I was linked to an interview on Videogamer.com with Capcom’s Yoshinoro Ono yesterday in which he [Ono] mentioned that he feels the entry barrier to fighting games needs to be lowered for them to truly capture a big audience.

[Source: Videogamer Interview with Yoshinoro Ono]

Now it doesn’t take a genius to realise that in terms of game sales, what he said is true.  Although on the contrary, speaking as a long time fan of fighting games, it is almost a tradition that any good beat em up will need to be learned for me to have any chance of succeeding within it.

I personally know quite a few people who have picked up fighting games over the years due to hearing good things about them, or because they had seen someone else play it and liked what they saw.  Yet once they take the game home, they’ll give arcade mode a try once or twice and then from there they’ll just let the game collect dust on there shelf.

I’d say about 75% of the time the game they’ve bought is a solid game that providing they had stuck with it, they could have potentially lost many many hours immersed in it’s great gameplay. Yet because they didn’t stick around to learn the game, they got bored out of frustration with it and left it behind…

For me personally the fighting series I’m most familiar with is Street Fighter, as I’ve dove into various Street Fighter games at several points in my life I have learned the fundamentals to playing a lot of 2D fighting games.  Even still…I know when I pick up a new 2D fighting game, one with a fresh fighting game engine in comparison to the games I’ve played before, that within the game will be a lot I will have to learn (and I’m talking many hours of learning here).

This seems daunting at first, because generally we play video games for fun, and steep learning curves can be a big turn off.  Another issue is the fact that playing against computer opponents is nowhere near as fun, or a true measure of skill, as fighting human opponents is.

Before the advent of online gaming it was something of a necessity for your friends to have the same beat em ups you have, so that you could learn to play the game at home alone, then hook up with friends to play some multiplayer and test your skills out.  Ideally, if you lost, you’d be determined to improve and learn more, then come back for redemption.  If you didn’t have people to play with though, the hard work you’re putting into learning that game is going to go unnoticed, and unless the game in question has put a lot of unlockable rewards or incentives to pat you on the back for your play time and skills, then you might not have been driven to keep at the game for that long.

Moving back to the original interview that inspired this post though…

When you’re lucky enough to find that special [fighting] game, one that several of your friends have, and thus enabling you to have some truly amazing competitive matches, that time you’ve put into the game, and into getting good with specific characters becomes very worthwhile.  In the past 2 years I’ve been playing a lot of the Street Fighter 4 series (naturally only Super since that came out), and with that came a lot of new things to learn about the game.  Not only do I need to learn about the fine mechanics of the game play, but I also need to learn many many match ups.  I need to know the advantages and disadvantages the character I use has against all of the other in game character choices, and beyond that there are differences in how people can use certain characters (some could be aggressive and offensive, some may be defensive and more tactical).

I have been lucky that I have local friends who play the game whom I can test my skills against in some intense and very fun multi-player sessions.  Local multi-player has certainly been a catalyst for my devotion and time spent on the game.  Although Super Street Fighter IV definitely benefits from having a decent matchmaking system online, so I can always find opponents to spar with, whether I want to specifically face people of a similar skill level, or just take on anyone who comes (whether much weaker or much stronger).

Super Street Fighter IV is a very deep and finely tuned game.  So much so that it would take a lot of time to try and break it down, and even if I tried I’d probably miss something.
The in game ‘challenge mode’ does a fairly good job to teach you a character’s moves (ranging from the basics to the advanced combo’s), the in game ‘training mode’ has a great offering of options to allow you to practice things and try out new things that even the challenge mode didn’t teach you too.

As good as those 2 modes combined are though, it’s not enough to turn a fresh newbie to the game into a good competitive player.

Now…

Finally on to the question of lowering the entry barrier in fighting games.

Yoshinoro Ono said the following in that interview:

“What I mean by broadening the appeal is that where hardcore players are at the moment, with all their hyper super techniques, that seems to isolate themselves from the rest of the players. What I want to do is connect those people and casual players together so that the progression is a bit more continuous than it is at the moment, where a few of the elitists deem their skills amazing and don’t want to play with other people.”

Reading that has me [as a fighting game enthusiast] a bit worried.  Is he implying that perhaps the deep level of gameplay that we’ve come to expect from a high level fighting game needs to be dumbed down to be more simple and accessible for new players?
I encourage you to sound off in the comments section on how you interpret this.

If and when Street Fighter 5 is to be announced, it would shatter my faith in it being a good game if I was to hear it was being made simple to play.  I would want it to be like all traditional games in it’s series before it, and require me to put a lot of time in return for me realising that I have definitely improved myself along the way.

If Capcom wanted to capture a wider audience and attract a new crowd to the genre, then I’d much rather they make some sort of fun party game type beat em up (like Mario Kart is to racing games), heck “Street Fighter Kids” or something.  Give them a balanced and fun to play game in the fighting game genre that just doesn’t require an extensive amount of time to learn.  Then if these players enjoy that, they can then move on to Capcom’s other games (it’d sort of be like going up in difficulty like you would in Guitar Hero or something).

Alternatively! and this would be my preference here.

Keep making these amazingly deep, satisfying to master games.  Just make sure that you deliver an in-depth training mode, yet make it interesting and fun for them to sit through it.

A lot of great fighting games, in fact a lot of the best (imo) fighting games do very little in regards to teaching you the game.  For me, guides in game magazines, or better yet; internet forums.  Those have been quite vital for me to become good at the games I’ve wanted to be better at.

Another option would be to do what Super Mario Galaxy 2 has done in Japan/ Europe… Include an optional tutorial DVD with the game.  Mario Galaxy 2′s training DVD is provided to help people who have never played a 3D Mario game before, it also teaches them all of Mario’s available moves, and eventually builds its way up to advanced creative tricks that even some veterans might not have even thought of trying.

DVD guides like that are pretty much irrelevant to veterans of a series [MEGA64: Video parodying the Mario DVD], but I can certainly see how they would be beneficial to new players, and helps ensure they’re not so alienated by the hardcore player.

Everyone happy?