So you like early access games. That's fine. Most people don't love when an early access game comes in a box not labeled as such.

I get the feeling very, very few casuals ended up picking this game up let alone sticking with it. That's a pretty bad sign, especially since Capcom seems utterly unable to do anything about it

@starvinggamer: Yes, I could for the 15 minutes it takes to get bored with the braindead AI in one round fights.

The professional scene is not all that matters, far from it. It's a good thing that Capcom really nurtures that scene and does a decent job of supporting the community. On the other hand forgetting about the thousands of other players who really enjoy the single player content, is really shitty.

They had achieved a good balance with Street Fighter IV, it's sad to see they just can't keep the ball rolling with the same level of quality as in the recent past.

In an era where Mortal Kombat X comes out with a story mode (had it at launch, how weird), multiple challenge towers, challenge modes, individual arcade ladders, the crypt for unlocks and got criticized for being thin on single player content, it's inexcusable to launch a full price game so short on features as Capcom did.

Personally the only problem I had at release was the lack of challenge mode and the price. What sucks is that the negativity surrounding SFV is putting people off that would otherwise have a good time with the game. The modes that casual players would enjoy are now in the game, but they will now avoid it all together.

@rafaelfc: The crypt is no different from any unlock menu except it's 1000x slower to navigate and sometimes you're not allowed to unlock certain stuff because that's compelling gameplay?

@mike: people are jumping on a bandwagon without actually thinking for themselves and that's unfairly detrimental to the game's image. enough people aren't encouraged to try out what is a fun fighting game at core and that also hurts the number of players and eventually its longevity. not that everyone should go out and buy it, but it's just poisonous to the game and everyone ends up thinking, "why even bother?"

i've also had fun with the survival mode being a sort of surrogate for arcade mode, but it would still be nice to see arcade mode make its way in eventually.

Let me ask you this. If I told you that you'd get Story Mode, Training mode and Arcade mode now but you couldn't play online vs or local vs until 6 months from now, Would you feel the same way?

Good or bad it took a lot of effort to make and it was functional day one, as opposed to Street Fighter V which launched without an in-game store and had to offer DLC characters for free to make up for it.

Even if you don`t count the crypt it still has all the challenge towers, arcade ladders and that jazz, which is still a lot of content.

@starvinggamer: Didn't they miss some character release windows and the story mode?

@sloppydetective: They missed Ibuki's window, but made up for it in my book by releasing Balrog early. The story mode was on schedule

The reaction to what was missing and how long it took to implement has been so massively overstated. Count me as one of the eye rollers every time this site brings it up.

I honestly legit feel bad for the dev team. Forced into spending all those resources supplying angry people with content they wont give two shits about in a week while everyone and their brother loses their mind every time the rest of the game manages to come out, however mildly late it's forced to be.

@slag: I'd love to see the fighting game that was somehow designed 1P modes first and characters second...?

Yeah I feel like SFV's issues have been blown out of proportion. It's not like it's Battlefield 4 or something. Yeah the servers were wonky the first few days, but after that they were pretty stable for most people. Honestly I feel like if SFV launched fine and kept it's content schedule perfect people would still complain because there's no arcade mode. Maybe people are just getting more and more offput by weird/imperfect launches, but SFV is far from the worst of them and it's a fantastic game.

There are a ton of games out there, and a ton more I missed and could go back to check out.
Waiting a few extra months or even a year for a completed version of a game is fine if you ask me. If they went the Paragon route and sold SFV as what it was, which was a game still in development, then maybe the story would be different.

An update comes out a few days late..."Ugh, Street Fighter V continues to disappoint. What a damn mess this game is. The fighting is pretty good but EVERYTHING ELSE is a damn garbage fire. Capcom is killing itself."

Just copy/paste a few times and you have the bulk of this games press coverage.

As someone who hasn't gotten into fighting games yet, I would really, really need the stuff that SFV didn't launch with. I have played maybe 2 fighting games in my life and they were street fighter 2 turbo and Mortal Kombat 2 on my SNES when I started my collection last summer. One thing those games needed were training and tutorial modes, as well as challenge modes. Those kinds of things would go a long way for a casual person like me. It would be much easier to have that stuff in game and have it be re-playable than to have to constantly refer to move lists that I printed out from a game faq. When SFV launched, I had no reason to buy that game, based on my needs as a basic skill level player. I'll never be a pro at fighting games but I have friends who play them and I would like to at least not be garbage, at launch SFV lacked that and I'm not sure it has what it needs quite yet. But that's just my casual player viewpoint.

@laxbro19: SFV... has those modes now? That said while you can practice the basic moveset doing that, you're not going to probably learn too much from that. I haven't played the game in a while myself, but I understand the GB folks run a voice server and play together, if you party up with them they'll show you the ropes in a relaxed, casual and friendly environment; not to mention maybe point you in the direction of some helpful videos.

A couple evenings with people who know how to play fighting games showing someone new the ropes will have that person be far ahead of people who spend years only playing singleplayer, both in mindset and strategy.

I knew the game was going to be bare-bones and pretty much online only for quite a while after launch. Didn't bother me. The last time I played fighting games .vs the CPU with any regularity was in the days before we had online play.

All that said I wish it had launched more complete so the game could have been more successful and had a bigger player base, at least initially, but I think we are past that stage at this point. The people that buy these types of games for story mode and arcade mode, I'd be willing to bet if you broke it down, you would find that on average those aren't the type of people who stick with the game for terribly long. So, yeah, sucks for them, but in the big picture of the competitive community? I think it's a pretty minor loss.

Really?

They released the game with half the features of the previous one (including some that are a staple of the genre since the beginning), the servers were busted for weeks and they kicked you out to the menu (even on single player content), the store was and still is a mess, they keep missing dates, everything from the lack of ragequit to the way they handle character select speaks of something designed for the competitive scene...

I get that, since the core fighting is fine, and they ironed out some of the issue, many people give them a past now, but at the time it came out at full price, it was a mess. Tekken Revolution was closer to a fully feature, stable fighting game, and it was free. And yes, you can tell me to stay with it, but that is not how it works. If a game misses its launch window for weeks, no amount of post release support will pick up its slack.

I feel you OP.

At this time it does seem like the quality and content of the game are irrelevant. SFV is a punching bag for many, and will continue to be until something else shiny (but not so shiny) comes along to distract them. This is only mildly annoying to me all in all, like people who always talk about the same band when they hang out or whatever. Er, is there nothing else to talk about :P ? Regardless of the "Joe Public Feeling" the pro scene has been really exciting for me to watch, and SFV has really amazing community content coming out on YT, etc that I am enjoying a lot.

Street Fighter is among the most legendary of franchises, and in our hearts, I believe we want to see it not just do well or be great, but be excellent. Number 1. I believe Capcom was never going to live up these exceptions. Street Fighter IV too would have crumbled under this weight but its release timing (historical context) was just a huge bonus in that regard. As a SF fan since II I never cared much for IV, whatever content it had. Played for a month then bounced. Didn't get back into it until its last year, and that was as a spectator only.

SFV for me has really been a perfect game, and I've never been so dedicated to a fighting game in my life. So, yeah, it worked out for me. I understand the perspective of "release has not been great" for gen. pop but I guess I have to say... I don't care? At all? I mean, honestly, so long as Capcom has enough money to keep the servers running, patch the game periodically, and drop a handful of characters every year, I will be happy. It's really not relevant to me if there 10 million people playing the game vs 2 or 3. At this rate I get matched up every night in ~10 seconds on average, and experience minimal lag when I do. Doesn't that sound OK? I'm not the best player (as some of you know) but I'm having a lot of fun online. Personally, I have no complaints about the game. Would more content be nice? Would better x or y be nice? Sure. But I'm very happy right now. I don't boot up the game and frown. I look forward to it. I mean shit, here I am on a work trip in the UK, and all I can think about is how rusty I will get in six days! Damn!

I kinda mixed on the whole thing. It was rough when it came out, so i just didn't play it for a couple of months. And now its better now so I'm fine. It kinda sucks that they didn't do single player stuff ,but I also don't think it was ever an option. They obviously knew their audience if the EVO numbers are anything to go by.

@hermes: Missed one date, accelerated another to make up for it

That's what most of it comes down to.

While there is an element of piling on, most of the reception is deserved. Not sure what's hard to understand about casuals finding the features lackluster. VS might be the core experience, but good single player content can be important ramp leading casuals to dig in an get more serious if done correctly. And honestly, for all the talk of wanting to be more friendly to beginners it still doesn't have much in the way of tutorials. Yeah there's plenty of internet resources but it's silly when you have to look up even basic concepts outside the game. Edit: Actually, that's unfair. It does have a character specific tutorials, but trying to look up is not as easy to find as it should be, UI in these games are not my favorite.

Personally, even though I've played a fair amount of fighting games over the years my modest skill have atrophied quite a bit in adulthood and my internet sucks, so I mostly play against AI these days. Not everyone who plays a fighting game is going to play it as a lifestyle game. Unless you're actively trying to cater to a much small audience, which is strange since SF supposedly reclaimed its title as the big granddaddy of the genre, I don't see how this rollout can be anything but ill-conceived. Which doesn't mean you can't enjoy what's there, but you only get one first impression and all that.

Street Fighter 1, you could also argue that the recent MKs are built around that as well. They are certainly rare though.

That wasn't really what I was trying to get at though.

The point I was trying to make is that many FGC people I've talked seem to be pretty blind to the perspectives of people who aren't FGC but like fighting games and when they hear it they dismiss it out of hand. The reason for the response is in this thread and countless others being said over and over of people saying the game didn't give them what they wanted, and it's just brushed off as not mattering because the people saying it weren't FGC.

The responses they seem to get is stuff "you just need to practice and get good" (not necessarily on here), all of which is 100% true if you want to become good at fighting games. But a lot of people don't want to get good at fighting games and have no intention of ever doing so, but they do want to play them a little bit. Maybe learn enough to know the basic systems. And that's something you have always been able to do with Street Fighter since the Arcade days until now. 90% of the people I ever played against in the Arcades were like that. Street Fighter is an incredibly well known brand, touched by tens of millions of people, even if it doesn't drive humongous sales numbers.

You shouldn't totally cave to all the wants of players like that but last I checked their $60.00 spent just as far as someone who is hardcore. And furthermore for the pro scene to be a viable e-sport, You need fans. No viewers, no ad money, no winnings. And best way to get fans is to make the game accessible for ppl to pick it up and play it causally some. If you don't know/understand the game at least some, it's hard to be a fan.

It's a problem plaguing Major League Baseball right now, Kids aren't playing youth baseball anywhere near the numbers they used to and thus America's Favorite Past Time recedes further out of the public eye every passing year. That's one reason you see MLB out there with programs like their R.B.I. program aimed at introducing inner city kids to the game. MLB knows their potential future customers need to be playing the game today to become fans.

There's different ways you can make a game accessible and different tactics, but pretty much all the successful MP games generally have ways of doing so whether it be training, vs AI modes and/or just making it free so there's not real big downside to getting stomped your first times out. SFV not only didn't do any of that, they more or less aggressively showed how little that stuff matters to them (and consequently all potential non FGC customers) by not shipping with any of those features and in some cases like Arcade to never include it at all in lieu of shipping to meet a tournament date. Capcom of all companies should know better than anybody out there, they would get this kind of reaction from some of their fanbase. They originated this genre, they know how rough the online experience can be for casuals and they had to have known how many people buy these aren't only FGC. If it was just FGC types there wouldn't be so many successful SF branding and multimedia merchandising of their iconic characters. Capcom took a franchise with mainstream appeal and turned it into a niche one by essentially telling non-Pros to eff off.

So can you blame people who have bought and played Street Fighter games for years feeling pretty put off by the whole thing when the game series they always played acts like it no longer wants them? Especially when other MP games bend over backwards to cultivate that audience? I'm sure some reactions were overblown, but implicit message Capcom sent was clear.

So I 100% get why the OP is bummed out, I am too (who didn't want SFV to be amazing?) , but I think in this case the reaction is unfortunately pretty fair. Capcom really screwed up, there was zero reason this had to happen this way. The whole thing reminds me a lot of the Xbox One launch which also had a decent core product but made a ton of bad messaging, feature priorities and marketing decisions that pissed of gamers off with good cause.

Don't have time to read the thread, so maybe my point has already been made far more effectively than I'm about to make it.

It's fine (even desirable!) for Capcom to want to shift SFV into more of a LoL-style esports direction where the emphasis is on skilled gameplay rather than the usual arcade/story mode casual fare -- but they needed to provide the tools to help players play like that. Fighting games are hard to learn to play properly, Capcom needed to strike with a scheme for addressing that at launch. They needed elaborate interactive tutorials and trials that teach and entrench good tactics on a compelling (addictive?) treadmill that makes everyday players get high on getting more proficient at the game, the way the pros do having long ago cleared the entry barrier that does most beginners in. Capcom did none of this. As it stands, Capcom sent out a full-priced incomplete game with serious flaws, without any real strategy for satisfying, let alone retaining customers.

But also, the causes of this mess seem to have been canvassed pretty well in plenty of other discussions on the topic. The situation seems like a failure of scheduling and funding more so than a failure of direction.

@fnrslvr: Tutorialising how to play a fighting game is damn nigh impossible within the game itself and not a person explaining it. Skullgirls and VF4 probably came the closest to succeeding at it, but even they had some nonsense thrown in there, e.g. "here's how to do an air combo!"

Could the game have used more/better tutorialisation? Definitely. Would it have somehow been able to teach people how to play fighting games? Probably not, aside from how to block, jump, do a super, and so on. At most give you an idea of when you should do these things, but the real nuances of fighting a player and not the game come from being shown or taught by a real person, and from experience.

Full price ($60) game that was nothing more than an an early access client with "COMING SOON" on lots of sections.

Full price season pass (characters only) with extra DLC released at the same time (including items for characters in the season pass) not covered under it for exorbitant prices ($3.99 costumes and stages EACH - $68 for the first round of all character costumes, minus $4 if you had a preorder costume already), no bundles available.

Character costume colors unlocked only via "survival mode" (made more difficult and a step backwards from prior models) .. including paid for DLC costumes that require runs through the same survival mode for each to receive colors, used only as a timesink to "keep people playing" (extra costumes have less colors available in total)

Training mode / tutorial that's useless for any new player coming into the game (See: Guilty Gear / KI) Also a step backwards in features from the previous game with no online training mode

Multiplayer servers that cannot function at high player capacity (Just look at the latest patch last week. Servers were unusable after everyone logged in to see the 'new content') The only reason servers hadn't been kicking people off since the release date is because there's probably only a single digit percentage of players that played on a regular basis. Ridiculous load times from matchmaking to match start. "Here comes a match" -> load --> player stat vs player stat intro -> load --> character intro --> match --> win/lose outro --> load --> win/lose point loss/add --> load --> rematch/main menu wait for next matchmake.

Missed release schedules, and complete silence from the developer for long stretches of time leaving everyone wondering what's going on. I give them no pass for only missing June by "1 day." That's July, not June. If they want to release it in July, say that. There's absolutely no way they were still working on the patch on June 31st trying to be ready for the first because they're always having to wait for console cert's, so there's no reason they had to miss June, it was only out of spite.

SFV is a great game for watching and playing matches online (assuming you don't care about lag), though as to whether it's good playing at a high level that seems to be a very divisive issue for top level players. It's pretty terrible at basically everything else imaginable, but it did manage to avoid having DLC characters, sort of, so that's a mild success.

To be clear most fighting games are terrible as anything but the above two things and it's only recently that most of them started being fleshed out in more interesting ways, NRS raised the standard of expectations from casual players and games like Xrd matched or surpassed those expectations, SFV falls horribly short. So it basically comes down to: Do you like SFV as much as SF2, CVS2, or KOF 98/XI? Those are the main comparable games with similar features, and I think almost universally the answer is no. But all of that said it's still extremely fun to watch, eventually Daigo/Tokido/Infiltration et al. will die of old age and then players like Sonic Fox and Phenom will be there to pick up the mantle.

@belegorm: Nigh impossible? It's not that crazy impossible to explain how to play a fighting game.

Look at what Guilty Gear does. It sets up situations for the player to understand and practice. It covers basically all the common situations you would find yourself in during a match and ways to deal with it. The tutorials don't have to be the end all for a new player to become tournament ready.

If you happened to watch the Street Fighter V basics videos that gootecks made a few months back, he basically covers the same concepts.

@belegorm: I don't think fighting game devs have come anywhere near tapping the potential for tutorial modes. I think KI has the technology in place with its Shadows system to set up lessons and trials in which they have you practice certain skills (e.g. anti-airing, frame trapping) against natural human-like AI that is biased towards being susceptible to said skills, so I want to see IG build a mode around that in KI. I don't think there is any excuse now for Capcom not implementing Shadows-like AI from the outset in SFV (really anyone making a modern fighting game should be doing this), so they should've been able to do that too. It's also worth looking at the extra credits episode about teaching fighting games -- dedicating your story mode to gradually teaching proficient play makes a lot of sense. (Even if that's something that obviously wasn't coming together at launch in SFV, even if Capcom went down this path.)

I don't buy this idea that a fighting game cannot teach players how to play fighting games properly. But if it were true, I think releasing SFV at full price without a whole lot of casual content was clearly a mistake. You're basically putting a product out there that 99% of players simply cannot get any reasonable use out of, because most can't afford to put months (probably ~6 months for me when I started with KI) into running around online, scraping together enough strategic knowledge and grinding their execution hard enough to reach that baseline level of proficiency necessary to engage in the kind of content that is locked away in the intricacies of character movesets.

@dkwildz: Didn't realize $54 of stuff for $30 was "full-price". Maybe you want everything to come easy, by I like the idea of hard-to-earn cosmetic stuff. And if you're going to condemn Capcom for being 1 second late on content without crediting them for being 30d23h59m59s early on another piece of content then clearly you just like complaining about SFV.

@starvinggamer: if i felt that I was actually receiving content worth $54 (or $30 for that matter) it wouldn't be an issue, but all we get are 6 characters ($9 each full price, $5 with the pass) and (so far) only 1 stage that game with Guile.

And regarding stages, what are they spending time on? Things like this new beach one that's already banned at all tournaments , like they completely forgot what some of the abilities in their game are.

And why should they get a pass with Balrog? If Ibuki wasn't ready, but Balrog is ready early, then what the heck are they doing? They never announced a specific release order, so why not swap the, and keep themselves out of the hole to begin with.

I enjoy playing the game, but Street Fighter doesn't get a free pass just because of legacy. You may not be bothered by the issues people here bring up, but that doesn't make us 'complainers' any less right, since these are all individual opinion.

I still cannot believe this game launched without a fucking lobby system. So mind-numbingly stupid.

You keep saying things were released early. Ibuki was originally planned for May (and was late), and the story update was planned for June. Balrog was originally planned for July. He released on July 1st, which makes his release "on time", where the other two mentioned were late.
Nothing has been early thus far.

People keep minimizing the content that was there at launch (online fighting in a fighting game, the single most important chunk of content in any game), overdramatizing how long other content wasn't there (comparing it to early access? really?) and undervaluing the current state of the game (somehow it being awesome now doesn't matter I guess?).

At this point it's just too cathartic to lambast Capcom for this supposed disaster, as in dunking on larger companies is our new national pastime and Street Fighter is the most recent punching bag.

"It's a mess/garbage fire" is 2016 in one phrase.

@cloudenvy: Well technically it did launch with a lobby system, they were just limited to 2 players. Sucked, but it did still allow for private matches.

@zella: Come on now.

@dkwildz: Stage designers are not the same as gameplay designers. Who cares if they made a dumb fun stage that isn't tournament viable? It's a fucking stage. It's not like their skills at modeling an environment would suddenly translate into intricate game balance and moveset design.

And Balrog being ready July 1 does not mean he was ready May 31 by any stretch of the imagination. When it comes to DLC characters, balance should take precedence over anything else. Ibuki is an immensely complicated character that would be too easy to accidentally make overpowered. It doesn't surprise me at all that she was delayed and when you compare it to the way NRS destroyed their competitive scene by rushing out half-baked and grossly overpowered DLC characters, delaying Ibuki by a month was definitely the right choice.

And if you read what I wrote, you'll see that the only point I labeled anyone as a complainer is when they chose to hang their argument on technicalities rather than the effective reality of the situation.

I think we can safely close this thread now if all it's going to be is people citing their disappointments or concerns with SF V and then a couple of other people defending the game and Capcom or telling other people how wrong their opinions are. This is going nowhere.