As we’ve discussed here on MXDWN lately, Capcom’s upcoming Street Fighter V is more than just making the rounds in the world of competitive gaming. With multiple pro exhibition tournaments and a steady stream of open betas under its belt, the latest installment in the nearly 30-year Street Fighter series is Capcom’s signal that the company is determined to clean up their image and make a splash in the gaming world. Street Fighter V certainly has more marketing effort put into it than the series’ last mainstream revival – Street Fighter 4 – did, anyway.
While Street Fighter 4 was geared toward drawing new players into the franchise, some of its nuances – like high-execution combos that were necessary to many characters’ game plans – tended to drive away fresh hopefuls. Street Fighter 4’s Director, Yoshinori Ono, aims to get it right this time with V. In an interview with Engadget earlier this week, Ono discussed how Street Fighter V will cater to new players and series veterans alike.
Ono recognizes that the first step to fostering a happy gaming community is to provide it with stable netcode. He lead the interview by stating that the Street Fighter V team is striving to make the game’s online experience as enjoyable as possible.
We’re working very hard to make a stress-free online experience that everyone can enjoy, and we’ve also been able to bring together the PS4 and PC community. We feel, with the way we’re handling online network play, people can enjoy it very seamlessly and have a very stress-free, awesome online experience so they can play this game for hours on end.
Capcom’s ambitions to turn Street Fighter into a full-fledged eSport are no secret, either. Ono sees Street Fighter V as the perfect opportunity to wipe away Capcom’s tumultuous public relations brought on by games like Street Fighter X Tekken, which was fraught with marketing decisions that soured many gamers’ opinions of the company. From the ashes, Ono envisions a new future for Street Fighter, one where new players will invigorate the community and older players will provide guidance and experience.
With Street Fighter V, we’re really considering eSports in that we really wanted to reset the community. We want to reset the entire game so that we can reset the playing field and let lots of new people jump in and start competing. Of course, we want everybody from the previous generation to join, but we want to create an environment where everyone can start fresh and be very welcoming to new players as well. We feel that’s really important in terms of building [Street Fighter] out as an eSport.
Ono acknowledges that this is just the beginning of the road for Capcom’s rise to prominence within the eSports scene. But for now, he aims to “keep that momentum going as we proceed forward into the eSports realm.”
The other crucial detail to creating a successful competitive video game is to retain the interest of new players. Losses against skilled players can be discouraging, and while a determined few will pick themselves up off the ground for more matches, many new players will simply quit due to waning interest.
Ono doesn’t intend to baby new players, but he does want to provide them with opportunities for improving their gameplay right from the beginning. The most significant of Street Fighter V’s features to open these doors is its ranking system, which will require players to achieve a certain win rate and a certain amount of level points to advance to the next rank. This new system differs from Street Fighter 4’s ranking system, which simply adds or deducts points from a linear pool with each win or loss.
With Street Fighter V, there will be a tutorial for beginners in there that teaches the very basic stuff. From there, people can go into the [arcade mode] and play the character stories and immerse themselves in the world of Street Fighter V.
After that, they might feel like “OK, I want to test the waters in terms of online matches. Like you said, there might be some concern about getting your butt whipped the first time you go online. But this time, we built a league system where you have to have a certain level win rate and a certain amount of points built up to proceed to the next league. We’re basically segregating people between leagues so you’re only playing with people in the same league to help balance out the win rates.
This approach is reminiscent of tutorial and story modes in Arc System Works games like Blazblue and Guilty Gear Xrd, which provide players with ample ground to begin their fighting game journey.
Ono stated that Capcom is also planning to host tournaments that cater to lower levels of play.
Looking toward the future — it’s not going to happen this year, but we’re looking into creating tournaments geared more toward the casual player. In Asia, we’ve already started something where we’re going to have college students compete with each other; that’s one of the things we’re doing. We also have plans — it’s still in the planning phase — but we’re talking about maybe a parent/child tournament where the parent and their kid enter together.
He compares Street Fighter skill levels to baseball. “There’s Major League Baseball, but there are also neighborhood baseball leagues where people can get together and play on the weekends,” Ono said. “We’d like to create an environment for Street Fighter where people can do that at a casual level and get together and just play.
Building up a diverse scene that caters to non-gamer demographics is new in the world of eSports. Ono acknowledges that Street Fighter 4 tended to turn away its new players with the aforementioned execution requirements. Street Fighter V has been designed in a way that lets new players easily grasp the mechanics of the game, while also providing experienced players with wiggle room to stand out among the rest.
When looking at Street Fighter V and examining who didn’t join the Street Fighter scene with Street Fighter IV, we realized it was people who weren’t necessarily able to do what they wanted to do with their characters in terms of actual physical execution of the game’s moves. With Street Fighter V, we’ve added a thing called input leniency — moves just come out a little easier than you might expect. A lot of the higher-level, hardcore players might wonder, “Is this OK?” And yes, we think it’s fine. Those guys are going to figure out how to use it to their advantage.
The whole idea there is just so people have a feel-good experience with the game. We want people to feel like they have full control over what’s going on and make things a little easier for them.
Ono closed by sharing his surprise over how many of Street Fighter V’s fans are eagerly awaiting its story mode, which was teased earlier this Monday. He’s proud to announce that Street Fighter V’s story mode is shaping up to be something that all fans of the series will enjoy, despite its long and arduous planning process. Said Ono, “I’m pretty confident that, once this finally is released in June, the story content that fans have been longing for will finally be delivered.”
The full interview can be found here.
Street Fighter V will be available for PlayStation 4 and PC on February 16. It will feature cross-platform play, meaning players on both of these systems will be able to duke it out with one another online. The game’s final open beta began last night, and runs until January 31 at 7 PM PT (though if past betas are anything to go by, Capcom could grant it an extension). To access the beta, players need to either pre-order Street Fighter V, or obtain an access code from someone else who has pre-ordered the game.