New Players Are Not Stupid Pt.2

I think, fundamentally, engaging with any video game (but especially a fighting game) is akin to a conversation between developer and player.
As a developer, your goal should be to confidently communicate your game’s mechanics to your player, and trust that the player will be able to keep up. There’s a delicate balance here, though – say too little, and your player won’t feel comfortable contributing to the conversation on their own. Say too much, however, and the player won’t have any room to express themselves on their own terms.

Once upon a time, I wrote this “conversation analogy” with respect to a little fighting game called Fantasy Strike, a creation of the not-so-little game developer and noted Low Strong Presser, David Sirlin. You see, it was to be the target of my ire for a follow up to my piece from 2020, “New Players Are Not Stupid”, where I would talk about what happens when you make a Fighting Game For Dummies. But the world has a funny way of changing your plans. Because while I did end up writing that follow up piece – this very one you’re reading right now – it’s not about Fantasy Strike. At least, not any more.

It’s about Guilty Gear Strive.

When you look through the history of the Guilty Gear franchise, comparing which entries are considered genuinely deep and engaging competitive experiences with which entries are liable to cause their players to loudly proclaim “KUSOGE” at a publisher-sponsored tournament, you start to get the impression that, throughout the series’ 23-year-long tenure, none of its iterations were ever really “developed” so much as they all just seemed to… happen within the Arc System Works offices, like mould growing in a petrie dish. Or, perhaps more accurately, in the back of the break room fridge. In this view, it starts to seem more and more miraculous that there are any good Guilty Gear games at all – the games that manage to land in that first category all seem to be there entirely by accident. To quote my good friend Hans “Pichy” Stockmann, who points to the notorious Guilty Gear XX Slash as an example of this:

“Slash is the first ASW game with intentionality to its design, and it still proves my thesis that this company cannot do math, hates math, and should never try designing games in a way that requires it.”
– Pichy on That Time Ky Was Top One, 2021

And so, when Daisuke Ishiwatari and Akira Katano told fans that the newest entry in the series, Guilty Gear Strive, would be a “complete reconstruction of the franchise”, it came with an implication that many of us didn’t catch on to – by starting from the ground up, Strive had inadvertently billed itself as the first Guilty Gear title to actually be, well… designed. Early on, I predicted that the presence of actual design intent would be what separated Strive from other games in the series. A few months after release, I now know that I was correct – and that my prediction was, in hindsight, more like a warning.

As a point of comparison, let’s take a step back and talk about the other most popular entry in the Guilty Gear series: Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R (which I’ll be referring to as ACPR for short).
Viewing the totality of that game’s various design elements – system mechanics and characters alike – it becomes increasingly clear that the game is completely asburd, full of all kinds of unbelievable bullshit that simply wouldn’t be allowed to exist in any other fighting game released in the current age. Like, I’ve seen people very genuinely consider quitting the game because of Justice, a character whose extremely polarised gameplan makes her mid-tier in the same way that E.Honda is mid tier in Super Turbo¹, all because in spite of those limitations she still manages to be one of the most toxic zoners I have ever encountered in any fighting game.
Despite ACPR’s endless stream of frustrations and ways in which the game seems determined to ignore your desires and intentions at every juncture, it remains extremely popular because of Arc System Works’ historically hands-off approach to the fine-tuning of character and systems balance (even to the extent that ACPR was an attempt to do just that with Accent Core) – rather than being a tightly choreographed competitive experience, the game system and its characters are instead allowed to exist in a somewhat unfiltered manner, and the meta becomes to be defined by emergent gameplay rather than strict developer intentions.²

“Emergent gameplay” doesn’t refer explicitly to doing things in a game outside of what the developers intended for players to do, of course. The name gives it away, really – the appeal of a game like ACPR is the fact that, for all its faults, it is a game that feels a lot like a fighting game sandbox, where players are just given tools and are then simply allowed to figure out which ways they want to use those tools. Strategies and advanced gameplay emerge from experimentation, rather than through developer dictates. This is usually what people mean when they say older Guilty Gear titles allow for a high degree of “player expression” – the game generally allows you to do whatever you imagine to be possible with the tools at your disposal, irrespective of whether or not doing that might be a good idea.

And thus enters Guilty Gear Strive, a game where you can only use your tools in the limited, narrow ways that Daisuke’s Vision allows you to. A game that gives you a hammer, then tells you that the hammer may only be used to hit the nail.³

Much has been made of the mechanics of Strive, both in my writings and elsewhere. Last time I covered the game, it was just after the end of the first closed beta test held in April 2020, and while some minor details have changed, the game is still largely the same as it was back then. Plenty has been said already about what Strive’s mechanics are and what they mean for the game as a whole, so we won’t be focusing on that here. Instead, I want to focus on the “why” – why are Strive’s mechanics designed the way that they are, and what influenced those design decisions?

As a starting point for this analysis, I’ll present my thesis statement: where ACPR told players to experiment, Strive tells players to optimise.

Now, when I say “optimise”, I don’t mean it in the sense that someone in your character’s twitter hashtag has found a way to squeeze 10 more damage out of your jump-in punish. Instead, I’m talking about a broader trend in modern fighting game design which I believe Strive epitomises – a trend which emphasises designing systems and toolkits such that the learning curve is as smooth as possible, and players can more quickly begin to make the “good” decisions in gamplay (commonly phrased as getting new players to “play the real game sooner”). In other words, it’s design that optimises decision-making.
If you’re developing a fighting game intended to have mass-market appeal, this seems like a pretty reasonable compromise. You don’t want your game to seem so dense and complex that it becomes inscrutable to anyone who isn’t already a capital-letter Fighting Game Player, but you also don’t want to make things too easy, lest you make match pacing extremely volatile and cause another round of complaining about comeback mechanics. So rather than making winning itself easier, you instead make it easier for people to ascertain what decisions might allow them to win – which generally means designing the tools available to players in a way that gives them very clear use cases. This is an anti-air, this is a reversal, this is a poke. The big problem with this approach, however, is that in making the use cases of these moves clear, you also make them much more narrow. This is an anti-air, this is a reversal, this is a poke – and nothing else. The hammer may only be used to hit the nail.

This is all above board (I guess) when you’re making something totally new, but what happens when you’re working from an established base? In this case, the flattening of the learning curve, the optimisation of decision-making, will invariably result in some things being removed or changed beyond recognition. The professional term for this is “streamlining”, or so I’m told. Strive gives us numerous examples of this design ethos, both on a system and an individual character level.
We can point to a number of ways this manifests on a system level – the inaccessibility of Instant Blocking and the strange decision to attach guard cancels to the Roman Cancel mechanic⁴ come to mind – but I think if we want to talk about the streamlining of system mechanics, we have to talk about the gatling system, don’t we?
Gatlings (aka chain combos) in every Guilty Gear game prior to Strive certainly had intriciacies, thanks to slightly different chain routes for each character, but the system was largely predicated on a pretty simple rule – if you press a light attack button, you can press the next strength button up from that, and then you do the next attack. It’s a very simple “ABC” formula that’s pretty easy to get to grips with. Whatever sequence of buttons you want to use, you can probably pull that sequence off, even if it might not be the “optimal” sequence to use. Strive cuts down the number of total gatling options available to every character and makes every chain route universal (the details of which I won’t get into, just read the Dustloop wiki) – what’s of note here, however, is which gatling options were made available. The thinking behind which gatling options are available seems to be based on which ones were most commonly used by players in a match setting. 2K > 2D was a really common sequence for a lot of characters, after all. If that’s what you were most likely to be doing with the K button in most situations, why should you need to do anything else?
Other restrictions can probably be explained with the ethos of mitigating reward from particular moves. P is a low commitment means of checking offense, so you shouldn’t be able to confirm a usable knockdown from it. K is a reasonably fast poke, so you shouldn’t be able to get your big combos from it. If you want the big combos, you need to use the S and H buttons. The hammer may only be used to hit the nail.

Of course, that’s just the system. If we really want to get into the definition, the true face of Strive’s design ethos, we need to talk characters – specifically, the game’s resident King of the Jungle (and the tier list), one Sol Badguy.
In ACPR, Sol was a fairly middle-of-the-road character who was definitely aggressive, but not exactly rushdown. He certainly excelled in the close range thanks to his myriad tools that allowed for powerful frame traps and strike/throw mixups, and while he did also struggle against characters who play well at long ranges, he had a number of unique, aggressive movement options to navigate around them. In Strive, Sol is honestly much the same character, but subjected to that “streamlining” process I mentioned. This process is endemic to the whole of Strive – many characters have significantly less tools they can use compared to previous games, less verbs with which players can express their ideas for the game and their character⁵ – and I think we see this pretty sharply when comparing both iterations of Sol.
For starters, there’s the separation of Bandit Revolver and Bandit Bringer into separate moves, partly facilitated by the qualitative changes to Bandit Revolver from previous entries – rather than being an arcing kick that causes a hard knockdown, it now simply moves directly forward, being a standard meterless combo ender and common Roman Cancel point. Bandit Bringer itself is also effectively a replacement for Sol’s divekick special from the Xrd games, repurposing an existing special move to serve the function of another, while largely removing the utility of the first iteration, mostly because its utility was somewhat limited and situational. There’s also Wild Throw, whose entire utility as a command grab that starts freeform air combos has been gutted in favour of just having all the damage front-loaded into the throw itself. After all, that’s the damage you should be getting from the move anyway. Its only utility outside of that now rests with its invulnerability to throws – a property afforded to all command grabs in Strive so that they can beat attempts by the opponent to break your normal throw. The hammer may only be used to hit the nail.

But the star of the show, really, is the meme move beloved by Sol players everywhere – this is the part where we talk about Riot Stamp.⁶
Riot Stamp is honestly the most Guilty Gear move in Guilty Gear. A flying kick that requires Sol to bounce off the wall behind him before flying towards the opponent, kicking them in the dome and maybe netting a combo. While it does have some situational (and very gimmicky) uses, it is largely a trick. In most situations, the move is trivially easy for the opponent to counter, and the reward you get from landing it compared to the risk you face by allowing your opponent to smack you with their strongest anti-air while you’re helplessly flying at them boot-first is not worth it. You don’t want to use this move.
Except, you totally do. Because it’s hilarious.
Specifically the move is hilarious because you don’t want to use it. See, humour is predicated on the subversion of expectation, and Riot Stamp can be a fantastic subversion of both players’ expectations – the opponent probably didn’t expect to see it come out because of how gimmicky it is, and the Sol player probably didn’t expect it to work. The highly situational nature of the move adds to this, as well. After all, it may be the World’s Most Obvious Overhead, but it’s a bit less obvious when the Sol player does it with their back to the corner, making the startup significantly faster due to the elimination of any travel time to the wall behind him. Even funnier if you do it at the most midscreen position possible, and it still manages to work purely because it caught the opponent so off guard that they screwed up their anti-air. It’s a window into the design ethos of a game like ACPR – it exists for no other reason than “just because”, and players are allowed to make their own fun with it.

In a way, though, Riot Stamp is also a window into the design ethos of Strive – because it isn’t there.
There really isn’t much more to say. Instead of giving players a sub-optimal tool and letting them figure out their preferred uses for it, the tool was simply taken away with no replacement because using it is not explicitly a good idea. If you want to hit the nail, you may only use a hammer.

Ostensibly, the goal of this design ethos is to lower the skill floor without changing the skill ceiling. If playing fighting games competently is broadly about making good decisions about what tools to use and when, then making the use cases clear and obvious should allow for more people to reach a level of competency without affecting the consistency of top level play. And while it doesn’t exactly achieve the opposite, it does, I think, serve to lower the skill ceiling regardless. After all, if playing fighting games competently is broadly about making good decisions about what tools to use and when, then one of the most important skills is learning about (or even discovering) those edge case uses for your more niche tools, or even innovating new ways of using tools whose use cases might otherwise seem cut and dry. If the hammer may only be used to hit the nail, then not only are you foregoing any other means of hitting the nail, you’re also foregoing any other uses the hammer may provide.

Guilty Gear Strive is a game which, in the pursuit of clarity of intent, allows its metagame to be dictated by those intentions rather than by what the players make of it. The issues with the game’s design are numerous, but I think it all comes back to this design ethos – a philosophy of not trusting your players to learn and discover the intricacies of the game themselves. A philosophy of not respecting the intelligence of new players.⁷
Guilty Gear Strive is The Fighting Game For Dummies. And if you ask me, players of any skill level, Dummies or otherwise, deserve better than this.