Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
known for a system called combos—moves that would lead into other
moves. Often, once you've hit a person with the first move the rest of the
moves in the sequence proceed automatically.
In the late 1990s, we got some of the very early entries in the 3D
fighter subgenre, with
Tekken
,
Virtua Fighter
, and a few others. Some
credit an earlier PlayStation game,
Battle Arena Toshinden
,
with being
the first truly 3D fighter, but the aforementioned games were the ones to
make the subgenre popular. In these games,
side stepping
into the
z
-axis
became an element of gameplay. This may sound like a small change—
and in the larger scope of things, it actually is—but if you had only played
2D fighters, it was monumental. Now, a spinning kick would still hit you
even if you moved to the side, but a straight-on jump-kick would miss.
Further, many of these games added hit-you-when-you're-down abili-
ties—which of course, could be dodged by rolling out of the way. These
small changes, which made players think about which way they were go-
ing to go, added a lot of inherent complexity to 3D fighters
In response, 2D fighters started becoming more and more complicat-
ed themselves. As of this writing, many fighters are released with upwards
of thirty or forty characters, four or five special bars that characters need
to fill up and spend during gameplay, and
thousands
of special moves
and inherent rules that a player must learn to really play. There also have
been a couple of outliers, such as
Super Smash Brothers
,
Rag Doll Kung
Fu
, and
Power Stone
, which started from scratch and asked fundamental
questions about what these games were going to be.
Fighters are special in that they have always maintained their
game
status; indeed, it would have been pretty hard to lose it because of the fact
that real fighting always has been and always will be a game. Today, we also
see massive communities of professionals
playing
Street Fighter
competi-
tively. Along with FPS games and RTS games, fighting games are some of
the most-played e-sports—that is, professionally played video games.
Again, Consider Symmetrical
A really fascinating thing about fighting games and the professional
fighting-game community is the obsession with asymmetrical forces.
One would think that if these were truly great games, that they would still
be great games even with just one character (i.e., symmetrical forces).
Yet, most people seem to think that the symmetrical matches in
Street
Fighter
—also known as mirror matches—are the most boring parts of
these games. How could this be? Could it be that when you peel back
that extra complexity, the core gameplay isn't all that strong? If a house
becomes worthless when you remove the furniture, what does that say
about the house?
