I’ve joked plenty about previous Marvel Vs. Capcom games being the ultimate in winning a match by headbutting your controller until a desired effect is achieved. That’s completely true…and kind of sad. When you examine the mechanics of a fighting game, they’re the absolute best at sucking you into their rhythm. That moment where you find serenity at the end of your fist and on the face of your opponent? Brilliant stuff.
If you know what you’re doing that is. With Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite, Capcom wants the playing field even for anyone, new or old. “As somebody who’s been with the series for a long time… it was a matter of… making sure that there was accessibility, because as somebody who played the games in the arcade and then on the consoles I’ve seen that the game can feel uninviting and very daunting for new players,” associate producer Peter Rosas said to VG247.
it’s about making sure that the new player can get that fun experience in
So, it was a definite design decision to make sure it was more accessible. Now, the thing is that… you don’t want to put too many of these things in because you don’t want to have players completely depend on them, right? For us, it’s really important for new players to experience how the combat system feels, to be able to perform a combo – to perform an air combo, too. Those kind of things make you feel good. You can think “oh, I’m beginning to understand the game, and the speed, and what my character can do!”
Just using a simple combo with Hulk versus using it with [Mega Man] X, you see that you have to push the square button, light punch, at different speeds. That already gives you an indication that the characters work a little differently. Same thing with the hyper combo – you’re just seeing a big, flashy action really quickly. We felt like by putting those two things in and also the universal combo string, there’s things there for new players to get familiar not only with their character but with the battle system. That should be enough for them to say “I’m having fun now, I want to transition” or “I’m having fun now, let it be.”
To your question of where we draw that line, it’s about making sure that the new player can get that fun experience in and understand what’s happening, and then we decide what to build on from there.
That line in the sand mentioned above? It happens to be drawn right at the point where tournament play comes in. “The thing is you always get the same six or seven attacks. The same string comes out when you push the easy combo command,” Rosas explained.
If you really want to exercise greater control of your character which in turn leads to greater damage – and this is a fighting game, so what you want to do is knock your opponent out as fast as possible – you’re going to want to learn their combos, their most optimal combos. That’s not going to be the simple command.
Although the simple command gets you initiated into the game, that’s not the end-all.
Sounds fair to me. Few fighting games manage to really convey a sense of how they function, how they operate at their very best in skilled hands. Games such as Killer Instinct and Guilty Gear Xrd have solid foundations, something more genre titles could learn from. If Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite can strike that balance between accessibility and pushing a player to be better without crutches, well the more the merrier.
Last Updated: May 4, 2017
