Canceling as a action in videogames?

For context canceling is when any action has started but before it ended another action stopped it and happened instead.

A funny example of this is in the DMC series you can by using enemy hop with the shotgun skips it's cool down which is reloading the gun giving the image of it's never reloading.

Another is in Tony Hawk Underground 1 and 2 where you can buffer tricks on top of buffered tricks giving the visual look of the board they're skating on instantly appearing all over the place and offering the multiplier and initial points for them while visually the tricks never seem to have a chance to appear.

What do you think of canceling in games and it's effects on gameplay?
Do you like it or dislike it for any particular reason outside of it's effect on gameplay?

Like cancelling an A-press midway thru so it …

...

Depends on the game itself. In faster paced games oftentimes canceling, especially dodge canceling, is an integral part of the game design and is an indispensable tool for higher level play. In slower games sometimes the developer wants the player to really think out their movements, therefore each attack is a commitment and can't be canceled out of. So canceling can be a detriment or a plus in a game's design, it all depends on its function and whether or not it accomplishes it well, a measure that's best applied on a game by game basis.

personally I favour canceling over non-canceling on the whole though

It's a pretty solid thing in fighters. Definitely not a bad thing since it usually involves more skill.

Since I'm op with the subject I should drop my view in here.

I like it, makes things feel faster and more in my control, most games I play where it's common would feel a lot worse without it.

I love cancelling things in video games, it's especially fun when you have a move that moves you and then cancel it into something else for even more range. Stuff like dash or jump cancelling is great too; like in anime fighters sometimes you can have a move that isn't special cancellable but is jump cancellable, so you can jump cancel the move then cancel into the special/super whatever out of the pre-jump frames.

Wouldn't cancelling only really have a purpose in fightan?

I mean, a lot of games will let you dodge out of the way during an attack if you need to and shit. But it doesn't really have the same effect as cancelling to bait your opponent or trick them like in fightan in my opinion.

Not really, Hack and Slashes and Beat em ups use it to try and avoid getting stuck in parts of attacks that keep them still and vulnerable like ending combo's in streets of rage with Grand Upper instead of the usual attack.

Instead of the slow ending kick it's now the I frame filled more powerful move that moves your position and in DMC stuff like royal guard can do the same but offer a defense option instead of a attack.

There's Tony Hawk like I mentioned, the game introduced a mechanic that to get grinding strings without jumping constantly that evolved into getting a mass of different grind inputs out constantly to build the multiplier, special meter and score all at once.

Kid Icarus uprising offered the ability to cancel attack attack animations with item usage like the invincibility boost baiting them into retorting into something that makes them open.

Kingdom hearts 2 offers canceling any part of a combo before finish commands into magic which could be like reflect or magnet.

Even stuff like Call of Duty can knife canceling which suddenly changed the meta of the game ever so slightly.

Cancels are worth a smirk or two as a glitch, but building a game around them is BS.

Integrating them into the internal logic of the game, though, is cool:
>Start playing Halo Mac port when it ships

I didn't even know you could do that in Tony Hawk. Are there other examples like this in non-fightan games? I can think of stuff like back dash canceling in Castlevania, where doing a back dash dodge move would cancel whatever action you were doing, allowing you to say swing an axe two times in quick succession instead of one swing that you had to wait longer to recover from. There's also the dash cancel for the Fencer in EDF, where you can use a shield or certain weapons to cancel the cool down of the Fencer's boost dash, allowing you to move faster. With the right set up, you could be zipping around like a fucking Char while even the fastest of giant insects struggle to keep up with you.
Come to think of it, dash cancelling is pretty common, isn't it?

In a obscure way, no.
In CSGO
When you reload, the reloading sound of the weapon you were reloading will play- but if you quick switch you actually cancel the full reload and can bait close enemies into thinking you're still in the middle of reloading.
I've actually caught people trying to push me while holding long doors while I do a fake reload, which ends with them dead because I still had 10 more bullets in my m4 mag.

Canceling the last few frames of an action is something that should exist in pretty every game, since it makes the game feel way less clunky.

That said, it does have gameplay implications, so obviously you can overdo it. There's plenty of cases where games allow you cancel a thing way too early, which results in completely broken gameplay.

...

DBZ games go from a 6 to an 9 once the glitch meta is discovered.

Unless it's battle of Z where whis can't be touched

if youre cutting an animation short into another action its fine, but when you use it to circumvent design like your shotgun example i think its rather homosexual.

High level DMC is all about canceling.

in a singleplayer game its more of a sort of extra trick that can boost a score
I don't really mind it then
in multiplayer games though it essentially serves as an overly complicated skill barrier since the ideal fix would just be to not have those skipped frames in the first place
its not like they're usually all that hard to do, but they shouldn't really be as necessary as they are
its like if you had a footrace where every 20 feet the runners would have to connect two normal lego blocks together before moving on.
it's simple, and you'd know there'd be people able to get it done in a fraction of a second without even stopping
but honestly there's no reason not to just take that portion out completely for a smoother experience

You called?

One thing that always gets to me in the DMC context is how people pick out stuff like jump cancelling and RG cancelling when EVERYTHING in the game is cancelling. It is the seminal example of a game built ground up around cancelling, and the way that DMC2 involved so much less of it is one of the many reasons why that game sucked.

Hey that shit took fucking skill.