Claire Obscur had an amazing water level where the entire point is that it wasn’t a water level – you could run around on land freely, everything just looked underwater.
I like parrying in RPGs. Forcing item use is stupid, since the item use is inevitable. It adds a layer of skill to combat, making it something other than menu with cursor. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are phenomenal examples. I do not like it in real-time games, unless it’s a core mechanic. The point is it should be a core mechanic, and not something thrown in because other games are doing it.
In my two examples, parrying is no different from blocking/dodging. The difference is simply tighter timing with a higher risk. This is fine, since this is the only thing that’s going on. If it’s real time, however, I now have this list of things to worry about–enemy positions, my own position, my health, the surrounding environment, being literally pelted with attacks. It’s fine in real life, but with a controller? Hell no.
Expedition 33 is great because it’s dead simple–a set of dodges and blocks, with a limited move set which just uses face buttons and the triggers, in contrast to Final Fantasy’s dozens and dozens of spells. The simpler a game is, the better. See Celeste. It has move, jump, climb, dash. VVVVVV is even simpler–move and flip. Tetris is move and rotate. Paper Mario is just timing with button prompts. Undertale is just a standard RPG, but you move a soul to collect friendliness pellets. Even Horizon is relatively straightforward, with basic movement, aiming, shooting, and a variety of weapons which utilise these mechanics in different ways.
Sekiro did it pretty well (almost as a rhythm action game), but in everything else it’s a bit shit. Usually you have to press a button within a particular timing window, except the actual timing can either be incredibly obscure (necessitating trial-and-error) or insultingly transparent and generous (i.e. the Assassin’s Creed model).
After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it’s the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don’t like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he’s talking about fencing.
There’s so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don’t get the contact feel of your opponent, you can’t physically feel what your opponent will do. You can’t really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can’t choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to “one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking”.
So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.
For Honor has, to this day, the best melee combat I have ever experienced in any game. The biggest problem that game has is that it’s a fighting game in medieval disguise, if it was more adventure/rpg, I’d bet people would be all over it. I do like the fighting game part of it though, but fighting games are ROUGH to get into, sweatiest player base around.
While it’s become long in the tooth and populated now by only the super try-hards, check out Mordhau. Blocks, ripostes, parries, chambers; all attack angle swings and stabs. Really the best that it’s been done, by far.
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it’s a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there’s certainly huge underexplored territory on “offensive” actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn’t mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it’s still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that’s a level of player and dev effort/investment that’s rarely on the table.
There are games like Half Sword, Hellish Quart and Blade Symphony (and maybe to an extent Exanima) that are built around “realistic”/physica-based sword/melee combat (idk about Half Sword as that’s basically QWOP Knights, but there can still be plenty of skill involved).
They lost me during the bit about “Do you want to have to not just learn about but care about ticky-tacky coder stuff when you are just a person trying to play a video game?”
In fighting games for example, frame data is essential for learning the game. It’s like knowing what the pieces do in chess. They just want to move the horsey around and not worry about all these pesky mechanics. Not all games need to be like that, but it’s absolutely appropriate in certain genres.
Parries we’re awesome in Sekiro because the entire game was built around them. The parry window was wide and the whole game was built to be a sort of rhythm combat game. It’s important to note that the parry wasn’t the only tool you were supposed to use. You had to react with Mikiri counters and jumps as well. The whole game came together to make the incredible duels that feel like a dance.
If they wanted to say that developers saw Sekiro’s popularity and started shoving parries in where they don’t belong then I could see that argument. There’s some nuance there that this blanket statement of parries bad misses though.
I remember ages ago when SF4 happened I was friends with a pretty solid tournament competitor and talking about this he mentioned that frame counting is for nerds because the only thing you need to know is if you can push a button or not and that happens from intuition, which is true. At least it’s true in a good game that has good animation. I’ve always had a kick of beating sweaties with their “this is minus three” obsession by having solid fundamentals. Some of them got pretty annoyed.
And to this day I will claim that Dragon Ball FighterZ is the best fighting game of the last decade specifically because a) every basic combo route is built out of repeatable, simplistic, easy to remember chunks, and b) you can mash the CRAP out of 90% of that game’s links and they work perfectly fine unless you’re trying to do a rejump or time an assist extension.
I will die on this hill, except I won’t because I’m right. I will survive on this hill. Make a little cottage on it and play fighting games inside it.
That hasn’t been my experience at all. Knowing the difference between what’s plus, what’s minus, and what’s block punishable is super important. Knowing if I can set up a frame trap is huge, and it works specifically because it isn’t always intuitive. In Tekken especially you need to know your frames for block punishes, when you can sidestep, and what options your opponent has in a given situation.
It’s not always mandatory, but it’s always useful.
It is super important, but it’s not a timing problem, it’s a knowledge check.
The thing you want to know is whether you can buffer a button during your recovery and get it off before the other guy. If you can, the timing is often very loose, you mash on that thing and you probably get your punish out frame 1.
And if the game is good you don’t learn it by spending a ton of time with a wiki or even with the training mode, you learn it by playing the game and looking at the animations.
If you are a bad game, like the first few Tekkens (yeah, I said it), then you won’t get that from the animation, but you can still learn it by trial and error. And crucially, once you learn it it’s always the same. In most decent games with consistent base mechanics, anyway.
So no, you shouldn’t have to learn whether your jab is four or five frames. That’s how the game is put together, but it should be good enough at communicating how fast your button came out that you can intuit when it’s safe or effective to put it out after blocking. At least after you try it once.
There are a ton of fighting games that are still grandfathered into the notion of putting complexity in this part of the design. You know, the ones where your fastest attack is different per character so you need to know this particular guy’s fastest opener is a crouching medium kick, but only when you’re close enough or whatever. I’d argue those games are less elegant without adding anything to the skill ceiling when compared to newer games like my previous DBFZ example, where everybody’s jab is probably the same speed and the basic flowchart of what to do after you block an attack doesn’t require a textbook and complementary materials.
Sounds like someone is a bit salty they can’t immediately get the timing right in Expedition 33 and it’s reminding them of all the other times they’ve sucked. Get good, loser.
Depends on the game. Parrying in the opening moments of Witcher 2 is a fucking pain, because it consumes 1 bar of stamina, as does rolling dodge, and you only have 2 stamina at that point, which also takes forever to regenerate. If the enemy isn’t dead after 2 parries, you’re fucked for 20 or so seconds because you have no way to actively avoid damage other than running away
On the other hand, the parries in the Batman Arkham games and Shadow of Mordor feel great.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
No humor/memes etc…
No affiliate links
No advertising.
No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
No self promotion.
No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
No politics.
Comments.
No personal attacks.
Obey instance rules.
No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc…)
Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Obviously this is hyperbole, because water is the worst thing in video games, but I do agree that parrying really is a pain in the ass.
True, I tried parrying my Xbox and it kinda glitched, but then worked just fine. But when I tried water on it, it stopped working at all.
Claire Obscur had an amazing water level where the entire point is that it wasn’t a water level – you could run around on land freely, everything just looked underwater.
And Maelle encourages me by aggressively shouting “Parry it!” at me.
I like parrying in RPGs. Forcing item use is stupid, since the item use is inevitable. It adds a layer of skill to combat, making it something other than menu with cursor. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are phenomenal examples. I do not like it in real-time games, unless it’s a core mechanic. The point is it should be a core mechanic, and not something thrown in because other games are doing it.
In my two examples, parrying is no different from blocking/dodging. The difference is simply tighter timing with a higher risk. This is fine, since this is the only thing that’s going on. If it’s real time, however, I now have this list of things to worry about–enemy positions, my own position, my health, the surrounding environment, being literally pelted with attacks. It’s fine in real life, but with a controller? Hell no.
Expedition 33 is great because it’s dead simple–a set of dodges and blocks, with a limited move set which just uses face buttons and the triggers, in contrast to Final Fantasy’s dozens and dozens of spells. The simpler a game is, the better. See Celeste. It has move, jump, climb, dash. VVVVVV is even simpler–move and flip. Tetris is move and rotate. Paper Mario is just timing with button prompts. Undertale is just a standard RPG, but you move a soul to collect friendliness pellets. Even Horizon is relatively straightforward, with basic movement, aiming, shooting, and a variety of weapons which utilise these mechanics in different ways.
Occam’s razor.
Nah gamers are
Breaking: video game journalist who’s bad at video games offers objectively incorrect insight
People (especially fucking game journalists) need to figure out that not liking something doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad
I remember when people thought quick time events were cool.
There’s a lot to be said about the aging of game mechanics and the efficacy of their continued use.
Yeah, and it’s right now. Reread the second line of my comment
Sekiro did it pretty well (almost as a rhythm action game), but in everything else it’s a bit shit. Usually you have to press a button within a particular timing window, except the actual timing can either be incredibly obscure (necessitating trial-and-error) or insultingly transparent and generous (i.e. the Assassin’s Creed model).
LOL, get good.
I mostly agree. It’s not fun.
After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it’s the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don’t like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he’s talking about fencing.
There’s so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don’t get the contact feel of your opponent, you can’t physically feel what your opponent will do. You can’t really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can’t choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to “one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking”.
So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.
For Honor has, to this day, the best melee combat I have ever experienced in any game. The biggest problem that game has is that it’s a fighting game in medieval disguise, if it was more adventure/rpg, I’d bet people would be all over it. I do like the fighting game part of it though, but fighting games are ROUGH to get into, sweatiest player base around.
While it’s become long in the tooth and populated now by only the super try-hards, check out Mordhau. Blocks, ripostes, parries, chambers; all attack angle swings and stabs. Really the best that it’s been done, by far.
Tried half sword?
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it’s a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there’s certainly huge underexplored territory on “offensive” actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn’t mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it’s still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that’s a level of player and dev effort/investment that’s rarely on the table.
There are games like Half Sword, Hellish Quart and Blade Symphony (and maybe to an extent Exanima) that are built around “realistic”/physica-based sword/melee combat (idk about Half Sword as that’s basically QWOP Knights, but there can still be plenty of skill involved).
Sekiro was lightning in a bottle, I can’t think of any games released after it that come close to how great the gameplay was in it.
i absolutely love the ‘sekiro-mode’ deflecting hardtear introduced in elden ring’s DLC and i hope they continue to emphasize that gameplay element
Ghost of Tsushima
They lost me during the bit about “Do you want to have to not just learn about but care about ticky-tacky coder stuff when you are just a person trying to play a video game?”
In fighting games for example, frame data is essential for learning the game. It’s like knowing what the pieces do in chess. They just want to move the horsey around and not worry about all these pesky mechanics. Not all games need to be like that, but it’s absolutely appropriate in certain genres.
Parries we’re awesome in Sekiro because the entire game was built around them. The parry window was wide and the whole game was built to be a sort of rhythm combat game. It’s important to note that the parry wasn’t the only tool you were supposed to use. You had to react with Mikiri counters and jumps as well. The whole game came together to make the incredible duels that feel like a dance.
If they wanted to say that developers saw Sekiro’s popularity and started shoving parries in where they don’t belong then I could see that argument. There’s some nuance there that this blanket statement of parries bad misses though.
I call bullshit on fighting games and frame data.
I remember ages ago when SF4 happened I was friends with a pretty solid tournament competitor and talking about this he mentioned that frame counting is for nerds because the only thing you need to know is if you can push a button or not and that happens from intuition, which is true. At least it’s true in a good game that has good animation. I’ve always had a kick of beating sweaties with their “this is minus three” obsession by having solid fundamentals. Some of them got pretty annoyed.
And to this day I will claim that Dragon Ball FighterZ is the best fighting game of the last decade specifically because a) every basic combo route is built out of repeatable, simplistic, easy to remember chunks, and b) you can mash the CRAP out of 90% of that game’s links and they work perfectly fine unless you’re trying to do a rejump or time an assist extension.
I will die on this hill, except I won’t because I’m right. I will survive on this hill. Make a little cottage on it and play fighting games inside it.
That hasn’t been my experience at all. Knowing the difference between what’s plus, what’s minus, and what’s block punishable is super important. Knowing if I can set up a frame trap is huge, and it works specifically because it isn’t always intuitive. In Tekken especially you need to know your frames for block punishes, when you can sidestep, and what options your opponent has in a given situation.
It’s not always mandatory, but it’s always useful.
It is super important, but it’s not a timing problem, it’s a knowledge check.
The thing you want to know is whether you can buffer a button during your recovery and get it off before the other guy. If you can, the timing is often very loose, you mash on that thing and you probably get your punish out frame 1.
And if the game is good you don’t learn it by spending a ton of time with a wiki or even with the training mode, you learn it by playing the game and looking at the animations.
If you are a bad game, like the first few Tekkens (yeah, I said it), then you won’t get that from the animation, but you can still learn it by trial and error. And crucially, once you learn it it’s always the same. In most decent games with consistent base mechanics, anyway.
So no, you shouldn’t have to learn whether your jab is four or five frames. That’s how the game is put together, but it should be good enough at communicating how fast your button came out that you can intuit when it’s safe or effective to put it out after blocking. At least after you try it once.
There are a ton of fighting games that are still grandfathered into the notion of putting complexity in this part of the design. You know, the ones where your fastest attack is different per character so you need to know this particular guy’s fastest opener is a crouching medium kick, but only when you’re close enough or whatever. I’d argue those games are less elegant without adding anything to the skill ceiling when compared to newer games like my previous DBFZ example, where everybody’s jab is probably the same speed and the basic flowchart of what to do after you block an attack doesn’t require a textbook and complementary materials.
Counterpoints: Mordhau, Nine Sols
Sounds like someone is a bit salty they can’t immediately get the timing right in Expedition 33 and it’s reminding them of all the other times they’ve sucked. Get good, loser.
To be fair, input delay and dropped inputs are a huge problem with kB+m, at least on the game pass version
Depends on the game. Parrying in the opening moments of Witcher 2 is a fucking pain, because it consumes 1 bar of stamina, as does rolling dodge, and you only have 2 stamina at that point, which also takes forever to regenerate. If the enemy isn’t dead after 2 parries, you’re fucked for 20 or so seconds because you have no way to actively avoid damage other than running away
On the other hand, the parries in the Batman Arkham games and Shadow of Mordor feel great.
I JUST SAW AN ARTICLE 2 MINS AGO DAYING ITS THE BEST THING IN VIDYA GAMES
Third Strike parry is peak gaming. I also enjoy Street Fighter 6 parry. However, my brain feels real good landing them in Third Strike