Motion Inputs Are Not Holding You Back
Taking a jab at the motion input discourse.
Are motion inputs a problem? Is the inability to perform a hadouken holding players back from enjoying Street Fighter to the fullest? Are motion inputs archaic? All these questions get raised every so often in “The Discourse tm”. Players get riled up, pick a side, and go at it on Twitter- sorry, on X- and type at each other until their fingers turn blue. Screenshots are taken, accusations of being a scrub are thrown around, then everyone gets tired and goes to argue about whatever topic trends next.
This particular motion-input discussion comes up a lot more often these days, since game developers themselves have weighed in. Street Fighter 6 features Modern Controls, where you press a direction and a button to execute a special move. You can even perform supers like that. Granblue Versus: Rising does not penalize using simple inputs over traditional motion inputs, which means that there is no reason to use motion. The upcoming Project L, League of Legends’ free to play fighting game, will feature one button specials and no motion inputs. League of Legends is a massive franchise, so the decisions they make in their game will affect how other games handle inputs. I predict that by 2030 Street Fighter 7 will do away with traditional inputs altogether.
Which I disagree with. Motion inputs should stay right where they are. There is a reason why the Shoryuken, a very fast attack that has had a history of being invincible, has such a bizarre input. It starts with a forward input so that if you want to use its invincibility to power through an attack you have to stop blocking. If you mistime the move or drop the input, you get hit. There is risk and reward.
Super moves have complicated motions for the same reason. In Street Fighter 6 you can perform invincible supers on reaction with a button press. This is incredibly convenient for the user. For the opponent, it means they can’t do much without eating a frame one counter super. Sure, it comes with a 20% damage penalty, but it’s still something you have to look out for. You can buffer a super and press the attack button to have it come out on reaction, but that in itself is a skill that has to be learned, unlike pressing the “I win” button.
Along with this discourse comes the mini side-kick discourse that motion inputs are a roadblock to enjoying the game at a higher level. Players don’t want to spend time learning how to do a shoryuken. They want to get into the nitty gritty and start making reads, playing mindgames and getting those hype plays that makes all their friends on Discord scream “YOOOOOO!!!!”.
So you’re telling me that the thing preventing you from playing the high-level 4D mind games of fighting games are the inputs? Do you think that, if you could press a button and throw a fireball, you could outplay your opponent and get the sicknasty reads? No.
If this were the case games like DNF Duel, Granblue Versus and Street Fighter 6 would not have a single player below platinum rank.
The image above is a breakdown of how many players are in each rank division in Street Fighter 6. 60% of the entire ranked player base is Gold 1 or below. I didn’t even know you could finish your placement matches in anything lower than Gold.
If motion inputs really were the thing holding players back from getting the full enjoyment of the game, from learning the REAL game, then we wouldn’t see any players in the lower ranks. You could just switch to Modern controls and pull off those megamind reads all the way up to Platinum.
“That’s a stupid argument, of course we’d see people below platinum. There’s people of all skill levels” Really? Then there’s something besides the motion inputs holding people back? Something deeper? Motion inputs aren’t holding you back. The fact that you don’t know how to play is holding you back.
Look at Tekken. Tekken barely uses motion inputs, yet there are people who think it’s too difficult to get into. Characters have a huge move list, yes, but almost no weird shennanigans. It skips right past the boring basics and gets to the actual meat of the game from the get-go.
It’s still too hard, and that’s the thing. Remove motion inputs and there is a new John to take its place. Combos are too long, defense is too hard, characters have too many moves to memorize etc etc etc. Scrubquotes exists for a reason. People will always find something to complain about. There’s always a new reason why someone “can’t get into fighting games”.
Remove motions? How about Okizeme? That whole thing where the opponent can knock me down and set up guessing situations is a bunch of nonsense. Let’s have players return to neutral when knocked down. While we’re at it, high/low mixups are toxic, too. I shouldn’t have to guess, it should be all pure reads and mind games- and OH BOY don’t get me started on zoners I tell you what! Why don’t you play a real character? It’s a fighting game not a shooter! Get over here and lemme punch ya! AND ANOTHER THING- and so on.
Motion inputs are the most entry-level complain out there. Learning to do them consistently takes around twenty minutes if you’re completely new to the genre. It’s a non-issue. It’s like saying that the rules of grammar are what’s keeping you from writing the next great novel.
So why am I wasting hundreds of words on a non-issue? Because it keeps getting brought up over and over again to the point where developers started listening. In a rush to appeal to everyone they’re taking into account the most asinine complaint out there and implementing it, only to piss off the people who actually play their games.
A common rebuttal that gets thrown around is “but fighting games need players to survive. You need to bring in new people.” This is true, but those new people should be able to play the game in the first place. If the thing that’s keeping them from playing is the most entry-level thing about the game, then they should play something else. Find something they would actually enjoy.
Maybe a nice shooter. You have to know how to aim in those, so that’s a barrier of entry. How about a shooter where you don’t need to aim? Or what if there are characters in a shooter with weapons that auto aim for you? That sounds great and there’s no way that people who pick those characters will be called scrubs for playing a “low skill” character and gatekept. No one ever bullies Mei player in Overwatch, and people loved it when Symmetra’s gun had auto tracking, right?
“That’s gatekeeping!” If you really want to do something, but you’re turned away by the most basic thing, did you really want to do it? The kinds of people complaining about motion inputs are the kinds of people who see the fun, hype moments and want to be in on that without any of the effort. They want to be a part of “The FGC”, without playing. They don’t want to play fighting games, they want to be someone who plays fighting games. There’s a difference. If they really wanted to, they’d already be doing it.
Imagine someone who desperately wants a hamburger. They dream about it, their shirt is stained with their drool thinking about that beautiful grilled meat and fluffy buns. Oh, what they wouldn’t do for a burger. They’re always watching Most Hype Burger Moments compilations on YouTube. You tell them there’s a burger place across the street. All they have to do is go over there and order a burger, but they don’t want to. It’s too hard, the couch is too comfy. Do you pick them up and carry them to the restaurant, or do you ignore them and go on with your day? Developers are bringing the restaurant to the players.
Now I’m going to open up a zero calorie Monster and go full Super Saiyan Boomer here. Back in my day we didn’t have no fancy modern controls or beginner friendly options. If I wanted to play a fighting game with someone else, I had to get my butt out of the house and go down to the arcade. There you paid a quarter for a few minutes with the game, always against someone who knew way more about the game than I did. I would pay 25 cents to get whooped at Marvel vs Capcom 2 with no real way to figure out what just happened and how to prevent it from happening. The cabinet didn’t even have the character’s move list on it. Makes sense, how are you going to fit the moves for 52 characters on one cabinet? You could ask someone else how to play, but do you really think the older kid who just got a perfect on you would tell you how he did it?
Do I think we should return to that? No. Modern fighting games have some great tools for beginners that were SORELY missing in earlier games. Tutorials, in-game movelists that tell you what the move does, refined training modes, online matchmaking. The fact that you can hop online and find someone of a similar skill level is incredible and underappreciated. Back then if you went to the arcade and the only guy there was the sweaty 20-something try-hard that knew all the infinite combos and smelled like Panda Express, that’s all you could play against. You were going to put your quarter up and get absolutely pummeled or go play Initial D or something. People complain about not being able to find someone to play against online, that everyone “is way better than me”. They don’t take into account the fact that they can find more than one person to play against, at any time, all from the comfort of their own homes.
The point I’m trying to make with this is that fighting games have been the way they are for a long time. Even while being in their roughest, most user unfriendly states, they have managed to get an audience of die-hard fans. The kinds of fans that turned Street Fighter from some random quarter muncher into the mega-franchise that it is today. A lot of the legitimate complaints have been ironed out. Tutorials were introduced, developers started being a lot more transparent with how their mechanics work, rollback netcode is becoming the standard. Good changes that had to be made. There are still a lot of things that could be improved, but motion inputs are a non-issue.