I’ve never understood why a lot of the big names In the fighting game scene, especially people like david sirlin, have always been against a fighting game demanding a steep execution learning curve. clearly these voices have resulted in affecting the philosophy of this franchise to a certain extent already.
I can be a bit objective when I say a fighting game is the only venue that requires the execution/timing/discipline of a guitar/instrument player and the competitive, reading into the opponents, strategical mind of a chess player. Its special because its the only medium which expects you to have a hybrid of both of these mentalities and thus cutting away from either of these would be hampering with the identity of what a fighting game is as a whole.
The people who are keen on removing the execution component to make the mind game/ strategy more accessible would be watering down the whole medium, since as a game with an emphasis on only strategies and mindgames it’ll be doing what games like chess and poker are already doing. so where’s the identity?
On different lines, Replacing a guitar with a guitar hero like contraption to get rid of the skill component and concentrate on creating/understanding music simply does not work. A guitar is not complicated for the sake of being complicated, the subtleties of how a string resonates has naturally expanded the horizons of what can be accomplished on it technically. Replacing the strings with buttons, while making it more accessible, will severely limit its potential as a musical instrument. It becomes more accessible to access nothing. similary whenever a developer has set out to make an accessible fighting game in the past by making execution easier and thus restricting the number of button presses to keep the emphasis on the “mind game”, he would’ve diminished a lot of the subtleties and nuances that otherwise would’ve made the mind game component complicated and cerebral without him realizing. so bottom line, not restricting the skill component only helps accentuate the meta game/strategy component - as proof, a game with a shallow skill component like dive kick or mortal combat x’s meta game can never be as deep as what something like virtua fighter has on offer.
Even if we’re going to hypothetically assume that its possible to make a fighting game with a lowered technical barrier and a rich meta game, it could NEVER provide same satisfaction of developing the discipline it takes to get past a technical barrier to start unravelling the layers of what the meta game has to offer on that plane.