Topic: Why the Wiimote works for shooting and sports but not brawlers

[KDR_11k]

I've been thinking about it and it seems pretty clear: The Wiimote works for sports and shooting because those use basic actions that require skill. You can swing a golf club wrong and have the ball go off into a bunker, you can aim incorrectly and miss the target. But what do most brawlers (any kind of melee combat in a game) ask you to do? They've usually got a predetermined set of actions and the difficulty comes from picking the right action at the right time, it's a digital selector where there are only a limited number of discrete results.

There's no difficulty in swinging Kratos's swords on chains no matter how difficult the weapon is probably to wield, you just select a slash and Kratos does it for you with perfect accuracy, he never swings it wrong and has the blade harmlessly fall to the ground, he never accidentally hits with the wrong part and loses his grip on the weapon. There are no errors in the act of using the weapon. When actions can never fail a button is the logical input, similar to the up and down of a button there are only two states for the action: active and inactive. The IR pointer doesn't help much with autoaim shooting either but manual aim has been standard for a while.

The logical conclusion would be that a brawler game should require the player to execute the actions skillfully instead of merely requiring the player to pick an action. For example a WMP-based sword game could track whether you're really angling the blade along the slash, if you hold it wrong the damage is reduced or you might even lose your grip on the weapon. The swing would have to be properly straight and go through, if you try nonsense like changing direction in the middle of the swing you similarily mess up.

Of course the actions would have to be toned down to something humanly possible, many game characters have inhuman stamina levels and I'm pretty sure no real soldier swung his sword about once per second for several hours. That's where the straining waggle comes from, expecting the player to keep up with a superhuman routine. No sports game expects you to keep swinging a baseball bat this rapidly for this long. Of course with buttons we never really had the means to develop combat systems that require skillful actions, sports had to use massive workarounds and only did that because they had their concepts pre-written already. Videogame combat was designed to ignore the difficulty of executing the action outside of maybe some button combo to trigger it.

Many who hear of 1:1 sword controls immediately imagine themselves as movie stars or jedi knights but this is an illusion created by games that did all the hard work for you. Removing this automation would result in duller-looking combat since it's no longer hollywoodized but it would overall be more intense for the player himself.

[broodwars]

I don't see any reason why the Wiimote can't work for any genre a talented developer sets for a project.  It's a matter of making the right effort and design choices.  I don't recall the Wiimote control being the problem with Madworld or No More Heroes (both "brawlers" when you get right down to it), but that the developers didn't make the right design decisions to keep those games interesting at all times.

The problem with the Wiimote is that developers seem determined to ditch the "fantasy" aspect of games just because the player can pantomime actions in the game.  Is there any reason why we shouldn't be able to pull off Hollywood-style Jedi manuevers just because I'm now directly swinging a "sword" with my controller rather than pressing buttons?  When I play a game, I should feel empowered, that I have the ability to do more than I can in real life.

[KDR_11k]

The movie actions aren't realistic. If you can pull them off, fine but there's still the limit of practicability, many moves in a movie are plain impractical and in a game that gives combatants full control over their weapon movements fancy movie moves would likely get you killed because they leave massive openings for an enemy to stab through and aren't more effective than more trained attacks.

I haven't played MadWorld because the excessive violence in that game prevented a release here (from the sounds of it that just used waggle to trigger moves) but NMH didn't use the remote in the main combat, for most of it you still used buttons. I'm pretty sure that's not what people imagined they'd do when they bought a lightsaber combat game for the Wii. It's just turning the Wiimote into a dualshock with fewer buttons. Using canned moves that are triggered by buttons and digital movements always leads to complaints that it would control better on a traditional controller. This is more about how the Wiimote can change a genre for the better than just how to resist changing the status quo when the underlying hardware changes.

[Ymeegod]

Well that's why nintendo's releasing Motion Plus :0.

I can't wait for boxing game that uses MC+, hopefully EA brings Fight Night to the WII.

As for the sword weiding, I'm looking forwarrd to Red Steel 2.  Damn I'll get my left nut for a Jedi using dual wield (I'm not talking about using the nunchuck but actual dual remotes). 

[Smash_Brother]

The movie actions aren't realistic. If you can pull them off, fine but there's still the limit of practicability, many moves in a movie are plain impractical and in a game that gives combatants full control over their weapon movements fancy movie moves would likely get you killed because they leave massive openings for an enemy to stab through and aren't more effective than more trained attacks.

I haven't played MadWorld because the excessive violence in that game prevented a release here (from the sounds of it that just used waggle to trigger moves) but NMH didn't use the remote in the main combat, for most of it you still used buttons. I'm pretty sure that's not what people imagined they'd do when they bought a lightsaber combat game for the Wii. It's just turning the Wiimote into a dualshock with fewer buttons. Using canned moves that are triggered by buttons and digital movements always leads to complaints that it would control better on a traditional controller. This is more about how the Wiimote can change a genre for the better than just how to resist changing the status quo when the underlying hardware changes.

I agree. At this point, we'll have to wait and see what Red Steel 2 does with WMP. From what I hear, it allows you to switch seamlessly between sword combat or shooting at any time, so if the player gets tired they can go back to gunplay.

But the thing about the any manner of control scheme that people need to remember is that a game only benefits from a new control system if more depth is added from it.

The analogue stick is a great example, and Mario 64 showed us just how useful it is. You could push it in any direction and choose where to move Mario. You could push it slightly and make him tip toe past sleeping enemies. You could spin it around to twirl Bowser before throwing him.

It's plain to see how the analogue stick added a plethora of depth to gaming. The same goes for the IR pointer and the tilt sensor. The IR pointer allows players to near-instantly target something on screen. The tilt sensor allows for a far more sensitive range of motion for games that involve steering or other means of using twisting to control a gameplay element.

But anything else could be mapped to a button with largely the same effect, I agree. Having motion control mapped to making a character perform a standard action is silly. It'll be interesting to see how WMP changes the landscape. The current motion sensor was just never accurate enough to add the necessary precision for sword-swings and everything else.

[KDR_11k]

I don't think Mario 64 really sold me on the analog stick (I still prefer to line the camera up and then walk along the cardinal axis because holding the stick steady in other directions tends to go badly and it's often hard to tell where you're going without the camera lined up), only Kururin Squash did...

There were complaints that you could just rapidly swing back and forth in WSR sword fighting to win. I think real Kendo requires a certain minimum strength in a strike for it to count so quickly reversing a swing would likely end up with too weak a hit. People also complain that RS2 isn't fully 1:1 and then go on about the WMP possibly not being enough. I'm pretty sure it's more ofa game design issue, real swords weight way more than a Wiimote. I think it could use 1:1 and still be fine gameplay-wise if it required the player to twist the sword to line up wiith the slash (takes time and can't be done that quickly) and punishes nonsense swings. Possibly add exhaustion or grip strength, if you do more than your character can handle your grip on the weapon weakens (or if you do something really bad like hitting a shield with full force you lose a lot of grip) and you'd have to go easy for a bit to recover your grip. Wouldn't necessarily need to have the weapon go flying if you lose your grip but your character could just be unable to act for a while as he recovers.

Chou Soujuu Mecha MG had 1:1 weapon controls but they often amounted to waggling back and forth, the game had a heat bar that made your mech overheat if you did too much too rapidly to reign it in a bit. Still seems clunky to use a stamina bar like that, grip would work better because it'd let you add penalties for wrong attacks and equire players to act with precision if they want to keep attacking for as long as possible.