A 9 minute read on:
- More Shields, Please, I’m a Platfighter: Rivals 1, but with shields and grabs;
- Don’t Forget – They’re Here Forever (?): Why you were at Scotland’s biggest Rivals 2 tournament last weekend;
- A Rivals Proposal: A summary of things to keep in mind as the game releases
1. More Shields, Please, I’m a Platfighter (permalink)
When Rivals of Aether entered early access in 2015, it made a bold statement: it was going to be a platform fighter with no shields, and no grabs. True, this was a design choice based on technical limitations. But it’s evidence that even when the most ironclad genre conventions are discarded, a creative developer can still make an incredibly fun game.
Why do platfighters like Super Smash Bros. have blocking and grabbing? Because ‘traditional’ fighters had them. It’s really as simple as that. In other creative mediums, I’ve explored the idea of ‘craft:’
https://brologue.net/2024/09/11/we-do-a-little-crafting/
Shields and grabs were a craft decision to appeal to an audience who, while wary to try the new things that Smash brought to the fighting game table, would find familiarity in the RPS-like dynamic that drives every fighting game, to wit: attacks beat grabs; grabs beat blocking; blocking beats attacks. It’s been this way since Street Fighter II released in 19911.
What makes platform fighters different from traditional fighters is its emphasis on, well, platforming. While spacing your attacks is still important (as any Marth player would tell you), this is secondary to spacing your characters themselves. Platform fighters contain far more vertical movement, with aerial attacks that can be thrown out safely with less risk of being anti-aired:
It’s quite crude to compare them, but Rivals 1 and 2 are, more or less, quasi-legal2 versions of Project M, a Brawl mod that drastically changed the game’s mechanics to be more in line with its predecessor, Melee, while reifying3 the character-specific techs Brawl was known for. Melee also defined one key genre convention most alternative platfighters adopt, but has been entirely abandoned in Smash – wavedashing:
https://www.ssbwiki.com/Wavedash
Smash abandoned wavedashing because it was an accident – and Rivals 2 reneged on its predecessor’s statement by adding the shields and grabs it didn’t have. It’s not a change I preferred, at first – and even after adjusting, I will inevitably grit my teeth when I think I’ve got a window to whiff punish someone, only for them to throw up their shield and go, “Actually, it wasn’t YOUR TURN yet, fuckface.”
2. Don’t Forget – They’re Here Forever (?) (permalink)
I got my first taste of Rivals 2 last weekend with Dundee’s annual Braveheart Brawl tournament. Ultimate was the main event, and until Razzle signed up before the deadline, I thought that, like Ultimate in general, I would have nothing to do with it. So did most of the those I spoke to last weekend. They were more or less looking for an excuse to turn up on Saturday.
That’s not a good sign for any competitive game. If Ultimate is an excuse, then what you really mean to say is that you don’t enjoy it. Someone at the venue said that Smash Ultimate was the ‘Twitter of platfighters,’ and they absolutely had a point:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back/
In recent years, Smash Ultimate players have faced another collective action problem – the game itself…
Ultimate players hold each other hostage not because the game is particularly good, nor is it because you get to beat six shades of shit out of Sephiroth as your Barack Obama Mii Gunner. Everyone in that venue agreed to unite their schedules, and turn up at the same place:
https://brologue.net/2024/01/01/f-is-for-friends-who-do-stuff-together/#u-is-for-u-n-me
That’s why you were there at Bonar Hall – your friends were there. It’s really as simple as that. Doesn’t matter if you were there for Melee, or found familiar faces few and far between. I’m no game designer, but I think that when I talk about social media’s network effects and the network effects of multiplayer games, it’s mostly one and the same:
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/29066/metcalfes-law
But network effects are only one half of the equation. Everyone is here because everyone is bound by what sociologists call a “collective action problem:”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/collective-action-problem-1917157
These sorts of problems are quite common to the tournament experience: if you decide to go for food as a group, it’s easy to decide what you would like to eat; as for deciding what works best for everyone, that’s where it gets complicated4.
You hate Ultimate. Your friends hate Ultimate. But you don’t know where to go, because no-one can agree on a game that’ll make everyone happy. Every platfighter released after Ultimate have had folks bolting for the exits, and they’re never without the perennial Mr. Gotcha, who hangs on every flaw of a new release, and heckles: “You’ll all come crawling back.”
3. A Rivals Proposal (permalink)
And people do come back to Smash Ultimate, as I’ve established, for reasons beyond their enjoyment of the game (or lack thereof). Collective action problems grow more entangled at scale – the more who participate, the harder it is to switch.
But Ultimate is not some kelpie, beckoning you to ride, and refuses to let you go once you do. This is not some tragedy that cannot be avoided. A difficult collective action problem? Yes. A solvable problem? Absolutely.
This Wednesday, the 16th October, the Rivals UK&IE Discord guild5 opened up again. What happened after I joined was something I won’t allow us to forget, dogshit search function be damned: folks, we made PLANS. A random assortment of players all across the British Isles chimed in for a brief half hour about how we were going to lift this scene off the ground. We were, for all intents and purposes, an affinity group:
https://brologue.net/2024/01/19/uh-oh-back-to-the-lab-again/
Someone wrote they were excited for future tournaments because Rivals 2 was likely to be there as a side bracket. Why curb your ambition? You know what’s better than a Rivals side bracket?
An Ultimate side bracket.
…
…The game isn’t even fucking out yet. But that little impromptu seminar had me excited. Here’s some of the things brought up that we need to consider as the game launches:
3.1 Price and Setup Factor (permalink)
Rivals 2 is $30 (probably £25), a steal of a steal for games these days. It’s the setups, however, that will make things tricky. I saw a couple laptops at BHB and the ethical hacker in me was shitting bricks. I’ve never liked the idea of using your laptop as a setup – even if you do set up a separate local account, it’s just a massive OPSEC shitemare.
What about a separate machine altogether? A couple setups were running the game on these things – they’re also pretty expensive:
Will there be a Switch 2 release next year? Will the Switch 2 even sell as well? Even if it does, there’s a risk that the console possesses a similar amount of native input delay that proved a stumbling block for Rivals 1 on the Switch (one user commented that “it was a completely different game”). Until it releases on a home console, Rivals 2 will only have so much reach vis a vis sales numbers.
At least with Ultimate, the setups are homogenous – with Rivals 2, for the time being, we’re going to have to play it by ear.
3.2 People WILL Leave the Game (permalink)
One thing we should expect is that the Rivals 2 community will ebb and flow. This happens to virtually every multiplayer game or social media platform you care to name. The honeymoon period ends; some are bound to write the game’s obituary the minute there’s a balance patch they don’t like; others will leave in response.
We’ve come to expect that any new service must experience hockey-stick growth, or it’s DOA. In reality, what Cory Doctorow calls ‘scalloped growth’ is not evidence of a service in decline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/of-course-mastodon-lost-users/
We should keep this in mind when our friends declare it’s not for them.
3.3 Turn Up – Everyone Has Their Part to Play (permalink)
If you believe this is the game for you, and you want your friends to play it, turn up. Turn up for your locals; turn up for online brackets (even if you don’t suffer lag lightly); turn up for your University’s societies; if you don’t own the game yourself, turn up.
If you’re the local’s 0-2 joker, who swears no matter what you do, you don’t improve; if you itch to pop off and say too much or too little after the set; turn up; if you are the most neurotic recluse to whom every conversation could blow south at any time, turn up. Remember Metcalfe’s law – the more people who turn up, the more social value that event has. You are what’s important, not how many sets you win or lose.
3.4 Talk About It (permalink)
Which is where I come in. If not talking, then writing; if not writing, then making art, graphics, videos, streaming, and so on. Perhaps you’d like to edit the wiki:
https://dragdown.wiki/wiki/Rivals_of_Aether_II
Talking about it on the public web is key. I’m prepared to use my platform to report on any brackets I go to; what’s unclear, however, is where the bulk of Rivals 2 discussion will take place. Twitter grows more precarious by the day – the recent ToS updates have had users bolting for the exits once more, to Bluesky:
https://fixupx.com/shiinareii/status/1846672917582766246
https://fixupx.com/XEng/status/1846605254864888180
If you’re thinking of giving Bluesky a shot, then post about Rivals as you would on any other platform. While you’re at it, you could also follow the Bridgy Fed bot to share those posts with Mastodon users:
https://brologue.net/2024/05/14/fool-me-twice-we-dont-err-what-was-that-first-thing-you-said/
Whether it’s a video game or social media platform, announcing your preference does make a difference. The Mastodon migration of 2022 was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to study collective behaviour change in response to social influence – and again, as with network effects, I do believe it’s not a stretch to draw a comparison to video games here:
https://fediversereport.com/study-on-the-twitter-migration
The ultimate truth of any community is that, every morning, we all collectively wake up and choose to make it. We can choose to make it differently just as easily. It’s the users who make the service; it’s the players who make the game; not the other way around.
What will you do to make Rivals 2?
- NB some series – like Street Fighter – have two varieties of block for high and low attacks; further still, some platform fighters have shields that only protect you in front. ↩︎
- Put it this way – Nintendo was founded to sell Hanafuda cards to the Yakuza, and only got worse after that:
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2023/11/21/how-nintendo-misuses-copyright/?ref=sb_series ↩︎ - In the sense that, where a lot of Brawl tech constitutes techniques that players have discovered through experimentation, certain characters have attacks with properties that were intentionally designed to break the rules e.g., Wrastor’s dash attack allows him to slip off ledges. All this before we get to everyone’s stage control gimmicks ↩︎
- But if you’d like more theory, then Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book Governing the Commons is a must-read. ↩︎
- bm’s first law: every time someone mentions a Discord server, remind them they are, in fact, not servers!
https://joinmatrix.org/guide/matrix-vs-discord/ ↩︎
Rivals 2 Will Live and Die By Collective Action is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Use this work however you wish, so long as you attribute it to me, and link back to Brologue.net.