Voices of UX
Fighting games’ UX holds the genre back — A case study into Guilty Gear Strive’s UX
A look into the under-developed user experience of Guilty Gear and Street Fighter, and what creators are doing to lower the barrier to entry
This is the first article in a three article series that covers Guilty Gear Strive. The next two will cover Street Fighter V and Street Fighter 6.
Fighting games are hard, so when you’ve gained enough experience to get good at them, it comes with some pride. But when you’re just starting out and getting stomped, it feels bad.
These issues are by far the biggest barrier to entry when it comes to learning and enjoying fighting games. There are so many concepts like anti-airs, whiff punishing, and pressure strings that you need to understand to even start playing the game in its intended way. This is a far cry from most other video games, wherein after playing through a quick tutorial the rest of the process is intuitive.
To solve this issue, even the hardest of franchises have resorted to making their games easier so that people can circumvent learning how to play and get to doing cool things faster. The creator of the Guilty Gear series, Daisuke Ishiwatari, has gone on record in an IGN article saying:
“So how do I put it? Amongst different I guess you would say, competitive games, fighting games in particular have a high bar of entry. It’s really hard for new people to join in on that. So if there’s something that I wish I could do better next time, it’s to make that a lot easier. Make it easier and simpler for people to be able to just join in the game and really start to enjoy fighting games.”
This statement came as a shock to many. Guilty Gear was one of the most difficult franchises and its newest edition, Guilty Gear Strive, had already alienated a lot of its core audience by being a way easier game. I agree with Daisuke’s end goal of making fighting games more accessible, but I disagree with his methods. No matter how easy you make a fighting game there will always be higher level concepts that create an insane gap in skill between beginners, novices, and professional players. The worst part about this gap is that the lesser skill player oftentimes doesn’t even know why they are losing. This is frustrating, and oftentimes causes people to drop the product before even knowing how to play it. An example of an easy game with a gigantic gap in skill between players can be found in Dragon Ball FighterZ.
This game introduced auto-combos (combos that only require one button to input) and super dash (a button that allows you to immediately get up into someone’s face) which allowed people to circumvent two of fighting game’s most fundamental concepts, combos and neutral. Yet, whenever a person who relies on these crutches goes up in a match against someone who has taken the time to really learn fighting game concepts we find ourselves in the same exact situation as before. The game may be “easier” but the user experience does not change.
With all of this being said, it seems that the only way to learn fighting games is to play fighting games, and that means losing a lot. That is, at least, how I learned..
But there has to be a better way.
Earlier, I mentioned that in other video games you just play a quick tutorial and the rest of the game is intuitive. The big obstacle here is that fighting games are not intuitive — and that’s one of the main appeals of the genre. But this is also where good UX can really make or break whether a person sticks with a game or not.
The UX of fighting games is notoriously bad. Their menus are oftentimes confusing and mislabeled, their tutorials can be lacking in actual useful information, and their matchmaking systems are clunky and hard to use. Although, in recent years they have been making strives (see what I did there) toward better UX, and I think that the newest upcoming release Street Fighter 6 is the prime example of good fighting game UX.
In this series of articles, I want to break down the successes and failures of Guilty Gear Strive, Street Fighter V, and Street Fighter 6’s UX by going through the menus, tutorials/beginner resources, and matchmaking systems. In addition, I want to review how these games communicate to the user how to go about accumulating the knowledge that they need to learn and play these games at a level above button mashing.
Guilty Gear UX: Heaven or Hell?
Before I start I want to preface that I will only look at the user experience provided inside of Strive. Arc System Works, the developers behind Strive, have meticulously created a starter guide to each character on their YouTube channel. This is rather typical of the overall fighting game community as the best resources for learning are typically found outside of the game itself. Things like the starter guides and the Dustloop Wiki are completely independent of the game and its developers. I also want to say that these resources should exist, but the information they provide should be available in the games themselves.
First things first, how does one rock?
The main menu
The first thing that a new player sees when opening Strive is this menu. There are three tabs which are divided into offline, network, and story. When you press any of these buttons, a pop-up appears welcoming you to the world of Guilty Gear Strive, asking you if you want to play a tutorial. Some of the microcopy for these sections are off, and I have some suggestions to fix it.
Gameplay being divided into offline, online, or story mode is fine. I think it’s understandable to new users for the most part, although I wouldn’t title those first two modes 1-player and 2-player. The 1-player tab is specifically for playing against a computer controlled character while the 2-player tab goes immediately into an offline 1v1 match where a person can either play against an in person opponent or a CPU. One thing I noticed is that the 2-player tab brings up the same menu as the VS CPU option in the 1-player tab.
My suggestion would be to rename 1-player to challenge or arcade and 2-player into Versus as well as consolidate VS CPU into the versus tab.
The offline tab is pretty standard as far as UI’s go, but the network tab has a few more issues.
The network tab contains four options, online Match, player match, ranking, and quick Start. The online match option is what brings you into a public lobby which allows you to play ranked. I will talk more about this option when I get to the matchmaking section but for now consider it the primary way to find matches online. The player match option is for creating a private or public lobby for your friends/randoms to join. It’s primarily used to play against your friends though. ranking is just a list of the top ranked players. quick start, in my opinion, is the easiest way to get into the game as it circumvents the lobby system provided in online match by putting the user into a training mode that automatically enters them in a queue for matchmaking. This is a lot of information, but there’s so many ways that this could be changed to streamline this UI.
Online match works fine for what it provides, which is the tower and the park which are the ranked and casual modes for Strive. Player match, on the other hand, doesn’t give much context to what it does. It creates a lobby so that individual players can join and play freely. I would change the name of player match to lobby match. I would also put quick start at the top and direct players to this as the standard way of matchmaking as it is the easiest manner of getting into a game.
As for the other tabs like story, profile, collection, etc. I believe that they do not need to be changed as they are all rather straightforward. All this being said, the user doesn’t even get a chance to get acquainted with this UI until later as they are whisked away to the tutorial.
Turning the gears in your head.
Tutorials
The first tutorial that a new user goes through is standard for the genre. I actually think it works better than most as it doesn’t hold your hand if you don’t want it to.
You are given control of Sol Badguy, the protagonist of Guilty Gear and a rather straightforward character, and you are put against Ky Kiske. The whole tutorial is taking place as a PR video for Ky as he begrudgingly trains you in things that Sol already knows how to do.
You are taught how to move, use your buttons, and burst against an opponent that starts off standing still. From there your opponent slowly starts moving, attacking, and blocking and eventually you are asked to use all of the skills you’ve learned to defeat your opponent. This is a good introduction that doesn’t hold your hand too much, although it does not go into special attacks or system mechanics.
At the end of the sequence it encourages you to try out the dojo or go into missions to go more in depth with the basics of the game. These places teach you those things I mentioned previously. Missions are basically voluntary extensions of the tutorial and are actually incredibly useful. I think they should be in every fighting game as they explain very high level concepts in a very digestible way.
If I were to suggest some changes to this tutorial, I would go into the system mechanics and special moves a bit more. The tutorial doesn’t require you to do a combo or input a roman cancel (a move that momentarily freezes the game) and introducing these things would help new players to understand how these things should be used. There is also the faultless defense (a move that allows a player to take no chip damage from enemy attacks as well as pushing the opponent away) and a plethora of other things that the tutorial could have addressed. That being said, all these things are touched upon in the mission mode.
Mission mode
When the user enters a mission they are prompted with a challenge that can range from being basic, like anti-airs, to open ended and convoluted, like character specific special attacks. Some of them have demos that show what exactly one has to do to clear the mission. The user has to succeed 3 out of the 5 times to pass, and if they pass they gain some character levels and in-game currency. Not all of them are created equally, as is the case of Ky’s second matchup mission. You are basically asked to do a combo that will defeat a low health character which isn’t particularly useful.
The image on the left are the directions given before you start. The image on the right are the tips given after you clear the mission. They can range from being helpful to vague. Some tips at the end of the mission literally just say “figure it out in training mode”.
There are also some tips at the end that state that the opponent can do other options that aren’t present in the mission. This is also incredibly strange to me, why not make an advanced mission that includes those options? This is what higher level players do already in the training mode, but if you can recreate it in this missions tab then I’d argue that it deserves to be expanded. I would also suggest that there should be an option to keep performing the missions over and over without needing to restart. I can see what Strive wants to do, they are making the extra tutorials little minigames that need to be cleared to earn points, but at the end of the day they are tools for improvement. Keep the game, but also have easy access to the tools as well.
The last issue that I have with the missions mode is how tucked away it is. I think that there should be more messages encouraging newer players to use the missions, and demonstrate that they show results. I can imagine tooltips that appear during loading screens could certainly help. These tooltips could also include some incentive if quotes by top players encouraging the use of the missions or training were included. When beginners see that these tools have results then they will be more likely to use it.
The lab
Lastly I want to look at the aforementioned training mode. Training is standard for every fighting game, it’s known as the lab by the wider community. In here you’re able to practice combos, record situations, and learn different techniques against the entire cast of characters in a safe and controlled environment. Strive’s training mode is effective for the most part.
Recording situations to practice against them is very clunky as you need to press down the analog sticks until you get the recording setting, create the situation, and then click the analog stick again. I’m not sure why it’s not in the training settings tab like everything else which is rather easy to use.
There is a recording settings tab but it doesn’t let you record. Instead it lets you manage situations you have already recorded. Besides that setting, everything else is pretty self explanatory. I particularly like that Strive allows you to record custom combos for sharing purposes.
I suggest possibly placing all of the recording settings in the recording tab itself. It’s by far the most clunky and user unfriendly part of this UI so I think it needs a revamp.
All of this being said, the tutorial, missions, and training mode that Strive provides is leaps and bounds ahead of most other fighting games on the market. I would say that every fighting game developer should look at this tutorial as a benchmark that they should shoot for. However, I do believe in all the criticisms I have stated earlier and I believe that there should be a way to access frame data in game.
Abandon hope all ye who enter ranked.
Online match
I’m not a big fan of Strive’s matchmaking, and I think that’s something the wider community unanimously agrees with.
Finding a match is extremely difficult for the average user. The way that the developers want you to enter a match is to go into the tower, find a stand with a player ready to fight (or go on an empty stand and hope someone matches with you), and then fight a first to three. This would be alright but there a multitudes of issues that come from implementation rather than UX. Using the stands is easier said than done as constant errors like being kicked off happen rather often. Also, there’s a gigantic news screen that takes up half the screen as you’re looking for a match which I think would be overwhelming for users.
The player also has the option to do casual matches in the park. I find that the park is useful for meeting random players and trying out new characters, but it also suffers from the same issues that the stands in the Tower provide.
The way to go about fixing this matchmaking system would mostly go into the implementation of the system. If the stands just worked the way they intended to work then there wouldn’t be much wrong with them. The process of navigating to a far off stand is also a pain and I think you should be able to teleport to a match in some manner. Also, the giant news tab has to go. I think it could just be a pop up for whenever a player loads into the lobby as then they can just mash through it if they don’t care about what’s on the news.
Quick start
Here is what the quick start menu looks like. You are able to use the training mode up until the game automatically puts you up against another player in the tower. Needless to say, this is a much better matchmaking system than what the developers want you to use and it should be the primary method of matchmaking. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its own problems, but those problems are shared with the tower as well.
Rankings and the floor system
Ranks in Guilty Gear Strive are effectively meaningless. Two big issues I have with Strive’s ranking system come from how it let’s you see what character your opponent is playing and how you rank up to higher floors. A user’s character choice is important as every single one of those characters come with different play styles and tools that separate them from the rest of the cast. Certain characters are bound to be stronger than others, and some characters are bound to be deemed as annoying by the wider community. Being able to see what your opponent is going to play leads into a gigantic issue with the ranked mode in Strive.
A user that is able to see what their opponent is playing can effectively avoid certain characters. Those players can still rank up to the highest floors whilst having no knowledge on certain characters which means that there are players on higher floors that are not good at the game. It’s also an unpleasant experience for users who play characters that are hated by the community. This May player I fought against has probably had users avoid matching up with them because of who they play. This is discouraging and drives people away from the product.
Ranking up in Strive is done by going on win-streaks, that is all. Most other fighting games have a point system that makes players accumulate points by winning and lose points by losing. Strive will give you opportunities to rank up once you’re on a hot streak, and if you continue to win you could even rank up multiple times. This is bizarre. What could happen is that a user could beat a few weak players in a row and rank up much higher than they deserve to be.
This may feel good for the user in the short term, but in the long term it devalues the ranks and causes gigantic gaps in skill between people of the same rank. The only rank that somewhat circumvents this is the Celestial Floor as players need to challenge those in the floor and win 5 matches without losing 2.
I can attest to these truths in the ranked system as I am currently ranked in 10th Floor. I have fought people who are much better than me and people who are a lot worse than me, and I have barely ever fought someone who I felt was at my level. I have fought people in lower floors who are much better than people in Floor 10. Hell, I don’t consider myself a good Strive player. I have 74 hours in the game which is a pittance compared to others who are currently in Floor 10 and below, I ranked up to Floor 10 from Floor 8 by beating two people 3–0.
I’m not trying to say that any person who is in any rank doesn’t deserve to be there, I’m saying that ranks themselves do not have much value outside of Celestial. To give some credit, there is typically a noticeable difference between players who are two floors or more apart and the lower ranks are a free zone for new players to get better.
The floor system needs to be point based. The method of ranking up and de-ranking is too spontaneous and undeserved most of the time. The current method is good for short term bursts of dopamine but doesn’t pave a way for a satisfying user experience as many people will quickly find that their rank that they put a lot of confidence in isn’t all that big of a deal. The climb to these ranks should be a motivator for players to get better and keep playing and it’s not that right now.
The fact that you see the opponents character is also a massive problem. Most other fighting games only show you the connection you have with your opponent before asking if you want to play or not. This should be how it is in Strive as well, show the opponents character while they are loading into the match, not before.
So, in summary…
Guilty Gear Strive’s UX is okay compared to most video games. Compared to most fighting games though it has some of the best UX there is to offer.
The menus are alright for the most part. There are a few confusing names that are a bit off-putting but nothing horrendous.
There are a breadth of tools and tutorials that allow new users to begin to understand the complexities of the game whilst not disabling them from getting right into the action and playing this beautiful game.
Overall, the matchmaking is the least user friendly part of the game. The intended method of finding a match is clunky and unintuitive and the easiest method is hidden in the menus. Even after playing a bunch of matches and getting to a rank, players won’t find much value on most of the floors.
In the next installment of this series, we’ll take a look into Street Fighter V’s UX and how it stands up when compared to Strive’s.
- Fighting games’ UX holds the genre back — A case study into Guilty Gear Strive’s UX
- Fighting games’ UX holds the genre back — A case study into Street Fighter V’s UX
- How Street Fighter 6 is elevating the genre’s UX
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