Just to chime in a million years late on this discussion about execution barriers:
(for reference this isn't a rebuttal, just vocalizing my thoughts etc. It's pretty rambly so bear with me)
So, I don't think you can take execution out of a compelling fighting game. I think it's actually difficult and unwise to do so.
I don't believe that SF4 etc is a series that is being propped up by the prevalence of links, or that giving Persona/UNiEL et al auto-dial combos changed their active, dedicated playerbases.
What I believe is that a fighting game needs sufficient complexity for it to be compelling, and if the core playerbase doesn't discover that after trying it out, they'll stop playing it. Before pacing, before relative difficulty, etc(even if these things can be crucial to the end result). The decision-making process between the two players needs to be meaningful--this is the end goal. Playing the game has to be stimulating--this is what the core playerbase wants, and the one thing as a game designer you need to give them, because spurning them in the name of broader appeal is like ripping out your own heart to feed vultures. They'll come to eat,but they won't stay, and your body(your game) is now a corpse.
To qualify this a bit, I don't think you have to answer this question(of whether the decisions you make when fighting another player have meaning) solely with execution, but I do think it's impossible to downplay. I believe many of the current fighting games we have today have all but reached the limit of going in that direction.
Inputs
You can safely say that any game that has
an action that requires more than one input across more than one frame has an input buffer. I don't think any modern fighting game lacks one. What's referred to as an 'input buffer' in these conversations is more specific, but I thought I'd spell that out to start.
At the base, if a game never did anything regarding reading inputs, everything you could possibly do that took more than a single input on a given frame would be equivalent to a 1f link(or simply that you couldn't have even one incorrect frame of input)
Naturally that's a terrible idea, so what's done instead is we grant windows of leniency between inputs, and let the game decide which combination of inputs takes precedence over another.
So from the very beginning, what I'm trying to say is that there is no true sanctity of input for input's sake; from the very beginning we're interpreting the best case of what we think you meant in the last few fractions of a second you pressed something on the controller.
What we often argue about is how strict or lenient interpretation of inputs can be. I think we can all agree at this point that fighting games are built on some measure of leniency and having it is a good thing.
So why is keeping things (relatively) strict desirable rather than making things more lenient? The biggest answer is enabling
freedom of choice, which naturally increases potential complexity.
If you bind actions to only standalone/simple inputs, the total number of actions you can take is limited to however many feasible combinations you can make from that. That's why more complicated motions exist to begin with.
However, the longer you open the window for a given move to be interpreted, the more that move's possible interpretation interferes with potentially taking other actions, meaning there are fewer decisions you can make over a given period of time, despite possibly having many on paper.
This is why taking any game in a vacuum and saying "let's make inputs more lenient!" harms complexity and thus can harm depth. It's similar in some ways to the argument of playing action games at 60fps versus 30fps; information between the player and the game is reduced, leading to less actions the player can take/decisions the player can make in a given period of time, leading to less complexity.
However, doing so may not harm depth in a meaningful way; if the existing rules of the game already prevent or heavily discourage the actions that the player could have taken in the hypothetical situation that s/he could have, then losing that aspect of complexity probably would not have a meaningful effect on the game's depth.
These are just dumb examples but perhaps having lower mobility options, or disallowing hard knockdowns, or having immense pushback on normals that connect
might be cases where those rules already ward off would-be-lost complexity from reading inputs with more lenience/having simpler inputs.
This leads to an open question I want to bring up at the end.
Execution
I think Kimosabe's argument about the 'athleticism' of keeping inputs difficult to master is compelling, and I don't think that inputs have to be 'made' difficult. I believe that a competitive community will naturally do this to a fighting game they see value in, and that there is no way of meaningfully stopping this.
Some examples that are prevalent in countless fighting games for that reason:
- Links - Next to impossible to remove from a game entirely, at best you can attempt to make them meaningless. Nobody liked combos anyway, right?
- Option Selects - As long as a game is forced to accept multiple valid inputs and decide between them in the same cycle, these will exist. Again, at best you can make them non-important.
- Infinites - A too-loose ruling on how consecutive moves interact or just a poor implementation of how said ruling works allow these to show up in nearly every fighting game ever.
(just to be clear, I'm not talking about how desirable these are, just saying that these are things often required or enabled by precise inputs, that the competitive community discovers in most games)
We may not be able to stomach a game where any dropped frame of input is effectively an error, but competitive players are driven to and do create situations where their opponent's ability to defend rests on a scant few frames of input in nearly any game. And by 'defend' I don't just mean against gimmick setups that require you to know or read them correctly, I mean even basic movement in the neutral space. I think anyone who's followed FGW and seen pro matches in literally any game knows this is true.
We don't really see calls for making basic movement more lenient in fighting games, despite the fact that it is hardcore and as restrictive as any other special input once you enter the competitive realm.
Plenty of casual players play each iteration of Smash and feel like they're completely in control of and know the full moveset, despite how hardcore those games are to master.
What exactly can you do about fundamental execution? It naturally becomes difficult, it naturally becomes hardcore as players push the game to its limits. Should anything be done?
Accessibility
This is the big reason why we consider making fighting games easier. It's a niche genre, and it is difficult to get people to do much besides mess around for a few days or weeks before moving on to something else.
Specifically, the argument for making fighting games easier to get into is that public perception that they are difficult to get into. Especially in this age, public attention span is shorter and games are dabbled with and abandoned in record time.
This perception doesn't exist because fighting games are competitive--plenty of competitive games exist that actually require exceptional amounts of muscle memory training and reactions, yet enjoy having massive core fanbases by comparison.
And it's not because fighting games themselves are difficult to mess around with--if there weren't hundreds of thousands of people playing fighting games today to just mess around, there wouldn't be any for us to play today.
It's been said a few different ways, but IMO it's because
too few casual players see value in continuing to play the game further and become core players. Frankly, the turnover rate sucks.
There's something to be said for not having the right/dedicated mentality to soak up the time in training mode and the many losses it requires to start seeing success, but I don't think that's the driving reason. I believe that the driving reason is that casual players that might-turn-core don't get to see the value of competition soon enough. If you don't realize how fun it is to refine your skills and communicate with your opponent rather than just going ham with one or two cheeseball move and smashing(or being smashed for it), then what's the drive to keep playing? Sure, plenty of people can run on salt, but that only becomes meaningful after you(indivudally) recognize that you could have outplayed them.
I don't believe that we're at the point where these players fighting the controls is why they give up. I believe that these players move on because they don't know what they're doing right/wrong and how to get better in a way that doesn't overwhelm them. I do believe that fighting games need to find a way to communicate to an audience with shorter attention spans why sticking with the genre is enjoyable.
I think the route to making fighting games more accessible lies here. We have to spell out a lot of the elements that can be intuitively understood through investing a lot of time, because we don't have the time to grasp hearts like we did years ago.
Tutorials, self-evaluation programs, cpu-trainers, and so on. I think Xrd made a great step with its release, but I believe we can and need to do more than that.
The Open Question
I'm going to go back to my statement that 'it would be possible to reduce complexity of a fighting game, assuming the lost options were of low value or redundant, without impacting depth'.
The issue with that statement is that whatever possible depth lay in that area was already removed by how the system was designed. You can't really remove what wasn't there in the first place, right? But several games make that work. Street Fighter doesn't need real air dashes or runs, Blazblue doesn't need rolls, etc. The current interactions they have within their own systems are compelling enough.
If you
really want to make execution less of a topic with a fighting game(and I'm not talking about 2f buffers instead of 1f buffers, but on a fundamental level of holding the player's hand compared to a normal FG and really lowering the skill cap), you have to provide the lost stimulation from somewhere else.
The question is simple:
Where?
I think if someone properly answers that, that will end up being the holy casual grail answer to fighting games; otherwise going the route of reducing execution requirements further than games like Skullgirls already have will lead to jack shit.