I appreciate Sajam turning the focus away from the devs who are trying their best to put out a product, and instead calling for the community to be more welcoming. Actual best take in this situation, and I'm hoping content creators will take him up on it.
Yes to the community being welcoming but I'm sorry, indie or not, putting tutorials on launch as a GOAL and not a core part of the game is such a bad move, especially when they had time to make sure their rotating cosmetics store and MTX were all set and ready to go day one.
There are already dozens of hours of accessible tutorial content on YT for Rivals 2, and a more-or-less complete Wiki (by Dragdown). The discord is also - sometimes - helpful for new players. These kinds of resources won't stop players from being turned off the game if they are true beginners, though.
@@johndelanie3649 So genuinely curious, are you implying the devs are being greedy here and intentionally putting out a worse product in search of short term profit? Or, just maybe, the 25 person studio that had to crowdsource funds to even create the game needed to put out a product so they could get some return on investment so that they could continue developing the game? Also a reminder, this is the same studio that promised every post launch character added to the game would be free for everyone.
@@OjoRojo40 How is it working for free? Content creators, whose job is making content, can make content focused on beginners to encourage the game's growth while also making money?
I'm here to plug IzAw's Rivals 2 guide which covers the absolute basics, published under the channel ArtofRivals. Based on his work in Smash Ultimate, we can expect very good, progressively more advanced guides in the near future.
Ofischial has a channel that is dropping a lot of really useful information too. He comes from an esports coaching background so he knows how to teach stuff, the channel is great.
I recommend "Art of Rivals 2 - Beginner" by the new youtube channel "Art of Rivals" It's a 12 minutes video that goes over every basic mechanics of the game and some advanced stuff. But it's very easy to understand. He will make character specific guides in the future. But now that you mention it... I've never encountered somebody coming from traditionnal fighting games trying to learn platform fighters. It was always the other way around. Maybe it's because a lot of fighting game players don't consider platform fighters as "real" fighting games. And maybe as a consequence nobody wants to make content directed towards them. Edit: For people coming from Traditionnal Fighting Games trying to learn Platform Fighters with Rivals 2, there is an entire Super Smash Bros section in the Fighting Game Glossary that goes over all the terminology you'll need. And yes, it applies to other plaform fighters than Smash Bros.
I really hope sajam enjoys and learns rivals so plat fighter content has an educational space instead of just “which character can make the hyrule castle jump?”
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
It's easy to joke about how he needs a smash tutorial but he is literally right that it has no info as a new player. I don't even mean character personal stuff, just stuff like aiming for kills. Smash actually does have those tutorials. Then you can have tutorials that basically tell you up tilt is good and combo into Nair.
I recall a story my friend told me where he had the first Rivals for like a year before he learned that Shovel Knight can open up the shop mid-fight to change his moves or something. Shits wild.
This doesn’t just apply to platform fighters most beginner guides for fighting games more often then not don’t breakdown terms like ok, pressure, Kara cancels etc When I was learning my first fighting game I kept getting frustrated because almost every guide wouldn’t actually explain those terms
@@goldskarrNow I could be wrong, but pretty sure that bit of info would have just been in the tutorial when he released and I'm pretty sure it was in his trailer. So that's on your friend at that point in this particular circumstance.
@@Megaman12Protoman14 I feel like having to either go through the tutorial multiple times each time a new character comes out or having to watch a trailer to know about a core mechanic isnt good
What you said about Rivals tutorials heavily referencing competitive smash was the same issue I ran into trying to get into Xrd in 2019. So many intro guides were from the perspective of teaching a Street Fighter character how Guilty Gear worked and this was my first attempt to learn a fighter competitively.
I hate that some people were saying Smash doesn't have a tutorial when every game in that franchise has an Attract Mode video that teaches you the basics of how to move, how to jump, learning different times of attacks as well as how to recover. The difference is that Rivals expects you know the basics of Smash or have competitive Smash experience before diving into the mechanics of the game. That's why the game gives you so many options to tweak with the controls that it all can be intimidating for a new player to understand.
Ultimate added a whole proper special move list to its characters too, which is really important when they have so many unique attributes and mechanics as time progresses. Seeing the Rivals characters and all their traits make it vital to convey that information to everyone, from newcomers to vets alike, and I hope they update things soon
Man that attract mode tutorial back in Brawl opened my third eye to all the stuff I was missing as a kid (like all the defensive options. Fighting Tabuu was a struggle because I just thought one of his moves was basically unavoidable). I've tried using the tutorial vid of smash 4/ultimate to help kids understand the basics in a school setting, but most of them didn't grasps the concepts even still just from watching and complained about things as I tried to gently remind them of the options they have. I do wonder if a playable tutorial would have given the unfamiliar students a better chance from the starting line though.
Smash Ultimate also shipped with a plethora of ways to play the game Solo, so you can easily get 10-20 hours of playing experience without ever touching pvp.
@@luxerhusku2609 Right? People are forgetting that Smash games even came with manuals for most of the games except for Ultimate (it was digital for the game before) and there was an official website for the series long before Discord was a thing. I won't say Smash has the best platform fighting tutorials, but there are more ways to teach than displaying hitboxes and recording inputs even if I'd like those to be official.
I played almost 600 hours of Rivals 1, was Master rank on about half the roster, and my literal first thought on starting Rivals 2 was "Where's the tutorials?". They added a bunch of new mechanics and changed the existing ones, so of course I want an explanation of how things work! When I tried to play Rivals 2 using the same skillset from Rivals 1, changes that I wasn't aware of kept popping up all over the place. I eventually learned most of what I wanted to know by looking around online/just trying stuff to see what worked in match but an in-game tutorial would have made it MUCH easier and less frustrating. It's especially galling because Rivals 1 had absolutely fantastic tutorials that took you through every step of the game, from the very basics to high-level tips. I had never played Melee competitively before so I learned to wavedash from the in-game tutorial!
It's really sad because rivals 1 had straight up the best tutorials out of any platform fighter, putting you in applicable scenarios that actually would come up in matches, dividing things into understandable sections (like beginner, intermediate and advanced movement), and having individual tutorials for every character. Also, I think the vibe partially comes from the fact that the game has been having fairly easy to access betas for about a year, and much of the community of the first game (and other platform fighters) has been playing it for a year now
I feel like the big thing (and sajam mentioned this too) is that this game has a specific target audience when it was designed. Its for melee players. All the content reflects this, and to a melee player, they already know most of the things about it, only needing to learn about the characters themselves.
The fact 1 has such amazing tutorials and 2 doesn't is kind of crazy honestly. Like really? Helping teach new players is a Kickstarter goal and not a baseline part of the game? The steam link it offers doesn't even tell you that grabs are KI style combo breaker where you hit the same button, it's lacking explanations of core game mechanics.
@@upcastplanet4808 No because if you're first game doesn't have tutorials on launch and you get feedback going "hey, this should have had tutorials on launch", when making the second game you should maybe listen to that. Plenty of time to design a MTX store with two currencies but not enough implement an onboarding system
I'm glad you're going to give the game another chance. I genuinely want to see you showcase the tutorial once they add it, because if it's anything like the first game's tutorial, it'll be a banger. A series of videos on beginner plat fighter tips geared toward FG players would be cool. I've never made a video in my life but somebody should do it.
oh my god, you made THE video visualizing exactly how i've been feeling lately. I've been a casual Smash fan my ENTIRE LIFE and played a bit of rivals 1 casually, jumped into rivals 2 IMMEDIATELY on release to try to get in on the fun while the iron's hot and tons of new people would be playing, and just... I feel like I'm the ONLY ONE as 'bad' as I am even with like 20 years of casual experience with "this game" more or less. I've been busting my balls trying to learn as much as I can as fast as I can but the gap between me and the 2nd-worst player of the game feels almost insurmountable. I'm not giving up yet but yeah we definitely need like.... a staircase to climb for people who are anything less than S+++ tier at the game especially for new games that come out that are very similar to other games that have existed in the competitive sphere for a long time.
Same. Casually played smash with buddies back in the day, played a little Brawlhalla, jumped into this game and it’s been unbelievably frustrating. I found guides on the basics of how to do things, but - to Sajam’s point - none of them explain what a basic game plan looks like. Giving me a bunch of tools in isolation from one another is helpful, but how do I play neutral? What 5 things should I focus on learning first? Like, cool that wavedashes exist, but I can’t turn around half the time without accidentally dashing instead. Hoping content creators take this video as a cue to start making that stuff. Cut the fluff, don’t teach me everything, but instead distill all your knowledge down to a simple beginner game plan that can get me over the initial jump. Then those other videos will be useful when I’m looking to fill in my knowledge gaps.
i think one of the most unfortunate things about the lack of tutorial is new players have no idea what DI (directional influence) is, which would be like playing a fighting game without knowing you can hold a button to tech out of combos. rivals 1's tutorial would literally just kill you until you did it right
Not only that but DI doesnt seem to work exactly the same as smash ult. (i.e., optimal DI is just in general different angles, holding up/in to go to the corner vs holding in in smash)
@@flyinhigh7681thats how DI works in melee, Ultimate attempted to make it more intuitive to someone with little platform fighter experience. Rivals is made with melee players in mind so it uses that system instead
@@Protoplanetary ahhh. My lack of melee experience showing here... either way. Ive seen it wrongfoot those experienced with platform fighters, but just not melee (myself included, evidently)
@@flyinhigh7681 fair enough, its an intuitive system that is basically hidden in Melee. People know how to wavedash before they knew how to properly DI lol. Holding in makes more sense from a momentum perspective, but DI's real purpose is to change the launch angle and abuse the geometry of a square (being a further distance to the corners than the sides). You can also DI to mix up people trying to punish you but strictly survival DI is altering your angle to fly towards the furthest possible point of the blastzone from you. I think ultimately that's a better system, but it needs a tutorial in a game meant to be competitive, Melee's lifecycle and discovery process is an anomaly not an example to follow lmao
I really like rivels one and am excited to play more rivals but i do think a big reason that platform fighters struggle to take off is that everything is so geared around the bubble of melee (and to a lesser extent smash in general) and really unfriendly to players just do to how much background knowledge both the game itself and as you said the community around the game expect you to have. As someone who hadn't played fighting games at all until a few years ago and who still sucks at them i find most traditional foghter way easier to get into than platform fighters
This video is so fascinating to me because I feel the exact same way he does but for traditional fighters. Like I have absolutely zero clue how to even approach those, they feel insanely impossible.
Check out Core-A Gaming’s video “Why Button Mashing Doesn’t Work”, it’s a fantastic video that goes over universal fighting game concepts and mechanics!
I can attest to New Player Guides being Evergreen content. I recently got hooked on playing BBTag, and Diaphone's guides from years ago have helped me decide which chars to play and given a basic understanding of how the game works. Made starting out a lot less daunting.
Definitely a big learning moment for Dan and the team I think putting the tutorial behind a Kickstarter goal was absolutely not the right play, I would have been happy to wait a couple more months for the game so that the people who've never played platform fighters before would have a good onboarding process at launch. I feel like the way it is now lots of people are going to end up refunding the game or not really sticking with it since it's not easy to learn right now. It wouldn't be as big of a problem if like you mentioned there was good educational community content out there which there has not been for Rivals.
That's not really how it works. Game development isn't just time, it's also money. You need to pay developers. You might have been able to wait a few more months, but that doesn't mean the budget was. It's unfortunate, but sometimes game devs have to operate with limited resources and decide what to prioritize pre-launch.
@@krowmoonlightright, but that’s an issue on the devs part no? Like the game has a super basic arcade mode, a decent training room, and online matchmaking. It also has a buttload of “content” you either pay real life money for or grind nonstop to get. Don’t get me wrong I love the game, but it’s basically an early access title with a fully fleshed out cash store but is lacking tutorials. Reminds me of Halo infinite dropping without Slayer but a fully working storefront
@@riplix20 I disagree. If your devs have to get a full time job to put food on their table, and pay their bills, they aren't working on your game. At some point, as a studio, you'd HAVE to release something. Some games go into Early Access, but arguably that kills the momentum and the game flops because of it. Some games do Kickstarter, like this one did, but all options are ways to buy time and that's it.
@@riplix20 im not saying launching with no tutorials wasnt a mistake. im saying the op made it sound like they just should have pushed the release date back, and thats silly. it was more a problem with their priorities.
Honestly, watching Sajam and Diaphone try Rivals was so interesting. I've been playing smash as long as I have memories so a lot of plat fighter stuff is just common sense to me. Seeing how much simple stuff they didn't know was cool.
An important thing to note here is that while you had no idea what you were doing, you did better online than both me and my brother who have played platform fighters our entire life. The people playing rivals ranked are just pretty good on average I think. I would love to see more of you learning rivals 2 personally, its very interesting to see how different two similarly inspired genres of games can be / feel.
@@Eval999Smash had a manual for three games, a digital manual plus loading screen tips for the fourth then full moveset breakdowns and gameplans in Smash Ultimate in like a dozen languages. It must have thousands of tips.
Tekken 7 was my first fighting game that wasn't a plat-fighter. The new-player experience was basically the same as Rivals 2 has right now. Actually, they didn't even have a link to a webpage with images of the controls; there was literally nothing. I watched a couple youtube videos that did explain most of that stuff, but needless to say, I didn't stick with that game very long. A while later, I picked up GG Strive, and that game's built-in tutorial, at least at the time I bought it, was really really good. I ended up playing that game for hundreds of hours and was able to rank up to Floor 10 without watching a single video. I learned a couple combos from the dustloop wiki, but not even that many; the in-game resources were just that good. Rivals 1 also had a really good tutorial, not quite at the level of Strive, but easily one of the best tutorials of a game I've played. I wouldn't recommend buying the game just for that, but most of the lessons from those tutorials are still relevant. I do think it was a pretty big mistake to not release the game with tutorials. On-boarding new players is the #1 most important part of any online-focused game. You need players to keep an online mode healthy, and focusing only on the relatively small playerbase of a niche genre of games is not an ideal strategy for building a playerbase.
Do people remember Bafael? I think his guides were basically what Sajam is talking about, very basic gameplans that most people can actually use. I think it also helps that the games usually are less "lab heavy" nowadays in terms of the knowledge depth you need in order to use a character well. SFIV was basically a knowledge check since almost every option your opponent had, your response would be character specific.
@@Bober909 Bafael is working on his own cinematic platformer, isn't he? He did some much great stuff for SF and also did a great job making me interested in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
seeing you talk about how awkward it was to learn to wavedash in roa2 after me and my friend spent like a full week talking about how we think it's too free really helped to put into perspective the level of sicko that melee/pm players are on lol. glad you are trying to learn a plat fighter I hope you stick with it. they are very very hard games but very rewarding.
There's never enough guides and there's always topics left to cover even in 20 year old games where seemingly everything has been figured out. So newer games have way more than plenty of material, only disadvantage as a viewer is that game patches obsolete a bunch of guides which may discourage creators from creating more right away because it will likely happen again, notice most people make character tutorials to be the first ones and get those sweet views but often don't bother when the character gets changed too much , even if they make a new guide that new one will have way less views compared to the first one so they bother even less, i suspect this is particularly true with Strive, specially last patch. Which also means that there's even more material for more guides but since fighting games are so ephemeral making guides at the end of it's life cycle it's not that attractive viewership wise either because most people move on to the next hot fighting game so future guides are made by specialists of that particular game for other specialists and because there's never enough of them there's always topics left to cover, at that point they are doing a service for the community rather than for views which requires a particular kind of player/content creator and if they make the guide it better not be exclusive to some discord server that can disappear at any moment, same with Twitter, for preservation and discovery sake UA-cam is better .
UA-cam is better than unindexed Discord servers, but UA-cam is not best. GameFAQs has guides from the 80s and 90s which can be easily searched for a specific term in text. Text/HTML guides are a great medium.
There ARE people out there who come in cold and just value a good, completely new original thing that they know has a complicated, unfamiliar base to understand before they can really meaningfully engage with it. Bless them, there's about 10, and Sajam is one of them. A lot of new people did learn +R when rollback hit ("a lot" in anime FGC terms I guess), and that was excellent and surprising, but it had other things going for it too (it was attached to a new currently popular IP, extremely cheap/easy to run, and perhaps most of all hit with great netcode at just the right time during COVID). It does also have excellent resources. Hopefully good resources become a thing for all fighters that are trying to grow, but on the old 2D anime side of things, the harder work is a necessity because they're trying to maintain a comparatively pretty small base. Displaced Smash players are in the millions.
Yeah this is a good ass problem to have. Rivals 1 got somewhere because it had people pick it up and adore it competitively and spread it from there (before workshop came out). Seeing the scope of Rivals 2 reach so far, where someone like Sajam and people with no platfighter experience are looking to play and learn, is amazing. I don’t think many people expected that, hence putting the “10 characters at launch” stretch goal before the “tutorials” goal. The time will come when tutorials and everything will be in place though. I think we’ll do a good job with this one :)
"Someone is going to be trying to learn Guilty Gear Strive when season four comes out. And if you have guides from four years ago, they'll mostly be applicable to the game now." Mostly true but not for every character lol
the channel ofischial has some pretty good new player tutorials imo, goes over the basics and also has some more videos on more advanced stuff as you learn the game
I honestly think one of the reasons there are so few good beginner guides for this game is just because people still see platform fighters as "the smash games and the smash clones". people just assume that the only people that'll play this game are people who already play smash so they don't think about someone coming in from outside
Im teaching my street fighter friends how to play RoA2. We have been playing SF for around 10 years together, and multiple of them said "yeah this isnt a party game" and are drowning in mechanics and movement. The first thing i told them to do, was spend time in the lab learning your characters movement. The game is all about your ability to MOVE. The fighting comes second imo. IZAW Art of Rivals Official online youtube tutorials for the game great places to start. Now i see why everyone thinks diamond is impossible to get too. I hopped in this game, transferred all my RoA1 knowledge and my Dedede knowledge towards Loxodont and have been having an absolute blast. Reminds me of the first time i played PM. Good luck everyone!
Well, in a board game it has rules you have to keep track of yourself. If you don't, you can't play the game. A video game keeps track of the rules for you, so you can mess around and figure things out in a training mode or just by playing. Not saying games shouldn't have a tutorial, but why your comparison doesn't really hold.
for the first rivals stream i remember feeling immediately validated that sajam was having a hard time picking the game up, not because of anything malicious but it did help a lot seeing someone i look up to in terms of play for 2d fighters having issues with something i had a lot of experience in and helps you realize that its always going to be hard to learn something new and if youre having issues in a fighting game you should feel down because youre not doing the cool shit right out the gate because its hard for some of the sickest players in the game to pick up something new!
Platform fighters have always been notorious for having awful beginner experiences, even worse than old-school fighting games, in some cases. Most players would learn through word of mouth and experimentation, and that was it Rivals of Aether was really the first game to include a tutorial, and it was... Overwhelming, for most new players. Every character had their own playable tutorial that would go extremely in-depth into most of their intricacies, and even then, some stuff got left out, because it was added later on. They did release some "101" videos on UA-cam to briefly explain what characters do, but I agree, they need to try to streamline their tutorials. If you want some more immediate help, I, and many others in the community would love to teach you on a more personal basis
as a platfighter content creator myself i couldnt agree more, platfighter content generally is made through a monopolized perspective and its EXTREMELY frustrating smash is to platfighters what doom was to fps games back in the 90s
Even as an experienced platform fighter I still wish there were tutorials. Like above the next fighter. How does di work in this game specifically? Other platform fighters dont have floor hugging, make a video exp explaining how it works, what the counter play is and why it is in there. Set up scenario's where you practice using them
I wanted to enjoy this game and got my cousin who is a platform fighter enjoyer (basically only smash) to buy it to try. We played for an hour or so, tried every character, had no idea what our moves were doing. We got so frustrated that our characters passed through each other when trying to approach with buttons and nothing was explained that he just refunded it. We tried rushdown revolt to wash the taste out and it was sick and made sense.
i never really played tag fighters before but i got hooked by the 2xko alpha (greatly assisted by your beginner guides). and then i went to bbtag to try to satisfy my 2xko cravings and i have been getting ground into paste every night. it took me 3 solid evenings of getting perfected over and over before i got my first win and i'm pretty sure that was a fluke. i haven't been able to find nearly the same level of introductory content for bbtag, sadly.
TAG has a troubled history, but yeah, getting into an older game without as many new players is tough. I had the same experience learning Central Fiction. You gotta be good at shifting your priority from winning to alternate goals, or you're gonna go crazy. When I stopped focusing so hard on winning and started focusing on antiairing, I was so much happier. Even if each antiair only felt like 1/2 or even 1/4 of the happiness I'd get from winning, it was a lot more net happiness per session.
BBTAG had the unfortunate fate of being so ridiculously overhated that the current version of the game has basically nobody with time, resources, or know-how to make accessible guides for it. Sucks cause it's a really cool but incredibly complicated game. Hope you manage to stick with it though, you might be able to find some stuff on dustloop depending on your team as a potential starting point.
Player onboarding and experimentation is never prioritized and that's a problem across the industry. You shouldn't need external resources to learn the games mechanics, it should be intuitive or have in game systems to help learn. UI design plays in here too. You don't need to overwhelm the player with every detail, but it can still be done way better than most games do now - little to no onboarding or insight into how the game works.
It's wild that games as technically dense as UNICLR or P4AU somehow manage to have the best onboarding with their tutorials. In any other genre the game not teaching you how to play would be insane, but with fighting games, where it's arguably the most important, devs still don't understand how crucial a good tutorial system is.
@@thepunisherxxx6804 Rivals really has neither, I had to read a reddit post to learn that grabs are KI style combo breakers and not a mash like smash bros, I should not have to dig that far outside of the game itself to learn something so fundamental.
I think a lot of people, a LOT of people will skip any tutorial that exists and have the same problems whether it's there or no. That said, SOME people would use it, and there's really no excuse to not have one. And calling out content creators who don't remember what it was like being new is honestly always justified.
The people skipping the tutorial were never gonna play your game for long anyways. But not having one loses you so much more players and then your just stuck with barely any players and all the sweats crying "I have no one to queue against anymore why why why"
@@RandomGuyCDN I don't think any part of what you said reflects reality. First, I expect that most people skip the tutorial. I don't; I always start with the tutorial. But if you watch Sajam's video on teaching deadlock, he mentions that it was pretty much everyone he tried to teach who skipped the tutorial, didn't play against bots, and just jumped into quick play and got bodied for their first several games. This is typical across most genres, in my experience. It's why everyone wants single-player, becaue singleplayer can be tuned with the inexperienced and uninformed player in mind. Second, having or not having a tutorial is really, really not what's going to determine the long-term success of a game. It has an influence, certainly, but pointing to it as **the** reason why a small game might founder is ridiculous.
When I searched “Platform Fighter Basics” on UA-cam, I got a playlist of videos on how to MAKE a platform fighter. It’s not just a Rivals thing as much as it is a platform fighter thing. They’re still in their 3rd Strike, figure it all out on your own era or something idek. I think Rivals is 100x more intuitive than Melee, and they can still capitalize on this. The game feels so great, and the tutorial thing just feels like a bonus. I’m so surprised there is 0 content on the basics of the genre. It’s insane.
@@bladegrape7248 I think the main problem there is that people are still using the term "Smash Clone" and algorithm isn't as tuned to sharing content about platform fighters unless you are a developer or looking for comparisons. "3D fighting game basics" returns similar results. You need to get specific and mention games like Slap City, Rushdown Revolt or NASB1/2.
As someone experienced with Smash Bros, a lot of the character-specific stuff and things unique to Rivals 2 feel completely obscure in their function and applications. Some characters have elements that are fairly easy to understand, like Wrastor not only having multiple mid-air jumps but also aerial smash attacks, which are obviously useful in a platform fighter, but then there's stuff like his slipstream line-thing or Ranno's bubble, or even just things like the rules that govern recovery options and what can be done out of what state (like walljumping out of 'helpless' state after doing a special move and extending your recovery in that way). Even if you know how to generally move around and hit the opponent into the blastzone, you still end up feeling like you're just hopelessly flailing around because there's so many unknowns all around you.
Learning a new genre is learning the basic strategies and skills to improve as well as common control schemes. Learning a new game is finding out all the minute ways this game is so different from another one even in the same series sometimes.
bunch of melee like plat fighters have come out and the first thing content creators do is try to get melee players to play, since they’re known for being passionate and very intimate with the systems (and also picky about what games they like). they’ll make good tutorials at some point but also a lot of them used to be melee players and want their friends to play rivals too
I was in the exact same predicament. Tried playing for a while, had fun but every match felt like a knowledge check in a language I’d never heard before
Ya I am new to not only plat fighters but fighters in general - rivals 2 is my only one now with about ~25 hours into the game. I constantly feel totally clueless about what to do in both a macro and micro sense, how to play against all the various matchups. I'm in the lowest rank and still everyone else seems to know so much more than me, edgegaurding me and punishing/comboing me every time they land a hit, punishing me for every mistake I make and they're constantly all over me. This combined with how fast the game is makes it incredibly hard to make any headway at first. Part of it may be the playerbase of course - I suspect theres an overrepresentation of experienced plat fighter players and less casual players than most games seeing as rivals would have attracted a lot of melee etc players. And to be fair, I'm choosing to queue ranked even though I'm clueless, but none of this was a "complaint" in the first place.
a lot of the lack of content with rivals stems the the fact that since rivals emulates so much of smash, smash tutorials that have been around for decades will work in terms of learning fundamentals. melee players who have never played rivals 2 before were able to still wavedash, same way a quarter circle input works in every fighting game. its regrettable that they didnt launch with tutorials but it's both good and bad that they had almost a decade of rivals 1 and smash stuff to help tide people over
Pretty interesting considering all I see on yt is stuff for absolute beginners that walks through how to do the basics, which I don't actually need. I suspect there is algorithm at play.
if you or anyone else wants good RoA 2 info to look at while the evergreen stuff is being made you could look into melee guides, some of the characters are almost direct translations and the engine/meta are similar enough to learn alot
Theres definitely not a ton of beginners guides for platform fighters in general but i think you also just had unfortunate timing because i had multiple beginners guides (recommend vids from Badmouthblooper and Bowler) popping up right after watching you stream the game Also asking what zetterburn fire does as the first example of a question to be answered by a movelist is so funny because “what does the fire do” is a huge meme in the community.
I knew launching with a tutorial would be a huge mistake. Rivals 1 has a great tutorial, one of the best ive ever comeacross for any game. They should have delayed and at least just copied over some of the basic basic tutorials from 1. Hell, if you want to learn 2 and need a tutorial, playing one wouldnt be bad at all, cost excluded. It was such a good tutorial it made me better at other platformer fighters, it explained some many concepts so well.
Rivals 2 has really made me appreciate what is in NASB2. I’m really enjoying rivals but the extra content goes a long way imo. Tutorials, game modes, skins in the game at frame one, nostalgia, a lot more voice acting
I have personally made several fighting game enjoyers out of nonbelievers thanks to the tireless work that went into Airdash Academy. The resources must be designed not for those who come after us on the same path but those who begin where we are.
I wish there was more resources for bridging the gap from absolute beginner to intermediate. I've been off and on trying to learn fighting games over the years so I always feel like once I get a really basic grasp of the game and my char, I struggle to start applying the deeper concepts I "know" in real situations. I feel like most competitive games have a gap in resources there, so you end up with a lot of beginner focused vids that may or may not be helpful and require sifting through to find something new to you, or very advanced videos / guides that aren't helpful unless you are just as advanced and have a strong enough foundation to engage with the topic.
I really feel the pain here. It’s tough being a rivals 1 players and seeing that a lot of sajam’s gripes were addressed. Rivals 1 has extensive tutorials and does a great job of teaching players all of the mechanics, whether system, character or otherwise. Hopefully Dan and his team get those resources in rivals 2 to the same quality
It's already too late. dont have those things on launch you've already lost the casuals that already refunded the game or made up their mind from word of mouth.
@ hard disagree, i picked up rivals on a steam sale 1 year after release. Games are not concerts, you don’t buy a ticket for a day, you buy something that can be experienced for a long time and adding these resources will ALWAYS be net positive
I really enjoy learning fighting games while you're learning about them, but now that I'm seeing how it looks when I'm the more experienced player in this genre, I'm confused where to start. Idk what all to say is a good starting point. I could say practice wavedashing but it's specific to platform fighters and while the timing is made way easier in Rivals 2 it's an odd skill compared to how other games use wavedashing. It's also could be harder if you use "up" to jump because the jump button is the usual method to wavedash. Or just get used to dash dancing, an easier skill but more limited. Get used to the length of your character's dash because it determines when you can act out of it with certain moves. These are just about movement, which is the most important and I'm not even talking about any attacks yet. Which another layer of difficulty is idk how long it would take to even get comfortable with movement. I could honestly write an essay on your first experience with Rivals (as if I haven't already) but I hope you find something that can help explain it in a way that makes sense All in all, I love how you approach new games and I try to emulate that attitude when I'm trying something new.
I'm a perpetual beginner in fighting games, and lean hard on tutorials and educational content because I dont have a ton of time for trial and error. That said, I enjoyed the first Rivals game and want to try the second
A lot of rivals 2 content has felt very biased to onboarding Ult and Melee players and I get why. This is a very ambitious platform fighter with a lot of cool ideas and it would be a huge loss to genre if it flopped and became irrelevant. If big smash players with their already existing audiences and hype jump on, we can avoid that. It makes sense. But like you said, it sort of has everyone who doesn’t exist in that sphere feel left out. Like, people are already under rhe assumption that beginners dont exist, its just intermediate players who dont know how rivals 2 specifically works, but know how to move around a platform fighter. The thing that I think truly sucks about this is that a lot of rivals characters are not hard to explain. A lot of the characters have very centralizing features that their entire kit revolves around and characters can become intuitive simply by explaining those features. For example Zetter’s fire does DoT and amps his strong attacks. Just by knowing that you know he’s an offensive character who puts on damage fast and has ways to close stocks better than anyone else. A little goes a really long way with this cast.
I was really waiting for rivals 2 to jump into a good platform fighter with rollback... But I dropped it immediately when I was trying to learn it without tutorials and had to be researching for online reaources just to know how to move or what control schemes can be more useful. Its just too much of a wall to climb for a new player even if i have a shit ton of FG experience. I hope when these resources or part of it is in the game jumping into it is more useful, and that some noobs still remain for me to learn
I am relieved to see this. I bought Rivals 2 to try out a platform fighter and the game just seems hostile to new players. I'm approaching the refund cutoff and have been waffling on refunding or keeping it. I'm glad it isn't just me having this problem but at the same time I'm dismayed that other people are. The game looks really cool, just as it is I can't really get into it because I have no clue what is going on.
Even as a long time melee player I felt that the lack of content hurt a lot for what characters were doing and how to face them. I look up stuff like “what does each character do” (yes I know the guide sheets are there) and there’s not much
I think part of the problem is that a good portion of the plat fighter community simply doesn't care about educational content. There hasn't been good guides because there was no demand for it. When you combine that with very little support from devs, it makes sense why the content side of smash tends to revolve around entertainment and streaming, instead of competition.
Yeah, I definitely had this issue too. I can know "Directional influence" is a thing but nothing in the game shows you when or how DI works (its specifically during Hitstun and not when you're actually being knocked back). There's also stuff like Clairen's Special grab or Wrastor's side special where the effects or advantages of them arent obvious.
ITS ONLY DURING HITSTUN? I've played smash casually for so long and knew it existed but I literally thought it worked like drifting during a jump holy shit
@@Tomoka51There are actually multiple types of DI. Smash DI is a common one which is during hitstun to shift your character and regular DI is what you are probably thinking of from most of the games.
@@Tomoka51 no, regular DI still only matters when you get hit in rivals one there was drift DI, which applied during being launched (when you were still in a combo) but in rivals 2 there is only nomral DI, which you can't affect while you're being launched
"It has a casual audience so I thought beginner guides would be really popular" Oh, he doesn't know... The casual Smash/Platform fighter audience hates guides. They mostly spectate and have no interest in trying to get better. Educational content is FAMOUSLY bad for Smash because the casual audience wants to watch and do not care to seek out resources. There is a decent amount of guides for Ricals right now, but the most popular creators have basically been conditioned to make stream highlights. It will get better. A lot of Rivals specific creators are improving here, but yea. Smash has a massive guide problem.
Also Smash has a casual audience, platform fighters definitely do not (imo). Rivals is a niche game with a pretty niche audience at the moment. Probably most comparable to like the Project M crowd
Ironically, the reason I often gave up trying to get better at smash was the lack of accessible and understandable guides on the basics. I could tell that my movement was slow and imprecise compared to competitive players, but I could never tell what they were actually doing, so I didn't know what to fix, and never really found any guides that didn't themselves use way too much unknown terminology. It reminds me of learning programming, where everyone uses jargon to explain jargon and it's all a long chain of frustration lol
this isn't really true can you name any smash game that doesn't have hours and hours of guides, plus practice resources, plus smashboards threads on how to get better? just look up "character - guide" for any character in ultimate, and you're likely to find something, and even in melee there's guides even for the most obscure characters (especially if you're willing to go on smashboards). this is somfething that someone who doesn't really ry to learn anything in the smash scene would say anyone who has actually gotten into smash through online resources can tell you there's a wealth
@@Tomoka51 which smash game were you playing? in melee the movement mechanics canbe found explained in many tutorials, and specific uses are found in vod analyses . in ultimate (and in general in the newer games) the movement mechanics are really not "basic", they're very little return at the beginning, but even then you should be pretty easily able to find resources about things like pivot, dash dancing, rar, and even wavebouncing
there's literally no info on what tech is in the game on the dragdown rivals ii wiki in contrast, why can i look at dustloop and see recommended combos and uses for moves
Smash Bros common knowledge fights against the community here for sure. Smash is so ubiquidous that a lot of people are gonna assume that the basics are already known.
I’m sure you’ve gotten many comments saying this but roa1 dose have a good tutorials and it has one for every specific character. Still roa2 needs one and needs less buttons.
They did make 101 guide videos for each of the characters on their official YT channel Don't know how useful they are though since they came out after I more or less figured out the basics during the betas
They're well made, but the one for my character, Orcane, talks about options for Tech chases and about DIs, so... I think they missed the mark a little bit on the 101 part. Someone that has never played a platform fighter before will probably come out of these videos knowing more about their character, but still with a LOT of questions.
Well they tell you what the character's moves do, which is already a step above what the game actually tells you. In what world does a FIGHTING game not tell you your moves? Are we back at the arcade where all the inputs are on the side of the cabinet all of a sudden?
@@RandomGuyCDN Not an excuse or a shield. Just some info because I don't see it mentioned often and I'm curios if they're even helpful for new players.
This platform fighter tutorial does exist, it's called "CunningKitsune's Guide to Ace Arwing Pilot Fox McCloud" and it was posted on gamefaqs 20 years ago. Also you have to transcribe everything in it for melee into rivals, except for what doesn't work, and it was only for Fox technically but it taught all the applicable stuff for every character, and also it was posted on gamefaqs 20 years ago so lmao. Anyways yeah people should make tutorials I agree.
Not Rivals related, but I wish there was a quick and digestible guide to play Vaseraga for GBFVR. The ones I find are 30+ minute in-depth guides, full ass multi page theses, or combo stuff that I suppose is cool but doesn’t cover anything else.
the dustloop starter guide is pretty quick and useful, you can probably get through it in a couple of minutes (especially if you only skim) it doesn't go into depth on combos or anything and it's pretty digestible and then if you want to get further, you can go into the in depth stuff
It is, but just like how a huge amount of SF players only have experience mashing punches and kicks with Honda or Chun. The majority of people probably only played some casual offline or only Smash with up to 8 players while not learning the competitive meta at all.
not everywhere i'm Pole and Smash Bros, and Nintendo consoles, were never a thing here. I've learned about Smash from English speaking internet; I've never saw even a mention of it in any local websites or gaming websites.
Skullgirls tried so hard, but what it fails to realize is that it doesn't really give players an active learning experience, whether that be through arcade mode or ways to practice/apply their skills in-game otherwise. It's really just wall of text, do a thing, wall of text, etc. I kinda like how Rocket League teaches the player. Basic controls and gameplan via a cool, controlled cinematic when first booting up the game, then you just learn by doing. If you want to learn anything else, you go to the training mode or look at community curated drills.
I personally think there is some room for improvement in tutorials. Games like Skullgirls and Uni tutorials are so comprehensive and so so completely useless. My best experience was with TFH that actually had useful explanations and drills for basic stuff.
to be honest, what could skullgirls have done? the "basic controls and gameplan" is basically covered in the tutorial, and making anything more specific would basically require having a completely unique tutorial just for character stuff
Tekken got away with it, but it was never just online versus and a cash shop and it is more intuitive to start than most fighting games I've ever played.
"What does the tongue do?"
Ayo Sajam you can't just ask that.
Freaky sajam
I appreciate Sajam turning the focus away from the devs who are trying their best to put out a product, and instead calling for the community to be more welcoming. Actual best take in this situation, and I'm hoping content creators will take him up on it.
Yes to the community being welcoming but I'm sorry, indie or not, putting tutorials on launch as a GOAL and not a core part of the game is such a bad move, especially when they had time to make sure their rotating cosmetics store and MTX were all set and ready to go day one.
There are already dozens of hours of accessible tutorial content on YT for Rivals 2, and a more-or-less complete Wiki (by Dragdown). The discord is also - sometimes - helpful for new players. These kinds of resources won't stop players from being turned off the game if they are true beginners, though.
Yeah the community working for free doing the work the devs didn't do is the way to go.
@@johndelanie3649 So genuinely curious, are you implying the devs are being greedy here and intentionally putting out a worse product in search of short term profit? Or, just maybe, the 25 person studio that had to crowdsource funds to even create the game needed to put out a product so they could get some return on investment so that they could continue developing the game? Also a reminder, this is the same studio that promised every post launch character added to the game would be free for everyone.
@@OjoRojo40 How is it working for free? Content creators, whose job is making content, can make content focused on beginners to encourage the game's growth while also making money?
I'm here to plug IzAw's Rivals 2 guide which covers the absolute basics, published under the channel ArtofRivals. Based on his work in Smash Ultimate, we can expect very good, progressively more advanced guides in the near future.
Thanks. This will be the first platform fighter I'm really getting into.
Ofischial has a channel that is dropping a lot of really useful information too. He comes from an esports coaching background so he knows how to teach stuff, the channel is great.
@@mattpritchard3137 YEAH
IzAw is a legend in platform fighters when it coes to making guides
Subbed even though I don't plan to play. I have wanted a better understanding of platform basics for a while.
I recommend "Art of Rivals 2 - Beginner" by the new youtube channel "Art of Rivals"
It's a 12 minutes video that goes over every basic mechanics of the game and some advanced stuff. But it's very easy to understand. He will make character specific guides in the future.
But now that you mention it... I've never encountered somebody coming from traditionnal fighting games trying to learn platform fighters. It was always the other way around.
Maybe it's because a lot of fighting game players don't consider platform fighters as "real" fighting games. And maybe as a consequence nobody wants to make content directed towards them.
Edit:
For people coming from Traditionnal Fighting Games trying to learn Platform Fighters with Rivals 2, there is an entire Super Smash Bros section in the Fighting Game Glossary that goes over all the terminology you'll need. And yes, it applies to other plaform fighters than Smash Bros.
best resource! helped me learn smash
I really hope sajam enjoys and learns rivals so plat fighter content has an educational space instead of just “which character can make the hyrule castle jump?”
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
Smash has a lot of educational content, it’s just not the most popular since so much of the viewership is casual players. IzAw is the biggest in the educational space and has one of the best resources for showing new players how the game works and is currently working with high top level players to make a ~20 min moderate depth guide on every one of the 80+ characters in the game. BananaBoy created a lot of easily digestible videos explaining more advanced concepts in simple terms and was getting great viewership until he stopped uploading 4 years ago. Poppt1 has a fantastic series on general guidelines for how to play the states of the game with top level examples but outside of those 8 videos, his channel isn’t really educational focused. Outside of those three (and the occasional top player video that is insightful), much of the channels that focus on educational content are under 20K subs. Ramses, Pink Fresh, Coach’s Corner, Silver, Vermanubis, You Suck at Neutral, etc. all have great guides for playing the game from a more general view. There’s a decent number of character specific content creators too like PoppinSwiss for Snake, Apolotion for Greninja, Lucretio for ROB, Ralts_1 for Peach, Ikechi for Ryu/Ken, Dakpo for Diddy Kong, etc.
It's easy to joke about how he needs a smash tutorial but he is literally right that it has no info as a new player. I don't even mean character personal stuff, just stuff like aiming for kills. Smash actually does have those tutorials. Then you can have tutorials that basically tell you up tilt is good and combo into Nair.
I recall a story my friend told me where he had the first Rivals for like a year before he learned that Shovel Knight can open up the shop mid-fight to change his moves or something. Shits wild.
This doesn’t just apply to platform fighters most beginner guides for fighting games more often then not don’t breakdown terms like ok, pressure, Kara cancels etc
When I was learning my first fighting game I kept getting frustrated because almost every guide wouldn’t actually explain those terms
@@Shuttergun1 quick shout out to the fighting game glossary (just type that into google). so useful for stuff like that.
@@goldskarrNow I could be wrong, but pretty sure that bit of info would have just been in the tutorial when he released and I'm pretty sure it was in his trailer. So that's on your friend at that point in this particular circumstance.
@@Megaman12Protoman14 I feel like having to either go through the tutorial multiple times each time a new character comes out or having to watch a trailer to know about a core mechanic isnt good
What you said about Rivals tutorials heavily referencing competitive smash was the same issue I ran into trying to get into Xrd in 2019. So many intro guides were from the perspective of teaching a Street Fighter character how Guilty Gear worked and this was my first attempt to learn a fighter competitively.
I hate that some people were saying Smash doesn't have a tutorial when every game in that franchise has an Attract Mode video that teaches you the basics of how to move, how to jump, learning different times of attacks as well as how to recover.
The difference is that Rivals expects you know the basics of Smash or have competitive Smash experience before diving into the mechanics of the game. That's why the game gives you so many options to tweak with the controls that it all can be intimidating for a new player to understand.
Ultimate added a whole proper special move list to its characters too, which is really important when they have so many unique attributes and mechanics as time progresses. Seeing the Rivals characters and all their traits make it vital to convey that information to everyone, from newcomers to vets alike, and I hope they update things soon
Man that attract mode tutorial back in Brawl opened my third eye to all the stuff I was missing as a kid (like all the defensive options. Fighting Tabuu was a struggle because I just thought one of his moves was basically unavoidable). I've tried using the tutorial vid of smash 4/ultimate to help kids understand the basics in a school setting, but most of them didn't grasps the concepts even still just from watching and complained about things as I tried to gently remind them of the options they have. I do wonder if a playable tutorial would have given the unfamiliar students a better chance from the starting line though.
Some of us are old enough to remember "Board The Platforms".
Smash Ultimate also shipped with a plethora of ways to play the game Solo, so you can easily get 10-20 hours of playing experience without ever touching pvp.
@@luxerhusku2609 Right? People are forgetting that Smash games even came with manuals for most of the games except for Ultimate (it was digital for the game before) and there was an official website for the series long before Discord was a thing.
I won't say Smash has the best platform fighting tutorials, but there are more ways to teach than displaying hitboxes and recording inputs even if I'd like those to be official.
Love a guide. Even guides for characters/games I don't play can help explain concepts in a different light that still ends up being useful.
Your Rivals experience was very much like my experience in 2XKO.
This thumbnail goes so crazy.
I played almost 600 hours of Rivals 1, was Master rank on about half the roster, and my literal first thought on starting Rivals 2 was "Where's the tutorials?". They added a bunch of new mechanics and changed the existing ones, so of course I want an explanation of how things work! When I tried to play Rivals 2 using the same skillset from Rivals 1, changes that I wasn't aware of kept popping up all over the place. I eventually learned most of what I wanted to know by looking around online/just trying stuff to see what worked in match but an in-game tutorial would have made it MUCH easier and less frustrating. It's especially galling because Rivals 1 had absolutely fantastic tutorials that took you through every step of the game, from the very basics to high-level tips. I had never played Melee competitively before so I learned to wavedash from the in-game tutorial!
It's really sad because rivals 1 had straight up the best tutorials out of any platform fighter, putting you in applicable scenarios that actually would come up in matches, dividing things into understandable sections (like beginner, intermediate and advanced movement), and having individual tutorials for every character.
Also, I think the vibe partially comes from the fact that the game has been having fairly easy to access betas for about a year, and much of the community of the first game (and other platform fighters) has been playing it for a year now
thats true, but rivals 1 also launched without tutorials, and added them over time
I feel like the big thing (and sajam mentioned this too) is that this game has a specific target audience when it was designed. Its for melee players. All the content reflects this, and to a melee player, they already know most of the things about it, only needing to learn about the characters themselves.
The fact 1 has such amazing tutorials and 2 doesn't is kind of crazy honestly. Like really? Helping teach new players is a Kickstarter goal and not a baseline part of the game? The steam link it offers doesn't even tell you that grabs are KI style combo breaker where you hit the same button, it's lacking explanations of core game mechanics.
@johndelanie3649 if rivals 1 didnt launch with a tutorial either then it makes perfect im not gonna lie to you
@@upcastplanet4808 No because if you're first game doesn't have tutorials on launch and you get feedback going "hey, this should have had tutorials on launch", when making the second game you should maybe listen to that. Plenty of time to design a MTX store with two currencies but not enough implement an onboarding system
I'm glad you're going to give the game another chance. I genuinely want to see you showcase the tutorial once they add it, because if it's anything like the first game's tutorial, it'll be a banger.
A series of videos on beginner plat fighter tips geared toward FG players would be cool. I've never made a video in my life but somebody should do it.
oh my god, you made THE video visualizing exactly how i've been feeling lately. I've been a casual Smash fan my ENTIRE LIFE and played a bit of rivals 1 casually, jumped into rivals 2 IMMEDIATELY on release to try to get in on the fun while the iron's hot and tons of new people would be playing, and just... I feel like I'm the ONLY ONE as 'bad' as I am even with like 20 years of casual experience with "this game" more or less. I've been busting my balls trying to learn as much as I can as fast as I can but the gap between me and the 2nd-worst player of the game feels almost insurmountable. I'm not giving up yet but yeah we definitely need like.... a staircase to climb for people who are anything less than S+++ tier at the game especially for new games that come out that are very similar to other games that have existed in the competitive sphere for a long time.
Same. Casually played smash with buddies back in the day, played a little Brawlhalla, jumped into this game and it’s been unbelievably frustrating.
I found guides on the basics of how to do things, but - to Sajam’s point - none of them explain what a basic game plan looks like. Giving me a bunch of tools in isolation from one another is helpful, but how do I play neutral? What 5 things should I focus on learning first? Like, cool that wavedashes exist, but I can’t turn around half the time without accidentally dashing instead.
Hoping content creators take this video as a cue to start making that stuff. Cut the fluff, don’t teach me everything, but instead distill all your knowledge down to a simple beginner game plan that can get me over the initial jump. Then those other videos will be useful when I’m looking to fill in my knowledge gaps.
i think one of the most unfortunate things about the lack of tutorial is new players have no idea what DI (directional influence) is, which would be like playing a fighting game without knowing you can hold a button to tech out of combos. rivals 1's tutorial would literally just kill you until you did it right
Not only that but DI doesnt seem to work exactly the same as smash ult. (i.e., optimal DI is just in general different angles, holding up/in to go to the corner vs holding in in smash)
@@flyinhigh7681thats how DI works in melee, Ultimate attempted to make it more intuitive to someone with little platform fighter experience. Rivals is made with melee players in mind so it uses that system instead
@@Protoplanetary ahhh. My lack of melee experience showing here... either way. Ive seen it wrongfoot those experienced with platform fighters, but just not melee (myself included, evidently)
@@flyinhigh7681 fair enough, its an intuitive system that is basically hidden in Melee. People know how to wavedash before they knew how to properly DI lol. Holding in makes more sense from a momentum perspective, but DI's real purpose is to change the launch angle and abuse the geometry of a square (being a further distance to the corners than the sides). You can also DI to mix up people trying to punish you but strictly survival DI is altering your angle to fly towards the furthest possible point of the blastzone from you. I think ultimately that's a better system, but it needs a tutorial in a game meant to be competitive, Melee's lifecycle and discovery process is an anomaly not an example to follow lmao
I really like rivels one and am excited to play more rivals but i do think a big reason that platform fighters struggle to take off is that everything is so geared around the bubble of melee (and to a lesser extent smash in general) and really unfriendly to players just do to how much background knowledge both the game itself and as you said the community around the game expect you to have. As someone who hadn't played fighting games at all until a few years ago and who still sucks at them i find most traditional foghter way easier to get into than platform fighters
This video is so fascinating to me because I feel the exact same way he does but for traditional fighters. Like I have absolutely zero clue how to even approach those, they feel insanely impossible.
Check out Core-A Gaming’s video “Why Button Mashing Doesn’t Work”, it’s a fantastic video that goes over universal fighting game concepts and mechanics!
I can attest to New Player Guides being Evergreen content. I recently got hooked on playing BBTag, and Diaphone's guides from years ago have helped me decide which chars to play and given a basic understanding of how the game works. Made starting out a lot less daunting.
Definitely a big learning moment for Dan and the team I think putting the tutorial behind a Kickstarter goal was absolutely not the right play, I would have been happy to wait a couple more months for the game so that the people who've never played platform fighters before would have a good onboarding process at launch. I feel like the way it is now lots of people are going to end up refunding the game or not really sticking with it since it's not easy to learn right now. It wouldn't be as big of a problem if like you mentioned there was good educational community content out there which there has not been for Rivals.
That's not really how it works. Game development isn't just time, it's also money. You need to pay developers. You might have been able to wait a few more months, but that doesn't mean the budget was. It's unfortunate, but sometimes game devs have to operate with limited resources and decide what to prioritize pre-launch.
@@krowmoonlightright, but that’s an issue on the devs part no?
Like the game has a super basic arcade mode, a decent training room, and online matchmaking.
It also has a buttload of “content” you either pay real life money for or grind nonstop to get.
Don’t get me wrong I love the game, but it’s basically an early access title with a fully fleshed out cash store but is lacking tutorials.
Reminds me of Halo infinite dropping without Slayer but a fully working storefront
I will say that there IS PLENTY of educational community content for this game, my feed is positively swamped with 'em!! 😅
@@riplix20 I disagree. If your devs have to get a full time job to put food on their table, and pay their bills, they aren't working on your game. At some point, as a studio, you'd HAVE to release something. Some games go into Early Access, but arguably that kills the momentum and the game flops because of it. Some games do Kickstarter, like this one did, but all options are ways to buy time and that's it.
@@riplix20 im not saying launching with no tutorials wasnt a mistake. im saying the op made it sound like they just should have pushed the release date back, and thats silly. it was more a problem with their priorities.
This is so real. Trying to figure out rivals as someone completely new to platform fighters is craaaaaaazy
Rivals 1 wouldn't be that bad since it actually has the resources. Rivals 2 is another story.
Honestly, watching Sajam and Diaphone try Rivals was so interesting. I've been playing smash as long as I have memories so a lot of plat fighter stuff is just common sense to me. Seeing how much simple stuff they didn't know was cool.
An important thing to note here is that while you had no idea what you were doing, you did better online than both me and my brother who have played platform fighters our entire life. The people playing rivals ranked are just pretty good on average I think.
I would love to see more of you learning rivals 2 personally, its very interesting to see how different two similarly inspired genres of games can be / feel.
No move list or explanation is wild
lmao we smash players are used to it.
@@Eval999smash has a move list for specials
@davey_rulez7301 not every game though, melee especially has very little tutorials
@@Eval999Smash had a manual for three games, a digital manual plus loading screen tips for the fourth then full moveset breakdowns and gameplans in Smash Ultimate in like a dozen languages. It must have thousands of tips.
@@thelastgogeta and brawl also had tutorial videos too. Its just 64 and melee that didnt have anything.
Tekken 7 was my first fighting game that wasn't a plat-fighter. The new-player experience was basically the same as Rivals 2 has right now. Actually, they didn't even have a link to a webpage with images of the controls; there was literally nothing. I watched a couple youtube videos that did explain most of that stuff, but needless to say, I didn't stick with that game very long.
A while later, I picked up GG Strive, and that game's built-in tutorial, at least at the time I bought it, was really really good. I ended up playing that game for hundreds of hours and was able to rank up to Floor 10 without watching a single video. I learned a couple combos from the dustloop wiki, but not even that many; the in-game resources were just that good.
Rivals 1 also had a really good tutorial, not quite at the level of Strive, but easily one of the best tutorials of a game I've played. I wouldn't recommend buying the game just for that, but most of the lessons from those tutorials are still relevant.
I do think it was a pretty big mistake to not release the game with tutorials. On-boarding new players is the #1 most important part of any online-focused game. You need players to keep an online mode healthy, and focusing only on the relatively small playerbase of a niche genre of games is not an ideal strategy for building a playerbase.
Do people remember Bafael? I think his guides were basically what Sajam is talking about, very basic gameplans that most people can actually use. I think it also helps that the games usually are less "lab heavy" nowadays in terms of the knowledge depth you need in order to use a character well. SFIV was basically a knowledge check since almost every option your opponent had, your response would be character specific.
@@Bober909 Bafael is working on his own cinematic platformer, isn't he?
He did some much great stuff for SF and also did a great job making me interested in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
Bro 6:22 is so real, like just seeing the reddit and the amount of person there that are anti tutorials and say exactly that.
Part of what I love about SF6 is just how much helpful content there is out there
seeing you talk about how awkward it was to learn to wavedash in roa2 after me and my friend spent like a full week talking about how we think it's too free really helped to put into perspective the level of sicko that melee/pm players are on lol. glad you are trying to learn a plat fighter I hope you stick with it. they are very very hard games but very rewarding.
There's never enough guides and there's always topics left to cover even in 20 year old games where seemingly everything has been figured out.
So newer games have way more than plenty of material, only disadvantage as a viewer is that game patches obsolete a bunch of guides which may discourage creators from creating more right away because it will likely happen again, notice most people make character tutorials to be the first ones and get those sweet views but often don't bother when the character gets changed too much , even if they make a new guide that new one will have way less views compared to the first one so they bother even less, i suspect this is particularly true with Strive, specially last patch.
Which also means that there's even more material for more guides but since fighting games are so ephemeral making guides at the end of it's life cycle it's not that attractive viewership wise either because most people move on to the next hot fighting game so future guides are made by specialists of that particular game for other specialists and because there's never enough of them there's always topics left to cover, at that point they are doing a service for the community rather than for views which requires a particular kind of player/content creator and if they make the guide it better not be exclusive to some discord server that can disappear at any moment, same with Twitter, for preservation and discovery sake UA-cam is better .
Did anyone tell him about crouch cancenling.
UA-cam is better than unindexed Discord servers, but UA-cam is not best. GameFAQs has guides from the 80s and 90s which can be easily searched for a specific term in text.
Text/HTML guides are a great medium.
There ARE people out there who come in cold and just value a good, completely new original thing that they know has a complicated, unfamiliar base to understand before they can really meaningfully engage with it. Bless them, there's about 10, and Sajam is one of them.
A lot of new people did learn +R when rollback hit ("a lot" in anime FGC terms I guess), and that was excellent and surprising, but it had other things going for it too (it was attached to a new currently popular IP, extremely cheap/easy to run, and perhaps most of all hit with great netcode at just the right time during COVID). It does also have excellent resources. Hopefully good resources become a thing for all fighters that are trying to grow, but on the old 2D anime side of things, the harder work is a necessity because they're trying to maintain a comparatively pretty small base. Displaced Smash players are in the millions.
Yeah this is a good ass problem to have.
Rivals 1 got somewhere because it had people pick it up and adore it competitively and spread it from there (before workshop came out).
Seeing the scope of Rivals 2 reach so far, where someone like Sajam and people with no platfighter experience are looking to play and learn, is amazing. I don’t think many people expected that, hence putting the “10 characters at launch” stretch goal before the “tutorials” goal.
The time will come when tutorials and everything will be in place though. I think we’ll do a good job with this one :)
Well said, hoping that you do consider playing it again even if there's some trouble learning it at first. It's been fun to watch.
"Someone is going to be trying to learn Guilty Gear Strive when season four comes out. And if you have guides from four years ago, they'll mostly be applicable to the game now."
Mostly true but not for every character lol
the channel ofischial has some pretty good new player tutorials imo, goes over the basics and also has some more videos on more advanced stuff as you learn the game
I honestly think one of the reasons there are so few good beginner guides for this game is just because people still see platform fighters as "the smash games and the smash clones". people just assume that the only people that'll play this game are people who already play smash so they don't think about someone coming in from outside
Im teaching my street fighter friends how to play RoA2. We have been playing SF for around 10 years together, and multiple of them said "yeah this isnt a party game" and are drowning in mechanics and movement.
The first thing i told them to do, was spend time in the lab learning your characters movement. The game is all about your ability to MOVE. The fighting comes second imo.
IZAW
Art of Rivals
Official online youtube tutorials for the game
great places to start. Now i see why everyone thinks diamond is impossible to get too. I hopped in this game, transferred all my RoA1 knowledge and my Dedede knowledge towards Loxodont and have been having an absolute blast. Reminds me of the first time i played PM.
Good luck everyone!
You would expect a board game to come with instructions, so why not a video game?
Manuals are a lost art
Well, in a board game it has rules you have to keep track of yourself. If you don't, you can't play the game. A video game keeps track of the rules for you, so you can mess around and figure things out in a training mode or just by playing. Not saying games shouldn't have a tutorial, but why your comparison doesn't really hold.
Back in my day, video games used to come with little booklets with fun art and instructions on how to play, sometimes little tips or hints to secrets!
@@johndelanie3649A PDF with some explanations would be an okay compromise since everyone is on Steam.
Because this video game is apart of the fgc genre there fore they're 20 years behind every other dev for some reason.
for the first rivals stream i remember feeling immediately validated that sajam was having a hard time picking the game up, not because of anything malicious but it did help a lot seeing someone i look up to in terms of play for 2d fighters having issues with something i had a lot of experience in and helps you realize that its always going to be hard to learn something new and if youre having issues in a fighting game you should feel down because youre not doing the cool shit right out the gate because its hard for some of the sickest players in the game to pick up something new!
sajam's ability to change shirts in milliseconds is really impressive
Platform fighters have always been notorious for having awful beginner experiences, even worse than old-school fighting games, in some cases. Most players would learn through word of mouth and experimentation, and that was it
Rivals of Aether was really the first game to include a tutorial, and it was... Overwhelming, for most new players. Every character had their own playable tutorial that would go extremely in-depth into most of their intricacies, and even then, some stuff got left out, because it was added later on.
They did release some "101" videos on UA-cam to briefly explain what characters do, but I agree, they need to try to streamline their tutorials. If you want some more immediate help, I, and many others in the community would love to teach you on a more personal basis
as a platfighter content creator myself i couldnt agree more, platfighter content generally is made through a monopolized perspective and its EXTREMELY frustrating
smash is to platfighters what doom was to fps games back in the 90s
Even as an experienced platform fighter I still wish there were tutorials. Like above the next fighter. How does di work in this game specifically? Other platform fighters dont have floor hugging, make a video exp explaining how it works, what the counter play is and why it is in there. Set up scenario's where you practice using them
Damn he hit us with the shirt change tech and thought we wouldn't notice
I wanted to enjoy this game and got my cousin who is a platform fighter enjoyer (basically only smash) to buy it to try. We played for an hour or so, tried every character, had no idea what our moves were doing. We got so frustrated that our characters passed through each other when trying to approach with buttons and nothing was explained that he just refunded it. We tried rushdown revolt to wash the taste out and it was sick and made sense.
Speaking of, those 2xko videos were invaluable for me, thanks for that!!
i never really played tag fighters before but i got hooked by the 2xko alpha (greatly assisted by your beginner guides). and then i went to bbtag to try to satisfy my 2xko cravings and i have been getting ground into paste every night. it took me 3 solid evenings of getting perfected over and over before i got my first win and i'm pretty sure that was a fluke. i haven't been able to find nearly the same level of introductory content for bbtag, sadly.
TAG has a troubled history, but yeah, getting into an older game without as many new players is tough. I had the same experience learning Central Fiction. You gotta be good at shifting your priority from winning to alternate goals, or you're gonna go crazy. When I stopped focusing so hard on winning and started focusing on antiairing, I was so much happier. Even if each antiair only felt like 1/2 or even 1/4 of the happiness I'd get from winning, it was a lot more net happiness per session.
BBTAG had the unfortunate fate of being so ridiculously overhated that the current version of the game has basically nobody with time, resources, or know-how to make accessible guides for it. Sucks cause it's a really cool but incredibly complicated game. Hope you manage to stick with it though, you might be able to find some stuff on dustloop depending on your team as a potential starting point.
Player onboarding and experimentation is never prioritized and that's a problem across the industry. You shouldn't need external resources to learn the games mechanics, it should be intuitive or have in game systems to help learn. UI design plays in here too.
You don't need to overwhelm the player with every detail, but it can still be done way better than most games do now - little to no onboarding or insight into how the game works.
It's wild that games as technically dense as UNICLR or P4AU somehow manage to have the best onboarding with their tutorials. In any other genre the game not teaching you how to play would be insane, but with fighting games, where it's arguably the most important, devs still don't understand how crucial a good tutorial system is.
@@johndelanie3649 Agreed. That + game readability is so important.
@@thepunisherxxx6804 Rivals really has neither, I had to read a reddit post to learn that grabs are KI style combo breakers and not a mash like smash bros, I should not have to dig that far outside of the game itself to learn something so fundamental.
I think a lot of people, a LOT of people will skip any tutorial that exists and have the same problems whether it's there or no. That said, SOME people would use it, and there's really no excuse to not have one. And calling out content creators who don't remember what it was like being new is honestly always justified.
The people skipping the tutorial were never gonna play your game for long anyways. But not having one loses you so much more players and then your just stuck with barely any players and all the sweats crying "I have no one to queue against anymore why why why"
@@RandomGuyCDN I don't think any part of what you said reflects reality. First, I expect that most people skip the tutorial. I don't; I always start with the tutorial. But if you watch Sajam's video on teaching deadlock, he mentions that it was pretty much everyone he tried to teach who skipped the tutorial, didn't play against bots, and just jumped into quick play and got bodied for their first several games. This is typical across most genres, in my experience. It's why everyone wants single-player, becaue singleplayer can be tuned with the inexperienced and uninformed player in mind.
Second, having or not having a tutorial is really, really not what's going to determine the long-term success of a game. It has an influence, certainly, but pointing to it as **the** reason why a small game might founder is ridiculous.
When I searched “Platform Fighter Basics” on UA-cam, I got a playlist of videos on how to MAKE a platform fighter. It’s not just a Rivals thing as much as it is a platform fighter thing. They’re still in their 3rd Strike, figure it all out on your own era or something idek. I think Rivals is 100x more intuitive than Melee, and they can still capitalize on this. The game feels so great, and the tutorial thing just feels like a bonus. I’m so surprised there is 0 content on the basics of the genre. It’s insane.
@@bladegrape7248 I think the main problem there is that people are still using the term "Smash Clone" and algorithm isn't as tuned to sharing content about platform fighters unless you are a developer or looking for comparisons.
"3D fighting game basics" returns similar results. You need to get specific and mention games like Slap City, Rushdown Revolt or NASB1/2.
As someone experienced with Smash Bros, a lot of the character-specific stuff and things unique to Rivals 2 feel completely obscure in their function and applications. Some characters have elements that are fairly easy to understand, like Wrastor not only having multiple mid-air jumps but also aerial smash attacks, which are obviously useful in a platform fighter, but then there's stuff like his slipstream line-thing or Ranno's bubble, or even just things like the rules that govern recovery options and what can be done out of what state (like walljumping out of 'helpless' state after doing a special move and extending your recovery in that way). Even if you know how to generally move around and hit the opponent into the blastzone, you still end up feeling like you're just hopelessly flailing around because there's so many unknowns all around you.
Learning a new genre is learning the basic strategies and skills to improve as well as common control schemes. Learning a new game is finding out all the minute ways this game is so different from another one even in the same series sometimes.
bunch of melee like plat fighters have come out and the first thing content creators do is try to get melee players to play, since they’re known for being passionate and very intimate with the systems (and also picky about what games they like). they’ll make good tutorials at some point but also a lot of them used to be melee players and want their friends to play rivals too
I was in the exact same predicament. Tried playing for a while, had fun but every match felt like a knowledge check in a language I’d never heard before
Ya I am new to not only plat fighters but fighters in general - rivals 2 is my only one now with about ~25 hours into the game.
I constantly feel totally clueless about what to do in both a macro and micro sense, how to play against all the various matchups. I'm in the lowest rank and still everyone else seems to know so much more than me, edgegaurding me and punishing/comboing me every time they land a hit, punishing me for every mistake I make and they're constantly all over me. This combined with how fast the game is makes it incredibly hard to make any headway at first.
Part of it may be the playerbase of course - I suspect theres an overrepresentation of experienced plat fighter players and less casual players than most games seeing as rivals would have attracted a lot of melee etc players. And to be fair, I'm choosing to queue ranked even though I'm clueless, but none of this was a "complaint" in the first place.
a lot of the lack of content with rivals stems the the fact that since rivals emulates so much of smash, smash tutorials that have been around for decades will work in terms of learning fundamentals. melee players who have never played rivals 2 before were able to still wavedash, same way a quarter circle input works in every fighting game.
its regrettable that they didnt launch with tutorials but it's both good and bad that they had almost a decade of rivals 1 and smash stuff to help tide people over
good video, agree with basically everything said, this is valuable info for the community
2:29 What that tongue do
Scouting the talent as usual
Pretty interesting considering all I see on yt is stuff for absolute beginners that walks through how to do the basics, which I don't actually need.
I suspect there is algorithm at play.
if you or anyone else wants good RoA 2 info to look at while the evergreen stuff is being made you could look into melee guides, some of the characters are almost direct translations and the engine/meta are similar enough to learn alot
Theres definitely not a ton of beginners guides for platform fighters in general but i think you also just had unfortunate timing because i had multiple beginners guides (recommend vids from Badmouthblooper and Bowler) popping up right after watching you stream the game
Also asking what zetterburn fire does as the first example of a question to be answered by a movelist is so funny because “what does the fire do” is a huge meme in the community.
I knew launching with a tutorial would be a huge mistake. Rivals 1 has a great tutorial, one of the best ive ever comeacross for any game. They should have delayed and at least just copied over some of the basic basic tutorials from 1. Hell, if you want to learn 2 and need a tutorial, playing one wouldnt be bad at all, cost excluded.
It was such a good tutorial it made me better at other platformer fighters, it explained some many concepts so well.
I love shmovement plat fighters and hope you still enjoy and play the game! :)
Rivals 2 has really made me appreciate what is in NASB2. I’m really enjoying rivals but the extra content goes a long way imo. Tutorials, game modes, skins in the game at frame one, nostalgia, a lot more voice acting
I have personally made several fighting game enjoyers out of nonbelievers thanks to the tireless work that went into Airdash Academy. The resources must be designed not for those who come after us on the same path but those who begin where we are.
I wish there was more resources for bridging the gap from absolute beginner to intermediate. I've been off and on trying to learn fighting games over the years so I always feel like once I get a really basic grasp of the game and my char, I struggle to start applying the deeper concepts I "know" in real situations.
I feel like most competitive games have a gap in resources there, so you end up with a lot of beginner focused vids that may or may not be helpful and require sifting through to find something new to you, or very advanced videos / guides that aren't helpful unless you are just as advanced and have a strong enough foundation to engage with the topic.
I really feel the pain here. It’s tough being a rivals 1 players and seeing that a lot of sajam’s gripes were addressed. Rivals 1 has extensive tutorials and does a great job of teaching players all of the mechanics, whether system, character or otherwise. Hopefully Dan and his team get those resources in rivals 2 to the same quality
It's already too late. dont have those things on launch you've already lost the casuals that already refunded the game or made up their mind from word of mouth.
@ hard disagree, i picked up rivals on a steam sale 1 year after release. Games are not concerts, you don’t buy a ticket for a day, you buy something that can be experienced for a long time and adding these resources will ALWAYS be net positive
The first Rivals has a great tutorial.
welcome to how i felt playing sf4 for the first time after only playing melee LOLLL
I really enjoy learning fighting games while you're learning about them, but now that I'm seeing how it looks when I'm the more experienced player in this genre, I'm confused where to start.
Idk what all to say is a good starting point. I could say practice wavedashing but it's specific to platform fighters and while the timing is made way easier in Rivals 2 it's an odd skill compared to how other games use wavedashing. It's also could be harder if you use "up" to jump because the jump button is the usual method to wavedash.
Or just get used to dash dancing, an easier skill but more limited. Get used to the length of your character's dash because it determines when you can act out of it with certain moves.
These are just about movement, which is the most important and I'm not even talking about any attacks yet. Which another layer of difficulty is idk how long it would take to even get comfortable with movement.
I could honestly write an essay on your first experience with Rivals (as if I haven't already) but I hope you find something that can help explain it in a way that makes sense
All in all, I love how you approach new games and I try to emulate that attitude when I'm trying something new.
I'm a perpetual beginner in fighting games, and lean hard on tutorials and educational content because I dont have a ton of time for trial and error.
That said, I enjoyed the first Rivals game and want to try the second
A lot of rivals 2 content has felt very biased to onboarding Ult and Melee players and I get why. This is a very ambitious platform fighter with a lot of cool ideas and it would be a huge loss to genre if it flopped and became irrelevant. If big smash players with their already existing audiences and hype jump on, we can avoid that. It makes sense. But like you said, it sort of has everyone who doesn’t exist in that sphere feel left out. Like, people are already under rhe assumption that beginners dont exist, its just intermediate players who dont know how rivals 2 specifically works, but know how to move around a platform fighter. The thing that I think truly sucks about this is that a lot of rivals characters are not hard to explain. A lot of the characters have very centralizing features that their entire kit revolves around and characters can become intuitive simply by explaining those features. For example Zetter’s fire does DoT and amps his strong attacks. Just by knowing that you know he’s an offensive character who puts on damage fast and has ways to close stocks better than anyone else. A little goes a really long way with this cast.
I was really waiting for rivals 2 to jump into a good platform fighter with rollback... But I dropped it immediately when I was trying to learn it without tutorials and had to be researching for online reaources just to know how to move or what control schemes can be more useful. Its just too much of a wall to climb for a new player even if i have a shit ton of FG experience.
I hope when these resources or part of it is in the game jumping into it is more useful, and that some noobs still remain for me to learn
I am relieved to see this. I bought Rivals 2 to try out a platform fighter and the game just seems hostile to new players. I'm approaching the refund cutoff and have been waffling on refunding or keeping it. I'm glad it isn't just me having this problem but at the same time I'm dismayed that other people are. The game looks really cool, just as it is I can't really get into it because I have no clue what is going on.
I agree with the people plugging IzAw, and there's also the Rivals Discord server, wiki's, and the first game's tutorials
Even as a long time melee player I felt that the lack of content hurt a lot for what characters were doing and how to face them. I look up stuff like “what does each character do” (yes I know the guide sheets are there) and there’s not much
I think part of the problem is that a good portion of the plat fighter community simply doesn't care about educational content. There hasn't been good guides because there was no demand for it. When you combine that with very little support from devs, it makes sense why the content side of smash tends to revolve around entertainment and streaming, instead of competition.
Yeah, I definitely had this issue too. I can know "Directional influence" is a thing but nothing in the game shows you when or how DI works (its specifically during Hitstun and not when you're actually being knocked back). There's also stuff like Clairen's Special grab or Wrastor's side special where the effects or advantages of them arent obvious.
ITS ONLY DURING HITSTUN? I've played smash casually for so long and knew it existed but I literally thought it worked like drifting during a jump holy shit
@@Tomoka51There are actually multiple types of DI. Smash DI is a common one which is during hitstun to shift your character and regular DI is what you are probably thinking of from most of the games.
@@thelastgogeta okay that does make a bit more sense. I didn't know about the other kind but glad I'm not crazy lol
@@Tomoka51 no, regular DI still only matters when you get hit
in rivals one there was drift DI, which applied during being launched (when you were still in a combo) but in rivals 2 there is only nomral DI, which you can't affect while you're being launched
Lots of good ideas here, appreciate this vid a lot.
No tutorial is one thing but no move list is insane!!! 😂
As a person who was born on the internet, I just searched on youtube how to play.
"It has a casual audience so I thought beginner guides would be really popular"
Oh, he doesn't know...
The casual Smash/Platform fighter audience hates guides. They mostly spectate and have no interest in trying to get better. Educational content is FAMOUSLY bad for Smash because the casual audience wants to watch and do not care to seek out resources. There is a decent amount of guides for Ricals right now, but the most popular creators have basically been conditioned to make stream highlights. It will get better. A lot of Rivals specific creators are improving here, but yea. Smash has a massive guide problem.
Also Smash has a casual audience, platform fighters definitely do not (imo). Rivals is a niche game with a pretty niche audience at the moment. Probably most comparable to like the Project M crowd
There was literally a thread on Twitter about this with how most Smash related videos are "slop" instead of guides or instresting stuff.
Ironically, the reason I often gave up trying to get better at smash was the lack of accessible and understandable guides on the basics. I could tell that my movement was slow and imprecise compared to competitive players, but I could never tell what they were actually doing, so I didn't know what to fix, and never really found any guides that didn't themselves use way too much unknown terminology. It reminds me of learning programming, where everyone uses jargon to explain jargon and it's all a long chain of frustration lol
this isn't really true
can you name any smash game that doesn't have hours and hours of guides, plus practice resources, plus smashboards threads on how to get better?
just look up "character - guide" for any character in ultimate, and you're likely to find something, and even in melee there's guides even for the most obscure characters (especially if you're willing to go on smashboards).
this is somfething that someone who doesn't really ry to learn anything in the smash scene would say
anyone who has actually gotten into smash through online resources can tell you there's a wealth
@@Tomoka51 which smash game were you playing? in melee the movement mechanics canbe found explained in many tutorials, and specific uses are found in vod analyses . in ultimate (and in general in the newer games) the movement mechanics are really not "basic", they're very little return at the beginning, but even then you should be pretty easily able to find resources about things like pivot, dash dancing, rar, and even wavebouncing
Can't agree with all of this more.
there's literally no info on what tech is in the game on the dragdown rivals ii wiki
in contrast, why can i look at dustloop and see recommended combos and uses for moves
If Rivals had tutorials I'd be all over it. It's simply too difficult for someone without any platformer or fighting game experience to jump into
Smash Bros common knowledge fights against the community here for sure. Smash is so ubiquidous that a lot of people are gonna assume that the basics are already known.
I’m sure you’ve gotten many comments saying this but roa1 dose have a good tutorials and it has one for every specific character. Still roa2 needs one and needs less buttons.
Goes to show what info people (me in this case) take for granted is widely known.
They did make 101 guide videos for each of the characters on their official YT channel
Don't know how useful they are though since they came out after I more or less figured out the basics during the betas
They're well made, but the one for my character, Orcane, talks about options for Tech chases and about DIs, so... I think they missed the mark a little bit on the 101 part. Someone that has never played a platform fighter before will probably come out of these videos knowing more about their character, but still with a LOT of questions.
Well they tell you what the character's moves do, which is already a step above what the game actually tells you. In what world does a FIGHTING game not tell you your moves? Are we back at the arcade where all the inputs are on the side of the cabinet all of a sudden?
outside material should not be needed to learn the basis of your game.
@@RandomGuyCDN Not an excuse or a shield. Just some info because I don't see it mentioned often and I'm curios if they're even helpful for new players.
This platform fighter tutorial does exist, it's called "CunningKitsune's Guide to Ace Arwing Pilot Fox McCloud" and it was posted on gamefaqs 20 years ago. Also you have to transcribe everything in it for melee into rivals, except for what doesn't work, and it was only for Fox technically but it taught all the applicable stuff for every character, and also it was posted on gamefaqs 20 years ago so lmao. Anyways yeah people should make tutorials I agree.
Common GameFAQs W but the game should have picked up the slack.
Not Rivals related, but I wish there was a quick and digestible guide to play Vaseraga for GBFVR. The ones I find are 30+ minute in-depth guides, full ass multi page theses, or combo stuff that I suppose is cool but doesn’t cover anything else.
the dustloop starter guide is pretty quick and useful, you can probably get through it in a couple of minutes (especially if you only skim)
it doesn't go into depth on combos or anything and it's pretty digestible
and then if you want to get further, you can go into the in depth stuff
Smash Bros is like a cultural icon, it’s so weird hearing someone say they don’t have experience with it. But of course it makes sense.
It is, but just like how a huge amount of SF players only have experience mashing punches and kicks with Honda or Chun. The majority of people probably only played some casual offline or only Smash with up to 8 players while not learning the competitive meta at all.
not everywhere
i'm Pole and Smash Bros, and Nintendo consoles, were never a thing here.
I've learned about Smash from English speaking internet; I've never saw even a mention of it in any local websites or gaming websites.
Skullgirls tried so hard, but what it fails to realize is that it doesn't really give players an active learning experience, whether that be through arcade mode or ways to practice/apply their skills in-game otherwise. It's really just wall of text, do a thing, wall of text, etc.
I kinda like how Rocket League teaches the player. Basic controls and gameplan via a cool, controlled cinematic when first booting up the game, then you just learn by doing. If you want to learn anything else, you go to the training mode or look at community curated drills.
I had been playing skullgirls for years by the time I finished the tutorial, execution shouldn't have been a barrier to the higher concepts
I personally think there is some room for improvement in tutorials. Games like Skullgirls and Uni tutorials are so comprehensive and so so completely useless. My best experience was with TFH that actually had useful explanations and drills for basic stuff.
to be honest, what could skullgirls have done?
the "basic controls and gameplan" is basically covered in the tutorial, and making anything more specific would basically require having a completely unique tutorial just for character stuff
*Looks at Tekken… every single Tekken.*
Tekken got away with it, but it was never just online versus and a cash shop and it is more intuitive to start than most fighting games I've ever played.
Most expensive option is getting Rivals 1 JUST for the tutorials, then migrate back to Rivals 2.
Rivals 1 had an absolutely fantastic tutorial, sad they didn't finish it for the launch of 2
because it was a "kickstarter stretch goal" devs be out of touch in 2024 is actually insane at this point.
wow didn't know sajam was a stand user, king crimson was going overtime in this vid 🤣
I always check sajam for how to learn.
Very interesting video, but have you noticed Jam's shirt changed twice
that's crazy, rivals 1 has a great tutorial
Everyone asks what the tongue doing but no one asks how the tongue doing