I hate this

They need to make lore accurate training stages. Instead of being “the grid” have it be a gym or a standard boxing ring. In Fighterz for example it could be the gravity chamber or hyperbolic time chamber. Instead of a generic stage have it make sense.

Finally, we address the Elephant in the Training Room

Imagine a training stage in GG Strive: you break the wall, have the character travel a huge distance with the background being identical and then both characters land in the exact same spot 😂

I definitely agree that its on devs, not players, to create incentives for stage variety. I think it's okay for there to be stages that lean into presentation over competitive viability (gotta have something for story mode after all) but situations like "I can't play on my main's home stage because it lags my console" are huge bummers on top of the reduced cool factor in competitive play. Letting intros rock on a real stage brings the hype in a way that a training stage can't match imo

The chat was ecstatic when Max said, “Fuck it! Let’s rant about it!” The chat: “We’re doing it live!”

I think if devs locked the training stage to “Training mode” and didn’t make it a selectable stage I’d be more okay with it.

I'm glad you're talking about this because this has been one of the biggest problems for me with Street Fighter 5, you tune in to watch it and two hours of watching graph paper just makes you feel numb. Yes it is true there is value to just watching high level play, but when you're watching it in the fighting game equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank then everything loses all meaning and nothing matters. My big fear though is that after years and years of players having to pick the Grid because it's the stage that the game runs the best on, I fear that even if Devs fixed that and now all stages ran perfectly and we could get undeniable proof that every stage ran the same, players would now be superstition to the point where they just believe the Grid still is the best stage.

As legally blind fighting game player I feel like a deviant having to default to the training stage because of its minimalist darker background that the characters don't blend into. Darker backgrounds are imperative for me to be able to play successfully. King of fighters 15 actually solved this issue for me by creating a contrast setting in display settings that allow you to literally mute the background into a darker background. Super helpful and awesome for grinding and practicing and playing online

Developers for fighting games like Street Fighter and Smash work so hard to make these beautiful, amazing stages with awesome music and then no one plays on them because it’s “too distracting”😑

"Training stage" in SF6 should be the boxing gym that Luke is in at the beginning of the new trailer

Honestly, the one grid-style training stage I actually really love is the one from Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. Probably because it's really the only one with any ounce of personality.

I think a viable solution could be to allow for stages to be played with a "tournament mode" setting for those wanting to hyper-optimize their playing conditions. Basically just allow players to voluntarily remove parts of the fluff content in the background of a stage in order to reduce the amount of resources their system needs to render the scene. This could be disabling background particle effects, certain background actors (ex. celebrating/hyped NPCS) / assets (cars, billboards, various props etc.) and other non-game impacting background content. By simply not rendering models and textures, the CPU and GPU will be taxed less and will be able to spend more resources rendering the rest of the scene, making it easier to achieve a stable high FPS. As far as I know, nothing regarding the state of the graphical assets renderered on a scene is typically sent between clients on a networked game, so it should have zero impact on the gameplay itself (other than a slightly less spectacular looking game). Of course, this type of solution still requires developers to respect a system's resources when designing levels, which seems to be the actual problem.

I love Mortal Kombat Xs training stage. Not only was it thematically different, in that it was like a simulation room, but you could have it as a vanilla stage or have it mimic the environmental interactions of every other stage in the game, so you didnt lose anything gameplay wise.

The train stage should be just that. THE TRAINING STAGE for offline usage

That's one of the reasons I like to watch Tekken 7 tournaments. The stage choice matters and we get to see strategy and variety on the stage choices. I wish more games would do that

6:12 "You would think that the training stage could remain for ... Training" Max bestowed the Truth upon us, and then ascended to eternal glory, in a beam of light.

This is a really difficult situation, because it seems unless the stage has an novel gameplay element that is critical to strategy, i.e. Tekken, Virtua Fighter, DOA, Smash Bros, most serious players are always going to choose the most visually optimal stage in the game. The only real solution I can see is make the "training stage" equivalent look visually interesting in some unique way without impacting the function of a training stage. Or just make the training stage unselectable and ensuring all stages provide adequate visual clarity without being boring.

Yes, catering to the hard-core audience keeps a franchise alive. But at least making it visually appealing so even a casual can glance at it and think "that looks neat, leet me see some more" is important to bring new players on or to fill the stands with spectators and make that franchise thrive.

Entirely on the devs. They need to have visual distinction and clarity on all environments and characters unless it's expressly a part of a characters design, and ensure the stages don't impact performance.

This feels like another "The player will optimize the fun out of the game." kind of deal, maybe it would just be better to not have the featureless training stage be useable. Although it would probably result in people using the least intrusive stage.