Street Fighter 6 fans rejoice, mere days after the historic million dollar Capcom Cup X a new patch has dropped into the laps of the Street Fighter playerbase. This patch brings the psychic boxer Ed, as expected, but as we speculated during Capcom Cup X the patch also brings some new balance changes to the game, not the full yearly balance change Capcom planned on surely, but still a welcome shake up to the current roster that many players were demanding.
As expected, Ed is probably the most anticipated DLC character so far, and he owes a lot of that to the fact that it’s been about 5 months since the last DLC character. But that’s not to say that Ed doesn’t bring hype on his own, in fact he’s probably the most exciting character revealed so far, with an amazing moveset that focuses on poking and swaying in and out of an opponent’s reach with ludicrously long buttons as well as sweet combos propped up by his Level 2 super Psycho Cannon, Ed’s release has seemingly breathed new life into Street Fighter 6 as the game reached an amazing 45,965 players on Steam alone, almost reaching release levels of activity.
But Ed isn’t all that’s been brought in this patch, as several smaller balance changes have made their way into Street Fighter 6. While this isn’t the big yearly patch Capcom promised, these changes are likely because of player unrest with the state of the game, and thus several things have been changed. Most notably there have been buffs to characters like Jamie and Ryu, who are often considered quite weak, while characters like JP and Luke got a few nerfs considering they were the strongest characters in the game. The entire changelog of what’s new in this patch can be found here, let us know if your character came out of this patch looking good (and my condolences if you’re a top tier player, but you sort of deserve the nerfs).
However, a change that has kind of gone under the radar despite being a massive new feature, is the ability to play with anyone in the world. Previously, you could only play online with people relatively local. For example, if you played in Texas you’d be matched up with mostly midwestern players as well as your fellow Texans, however, with the new change to matchmaking you can instead extend this to be a much larger radius, or even worldwide (though the connection quality for worldwide matches may be a bit finicky, only time will tell if it’ll stabilize).
Indeed, it’s looking like Ed and the patch have really reinvigorated Street Fighter 6, both competitively and casually, and it’s an exciting time to be playing the game. Both players that have dropped the game and those who are interested in what’s new have picked that game back up, and hopefully they’ll stick around. If you’re interested in buying Ed, be sure to purchase Street Fighter 6 on Playstation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X|S, and on PC through Steam.