short the distance is and how slow it is... In Melee, you didn't roll, you wavedashed. In Brawl, you didn't roll, you got hit.

So, honestly, I think rolls should just be removed entirely. Think about what the design purpose of the roll is. It's to allow you to reposition, usually to a place where you have the spacing advantage. Yes, it gets you out of the way of attacks, but the invincibility frames are actually really bad at doing that unless you are literally RIGHT in someone's face and you predict well. A back / forward step could easily do both of those things, and as the wavedash proved, you don't need invincibility frames to make evasion possible, even in the vast majority of situations.

So, replace the roll, I say. Let shield + back tap make you perform a quick backstep that can be cancelled into a forward dash or any standing attack and let shield + forward tap make you do a quick advancing step that can be cancelled into any standing attack or continued into a run. What was important about the wavedash is that it allowed you to act while moving, and while that's a bit... well, dumb, at least some of the facets of that can be feasibly preserved in a quickstep, at least in a way that's meaningful to the options a player has at her disposal.

 

[Zage]

Error in execution is bound to happen once in a while, but I disagree with this:



Because it absolutely does. Here is how you activate a Final Smash in Brawl:

Here is how you activate Chun-Li's Ultra 1 in SF4:

There is absolutely more room for error in the latter. And that's stupid. If having that complicated of an input was really necessary, they could have just made every character have the same input for an ultra, but they didn't. They instead have hugely different movesets for each character to such a degree that you never learn how to play the game, just how to play the character. And why did they have people memorize all this crap when they could have just had it all be universal? To appeal to "hardcore" fans. But in reality it's just artificial difficulty.

While I'm complete agreement that the Smash series does not need any quarter circle forward movements and I'd rather they stay completely out of the game, your reasoning for not liking them is the very epitome of why we have a barrier between the Smash community and Traditional fighting game communities :U.

 

[smashbrolink]

This is how I've always thought of it when thinking of how an "official wavedash" would work.

So, the roll in this game is, let's be honest, pretty trash. Sure, SOME characters have alright rolls, but in general, rolling is a bad idea; it's slow, it's predictable, the invincibility isn't long enough to compensate for how short the distance is and how slow it is... In Melee, you didn't roll, you wavedashed. In Brawl, you didn't roll, you got hit.

So, honestly, I think rolls should just be removed entirely. Think about what the design purpose of the roll is. It's to allow you to reposition, usually to a place where you have the spacing advantage. Yes, it gets you out of the way of attacks, but the invincibility frames are actually really bad at doing that unless you are literally RIGHT in someone's face and you predict well. A back / forward step could easily do both of those things, and as the wavedash proved, you don't need invincibility frames to make evasion possible, even in the vast majority of situations.

So, replace the roll, I say. Let shield + back tap make you perform a quick backstep that can be cancelled into a forward dash or any standing attack and let shield + forward tap make you do a quick advancing step that can be cancelled into any standing attack or continued into a run. What was important about the wavedash is that it allowed you to act while moving, and while that's a bit... well, dumb, at least some of the facets of that can be feasibly preserved in a quickstep, at least in a way that's meaningful to the options a player has at her disposal.

I like the way you put this, but I think there's one thing you're overlooking about Rolls that did make them advantageous compared to a WD...
When rolling around an opponent, it allowed you to come face-forward with their back.
If we replaced rolling with a WD, and we stepped past an opponent, our backs would be to them, which wouldn't really gain us as big an advantage as if we had come up facing them.

If they programmed it so that WD past an opponent automatically turned the player to face the opponent through the move, and merely moved them forward quickly when not going past an opponent, then that would be a better design, since it would lose nothing that way in terms of advantage.
The only thing is that that might be harder to program.

 

[Jack Kieser]

I like the way you put this, but I think there's one thing you're overlooking about Rolls that did make them advantageous compared to a WD...
When rolling around an opponent, it allowed you to come face-forward with their back.
If we replaced rolling with a WD, and we stepped past an opponent, our backs would be to them, which wouldn't really gain us as big an advantage as if we had come up facing them.

If they programmed it so that WD past an opponent automatically turned the player to face the opponent through the move, and merely moved them forward quickly when not going past an opponent, then that would be a better design, since it would lose nothing that way in terms of advantage.
The only thing is that that might be harder to program.

I don't see how that wouldn't work; if you don't end up past the opponent, stay the same direction, and if you do end up past the opponent, you turn around. I mean, first of all, it's not like the programming would really be hard. If the guys in the PMBR can do what they've done with their reverse engineered toolsets, I can't imagine the actual dev team couldn't do it. But, second, it would preserve that positional advantage. Although, I can't help but think it's not too big of a deal if it didn't turn you around. Really, it'd only affect you if you wanted to quickstep past and then do a Fair or grab, because you'd have to pivot first before jumping or grabbing; if you want to do a tilt or Smash, you'd end up turning either way, and there wouldn't be any extra inputs.

 

[SmashShadow]

Hmm..what's expendable here? How about the 3 different ways we have to jump. I'm sure we could spare the Y button seeing as it's the least used. Or if you want to get rid of having 2 shield button you could do that as well although that might feel awkward to some.

 

[Lemonwater]

Although I don't think wavedashing is entirely neccessary for a well-polished smash game (since it's unnecessary complicated, standardizes approaches across the roster, and just isn't very fun to watch), the simplest way to input it would probably be a button press out of shield with a button that isn't being used very much, like Y or one of the taunts, although the placement for the directional pad is pretty awkward.

 

[Son of Slobodan]

While I'm complete agreement that the Smash series does not need any quarter circle forward movements and I'd rather they stay completely out of the game, your reasoning for not liking them is the very epitome of why we have a barrier between the Smash community and Traditional fighting game communities :U.

huh? So are you suggesting its wrong to call out a poorly designed system just because the traditional fighter is better established? Just because smash is in the minority doesn't mean we should blindly accept all the arbitrary rules fighters have accumulated over the years.

There's nothing interesting or intuitive about memorizing a complex input like that, especially when its just a preset command. When you pick up a character in smash, you can immediately use all of that character's moves because the game shares a common logic. That way, you can get to the more interesting part of the game which is HOW you choose to use those moves rather than memorizing a bunch of awkward, hard-coded inputs.

Streetfighter and similar fighters have SIX ****ING BUTTONS for all the attack commands, and among those 6 buttons they still feel the need to make a "double quarter-circle while pushing 3 attack buttons simultaneously" input? That's pretty stupid and inefficient honestly. The smash series gets 15 attacks just from one button and the control stick. Which is the more elegant system? Why should we have to keep putting up with this bull****?

 

[Dragoomba]

SF-esque inputs are what turned me off from traditional fighters competitively. I can still have fun button-mashing with friends but having to practice inputs is stupid. Having any sort of technical barrier beyond what's absolutely necessary to have the game recognize your desire to utilize a move is artificial difficulty.

Smashboards can't possibly be this stupid.

 

[Moon Monkey]

Is wavedashing necessary to add to the game?

 

[TheCatPhysician]

What if they simply had both Brawl and Melee airdodges? They could allow your first airdodge in a jump to be directional, if you assign a direction. And if you do, you would be helpless afterward as in melee (assuming you're not wavedash/landing of course). If you don't, it would be a typical non directional brawl airdodge with its beloved lack of consequences (you're free to jump, aerial attack or airdodge again before landing).
So the only thing you wouldn't be able to do is melee's neutral airdodge, where your momentum is halted. Not so great a loss. The only problem I can see is casuals complaining that they have to remember to let go of the control stick before airdodging. Hopefully that wouldn't prove too high a skill barrier

 

[Mr.Jackpot]

What's wrong with it as is? Adding too many base inputs takes away from the simplicity of Smash, just let it happen naturally so it's doable from a jump and put in in the dojo/manual as "sliding", that term makes a million times more sense.