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After a, uh, heated discussion on Discord the other day, I was asked to post a more detailed writeup of my thoughts on the matter here. Strap in, 'cause this is gonna be long and blunt. And if a fight breaks out, I'm just gonna blame @Liam so go yell at him instead of me.
But before I get into my own thoughts, I'd like to defer to a much smarter man who also has very strong opinions about things fighting games should and should not do. Start at 53:51 if the embed doesn't automatically jump there.
One of the most important principles of fighting game design is that everything should have a clear way to beat it. From general concepts like attack/block/throw to more specific cases like DPing to beat a meaty, there should always be some sort of answer to anything your opponent throws at you.
But when a fighting game includes unblockables, whether by design or by those 1f "hard-to-block-able" mixups, you can expect devious players to look for ways to create truly unavoidable setups with them, trapping the opponent so that there is no way to counter it. Worst case scenario, you may even get loops where the attacker can do the setup over and over until the opponent is dead, and there is nothing left that can be done once they get you in that loop. This is what Mike demonstrates with the UMvC3 clip, where Firebrand is able to charge up the unblockable while the assist holds his opponent in place, and can keep doing this until the entire enemy team is dead, and it will always work regardless of anything the opponent tries to do.
Still, some games do choose to include unblockables while carefully including failsafes to prevent setting them up. At the start of the segment I linked, Mike mentioned that if you really insist on having unblockables, they should at least be special-cased so that you can block them if you are already in blockstun - this would've stopped Firebrand from using an assist to trap the opponent like that. It's the same principle as how most every fighting game after SF2 doesn't let you tick throw while the opponent is still in blockstun, you have to get them while they are able to act and could've tried to do something about it.
For another type of failsafe Mike didn't mention, Tekken is a good case study in how to have unblockables but keep them fair. The game doesn't have assists and there aren't many examples of ways to hold an opponent in blockstun while you're free to try and charge one up, so as far as I know no setups exist (Disclaimer: I've only ever played Tekken off and on casually so I have no idea if there actually are some setups I don't know about). But besides just not having a way to create setups, Tekken also makes its unblockables very slow and telegraphed, signaling to the opponent that they need to do something in response. When you see an unblockable coming, you have two options to try and deal with it:
*I have seen Filia and Parasoul manage to use their own invincibility frames to dodge, Peacock and Painwheel may also be able to do this too, but in my experience this is extremely difficult to do consistently since you'd have to predict the exact timing they will super, and it won't work at all on longer supers that outlast your active frames. And since doing it too early causes the super to just wait for the iframes to end, I assume you weren't supposed to be able to do this in the first place.
So as a result, BB3's are almost completely unavoidable, and you don't even need to come up with a special setup for this. You click the button, it will hit, no matter what the opponent is doing. There is no possible counterplay here, making it a completely uninteractive mechanic. In many cases they can do enough damage to straight up kill a character from full health, leaving you to reflect on the fact that there was nothing you could've done about that, no amount of player skill that would've changed the outcome. If I see my opponent get to full meter, I know that I'm already dead.
Now, when discussing this the other day, I was told three potential ways to get around BB3s:
At first this problem may have been less obvious since most of those late game missions, as well as the bots when you're already at the top of Prize Fighter, did not carry supers at all, so you didn't have to worry about them often. But now 1.2.1 has 'fixed' this, so you can be subjected to BB3s on top of having all the numbers stacked against you. You can still get lucky and retry until they aren't carrying the BB3, but that's still just temporarily sidestepping the problem, you will still have those unlucky fights that rob you of your Prize Fight streak and/or energy. It's never fun to put the player in a position where they are nearly guaranteed to lose regardless of what they do, is it?
And even if just grinding your way out of these predicaments was an option, is that really a healthy thing for the game to have? Should player skill take a backseat to hard barriers that literally say "your numbers must be this big to pass" with no other way out? BB3s completely nullify player skill, ultimately reducing the game to a stat check any time they're involved. To me that sort of thing makes the game feel less like a fighting game with some RPG elements and more like a grinding treadmill that's only vaguely fighting game-flavored.
I think I've rambled on about game design long enough now, so for anyone who read all that and still thinks BB3s are fine the way they are, I'll leave you with a dare to prove me wrong. Try and take The 1.2.1 BB3 Challenge:
But before I get into my own thoughts, I'd like to defer to a much smarter man who also has very strong opinions about things fighting games should and should not do. Start at 53:51 if the embed doesn't automatically jump there.
One of the most important principles of fighting game design is that everything should have a clear way to beat it. From general concepts like attack/block/throw to more specific cases like DPing to beat a meaty, there should always be some sort of answer to anything your opponent throws at you.
But when a fighting game includes unblockables, whether by design or by those 1f "hard-to-block-able" mixups, you can expect devious players to look for ways to create truly unavoidable setups with them, trapping the opponent so that there is no way to counter it. Worst case scenario, you may even get loops where the attacker can do the setup over and over until the opponent is dead, and there is nothing left that can be done once they get you in that loop. This is what Mike demonstrates with the UMvC3 clip, where Firebrand is able to charge up the unblockable while the assist holds his opponent in place, and can keep doing this until the entire enemy team is dead, and it will always work regardless of anything the opponent tries to do.
Still, some games do choose to include unblockables while carefully including failsafes to prevent setting them up. At the start of the segment I linked, Mike mentioned that if you really insist on having unblockables, they should at least be special-cased so that you can block them if you are already in blockstun - this would've stopped Firebrand from using an assist to trap the opponent like that. It's the same principle as how most every fighting game after SF2 doesn't let you tick throw while the opponent is still in blockstun, you have to get them while they are able to act and could've tried to do something about it.
For another type of failsafe Mike didn't mention, Tekken is a good case study in how to have unblockables but keep them fair. The game doesn't have assists and there aren't many examples of ways to hold an opponent in blockstun while you're free to try and charge one up, so as far as I know no setups exist (Disclaimer: I've only ever played Tekken off and on casually so I have no idea if there actually are some setups I don't know about). But besides just not having a way to create setups, Tekken also makes its unblockables very slow and telegraphed, signaling to the opponent that they need to do something in response. When you see an unblockable coming, you have two options to try and deal with it:
- Hit them first and interrupt the startup
- Move out of the way so it whiffs
*I have seen Filia and Parasoul manage to use their own invincibility frames to dodge, Peacock and Painwheel may also be able to do this too, but in my experience this is extremely difficult to do consistently since you'd have to predict the exact timing they will super, and it won't work at all on longer supers that outlast your active frames. And since doing it too early causes the super to just wait for the iframes to end, I assume you weren't supposed to be able to do this in the first place.
So as a result, BB3's are almost completely unavoidable, and you don't even need to come up with a special setup for this. You click the button, it will hit, no matter what the opponent is doing. There is no possible counterplay here, making it a completely uninteractive mechanic. In many cases they can do enough damage to straight up kill a character from full health, leaving you to reflect on the fact that there was nothing you could've done about that, no amount of player skill that would've changed the outcome. If I see my opponent get to full meter, I know that I'm already dead.
Now, when discussing this the other day, I was told three potential ways to get around BB3s:
- Kill them before they build the meter
- Be beefy enough to tank the hit
- Just sacrifice one character then let the rest finish the job.
At first this problem may have been less obvious since most of those late game missions, as well as the bots when you're already at the top of Prize Fighter, did not carry supers at all, so you didn't have to worry about them often. But now 1.2.1 has 'fixed' this, so you can be subjected to BB3s on top of having all the numbers stacked against you. You can still get lucky and retry until they aren't carrying the BB3, but that's still just temporarily sidestepping the problem, you will still have those unlucky fights that rob you of your Prize Fight streak and/or energy. It's never fun to put the player in a position where they are nearly guaranteed to lose regardless of what they do, is it?
And even if just grinding your way out of these predicaments was an option, is that really a healthy thing for the game to have? Should player skill take a backseat to hard barriers that literally say "your numbers must be this big to pass" with no other way out? BB3s completely nullify player skill, ultimately reducing the game to a stat check any time they're involved. To me that sort of thing makes the game feel less like a fighting game with some RPG elements and more like a grinding treadmill that's only vaguely fighting game-flavored.
I think I've rambled on about game design long enough now, so for anyone who read all that and still thinks BB3s are fine the way they are, I'll leave you with a dare to prove me wrong. Try and take The 1.2.1 BB3 Challenge:
- Find this mission located in Expert Going All In, River King Casino.
- Retry until you see one or both opponents carrying a BB3. Might take a few refreshes before one shows up.
- Prove to me that this is at all winnable! And for extra credit, can it be consistently done by any character, without just getting lucky or abusing a specific overpowered ability or effect?
