Street Fighter V: Our Wishlist

Now that E3 is over, we have a wealth of footage from Street Fighter V. The game isn't coming out until next Spring, but we have a pretty good idea of what the game is like.

Compared to Street Fighter IV, Street Fighter V appears to be faster. Critical Arts (the new name for Super Combos) do huge damage, and many of the basic combos hurt a lot. It's unclear how much the damage values will change before the game releases, but it is exciting to see the flow of matches are very different from Street Fighter IV at first glance.

A few weeks ago, I asked a lot of Street Fighter fans what they would like to see in the upcoming game. Filtering out the many character requests (Juri being the most popular), I got a lot of cool ideas of how to bring Street Fighter up to speed with other modern fighting games. Street Fighter IV revitalized the genre in 2009, but its list of features looks archaic compared to the many fighting games that followed in its wake.

So here's a list of features we'd like to see in Street Fighter V in no particular order, from small cosmetic requests to features that are absolutely necessary.

Simplify.

A common misconception among new fighting game players or those who aren't deep into Street Fighter: “more complicated = better!”

Not the case. Many elements of Street Fighter IV were unnecessarily complex, to the detriment of our enjoyment of playing the game. So there are a few ways they could simplify the game and still keep the competitive depth.

-Ease up on the Ultra inputs. The Ultras in SFIV were two motions + triple button press. The most egregious example of this were Ultras for grappler characters, which required two FULL 360 inputs AND pressing three buttons. There's also Charge Ultras, which look like this (Charge Back, Forward, Forward, Back, Forward ) It's common for players to set “cheater buttons”, or a macro that hits 3 Kicks/Punches at the same time because it's just not comfortable to do the normal way. The Critical Arts in Street Fighter V will have simpler inputs than Ultras, and I hope it's a change that stays.

( 360+360 + 3 Punches) could easily be simplified to (360 + 3 Punches) and it would be better. I would even be okay with the Skullgirls & Street Fighter x Tekken method of having a universal input for Supers.

-Ease up on weird inputs. Hooligan Combo Input is intimidating to new players and somewhat awkward to do for anyone who isn't already good.

360 inputs cannot be done without jumping...unless you practice a lot! Either put in anti-jump protection for 360s (Skullgirls has this) or simplify them to half-circles (which has been hinted at for SFV).

Oni has an air dash that requires a quarter-circle back+punch in midair. Why not just simplify it so you can just...press dash in midair?

-Delayed Wakeup. Change the command to “hold down on the joystick” PLEASE.

-One Frame Links. The timing on Street Fighter IV combos is notoriously strict. You cannot simply hit the buttons in sequence, you have to time them well. Some of the combos are so demanding that people developed the “plinking” strategy which is really weird and involves hitting the Select button to make the timing easier? I'm not very clear on it, but I do know that I avoid playing SFIV because combos feel awkward to me.

I'm not saying to remove the more demanding combos from the game entirely. I'm saying that you can ALSO give players alternatives. Street Fighter x Tekken and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 have easy, guaranteed combos if you just hit Light, Medium, Heavy, Heavy. They don't do much damage but they allow new players to have something to fall back on. Auto Combos in Persona 4 Arena are weaker than an actual combo you create, but they are a base for new players to build on or fall back to if they are overwhelmed. Target Combos in Street Fighter IV were limited but appreciated: they allowed you to hit a predetermined button sequence quickly to get a combo. Ibuki has several of them:

So ease up a bit on the super-tough 1 frame links. Give some more Target Combos out. Maybe bring back an equivalent the “Cross Rush” simple combo from SFxT.

Help New Players.

Street Fighter IV has no playable tutorial. There's an in-game manual (that's hard to navigate) which teaches you the commands. In the modern era of fighting games, that's not acceptable.

Skullgirls, Guilty Gear Xrd, Killer Instinct, and Dead or Alive 5 have transcendent tutorials that teach you EVERYTHING about the current game AND gives you strategies to carry over into other fighting games. In my eyes, it's simply not acceptable to go the Street Fighter IV route and have no tutorial.

So put in the effort this time. Don't half-ass it with a manual. I want a full tutorial in the game that's on par with those games I mentioned above. Trials must return, but I also want move details.

Let me access a move list quickly and easily in the pause menu. Show me the special properties of each move in this menu, as well as the frame data. Let me tag moves on the screen in case I want to remember them.

Explain how links, Target Combos, and Cancels work in the tutorial. They're still an important part of Street Fighter, so the game should teach you about them.

Street Fighter is the most popular game in the genre. It should be setting the standard for other games to follow, and I want other games to have great tutorial materials.

Character Customization

This has been in previous Street Fighter games, so it's not such a large request. In Street Fighter x Tekken, you could alter the color of every part of your outfit and it was really cool. It meant that everyone online could have their own unique version of a character.

Killer Instinct gives you different costume pieces that allow you to dress up your character like you want. Dead or Alive 5 gives each character a variety of hairstyles and glasses for each of their costumes. It would be nice to have in Street Fighter V!

-Voice Customization. This was in Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter X Tekken, so it's not an unreasonable request. Please allow us to set the language of each character individually so no one would be subjected to Sakura's English voice.

If they were REALLY cool everyone would speak their own native language like in Tekken, but Capcom won't put in that much effort. Imagine Chun-Li speaking Chinese in her intro or Dhalsim speaking Hindu.

Good Netcode

Street Fighter IV's netcode was acceptable. But the netcode in Killer Instinct and Skullgirls are exceptional. The netcode of Street Fighter V should live up to this.

Of course playing fighting games locally is preferable, but online multiplayer IS important. There are players who simply don't have a local scene or can't travel often. Then there's those of us who just feel more comfortable playing online. So make the online great!

Good Training Mode

I have a list of features wanted in Street Fighter V's training mode:

-Hitbox viewer

-Online training

-Replay & Save State. Allows players to replay a certain combo, making it easier to practice against it without requiring a second controller.

-”Record” function to save cool combos for later viewing

-Move Details- show if an attack hits Mid, Low, or High as it is performed

-Press Select+direction to teleport into a corner

-Set Character-Specific options in the Pause menu (how much oil does Hakan have on?)

I may be missing some things, so please add them to the comments if you have ideas. I will be participating in the Street Fighter V beta and giving lots of feedback, because I want Street Fighter V to be better than IV in every way. I want it to take notes from other fighting games to improve itself.

So far, I like how Street Fighter V looks. There's higher damage with no “get out of jail free” options like FADCs. The new V-Trigger & V-Skill systems are nice replacements for Ultra Combo. It has more than a few elements from Street Fighter x Tekken so none of you will ever beat me.

I hope it can live up to the impossibly high expectations.

If not there's a lot of other fighting games to play now.

In line with DR3's Super Ultra Remix Dash, I'd like to see some balls-out stupidity... by which I mean MK DLC (more of an expansion though, not like 4 characters). Based on what they said regarding the tone of both franchises, that's literally the only way it'll ever happen. I'll settle for only evil SF characters if need be.

Links aren't needed to have fun with the game or even to do well in the game.

That said, it sounds from interviews and things like they are going to be implementing an input buffer to make execution on tight links easier to pull off, which is great. They are also using rollback based netcode, which means saving state is already in the engine, so there is no reason for them to not have save/load state in training mode. If they don't, they basically just fucked up.

Personally I hope they steal a lot of ux stuff from skullgirls. Tournament mode, keybindings, training mode stuff, tutorials, etc. Mike Z is a smart dude.

Imagine Chun-Li speaking Chinese in her intro or Dhalsim speaking Hindu.

You can speak Hindu?

We?

Anyway looks like SFV will be more approachable except if you go against a good player then you die in 2 combos into stun. The game will be easy to pick up and play to start with and impossible to play in 6 years, that shouldn't be overly surprising.

A lot of your concerns have already been addressed, not sure why they're reiterated after accumulating a "wealth of knowledge."

T-Hawk.

Capcom/Sony, you can do whatever you like, put in whatever you like, just please include my man, da Thunder Hawk.

Thanks.

Actually they are doing a lot of these things. There aren't ultras, there a very few hard knockdowns at all, no difficult motions like 360s, etc. That being said I hope they take a note from games like Skullgirls that have tons of smart little features for casual and tournament players alike. As well, something like Dota 2 that has a lot of smart streaming/casting/hosting/spectating stuff in it too. Lastly, a good single player mode that is reminiscent of the stuff NRS does lately. Also please have good voice acting.

Also FADC really isn't get out of jail free anymore. Most characters can punish that stuff now it seems.

Not very well.

Yeah, I did read in some E3 coverage that the timing on links would be less strict which is good news.

It would be crazy if they don't have save/load state in Training Mode, but look how many options Street Fighter IV lacks. Capcom doesn't seem to care about missing the things that are obvious to us, which is why I hope they're listening to beta feedback very closely.

And yeah, Skullgirls pretty much blows away every fighting game in terms of user interface. Tournament Mode, especially the part where it forces a button check would be great for SFV. And "hold start to pause" is necessary.

360 inputs cannot be done without jumping...unless you practice a lot!

They're really not that hard. It helps if you understand what the game defines as "360". All you need to do is hit each cardinal direction (up, down, left, right). So to do a 360 one the ground the minimum stick positions you need to hit are either Right -> Down -> Left -> Up or Left -> Down -> Right -> Up. Hit a button once the stick reaches the Up position and the game will prioritize the 360 movement over the jump and a move will come out.

Some of the combos are so demanding that people developed the “plinking” strategy which is really weird and involves hitting the Select button to make the timing easier?

"Plinking" doesn't need to involve the Select button. All you really need is a button at a lower priority than the one you intend to come out. The Select button is only needed when you want to plink off of one of the low priority buttons (Light Punch/Kick).

I fully agree with better Tutorials/Training modes. I understand that some people aren't as crazy as me or others who are willing to use wiki entries to learn the BnB combos for our characters and spend hours practicing combos. Having good teaching materials will go a long way for that. I do wish that tutorials came with an "I understand how to play fighting games, just teach me the unique things in this game" option. I don't want to wade through the "press the stick to the right to move to the right" tutorials just in case I miss a tutorial on short jumping or something.

Pretty much, a 360+p/k is basically a 270+p/k, it doesn't require any practise and eventually it just comes down to muscle memory knowing when to touch the punch or kick at the right time, using numbers it's 412369 and p/k.

I don't see why they wouldn't have reloading a state and replaying a dummy's movements in at this point. I forget if it was added later on, but USF4 already has that.

Motions have been simplified. Nothing beyond a half-circle motion. Not saying this won't change, but as of right now this is an intentional design decision. Also no tap specials a la Hyakuretsukyaku.

I don't think delayed wakeup is even a thing is SFV since you almost never see a hard knockdown.

A buffer window has been added (of an unspecified amount) to increase the input window so that even links that are 1f on paper behave as something like a 3f link.

There seem to be more target combos in general but I wouldn't expect any sort of canned universal combos ala SFxT. They seem to be moving away from Jabs and Shorts as combo starters.

@starvinggamer: I believe that delayed wakeup is in and there are different versions of it now. That or there is a get up quickly option and a roll.

@perfidioussinn: Excellent post, I agree with just about everything suggested. In terms of the tutorial, I haven't played Skullgirls but I really like the Dojo in KI. However, you can only use Jago. I think allowing you to select the character you want to go through it with would be incredible - you'd be able to get an excellent undetstanding of each character's basic tools, movement, and combos. If SFV did something like that I feel like it would open up the doors even wider for competitive play.

Regardless, I'm very excited for this game, and I'm not a big SF4 fan, or SF fan in general (I'm more of a Tekken and MK guy). They've done a great job promoting this game so far.

@shoguns_decapitator: So far there's no 360 inputs in SFV, even Birdie's command throw is just a half-circle forward. I'm okay with this change!

I don't really understand why anyone would want an unblockable to have an easier input motion, I'm sure they'll stick with 360 motions for the out and out grapplers.

Simplifying the garbage that is Vega and Blanka's DB, Delta PPP/KKK motion would be a good start.

@shoguns_decapitator: 360 commands are cool if they incorporate an "anti-jump" buffer like Skullgirls has. I have no problem doing 360s in that game.

Skullgirls also has command grabs that are just QCF+Throw, which is awesome.

While I'm totally fine with Capcom making the game more approachable to newcomers, some of your examples would be awful to deal with in game.

360s don't need to be performed after a jump, you can buffer them into dashes, wakeup, blockstun, or other moves like s.hk without leaving the ground. You don't even need to spin the stick in a full circle to get them, it's more of a 270 with the shortcut. If you took SF4 as is and made Zangief's Ultra 1 a single 360 he would have a 400+ damage extremely fast special move, which would make him almost impossible to deal with for some characters.

If Oni's air dash was done by inputting a dash in air he would be near impossible to anti air effectively, doubly so since he can cancel the air dash into a tatsu to re-change his jump arc. As it is the time spent doing the quarter circle prevents him from flying around the air like a marvel character.

Is it really so hard to hit two buttons for delayed wake-up? A number of top players just mash since the window to input the command is fairly generous on a knockdown.

Character Customization seems fun when you mess around with it in training mode, but in practice it makes everybody online look super stupid. At worst you get SFxTK where a bunch of players made their characters wear incredibly distracting bright neon outfits that made them difficult to look at and space attacks correctly.

I guess I should end by saying that I agree with a lot of the more broad things you are saying here (although your use of "our" and "we" leaves a bad taste in my mouth). Better tutorials and training modes along with easier execution are things I'm all for, but people should try to understand the reasons why things are the ways they are in games like SF4 and how requested changes could impact the overall gameplay of a new fighter like SFV before demanding that Guile's sonic boom should be a quarter circle instead of a charge move.

@jesna: So far there's no 360s in SFV, which is good. But like I said, they'd be acceptable with anti-jump protection which would not hurt the game at all to add.

There's no air dashes or Oni so far, so that's good.

Delayed Wakeup doesn't seem to be a thing in SFV yet so that's good.

I played SFxT for hundreds of hours and the neon outfits aren't that bad if you are competent in the game. Doesn't make it difficult to space attacks correctly.

I used "we" and "our" because I asked a bunch of people for their opinions on this, as I stated in an early paragraph.

I don't have an issue with charge moves (and there are still some in SFV) and Charlie's Sonic Boom is a QCF so that's good.

@perfidioussinn: I have to disagree with alot of your ideas for simplifying the game.

The 360 commands are easy to do without jumping as they made them a lot more lenient in sf4 as opposed to say sf2.

Changing the ultra command grab to single 360 would be nuts, the only way to counter balance this is to make the ultra do very little damage otherwise it would be way to strong.

1 Frame links are tough but thats part of the fun of the game if you ask me, once you get to the point where you hardly ever miss one it is very rewarding.

I see what your saying about making the harder combos do more damage but you would have to make the damage variation significant and therefore probably break the game. If the auto (easy) combos do very little damage then whats the point of them to begin with and if they do alot of damage then the hard combos would break the game by killing the opponent of in two combos. If you kept them closes together then it makes little sense alot of the time to go for the harder combo where you could instead get the guaranteed.

I dont know, ive put in over 3000 hours into sf4 and love the complexity but I do understand that a lot of people arnt willing to put in the time to get over the hump.

@hassun: Off of soft knockdown you can do nothing, quick rise, or back roll

The thought of a 720 critical arts being a 360 instead is crazy... The thought of being able to walk up command grab CA would be insane... They'd have to nerf the damage a ton or make it not instant anymore. You'd have to be able to jump out of it on reaction. Which would make it useless like balrogs, e.honda, ibuki and Guy's command throw ultras. You'd only be able to use it to punish specific things or gimmick out people.

All your ideas seem like you didn't put much time into SFIV(no disrespect). But I do agree with you on net code, training mode and 1 frame links. I love doing 1 frame links but they can definetly go.

Edit; in theory I want character customization, but I think of SFXT and the later Tekken games and realize how that can quickly become a nightmare

@projectino:Pretty much agree with you, just let us have better netcode, better training mode (though SF4's training mode of 2015 is alright by this point), and easier/rarer 1 frame links, would be good.

@starvinggamer: Man I really like delayed wake-up, going to be a bummer if that's not in.

@fredchuckdave: Dude like nothing causes a hard knockdown any more. Bison EX Scissors. Cammy Cannon Spike against airborn opponents maybe. Can't think of anything else off the top of my head.

Not saying there isn't plenty of stuff I'm forgetting, but it's not throws, not sweeps, not most combo enders iirc. The whole reason they implemented it, to blow up set play, seems completely moot in SFV.

I want Balrog to stop being a charge character. Because I hate charge characters. That is all.

Scorpion: Because it's about goddamned time.

Bring back the ST reversal window.

There's a lot of good ideas here.

I too would love to see 1 frame links, become 3 frame for everything. Combofiend said 1f links are still there, but "easier" to do...which sounds confusing as hell. A 1F link can't be easy unless you mean I can now mash and it will take the input if it was done in that 1F time even though I slapped it 20 times before and after.

Online netcode being ace is critical. I hope the beta next month will go down to help get us closer to Killer Instinct quality, if not better.

I feel the game does need more in a variety of ways and to not wait for DLC to do it. The simplest of which is to give each character at least 2 Critical Arts to pick from, and then you can add the third as DLC a year after release for the entire cast or something. It adds the right layer of depth without complexity. Hell I'd even go so far as to give each character more than one V-Skill. Parry for Ryu is a great one, but Cammy's Spin Knuckle for example is more for situation based match ups. If she had a choice for something else perhaps it could again, add depth to the game, without over doing complexity.

One thing I noticed is that I really don't like the lightning effect on Ryu for his V-trigger. Lightning doesn't fit Ryu at all. He's not a Mishima.

@zlatko: They can make 1f links easier to perform by adding an input buffer.

If they add a 5 frame buffer, that means you can input the button for the next move during the last 4 active frames of the current move and it'll still come out within the 1 frame window and it'll still combo.

Still can't input late, obviously.