Capcom's Street Fighter IV Release History and Why It's Dumb to Be Mad

It is not a problem of cost. It is a problem of rearrangement and rebalanced and they want me to pay for it again. I generally don't like the idea of a season pass but SF4 is a scenario where a season pass would have worked out well.

I agree. The only thing I'd like to know about is the status of a PC version of it. I'm sure that the PC version of SF4 isn't exactly the go to place for that game, and that Capcom didn't even want to put out the SSF4AE on the PC due to piracy, and even then they made people who had SF4 on PC buy SSF4AE wholesale instead of allowing the upgrade buy for it (due to piracy.) I'd just like to know if a) there were any plans at all for a PC release and b) if there is, if they were leaning towards the "you have to buy USF4 completely new" thing again or allow it as an update.

Edit: Apparently in the gamespot mini-extra details thing they did they actually did mention it coming to PC. Up until watching that the only thing I'd ever seen was them stating 360 and PS3 (with a distinct lack of mentioning the PC.) So hopefully the PC release is treated the same as the other two; at which point I'm all kinds of excited about this update.

Anyone who complains is probably not hardcore in the FGC. Anyone who plays these games day in and day out loves it to get refreshed on a yearly basis.

Poison and Hugo were great characters in SF x Tekken, but the problem was you were playing them in SF x Tekken... I like to see more SFIV though and I've got fingers crossed for either Rainbow Mika or Karin to be the fifth character.

Firstly, you don't have to play a game to criticize it from a consumer perspective. People are free to look at Ultra SF4 and discuss whether they think it is worth it or not and for what reasons.

Personally I don't have anyone to play with in real life, and playing fighting games online is torture. Even before Arcade Edition came out and "everyone" was still playing Super, I still have trouble finding stable matches.

I bought SF4 and Super, and spent a few hundred hours on both. BUT I wasn't sold with AE and I'm not sold with Ultra. I feel like Ultra does almost nothing for casual gamers or people who aren't already sold on SF4. Except.. oh you get all those pretty costumes if you buy the retail copy. Yeah no thanks Capcom.

Lastly the overuse of the "oh it takes a lot of work hours to get this done, so of course it's worth it" argument is getting silly. You don't buy tickets to go listen to a concert pianist just because they spent hundreds of hours working on their pieces. You buy tickets to listen to a concert pianist because the way he/she plays music is absolutely beautiful. Yes I can appreciate how much time it takes to balance fighting games, but if the end result is more of the same I'm going to pass.

I have no issues finding stable matches, it's region and connection dependant. Unlike Vanilla SFIV, which was flat out broken on PS3 online, I sold my PS3 arcade stick and copy of the game at the time and bought 360 versions instead because it was that bad, they fixed it with Super and up.

I don't mean to sound like a dick, but if you were really into SFIV, you'd have bought AE regardless, because it's the only way you could have continued to play it. Are you really that offended by a $15 update which adds substantial content? And you're right, Ultra doesn't really do much for casual gamers, and I'm pretty sure they aren't intending it to. Casual gamers are hardly going to flock out to buy a 4 year (5 year old when Ultra is out) fighting game, let's not be silly, the only thing Ultra might do is reel in a few people by putting a fresh new all-in-one sku out on the shelves.

@auron570: I mean just look at the actual people edited into that trailer...I'm pretty sure Capcom knows their target audience isn't casuals. You're right that you don't have to play a game to criticize it from a consumer perspective. But then again, you're also not the targeted consumer. The consumer perspective is different for everyone. Why take the time to criticize something not aimed at you, esp. when this is something other consumers have been asking for?

That was before they announced extra characters and stages, I think the original plan was re-balancing only and it was gonna be free.

@sooty: Question: I want to pick up street fighter arcade edition in the steam sale so I can play around and maybe get into it by the time ultra comes. And in the end I will have paid about 30$ to have the ultra version. But people have said something about how doing it that way will be bad because I wont have the dlc's? That the 40$ release will have the dlc?

In any case, I have been chomping at the bit to get a good fighting game on pc with a thriving online community and I think Ultra might be my best chance (at least until I mvc4 also launches on pc...fingers crossed). You clearly know what is happening. Is me getting sf:ae in the steam sale for 15$ or less a bad call?

Honestly, looking at that list of releases, the only thing that seems annoying is Super Street Fighter IV, and that's because it's retail only and not a DLC option.

SSFIV AE will only be around $5 in the Steam sale when it comes down in price again, and they also discount all the DLC. If you buy it on Steam for around $10 (Game + all costume pack) you'll only have to pay $15 to upgrade to Ultra. At least that is the assumption as Ultra is coming to Steam and I have to assume it's a DLC upgrade that'll just replace the existing entry for SSFIV AE.

Right now at 50% off on Steam, you can buy the game with all the DLC for $30, when the game is on daily deal it's going to be $10-15 guaranteed. (or even less if you buy only the game, which is currently $15)

Wait for it come back on a daily or flash sale and it will be dirt cheap. If it doesn't then at the most you'll pay $15 for the base game and $30 if you want all the costumes. Online community is still pretty strong too!

@sooty: its actually killing me every time I check the flash sales and dailies and I dont see skyrim (original) and streetfighter. they are the last thing on my list of games to get.

I know it's coming to Steam, I just mean I don't know in what form. Like, will it be a DLC add-on for SSFIV AE or will it replace SSFIV AE entirely on the Steam store. Maybe they'll both just co-exist and people will have to remember to purchase Ultra if they don't already have AE.

@egg: im just gonna be that guy and say ... why you need to look at movelists bro ?

I'm gonna have to be that other guy and ask: Why do you need to look at the movelists of characters you aren't playing? It takes like 20 seconds to get into game and access the movelists for every character anyway.

When I look at the move lists on Tekken, I feel like I'm reading an essay. (and weep accordingly)

I didn't know people were mad.

I played SFIV a lot with a friend when it first came out, and while I'm not hardcore in the slightest, I will be buying USFIV for all the characters/costumes/stages I've missed. The balance issues likely won't affect my play directly, but at least I know the game is generally better rounded.

Maybe for some of these kids this is the first wave of fighting games they've seen? I thought everybody just knew Street Fighter games always had tons of versions. Why would you want SFV already? That's diluting the brand. Plus, we've still got ULTRA STREET FIGHTER IV - HYPER FIGHTING to look forward to.

nah I like this a lot. Means the game is maintained for the scene. Not to mention Street Fighter has always done this/

And that used copies of old versions are super cheap.

It's the internet tho,. People will grasp on to anything and shit on it whether they care or not. That Super Hyper Ultra Rainbow etc. Edition joke is beyond hack and Capcom apparently knows this.

I'm more than looking forward to it and the only things I'm really pissed about is that:

1) it's releasing next year

2) I fucking waited up all night to watch for the trailer and announcement only not to be shown the 5th character (I live on the east coast and work at 3am)! Granted top 8 was hype as shit but I couldn't watch it all.

If you're into the fighting game scene and you understand what things like kappa, and bodied mean you probably are hype for this.

yeah I really wasn't expecting 2014, you can tell it's quite early on though because they showed hardly any changes and hardly any specials, supers or ultras for the 4 new guys.

There's nothing wrong with fighting game revisions. They tend to give us classics that the community can latch on to forever (hello Super Turbo, 3rd Strike, Accent Core until ArkSys decided to revise it again recently). I can sort of understand people being upset that they "have" to put more money into this game, but truth be told, they don't "have" to. A much more realistic complaint is that the current version of the game is already so well balanced that a new version can only hurt the balance. That many of the supposedly bad characters are actually probably much better than they appear, and people just haven't had enough time yet to discover their technology. It's not "dumb" for them to be mad, because they think the version of the game they have right now doesn't need to be tinkered with.

But I'm looking forward to this update, because Street Fighter IV doesn't appeal to me right now. It may be the most balanced it's ever been, but it's also the least fun. At least for me. I can't claim that I used to love Street Fighter IV, but I can say that each revision has exacerbated the problems I had with it in the first place. So here's hoping this version is more to my liking. And if it's not, then I'm only out $15. Hardly the biggest waste of money I've ever made.

I'm not really sure how each version could have made it worse for you, SFIV was kind of busted in some ways and it had hardly any rushdown characters (the ones it had kind of sucked). Although I guess if you hate being rushed down you'll absolutely have hated Arcade Edition with Yun and Yang, along with buffs to Cammy, Cody and such, lol.

the only thing im mad about is the (high) possibility that the PC version wont be day and date with consoles. The price is fine, the game needs this to be revitilized again, those characters and backgrounds are cool in sf x tekken, just seems like a overall good deal, just the internet being the internet as usual

It's not rushdown that bothers me. It's that the game became more rushdown oriented without the infrastructure supporting it. From the first version of SF4, the lion's share of my complaints have come back to the slow walk speed. That walk speed was much less of a problem when the game wasn't a rushdown game. When your game is more about projectile zoning, like it was in the first console version, it's a lot easier to overlook something like that. It's like how it's easy to overlook Third Strike having no meaningful projectile zoning game to speak of because it's a game meant to be played at the close-to-mid range, and has everything to support that. If you tweaked Third Strike so that characters who try to approach are at a major disadvantage, and the safest strategy was to fight at a distance and use projectiles to try to force your opponent in, the game would be horrible to play, because the rest of the game isn't set up in a way that supports that. We'd just be throwing and parrying fireballs all day until someone made a mistake. That's no fun.

But I'm not going to get into a long spiel about what I don't like about SF4, because I'm not going to or trying to convince anyone not to like the game. Plenty of people do like it, which is what matters at the end of the day. Like I said, I hope the changes to USF4 make it a game I can like, too, but if not, I'll just keep playing the fighting games I already play, and people who like SF4 can keep playing SF4. That's one of the great things about fighting games. There's enough variety in the genre that almost anyone can find something to like.

I don't really know how to relate to that, the rushdown characters mostly have pretty fast walk speeds (or an obscenely fast dash, like Makoto) and the characters with zoning tools typically walk either slow or pretty averagely. (excluding Akuma)

Although I will say that in Ultra I did hear they are looking at increasing walk speed across the board, at least I'm sure I did. Pretty sung Yang got a walk speed buff.

I don't really know how to relate to that, the rushdown characters mostly have pretty fast walk speeds (or an obscenely fast dash, like Makoto) and the characters with zoning tools typically walk either slow or pretty averagely. (excluding Akuma)

Although I will say that in Ultra I did hear they are looking at increasing walk speed across the board, at least I'm sure I did. Pretty sung Yang got a walk speed buff.

Makoto's insanely fast dash is awesome. I loved watching Haitani play her at Evo. I'm not saying everyone has to move that fast, but I do feel that the walk speeds, as they are now, hurt the mid-range game a lot. It's hard to explain why that is without turning this post into an essay, though, which I don't think anyone would care to read, anyway. Faster walk speeds across the board would definitely go a long way towards making me happier with the game, so I hope you're right! I'll be buying the game either way just to try it out like I do with most fighting games, so I hope this time the game finally sticks with me. :)

At some point I will need to look at movelists in order to know how to do the moves.

For some reason I never got into Street Fighter until I bought AE on steam a few months ago. Now it's probably my favourite game and I can't wait until the update! Keep Ryu the same and nerf everyone else :P

My only problems with that trailer were I have to wait till 2014 to get it and the terrible editing when showing the new characters. Please stop zooming in and out, it's making me dizzy.

@egg: and you think in the middle of a fight is that time ?? bit late ... naw i was just being a fighting game elitist .. i understood your point but was just being a dick :p imo fighting game movelists have been shitty for ages , but probably wont be focused on , because they just dont matter to the hardcore crowd (hell skullgirls knew its demographic and didnt even bother with a movelist feature because it would be more of a hassle to update it than just have ppl look them up online)

there you go a bit more of a salient point :P

My only issue with the game right now is there's pretty much a solid top 10 and then...everyone else, or close to it, with a few characters just being flat out bad. I mean it's still pretty well rounded, those mid tier guys can still place high in tournaments. T.Hawk though...no chance.

and Dudley makes me sad, because he's actually amazing but let down by a horrid mid-range game. He has great damage, great pressure, great frame traps, two great ultras and then...horrible mid-range pokes. But they are buffing that aspect of him in Ultra, so yay! If they can get that figured out he'll jump up to top tier probably.