Talking back to Arc System Works WITH A WALL OF TEXT

 Now that I think about it, I realize I've actually managed to cover every recent release by Arc System Works on this blog. I guess I really like those guys, so it doesn't seem right not to talk about the interview they just did over at Gamasutra. And since only industry people seem to be allowed to comment there, I guess this is my alternative. A WALL OF TEXT.

To lead off, kind of a bomb about Battle Fantasia (DI is Guilty Gear series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari):

If there was no one on the team who could do 3D graphics, why did you decide to proceed with that?
DI: Those were the company orders.

Yow. Considering it's 3D by people who only do 2D, Battle Fantasia's graphics actually turned out quite well. The models obviously aren't up to the mark set by AAA games (though I will note that concentrating on said graphics seems to cripple a lot of AAA games off the bat), but they show the kind of detail and personality that is typically reserved for, well, 2D sprites. You can see where the influence on SF4's crazy-faced characters came from if you just take a look at this game. Even Guilty Gear 2 has a lot of really cool-looking stuff that animates really well: it's just that due to the nature of the game (running around a map or flicking through a menu or fighting at all times), you never actually get to see it unless you make the conscious decision to do so. Try standing still with Valentine if you want to see her balloon hit on her awkwardly for a minute and a half or so.

I'm not going to use a direct quote here, but the rumors about Guilty Gear that fans had suspected-- that the rights to GG are wrapped up with Sega/Sammy-- turned out to be entirely true. What's more interesting is that Ishiwatari says Arc was only directly involved with Guilty Gear XX up until #Reload, the first of three revisions. To this I say, "really?" I noticed Ishiwatari's name disappaearing from the credits from Slash on, but he seems to give the impression that nobody at all at Arc was working on Slash, Accent Core, or black sheep Isuka. It doesn't make a lot of sense, especially considering Arc has published most of their recent output themselves. One possiblity: does Sega/Sammy own all profits from the arcade version, and Arc only have rights to home releases of GG? It's the only thing I can think of.

Here's an excerpt on the difficulty of Arc's games, something I've commented on before.

DI: For the original Guilty Gear, and I think this is true for any person playing any game really, there comes a time when you hit a wall in terms of difficulty, and you have to decide whether you'll keep at it, or stop playing. In designing games, you have to decide when the player is going to hit that wall, early on, or later. I prefer it to be later, so that even beginners can enjoy themselves. 

And it's a bit subjective for us as designers, as we're the ones who have to control the difficulty and complexity. We have to be very careful that this "wall" doesn't just turn people away, no matter how bad at or uninterested in the game they might be.

That said, we also want to cater to our core audience by implementing solid and more complex gameplay that rewards those who really delve into it. It's sort of difficult to explain. In my own opinion, no matter what the game, it's important to make sure that beginners and non-gamers can pick it up, and have fun just mashing the buttons.

My personal theory about GGXX's popularity among gamers and especially anime fans in its heyday is that it was very pretty and very mashable. Obviously there's a very deep system behind this, and a masher is going to lose against even a player with basic skill, but most players are going to be mashing and it's extremely important for a fighting game's commercial success that it be superficially playable as well as rewarding for the expert. This characteristic, by itself, easily put GGXX in Soul Calibur's territory for a "get out and play with your big nerdy friends" game.

GGXX went through a lot of revision and a lot of rebalancing, and it's a much better competitive game now, at Accent Core, than it has ever been. But it never kept the popularity it had at its very first release (which, from a competitive POV, ended up fairly busted). It's funny, because I look at Arc's fighting games as expert-only affairs where the "wall" comes down about an hour after you've learned all the moves and are left to figure out some really tough combos, but I have to admit, they do kinda work as beginner games. Except Guilty Gear 2. Maybe I'm just appreciating GG's curve in relation to Fate/Unlimited Codes'? Scoops! Scoops Haagen-Dazs!

Ishiwatari and Blazblue lead designer Toshimichi Mori on console online play:

....and so far, the technology that would equal the zero lag environment of an arcade just doesn't exist yet. (Ishiwatari)

To tell the truth, I'm a skeptic about making fighting games work online on the consoles. When you're playing against someone, I think the best communication comes from the fact that you have to share a physical space with your opponent and face off against them. (Mori)

Being as we are outside of Japan, on a rather barren arcade landscape where the players are great distances from each other-- even the big US spots are kinda jokes by comparison to what they have in Japan-- we don't have the luxury of just ignoring online play. We don't have a zero-lag environment for any game, as contrary to the unqualified claims of publishers, reviewers and such, that is still science fiction at this point. Still, there are services like GGPO and 2df, both of which I was a little surprised the Arc guys didn't know about. They're running emulators and exclusively play older games-- as I recall, the emulators are actually running two copies of the game on one computer, so it would be impossible to use with current-gen stuff-- but these programs offer the closest to a lag-free experience that anybody's come up with for online fighting games. Speaking of old fighting games aging like a fine wine, just go on GGPO or 2df to play some Street Fighter Alpha 2, and you'll see a game that's truly aged gracefully.

On top of that, current-gen fighting games have made serious steps forward in online play, to the point where I don't mind playing Virtua Fighter 5 casuals online at all, despite the game losing some consistency compared to real in-person matches. And Mori is obviously right about the appeal of in-person communication: outside of a couple of niche spots with seriously hardened competition, it's nearly impossible to have the old arcade experience, with people actually interacting and helping each other out with the game. Never mind the "WE JUS' GOT A REAL MATCH" excitement that's just impossible to capture when everybody is at home in front of their Xbox.

The physical community has almost completely been supplanted by the internet and its rich information bases (buried though they may be in a stream of excrement). As ever, it's going to come down to the community--not the across-the-world devs and not the publishers-- to get together and spark that excitement when they have the chance.

It was kind of depressing when I met up with my VF friends a while ago and realized, despite playing with them for months and months, I hadn't, you know, seen any of them since the game came out for 360.

About difficulty and the claims by the Street Fighter IV team that the goal of the project is to be an easier fighting game for new players:

Sure, people like us who work with games, or fans of fighting games can do a hadouken or a shoryuken without thinking much about it, but for somebody just getting started? Those moves are pretty tough! You can't expect new players to just whip those moves out every time. (Mori)

This is a big thing that designers especially may not be thinking of. I had the pleasure of teaching basic Street Fighter II to a very enthusiastic but inexperienced student a month or so ago on HD Remix, and the bulk of the lesson was just teaching the motion that intimidated me as a kid, and that I had already internalized years ago: quarter circle forward. The fireball. They're just not something that other videogames ask of the player, these joystick yo-yo tricks. It took forty minutes just for fireballs to start to come out 50% of the time, but after that, the motion starts to get committed to muscle memory. From there, senior student didn't have much trouble with the hurricane kick or the dragon punch at all. That's the process. There is no shortcut and no easy way to learning the move.

If you really want to have a "technique training" mode, like in Street Fighter EX or more recently (but not as effectively Fate/Unlimited Codes), then you have do a real tutorial that's going to show the player the basics, step by step. Most fighting game players don't know how to play fighting games. It's kind of an elitist statement, but there it is. The games don't teach, for the most part, and I think that's a huge mistake for them. Only so many people-- yours truly being that type-- will actively bang their head against a game to learn it. And games should reward effort, but they should also give the player a little inkling of how to get up there. The tutorial mode in Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution remains the only time I've ever seen a developer really attempt to teach a fighting game outside of rote memorization of techniques.

Of course, you could make a videogame that encapsulated the fighting game experience for absolute beginners and non-gamers with the easiest and most manageable interface possible. Street Fighter could easily be pared down to a game on the level of the new Prince of Persia. And that would be Rock Paper Scissors. An indie dev might want to put together that game for Live Arcade or Steam or something. Online play, please.

Comments

[zerochan]

The definitely worked on Isuka. I kinda grilled him on that one when I spoke to him.

[Nemo]

I think I should offer my perspective on Guilty Gear here.

Mr Ishiwatari says when I hit the 'wall of difficulty' I have two choices: give up or get better. I didn't do either. I didn't stop playing because I still enjoyed it and I didn't have a reason to train harder because that level of skill is a waste if I'm only playing against friends or the CPU (and there's no tournaments where I live anyway).

I like to say Guilty Gear is a very user-friendly fighting game because it did reward the effort I took to learn the basics. GG characters have lots of features and options - this being the thing that makes other people say the game is 'too complex' - and learning and using them was like a tutorial that taught me the basics of the game. Having sixty minutes before I hit the wall is a huge improvement over my time with SF or KoF or every other fighting game I failed to get into where the wall was in my face from the minute I started ("here's your character, you figure the rest out").

Other people might be happy to mash but I can't enjoy a game if I feel I'm not playing it competently. Characters in Guilty Gear are, compared to most other fighting games, very mobile, very versatile and very easy to do combos with. Even if I know I'm not a really good player the game likes to make me feel like one. Now I think I'm spoiled because I can't go back to any fighter without chain combos and airdashing.

[ferricide]

christian nutt here, who conducted the original interview.

fwiw, i don't think it's true that #reload was the last game ASW worked on, and unfortunately as the interview was conducted in japanese that was not being interpreted -- the recording was later translated -- that statement slipped by me and i wasn't able to ask a followup.

fwiw their official site lists all the way up through accent core and its derivatives as ASW products. there's a world of possibilities about what might have been happening with those games or what he meant to imply, but i think the safe bet is that, one way or another, arc has been involved with all currently-released GG games.