I fully expect backlash on this one, may contain elements of 3D fighter elitism.

Street Fighter 6 will be including an optional more simple control scheme for players who want it which they are calling "Modern" controls, i'm not sure why removing inputs to make it easier makes it "modern" but it got me thinking and i've been thinking this for a while, are developer's attempts to make 2D fighting games appealing or even playable for a broader audience a sign that the genre itself is outdated? If not outdated then maybe just requiring of a different kind of evolution?

Street Fighter was a massive success and created the foundation for which almost all 2D fighters would be made going forward, the sequels and other games that followed added new mechanics, combos, more difficult inputs (especially in KOF) and now... to cut a long story short, every new big name 2D fighter that comes out is slowing things down, adding auto combos, reducing complex inputs, basically removing or simplifying anything that might intimidate more casual players, but i can't help but notice the same thing hasn't happened with 3D fighters, like, not at all.

Tekken and especially 2 and 3 were huge hits when they came out, appealing to a wide audience with their presentation but also their low barrier of entry, you can hit buttons and make cool rewarding things happen, and with each iteration more moves, new mechanics, crazy combos and more have been added with every release but the foundation of Tekken remains, hit buttons, cool things happen, and the franchise has never been more popular despite becoming more complex. Neither Tekken, Soulcalibur or Dead or Alive has had to remove or simplify mechanics to make them accessible to casual fans, and i see this as a sign that maybe instead of constantly rounding off the sharp edges with every new 2D fighter a bigger change is needed, and i think i can see some of those changes in Street Fighter 6.

Early impressions of SF6 report that it's heavier, slower, there are more pauses giving players more time to react, attacks have more forward momentum, when i hear these things i think "so they're making it more like Tekken?", they're not going that far of course it's still clearly the sequel to SF5, which was already simpler than SF4, that's just the impression i get, they haven't found a way to naturally solve all the issues otherwise it wouldn't need an easier alternate control scheme and auto combos, but it's the first time in my eyes the franchise is taking steps to move away from Street Fighter 2's foundations.

I don't know how long i wanted this to be but it's clearly too long, i just wanted to try and find a way to explain my frustration with 2D fighters and some of the changes in SF6 including calling its simplified controls "Modern" gave me the idea.

I mean Mortal Kombat 11 has sold 12 million copies so it seems pretty clear that no, at least commercially, they are not outdated.

I think this is just the progression of games in general. They're getting more accessible, outside of those that are sold based on their difficulty. You see it across every genre. Games have a broad audience now and they can sell more copies appealing to a less hardcore crowd.

I was actually surprised by how short it is. I guess I've gotten used to the longer blogs on this site.

@bigsocrates: I agree and disagree :P.

Most multiplayer shooters keep getting more complex, what used to be team deathmatch and capture the flag with 12 or so people is now a hunt for weapons and equipment over 9 square kilometers with 100+ players, inventory management, vehicles, gadgets and squad interaction, but really the hard part with first person shooters is the aiming and shooting which isn't thaaaat hard, in terms of competition and the player experience i can definitely kill some people in every first person shooter ever made, but to feel rewarded in a fighting game i need to study and practice, but to want to put that time in the base mechanics need to feel satisfying and for me that's where 2D fighters fall short.

MK sells on its gore, established characters and high production value story mode, at a glance it's always the most impressive upcoming fighting game and its mechanics are easier than most 2D fighters with simple inputs and dial-a-combos, they don't need to simplify further to try and appeal to casual players because they're already buying it. In terms of player count, and i don't know if Steam figures are a good way to measure this but it's all i've got, T7 is 2 years older than MK11 and sold millions less, but saw 5,000 more players on it today.

@cikame: I do not think that you have fairly describe the state of shooters. The team deathmatch and capture the flag shooters still exist and in some cases have been simplified (Overwatch may be class based but there are no loadouts and simple controls) but there are also Battle Royale shooters as a separate sub genre. People play both Call of Duty Warzone and the old style. And even in Battle Royale we have seen increases in accessibility with Fortnite creating a much less hardcore version of Battlegrounds and now having a mode that removes its own building mechanics. Yes there are games aimed at the hardcore too, but a lot of the bigger hits have simplified. I also think arguably that Battle Royale games are less hardcore than traditional shooters because you just die and move on to another round, which is what a lot of people do. Not everyone treats them as these hardcore experiences.

I also don't think it's fair to just discount MK for being a game for casuals because it is, in fact, the biggest fighting game franchise going right now, and it used to be 3D but went back to 2D and had MORE success. There are other 2D fighting games that have sold quite well (Such as Dragon Ball Fighter Z) and the Guilty Gear series. You can always find a reason to discount these games (like Dragon Ball being based on a popular franchise, or Guilty Gear's flashy graphics, or Persona 4 Arena's tie in to a popular series) but they are really the majority of the 2D fighters being produced these days (unless you want to include Smash in which case your argument would be much weaker.)

So really your argument would boil down to whether Street Fighter needs to simplify and that's a separate discussion. Personally I think Street Fighter 5 had a lot of issues, and complexity was only one of them, but if you want to make this argument more broadly and you also want to discount the majority of 2D fighters being released you need to name some of the other games you're talking about.

As for Tekken vs MK on Steam...it's only one platform, but besides that it's not too surprising because Tekken has a stronger hardcore scene and MK has more single player fans, and both games are getting old anyway. However when we say games need to do something it's important to note what the goals of developers are. They want to make money. While having games with long legs can help with that, if the MK team sold millions of copies to people who played the single player mode and messed around with some towers and online battles with friends and moved on they don't need to change anything as long as those customers were satisfied and will buy the next one. Having more concurrent users is not the goal here and doesn't put any pressure on the games to change.

Capcom released a 2D Street Fighter collection and is doing a new 2D fighter collection soon with Darkstalkers and some other stuff, so clearly they think there's still an appetite for the classic 2D fighter as well. Other than Street Fighter what are the franchises that need to adapt?

In short: No.

I say this as someone who is neither a Street Fighter fan nor a Tekken fan, though I have played my fair share of both of those series and absolutely own and have spent a good deal of time with SF5 and Tekken 7; my favourite fighting games of the last few years have been Virtua Fighter 5, Samurai Shodown and Guilty Gear Strive.

I think what you're really expressing here is that you prefer the feel of 3D fighters. And thats cool. I tend to prefer 2D fighters, and thats cool too. They're surprisingly different branches of the same genre nowadays; I enjoy the technical aspects of the Arc System works and Virtua Fighter games (I'm not that good at them, but I still enjoy them, damnit), but 3D fighters tend to be built more around a flow and preset combo system.

Of course, Guilty Gear has an 'easy input' option to make it more accessible for newcomers, just like SF6 has it's 'modern' controls option. I don't think either of these highlight a need to simplify the genre because the depth is certainly still there, but you're right in that there's definitely more of an instant gratification feel about 3D fighters which beginners and newcomers will always find easy to appreciate.

If you look at the FGC as a whole though, 2D fighters remain the most popular option for competitions - of the 9 headliners for Evo 2022 only one, Tekken 7, is a 3D fighter, so you could easily turn this question around - are 3D fighters not complex or interesting enough to be considered for high end tournament play?

What I'm trying to say is, you can wiggle the stats around any way you like to make a point, but ultimately it comes down to personal preference. Personally, I don't think 2D fighters are outdated, and I don't think 3D fighters are too simple, either. I like 'em both.

When BlazBlue Calamity Trigger came out way back when on the 360, I was overjoyed to be able to tell my friend, who is not a huge fan of fighting games, that all they need to do to unleash some of the character's coolest moves is button mash until the meter fills a bit, then tilt the right thumbstick in a direction. We had a great time playing for a few weeks, until I started to main a character and play online, at which point the skill gap became a gulf and we moved on to something else.

That was in, what, 2007? 2008? And it arguably only had the intended effect of enabling a newcomer to enjoy playing the game for a short amount of time. I'm certain that for someone somewhere, that ease of access turned into them sticking with the game and genre for much longer than they thought they would, and may have turned into them learning the inputs without the shortcuts.

I don't really think it's indicative of the genre losing steam or being outdated that they've started to include this sort of feature with the real heavy-hitters of the genre. If anything, it's more of an admission that these features can help with player onboarding, and the desire to grow the playerbase is endemic to all multiplayer genres.

They are in the sense that there are millions and millions of people playing video games nowadays, of all different degrees and skill types, that if you want to tap into the casual market, you need accessible controls. The wide audience that something like Tekken 2 or 3 would have appealed to back in the day is nowhere near as wide as the audience is now. Games like Tekken, Soul Calibur, and Dead or Alive just aren't targeting that audience. They might be appealing to casual fighting game fans, or people that play a more diverse set of games, but they aren't drawing in the huge Fortnite crowds, and the Minecraft people, or the mobile audience. I think that's where all fighting games are guilty of outdated thinking. Not that there is anything wrong with chasing your core demographic, but no one is going after that wider audience, aside from maybe NetherRealm with MK and Injustice, to bring fighting games into the true mainstream audience, and I think this is Capcom trying to do that and be in that spot.

@brian_: Super Smash Bros is the fighting game for the masses. Multiversus and All Star Brawl are trying to copy that on other consoles.

@bigsocrates: Sure. Smash is a very "non-traditional" fighting game. It's very accessible in it's simplicity, and I think it's success is what "traditional" fighting games look at in order to take queues on how to target more of that wider audience.

These responses are awesome thank you, i said at the start i didn't expect people to share my opinion and i'm glad you guys took the time to explain why.

I have a few rebuttals :P, also a funny anecdote, i had a friend proof read my original post and he added that Fighting EX Layer had a more simple control scheme called "Progressive", i thought that was funny.

@bigsocrates I did consider the popular response to Fortnite's no build mode, but it's only one example of a shooter removing something to make it simpler so i didn't bring it up, also it's not the core experience it's a separate mode. I assume Fortnite was what you had in mind when you said games are getting more accessible because i couldn't think of anything else, especially in competitive multiplayer which is mostly dominated by shooters.

I consider Battle Royale to be complex not necessarily "difficult", there's a lot of things happening which a new player will have to learn, as opposed to a team deathmatch where you just shoot people, a player with bad strategy or luck can have their game ended before anything rewarding happens, but they keep playing because the core mechanics of a shooter are simple and inviting, which ties into my original post, developers are trying to make 2D fighters more simple and inviting but similar to shooters 3D fighters aren't having that problem.

I didn't say MK is for casuals i said its mechanics are already easier, and that the devs don't need to try and simplify it further like Capcom or Arcsys to attract more players because it's always a best seller regardless. They're an outlier and don't really fit into this discussion, i only used the difference in player count to suggest Tekken's approachability is why more people are playing it now despite its age and the difference in sales.

@laughingorc It's not just about controls, i also think of systems put in place to prevent players abusing mechanics, in pretty much all 2D fighters you can jump really high and far as much as you want making running away easy, they counter this in Guilty Gear with Tension which gives you a negative penalty for running away... this feels like one of those bandaids i mentioned, the game mechanics let you do that but the devs don't want you to do that, however that's an option in pretty much all 2D fighters it's not Arcsys's fault.

The Evo example is kind of an unfair one, it started in 1996 on arcade machines where it was pretty much exclusively Capcom games for 7 years before consoles were introduced, Capcom is in the blood of Evo and while there was certainly a competitive arcade scene for Tekken in Japan it's mostly known as a console game, it sold Playstations, the competitive scene especially in the west wouldn't truly arrive until Tekken 6... terrible netcode aside it did provide a notable growth in Evo attendees, and it planted the seeds for the growth we'd see with Tag 2 and especially T7, that growth is one of the reasons T7 is still as popular as it is. SF5's rocky launch and the mishandling of MvCI did lower some of the enthusiasm for Capcom games at Evo but it's still a Capcom tournament at heart.

@broshmosh I don't think it's possible to prevent the online skill gap from pushing people away, i guess one example would be For Honor (you can argue whether it's a fighting game but i say it is), the 1v1 experience is the same as a fighting game, but with team modes and loot a bigger variety of players had more reasons to stay, SF6 is doing something similar by having a story mode that has you running around a city, remains to be seen how interesting that is or whether it's just an ai fight hub, but i'm glad to see them doing something new to keep players playing besides practice mode.

@cikame: Without derailing the thread too much:

A) Battle Royale absolutely is its own genre, which you can see with Battle Royale games that are not FPS at all, like Tetris or Forza Horizon's eliminator. Now some battle royale games are also FPS games, but they are at the very least a subgenre that have not replaced the mainstay team death match games like Call of Duty and Halo, which are still very popular.

2) Battle Royale games create accessibility through randomness and by making it so that if you lose you can move on quickly. You get dropped into a chaotic environment where even a bad player can sometimes find a weapon and kill a better player by coming upon them in a weakened state or just through chance. Then when the bad player loses they move on to a new game, as opposed to sitting around in a COD map getting slaughtered while the kill count is so out of reach they can't possibly win. The randomness factor of the chaotic environments serves to squish the skill gap some. The games are less complex in that you need to have less skill and knowledge to have fun than you do in the games they supplanted.

Back to the topic at hand.

For you to make your argument easier to understand I still think you have to name some of the other 2D games besides Street Fighter that you think have these problems. 2D fighting games seem to be doing fine, with a number of concurrent series that are doing very well and lots of new entries.

3D fighting games, on the other hand, have the 2 Namco series, DOA (which at this point is more or less a weird costume DLC thing that seems to make money by extracting a lot of money from a small base) and...that's basically it. There are no other major series going.

2D on the other hand has Street Fighter, MK/Injustice, Guilty Gear/Blazblue, Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Samurai Shodown/KOF(both have had new entries recently), and about a billion anime fighters, licensed games like Power Rangers, or smaller series like Meltyblood.

It's weird to me that you say that 3D fighters are the more accessible ones when there are basically 2 current 3D fighting franchises of note, and they're both by the same company. Meanwhile 2D fighters have a ton of recent entires, some of them more popular than the 3D fighters, but they're the ones who need to change to have more market appeal?

@bigsocrates: It is established and successful mechanics that BR is built upon, whether it's Forza Horizon's open world driving, Tetris's addictive and time proven formulae or shooters, and these genres have not seen drastic changes to make them more accessible because they already are.

I shouldn't have used BR as an example of shooters getting more complex because... even though i think it's still a fair point, it distracts from the actual point i'm trying to make since it's still based on accessible shooter mechanics, i want to focus on the accessibility issues with 2D fighters.

There are more 2D fighters than 3D but there might be a reason for that, 2D fighters are cheaper and easier to make. I know i know i'm not a developer i don't know s*** but it's true, you've only got one plane to worry about, the camera doesn't need to move much, the stages are very small, characters don't need to track and interact in 3D space, there are so many more variables that come with an extra dimension. Anime fighters are pretty much exclusively 2D, it wouldn't be until much later with cell shading that the 3D Naruto and Dragon Ball games would be made but... we'll save those for another time.

Without surveys it's impossible to know how many players bounce off 2D vs 3D, the difference in active players between MK11 and Tekken 7 is interesting because they're the two most successful games in the genre's dimensional divide, but it doesn't work with the smaller games since they only have a handful of players.

@cikame: I don't know that 2D fighters are cheaper and easier to make. I think it depends on the game and the production values etc...

But I want to get back to the question of what other 2D games besides Street Fighter need to evolve and why. Because my main issue with your original question is that I don't think you have a strong basis for saying 3D fighters are more popular than 2D (there are many more 2D fighters than 3D and the biggest selling franchise is 2D) or that 2D fighters are struggling, since there continue to be a lot of them put out with many being very high quality games.

I just don't see a genre that's currently struggling, especially compared to 3D fighters where you only have 3 legacy franchises, one of which seems pretty niche.

I think that Street Fighter 5 was a troubled game that did not do as well as prior numbered entries in the series (certainly in cultural impact) and so the Street Fighter franchise wants to retool and go in a different direction, getting back to being more accessible (Street Fighter II was insanely popular in its day.) But I don't think it's applicable to the genre at large.

@bigsocrates: I didn't say 3D was more popular or that 2D was struggling, we're not talking about sales but accessibility and the reason why the 3 biggest 2D fighters (excluding NetherRealm) are making changes in an attempt to become more accessible, where 3D fighters haven't had to.

I've always thought the physics based nature of Tekken was easy to understand, if your attack connects it always hits, but there are many circumstances in 2D fighters where someone's in a state where they can't be hit, or you can't be grabbed during a certain animation, or someone can't be hit with a projectile during certain animations, some moves have anti air properties while some that look like they should don't, it's things like that which make 2D fighters hard to learn in my eyes.

Plenty of people do learn it all it's not impossible but it's certainly not intuitive i don't think, whenever i've played fighting games with my non fighting game friends they don't want to play 2D with me because i put in time to learn the hidden rules of what works and what doesn't so i have a huge advantage, but they can get some success out of 3D because it's just easier to interact with, even if i have hundreds of hours in Tekken throw enough attacks at me and you might still get a lucky KO or two, give me 5-10 minutes and i'll teach you a healthy combo but i have spent half an hour trying to teach someone to throw a fireball before, easier inputs helps with that but you still have to learn why things work sometimes and not other times, that's the sort of 2D foundations i'm referring to, learning through experimentation and studying rather than playing.

@cikame: I think by arguing that mechanics are outdated you are necessarily talking about popularity and profitability because if something is still very popular and commercially viable it is by definition not outdated. The fact that 3D fighters have dwindled to 3 remaining series (one of which isn't even being sold primarily as a fight game) while 2D fighters continue to offer a ton more variety suggests to me that the first is more likely to be outdated than the second.

Tekken is mashier than most 2D fighters, but you yourself have said that Mortal Kombat (which, once again I think it's important to note, is the most popular fighting game franchise going) is pretty accessible because it's also button masher friendly. I don't think this is inherent to 2D vs 3D but rather to the design of the specific games and a lot of it comes down to the fact that Namco, whose games were always masher friendly, has 2 of the remaining series.

There have been technical 3D fighters before. Virtua Fighter is much less masher friendly, but it just hasn't released a new game in a long time.

I think that the 2D/3D divide you're seeing here is not really a 2D/3D divide but more about the specifics of Street Fighter. You've said MK is beginner friendly. I think you can make the same argument for Fighter Z and things like Skullgirls. Street Fighter has just gone down a technical route since SF 3 (with SF 4 being a bit less technical).

Think about how N00b friendly the old Marvel vs Capcom games were. This isn't about 2D vs 3D it's about Street Fighter in particular.

This might have been true during the early 2000s, because the fighting game industry as a whole was dying, then EVO Moment 37 happened. Those who follow the fighting game community know what I'm talking about. Anyway, the fighting game genre today is doing better than it has ever been. And thanks to the pro fighting game scene, new tech, as it is called are being discovered all the time. People are still discovering gameplay tactics using the mechanics for games like SFII and Marvel Vs Capcom 2 among many others. So the answer to your question is no, the mechanics are not outdated if people can discover new ways to use them and win at the highest level. In fact, the testament to a great fighting game is the game's ability to have such depth. Which is why many credit SFIII: Third Strike for saving the fighting game genre, because of its never ending depth and use of its game mechanics. And SF6 seems to be following in that same direction with it having popular gameplay mechanics from some of the series best games.

@cikame

I'd argue capcom is sitting on a gold mine and doesn't notice it if they want mass appeal. They think this game failed due to it being bad, much like Netflix misplacing lost revenue due to not seeing jumps in consistent subscribers, they overlook hey maybe the worldwide virus made people stay inside and sub to shows, and maybe removing yourself from Russia hurt your stats...naw blame the people and execs take away good stuff...tangent, but basically capcom made a friendly easy to play game and put it on a dying system and blamed the game, but most people loved the game on the system...its called power stone 1/2. I'd argue the lame 3d anime brawlers don't get the feel right that power stone did and putting out a basic power stone 2 again with good online would give them the mass appeal they need. Add twitch chats and unlocks for new weapons off some sorta season pass, new characters, etc. Easy money.

Tekken plays like a 2D fighter as of 5 so nah.

Accessibility options have been in fighting games (2D and 3D) for decades now, so I feel your argument is based off a false pretence.

Also I really disagree with the claim 3D fighters haven’t been simplifying to pull in and keep audiences. The 100% reason I stopped playing Tekken, Soul Calibur, Mortal Kombat etc was because they introduced too many comeback mechanics, too many a-b-c type combos and supers. Like if anything, 3D has been aping 2D in all the wrong ways lately, whereas 2D has been getting smarter about this stuff (Strive and FighterZ are good examples of this).