7 Comments
Feb 21, 2022Liked by Nathan Brown

Loving the newsletter!

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Feb 21, 2022Liked by Nathan Brown

I love Street Fighter. I’ve put countless hours into the series many instalments, but mostly into practicing and learning characters offline, rather than actually playing against others.

I feel that there is a more fundamental issue that the 1v1 competitive format has yet to crack: that losing isn’t much fun. 50% of players in any given match are going to lose, if half of your players aren’t having a good time you’re going to see drop off over time. Meanwhile in a game like Fortnite, 99% of players are not winning each match, but there’s still enough to keep them coming back for more.

Some of this draw is the social aspect of hanging out, (most encounters in 1v1 are confrontational, so that’s a tough one) but to build lots of appeal fast SF6 needs to be super-generous with making players feel like they are achieving/progressing/contributing with every action, rather than being laser-focused on getting that W.

(Also, in my perfect world of fighting game tutorials, I would have a reference lesson archive of ‘what to do in this situation’s, as it’s the worst to lose to a move where you just don’t know the counter. Maybe when you lose a match you could search though match replays of similar matchups where that move was used. Meta-tagging and databases must be able to make this happen, right??!)

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Feb 21, 2022Liked by Nathan Brown

The last Street Fighter I played was Street Fighter II... I dipped in over the years to the likes of Killer Instinct, Soulcalibur etc. but never really got hooked on these fighting games... I would actually really be interested in trying a new Street Fighter but the reasons you list keep me away... specifically lack of a decent tutorial, good single player mode and a 9 year old child prodigy handing me my ass in online play ... if they made it more appealing for newbs like me to come and give it a go sure it could only be good for the franchise

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Feb 22, 2022·edited Feb 22, 2022

Love reading your thoughts on fighting games Nathan - a genre I absolutely loved as a kid, but now find kind of impenetrable. You do such a good job of comprehensively articulating the appeal of playing them competitively, without drowning it in the jargon of frame traps and negative edge and damage scaling and etc etc.

I have played through the campaigns of the Injustices and one of the recent Mortal Kombats, and while you are quite right that they are useless at teaching each game's quirks or any character with any depth, I've always thought of them as a tasting menu with very silly, quite entertaining presentation - a 22 course meal served on iPads playing 80s b-movies, but not as terrible as that sounds. It gave me an idea of which characters I liked the feel of most and who I'd want to invest time in learning first.

If SFVI/SF6 is FTP and has a tutorial that can get me doing a 10-hit combo without it being a maddening evening of trial and error, I would happily give it another go.

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