Modern game patch culture, simplified execution, and playing old games forever
I don’t follow SF6 closely, so it was kind of funny to see videos from both Max and Sajam discussing the apparently common opinions that SF6 is both a) in a healthy state, generally and b) also needs a “shakeup” to keep things fresh. White Beast has my favorite take on it, personally:
But it’s easy for me to agree when I spend my evenings rotating between Xrd, MvC2, CvS2, and the occasional +R session, the newest of which got its last update 8 years ago. When I have dipped into games that were actively getting patched, I generally tried to play the game that was in front of me instead of trying to anticipate future patches, and when I quit those games it was because I knew that the things I didn’t like about those games weren’t things that were going to be changed. If anything, seeing fighting games settle into healthy states is a relief, since it means I don’t need to worry about whether the time I spend practicing any given aspect of the game is going to be devalued after a patch. So the idea that someone could think “this game is in a good place” and “this game needs a change” is somewhat alien to me because I am still nowhere near done plumbing the depths of the games I’ve been playing for years to decades.
That said, it’s not exactly a surprise. I’ve said before that I look for games that I can play forever, and if a game smells like it’s only good for a year or five, I’m probably not going to stick around. One of the critical factors that make a game feel like a forever game to me is execution; if a game rewards players for labbing hard things and executing them successfully in-game, it generally has a lot of staying power for me, even though I would not consider myself an execution specialist. I do enjoy labbing execution, but it’s a thing I learned to enjoy fairly late in my fighting game career, and even when I didn’t like it so much, I still found myself drawn to fighting games that rewarded it.
Over time, I’ve learned that execution functions as a “time-release” mechanism for a fighting game; the depth of a game is limited by how thoroughly its players can explore and express it. When a game’s strongest techniques are hard to learn how to do and hard to reproduce reliably, players are more readily differentiated at the high end by what skillsets they’ve invested their time in, and the game can look and feel dramatically different whenever different people are playing it as a result. This keeps a game “fresh” to me, since the deeper I go, the more varied my experience is playing against other invested players, and there’s practically no end to the kinds of things that I can learn to further my mastery of the game. If a game is easier to play, and the rewards for execution aren’t as powerful, then most players will generally arrive at a functional holistic understanding of “the game” relatively quickly, and with little room to disagree (at least, unless there is an additional source of depth that contributes a similar time-release function).
MvC2 is the most executionally demanding game I play, which is why I have 152 hours in the MvC2 collection since it came out in September 2024, and I’d guess at least 145 of those hours have been spent practicing Magneto’s ROM infinite into Hyper Grav -> Magnetic Tempest. I played a decent amount of MvC2 during its heyday, and most of that time was spent playing teams which weren’t really execution-heavy (Storm/Cable/Cyclops, Sentinel/Cable/CapCom, etc.) but I was always a little fascinated by Magneto and had fun practicing his combos even if I couldn’t play him for shit. Later, I would go on to work at Riot, and when they got a MvC2 cabinet in the LA office game room I’d play through an Arcade Mode session after lunch to decompress from a hectic meeting schedule and get some Magneto combo practice in. The nice thing about knowing I’m in for the long haul is that there’s no urgency to Git Gud; it can just happen fifteen minutes at a time for years. So I’ll play MvC2 at locals, but in my daily home practice I’m just grinding the combos until I get consistent enough with them that my Magneto feels like a real threat.
This, to me, is something beautiful about MvC2. I do not have to grind these Magneto combos to play the game. I could play top tier teams with lower execution rewards, or I could pick a Magneto team that doesn’t need high execution to kill (with Tron assist, for example), or I could choose to emphasize resets so my ability to reliably land the ROM infinite and kill with Tempest isn’t as big a liability. But I don’t, because I have enjoyed every single hour spent labbing this combo extremely enjoyable (far more so than netplaying randos, actually). The infinite itself has multiple tricky points, including several situational entry routes, character-specific weight and size nuances, and height management, but the hardest part of executing the ROM infinite correctly is the need to perform the air dash input (down-forward + LP + LK, I don’t use a dash button) perfectly on the same frame up to 13 times or so. This is an execution challenge I’ve never faced outside of MvC2, since most games have a window of input leniency on button combinations, but not here.
Every session I get a little closer to unlocking new insights about how to get my fingers to hit those two buttons within the same frame more consistently; changing my wrist angle, contorting my fingers into ever more arcane shapes, whatever it takes. And since the ROM infinite rarely kills, I’ve needed to invest additional practice time in reliably routing into the Hyper Grav -> Magnetic Tempest, which has led me further down all the inconsistencies in my left-hand execution that are exposed by older games which are far more picky about half-circle input reading. These days, labbing MvC2 is often my warmup for the rest of the evening’s fighting game session because it serves as a decent mental calibration exercise for understanding where my hands are at today. Funnily enough, I’ve found a similar joy in getting into golf over the past few years, because it is another sport that gives you a lot of room to grind execution upfront at the driving range before ever playing a course. It’s something I get to pick at over time, at my own pace, and taking a long-term view on the game makes it easier to take my time working on what I want to work on.
I am also practicing execution in CvS2, though it is perhaps a little more rehabilitative in nature. I did not spend that much time grinding execution in my youth because it was my first fighting game, and I did not have experience in any analogous skills, like playing sports or musical instruments, to convince me that my execution could get better with practice. It just felt like something I didn’t have compared to the things I saw others do seemingly effortlessly. So I learned to play and compete without being able to do things like reliably hit links for a basic combo, or combo into supers.
Instead of sinking my time into refining my combo execution, I learned how to play the breadth of the game. I know how to play most of the cast in most of the grooves at a reasonably decent level, so if I’m in a local CvS2 bracket with no other notable competitors in it I’ll random select, or mirror match, or play a team in a groove I don’t normally compete with, or whatever. I also developed some pretty decent footsies, since that was usually how I was doing damage. Both of these skillsets continue to serve me well, but now that I have a couple decades of fighting game experience under my belt, I’m going back to actually cultivate some of the execution that I lacked back then. Nothing fancy right now, just getting better at comboing into supers.
The funny thing about CvS2 is that a lot of the combos are so hard to hit reliably (compared to other games, anyway) that failure is a normal and expected part of the game. Bas invited me to his apartment one day and had me practice a couple basic Sagat combos while he took a meeting in the other room; when I asked him how often a strong player would consistently hit those combos in a tournament match, he shrugged and said “Oh, maybe 80%?”
Fighting games feel very different when a basic combo has a 20% failure rate. At a basic level, it encourages taking risks, since it’s entirely possible that your opponent drops the punish, and a lot of things that might seem risky at first become less risky when you realize that consistently executing the optimal counterplay on reaction is a lot harder than it is in other games. The thing that I like most about the increased risk of failure, however, is that it changes the expected value on grinding execution. It still rewards players for doing it — quite significantly, in fact, as stuff like Roll Cancel, Custom Combos, Parry, and Just Defend all create game-changing advantages when mastered — but the sensitivity to which these skills must be executed is high enough that a player’s actual ability varies highly based on how they’re feeling that day, whether they’ve been maintaining their execution by practicing regularly, and so on. Old game execution is not mastered once and retained forever, it must be maintained and refined, and the gap between “what a player can do” and “what a player can do today” is where players like me can find wins against objectively stronger players.
What this means in practice is that every time I play the game against another strong player, I’m playing against who they are that day. By seeing how aggressively they chase higher-execution rewards, I can feel whether they’ve been actively practicing the game, or if they’re content to sit on their reliable fundamentals and punish players who are more ambitious in their practice. I may have been playing CvS2 for 25 years, but it never feels like I’m playing the same game. And as I continue to see more players expressing the game at high levels, I am driven to do more myself. Besides grinding execution for my competitive team, I’ve been continuing to try out different characters and grooves. Since CvS2 is a team game, there is a lot of room for players to switch team order and character picks to avoid matchups they don’t like, or run surprise picks to catch their opponents off guard.
When I look for a game that can be played forever, this is the kind of thing I look for to keep a game fresh. The subtle interplay between different axes of mastery allows strong players to disagree about how to play the game. Modern fighting games have largely left this behind in service of creating more consumable, sellable experiences; a fighting game is about this but not that, everyone who’s playing agrees, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go play a game that is about that instead. I assume that is correct for the business of fighting games, but every now and then I see a forever-game sneak out one way or another, and I add it to my list. I spend way too much time with the games I love to bother with one that wasn’t built to last.
pm
Twitter, FGC.Network Mastodon| read my words
Twitch | watch me play
Patreon | support my work
💪😎👍❤
