Way of the Warrior: discussion about the smoothness of the game!

By David R. Liu <davidliu@case.ai.mit.edu>.

Patrick Horio writes:

"I got a chance to see WOTW demo at a Captron Store recently. It was definitely better than the sampler disc version. However, the characters movements still seemed a little jerky - like there wasn't enought animation frames... It was definitely not as smooth as MKII in terms of character animation - most people there agreed including the the people running the store. So, will the developers try to improve this before release? They did, after all, claim that this game would blow away SFII and MKII (or something like that...) Right now, it's a decent fighting game but definitely not SFII caliber... "

Here what I think:

I agree that some moves in MKII look smoother; however this fact alone does not make or break the game in my opinion. Way has over 250 frames per character. The programmer could have made a teflon-smooth fighter by distributing these 250 frames over say 10 moves as many fighting games do, however he wanted to make a fighting game that has much more variety than most games. Each character has a standard complement of weak, strong, and superstrong punch + weak, strong, and superstrong kick standing, crouching, and in the air but in addition, each character has say around 15 special moves, plus a subset of more than a dozen magics, plus multiple fatalities. All these take frames and thus memory.

However, the game looks smooth enough to be quite acceptable in my opinion. Its unique attributes stand out enough that i don't think having "only" 250 frames per character will make people unhappy.

Not to slam MKII (which I think is a very nice piece of work), but MK and MKII use lots of shortcuts in its fighting engine which make it possible to get away with a smaller, well-defined set of needed character animations. For example, all chracters are the same height. Your character can stand ONLY on one of 30 discrete standing points on the arena; if you try to stand in between these points, the result is that your character gets forced to the nearest point. These facts make the set of possible things you can do very discrete and limited; if you are X distance points away from enemy and do a jump kick then it will hit at the same place always. It's a clever way to handle things, and allows for a smaller number of possible moves to have to be drawn. However, you lose having complete freedom and flexibility of movement (not to mention variety of character size and moves). I believe this is the reason behind many players' complaints that MKII has lousy gameplay.

When the Naughty Dogs a long time ago said that Way would top MKII and SFII I believe they meant as a complete package. Every decent fighting game including SFII, MKII, etc. brings certain attributes to the genre which that game clearly stands as the best; SFII has the best engine IMO, MKII has the best special effects such as lighting effects, Sam Sho has the best use of weapons and animals, etc. etc. etc. Way pushes the genre in its own way, learning from these classics while added several new twists to the game. It is meaningless, I believe, to say that any fighting game blows away every other fighting game in every respect; however some add novel features and improvements while remaining quite acceptable in all other departments. Hopefully Way will prove to be such a game.

David