It’s worth noting to that an attempt at this kind of thing actually did appear in a shooter once (Unreal Tournament 2003) and then was discarded in later versions of the game. FWIW I liked the feature at the time.

I would imagine it would have something to do with amount of challenge and forethought required by the first-person shooter space and the fighter space, as well as making sure that players are mentally engaged and challenged by the game. The FPS has enough going on in the environment to keep the player engaged, while the fighter isn’t really so complicated, so it has to add in some difficulty to make things interesting. (This is assuming that players enjoy having to consider a bunch of variables at once and like being challenged.)

In an FPS, the player has to be thinking a lot. The space is complicated, three-dimensional, and full of things that make it challenging to pull off actions. In your example, you mention a bunch of the things that the player has to keep in mind while playing: the position of their character in 3D space, the direction their character’s gaze in the 3D space, their character and team attributes (score, health, armour, ammo), and all the stuff in the environment (distance of enemies, number of enemies, barrels, walls, etc.). and plan their actions (bank the grenade off the wall to hit the barrels). The challenge of pulling off an action in the FPS is in the world: planning to use a grenade, what wall to bank it off of, etc.

In the 2D world of “Street Fighter”, the space isn’t as complicated. Players still have to deal with position, distance, and timing, but the space is 2D, and only two screens wide. Also, the results of player actions (punch, kick, jump, block) aren’t as complicated or as hard to predict as those in the FPS world. In order to keep players interested, the designers added in these hard-to-execute moves and combos. Now the player has to keep in mind their character’s special moves, as well as long strings of button presses. In the fighter, the challenge is less in the world and more in the player’s ability to memorize and execute moves.

Of course, it could also be the level of realism one expects of the game’s world. Long arbitrary sequences of button presses are okay when dealing with comic-book—like characters in a goofy arcade game, but they seem out of place in a more immersive simulation of the physical world (even if you happen to be carrying a rocket launcher in that world).

Maybe it’s because fighters originated in the merciless, quarter-hungry arcades (which wanted to encourage you to try again and again to master the game), while FPS games came from shareware computer games (which didn’t profit when you fucked up a move, only when you liked the game enough to purchase the full version).

In the fighter, the challenge is less in the world and more in the player’s ability to memorize and execute moves.

I don’t buy this at all. Maybe — maybe — in a button combo crazy game like Tekken, but not for Street Fighter. The moves are pretty much standard across the board, with only two to four special moves per character. The skill with Street Figher IV is not about memorizing every permutation of button presses and combos, but about mastering the few moves you do have. And more important to execution of those moves is timing. Half the game of SFIV, if you watch tournament videos, is psychological — knowing what the opponent is likely to do, psyching him/her out, countering. That’s all part of mastering the game: knowing what links to what, what move cancels what, etc.

Being able to pull off an ultra combo 100% of the time doesn’t mean you’re good at Street Fighter (doing it blindly will leave you wide open to counter attack), it just mean you are dexterous at input schemes. Being competitive at Street Fighter involves a lot more than that. So why sabotage that with an unnecessary layer of awkward controls?

As to your last point, PC FPS’ always had the benefit of having a 100+ key input at their disposal. Street Fighter only had 6!

I agree that Street Fighter is more about “execution and timing,” and would add “less about orientation in the simulated space.” In an FPS, the world is already pretty hard to play in, and that has a lot to do with working 1) in a 3D space (Descent vs. Doom) and 2) having a first-person view in that space (Doom vs. Smash TV). Again, assuming the designers want to maintain a certian level of cognitive engagement with the player, if the 2D space isn’t as hard to move around in, something else has to take up the slack. Street Fighter doesn’t require so much navigating, orienting, and camping, so it instead requires more careful timing, execution, and countering.

Which, uh, may have something to do with long combos—but I’m not sure I’m arguing that any more. They’re a way of making things harder to execute, so…

(What would be the opposite of long combos? Quick time events? You’d just approach the other fighter and, when their face flashed orange, smash on B to punch?)

Me, I’ve never been very good at fighting games, and I find memorizing combos a challenge. To me, learning moves is like learning to use an institutional phone system: a bunch of arbitrary button sequences that I can never remember when I needed them.

You’re right about the difference in controls too.

Good topic!

There’s plenty of strategy to consider in both FPS and 2D 1 on 1 fighters, it’s just that the complexity is weighed more in the world in one, and more on the character interface in the other.

As to the question “why to inputs have to be so complex?”, I got a couple of points, maybe.

One thing I think that’s missing in this discussion is that there’s something nice about the kinaesthetics of (some) fighting game moves – like nailing a solo on a guitar and being amazed at your fingers producing those notes without even thinking… but i think that’s more post rationalization on my part.

In a lot of cases, the special moves in SFIV are able to work alongside the more standard attacks, such that throwing a medium kick in half way through a gesture for a hadouken results in a combo. These were born of emergent mechanics/exploits in the earlier versions of sfii, and their natural progression into insanely in-depth, frame perfect combo requirements feed a reward-schedule for a player’s desterous mastery.

So, in world of warcraft, you grind for artificial skills, items and spells in parallel with other skinnerian treats. In streetfighter 4, you’re simultaneously grinding the strategic, psychological and tactical (i.e. accurate button mashing) reward structures.

While I agree, simplifying the controls to basically just 1-button wouldn’t necessarily damage the psych or strategic game play, there would be no tactical aspect left. I’m not saying it would necessarily be worse (you could toootally do a turn based street fighter!), but it would feel a lot dryer when there’s zero sense that you could use someone’s low-level fuck up to take the advantage.