Fighting games, please let me acknowledge when opponents do something cool

30 August 2024 • Andy Corrigan

I know as well as anyone that losing in fighting games can absolutely suck, especially when your own mistakes cause your downfall. You can get so caught up in your performance that it’s easy to forget there’s someone else on the other end trying their hardest to best you, and they deserve credit too.

And, as much as we all hate to admit it, sometimes people will just be better than you. They’ll make the right reads, condition and mix you up so well that you’ll never guess correctly, and land a cash-out combo so slick and intricate that you hadn’t even considered it possible.

And in these moments, you can only hold your hands up and say 'wow, well fucking played'…

… and I wish modern fighting games had a way to do that during a match.

Some might argue that the experience of Street Fighter 6’s Battle Hub, Tekken’s Fight Lounge, and countless ArcSys lobbies offer ways to pay that respect to each other. All those interactions happen post-game, though, and messages can get lost in the noise of hundreds of others. Lobby text chat lacks immediacy and, honestly, how many times have you seen these interactions posted on ScrubQuotes?

This is great. I hope we keep this. This isn't what I mean, though.

Post-match, Street Fighter 6 at least has an option to give your opponent a ‘like’ to flag a positive experience. Your opponent gets no notification, though; they can only see the total number of people that hit the button.

You know what, though? It’s something, given not many other fighting games offer anything like it.

For, me, I'd like to take that a step further. As Ryu often said way back in Street Fighter IV; "The answer lies in the heat of battle".

Of course, in arcades and at locals, the immediacy of respect is part of the experience. In-person, you can compliment people on their anti-airs and whiff-punishes in real time. We need a simplified online equivalent. There has to be a happy medium between post-game text messages and the err… captivating conversations that happen in Mortal Kombat’s in-built voice chat.

We can find the solution by looking to the past, though; what I’m asking for already exists on Fightcade where users repurposed a redundant arcade feature to foster positive interactions and attitudes.

Most games on Fightcade are classic arcade games, all of which boot into free-play mode so you and your opponent can rematch as much as you like.

When setting up your controller, however, you still assign a button that mimics the physical act of putting a coin into the arcade machine (most people opt for ‘Select’). Pressing that button triggers a noise originally intended to let you know your money’s good and you can play.

In one of those weird cases where a social custom forms through nothing more than unspoken, mutual understanding, players started triggering that noise to say ‘Hey, good job’, ‘Great parry’, and ‘Holy shit, that hit-confirm!’

Not only is this much quicker than grabbing your keyboard, pressing ’T’ to open the in-built chat prompt, and typing something out, it helps temper some of the inherent animosity out of the fighting game experience. Knowing your opponent respects something you just did changes the dynamics of a match for the better.

The ultimate in-game respect. No. No, I will not stop bringing up 3rd Strike.

Hell, it was this repurposing of a redundant feature that made me — an introvert — actually type something to my opponent post-game for the first time. That led to my opponent and I playing often, and me getting invited to a local Discord community of cool folks who love 3rd Strike.

Not bad for a redundant button, hey?

So that’s it, really; give me an easy way to praise people for something they did as it happens. Let me spread some positivity.