When it comes to fighting games, they often have this stigma of being for a select group of people. The reason for this is that the control schemes are often very complicated, and so you have to be able to enact a series of moves and commands in order to get characters to do what you want. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, and more are guilty of this. But when Dragon Ball FighterZ was being made, the team at Arc Systems wanted to do something different.
In an interview with Eurogamer, producer Tomoko Hiroki and director Junya Motomura talked about why they went the direction they did with Dragon Ball FighterZ to make it a game anyone could play with limited fighting game skill.
“We thought that, rather than make the controls more and more difficult, we wanted to focus more on mind games, making each of the characters quite different. Another thing I realised only after the game was released is that when this game is being played for esports, the fact we were able to use easier to understand words for the specific mechanics we have for the game – so, for example, the Z Change, the Super Dash – this wasn’t our main objective, but the fact we were able to use rather easy to understand words was something that worked to lower the hurdles for the casual fans.”
“We started out with a clear goal that we had to satisfy both the casual players and the competitive players. We had that idea from the start. Since this was a new franchise, we were able to build from the ground up without pulling anything from a series fighting game. So we were able to build from the ground up to balance the system without having to think about how we were going to satisfy the old players.
They succeeded in their goal, and FighterZ has been one of the biggest hits of the year so far, and it’s going into EVO 2018 as the most popular game in the tournament.
