I hope this isn't too weird a post for Tildes. This is an opinion piece about motion inputs in fighting games put out by Leon Massey over three years ago, before SF6's modern mode or Granblue...
I hope this isn't too weird a post for Tildes. This is an opinion piece about motion inputs in fighting games put out by Leon Massey over three years ago, before SF6's modern mode or Granblue Fantasy Versus, and my mind called back to it when playing a bit of the 2XKO beta yesterday. I haven't seen too much fighter talk on Tildes, but I was saddened to see the comments on the video seemed to diverge entirely from its content, as if everyone was just going off its title. Tildians(?) generally seem less prone to such a thing, so I want to see if I can drum up any discussion about it here.
I like Leon's take on this fairly common topic because he tells it from a perspective that's rarely seen in such convos. He's good at the games he plays and a figure that's contributed a good bit in his scenes from my understanding, but he's not a single-minded professional player nor a content creator beheld to pleasing the algorithm or keeping with the latest. He's just a guy, and notably, he plays other games and has a sense of general game design sensibilities. In sum, he's in a good place to see where fighters stand in relation to other genres past the question of entry level while still having an idea of how players of all skill levels engage with them.
The conclusion he presents more or less aligns with my own thoughts on the topic. Motion inputs are interesting, no one can deny this, but the value they provide to the depth of the gameplay has diminished as fighter design has evolved away from truly designing around them. Today, as Leon says, they present a challenge that has little value at the entry level, and considerably less than they used to at the high level.
What Leon doesn't really bring up is that in addition to making the control scheme overload the stick a lot, by associating at least four major verbs to it, they're also just part of a number of things about fighter controls that make them seem, beyond being 'complex' (they're not that complex!), completely alien to the average new player. Masahiro Sakurai mentioned on his game design channel how Smash Bros.'s conception as a platform fighter was based on the idea that players would already be familiar with the control scheme from playing 2D platformers. And it works. Meanwhile, if you compare today's fighters that are based on SF2's codes to any other game genre on the market, it's clear to see how you can't have that. Virtual 8-way joystick, jump by pressing up, block by pressing... back? Every button is an attack verb and most other mechanics are accessed through arbitrary combos of these buttons, often misinputtable. Everything is relative to your position and the enemy's. No air control. No analog input. And of course, swiveling the stick to access moves, with unclear semantics and variations on verbs being tied to one motion and different buttons, opposite of most games out there. Other games might have some of these traits, but only fighting games have them all. And all of it remains primarily to conserve the mountains of design tropes built over years and years, despite how alienating it is when coming in. I'm bothered by the fact that few people in the FGC seem to be willing to consider how there's other ways to achieve profound dynamics other than this that could be explored in new IPs.
What does Tildes think? Is this a biased perspective, or is something not being talked about here that should be? I want to know your thoughts if you have any interest in fighters.
I find that replacing motion inputs with special move buttons almost exclusively has the effect of making the opponent less interesting to fight against. I think the aspect of attacking your...
I find that replacing motion inputs with special move buttons almost exclusively has the effect of making the opponent less interesting to fight against. I think the aspect of attacking your opponent's inputs is very interesting, and one button specials and supers just straight up give you less to attack. I've been playing Jinx in 2XKO. Her beam super is really good. It is probably pretty frustrating for my opponent that I can just delete anything on the screen in an instant because reacting with super is really easy. A lot of people seem to want to get rid of motion inputs to remove the punishment they feel when there is slop in their play (not being able to anti air, dropping combos), but if you give your opponents really good stuff like easy anti airs and full screen supers at the touch of a button, much more is being demanded of you to not get your teeth kicked in. Slop is getting punished either way.
To me the breaking point is that people want to make Street Fighter II, but every successful fighter with no/significantly less motion inputs throws the Street Fighter blue prints in the garbage. Platform fighters and 3D fighters either have no motion inputs or have significantly less motion inputs. Jinx's super is the way it is because they wanted to put Cable's Hyper Viper Beam from Marvel vs Capcom into 2XKO. That is baggage that was never considered when Smash Bros was made. Tekken didn't have the concept of a shoto until 7. I think games should just accept the baggage they are self imposing upon themselves, or they should kill their masters.
The thing is that no one sensible is saying that the only replacement for motion inputs is simple one-button inputs giving the exact same result. It's as I said in my comment: there's other ways...
The thing is that no one sensible is saying that the only replacement for motion inputs is simple one-button inputs giving the exact same result. It's as I said in my comment: there's other ways to achieve profound dynamics other than this brand of control scheme that could be explored in new IPs.
I hold the opinion that the problem isn't that motion inputs are too hard. It's that they, alongside the rest of the SFII-derived control scheme, are unintuitive by the standards of anything else, including games that are as hard or harder mechanically. Taking that in account, there is very much room for there to be games with control schemes that pose similarly interesting mechanical and cognitive challenges, while being more in-line with what modern gamers expect from a game and thus easier to approach. It would always be different, but it doesn't have to be simpler, nor does it have to be unbalanced or frustrating.
every successful fighter with no/significantly less motion inputs throws the Street Fighter blue prints in the garbage. [...] I think games should just accept the baggage they are self imposing upon themselves, or they should kill their masters.
This, I agree with; I absolutely think more games should be willing to kill their masters. The reality of it is that there's so much left unexplored in the space of fighting games because people have tunnel visioned onto that one blueprint for so long, to the point of pushing away games that don't match it. I think it's essential to have games that try to work against that. (One title in development I found out about recently is Netcode Warriors, and it's definitely going out of the bounds of what's common.)
I do want to make a sidenote about Jinx's super. The idea of a fullscreen whiff punish being set to a pair of buttons seems scary on paper, but you mention Cable's beam... the input for that in MvC2 is 236PP (it might have been different in older games, but I'm not familiar with them; but I do know that's usually what Capcom super inputs look like so I expect it must have remained similar). It's a motion, sure, but a trivial one. Once you learn to do a fireball reliably, you can hit that on reaction with just about as much ease, and compared to a DP, you don't even have to worry about not being able to block while inputting it. Even a 236236 input would not be much harder; Guilty Gear players hit that on reaction for reversal supers frequently.
And that exemplifies what Leon's talking about towards the end. The cognitive challenge occurred by having that super on a motion doesn't really pose itself all that much, because the question doesn't occur at an entry level (players either don't know how to use it or don't think or know about the difficulty of the input enough to try to attack it) and it becomes moot very quickly as you go up (if both players know how to fireball, then both of them could hit that reliably on reaction no problem, and there's no longer any need to question whether it's worth going for over a simpler option for a whiff punish; it is, unless it provides less benefit somehow). So, why even bother?
To be clear while I haven't touched 2XKO, i can bet money it's NOT as good as Cables HVB. Trobador already touched on it lightly, but for those who are interested: HVB (hyper viper beam) is a...
. Jinx's super is the way it is because they wanted to put Cable's Hyper Viper Beam from Marvel vs Capcom into 2XKO.
To be clear while I haven't touched 2XKO, i can bet money it's NOT as good as Cables HVB. Trobador already touched on it lightly, but for those who are interested:
HVB (hyper viper beam) is a notorious super in MvC2 that cable has. It's a beam, it can be aimed, so what?
Welll due to oversight or just the right amount of heavy drugs, the AIR HVB (AHVB) has 1 frame of startup. What this usually means is that if you're not blocking when the super flash occurs, you've been hit.
VERY few moves have 0-1 frames of startup. Usually those moves are point blank 720 inputs.
You might say "well AHVB requires you to not be on the ground, so you can look for that" but no, because you can 2369 (look at a numpad, 2 is down, 3 is downright, 6 is forward, 9 is up forward) for what's known as a "Tiger Knee" motion, and trivial to do, and get the instant AHVB to punish/blow up/murder your opponent from across the screen.
AHVB is so fast in fact that it combos into itself. So if you've got 5 bars you can usually do 5 back to back after landing a hit.
Due to ANOTHER quirk of MvC2, you can "guard break" an incoming character with the right setup. This means that a cable sitting on 5 bars in the right circumstances can kill your entire team from one touch.
He's generally considered to be on the bottom half of the highest tier(God tier Sent/Storm/Mag/Cable..roughly).
And with all that said, MvC2 still has a ton of viable options and playstyles, even with shit like that in there.
However, I sincerely doubt jinx has anything near the AHVB. Beam/fullscreen projectile punish supers are a mainstay of fighters. I can't find any hard frame data at the moment, but I suspect it's just there to mess up people who don't respect it (which congrats, you're doing that. Keep it up. You'll hit people who show you the flaws with that plan soon enough)
Edit:
I tell a slight lie and had to check my homework.
AHVB has 1 frame pre freeze and 1 frame post freeze for a total of 2 frames of startup, which is disgusting.
For reference doing the same super on the ground is 4 frames pre freeze and 16 post. A WORLD of difference and likely a lot closer to what Jinx is doing.
I don't think Jinx's super is as good as AHVB, but I do think it is scrubby, and I think having to tiger knee it would make it way less so a the lower level.
I don't think Jinx's super is as good as AHVB, but I do think it is scrubby, and I think having to tiger knee it would make it way less so a the lower level.
Heh. I've probably written more than most on the subject on forums long gone. I'll glaaaadly go into the nitty gritty of fighter details all day. Some other notable 1 button special games, for...
Heh. I've probably written more than most on the subject on forums long gone. I'll glaaaadly go into the nitty gritty of fighter details all day. Some other notable 1 button special games, for reference(there are more):
Rising Thunder (2XKO's uh....descendant. Not much in common).
Fantasy Strike Fighting Game
Gran Blue Fantasy
99% of platform fighters like smash bros
Dive Kick
Blade Strangers? (i forget)
With those in mind:
What do motion inputs do?:
They provide a difficulty curve for beginners.
A. I'd argue this is a weak reason to have them. To paraphrase Seth Killian, lead dev of Rising Thunder, "no one ever gets excited because someone managed to throw a fireball". Maybe at the lowest of the low levels, but as an intermediate to high level player over my life, there's a point where this NEVER matters. It's just assumed they can, because the execution is trivial.
B. @Monte_Kristo already has an interesting example in this topic with Jinx:
Her beam super is really good. It is probably pretty frustrating for my opponent that I can just delete anything on the screen in an instant because reacting with super is really easy.
From my POV, that's just assumed. There's very few motion inputs I would ever assume a decent opponent couldn't do on reaction. So in 2XKO's case they've managed to lower the skill gap between Monte and a top level player. This sucks for players who are relying on someone like Monte being bad at doing his super, but "oh you can't do QCF+PP reliably" is not something most players struggle with anyways.
They provide some level of execution test even for pros.
A. KOF is probably the most notable for this. A game where combo routing can get VERY hard, and there are meaningful differences between BNB's and optimal combos, but doing an optimal in a real match risks actually dropping the combo due to extremely tight timing.
B. The fighting game community has mostly gone away from this. Watching someone win because someone else dropped a hard combo can be hype, but not if its all over the place. SFIV was PLAGUED with 1 frame links (edge of human consistency), but found a work around in plinking turning everything into 2frame links (vastly more reliable) with the added downside that now there's some non obvious skill you need to learn to even play the game.
C. A very noteworthy example of this that even most pros don't recognize is that these days input buffers are WAY nicer. Doing a reversal DP on ST (street fighter 2 super turbo, still played to this day), is VERY hard. Covering both the normal input and the crossup is even harder. Thus knockdowns are SUPER strong vs beginners, and there are setups even at the top level that can make this difficult. Even still, most players prefer modern input buffers and reversal windows. It can go TOO far (SFIV again with the 33P DP input) and make certain mechanics too good, but in general "hey i made the right call on what to do, and just did it slightly less than perfect" is rarely interesting.
They make certain interactions flat out impossible (cannot walk forward and do a sonic boom).
A. This is, by far, the most interesting thing about motion inputs. A guile who just walked forward physically CANNOT do a sonic boom or a flash kick (yes you get brownie points for mentioning edge cases like ST Chun but you get my point). 360's and the like are another move that usually will require some level of setup and thus leads to strategic options based around knowing if your opponent physically could have even entered the motion in the moment. The "fear" of modern controls grappler is legit because it can straight up change the situations where you need to worry about an SPD and DOES change the reaction time reasonably to where it's much easier for a grappler to snag "limbs" (extender hurtbox on normals) when they wouldn't otherwise be able to.
Can 1 button special fighters work around any of this?
Yes.
I'd argue that issue 1 isn't worth working around. The whole goal, in my eyes, is to get more people to experience and understand whats ACTUALLY fun about fighting games. There's this entire framework that they spend most of their time developing and balancing that the average player never even engages with, and Monte's anecdote is very much an example of that. I don't want to win because my opponent couldn't do what they wanted to do, I want to figure out how to win ANYWAYS.
Issue 2 is harder. A button to get a move is a button to get a move. You CAN do artificial difficulty like adding Just Frames (very small windows) to follow up or do combos, but I'm really not sure that's ever going to be interesting.
Issue 3, already has some solutions.
In Fantasy Strike Geiger, the Guile analogue(copy...long story), has a meter that fills quite quickly if you're not walking forward. You don't have to hold back or down (especially since the game doesn't have crouching), but if you touch forward AT ALL, you lose that "charge" and must hold still/walk back to regain it. If the meter is full you can fireball/DP. If it's not, you cannot. This maps very well to abstracting out what was interesting about charge inputs, without being nearly as finnicky or weird as charge inputs (which when still in a fighter, often have things to help make them easier like SFV bison having QCB moves with enough time to charge).
The same logic could be done for SPDs, or you can do things like what RT did and instead make the grabs a bit slower, but give them armor. You lose the INSTANT threat of something with 2 frames ripping you in half, but it's a decent compromise.
Secret issue 4, spamming
So what just stops someone from doing DP's/Fireballs/Etc over and over.
Well first off, at a higher level of any game, that's pretty trivial, and often a strategy. So the real answer is "proper balance". There's a reason no EVO winner button mashes or just spams 1 move (well....god knows there's games that encourage things that look like it, but that's a whole other subject).
Second however, you might notice that most of the examples given have special move cooldowns. Some fighting game players HATE this, personally I find it a neat mechanic. KNOWING 100% that my opponent cannot DP my next mixup because I just baited it in RT was a glorious feeling, and had this layered mindgame for the defender. Knowing that as bad as this mixup might be, if they bait your DP, the next one will be utter garbage to deal with because you'll be out of options.
In theory this stops "spamming" but in practice i'm not sure its even required. The physical limitation of doing any QCF/DP motion is so minimal to any intermediate player that you've been able to "spam" these moves since the 90s. The only issue with having 1 button to do them is now "bad" players can do that to. I think that's fine because....
What is the goal?
To me, the goal is to get more people to understand and enjoy the depth of fighting games. The rapid fire, slanted, ever changing game of space, space control, and weighted RPS that turns into such an enjoyable experience shouldn't be locked behind "here's 5 or 6 motions you'll never need in any other genre, drill them for a few days and NEVER worry about them again". For every rare case of it having something interesting that's not possible to replicate with 1 button specials (Ivy from SC and her command throws come to mind), I think there's just a thousand or more cases where you get more players playing at a real level.
For a genre that struggles to keep its multiplayer scene alive if you aren't part of the BIG names (SF/Tekken/MK), we should be encouraging more and more ways to onboard players and keep them around. I don't want to win because you knew what to do, and just couldn't do it. I want to win because I outplayed you, and being better at "finger ddr" isn't often that interesting.
The fact that there's already so many little examples of how this could work, and frameworks for keeping other things like combo complexity already out there, makes me think that it's just a matter of time before it's the future. Much like the extremely generous reversal and input buffers that have become standardized.
I hope this isn't too weird a post for Tildes. This is an opinion piece about motion inputs in fighting games put out by Leon Massey over three years ago, before SF6's modern mode or Granblue Fantasy Versus, and my mind called back to it when playing a bit of the 2XKO beta yesterday. I haven't seen too much fighter talk on Tildes, but I was saddened to see the comments on the video seemed to diverge entirely from its content, as if everyone was just going off its title. Tildians(?) generally seem less prone to such a thing, so I want to see if I can drum up any discussion about it here.
I like Leon's take on this fairly common topic because he tells it from a perspective that's rarely seen in such convos. He's good at the games he plays and a figure that's contributed a good bit in his scenes from my understanding, but he's not a single-minded professional player nor a content creator beheld to pleasing the algorithm or keeping with the latest. He's just a guy, and notably, he plays other games and has a sense of general game design sensibilities. In sum, he's in a good place to see where fighters stand in relation to other genres past the question of entry level while still having an idea of how players of all skill levels engage with them.
The conclusion he presents more or less aligns with my own thoughts on the topic. Motion inputs are interesting, no one can deny this, but the value they provide to the depth of the gameplay has diminished as fighter design has evolved away from truly designing around them. Today, as Leon says, they present a challenge that has little value at the entry level, and considerably less than they used to at the high level.
What Leon doesn't really bring up is that in addition to making the control scheme overload the stick a lot, by associating at least four major verbs to it, they're also just part of a number of things about fighter controls that make them seem, beyond being 'complex' (they're not that complex!), completely alien to the average new player. Masahiro Sakurai mentioned on his game design channel how Smash Bros.'s conception as a platform fighter was based on the idea that players would already be familiar with the control scheme from playing 2D platformers. And it works. Meanwhile, if you compare today's fighters that are based on SF2's codes to any other game genre on the market, it's clear to see how you can't have that. Virtual 8-way joystick, jump by pressing up, block by pressing... back? Every button is an attack verb and most other mechanics are accessed through arbitrary combos of these buttons, often misinputtable. Everything is relative to your position and the enemy's. No air control. No analog input. And of course, swiveling the stick to access moves, with unclear semantics and variations on verbs being tied to one motion and different buttons, opposite of most games out there. Other games might have some of these traits, but only fighting games have them all. And all of it remains primarily to conserve the mountains of design tropes built over years and years, despite how alienating it is when coming in. I'm bothered by the fact that few people in the FGC seem to be willing to consider how there's other ways to achieve profound dynamics other than this that could be explored in new IPs.
What does Tildes think? Is this a biased perspective, or is something not being talked about here that should be? I want to know your thoughts if you have any interest in fighters.
I find that replacing motion inputs with special move buttons almost exclusively has the effect of making the opponent less interesting to fight against. I think the aspect of attacking your opponent's inputs is very interesting, and one button specials and supers just straight up give you less to attack. I've been playing Jinx in 2XKO. Her beam super is really good. It is probably pretty frustrating for my opponent that I can just delete anything on the screen in an instant because reacting with super is really easy. A lot of people seem to want to get rid of motion inputs to remove the punishment they feel when there is slop in their play (not being able to anti air, dropping combos), but if you give your opponents really good stuff like easy anti airs and full screen supers at the touch of a button, much more is being demanded of you to not get your teeth kicked in. Slop is getting punished either way.
To me the breaking point is that people want to make Street Fighter II, but every successful fighter with no/significantly less motion inputs throws the Street Fighter blue prints in the garbage. Platform fighters and 3D fighters either have no motion inputs or have significantly less motion inputs. Jinx's super is the way it is because they wanted to put Cable's Hyper Viper Beam from Marvel vs Capcom into 2XKO. That is baggage that was never considered when Smash Bros was made. Tekken didn't have the concept of a shoto until 7. I think games should just accept the baggage they are self imposing upon themselves, or they should kill their masters.
The thing is that no one sensible is saying that the only replacement for motion inputs is simple one-button inputs giving the exact same result. It's as I said in my comment: there's other ways to achieve profound dynamics other than this brand of control scheme that could be explored in new IPs.
I hold the opinion that the problem isn't that motion inputs are too hard. It's that they, alongside the rest of the SFII-derived control scheme, are unintuitive by the standards of anything else, including games that are as hard or harder mechanically. Taking that in account, there is very much room for there to be games with control schemes that pose similarly interesting mechanical and cognitive challenges, while being more in-line with what modern gamers expect from a game and thus easier to approach. It would always be different, but it doesn't have to be simpler, nor does it have to be unbalanced or frustrating.
This, I agree with; I absolutely think more games should be willing to kill their masters. The reality of it is that there's so much left unexplored in the space of fighting games because people have tunnel visioned onto that one blueprint for so long, to the point of pushing away games that don't match it. I think it's essential to have games that try to work against that. (One title in development I found out about recently is Netcode Warriors, and it's definitely going out of the bounds of what's common.)
I do want to make a sidenote about Jinx's super. The idea of a fullscreen whiff punish being set to a pair of buttons seems scary on paper, but you mention Cable's beam... the input for that in MvC2 is 236PP (it might have been different in older games, but I'm not familiar with them; but I do know that's usually what Capcom super inputs look like so I expect it must have remained similar). It's a motion, sure, but a trivial one. Once you learn to do a fireball reliably, you can hit that on reaction with just about as much ease, and compared to a DP, you don't even have to worry about not being able to block while inputting it. Even a 236236 input would not be much harder; Guilty Gear players hit that on reaction for reversal supers frequently.
And that exemplifies what Leon's talking about towards the end. The cognitive challenge occurred by having that super on a motion doesn't really pose itself all that much, because the question doesn't occur at an entry level (players either don't know how to use it or don't think or know about the difficulty of the input enough to try to attack it) and it becomes moot very quickly as you go up (if both players know how to fireball, then both of them could hit that reliably on reaction no problem, and there's no longer any need to question whether it's worth going for over a simpler option for a whiff punish; it is, unless it provides less benefit somehow). So, why even bother?
To be clear while I haven't touched 2XKO, i can bet money it's NOT as good as Cables HVB. Trobador already touched on it lightly, but for those who are interested:
HVB (hyper viper beam) is a notorious super in MvC2 that cable has. It's a beam, it can be aimed, so what?
Welll due to oversight or just the right amount of heavy drugs, the AIR HVB (AHVB) has 1 frame of startup. What this usually means is that if you're not blocking when the super flash occurs, you've been hit.
VERY few moves have 0-1 frames of startup. Usually those moves are point blank 720 inputs.
You might say "well AHVB requires you to not be on the ground, so you can look for that" but no, because you can 2369 (look at a numpad, 2 is down, 3 is downright, 6 is forward, 9 is up forward) for what's known as a "Tiger Knee" motion, and trivial to do, and get the instant AHVB to punish/blow up/murder your opponent from across the screen.
AHVB is so fast in fact that it combos into itself. So if you've got 5 bars you can usually do 5 back to back after landing a hit.
Due to ANOTHER quirk of MvC2, you can "guard break" an incoming character with the right setup. This means that a cable sitting on 5 bars in the right circumstances can kill your entire team from one touch.
He's generally considered to be on the bottom half of the highest tier(God tier Sent/Storm/Mag/Cable..roughly).
And with all that said, MvC2 still has a ton of viable options and playstyles, even with shit like that in there.
However, I sincerely doubt jinx has anything near the AHVB. Beam/fullscreen projectile punish supers are a mainstay of fighters. I can't find any hard frame data at the moment, but I suspect it's just there to mess up people who don't respect it (which congrats, you're doing that. Keep it up. You'll hit people who show you the flaws with that plan soon enough)
Edit:
I tell a slight lie and had to check my homework.
AHVB has 1 frame pre freeze and 1 frame post freeze for a total of 2 frames of startup, which is disgusting.
For reference doing the same super on the ground is 4 frames pre freeze and 16 post. A WORLD of difference and likely a lot closer to what Jinx is doing.
I don't think Jinx's super is as good as AHVB, but I do think it is scrubby, and I think having to tiger knee it would make it way less so a the lower level.
Heh. I've probably written more than most on the subject on forums long gone. I'll glaaaadly go into the nitty gritty of fighter details all day. Some other notable 1 button special games, for reference(there are more):
With those in mind:
What do motion inputs do?:
They provide a difficulty curve for beginners.
A. I'd argue this is a weak reason to have them. To paraphrase Seth Killian, lead dev of Rising Thunder, "no one ever gets excited because someone managed to throw a fireball". Maybe at the lowest of the low levels, but as an intermediate to high level player over my life, there's a point where this NEVER matters. It's just assumed they can, because the execution is trivial.
B. @Monte_Kristo already has an interesting example in this topic with Jinx:
From my POV, that's just assumed. There's very few motion inputs I would ever assume a decent opponent couldn't do on reaction. So in 2XKO's case they've managed to lower the skill gap between Monte and a top level player. This sucks for players who are relying on someone like Monte being bad at doing his super, but "oh you can't do QCF+PP reliably" is not something most players struggle with anyways.
They provide some level of execution test even for pros.
A. KOF is probably the most notable for this. A game where combo routing can get VERY hard, and there are meaningful differences between BNB's and optimal combos, but doing an optimal in a real match risks actually dropping the combo due to extremely tight timing.
B. The fighting game community has mostly gone away from this. Watching someone win because someone else dropped a hard combo can be hype, but not if its all over the place. SFIV was PLAGUED with 1 frame links (edge of human consistency), but found a work around in plinking turning everything into 2frame links (vastly more reliable) with the added downside that now there's some non obvious skill you need to learn to even play the game.
C. A very noteworthy example of this that even most pros don't recognize is that these days input buffers are WAY nicer. Doing a reversal DP on ST (street fighter 2 super turbo, still played to this day), is VERY hard. Covering both the normal input and the crossup is even harder. Thus knockdowns are SUPER strong vs beginners, and there are setups even at the top level that can make this difficult. Even still, most players prefer modern input buffers and reversal windows. It can go TOO far (SFIV again with the 33P DP input) and make certain mechanics too good, but in general "hey i made the right call on what to do, and just did it slightly less than perfect" is rarely interesting.
They make certain interactions flat out impossible (cannot walk forward and do a sonic boom).
A. This is, by far, the most interesting thing about motion inputs. A guile who just walked forward physically CANNOT do a sonic boom or a flash kick (yes you get brownie points for mentioning edge cases like ST Chun but you get my point). 360's and the like are another move that usually will require some level of setup and thus leads to strategic options based around knowing if your opponent physically could have even entered the motion in the moment. The "fear" of modern controls grappler is legit because it can straight up change the situations where you need to worry about an SPD and DOES change the reaction time reasonably to where it's much easier for a grappler to snag "limbs" (extender hurtbox on normals) when they wouldn't otherwise be able to.
Can 1 button special fighters work around any of this?
Yes.
I'd argue that issue 1 isn't worth working around. The whole goal, in my eyes, is to get more people to experience and understand whats ACTUALLY fun about fighting games. There's this entire framework that they spend most of their time developing and balancing that the average player never even engages with, and Monte's anecdote is very much an example of that. I don't want to win because my opponent couldn't do what they wanted to do, I want to figure out how to win ANYWAYS.
Issue 2 is harder. A button to get a move is a button to get a move. You CAN do artificial difficulty like adding Just Frames (very small windows) to follow up or do combos, but I'm really not sure that's ever going to be interesting.
Issue 3, already has some solutions.
In Fantasy Strike Geiger, the Guile analogue(copy...long story), has a meter that fills quite quickly if you're not walking forward. You don't have to hold back or down (especially since the game doesn't have crouching), but if you touch forward AT ALL, you lose that "charge" and must hold still/walk back to regain it. If the meter is full you can fireball/DP. If it's not, you cannot. This maps very well to abstracting out what was interesting about charge inputs, without being nearly as finnicky or weird as charge inputs (which when still in a fighter, often have things to help make them easier like SFV bison having QCB moves with enough time to charge).
The same logic could be done for SPDs, or you can do things like what RT did and instead make the grabs a bit slower, but give them armor. You lose the INSTANT threat of something with 2 frames ripping you in half, but it's a decent compromise.
Secret issue 4, spamming
So what just stops someone from doing DP's/Fireballs/Etc over and over.
Well first off, at a higher level of any game, that's pretty trivial, and often a strategy. So the real answer is "proper balance". There's a reason no EVO winner button mashes or just spams 1 move (well....god knows there's games that encourage things that look like it, but that's a whole other subject).
Second however, you might notice that most of the examples given have special move cooldowns. Some fighting game players HATE this, personally I find it a neat mechanic. KNOWING 100% that my opponent cannot DP my next mixup because I just baited it in RT was a glorious feeling, and had this layered mindgame for the defender. Knowing that as bad as this mixup might be, if they bait your DP, the next one will be utter garbage to deal with because you'll be out of options.
In theory this stops "spamming" but in practice i'm not sure its even required. The physical limitation of doing any QCF/DP motion is so minimal to any intermediate player that you've been able to "spam" these moves since the 90s. The only issue with having 1 button to do them is now "bad" players can do that to. I think that's fine because....
What is the goal?
To me, the goal is to get more people to understand and enjoy the depth of fighting games. The rapid fire, slanted, ever changing game of space, space control, and weighted RPS that turns into such an enjoyable experience shouldn't be locked behind "here's 5 or 6 motions you'll never need in any other genre, drill them for a few days and NEVER worry about them again". For every rare case of it having something interesting that's not possible to replicate with 1 button specials (Ivy from SC and her command throws come to mind), I think there's just a thousand or more cases where you get more players playing at a real level.
For a genre that struggles to keep its multiplayer scene alive if you aren't part of the BIG names (SF/Tekken/MK), we should be encouraging more and more ways to onboard players and keep them around. I don't want to win because you knew what to do, and just couldn't do it. I want to win because I outplayed you, and being better at "finger ddr" isn't often that interesting.
The fact that there's already so many little examples of how this could work, and frameworks for keeping other things like combo complexity already out there, makes me think that it's just a matter of time before it's the future. Much like the extremely generous reversal and input buffers that have become standardized.