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Depends on the game. Parrying in the opening moments of Witcher 2 is a fucking pain, because it consumes 1 bar of stamina, as does rolling dodge, and you only have 2 stamina at that point, which also takes forever to regenerate. If the enemy isn’t dead after 2 parries, you’re fucked for 20 or so seconds because you have no way to actively avoid damage other than running away
On the other hand, the parries in the Batman Arkham games and Shadow of Mordor feel great.
I JUST SAW AN ARTICLE 2 MINS AGO DAYING ITS THE BEST THING IN VIDYA GAMES
give me parry or give me death. If I can’t run around in my loincloth and boots with a parry tool and a stick and beat the game with timing alone I’d rather die.
parries your article
Lmao get rekt
shield bash author
Breaking: video game journalist who’s bad at video games offers objectively incorrect insight
People (especially fucking game journalists) need to figure out that not liking something doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad
I remember when people thought quick time events were cool.
There’s a lot to be said about the aging of game mechanics and the efficacy of their continued use.
Yeah, and it’s right now. Reread the second line of my comment
I haven’t played it in a while (due to performance issues,) but I remember parrying in Deadlock being really satisfying. The timing was so generous, and led to mind games, fakeouts, mixups and all kinds of shenanigans about when you parry, bait parry, hold parry so the enemy doesn’t know if you’ll parry, training the enemy to expect when you’ll parry before changing when you parry. And because melee isn’t the only focus in combat, it made it a nice skill expression without being a win button.
I will take it one step further:
Timing is not the only skill that is fun and developers should acknowledge this.
The reason we talk about parrying this way is it’s everywhere now and people have decided it’s what’s needed to make turn based games compelling, but it isn’t.
The reason they think that is that people have decided that timing a thing is the only exploit-free, skill-driven action you can have at the core of gameplay.
But it isn’t.
I find it a bit lazy to default to this approach on everything and it’s certainly on everything. Timing is a big part of gaming, particularly in real time action stuff, but there are other tools in the toolbox.
Here’s an observation: the reason people keep trying to make metroidvanias and being worse than SotN and its handheld sequels is that modern designers can’t get over adapting Soulslike combat where the Igavanias were more concerned with giving you a ton of options. Timing is there, but there’s a ridiculous amount of self-expression through tool selection. You can go for a tanky build, you can break DPS and movement a hundred different ways. Getting good at those games makes them look like a broken mess, but it’s self-expressive and fun.
Timing a marker to a yellow bar in Clair Obscur or trying to guess when the ridiculous fifteen second windup animation of an enemy is going to trigger a five frame active window is not self-expressive and fun. It’s a QTE.
Clair Obscur’s combat has other issues with balance beyond that, and you can certainly spec to trivialize the parry even without changing the difficulty level, but the annoying part is the focus everybody puts on the timing minigame versus the actual (pretty solid) turn based game design running underneath.
I really prefer dodging to parrying or blocking, so I don’t like it when a game is set up so that parrying is necessary or overly rewarded in a way that makes the fights much longer or more difficult if you choose to not play that way.
I dont understand why some people think every video game should be catered to their playstyle preferences. It’s ok to not like every single video game. It’s ok if some people like video games that you dont like. Just play what you like and ignore the rest. It’s so easy.
I think with parrying specifically, it’s frustrating to see it become a crutch for games to add combat depth, or pop up as the central mechanic everywhere at the expense of exploring new combat ideas.
Dishonored is obviously not a bad example of parrying, so I’ll give a bad one I just encountered recently: Slitterhead. The game has plenty of cool combat mechanics, but it repeatedly puts you in scenarios where parrying becomes either your only option or your quickest road to victory, which trivializes the rest of its cool combat ideas.
I think games like Ninja Gaiden II or Bayonetta perfectly handled parrying: it’s a tool that unlocks combat depth, but not the only one, and combat is still fun without it. Not to say anything is wrong with a game like Sekiro, but to see games blindly copy this design philosophy is disappointing.
It gets frustrating when the thing you don’t like is a very common feature though, and it’s valid to complain.
I agree games often come with features that are worthy of complaint. I really don’t think the parry feature that this author speaks on is one of them though. At least not in their given examples. I’ll admit I have not yet played Clair Obscur, but the other example given was of Dishonored, a game the author claims is beloved to them. I’ve played Dishonored 1 and 2 several times over. It is an extremely re-playable series because it offers players a multitude of ways to go about each mission. The parry feature of that game is in no way necessary for many play styles. Forgetting the fact that you can play through the game as a pacifist, parrying isn’t even necessary if you wanted to charge every enemy head on as a blood-thirsty maniac.
The author talks about i-frames and hitboxes as if those concepts can’t enter into a conversation with casual gamers. Its ok, if you want to play a game that doesn’t require a lot of thought when it comes to those two things, but there are tons of games that fit that bill. Even ones that have parry mechanics like Batman and Spiderman games. It’s the equivalent of saying that double jumping is a bad mechanic because its not physically possible in real life, so it doesn’t belong in video games… Oh wait the same author said that too! Under a picture of Elden Ring of all games!
tldr; The author specifically complains about 100% optional mechanics that in no way affect one’s ability to play the game otherwise.
Nah gamers are
They lost me during the bit about “Do you want to have to not just learn about but care about ticky-tacky coder stuff when you are just a person trying to play a video game?”
In fighting games for example, frame data is essential for learning the game. It’s like knowing what the pieces do in chess. They just want to move the horsey around and not worry about all these pesky mechanics. Not all games need to be like that, but it’s absolutely appropriate in certain genres.
Parries we’re awesome in Sekiro because the entire game was built around them. The parry window was wide and the whole game was built to be a sort of rhythm combat game. It’s important to note that the parry wasn’t the only tool you were supposed to use. You had to react with Mikiri counters and jumps as well. The whole game came together to make the incredible duels that feel like a dance.
If they wanted to say that developers saw Sekiro’s popularity and started shoving parries in where they don’t belong then I could see that argument. There’s some nuance there that this blanket statement of parries bad misses though.
I call bullshit on fighting games and frame data.
I remember ages ago when SF4 happened I was friends with a pretty solid tournament competitor and talking about this he mentioned that frame counting is for nerds because the only thing you need to know is if you can push a button or not and that happens from intuition, which is true. At least it’s true in a good game that has good animation. I’ve always had a kick of beating sweaties with their “this is minus three” obsession by having solid fundamentals. Some of them got pretty annoyed.
And to this day I will claim that Dragon Ball FighterZ is the best fighting game of the last decade specifically because a) every basic combo route is built out of repeatable, simplistic, easy to remember chunks, and b) you can mash the CRAP out of 90% of that game’s links and they work perfectly fine unless you’re trying to do a rejump or time an assist extension.
I will die on this hill, except I won’t because I’m right. I will survive on this hill. Make a little cottage on it and play fighting games inside it.
That hasn’t been my experience at all. Knowing the difference between what’s plus, what’s minus, and what’s block punishable is super important. Knowing if I can set up a frame trap is huge, and it works specifically because it isn’t always intuitive. In Tekken especially you need to know your frames for block punishes, when you can sidestep, and what options your opponent has in a given situation.
It’s not always mandatory, but it’s always useful.
It is super important, but it’s not a timing problem, it’s a knowledge check.
The thing you want to know is whether you can buffer a button during your recovery and get it off before the other guy. If you can, the timing is often very loose, you mash on that thing and you probably get your punish out frame 1.
And if the game is good you don’t learn it by spending a ton of time with a wiki or even with the training mode, you learn it by playing the game and looking at the animations.
If you are a bad game, like the first few Tekkens (yeah, I said it), then you won’t get that from the animation, but you can still learn it by trial and error. And crucially, once you learn it it’s always the same. In most decent games with consistent base mechanics, anyway.
So no, you shouldn’t have to learn whether your jab is four or five frames. That’s how the game is put together, but it should be good enough at communicating how fast your button came out that you can intuit when it’s safe or effective to put it out after blocking. At least after you try it once.
There are a ton of fighting games that are still grandfathered into the notion of putting complexity in this part of the design. You know, the ones where your fastest attack is different per character so you need to know this particular guy’s fastest opener is a crouching medium kick, but only when you’re close enough or whatever. I’d argue those games are less elegant without adding anything to the skill ceiling when compared to newer games like my previous DBFZ example, where everybody’s jab is probably the same speed and the basic flowchart of what to do after you block an attack doesn’t require a textbook and complementary materials.
Why the two opposite articles?
Stirring up drama and discussion = clicks = money
I can absolutely understand it, not everyone has the time to invest hours into learning attack patterns or parry rhythms.
It is very normal that people only have a few hours a month for gaming, a hour here a hour there, with maybe days in-between.
After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it’s the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don’t like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he’s talking about fencing.
There’s so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don’t get the contact feel of your opponent, you can’t physically feel what your opponent will do. You can’t really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can’t choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to “one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking”.
So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it’s a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there’s certainly huge underexplored territory on “offensive” actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn’t mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it’s still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that’s a level of player and dev effort/investment that’s rarely on the table.
There are games like Half Sword, Hellish Quart and Blade Symphony (and maybe to an extent Exanima) that are built around “realistic”/physica-based sword/melee combat (idk about Half Sword as that’s basically QWOP Knights, but there can still be plenty of skill involved).
While it’s become long in the tooth and populated now by only the super try-hards, check out Mordhau. Blocks, ripostes, parries, chambers; all attack angle swings and stabs. Really the best that it’s been done, by far.
For Honor has, to this day, the best melee combat I have ever experienced in any game. The biggest problem that game has is that it’s a fighting game in medieval disguise, if it was more adventure/rpg, I’d bet people would be all over it. I do like the fighting game part of it though, but fighting games are ROUGH to get into, sweatiest player base around.
Tried half sword?
Games that have a good Merle combat system might be something for you. I would think of mordhau, which has a quite complex and challenging fighting system. However, its quite hard to get into it, since its almost dead.
I haven’t played Mordhau but based on what I’ve seen of gameplay it has a different issue I have with first person melee, which is that you have no perception of reach. If you can’t identify how far you or your opponents can attack then the gameplay turns into sticking your face in your opponents face and I find that pretty annoying. I guess I’m kinda picky about my melee combat.
You can learn to judge reach in Mordhau, though what you’re describing is a fundamental problem in video games. Unfortunately, like Chivalry before it, Mordhau devolved into ultra-high skill cap animation manipulation. Still, it has the best, highest fidelity melee combat ever, making games like for honor look and feel like trash. It’s almost impossible to enjoy any other melee combat games/RPGs after experiencing Mordhau.
Third Strike parry is peak gaming. I also enjoy Street Fighter 6 parry. However, my brain feels real good landing them in Third Strike
