Ideas for a Street Fighter 6

Off-Topic
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Yeah, SF3 is a wonderfully animated game, no doubt. It made a huge impression on me when I first saw it and it must have cost them a fortune to make. We have seen plenty of lovely, high def sprite based fighting games since then but none of them have been animated like SF3. I doubt we ever will again unless someone decides to make the CupHead of fighting games.

For what it’s worth, I thought the SFIV designs were way over muscled and that has continued in V. It’s not graphics it’s a design choice for sure, but I understand why people may not like it.

MH World is an amazing game, and I am a huge fan of that series. But Capcom does the same stuff with that series as with their fighting games. I think the last “new” animation in the series might have been introduced in 2007, lol. World got a huge visual upgrade in the environments and tons of quality of life improvements that mostly fixed the series’s self inflicted problems that fans either overlooked or developed Stockholm syndrome for. But you can do that sort of thing when 90% of the animation and design work is already sitting on a shelf waiting for you. Even the cool “new” mister designs are stuck on existing wireframes for animation with maybe a couple of new moves. Same with your hunter character.

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Considering SFV made so many decisions that most people hated, resulting in a true financial low point in the series, they’d do best to do some fan pleasing so they can make more money.

Keep in mind, Capcom has had something of a revolution in recent years. Kind of like what happened with Nintendo in 2017. Mega Man 11, RE7, RE2R, and DMCV all feel like they signal a new direction going forward. Especially sense it would have been really easy to cram excessive/aggressive monetization into those titles and it wasn’t there. And the games were all really tight amazing experiences.

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Words like “most” are a bit…imprecise. SFV has to date sold 3.1 million units. That is exceedingly far from the series’ financial low point, and is completely independent of whatever money has been made from selling 15 different Chun-Li costumes. While I’m sure Capcom would love for it to have done better, that still makes it the 4th highest selling Capcom fighting game ever made. For reference, no version of Street Fighter 3 ever went platinum (1 million units sold).

And for what it’s worth, I actually don’t think selling 15 different Chun-Li costumes is excessive, and while Capcom is probably too aggressive with their SFV MTX (the glacial pace of earning FM, some outfits being locked exclusively behind a paywall, the Capcom Pro Tour stickers), I think they are closer to fair than not. The people who want to have 15 Chun costumes can rock out, and people who play only one or two characters can just enjoy some basics and maybe save up Fight Money for an outfit they really like. There’s definitely room for tweaking and improving, but I’d be surprised if Capcom decided to toss out the strategy entirely. They could, of course, but I just doubt it. Fighting game fans are notorious for loving to play dress-up and being willing to pay for the privilege.

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I tend to agree with @STORM179. It’s very easy to see a lot of noise on the internet and think it represents some kind of popular opinion. But it doesn’t. This leads to paradoxes like people saying SFV was a failure and Capcom still invests in esports for it. So why not MvCi or why don’t other developers do this? But the central premise is wrong. SFV isn’t a failure financially. MvCi definitely was, and it probably had a higher expectation from Marvel. And as an aside, I think that’s a real shame because it is my favorite Vs series game. But hold that thought because there’s a lesson in here about why it failed.

What is definitely true is that SFV at launch received a LOT of negative publicity. Some of it was about the visuals and gameplay but most of it (and most legitimately, in my opinion) was about the lack of content - characters and gameplay modes. The game as it is now is definitely a much better product.

I would definitely agree with you that Capcom will want the next game in the series to have a much more popular reception right out of the gate. I’m not sure that gameplay is the way to do that, though. Most SF player (myself included) can walk up to SF2, SF3, SF4 or SFV and play them pretty much the same way - and do pretty well. I know there are subsystem changes between games and I think on a deeper level these things matter a lot. But if we are talking about cracking open a fresh SF game and spending a day or two with it then going to the internet to share your opinion, I don’t think what most people are going to focus on will be the subtleties of the game mechanics. Even now, what’s the most striking thing about SF3? The animation. Yeah, the pros will tell you it had the most sophisticated high level gameplay. But is that what matters to me most about the game? Not really. And while I’m no pro, I am certainly an enthusiast not just a Joe casual.

So to go back to my MvCi reference - that game failed because of the visuals. Period. I think this was unfair but it doesn’t really matter what I think. The snowball started with the visuals, then extended to the roster size at launch, and then a bunch of individual nitpicks about the games style crept in but this vary so widely that they are almost certainly irrelevant. But lots if not most people who actually played the game have said the gameplay mechanics are really fun and the game has a ton of potential for competitive play. And yet it was a dismal failure. This compares pretty directly to its closest competitor DB FighterZ which got everybody hyped as ■■■■ just over the way it looks and then performed way better than expectations. A year later, my understanding of the general consensus is that the actual fighting is somewhat lacking, but what difference does that make? I don’t even like Dragonball and I’m one Xbox sales event away from picking it up just because of the visuals.

So the lesson here is that I think big name fighting games especially (maybe not every specialty anime fighter out there) need to have good visuals. They don’t need to be universally beloved, but they should be impressive. Not everyone liked SFIV’s art direction but I think people were generally impressed by the ink in 3D art style and effects associated with the game. If you can’t hook them with your visuals then you better hook them with something (cough fatalities cough cough) that has mass appeal. The gameplay is something that will matter for the long term success of the tournament scene, but as long as the game is playable I don’t see it making a huge difference to sales. Weird when you say it out loud. But that’s how I see it.

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I don’t necessarily care about the gameplay. SF has always been the Fighter I enjoy actually playing the least out of all of them. I actually was talking about visuals and I’m sorry it wasn’t clear. I still think something resembling an Arc System Works Fighter (art style, not gameplay) with more grounded proportions would look the best. Heck, the Japanese calligraphy ink think from four would look GORGEOUS on that art style. But doing that would prevent them from being able to aggressively monetize the costumes the way they have been.

I actually think the seasonal model for characters works great for SF. It’s a natural evolution of the whole “Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo” thing. Arcade Edition barely counts as that was more for marketing rather than anything else. But this way they can still do their huge expansions and iterations without having to print and ship and expect people to buy a whole new $60 game every time. It just needs to have more at launch. You can not look at launch SFV and say it’s a better deal than USFIV.

Also, this might just be me. But I do not understand why people think MvCI looks bad. It’s not outstanding or anything, but it doesn’t look bad. There’s lots of detail and high quality textures. At least the way I see it. I always get frustrated because I would hear people complaining about how it looks and I’m just sitting here going “I literally have no idea what your talking about”. Like, no one would ever tell me WHY it looked bad. Just that it looked bad. If anything, SFV is the one that looks bad because all the textures look like play dough and the characters all look like The Shire was flooded with gamma rays.

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I think MvCI looks a lot better in person than it does on streams. That said…

Muddy colors, odd mix of attempted realism and cartoony-ness, flat character textures set against pretty dynamic backgrounds, wonky faces, and a general lack of consistency/cohesiveness in lighting are a few of the big issues.

Flat Ryu/Strider versus very detailed symbiote/Soul Stone background:

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Faces:

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Strider’s colors flat and drab, while Ultron shines like a spotlight is on him:

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Questionable cutscene posing:

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I want to be very clear: the absolute worst thing you can do to an animator is to pause or slow down their work - there are many, many things that look fantastic in motion that are jank, broken, or otherwise obviously dodgy if you slow it down. MvCI generally looks pretty good in motion. However, Capcom chose to release stills like the above when they revealed the game, and it is very easy to find fault with any of the above shots. MvCI kind of got hit with the double whammy. It’s own presentation was pretty jumbled, and then its predecessor was an absolutely gorgeous living comic book.

In MvCI some things are weirdly shiny and reflect everything, and other things apparently suck in all available light to create a dull blue/green/brown/whatever. Iron Man and Ultron look very, very different from X, even though they are all basically suits of metal. It all just feels very incongruous, and that’s because all these properties genuinely are wildly different. Spencer, a more-or-less normal human, looks very strange next to shiny suited, huge-eyed Arthur. Previous Versus games sidestepped that dichotomy because all the characters were obviously stylized and vibrantly colored in that cartoony way; Infinite had to face those differences head on. It tried to split the difference, and because of that things just don’t “fit” the way they should.

Capcom did fix some of these issues (Dante and Chun got facelifts for example), but to Andy’s point the game suffered a ton of bad press before it even hit the shelves. Which sucks, because the game is ■■■■ fun, has great online, and in my opinion looks a lot better in motion than people give it credit for. But a lot of the visual complaints are real I think, and a lot of people just hard passed on it because it wasn’t pretty and their favorite characters got caught in licensing hell.

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I think the other visual complaint has to do with some deliberate design choices @CausingThought6 . There is a pretty funky lighting filter running that gives everything this hazy, through a prism, rainbow edged look. And I think people looked at that and didn’t like it so they threw it on the pile of “bad graphics” even though it’s a design choice.

The game does have a lot of jaggies and some pretty bad antialiasing on xbox but i certainly don’t think it looks bad in motion. I was also not a super fan of MvC3’s aesthetic so maybe I’m just inclined to be more forgiving of MVCi since I’m not missing the old version.

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I’m glad the X-Men can come back now. Especially if UA3 is any indication. But I don’t want the roster to be mostly made up of them like past titles in the series. There needs to be a balance.

As for the art style… I agree. It can be weird. It looks great on the Marvel characters and even the realistic Capcom characters like Dante and Chris. I just don’t know what to do with it. I do not like the cell shaded style in 3. And I do not like the classic comics designs for a number of characters (cough, Hawkeye). MvC is in a weird place. If it’s in a place at all.

But woah, were supposed to be talking about Street Fighter. Honestly… I don’t know what we can expect. E3 is in a few weeks. You know what, i’ll call it. We are going to get the final character for V and a teaser for 6. But that teaser will only come IF we get an announcement for the next gen consoles. It won’t be an exclusive, but they will show it off at the Xbox conference and make a big deal about it going multi-plat again.

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I suspect we will get the last character and maybe some stage or costume announcement for V along with maybe some announcement about the pro tour.

I would be very surprised if we got a teaser for SF6 since that takes some of the thunder away from any announcement about V. But I guess it’s possible.

Since Sony is not at E3 it’s possible Capcom won’t do anything with SFV at all though.

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Even if there is no actual announcement at a conference, I suspect a trailer for it dropping around that timeframe.

Isn’t Sony doing their own event around the same time period?

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I honestly couldn’t tell you. I don’t have a PS4 and I’ve just kind of lost track of what Sony is doing. I always thought I would get one eventually, but the great games on there are single player exclusives that I don’t have time for (Spider-Man) or single player exclusives that are getting less and less interesting the more I see of them (The Last of Us)

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The EVO lineup was just announced and considering both Street Fighter 5 and MvC2 are going to be there…

I think it’s a safe bet that we’ll be getting a look into whatever’s next for Capcom’s next gen fighting games there.

Let’s hope whatever they show us is a definitive improvement over the PS4/XBONE generation and they finally get the same spark of inspiration and passion that reinvigorated Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, and Mega Man.

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I would rate the odds of a SF6 announcement at 0 and the odds of any kind of Marvel announcement at negative infinity. If capcom does announce a future project it will either be a different franchise or a vs style game without Marvel.

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While I do agree that starting off with doing something like reviving Darkstalkers or Rival Schools would be a good way to win back fans… that all depends on how Capcom wants to see it. Do they take a risk with an older franchise or do they get their heavy hitter out ASAP? To us it makes the most sense to do the former, but maybe Capcom sees it differently? We just don’t know. And it’s certainly not as impossible as your trying to make it seam.

And they’re clearly still willing to at least talk with Marvel. That arcade cabinet AND MvC2 at EVO couldn’t have happened if they weren’t on friendly and speaking terms.

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I wouldn’t assume the MVC2 cabinet or it’s presence at EVO have anything to do with good will between Capcom and Marvel. That’s a pretty big leap.

As far as bringing out the heavy hitters, if Capcom wants to bring out the heavy hitters and ignore their other franchises (and this seems likely to me) then that just means there won’t be any announcement this year. There’s no way they are announcing either SF6 or MvC anything this year.

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…

For both of those things to happen, Marvel and Capcom would both have needed to agree. And if they hated each other like you seam to think, then they wouldn’t. If anything it feels like a big leap of logic for this NOT to mean they’re at least friendly with each other.

And why are you so sure about SF6 and MvC not happening this year? I could understand “oh I don’t think it’s likely” but not “completely impossible”.

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So is DLC completely done for SFV or are they still putting stuff out here and there? I know championship edition is coming out next week, but it seems odd to me that they’d talk about SF6 if they’re not completely done with SFV. Who knows, maybe EVO is kind of SFV’s swan song?

Either way, I tend to doubt that Capcom will announce anything. I think they’ll let MVC sit for a while before doing anything with that series. Darkstalkers, I still tend to think they’re not bothering with that series anymore.

As for ideas on SF6, here are my thoughts:

-No more charge moves. Yeah, I know it’s not a popular opinion and longtime SF fans will likely hate this, but if SF wants to be more casual friendly, they’ll get rid of this mechanic.

-Realistic visuals. Ditch the muscle milk art style (as described above). Characters can still look strong and powerful, but ditch the idea of having characters look so strong and cartoony that they look ridiculous.

-No more anime stuff. I’m not sure when it happened, maybe SF3 or SF Alpha, but I’d love to see SF go in a darker, more gritty direction in terms of characters designs, backgrounds, and especially storytelling. The grown women don’t all need to act like children, the stereotypes don’t need to be quite so stereotypical, and the story could actually be a compelling narrative with actual themes explored for once.

-As for gameplay, I think there’s plenty of room to expand upon SFV and SF3 ideas, with maybe some Martial Masters depth of specific fighting styles thrown in as well. By that, I mean give characters some unique styles that really permeate their movelist beyond wrestlers having a bunch of throws. Give us a character that does drunken kung fu, or monkey style, and so on.

I think that there can be a solid mix of street fighter mechanics that SF fans know and love, but also enough style and move list depth to give SF3 diehards and what they want as well. I’m not saying it’s easy to do by any means, but this is more the direction I’d like to see Capcom go.

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Realistic? Nah. I think a less exaggerated style would be appreciated, but I think something like what Arc Sys does would suit the series better in terms of visual direction. Really I don’t think gritty and street fighter are two terms that should go together. Be more like KI. More serious but still goofey.

Truthfully I think dark and gritty needs to be removed from as many parts of pop culture as possible except for the few places where it’s really warrented. As someone who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s and suffered through the dark knight trilogy and man of steel, I’m frankly sick of it. It’s definitely appropriate for some franchises… but it’s still even today in way to many inappropriate places.

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No no, that’s what I meant by realistic. Less muscle milk look, less cartoony. I think you can achieve the latter by maybe having some certain effects like sweat, damage, ripped clothes, nothing gory by any means, but just something to give their skin texture that doesn’t look quite so cartoony and flat.

KI looks way grittier than Street Fighter, and I’d love it if they went in that direction. I’m not looking for Mortal Kombat levels of darkness; with skulls and blood lakes and what not. Just something that’s a little darker and less anime. I’d call it more of a “serious” tone, though that’s probably a loaded word too.

Yeah I disagree. As someone that grew up in the 80’s and 90’s and suffered through movies and games that were nowhere near the source material because studios thought the only people that liked this stuff were kids, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having some series grow up with the players that played them for so long.

Granted, I’m not saying that everything has to be super dark. Not by any means. I also think that there’s such a thing as too dark or gritty (Mortal Kombat Rebirth, where monster characters like Reptile and Baraka are serial killers springs to mind).

But most fighting games have more or less found that mix of serious and goofy. Mortal Kombat’s fatalities are absurdity personified. They also have jokes and fan service riddled throughout. Same goes for Tekken. I’m not saying all fighting games have to be like these two titles, but given that Street Fighter is still, more or less, the de facto leader of the genre, it’d be nice if they could go beyond the 16 year fantasies of the female physique, the ridiculous character designs, the exaggerated, cartoony art style, racial stereotypes and the bad anime storytelling and simply move the series forward a bit.

Also dang… “Suffered” through the Dark Knight Trilogy? TDKR wasn’t great, but Begins was good and TDK was the best super hero movie ever released IMO. I agree that there’s probably too much grittiness as a style out there as far as it being in some inappropriate places, but Batman’s kinda the perfect place for it, unless you’re super in to those terrible Joel Schumacher Batman movies.

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I do not like the dark knight trilogy. I think they lean too hard into the grim dark aesthetic to still be Batman (imo). The Batman media I have liked the most are the Kevin Conroy series, the Arkham Games, and Beware the Batman. They can be serious, AND they can be lighthearted. Sometimes it’s something super realistic and terrible like Two-Face or a Professor Pyg, other times you’ve got more sci-fi and exaggerated concepts like Mr. Freeze and Man-Bat. Without ever sinking as dark as things like Dark Knight or Gotham (there was an episode of Gotham that gave me nightmares as an 18 year old. Nothing should be that disturbing). Like, I don’t even consider the Nolan trilogy superhero movies because they were too committed to “realism” that they barely resembled the source material in certain ways. Like there are plenty of super serious stories you could tell with Ra’s Al Ghul AND the Lazarus Pit. That he’s a “demon who always comes back no matter how Batman fights” that kind of thing. But nope. Lazarus pits don’t exist in real life, therefor they can not exist in this movie. Let’s take away the joker’s accent and wackier more psychotic crimes and make him an prototype of 2020 nihilistic internet trolls. Babe has a drug that makes him super strong? Nope! Too unrealistic. It’s not like we had a gas that made people see their greatest fears in an earlier movie in the same series! Mr. Freeze? Poison Ivy? Clayface? Nah, they’re just silly goofey kids stuff, never mind that they have some of the more tragic (and in the case of Mr. Freeze, Shakespearean) stories in the entirety of the Batman cannon. Batman as the worlds greatest detective? No way! He would be too perfect! He needs to be dumb and just punch people in the face and have people he talks too over the radio that do the smart things for him. He chooses the bat mantel because he thinks it’s a sign from his dead parents! Har de har, that’s rediculous! He chose it because he FRLL IN A WELL.

But that is way off topic (I have a lot of feelings about the Dark Knight, and the series is part of the reason I don’t like Batman as much as I otherwise would). And what’s weird is we’re basically describing the same thing for what we want to see from Street Fighter, but I don’t call anything gritty until it’s at least at Dark Knight levels.

And there’s nothing wrong with growing up with your fans. But you don’t have to become super grimdark and serious with no light heartedness or fantasy in it at all to achieve that. Like, there are other ways to be more serious. Be more in tune with the emotional nature of the conflict, and have your characters treat something fantastical in a serious way because for them it actually IS dangerous and serious. You don’t have to dilute your brand identity with realism and become edgier then Shadow the Hedgehog shopping at Hot Topic in Seattle.

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