Combos in fighting games

What is even the point of having combos in fighting games? They're a pointless barrier to entry, anyone who wants to have fun with the game must first spend hours in training mode memorizing inputs. They also add no depth to the game: landing your hit confirm is the part that actually takes skill, it's the interactive part of the game that makes fighters so fun. Everything afterwards is merely a single-player execution test.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=DbAL_822D4o
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

>They're a pointless barrier to entry
>landing your hit confirm is the part that actually takes skill

Way to contradict yourself. Also you seem to base your entire knowledge of fightan off of MvC3, which is very non-indicative of most fightan where you need resets due to damage scaling.

personal style and situational punishes. a combo does not work in every situation and the fun is figuring out the right times to use them.

just got into fightans so idk but I think they're fun and satisfying

I could see some good points and bad points to combos, enough to leave me uncertain how well a comboless fighting game would work. But are you really interested in the subject, or just want to shitpost?

OP is right. It's artificial difficulty. Any game could be made harder doing so. If shoot in a fps was u+f+c instead of the mouse button the game would be instantly "harder". Having poor controls is not difficulty.

How is that at all contradictory?
There's nothing remotely shitposty about what I wrote.

Do frogposters collaborate in a discord where they try and come up with the stupidest questions to post as some sort of meme?

If combos are a "pointless barrier to entry", then they are the most skillful part, since you apparently need to be proficient at them to enter into fighting games. In the next sentence, you posit that "landing your hit confirm is the part that actually takes skill", implying that combos are not the most skillful part, but that getting the hit confirm is, implying that combos are not a barrier to entry because they take less skill than getting the hit confirm.

So tldr; git gud, put in some practice and stop being a whiny scrub.

It allows different skillsets to thrive and interact. I'm not much of a labmonster but my reads and conditioning are good. I get in on someone more often than they get in on me usually, but a lab monster will have optimized combos and take more health off of me.

It makes for an interesting competitive environment.

He means "barrier to entry" applying to accualy putting in the command with a controler or keyboard. The skill is landing the hit. The only skillful part programed into the game is landing the hit. The control entry is just padding for "artificial difficulty". The game could have easly made that long comb one button like most games but the added a complex controls for the illusion of difficulty.

Good god, you're a fucking retard. I don't even know where to begin with this mess of a post.
>If combos are a "pointless barrier to entry", then they are the most skillful part
How on earth did you come to that conclusion?
>implying that combos are not a barrier to entry because they take less skill than getting the hit confirm
Or this one?

The point you seem to miss while you're busy coming to retarded conclusions like the sub-70 IQ mouthbreather you are is that they're both barriers to entry, but one of them is pointless and tedious. Getting a hit confirm requires that you outplay your opponent somehow; whether that means making a read, spacing well, or baiting them to commit in some way. Comboing requires that you have spent hours in training mode memorizing a combo until it's in your muscle memory. The former is interactive, the latter is not.

>There's nothing remotely shitposty about what I wrote.
Well, alright then.

On the one hand, I do agree with you. Well, sort of. Combos (at least lengthy ones) in a game like Street Fighter or most anime titles tend to just feel like dial-a-combos. While not at technically true as in Mortal Kombat 3, you're still selecting the one or two combos in the situation that deal the most damage and throwing those out whenever a hit connects. Sure, I can understand why some people like the flashiness (especially in anime fighters) but there isn't much difference between a combo string and a single big hit followup. Execution, perhaps, but they are frequently called "guaranteed combos" for a reason.

On the other hand, there is a big difference between getting punished for whiffing a jab and getting punished for throwing a full combo into an opponent's block. A combo system does allow a player to halt the combo at any point, not necessarily at its conclusion, and so they can stop if they are in a bad position. Plus, they can stop and change what they are doing (say, go for a throw) when their opponent might still be thinking of blocking.

With a game like Street Fighter 3, there are also factors in the parrying system, and being able to change your combo prevents an opponent from just parrying everything due to knowing the combo rhythm.
See: Diego vs Justin Chun Li, YSB Hugo vs Chun Li

When we get into 3D games other than Tekken, we see even more good reasons to use combos. Lots of moves links into different moves, and so you can consider things like enemy positioning or if the enemy was standing/crouching/jumping when you hit them, or even something as simple as the size of the enemy, to choose which combo to use. And you can do this dynamically, in the middle of a combo, because these games have counter systems more advanced than the one is SF3. (even if not as technically precise to pull off)

This it makes improving at fighting games that much more fun.
Some people are naturally good at different parts of the game with there character.
Improving usually involves refining something you are already good at or becoming proficient in an area you struggle at.

>The game could have easly made that long comb one button like most games but the added a complex controls for the illusion of difficulty.

Just look at MvC3 if you want to see what happens when a game tries to do one-button combos. It just leads to retards who want to look cool like the pros absolutely getting their shit pushed in because they refuse to learn how to actually play or utilize the tools the characters have. Simplified combos simply don't work.

>Comboing requires that you have spent hours in training mode memorizing a combo until it's in your muscle memory.

That's part and parcel of training. Tokido once spent a 12 hour day just practicing E. Honda roll combos in CvS2 because he knew it would be handy. If you aren't willing to put in time and effort to learn the parts of a fighting game (and that does include combos), then I don't see why you're bothering in the first place.

I agree. But I'm realizing now this was just a shitpost thread.

just go back to your shows mom, you don't understand me

>Simplified combos simply don't work.
Not learing the game has noting to do with the combos entry. Long comobs are pointless and make the game like DDR just spamming buttons.

I should clarify then, my problem is exactly with "guaranteed combos", where the game loses all interactivity between players and essentially becomes a single player game for a few seconds. Blockstring mixups are good, the parry system forcing some level of interactivity to combos is good, things like air control in SC are good. But guaranteed combos are pointless archaic crap holding fighting games back from being something much better than they currently are.

Combos make you feel like you're actually improving because combos or not you're going to get your ass kicked anyway, so why not have them anyway?

>anyone who wants to have fun with the game must first spend hours in training mode memorizing inputs
That's not true, on my experience.

Leaving aside Street Fighter 3 (since that is a specific case) and the 3D fighters...

You've still not talked about the ability to drop a combo partway or do something unusual in it. Even if we turn all combos into just two-hit affairs, where you have the initial strike and the followup "combo" which deals the damage, there is still the problem with any combo being a predicted outcome. (Let's call this a 1-2 combo system.) In a standard fighting game, I might decide to just throw out three or four strikes of a combo rather than the whole thing, while the above proposal would force me to either choose between the single poke or the full combo. The disadvantage of the 1-2 combo is that I'm forced to play it out to the end point, meaning that someone could just block and predictably counter when it is finished. With the standard combo system, I'm free to drop the combo at any point, to do something unexpected: like a sweep instead of a high attack, or a grab, or even jumping away with a kick. It does leave me open, but it leaves me open at a different point than what an opponent would normally "predict" and so gives me more control and strategic options when playing.

My biggest concern with dropping standard combos, in exchange for the 1-2 combo system, is that it kills that aspect. Either players poke, or they full combo, and it becomes incredibly predictable if the combo gets blocked. There's less thinking and it becomes easier to counter, thus reducing how interesting the game becomes. I'd honestly be all for the 1-2 combo system if this problem could be properly addressed.


Anime fighting games are very bad at the whole DDR dial-a-combo system, but then again, the whole purpose of anime fighting games are in general to look big and flash with lots of silly juggling. So I forgive them for that, because it's a selling point. Although I think it is also a big reason why 90% of these games go unnoticed and end up forgotten.

Collaboration or not, Pepe's an excellent indicator of the post it's attached to being completely worthless.

More to the point, the people using Simple Mode are generally shitters who aren't going to bother learning proper hit confirming anyway. The hit confirm is only half the battle, the other half is capitalizing on that hit confirm.

And hell, if all you want is hit confirms, there are plenty of games for that. Try Divekick or the Fight Night series, both reward clean hits over combos.

As an aside, the SF3 match I was thinking of wasn't YSB Hugo. It was Hayao Hugo vs Umezono's Chun Li, at the end.

youtube.com/watch?v=DbAL_822D4o

>parry first half of super
>throw out your own super before the second half even comes out

Not him. I agree with you, but ironically Guilty Gear's implementation of bursting actually makes reacting/predicting during combos meaningful despite being an anime fighter. Mostly because you can actually bait bursts, they're not guaranteed combo enders. At the same, they're also risky to use because they take forever to re-build and don't restore between rounds.
That's 100% applicable in Marvel games though, including release Skullgirls. Combos are way too long for their own good and you get to Dota-tier levels of just sitting there and watching your character die if you fuck up. Admittedly Skullgirls got patched to fix that though, kind of clever how they did it too. Drama gauge basically sets a hard limit on the total number of moves you can use in a combo, and persists for a few seconds after a combo ends to discourage hard resets. If the gauge fills, your opponent gets a tech-out even if the combo is legit.

Tekken 7..