Simplified Inputs

Now that we’ve had a first look at Street Fighter 6 and that it will add a simplified, or what Street Fighter 6 calls it, a modern control scheme, I think it’s as good a time as any to talk about simple inputs. Does it really matter if something is simple, complicated, modern or stupid? Well?

Different platforms

While arcade sticks are very common and I am including stickless arcade controllers like my trusty HitBox into that category as well, I would assume that gamepads are still the most widely used input devices and following that, probably keyboards. Now I don’t have any stats to back this up and anecdotal evidence is as good as, you know, used toilet paper, however talking with PC gamers, which is almost everyone I know that plays video games, none of them own a gamepad. All of them are playing with keyboard and mouse. Be it Monster Hunter, Elden Ring or Street Fighter V. I’d hazard a guess that the mouse isn’t seeing a lot of action in fighting games, but I don’t know.

What type of input device you prefer is mostly shaped by what you are accustomed to. To get used to something else, you really have to go out of your way, to relearn what you already know, with a new tool. That is not really something anyone wants to do, unless there is a reason for it. As I mentioned in my Switching to HitBox videos, my reason was a painful left wrist, otherwise I would most likely still be playing on an arcade stick. I was playing on an arcade stick, because when I moved to London, everyone was playing Tekken 5 at Casino Goodge Street, the most amazing ghetto arcade, with so many messed up stories, btw. Also, it was right next to a Scientology recruiting place, yeah that place was just special, with an endless amount of dumb and hilarious stories, but that’s not what we are here for. My point is, I was playing on a PS2 DualShock 2 back then, but to play Tekken 5, at least outside of the Ranking Battles near Victoria Station, I had to learn how to play on an arcade stick. Back then it was also very much a pride kind of thing, right? Because Scrubs play on gamepads and if you want to get good, you have to play on an arcade stick… remember that nonsense? Eh, you might be too young.

If you grew up playing on PC without any consoles around, you are probably most accustomed and proficient playing on a keyboard. If you are even older than I am and grew up in arcades, you are most likely a proponent of arcade sticks and most people coming up with consoles have a high chance of just learning the games they are playing on that console’s gamepad. Between your DualShocks, DualSenses, Switch Pro Controllers, Arcade Sticks, Hitboxes, Mixboxes, Keyboards and whatever the Xbox controllers are called, there is just such a wide spectrum now of how inputs from a player’s hands are getting to the game. So at some point the developers of fighting games started to implement changes of how inputs are read.

Easier inputs

I am not claiming that SF4 was the first one to do so, but for me at least it was the first one where I was acutely aware of it, that something had been “dumbed down”. When I think back to being like 5 or 6 years old, trying to get a Dragon Punch out on a Super Nintendo controller and failing miserably, to all of a sudden just having to tap down forward twice in Street Fighter 4, something had definitely changed. Fast forward to games like Rising Thunder, Fantasy Strike, Granblue Fantasy Versus, Power Rangers Battle for the Grid and others, all the way to the inclusion of Ed and Falke in Street Fighter V to now having an optional input system in Street Fighter 6 it’s very clear that the input device of your choice, is only a preference now and nothing else. What works well on one, might not be so great on another and vice versa. So they all have their little advantages and shortcomings. Some of these pros and cons aren’t even related to the game. Being a pad player means that you can carry your controller of choice with you everywhere, without it being in the way. If I was a pad player playing Melty Blood, I would probably spend the majority of my time in training mode on a Nintendo Switch, because convenience can trump almost every single ergonomic counter argument you can throw at someone. Yeah playing on my Hitbox is great, but it’s unlikely I’ll be doing that on a plane, at a train station, or at a hospital.

Making inputs simpler is always met with a lot of disdain from people who seemingly don’t even play the games. You know the Twitch Chat and Twitter force, to me at least they seem to be the loudest. I do agree that there certainly is an argument to be made that simplifying controls can take away depth, but the games are balanced around that. In Granblue Fantasy Versus for example you get penalised for using simplified inputs. For one you actually have a cooldown on Non-EX Moves when you use simplified inputs, EX moves have an even longer cooldown than usual now, Skybound and Super Skybound arts have all kinds of different penalties for using simplified inputs like less damage, or less reach, or not getting the full animation, less oki options, more recovery… actually I’ll stop here, because I am not sure the more recovery one is actually true. But yeah, there is an incentive to using technical inputs, which means it was taken into account, balancing the game with that option in mind. DNF Duel is similar to Granblue in that regard, in that case it’s based on your MP gauge usage and regeneration rather than a cooldown, but the thought process behind it is virtually the same. So the depth argument doesn’t really hold up all that well.

Satisfaction

This is the one instance where I am also on the side of preferring technical inputs and being rewarded for them. I mentioned this in one of my earlier Happy Chaos videos, but I just want my hands to do cool shit. It is deeply satisfying and in a sense almost cathartic when it was something difficult that you had to learn, practice and grind it out until you could get it done at will, in a real match. Which is why I like how Granblue does it. You are rewarded for using technical inputs in that sense, as you are allowed more options following that, you do however also have the option to go for a simplified anti air DP at the end of the round, because there can’t be a penalty if the round’s over, right? It even promotes smart decision making in that sense. Having both options at the same time allows for a wider spread of strategies to emerge and most importantly it will satisfy both technical input die-hards, as well as those people that need an easier way in, those that are new to the genre, or even more important, people with accessibility issues.

Necessity

Heavy Hitters like Street Fighter 6 and Project L are both seemingly embracing the world we are now finding us in. The last two years weren’t great, right? COVID didn’t exactly make things easy, I just caught it a couple of weeks ago myself, so it’s not like the dreaded thing has disappeared. From a fighting games perspective though and as we offered up Granblue Fantasy Versus as our unfortunate sacrificial lamb, we are now finding ourselves in a position of developers actually listening to people who play those games. Rollback netcode is now seemingly a fixture, if not the standard moving forward, which will allow games to be populated for a lot longer, simply because the matching distance is increased. Guilty Gear Strive is finally getting crossplay, maybe we’ll be able to get that as a standard as well. Street Fighter 6 is going to be on Playstation, Xbox and Steam and Project L will hopefully be on everything including a Nokia 3310. With all this stuff that has happened over the last two years, we have more people playing these games, a lot of them being completely new, my first fighting game kind of new. Why would you not want these people to get a foot in the door? They are new, they are not going to beat you unless you suck and if that’s the case, my guy, simplified inputs are the least of your problems. Let these people get into the game, if they want to advance and they don’t even have to do that, they just need to enjoy the game and populate the lower skill levels, to allow other new people to advance, but if getting better is a goal, then at that point they will just get with the meta. If that’s technical inputs or some other such thingamajig, that’s just what they will have to do at that point. Whining about people stealing games off you though, because of X, Y and Z, I mean, get real. You are the only person responsible for your scrubby existence, not some new person simply enjoying the features presented to them.

Closing Words

I might have waffled on for a bit too long here, but I think it’s a rather complicated topic to discuss without having some form of a bias. As I said, your preferred choice of input device is most likely simply tied to whatever input device you had available to you. With that in mind it’s very likely that you are more inclined to be for or against simple inputs, depending on the environment you used to play in. So I put these two questions over to you: What controller do you play fighting games on and what is your take on simplified inputs? Let me know in the comments, either here or on the YouTube video. See you next time.