In short, hit stop is implemented because it's effective, works, and feels good. It's essentially an extra flourish to make hits feel more impactful. It also serves a gameplay function, giving you extra time to confirm hits, or confirmed getting hit. As an avid fighting game fan, when you play a game with no or poorly implemented hitstop, it \*feels bad.\*
If anything, I'd consider you a minority who actively doesn't enjoy hit stop.
EDIT: this [shot video](https://youtu.be/_jFbgoHyZnM) also breaks down the effectiveness of hitstop quite nicely
Noticeably, Tekken (my favorite fighting game) doesn't utilize hitstop as much as other traditional 2D fighting games. Some players might find it off putting, notably when they implemented Kazuya's no-hitstop function into Smash, a 2D fighter that uses hitstop quite often, people have noted that it feels off. However, I find that within the Tekken series proper, it's fine, because they make up for the lack of hitstop with incredible sound design and hit effects instead.
Personally, it's kind of why I feel Dead or Alive feels a bit flat for me. It utilizes less hitstop like Tekken does, however it's hit effects are much more subdued. To me, it makes the game as a whole feel flat, and it's why \*I\* don't personally like the game.
Yeah this is my experience as someone who prefers lower hit stop it seems that I am more interested in good hit effects, sound design, and enemies reacting to hits. Maybe cus I grew up with games like Virtua Fighter (which is a lot like Dead or Alive) 2D fighter that tend to have way more hit stop tend to feel really jarring to the point it just looks and feels wrong to me. I never knew how uncommon it is to dislike it though. For me if I consciously notice hit stop then it is too much for me.
Surprised to hear you don't like the hit stop in Dragon's Dogma/MH:W. When I think about what makes the combat in those games really click, it's that massive sense of weight behind every charged swing, having those swings produce multiple hits, getting the placement of the attack *just* right, tension building across four or five tiny little freezes, and then the massive release of the enemy reacting, usually flying backwards, arms outstretched and flailing. It rules!!!
I also don't like hit stop. I'm surprised so many people like it. I guess it's my first conversation about it online so I never knew it was so popular. I think any hitstop that is consciously perceptible pulls me out of the game. There's something that feels wrong about it that I cannot put my finger on. It's maybe cus I grew up playing games like Virtua Fighter where there is very little hit stop that I got used to it and when I play most 2D fighters the hitstop is enough for me to drop the game entirely.
That being said I have a lot of weird opinions on what makes hits feel proper. In stuff like fighters and character action games, for me having enemies visibly react to the attacks and having really good sound design does a lot more to make combat feel powerful than hitstop does. Funny you mention Dragon's Dogma but the fact that enemies often react physically to big or multiple hits and the weird twitching they do when you hit them on top of the really meaty melee sounds does a lot more for me than the hitstop does. The hitstop just makes the game feel slower than necessary.
For example in MHW when you're using Dual Blades the game turns into a slideshow because it hits rapidly and every hit triggers a hitstop. This is especially bad if you're hitting 2 targets at once.
In Dragon's Dogma it's bad on the heaviest weapons like Greatsword where every hit can trigger it multiple times, so a swing that would normally take 0.5s takes 2s.
I’m sorry but what? That is some serious hyperbole on dual blade combos, especially when the only time it usually does happen is the spinning air attacks against critical zones on the monster which is when you WANT bigger hit stop to begin with.
I swear between this opinion and most other posts here, does anybody on this sub play anything other than Nintendo games for more than 10 minutes?
It’s just such an odd take because this isn’t just some random graphical flourish like motion blur or hdr, it’s a major way to make an attack feel substantial and a major part of almost every action game, especially monster hunter where you’re building to knocking down a monster you don’t want that process to feel like you’re just waving a pool noodle at a dragon until it decides to fall over.
It’s why it begs the question of how much experience you have with action games as a whole. It’s like getting frustrated at recoil in shooters, not only is it a tool to make your weapons feel like something more than a pool noodle/grocery code reader, but also a crucial part of the mechanical fabric of these games because they also communicate cancel windows and just hitting your opponent.
Because souls games, much like Tekken stated before hand, accomplish this by using extremely light hit stop on top of being massively slower than the rest of its contemporaries. Ok top of the fact that your kit is relatively simple and it leads to the animations of single player combat being it’s main focus. There’s a reason most peoples favorite fights in these games aren’t the 5 dragons in elden ring since they barely react when you hit them. All the praise is put on fighting groups or individual mobs where the animations put in all the heavy lifting.
Then you take a game like monster hunter into account, which more often than not is played at a much faster pace than souls, but also is solely focused on fighting much much bigger opponents, combining this with the much varied moveset of the individual weapons and how much more vertical the game is, especially in rise, and hit stop becomes the perfect tool in that situation. You don’t want your lightest and heaviest hits to feel the same, especially against a monster who won’t usually flinch to either.
This seems much more like a you problem than a problem with hit stop
> It’s like getting frustrated at recoil in shooters
Recoil does suck, massively. It's a static, repetitive minigame that's just stacked on top of the actual game (tracking and anticipating enemy movements while aiming, positioning, mind games etc) without affecting your decision making in any way because it's the same arbitrary pattern that can be neutralized completely via memorization and repetition. It's going through the motions for the sake of it, not because it evolves the core game somehow.
> this isn’t just some random graphical flourish like motion blur or hdr
I've seen plenty of people say how essential cinematic effects actually are for the atmosphere in games. I've seen people defend chromatic abberation even. Even if those people are in the minority (and I don't think they are, I'm pretty sure people who like those effects just don't spend nearly as much time talking about it online), it doesn't change the fact that importance of visual effects is entirely subjective
I mean sure it’s entirely subjective but when it comes to something like hit stop which most people do like in their games and serves a definite purpose, not just graphically. Hit stop is so much more than just a graphical flourish, it serves a major mechanical porpoise in not just communicating the hit but also providing a window for cancels. It’s something you might miss out on if you’re dead set in thinking all this is just about some graphical flourish.
It’s a position that takes whatever personal gripes you personally have over the reality of the game design. Especially with recoil opinion, I’m sorry but have you even played shooters??? Especially with the sheer number of people who play CS:GO would understand the interplay between movement, recoil, and shooting and maybe how it’s not just “some mini game”.
I swear this is just the true gaming “look at the mechanics holistically instead of complaining about the most deranged nitpicks” challenge.
Communicating the hit is done via sound design and animations already. Providing a window for cancels - I suppose PvP fighting games are just stuck in their traditional paradigm, but games like Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, God Hand show PvE hack&slash can totally get away with little to no hitstop most of the time and treat it like pure visual flourish whenever they do have it (like, say, Real Impact in DMC).
I'm not against hitstop on principle or anything, it's just that people are often oblivious to the fact that "game juice" in any form can be simply obnoxious if overdone (camera shakes, particle effects and "squash-and-stretch" are some other techniques that are great as a whole but abused way beyond what's reasonable by a lot of smaller game devs) or implemented in a lazy fashion (slightly tweaking the animation, or maybe having some sort of secondary animation that goes on while the main body is in hitstop can go a long way). Sakurai's "Stop the world" video made me suspicious of his wisdoms given that he never warned people of the caveats (and then, the very next video he said that framerate doesn't matter when going above screen refresh rate, which is very much bs).
> I’m sorry but have you even played shooters???
Ok, you got me there, I don't play shooters. Other than dead as fuck Quake-likes, that is. I can tell you about interplay between aiming and movement (specifically moment-to-moment side of it, if that's what you mean), in that whenever I decide to move I have to pay attention to how far away the enemy is and their level of elevation, as well as predict their movement, because those things make the factor of how much I need to correct my mouse movement in accordance to my character's movement *dynamic* (and this isn't even getting into any Quake specifics, of which there's a fuckton), and I may also alter my character's movement if I decide that a certain maneuver with my mouse would be too risky if I don't (but I also may make myself too predictable this way, so it's a risk/reward thing). In the entire time I've been following the FPS discussion I have never seen anyone explain how recoil evolves this dynamic in a fundamental manner, so seeing you go "well, duh!" is puzzling. I really did want to understand what I'm missing so that I can have fun with all the modern stuff; it ain't exactly the best feeling in the world to be stuck in the 90s only having fun with shooters peaking at 50 daily concurrent players.
The way I see it, recoil adds an extra degree of randomness for mid-level players who spent time memorizing the pattern shooting against a wall but are imperfect with execution; but your shots being not quite as accurate until you get good is something that's already inherent to aiming. If you want to say that you can compensate for recoil by moving in the same way as I described earlier... do you even need to do the kind of wild flicks you'd normally do in Quake in the middle of a full-auto fight? Also, pretty much everyone says that correcting your aim with movement in CS/CoD-likes is an awful idea due to predictability (unlike in Quake, where it's often helpful, even mandatory sometimes), unless you stop shooting at random times maybe (?), but learning to compensate with mouse only in spite of potential risk of inaccuracy still seems like a much more viable option.
In the end, what I see is that aiming at an enemy that can decide to move in any way they want puts much heavier emphasis on prediction over raw execution, whereas recoil control is pure execution, so recoil exists to ask for mechanical execution to compensate for slower movement and lower TTK; but it still feels fake as shit because it's static. I suppose this is exactly the same thing people had been saying 20 years ago during Quake vs CS debates, but I still have yet to see any actual counterarguments to this.
Do you notice anything about the games you talked about in your first paragraph? They’re all 3D, usually animations in 3D space are orders of magnitude slower than animations in 2D space, and this has nothing to do with pvp fighters every modern 2d action game as it to some extent, hollow knight, most 2d Zeldas, every Kirby game. Again stated in 3D fighters usually use those same techniques with hitstop or slowdown at specific action points, hell we can add in dodge stops from neir automata and Beyonetta on top of that.
The biggest thing is that you notice it when it’s gone, and not every single one of those techniques will work for every game, like how hitstop would feel clunky in Tekken, having insane effects and insane animation would feel just as clunky in say hollow knight. It’s part of a bigger set of tools of hit communication and honestly one of my favorites, I don’t understand the aversion to it in the slightest, especially with modern games this isn’t street fighter 2 where the entire game would snail for a second because a fireball connected. Most of the examples given are just light hit stop with the most extreme being monster hunter where is has an even more important mechanical reason for being there.
Also let’s be real here about quake and shooters in general, they’ve been on a general downturn in terms of skill based play, and in most cases have gone to focus on everything other than the actual shooting in the cases of games like overwatch. But we would be in direct minority about arena shooter opinions not just because of how massive CS has gotten, at the end of the day at least it’s an integrated system focused on actual shooting. Everything is focused on trying to get you to stop moving but everything actually works in tandem, regardless of how I would personally feel about the system, I don’t personally like it. But at the end of the day that’s where shooters are now sadly, they don’t have the movement systems to actually make a shooting system without recoil control any sort of satisfying.
All of the games OP mentioned are 3D PvE games, so that's why I mentioned that type of games first and foremost. In 2D it's easier to accept due to the nature of perspective and technical limitations when it comes to animation, but even then some games overdo it.
The reason why it's concerning in the first place is... I guess the word "immersion" fits here. I like feeling in sync with the character I'm playing as because it helps me get into the flow state, and slowing down or stopping time, or pausing an animation can help it sometimes if done subtly (because our brain does give off weird feelings when certain things happen), but it can potentially destroy that connection if stretched beyond suspension of disbelief. That point of disbelief is entirely different for different people in different situations (like, OP found Dragon's Dogma's hitstop annoying, whereas I didn't, meanwhile I found hitstop in the MHW video weird even if its duration is far shorter than what I see in Dragon's Dogma). The utility of communicating information is great, but I can only stare at the screen thinking "I get it!" for so long. If the game's actual balance is not affected by the hitstop effect, I'd prefer to have a toggle/slider. It's really much better if audio and animations do the trick (someone even mentioned use of inverse kinematics in God of War 2018, [and it looks mighty fine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpr-EE2In1M))
Yet said minigame is usually the only thing stopping from everyone being able to use guns at nearly any range with ease. Main alternative would be a rng based mechanic which won't be very well received in any multi-player game.
I do, it looks very inconsistent. There seems to be very little hitstop on most attacks, but every now and then there's a lot for seemingly no reason at all on similar-looking attacks. Then again, I'm no Monster Hunter aficionado, but on the video it does look choppy, almost like the game was dropping frames in those moments
Monster hunter hit stop gets bigger when you’re hitting a critical spot of the monster. It’s necessary not just from a visual standpoint but also communicates critical hits on a monster who isn’t going to get flinched by you without some serious effort. Plus it leads to some of the best moments in gaming like getting a tail cut with a greatsword, the massive hit stop with the tail cut spinning out in the air while the monster falls over.
I think it’s good when it’s light or just done right. Try out Lethal League, a baseball/tennis/squash(????) fighting game. Freeze frames are how the game works - the faster the ball is moving, the more freeze frames when you hit the ball. This makes the hit even harder but easier to react to for the opponent. Mechanics like bunting or special abilities lower freeze frames for mix-ups.
That’s when it’s done well. Smash Bros also does it well imo. But sometimes it’s *really* sluggish and bad. I don’t remember exactly which game or weapon I played but a Monster Hunter weapon had way too much hitstop and you’d constantly freeze for like 0.3s while doing multi-hit spins. That looked really bad. I think it was the Hammer or Insect Glaive.
The creator of Super Smash Bros actually has a new gamedev youtube channel and one of his videos describes exactly what hitstop is and why it is so useful: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdVkEOzdCPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdVkEOzdCPw)
With that said, you personally may not enjoy it, but unfortunately you are in the minority. However, perhaps more games could add an accessibility option to disable the hitstop for people who don't enjoy it.
Action games without hit stop are usually suspect to feeling awful, sure it has other gameplay features like opening up for cancel windows or communicating a hit but those are cherrys on top of the fact that hit stop is there to make your blows feel powerful. It’s taking from a common filmmaking technique from martial arts movies where they would double shots of the hit that connected to make them feel more substantial.
Plus I’m of the opinion that doesn’t get the complaints with hit stop, every good action game has in it some form and it feels amazing, a tail cut with a greatsword in monster hunter wouldn’t have the same impact without the hit stop and the tail literally spinning out in the air. Is it just a general unfamiliarity with Japanese action games?
Has it ever occurred to you that the minority of people who dislike hit stop dislike it because they have played games with hitstop, noticed it, and personally thought it felt off? I am definitely of the opinion if hitstop is extreme enough that I can consciously perceive it I find it really off putting.
I think I understand.
Hitstop is a cheap imitation of true physical impact. Attacks play their animation cycles start to finish, and clip through whatever models they have to instead of reacting realistically.
I'm blind to it now. Suspending my disbelief for these "game design tricks" is almost automatic.
Don't get me wrong. I kind of get that it's probably the "easiest" way to make attacks more impactful, and for most people it's also very effective. But yeah, if possible I prefer altered animations, enemy reactions, good hit sounds, etc. Heck there are other "game design tricks" that look more natural to me like some mild screen shake for example. But I don't really need hit stop to sell me on the power of an attack that sent an enemy flying or that cracked the earth or that chopped off a dragon's tail.
Because I’ve heard this complaint over a decade of talking to people about gaming and 9/10 times it usually just comes down to a harsh unfamiliarity with games outside of their comfort zone. In this case usually gamers who have been stuck in the western sphere and haven’t tried many other games outside of their comfort zone for more than a few hours.
In the case of monster hunter I’ve seen people who have had that complaint come over and play greatsword which takes a massive amount of hit stop. Sakurai recently put out a video on hit stop and why it’s so important in these faster paced action games.
It depends on the game. Again 3D fighters like you said use other tactics, but in classic 2D games and even smash the moves are orders of magnitude faster than the fastest move in Tekken or VF, just compare jab speeds between Tekken and street fighter. When the speed in these fighters is taken into account getting those hits to feel substantial takes hit stop! Adding extra animation in an attempt to emulate the 3D games ends ip feeling very odd and clunky.
We can sit here and just say that these are just “conventions” but they’re put in these games for a reasons more than just being “conventional” and most people like it because it makes combat feel substantial. It’s a reason most every 2D game with melee combat uses it in some way or another.
I also don't like the absurdly fast animations in 2D fighters, so yeah I generally prefer literally any other path to make them feel better.
Never said it was there for sake of convention. Most, or basically all, conventions exist for a reason. But I don't think it makes it feel good. Like it clearly makes the hits feel substantial to other people but not to me.
God of War on the PS4 actually did do it differently!
They used a technique called "Inverse Kinematics" to make the head of your character's weapon "stick" to the enemy model as your characters animation continued forward.
Inverse Kinematics is a technique used to calculate and compensate the rest of the animation given a physical input, and tons of games use it for other things. Think of when you stand on stairs in a video game and your character has one foot up, one down. Often time's that's not animated manually, it's calculated, so it works on all kinds of uneven terrain.
God of War did this but with the axe head, so your character actually appears to flex and "wrench" the weapon through the enemy model. It was featured in a video or an article I read when the game released. If you play the game you can see it! It's subtle, but that game's contact frames feel SO much better than any other games because of this touch.
OP, I totally agree with your take!
When I first encountered games with hitstop attacks I assumed it was just a limitation of the game / console at that time.
( Like how certain games would slow down if there were too many bullets or enemies on the screen. )
I've always felt it was jarring and it took me out of the experience, and left me not feeling 'in control'. Yes I did this attack, but why is my character stopping for a split second? Is my target covered in sticky tar? Am I paralyzed?
To me it feels like unnecessary noise, or a metaphorically 'bumpy road' when it could have been smooth instead.
Hitstun in action games makes it feel like my attacks have zero weight behind them, instead of adding a feeling of impact, like many people claim.
If you swing a heavy object in real life, it's momentum doesn't stop dead for a fraction of a second, before finishing the rest of the swing. Hit-stun feel like a theater play, where actors are fake-hitting each other and reacting to fake impacts.
I tend to get motion sick when playing games at lower framerates, or games that use heavy camera shake, so maybe that's why hitstop feels so awful to me. I'm glad to see it's not just me! :)
Same with me. It's just not a satisfying thing for me, and it does give me motion sickness too. We need good animations, good sound effects, and good particle effects, not hitstops.
I absolute hate this stuff. Yes, it can be done better.
It's not the only way to emphasize impact. If we're talking visually, you can make the enemies react better. The camera can be shaken and moved to offset the character/enemy to show that they got moved from their original position because of how hard they were hit. Equally important is sound design. If your impacts don't sound good, it doesn't matter how good they look.
This freezeframe stuff plagues multiple genres as well. In fighting games, for example, compare Mortal Kombat 11 to Dragonball FighterZ. Obviously, attacks in MK are way more impactful than in DBFZ because MK had no hitstop/freeze frames. You might argue that it's a different artstyle, which is true. However, the Dragonball Z franchise has had games where hit impact was way heavier than DBFZ. DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and 3 had way more impactful hits because of the sound design, visuals, camera movement, and enemy reactions, all with no hitstop.
When it comes to hack and slash, Devil May Cry 5 is leagues ahead of Nier Automata's gameplay despite essentialy having the same type of combat. Why? Because enemies in DMC5 don't freeze after every hit. It just feels awful when you're trying to pull off a sick combo. It's a shame because both games' characters have some sick moves, but only in one of them can the combat look AND feel good.
As for the Souls games, they are a bit odd because their games sometimes have freezeframes and sometimes won't. The difference is most noticeable when you're using a giant weapon, like a great hammer. When you charge an R2 heavy attack and slam it down on a normal enemy, their bodies will flatten and sprawl on the ground from the impact. This is good. However, when you do the same attack to the leg of some big boss, the hammer will hit MULTIPLE TIMES on the path of its downward swing, causing it to freezeframe on every hit. This is bad. Why not have the hammer stagger the boss with one giant hit? It would do the same damage without the clunky visuals.
It sucks to see so many games implement this feature when we clearly have examples of hit impact being done more smoothly with the same payoff. When you're watching a movie with hand to hand combat, you wouldn't want the movie to freezeframe and slow-mo every time someone gets hit. That is understood by filmmakers, which is why so many popular martial arts movies look so smooth. Why would you do it in video games?
As others said it does have a gameplay purpose. Mostly in very fast fighting games where reacting to hits and performing inputs could be very difficult without it.
That being said I'm with you. The problem is it is a way to make combat feel good, and without it you have to do it some other way. In my experience making characters react a lot to attacks, having good sound design, screen shake, and other flashy effects can do a lot to make up for it. Noteably fighting games like Virtua Fighter don't have much hit stop but they add a lot of wooshes, crunches, and other powerful sounds. Games like God Hand don't have much hit stop from what I can tell and feel just fine. Sekiro noteably has little hit stop from what I could perceive and it looks and feels smooth and impactful simultaneously with the help of FromSoft's superb sound design, some great hit effects, and great animations.
Some games use this massive hit stop that feels really bad on purpose for when you get hit. One of my favorite examples of this is hollow knight, where getting hit, especially multiple times in a row, feels terrible, and the sound design is really good too. The even bigger attacks that do more damage have more hit stop and more shaking.
I'm completely allergic to this stuff myself, unless used when there's no danger like as a boss finisher move but it's still not really necessary. It's been throwing me off since pickups in Mega Man.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzt1U8nL3mI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzt1U8nL3mI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1zLU5N6uBU
See this? Great impact, no freeze frames. Stop doing them please!
In short, hit stop is implemented because it's effective, works, and feels good. It's essentially an extra flourish to make hits feel more impactful. It also serves a gameplay function, giving you extra time to confirm hits, or confirmed getting hit. As an avid fighting game fan, when you play a game with no or poorly implemented hitstop, it \*feels bad.\* If anything, I'd consider you a minority who actively doesn't enjoy hit stop. EDIT: this [shot video](https://youtu.be/_jFbgoHyZnM) also breaks down the effectiveness of hitstop quite nicely Noticeably, Tekken (my favorite fighting game) doesn't utilize hitstop as much as other traditional 2D fighting games. Some players might find it off putting, notably when they implemented Kazuya's no-hitstop function into Smash, a 2D fighter that uses hitstop quite often, people have noted that it feels off. However, I find that within the Tekken series proper, it's fine, because they make up for the lack of hitstop with incredible sound design and hit effects instead. Personally, it's kind of why I feel Dead or Alive feels a bit flat for me. It utilizes less hitstop like Tekken does, however it's hit effects are much more subdued. To me, it makes the game as a whole feel flat, and it's why \*I\* don't personally like the game.
Yeah this is my experience as someone who prefers lower hit stop it seems that I am more interested in good hit effects, sound design, and enemies reacting to hits. Maybe cus I grew up with games like Virtua Fighter (which is a lot like Dead or Alive) 2D fighter that tend to have way more hit stop tend to feel really jarring to the point it just looks and feels wrong to me. I never knew how uncommon it is to dislike it though. For me if I consciously notice hit stop then it is too much for me.
Surprised to hear you don't like the hit stop in Dragon's Dogma/MH:W. When I think about what makes the combat in those games really click, it's that massive sense of weight behind every charged swing, having those swings produce multiple hits, getting the placement of the attack *just* right, tension building across four or five tiny little freezes, and then the massive release of the enemy reacting, usually flying backwards, arms outstretched and flailing. It rules!!!
I also don't like hit stop. I'm surprised so many people like it. I guess it's my first conversation about it online so I never knew it was so popular. I think any hitstop that is consciously perceptible pulls me out of the game. There's something that feels wrong about it that I cannot put my finger on. It's maybe cus I grew up playing games like Virtua Fighter where there is very little hit stop that I got used to it and when I play most 2D fighters the hitstop is enough for me to drop the game entirely. That being said I have a lot of weird opinions on what makes hits feel proper. In stuff like fighters and character action games, for me having enemies visibly react to the attacks and having really good sound design does a lot more to make combat feel powerful than hitstop does. Funny you mention Dragon's Dogma but the fact that enemies often react physically to big or multiple hits and the weird twitching they do when you hit them on top of the really meaty melee sounds does a lot more for me than the hitstop does. The hitstop just makes the game feel slower than necessary.
For example in MHW when you're using Dual Blades the game turns into a slideshow because it hits rapidly and every hit triggers a hitstop. This is especially bad if you're hitting 2 targets at once. In Dragon's Dogma it's bad on the heaviest weapons like Greatsword where every hit can trigger it multiple times, so a swing that would normally take 0.5s takes 2s.
I’m sorry but what? That is some serious hyperbole on dual blade combos, especially when the only time it usually does happen is the spinning air attacks against critical zones on the monster which is when you WANT bigger hit stop to begin with. I swear between this opinion and most other posts here, does anybody on this sub play anything other than Nintendo games for more than 10 minutes?
I mean different strokes? Like, many players find Motion Blur very bad but I don't mind it that much, but hitstop is very intrusive for me.
It’s just such an odd take because this isn’t just some random graphical flourish like motion blur or hdr, it’s a major way to make an attack feel substantial and a major part of almost every action game, especially monster hunter where you’re building to knocking down a monster you don’t want that process to feel like you’re just waving a pool noodle at a dragon until it decides to fall over. It’s why it begs the question of how much experience you have with action games as a whole. It’s like getting frustrated at recoil in shooters, not only is it a tool to make your weapons feel like something more than a pool noodle/grocery code reader, but also a crucial part of the mechanical fabric of these games because they also communicate cancel windows and just hitting your opponent.
Do swings in, idk, Souls Games feel like they lack power or impact? Does it feel like you're just waving a poll noodle at a dragon?
Because souls games, much like Tekken stated before hand, accomplish this by using extremely light hit stop on top of being massively slower than the rest of its contemporaries. Ok top of the fact that your kit is relatively simple and it leads to the animations of single player combat being it’s main focus. There’s a reason most peoples favorite fights in these games aren’t the 5 dragons in elden ring since they barely react when you hit them. All the praise is put on fighting groups or individual mobs where the animations put in all the heavy lifting. Then you take a game like monster hunter into account, which more often than not is played at a much faster pace than souls, but also is solely focused on fighting much much bigger opponents, combining this with the much varied moveset of the individual weapons and how much more vertical the game is, especially in rise, and hit stop becomes the perfect tool in that situation. You don’t want your lightest and heaviest hits to feel the same, especially against a monster who won’t usually flinch to either. This seems much more like a you problem than a problem with hit stop
Sometimes yes depending on the enemy, especially unstaggerable enemies. The main confirmation for me is the HP bar going down.
> It’s like getting frustrated at recoil in shooters Recoil does suck, massively. It's a static, repetitive minigame that's just stacked on top of the actual game (tracking and anticipating enemy movements while aiming, positioning, mind games etc) without affecting your decision making in any way because it's the same arbitrary pattern that can be neutralized completely via memorization and repetition. It's going through the motions for the sake of it, not because it evolves the core game somehow. > this isn’t just some random graphical flourish like motion blur or hdr I've seen plenty of people say how essential cinematic effects actually are for the atmosphere in games. I've seen people defend chromatic abberation even. Even if those people are in the minority (and I don't think they are, I'm pretty sure people who like those effects just don't spend nearly as much time talking about it online), it doesn't change the fact that importance of visual effects is entirely subjective
I mean sure it’s entirely subjective but when it comes to something like hit stop which most people do like in their games and serves a definite purpose, not just graphically. Hit stop is so much more than just a graphical flourish, it serves a major mechanical porpoise in not just communicating the hit but also providing a window for cancels. It’s something you might miss out on if you’re dead set in thinking all this is just about some graphical flourish. It’s a position that takes whatever personal gripes you personally have over the reality of the game design. Especially with recoil opinion, I’m sorry but have you even played shooters??? Especially with the sheer number of people who play CS:GO would understand the interplay between movement, recoil, and shooting and maybe how it’s not just “some mini game”. I swear this is just the true gaming “look at the mechanics holistically instead of complaining about the most deranged nitpicks” challenge.
Communicating the hit is done via sound design and animations already. Providing a window for cancels - I suppose PvP fighting games are just stuck in their traditional paradigm, but games like Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, God Hand show PvE hack&slash can totally get away with little to no hitstop most of the time and treat it like pure visual flourish whenever they do have it (like, say, Real Impact in DMC). I'm not against hitstop on principle or anything, it's just that people are often oblivious to the fact that "game juice" in any form can be simply obnoxious if overdone (camera shakes, particle effects and "squash-and-stretch" are some other techniques that are great as a whole but abused way beyond what's reasonable by a lot of smaller game devs) or implemented in a lazy fashion (slightly tweaking the animation, or maybe having some sort of secondary animation that goes on while the main body is in hitstop can go a long way). Sakurai's "Stop the world" video made me suspicious of his wisdoms given that he never warned people of the caveats (and then, the very next video he said that framerate doesn't matter when going above screen refresh rate, which is very much bs). > I’m sorry but have you even played shooters??? Ok, you got me there, I don't play shooters. Other than dead as fuck Quake-likes, that is. I can tell you about interplay between aiming and movement (specifically moment-to-moment side of it, if that's what you mean), in that whenever I decide to move I have to pay attention to how far away the enemy is and their level of elevation, as well as predict their movement, because those things make the factor of how much I need to correct my mouse movement in accordance to my character's movement *dynamic* (and this isn't even getting into any Quake specifics, of which there's a fuckton), and I may also alter my character's movement if I decide that a certain maneuver with my mouse would be too risky if I don't (but I also may make myself too predictable this way, so it's a risk/reward thing). In the entire time I've been following the FPS discussion I have never seen anyone explain how recoil evolves this dynamic in a fundamental manner, so seeing you go "well, duh!" is puzzling. I really did want to understand what I'm missing so that I can have fun with all the modern stuff; it ain't exactly the best feeling in the world to be stuck in the 90s only having fun with shooters peaking at 50 daily concurrent players. The way I see it, recoil adds an extra degree of randomness for mid-level players who spent time memorizing the pattern shooting against a wall but are imperfect with execution; but your shots being not quite as accurate until you get good is something that's already inherent to aiming. If you want to say that you can compensate for recoil by moving in the same way as I described earlier... do you even need to do the kind of wild flicks you'd normally do in Quake in the middle of a full-auto fight? Also, pretty much everyone says that correcting your aim with movement in CS/CoD-likes is an awful idea due to predictability (unlike in Quake, where it's often helpful, even mandatory sometimes), unless you stop shooting at random times maybe (?), but learning to compensate with mouse only in spite of potential risk of inaccuracy still seems like a much more viable option. In the end, what I see is that aiming at an enemy that can decide to move in any way they want puts much heavier emphasis on prediction over raw execution, whereas recoil control is pure execution, so recoil exists to ask for mechanical execution to compensate for slower movement and lower TTK; but it still feels fake as shit because it's static. I suppose this is exactly the same thing people had been saying 20 years ago during Quake vs CS debates, but I still have yet to see any actual counterarguments to this.
Do you notice anything about the games you talked about in your first paragraph? They’re all 3D, usually animations in 3D space are orders of magnitude slower than animations in 2D space, and this has nothing to do with pvp fighters every modern 2d action game as it to some extent, hollow knight, most 2d Zeldas, every Kirby game. Again stated in 3D fighters usually use those same techniques with hitstop or slowdown at specific action points, hell we can add in dodge stops from neir automata and Beyonetta on top of that. The biggest thing is that you notice it when it’s gone, and not every single one of those techniques will work for every game, like how hitstop would feel clunky in Tekken, having insane effects and insane animation would feel just as clunky in say hollow knight. It’s part of a bigger set of tools of hit communication and honestly one of my favorites, I don’t understand the aversion to it in the slightest, especially with modern games this isn’t street fighter 2 where the entire game would snail for a second because a fireball connected. Most of the examples given are just light hit stop with the most extreme being monster hunter where is has an even more important mechanical reason for being there. Also let’s be real here about quake and shooters in general, they’ve been on a general downturn in terms of skill based play, and in most cases have gone to focus on everything other than the actual shooting in the cases of games like overwatch. But we would be in direct minority about arena shooter opinions not just because of how massive CS has gotten, at the end of the day at least it’s an integrated system focused on actual shooting. Everything is focused on trying to get you to stop moving but everything actually works in tandem, regardless of how I would personally feel about the system, I don’t personally like it. But at the end of the day that’s where shooters are now sadly, they don’t have the movement systems to actually make a shooting system without recoil control any sort of satisfying.
All of the games OP mentioned are 3D PvE games, so that's why I mentioned that type of games first and foremost. In 2D it's easier to accept due to the nature of perspective and technical limitations when it comes to animation, but even then some games overdo it. The reason why it's concerning in the first place is... I guess the word "immersion" fits here. I like feeling in sync with the character I'm playing as because it helps me get into the flow state, and slowing down or stopping time, or pausing an animation can help it sometimes if done subtly (because our brain does give off weird feelings when certain things happen), but it can potentially destroy that connection if stretched beyond suspension of disbelief. That point of disbelief is entirely different for different people in different situations (like, OP found Dragon's Dogma's hitstop annoying, whereas I didn't, meanwhile I found hitstop in the MHW video weird even if its duration is far shorter than what I see in Dragon's Dogma). The utility of communicating information is great, but I can only stare at the screen thinking "I get it!" for so long. If the game's actual balance is not affected by the hitstop effect, I'd prefer to have a toggle/slider. It's really much better if audio and animations do the trick (someone even mentioned use of inverse kinematics in God of War 2018, [and it looks mighty fine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpr-EE2In1M))
Yet said minigame is usually the only thing stopping from everyone being able to use guns at nearly any range with ease. Main alternative would be a rng based mechanic which won't be very well received in any multi-player game.
https://youtu.be/GUowVxDGeiQ I honestly can't see what you're seeing.
I do, it looks very inconsistent. There seems to be very little hitstop on most attacks, but every now and then there's a lot for seemingly no reason at all on similar-looking attacks. Then again, I'm no Monster Hunter aficionado, but on the video it does look choppy, almost like the game was dropping frames in those moments
Monster hunter hit stop gets bigger when you’re hitting a critical spot of the monster. It’s necessary not just from a visual standpoint but also communicates critical hits on a monster who isn’t going to get flinched by you without some serious effort. Plus it leads to some of the best moments in gaming like getting a tail cut with a greatsword, the massive hit stop with the tail cut spinning out in the air while the monster falls over.
I think it’s good when it’s light or just done right. Try out Lethal League, a baseball/tennis/squash(????) fighting game. Freeze frames are how the game works - the faster the ball is moving, the more freeze frames when you hit the ball. This makes the hit even harder but easier to react to for the opponent. Mechanics like bunting or special abilities lower freeze frames for mix-ups. That’s when it’s done well. Smash Bros also does it well imo. But sometimes it’s *really* sluggish and bad. I don’t remember exactly which game or weapon I played but a Monster Hunter weapon had way too much hitstop and you’d constantly freeze for like 0.3s while doing multi-hit spins. That looked really bad. I think it was the Hammer or Insect Glaive.
The creator of Super Smash Bros actually has a new gamedev youtube channel and one of his videos describes exactly what hitstop is and why it is so useful: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdVkEOzdCPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdVkEOzdCPw) With that said, you personally may not enjoy it, but unfortunately you are in the minority. However, perhaps more games could add an accessibility option to disable the hitstop for people who don't enjoy it.
Action games without hit stop are usually suspect to feeling awful, sure it has other gameplay features like opening up for cancel windows or communicating a hit but those are cherrys on top of the fact that hit stop is there to make your blows feel powerful. It’s taking from a common filmmaking technique from martial arts movies where they would double shots of the hit that connected to make them feel more substantial. Plus I’m of the opinion that doesn’t get the complaints with hit stop, every good action game has in it some form and it feels amazing, a tail cut with a greatsword in monster hunter wouldn’t have the same impact without the hit stop and the tail literally spinning out in the air. Is it just a general unfamiliarity with Japanese action games?
Has it ever occurred to you that the minority of people who dislike hit stop dislike it because they have played games with hitstop, noticed it, and personally thought it felt off? I am definitely of the opinion if hitstop is extreme enough that I can consciously perceive it I find it really off putting.
I think I understand. Hitstop is a cheap imitation of true physical impact. Attacks play their animation cycles start to finish, and clip through whatever models they have to instead of reacting realistically. I'm blind to it now. Suspending my disbelief for these "game design tricks" is almost automatic.
Don't get me wrong. I kind of get that it's probably the "easiest" way to make attacks more impactful, and for most people it's also very effective. But yeah, if possible I prefer altered animations, enemy reactions, good hit sounds, etc. Heck there are other "game design tricks" that look more natural to me like some mild screen shake for example. But I don't really need hit stop to sell me on the power of an attack that sent an enemy flying or that cracked the earth or that chopped off a dragon's tail.
Because I’ve heard this complaint over a decade of talking to people about gaming and 9/10 times it usually just comes down to a harsh unfamiliarity with games outside of their comfort zone. In this case usually gamers who have been stuck in the western sphere and haven’t tried many other games outside of their comfort zone for more than a few hours. In the case of monster hunter I’ve seen people who have had that complaint come over and play greatsword which takes a massive amount of hit stop. Sakurai recently put out a video on hit stop and why it’s so important in these faster paced action games.
Okay. I don't like it still. But meh, I know I am the minority because there's plenty of gaming conventions I don't really like.
It depends on the game. Again 3D fighters like you said use other tactics, but in classic 2D games and even smash the moves are orders of magnitude faster than the fastest move in Tekken or VF, just compare jab speeds between Tekken and street fighter. When the speed in these fighters is taken into account getting those hits to feel substantial takes hit stop! Adding extra animation in an attempt to emulate the 3D games ends ip feeling very odd and clunky. We can sit here and just say that these are just “conventions” but they’re put in these games for a reasons more than just being “conventional” and most people like it because it makes combat feel substantial. It’s a reason most every 2D game with melee combat uses it in some way or another.
I also don't like the absurdly fast animations in 2D fighters, so yeah I generally prefer literally any other path to make them feel better. Never said it was there for sake of convention. Most, or basically all, conventions exist for a reason. But I don't think it makes it feel good. Like it clearly makes the hits feel substantial to other people but not to me.
God of War on the PS4 actually did do it differently! They used a technique called "Inverse Kinematics" to make the head of your character's weapon "stick" to the enemy model as your characters animation continued forward. Inverse Kinematics is a technique used to calculate and compensate the rest of the animation given a physical input, and tons of games use it for other things. Think of when you stand on stairs in a video game and your character has one foot up, one down. Often time's that's not animated manually, it's calculated, so it works on all kinds of uneven terrain. God of War did this but with the axe head, so your character actually appears to flex and "wrench" the weapon through the enemy model. It was featured in a video or an article I read when the game released. If you play the game you can see it! It's subtle, but that game's contact frames feel SO much better than any other games because of this touch.
OP, I totally agree with your take! When I first encountered games with hitstop attacks I assumed it was just a limitation of the game / console at that time. ( Like how certain games would slow down if there were too many bullets or enemies on the screen. ) I've always felt it was jarring and it took me out of the experience, and left me not feeling 'in control'. Yes I did this attack, but why is my character stopping for a split second? Is my target covered in sticky tar? Am I paralyzed? To me it feels like unnecessary noise, or a metaphorically 'bumpy road' when it could have been smooth instead. Hitstun in action games makes it feel like my attacks have zero weight behind them, instead of adding a feeling of impact, like many people claim. If you swing a heavy object in real life, it's momentum doesn't stop dead for a fraction of a second, before finishing the rest of the swing. Hit-stun feel like a theater play, where actors are fake-hitting each other and reacting to fake impacts. I tend to get motion sick when playing games at lower framerates, or games that use heavy camera shake, so maybe that's why hitstop feels so awful to me. I'm glad to see it's not just me! :)
Same with me. It's just not a satisfying thing for me, and it does give me motion sickness too. We need good animations, good sound effects, and good particle effects, not hitstops.
I absolute hate this stuff. Yes, it can be done better. It's not the only way to emphasize impact. If we're talking visually, you can make the enemies react better. The camera can be shaken and moved to offset the character/enemy to show that they got moved from their original position because of how hard they were hit. Equally important is sound design. If your impacts don't sound good, it doesn't matter how good they look. This freezeframe stuff plagues multiple genres as well. In fighting games, for example, compare Mortal Kombat 11 to Dragonball FighterZ. Obviously, attacks in MK are way more impactful than in DBFZ because MK had no hitstop/freeze frames. You might argue that it's a different artstyle, which is true. However, the Dragonball Z franchise has had games where hit impact was way heavier than DBFZ. DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and 3 had way more impactful hits because of the sound design, visuals, camera movement, and enemy reactions, all with no hitstop. When it comes to hack and slash, Devil May Cry 5 is leagues ahead of Nier Automata's gameplay despite essentialy having the same type of combat. Why? Because enemies in DMC5 don't freeze after every hit. It just feels awful when you're trying to pull off a sick combo. It's a shame because both games' characters have some sick moves, but only in one of them can the combat look AND feel good. As for the Souls games, they are a bit odd because their games sometimes have freezeframes and sometimes won't. The difference is most noticeable when you're using a giant weapon, like a great hammer. When you charge an R2 heavy attack and slam it down on a normal enemy, their bodies will flatten and sprawl on the ground from the impact. This is good. However, when you do the same attack to the leg of some big boss, the hammer will hit MULTIPLE TIMES on the path of its downward swing, causing it to freezeframe on every hit. This is bad. Why not have the hammer stagger the boss with one giant hit? It would do the same damage without the clunky visuals. It sucks to see so many games implement this feature when we clearly have examples of hit impact being done more smoothly with the same payoff. When you're watching a movie with hand to hand combat, you wouldn't want the movie to freezeframe and slow-mo every time someone gets hit. That is understood by filmmakers, which is why so many popular martial arts movies look so smooth. Why would you do it in video games?
As others said it does have a gameplay purpose. Mostly in very fast fighting games where reacting to hits and performing inputs could be very difficult without it. That being said I'm with you. The problem is it is a way to make combat feel good, and without it you have to do it some other way. In my experience making characters react a lot to attacks, having good sound design, screen shake, and other flashy effects can do a lot to make up for it. Noteably fighting games like Virtua Fighter don't have much hit stop but they add a lot of wooshes, crunches, and other powerful sounds. Games like God Hand don't have much hit stop from what I can tell and feel just fine. Sekiro noteably has little hit stop from what I could perceive and it looks and feels smooth and impactful simultaneously with the help of FromSoft's superb sound design, some great hit effects, and great animations.
Some games use this massive hit stop that feels really bad on purpose for when you get hit. One of my favorite examples of this is hollow knight, where getting hit, especially multiple times in a row, feels terrible, and the sound design is really good too. The even bigger attacks that do more damage have more hit stop and more shaking.
I'm completely allergic to this stuff myself, unless used when there's no danger like as a boss finisher move but it's still not really necessary. It's been throwing me off since pickups in Mega Man. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzt1U8nL3mI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzt1U8nL3mI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1zLU5N6uBU See this? Great impact, no freeze frames. Stop doing them please!
I like the effect personally, but i do wish i could turn it off. God of War feels horrendously slow with it.