Rising Thunder

Fighting games can be one of the most thrilling tests of pure skill, challenging players to anticipate their opponents’ moves and react with lightning speed. Newcomers hoping to tap into that excitement face an intimidating climb from the outset. What other genre asks its players to memorize arcane button combinations to perform the moves that are critical to success? More to the point, is that kind of barrier necessary? A new game debuted at this year’s Evo tournaments that poses those big questions, and it has a pedigree that could make even the biggest advocates of the genre’s secret knocks take notice. 

Seth Killian is a well-known member of the fighting-game community, having worked at Capcom on its Street Fighter IV series and served as a public face for the franchise. Killian was a lead designer at Sony Santa Monica’s External Studio until last year, when he decided to forge out on his own. Now he manages a team at Radiant Entertainment, where he’s working on an all-new competitive fighting game on PC. With it, he’s hoping to make the genre he loves accessible to a new generation of fans. 

“It’s such an awesome genre, and it’s so easy to watch and get into and at least understand at a base level,” he says. The problem is, it can take so long to get good at them – anywhere from three months to a year, by Killian’s estimate – that he finds them difficult to easily recommend. His new game, Rising Thunder, removes one of the biggest hurdles by mapping special moves to ordinary button presses. “I’ve seen it short-circuit that kind of path, going down from six months to two weeks. And I think that is the kind of thing that people are going to be willing to put the time into, because it’s fun along the way.”

You might not recognize Radiant Entertainment, developer of the town-building game Stonehearth, but it has deep roots in the fighting-game community. The studio’s founders, Tom and Tony Cannon, are incredibly influential in the genre. Tom founded Evo, and Tony developed the GGPO tech that’s the basis of many fighting games’ netcode. Killian wants to make it clear, however, that it’s going to have to survive in the ring on its own merits.

"Evo has given us a deep understanding of tournaments, the competitive mindset, and community building, but Evo is first and foremost a community event,” he says. “Evo games are there because the communities supported them, which is a privilege that is earned, not given. We definitely have a lot of plans to support competitions for Rising Thunder, and of course we hope to be at Evo one day, but only because the players are there to support it."

 Killian says the game will be designed around online competition, since that’s how people generally play fighting games today. Because of that, the team is exploring some elements that are particularly unconventional for the genre. For instance, the Crow character is able to generate an energy field that creates an invisibility effect as long as he remains within its boundaries. The other player sees the dome, but they aren’t able to see what their opponent is up to so long as they stay inside. Another asynchronous-style move lets Vlad fire a volley of missiles and target specific areas – areas that the opponent is unaware of until it could be too late. Killian seems to be having a lot of fun tinkering around with these kinds of unexpected moves, but he’s also aware that the game has to be fair.

“By doing some of those experiments, they also stick in the back of my mind. Something that is clearly broken or unfair or sort of unsalvageable will pop back out of my brain after a few weeks or a month in a different form that totally can work,” he says. “Like that Vlad missile-drop move was originally Vlad just exploding into parts. I really like a lot of that, and it seemed like a Vlad thing to do, explode himself and fall down, and it was kind of a funny animation and all that, but it was just causing too many problems and too many weird edge cases. I could also start to foresee certain types of forced situations from knockdowns that would make it unfair – so you have a move that’s sort of trollish and unfun. It came back to a missile-strike kind of thing, which, again is something we’ve seen before in different forms, but not like this with the hidden information. I want to find that balance of sort of a light dusting of real freshness to it, to introduce a deep new strategy, but keep the game feeling familiar to anyone that knows fighting-game archetypes.”

Along the same lines, his team at Radiant is trying to walk a line when it comes to balancing. Killian says that there are two schools of thought in that area. He cites Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Mortal Kombat as examples. Killian says Capcom hasn’t released any MvC balance patches since one was released a few weeks after the game’s launch, and now the meta shows it could probably use one. On the other hand, Netherrealm has released around eight major balance patches. 

“We want to take sort of a middle hand on the balance side to let players sink into the characters,” Killian says. “There can be situations in fighting games where it seems like this is just a really bad match, and I feel like this is just not fun for me, and then players sort of stick with it and they discover – that can be one of the most rewarding things in a fighting game. You discover some sort of – we call it a new technology – or a new strategy or something like that that does allow you to win the match. You need a certain amount of game stability in there to really let that happen. If the game is changing every couple of weeks, it’s really hard to perfect those strategies and understand the match in a really deep way. We don’t want to try to change the balance a ton, though if that happens it will probably happen earlier in the game’s life because we need the player input in the beginning especially. We’re looking at adding variants, which is a form of balancing, but it’s also not a destabilizing form of balancing.”

The game made its debut at this weekend’s Evo tournament, and players can now sign up to get access to the playable alpha when it’s released next week. Players can choose between one of six different hulking robots in its current state and challenge foes online – focusing on when to pull off Vlad’s missile strikes, for example, instead of getting psyched out by the stick-twiddling minutiae of how to do it. Killian says the game will continue to evolve from its current state, with Radiant Entertainment adding new features, characters, and moves along the way. It will remain free to play, with the eventual sale of cosmetic items and skins paying the bills.

Killian points out that the genre’s popularity has surged as the games have become more accessible. Modern pros have a tough time executing fireballs in the Street Fighter 1, he says, thanks to that game’s frame-perfect requirements. “They relaxed that input in Street Fighter II, and all of a sudden the game caught fire,” Killian says. “Obviously, that was a sensation, and it bled into things like canceling and whatnot, and it’s been sort of a linear progression of these games getting easier and easier from the execution side, and every time they do that you get a bump in popularity – not necessarily because the game is any better or worse, because more people are able to have that experience. And when you have more people competing in a game, you just get more interesting things. The matches deepen, and the strategies and the meta begin to develop around it. I’d love to help make that happen for more people.”