50/50 vs Reaction choices in For Honor | Forums

[TheGoblinzKing]

Sorry bout the long message. Now let me start of by staying I love For Honor. I loved the idea of it upon announcement. I loved that first beta and I've bought it and played it since launch on both ps4 and pc.

With all the updates and the old character reworks I'm mostly pretty happy with the game. However recently it seems that the devs have taken a different approach to designing the characters. While upon release and with the first few dlc characters the design of them seemed to be along the design practice of 'Every attack is reactable'. Fast attack characters like Orochi & Peacekeeper (before rework) could be blocked providing you reacted in time to their light chains. The same can be said for Galdiator and Shinobi. I liked this design practice as you felt good when you were blocking everything however the downside did create fights where it was hard to open your opponent up if they blocked everything. Use of unblock-able bashes (Centurion Kick, Shinobi kick etc) were good ways to give players ways to get round such opponents. These moves at start didn't necessarily have a combo which guarantees a hit but players had to use other attacks in their tool kit to make use of the opening it gave them (Nuboshi is perfect example. Kick > sidewinder) However recently they've seemed to change up this design practice .

Starting probably around the drop of Aramusha and Shaman the devs started giving characters combos that put their opponent in situations where they must make a choice out of 2 options with a 50/50 chance of success. The Orochi is a perfect example of this where his light chains are impossible to block if you guessed the wrong block. Looking at some of the gameplay of the new Chinese Warriors, such as Tiandi, the same 50/50 choice for the opponent occurs. For Tiandi he can make his unblock-able into a attach which is undodge-able, thus if you dodge the unblock-able you get hit by the undodge-able. If you don't dodge you get hit by the unblock-able Obviously this change of design was implemented to get away from the Turtle-ing fight style that was predominant in the game at the time and it was needed.

My issue here is when 50/50 choices that result in damage completly change the type of game For Honor is. Against those characters For Honor becomes a game like rock paper scissors where your skill means nothing just your luck in choosing the right side to block,. I have nothing wrong with the 50/50 choices they are needed to open up players who are playing defensivly, however they shouldn't be there for attacks like the new Orochi's light chain and Tiandi's unblockable strike cancel to light undodgeable as it allows players to spam such moves and ultimately turn a whole match into a luck game. With the end result of a match being played where you feel that there was no opportunity to actually apply your skill and practice.When you lose to a centurion although frustrating you know where you went wrong, ether missing a block/parry or a guardbreak counter. However against Orochi lights or the Conquerors Attack cancel to bash or allblock its a 50/50 game of what your opponent is to do with no test on your reactions or skill at playing your character.

For Honor is great because its one of the few pvp games that isn't dependent on Fps. Your skills, reactions and quick thinking should be what determines your ability to block an attack, dodge a bash or parry/deflect not luck of the draw. Yes some characters have skills to get you out of such 50/50 choices ( Shokgoki's passive shield, Any All-block character) and so one can argue that 50/50 attacks are fine as players can use their characters other skills to avoid a 50/50 choice. Ultimately only a few characters have a skill to counter such 50/50 choices.

Was wondering your thoughts on this do you guys prefer 50/50 choice combos or wish it to be more reaction based. Do any of you have solutions to 50/50 choices to make it not so soul destroying when you guess wrong each time?

[DFQN1]

50/50s should be taken out of the game alongside with free damage from parries.

[Knight_Raime]

Just want to say a few things before I give my opinion.
50/50 like other terms is kind of misused a lot. 50/50's are when an opponent does one action that has 2 outcomes. And the opponent has to guess which one to counter. If he guesses wrong he gets punished for it. If you have something that counters both options it removes the guessing portion. So you'll never be punished. Firstly, for honor doesn't have any true 50/50's when you have stamina. This is because you can roll away to escape everything in this game. But when you're out of stamina you can't roll. So when OOS some things are close to 50/50's.

The second part of this is guessing. This is a little bit more touchy because it's about reactions. And people have widely different reaction times. Someone like myself could react to the kick/caber toss mix up just fine. But other players can't due to their poor reaction skills. So to them it feels like a guessing game. A line has to be drawn. And in For honor that line happens to be with true 400ms attack times. Or to put it. When you delay your 400ms light properly it gives a window of 233ms to "react" in time to deal with it. That's for the sake of for honor not reactable. Barring that basically everything else in the game is considered reactable.

So just so i'm clear here outside of these specific lights nothing else is a "guess." And unless you're OOS nothing is close to being a 50/50.

Now on to for honor and what makes it unique. For honor is "unique" in that it's more largely based on reactionary play. Where as most typical fighters have a mix of prediction play and reaction play. But I wouldn't call reactionary play it's defining technique. As even in stupidly technical fighters such as the fighting game series known as "Melty blood" If you get good enough you can have a solid enough defense to block/avoid pretty much everything. So the fact that this is possible in For honor isn't unique.

In my opinion what makes for honor...for honor is it's fight system. "the art of battle." Even in a lot of 3d esque fighters you only have 2 directions to deal with at any given time. Where as in For honor you have 3. Apart of this system is the fact that blocking for a majority of the cast is a passive action. No other fighter i've heard of or played does this. You always have to block as an action. Where as in For Honor simply having your widget in a direction blocks everything from that direction (barring unblockables) without you having to press anything.

So, in my opinion, Adding "50/50's" or more correctly put, adding more prediction play is not moving for honor away from it's unique gameplay. We could have a whole seperate debate on wether or not prediction play is the right way to go with for honor. But i'd argue that it's really irrelevant. The devs have decided to go this direction in attempts to foster competitive play. So there really is no debating on wether this should happen or not. The only discussions left to be had is how to foster said competitive play.

Also just for information sake prediction play has existed since the game has launched. It just wasn't available to a majority of the cast. And not implimented in the best of ways. The first 2 dlc heros were bandaids to try to address the defensive meta. Which both didn't do. The second set of heros were meant to try to add technical fighters to the roster. As we didn't have people like that sans bushi. And the final group of heros were a mixed bag. Shaman is the first hero in the game that has a kit viable at all skill levels. but with clear weaknesses meaning if you correctly predict how she plays you shut her down. And aramusha is a throw back to their older style of design heros. As he's rubbish on offense. Better at playing defensively/passively. and given 2 half baked ideas that were never going to pan out with decent players.

[AzureSky.]

Just want to say a few things before I give my opinion.
50/50 like other terms is kind of misused a lot. 50/50's are when an opponent does one action that has 2 outcomes. And the opponent has to guess which one to counter. If he guesses wrong he gets punished for it. If you have something that counters both options it removes the guessing portion. So you'll never be punished. Firstly, for honor doesn't have any true 50/50's when you have stamina. This is because you can roll away to escape everything in this game. But when you're out of stamina you can't roll. So when OOS some things are close to 50/50's.

The second part of this is guessing. This is a little bit more touchy because it's about reactions. And people have widely different reaction times. Someone like myself could react to the kick/caber toss mix up just fine. But other players can't due to their poor reaction skills. So to them it feels like a guessing game. A line has to be drawn. And in For honor that line happens to be with true 400ms attack times. Or to put it. When you delay your 400ms light properly it gives a window of 233ms to "react" in time to deal with it. That's for the sake of for honor not reactable. Barring that basically everything else in the game is considered reactable.

So just so i'm clear here outside of these specific lights nothing else is a "guess." And unless you're OOS nothing is close to being a 50/50.

Now on to for honor and what makes it unique. For honor is "unique" in that it's more largely based on reactionary play. Where as most typical fighters have a mix of prediction play and reaction play. But I wouldn't call reactionary play it's defining technique. As even in stupidly technical fighters such as the fighting game series known as "Melty blood" If you get good enough you can have a solid enough defense to block/avoid pretty much everything. So the fact that this is possible in For honor isn't unique.

In my opinion what makes for honor...for honor is it's fight system. "the art of battle." Even in a lot of 3d esque fighters you only have 2 directions to deal with at any given time. Where as in For honor you have 3. Apart of this system is the fact that blocking for a majority of the cast is a passive action. No other fighter i've heard of or played does this. You always have to block as an action. Where as in For Honor simply having your widget in a direction blocks everything from that direction (barring unblockables) without you having to press anything.

So, in my opinion, Adding "50/50's" or more correctly put, adding more prediction play is not moving for honor away from it's unique gameplay. We could have a whole seperate debate on wether or not prediction play is the right way to go with for honor. But i'd argue that it's really irrelevant. The devs have decided to go this direction in attempts to foster competitive play. So there really is no debating on wether this should happen or not. The only discussions left to be had is how to foster said competitive play.

Also just for information sake prediction play has existed since the game has launched. It just wasn't available to a majority of the cast. And not implimented in the best of ways. The first 2 dlc heros were bandaids to try to address the defensive meta. Which both didn't do. The second set of heros were meant to try to add technical fighters to the roster. As we didn't have people like that sans bushi. And the final group of heros were a mixed bag. Shaman is the first hero in the game that has a kit viable at all skill levels. but with clear weaknesses meaning if you correctly predict how she plays you shut her down. And aramusha is a throw back to their older style of design heros. As he's rubbish on offense. Better at playing defensively/passively. and given 2 half baked ideas that were never going to pan out with decent players.

Tekken 7 is very similar to for honor, the only change is the point of view and also that you have a lot more complexity on the moves, making it a very good game for both new and old players (since even if you have complex moves the "overpowered" moves have their cons in frame advantage)

in tekken you have passive defense too, if you just don't touch anything your character is going to block all high and mid attacks but recieve lows, if you crouch you evade high attacks and block lows but recieve mediums that are launch punishable.

What For Honor needs and i didn't saw anyone talking about is frame advantage on characters, Doing X move over and over sounds good in for honor since all the characters have overall the same frames after light and heavy block.

In tekken is works this way, most of the moves makes you negative on block, but this is just after the chain ended or the single move ends, also on the chains you have some mixups based on characters but you need to input the other moves before doing the mixup (so you can't really spam it from neutral) The only character in for honor that has this is valkyrie with the sweep, on chain ender, if this doesn't happen you should have really negative frames after doing a mixup that starts instantly without any movement beforehand, for example Paul sweep move into 2 other moves (the character does a sweep that launches you for free damage after that, but if you block it he has really high negative frames, so you can launch it for big damage)

i could go and go with examples but the point is that for honor needs frames advantages based on characters, if you make a really slow and easy to block heavy attack, you should have + frames that you can use on your next move, this will fix problems with characters that have no openers, they won't have openers but they will have frame advantage, and that's really important to have, same with assasins but in a negative frame way after doing their light spam chains, after the chain they should have negative frames that makes them lose if they try to make a light attack after that.