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Rookie
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2K can use a more comprehensive practice mode
There are times where Ive seen moves done, where I wondered "how do you do that?" and there is nowhere in the game itself where it is explained. Or there are times where I say "I need to work on...." but there is no convenient way of actually practicing it.
I'm talking about something similar to how its done in many fighting games. Obviously all fighting game practice modes aren't the same, but ive seen a lot of great ideas in various games that 2K should try to replicate in their practice mode.
In those games, you pick a player and an opponent, then you get put in some arena where you can practice moves. In this mode, you can pull up a list of all the moves available to that character, along with the contexts necessary for the move. Not a generic listing of all possible moves in the game, but a list that is specific to the character you have selected. Along with having the list of a character's moveset, you can often watch a preview of a desired move being done, so you can see what it looks like when done correctly. Often, you can also select a move so that the required controller inputs are laid out on the screen, so while youre trying to practice the move, you always have the commands in front of you so you don't have to go back to the menu to look it up in case you forget. Even better is when the commands on the screen are interactive, so that as you try the move, the commands will change color or flash in some fashion, as to let you know where you are in the chain of commands, and should you fail you can see where you made your mistake.
A feature I have only seen in one series so far (to be fair I don't play fighting games nearly as much anymore) was in the UFC Undisputed series, where you could see all the moves available to your character in specific contexts on the ground. This allowed you to explore what all your options with a specific character were, when you were in certain positions. It even took things a step further where you could not only see what your move options were, but you could even see a preview of what the different success states looked like after doing a move. In that game, I believe the success states were "Success", "Blocked", and "Reversed". This allowed you to clearly see what happens when a move works, when a move is denied, or when a move is outright countered. 2K could really use a system like that in practice, for the situations where players are entangled and normal movements are restricted (Low post play, boxouts, crowded defense, double teams, etc).
The ability to have a modifiable practice opponent. For practice, opponents usually don't block anything and let you hit them, but you can often select to have the computer block everything, or have every hit register as some critical hit (like a counter hit of some sort). You can also tell the game to run an AI script, where you can either have the computer perform some basic action repeatedly, or run the full AI script of that character at some chosen difficulty level. This used to be how I practiced the timings for reversals, or just to see what the frame priorities were for certain moves so I could figure out the best moves to counter with. The full AI script was great for practicing against characters your weak against, so you would have infinite health bars and you could just keep fighting until you felt like you were getting the hang of how best to deal with that particular person. Or if you wanted to try out moves in a more gamelike scenario, you could mimic a real match against a character, while still focusing on some maneuver but not having to worry about win/loss conditions associated with a real match.
Lastly, most fighting games give you the ability to adjust practice settings, so you can focus on improving the context sensitive moves (finishing moves, special moves that require some meter be filled, etc). I would love to be able to select some settings on the fly, where I can have an offense or defense only low post practice, offense or defense only boxout practice, low post or approach from perimeter putback practice, and any other situationally specific maneuver.
I feel like I am forgetting something, but this is long enough so I will leave it here.
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01-09-2016, 10:09 PM
