I'm spending nearly all my free time these days practicing for Combo Breaker next weekend (and also playing Clair Obscur, shhh), which kinda informs both the topic and length of this post. I'm still figuring out how I want to write for this blog but I imagine some more informal writings like this will be pretty common, thank you for bearing with me!
I gonna be playing four games at CB this year (in order of how much I've been practicing them): Rivals of Aether 2, PKMN:CC, Street Fighter 6, and Blazblue Cross Tag Battle. The thing that's sticking out for me, though, is how different it feels to practice for Rivals compared to P:CC.
A typical match of Rivals is something like 4-5 minutes long, but an online ranked set is first to 2 wins and also includes going to character select and stage striking for every match. If I have thirty minutes to play, I am expecting to play two sets, maybe three if I'm lucky. P:CC on the other hand has average matches consistently less than two minutes, and the time spent between matches is lighting fast. Thirty minutes is enough for a pretty long set in that game. When I'm playing I don't really have a huge preference for either; it's fun to bang out games in P:CC but it's also fun to endure the marathon that is a Rivals set.
But because of the game length, it's so much faster to try out new ideas in P:CC. Can I 2A under Blaziken's jump ins consistently? in an idea that I'll be able to get a feel for immediately (the answer is no, by the way). In Rivals, the trial and error takes so much longer. I had the idea of trying to use falling up air as an approach to beat CC like two weeks ago and I'm still not sure good it is. I think the real factor at play here is how often you find yourself in a specific game state, but shorter game length increases that frequency. P:CC and traditional fighters are reverting to the same round start game state, and you're more likely to find yourself in a specific midgame or endgame just due to raw number of matches. Rivals has differences in positioning, damage, and stock counts always making things feel different. It does just feel harder to improve in Rivals for me, compared to P:CC or even SF6.
I'm being kind of a baby though. I'm calling a fifteen minute Rivals set a marathon, meanwhile the average length of a DotA 2 match is 41 minutes! How do people live like this? You get to try a new idea for the midgame once every hour? And DotA might be an extreme example but League of Legends and Valorant matches are somewhere around 25-30. This kinda made the big eSports game training grind make more sense to me. There are actual tangible gains from scrimming for 8 hours and streaming for another 4. There's also tangible burnout and tangible injuries but I guess that's what happens when its a bunch of 20 year olds playing and a bunch of 30 year olds in charge.
It makes me wonder if it's ever something a game designer should take into account. I mean, the answer is no, if you are trying to make money. You should be focusing on play time or successive login days or whatever other dumb metric. But in the ideal scenario where you are making a game for sickos and don't have to worry about money, I wonder if people are like me and prefer games that really let you iterate on your play quickly, or if longer game length with constantly novel game states is more important and fun in the long run. I have to admit that it's probably the second for most people.
I think for now, I need to continue to work on the way I practice for a platfighter than I do for 2D fighting games. It's already required a few other changes in my mindest, which has been really challenging but pretty fun. I'll have to figure out how to factor in the game length whilie trying to practice efficiently, though if you have any ideas feel free to shoot them my way.