cyberninja45 said:
You know I always thought the precursor to fighting games (like street fighter) were beat em ups like double dragon, they took the core parts of it and made it into its own genre. Now fighters are still around but there popularity also kind of faded,except for a few titles, and those few titles that are still around are mostly those that were established years ago, as it is especially hard for a new fighter to have mainstream popularity these days. Most of the people that played fighters back then I think are the only ones supporting it now, I think this occurred due to fighters only catering to their audience and making it impossible if you were new to the genre to get into it, as you would get destroyed by veteran players (those darn stinking veteran players) so this in turn caused this genre to dwindle alot in its popularity. Could this also happen to online multiplayer in FPS? |
Personally two of my most played genres this game were FPS and fighting games, so this question you bring up is quite interesting to me.
One thing I can say for certain is that FPS are much MUCH more pick up and play friendly than a fighting game. A good fighting game by design requires the player to spend a substantial amount of time into the game to get better, and it has a huge payoff. If you make a watered down fighting game for the masses, it'll just lead to a spamfest (as I've seen with many casual games like Naruto UNS2) and everyone will lose interest. This leads to the weeding out of casual gamers who just want to spend a few hours online, and ends up developing a community where everyone is very serious about the game (veterans). So for anyone new to come in after the initial release of the game is extremely hard since the veterans will just whoop your candy a** in whatever you do, and this is a problem with many fighters. The only way to solve this problem is through skill based matchmaking, but unfortunately for that to work you need a relatively large playerbase, which many fighters don't have due to their inherent design as discussed above. The one place where I saw this being implemented well was in Soul Calibur 5 because it has quite a large following. When I first got into the game I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but by playing people of similar rank to me I was able to have fun with relatively fair challenge. Unfortunately this isn't really possible with many others, like say Blazblue, which is an amazing game but suffers from a lack of a large userbase due to its complexity. This leads to you just sitting in the ranked match menu for 10-15 minutes before you can find a match with someone with the same skill level.
All the above is not a problem with FPS because the novice to veteran ratio is extremely lopsided due to the huge userbase. Plus FPS are in general much easier to get decent at (although you do need to spend time to become amazing), so people just stick to them without giving up. So when you are online and you're new, chances are you're playing mostly against other newcomers as well, which leads to a somewhat fun experience even if you are a newbie. It also helps that the matches are not 1 V 1, which could lead to similar problems as with fighting games, but rather 6 v 6, so the chances of continuously getting owned by a single good player is reduced.
