PlusHeart Issue #15: Constructing a mainstream fighting game (Part 2)
In which it's probably hard to ask for everything at once.
As promised, I'm back with the follow-up to my previous newsletter about constructing a mainstream fighting game. While last time I talked about how the genre usually clashes against what's popular, this time I wanted to create a hypothetical; one where a game could break through.
This is mostly going to be a series of points that, when combined, hit what I feel are the main ingredients to mainstream competitive video game success. Feel free to take them with a grain of salt, because hey, this is all spitballing.
The in-game features
As I went over last week, a fighting game suffers when it doesn't have a way of encouraging non-enthusiasts to play. The problem with this experiment comes with fixing this issue: do we want the game to be good, or just be mainstream-friendly?
Ideally, a good fighting game has all the features that current ones do: it would have a good training mode (with all the frame data, movelists and quality-of-life features that come with it), LAN/Offline play, and some kind of mode that allows the player to practice against the computer.
Some of the issues with offline training involve the feelings of "I am not able to effectively apply what I'm practicing or testing against a opponent in a low-stakes environment" and "I am not motivated to play because of the anxiety that's present in competition." If players aren't playing, they aren't learning, and if they aren't hitting the "Queue Up" button, the game is dying.
What I'd like to see is something that emulates the competitive 1v1 experience, but only if the player chooses to focus on that. The benefits of this would be that players would be able to gain confidence "when it counts", while also providing somewhere to just have fun.
League of Legends has its mutation modes (or its "All Random, All Mid" mode) that takes away a lot of pressure; you get one random character assigned to you at game start (with the option for re-rolls), and you're kind of forced to learn them if you've never played them before. Deaths aren't as punishing, cooldowns aren't as harsh, and there's less fundamental LoL to worry about; you just get to do the fun stuff of fighting, itemizing, and learning.
I know friends whose entire League experience is ARAM, and if they're involved with the culture of the game and logging in/participating, that's all that matters.
Them's Fighting Herds had a good mode called "The Salt Mine", where multiple players would face off against CPU opponents with the aim of collecting resources and strengthening their character. Eventually, these characters would the others players' in the lobby; it somewhat emulates the "looting" phase of Battle Royales, which have the function of giving the player something fun to do, even if they're dying quickly.
I believe these kinds of things need to become more of a priority, and I don't just mean a Story or Arcade mode. There needs to be more resources devoted to modes that ensure the ongoing health of the game, and that likely has a lot to do with the mentality of "we have a yearly sequel or expansion to get out." Despite how weird it felt to think of Street Fighter V as a Games-as-a-service (GaaS) title, that whole "free, supplemented by skins and microtransations" thing might be what needs to happen. Being able to tweak a Battle Pass into multiple weeks of challenges (even if they're auto-generated) gives people a reason to play, and play differently; the ability to customize characters to better reflect the investment you have in them is another.
I didn't want to spend too much on that character customization aspect because in my fantasy world, we don't have to worry about monetization (🙃). However, I believe Dota 2 hit on something by making individual pieces of armor or skins that fit into slots, instead of something complete and all-encompassing.
It takes a bit to be able to express yourself in a game like this, and being able to mix, match, tweak and re-tweak goes a lot way to making "your character" look different than the one you'll face online. We'll be going into this a little bit later, but it's important, because investment in your character means investment in the game itself.
The online features
I'll be blunt: in most cases, the online for fighting games sucks. I don't mean just the netcode, because that's a problem that's been discussed at length, and it still getting better. Bluntly: even if League of Legends' online isn't a perfect, latency-free environment for all players, if it's "good enough", it doesn't break the gameplay. Fighting games don't have that luxury. A successful fighting game at a mainstream level needs to be able to work on a lot of different network environments, on a lot of different levels of infrastructure.
When I mean "the online", I mean the complete ecosystem of in-game and out-of-game features that players need to live in every single day. This goes beyond being able to match up or hang out in a lobby: it means having a full suite of motivators, trackers, and feedback that lets people participate.
That last word is important: participation doesn't equal skill, nor does it mean everyone is going to be winning. You need to be able to furnish players who want to be good while not discouraging players who don't want to put in the work, and that can be a contentious thing: it is baked into the culture of fighting games to only accept the strong, or those who desire to be strong. Part of why my friend in Part 1 of this project said "This isn't possible" is that it would require a major shift in that culture to be mainstream-palatable.
Regardless:
We need the ability to play training mode with other people. Doing so allows us to join with friends who would be able to teach us in a low-stakes environment. No more doing 1v1 lobbies where we forget to turn off the timer.
We need the ability to make training more of a social activity, period. Beyond mission modes and associated achievements/unlocks, we need ways to provide incentives to practice; give me a Battle Pass that tells me I need to "land 5 different 10-hit combos with 3 different characters". This gets me to play characters I haven't touched before, and maybe learn their strengths for when I face them.
Again, we need the ability to make training collaborative. Aim Lab has done a great job of making training for shooters interesting by being able to construct, record and share training routines, completely tailored to each game someone might want to play (CSGO, Apex, etc). Being able to share combo tutorials, or even explainers as to why and how you might use a combo or technique would go a long way from taking it out of YouTube's hands (or god forbid, Discord's terrible search indexing) to give people good training/learning material.
In Aim Lab, the ability to get consistent feedback of "You need to work on how controlled you are when moving your mouse right" is better than someone dropping money on coaching just to be told "play more." Give me a breakdown of when I'm taking counter-hits or failing to block mix-ups. Give me a ratio of when I'm on the offensive.
Give me a sentence that says "Over your last 20 losses you've lost the majority of your health in the last 15% of the match." I need the ability to — on my own — know where I need to put my effort; in some cases, it can be embarrassing or discouraging to get that kind of help directly from another human.We need the ability to watch other matches or tournaments and feel motivated to do so. Give us match gambling with in-game currency. Give us some kind of grading/feedback/cheering-on-live-matches system. Give us a gamified way to expose ourselves to different situations and get us to think about the game we're playing. This also has the added benefit of juicing the esports scene and getting people familiar with pro players; if they're consistently winning currency betting on someone, they're more likely to become a fan.
We need the ability to group with other players, through a club/guild system. We need this to matter. Dota 2 has group and solo goals tied into this system with bonus currency for those who participate. This also has the added benefit of getting people to run "locals" within their guilds (or maybe have some kind of skill-based matchmaking that matches guilds against each other?) where you can develop storylines and get better together.
We need a set of goals that helps motivate us to play. Again, taking it away from training mode with the "Do X a number of times", you need the ability to get players out of a comfort zone, or away from goals that only hinge on success. The reason Apex Legends has challenges that are "Do X amount of damage with Pistols" is so someone has something to work towards that doesn't hinge on them winning the game.
Being able to say "Do X amount of damage after a counter-hit" or "Do X amount of damage after a guard break", or "Successfully block a string of six hits 10 times" at least gives people a reason to think about their playstyle; when would they do something like that? Do they not do it right now? Is there something to be gained by playing in that way?
The marketing budget
It's hard to just magically make a marketing budget appear, but the ability to have people know about the game and think it's worth their time is pretty essential for having its initial growth spurt. A problem with fighting games is that after the initial "this is cool and new", the remaining population of the game gets the reputation of "being too good" for new players.
The ability to make newbies feel included regardless of when or how they're starting is important, and we'll go more into that with "the culture" later on.
At the moment, there's the traditional "influencers" model of throwing game keys at creators and hoping the provide the hype, but I get the feeling that there needs to be more emphasis on something self-sustaining. Having a world that people want to make things for (fanworks like art, cosplay, tools, fiction, etc) means that people have a hard time ignoring the product; I honestly thought that Granblue Fantasy Versus would be able to make this work, considering Cygames' Granblue Fantasy juggernaut and the resulting crossover, but it kind of died on the vine in the West due to not having good online outside of Japan.
This section is somewhat where I feel my argument loses steam, because what's considered a successful fighting game launch relies on relatively short-term support (again, enough to last until a sequel), and not as a full-fledged GaaS. Riot Games' competitive League of Legends offerings have been an expensive marketing line item, but it's contributed to a more complete ecosystem: you play the game to learn it, and then apply that knowledge when watching it for fun, because that's what your friends are doing, too.
You're watching streams of other players, and then also following artists and cosplayers on Instagram, because they're making stuff surrounding your favorite character. You're potentially going to meetups and live events and local LANs because that's where other people who share your passion are, and that's all fuelled from somewhere.
It isn't necessarily saying "just throw a whole bunch of money at people to run events, all over the globe", but it's about having faith enough in the longevity of your game to not just say "well, launch is over, we've made our sales, we're done." The perception of your game being dead or alive (no pun intended) is important to being able to bring in new players, and that's something fighting games hasn't quite conquered yet.
The brand and culture
How do you just say "make it cool"?
It's such a hard descriptor to just create because it comes down to not only what you make, but how people react to it. If cool people react well to your product, it becomes cool by proxy, and well, that's out of your control.
To become "cool" means that the act of playing your game becomes something that people gain from without you having to convince them. Someone being able to derive their own social capital from your product without anything more from you means they're going to be essentially doing free marketing (cosplay, fanworks, etc), keeping the game alive (playerbase), and encouraging continued development through revenue general.
So how do you position your game to become cool?
The characters need to be well-designed in order to suit a number of tastes. This isn't to fall back on the "make the women hot or nerds won't buy it" bullshit, but modern character design is usually based on crafting characters that distill down moods, qualities, personalities or aesthetics. This is why you have so many properties (in gaming or not) feature factions, "houses", or anything that people can use to sort themselves into accordingly.
Having a third of your roster being "Team Blue" or be from "Hometown" means that players have reasons to pay attention to and interact with them. The edgelords can love all the characters from Bladetown and all the moeblobs can cosplay as characters from Twinklespark Forest; there's something for everyone, and the crossovers are tolerated because you get enough of "your thing." This also fits into the cosmetics mechanics; Dota 2 is just as valid as a dress-up game because the fact you have a favorite character in the first place is a good thing.
Characters need to also be easy to create art for and cosplay. This is why you see League of Legends abandoning non-human designs; cosplay is free marketing, marketing means a playerbase, and a playerbase means life.The music, stage design, UI and UX all have to step up. I'm going to be writing a third article about Fighting Games (not part of this duology) about why I find Capcom's Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike so stylish and downright cool; the vibe of that game is just otherworldly, but there's an added need to make that all tie into the usability of the game itself.
A strong aesthetic (like, the sum of all of its design parts) needs to come from someone with a strong vision, and it needs to decide early on if it's going to emulate something already mainstream (like, for instance, music) or hinge on elevating underground styles in a way that makes the user feel special or in-the-know for partaking. 3rd Strike's drum-and-bass/hip-hop soundtrack may have been a bit underground, but it stands the test of time simply by being unique and taking risks.
I guess the oxymoron is that you want something that's both unique enough to feel exclusive, but not alienating to a wider audience. Those two things feel incompatible, but again, looking at Riot and League of Legends, they've been able to weave in K-pop to a successful degree by hedging their bets that it won't annoy all of their fanbase.
I think back to the Tony Hawk series of skateboarding games and their soundtracks, mostly because people still talk about how that was the reason they got into punk, ska, or hip-hop; unfortunately, again, this comes down to trying to placate a mainstream audience while still making something good. To me, good means having soul, and that's not something the mainstream always has.The culture has to reward people for the right reasons (and the community needs to decide what those reasons are). This is a tough one because that definition fluctuates, and for fighting games it has most been about winning. I've experienced people getting shit on because they're getting attention (and therefore "rewarded") in ways that don't involve being good at the game, and for something to thrive longterm, this would need to change.
I think this is perhaps the most difficult change to grasp, because it involves letting go of a resentment of "not being the coolest" that has been festering for some time. The idea of "this person doesn't deserve attention or money because I'm better than them, and I never got that" is something toxic and comes from a real place of hurt, envy or just not understanding how media works.
At the end of the day, that last point is what Project L is going to succeed or fail on. It's either going to win over tastemakers with quality, or just by being so big and potentially profitable that it can't be ignored.
That kind of power is what influences the change of culture. It's being able to say "it doesn't matter if we're at Evo or Combo Breaker or CEO, because RiotCon 2025 is going to have the Project L championships, and the winner's going to take home a million dollars." That means that anyone good at fighting games isn't going to pass up the opportunity, and it lends the whole thing credibility by proxy.
Wrap-up and housekeeping
Maybe this needs a third part. Maybe this is too big a subject to tackle, and that's why it's impossible. Maybe it's just a matter of tastes colliding and things being a bit too... difficult to untangle. I'm not sure, but I wanted to give it a shot.
It took me a while to "get" fighting games from a spectator's perspective, and in trying to play them myself I learned a lot about how I process failure, and how I want to learn. I believe that they're a great conduit for a certain type of gameplay and interaction, and their niche has damaged the scope of "what they need to be" in order to break away to something bigger.
It's funny, because even if I've painted a picture of a hard-to-please fighting game fan, they don't often get things made for them. The further problem with this is for all their nitpicking, they're usually right about what the important parts of designs are: seeing a game that qualifies as "bad" usually means non-functional online, terribly unhealthy cosmetic strategies (I'm looking at you, Dead or Alive) or just... sludge.
So not only do we need to get above sludge to a "passable by enthusiast" standards, you also need to vault over that to get to "approachable by a non-enthusiast." It's so tough, yet you can still see the potential if certain things just caught up. I feel like I've spent 2500 words here and barely scratched the surface.
Anyways, going to leave you with that. Feel free to comment with what you might've thought I've missed, or if I'm weighing something heavier than you'd like.
I'm still streaming weekly on Saturdays on Twitch. Give me a follow, because it helps. If you want push notifications of when I go live, join my Discord; I don't do notifications for anything besides new work, and there's no channels to get lost in besides that.
See you in 14.
Image Credit: Corey Dupree, cottonbro [2] [3] [4], RODNAE Productions