Hey GB people! I'm looking for opinions on SFV as it is on sale right now. I've gotten the impression that Jeff and Jason are very cold on this game after being higher on it earlier this year. What about you all? Is it a game that is worth jumping into at this point? Any help is appreciated - thanks!

Better now than ever, really. That game's had lots of issues, but most of them are related to it being released too early. Over the year they have added a bunch of stuff to it that makes it more like a fully featured release. So if you like what it looks like and it's cheap, give it a go. I have been playing it since release, but almost exclusively as a multiplayer game. I love it, but I really like their style and characters, both gameplay wise and in design. If that doesn't do anything for you, I think it's a bit slim on content, and there are other fighting games out there with stuff like objectively better frame delay and load times. For me there's not much of an alternative that I know of. There are lots of different types of fighting games out there, but if I want to play a Street Fighter-style game that isn't 8 years old, it's either this or 1 character only-Skullgirls.

Don't get it if your normal way of playing fighting games is to do the Arcade mode a bunch, because they still haven't got one. Also, maybe don't get the season pass, assuming they are still selling that. You can grind out Fight Money(their in-game currency) pretty easily by playing a character's story mode, watching demonstration videos and the like. You only get characters and a costume for each with the season pass, and you can just buy the characters with fight money.

Honestly not really. The netcode is terrible, I've played it in three countries on three excellent connections but it's all over the place. It also has one sided lag at times which is very frustrating to deal with. The 'cinematic' story mode isn't very good and not at all as high quality as the stuff Mortal Kombat has been doing.

If I were you I would wait until next year, some big announcements are coming with regards to season two characters and the post Capcom Cup rebalancing. If they don't fix the netcode I'm done, it's the worst fighting game netcode I've used in a few years, even SFIV was better (because it was more consistent).

I'm thinking Capcom have given up with fixing the online because since February they haven't altered the netcode at all nor have they admitted one sided lag is a problem, and the connection bars and country flags don't work in the lobby search.

Excluding all of this, Street Fighter V is just not as good as Street Fighter IV. As a spectator and a player, I don't get the same hype. There's a lot of upset about the state of SFV's metagame right now, it really is very boring compared to SFIV. Check the comments on this article for a look at that.

I say this as someone that has over 6000 hours in Street Fighter IV and spent over $1000 in Japanese arcades playing, so to say I am a big fan of this series is an understatement. I am indeed very salty about how Street Fighter V has turned out.

Depends on a whole bunch of factors imo. What do you want out of a fighting game? Good tutorials, lots of content, great online multiplayer? Then no, I probably wouldn't recommend it. Want a still solid fighting game, the largest playerbase, and don't mind a somewhat uneven online experience? Then sure.

While this is still the best answer when it comes to SFV, it's a shame that all the problems haven't been fixed or fully addressed almost a year into its life. The tutorials are barebones as is the single player story mode, the trials have been basically the same since Vanilla SF4 and online isn't quite there yet for a game from 2016.

And if you want a fighting game with more single player aspects to it... Might I suggest Guilty Gear Xrd - Revelator? The amount of sheer stuff Arc System Works crammed in there is absolutely insane.

Jason sounded pretty down on it during a recent Bombcast, but it's ~$20 right now. It depends what you're looking for.

Honestly I'd wait for Tekken 7.

Depends on the price and how much you are into fighting games or street fighter specifically. Never did much online with it as i never got good enough, bought it at launch have about 70hrs in total.

its a great core game with a lot of bad things around it.

if you have friends to play its worth 20.

if not I dont know

Get Guilty Gear Revelator.

The GB fighting game community is most active playing SFV so there are definitely people to play against. Of course connection quality depends on where you're located. I'm on the East Coast and have had very few online issues playing with duders from across America and Canada. I've heard it's a nightmare if you're in Australia. If you like fighting games and want people to play with, SFV is probably your strongest option right now. We do have a few people who also play BlazBlue and Guilty Gear but those sessions come much more sporadically.

Also as a fighting-ass fighting game SFV is one of my favorites.

This. The GBFGC is fairly active for SFV, we'll have a lobby going a few times a week and currently have semi weekly tournaments. There are players from all skill levels too. SFV is centered around the core gameplay and online, there is single player content but if you are looking for something more in depth like MKX then SFV still does not have that kind of content (and likely never will). If you are looking to play with people online or locally then I 100% recommend SFV, if you are looking for more of a single player approach then it is a much tougher sell.

I think it's worth it. People complain about Netcode but I play people in France (in NY) with minimal lag all the time. If you play on WiFi you'll have problems but they can only do so much. The game is fun and the mechanics are strong. Single player is Meh though. If you're a fighting game fan or a Street Fighter fan I would definitely get it, no question.

If you got a local scene or some mates to play it with locally, can't recommend it enough. The actual fighting is a hell of a lot of fun, the cast is diverse and there's an OK amount of content now (though the quality is very inconsistent from mode to mode.)

If you're looking to play online and you aren't in America, Japan or more populated European countries I find it hard to recommend. Even if you are from those regions you're still rolling the dice on whether the game decides how connections will behave for you. As @wynnduffysaid, the netcode is still terrible even if you have amazing connection speeds with very low packet loss the game can still lag tremendously. A lot of people have looked into the netcode and it really just falls well behind other games that are implementing rollback netcode like Killer Instinct or Skullgirls. The worst part is Capcom haven't addressed a single complaint about the netcode, they've continually ignored every single issue people have brought up which indicates no intention of trying to fix it.

I think so, it's by far the easiest fighting game to get into that has a lot of people playing, with the lowered execution requirements you can get into the strategy and depth that makes fighting games rewarding.

I've heard a lot of people have had netcode problems but as someone living in the continental US, I never had many issues. Also they added much of the extra stuff that people were griping about that wasn't in at launch.

@ivdamke: I've played it in both South Korea and Japan, the netcode is still terrible even there; it's truly an amazing feat!

To an extent, but explain this to me:

Me and a friend are located within 200 miles of each other . We play USFIV and there is no lag, 5 green bars. We try and play SFV, it's unplayable, extremely laggy. 2 connection bars. We cannot play SFV together yet USFIV was perfect and continues to be.

As I said I've played the game in three countries on three very fast wired connections and the experience remains the same. A garbled inconsistent mess with obvious one sided lag at times. When the other player is going for mixups and playing normally while I'm watching them warp all over the screen you know something is seriously wrong with the netcode. Over half of my matches are riddled with either some lag or an unplayable amount of it.

Capcom's recycled SFXT rollback netcode is such a mess. USFIV and Xrd's delay based netcode are infinitely better. The funniest/saddest thing about all of this is that USFIV has around the same input lag online than SFV offline (in a good connection). Xrd has less input lag online than SFV offline.

Just because they have a French flag doesn't mean they are in France. I couldn't even get good connections Japan to Japan/SK a lot of the time. Wired connection of course, not that it matters with this one sided lag BS.

Removing IP assigned country flags is one of the stupidest changes Capcom made. People being able to choose any flag is annoying, what's more annoying is you can only choose it once so I'm stuck with an Asian flag atm.

@wynnduffy: No idea. I'm no netcode designer. All I can say is I've never had that experience with a player that wasn't on a different continent, outside of the occasional freakout. Sucks that you've had so many problems. Hopefully they were able to find someone on their skeleton team to fix these problems when S2 hits.

Also citing input lag is kinda meaningless, unless you believe Capcom balanced their game by just plugging in frame data without actually playing it.

If you want a game to sink hundreds of hours in, then it's worth it as it's far and away GOTY for 2016.

If you're just looking for a fun game to play around with for a bit, it's probably not for you unless you have a community of like minded individuals to play with.

Yeah the one sided lag thing was actually discovered in beta 2 last year. I'm not sure if they are going to change anything but I am hopeful. I know it's a widespread thing judging by the amount of uproar on the Internet about the netcode. I mean that is pretty obvious anyway as three connections, three countries...definitely something wrong.

The main problem is inconsistency. When SFV is working properly the netcode is great, but there's too many cases where one round is laggy and then it's OK the next, or the obvious one sided lag and of course extreme teleporting and rollback. I've never had any extremes like this on FightCade playing Third Strike with the rollback netcode, which is developed by like 5 people...

I think the input lag is a problem, V feels noticeably less fluid than IV and games like Xrd to me. It doesn't bother me that much because nothing in V is very hard to block (unlike IV with much harder mixups, deadlier overheads) and combos are easy too. It's just a little ridiculous to have more lag offline than a lot of games online though.

A lot of people don't consider small input lag differences but if you played the PS3 versions of UMVC3 and SFIV, they felt extremely bad compared to the 360 and PC versions even though it was only a 2-3f difference.

I think so, the fighting feels better to me then any other fighting game I've played in the past few years. Main thing is if you have friends or a community to play it with.

Ehhh. I hate to say it, but I haven't really played the game. It's been inside my PS4 for three months now and I've launched it once. And don't take that to mean that my PS4 is seldom used, I play Hitman on it nearly every week. I bought it near launch and played a little, but it hasn't held my interest and I love the genre. It's probably the game purchase I'm least satisfied with this year.

I guess I'm saying I don't think it's worth it. The game definitely feels okay to play, but when compared to IV, it feels a little off. It's more fully featured now than at launch, but that isn't really saying much as it was pretty barebones then.

@wynnduffy: Me and a friend had the same problem. We used to play quite a lot of SFIV on PC against each other without any lag whatsoever. But when SFV came around it was unplayable. Turns out that it was his router (some shitty technicolor or thompson router that was provided by the ISP) Seems like SFV doesn't play nice with certain routers. Why this is the case i don't know but that was the reason for our problems at least. I had a spare NetGear router that he borrowed and it's been flawless ever since.

On topic though: If you enjoy playing online against other people and don't necessarily need an arcade mode or a story mode as high quality as MK9/X i think you should buy it. Maybe the mechanics is a bit simplified compared to SFIV but it's super fun to play and the general feel of the game is amazing.

If you want to get seriously competitive about it and are not afraid of losing 15 matches online in a row, or have a bunch of friends to play with locally, then yes it's worth it.

If you're more on the casual side and would enjoy more the single player portion and would prefer the online to have more similar minded folks, then steer clear of it.

We thought it might be a router thing too, so we set our computers to be in the DMZ (all ports opened) but it was exactly the same. I don't understand, it happens with two of my friends! IV works great, V is unplayable. Crazy. Hopefully they sort the netcode but if they don't I'm gonna stick to the recently announced arcade version when it comes out.

Not happy at how simplified it is compared to IV but I think the game is getting more interesting with the DLC characters so I'm hopeful it will be more entertaining in the near future when more are added and it gets rebalanced (Capcom Cup has 6 Chun and 5 Ken players...zzz).

I'm curious about your opinion. From the outside looking in is there anything about the game that you find attractive? On the other hand, what has pushed you away outside of Jeff and Jason's comments?

@technician: I have always enjoyed fighting games of all kinds - one of the first games I ever played was MK on the SNES, and have played Virtua Fighter, Street Fighter, Tekken, DOA, Soul Caliber, Injustice, and BlazBlue series ever since. I really came to this realization that I have enjoyed fighting games more than I thought I did only recently, and realized I haven't sunk deep in a fighting game since Soul Caliber 4. So - I really enjoy a lot of different fighting games and styles, and SFV has been somewhat on my radar all year.

At launch, it was a hard pass due to the lack of content - I figured I would wait until summer and see what happened. The Bombcast was pretty instrumental in influencing my opinion - hearing about how high they were on the game from a mechanical level kept me optimistic about it - but then as the year went on, it felt like they got colder. Thus, the origin of this question!

But for the TL;DR, here's what has kept the game on my radar, and what has kept me from buying so far:

Good:

-Hearing how good the game feels

-My perception of a huge global player base online

-Graphics

-Opportunity to sink time into the game and dive deep/continually get better

-Optimism of Capcom support for years

Bad:

-Bombcast comments

-Price (until now)

-Having no one around me to play with

-Unsure about the overall content offering in-game

-Competition (Guilty Gear especially)

I figured I would turn to the GB community and so far I have not been let down!

@yeahbrother: Revelator was on a pretty good sale last I saw, might as well buy both? :P

@starvinggamer: .......I've thought about it haha. But - I've heard both of these games are of the nature where you need to really deep dive into characters/systems to be competent, and I'm afraid if I get both, I'll never be good in either haha

If you want a good multiplayer fighting game, it is absolutely that. If you're happy playing online you'll always get games and the connections seem mostly pretty good (for me at least). It's certainly at its best with people there in person, but then that's true of any fighting game.

If you're after something you can spend time with single-player modes and story, I'd steer clear. There are plenty of other better options for that (you can probably pick up games such as MK X pretty cheaply if you want something with a strong story mode and solo challenges to dig into). A lot of the anime fighters are great fun too. As a straight multiplayer fighter, though, I'd say SF V is simultaneously one of the more accessible and also most entertaining titles going right now.

Thanks for the response, I added some comments in bold. Overall based on the responses it seems like there are more positives than negatives and I think you should get the game; the only thing that might cause problems would be the competition since there is some good competition out there - you mention Revelator but the new BlazBlue is pretty nice as well, not cheap though. I haven't tried Nitroplus Blasterz and that game is going for $20 at some places as well so that would be another option. KOF14 is an alternative as well but I'm not seeing a lot of deals for that game.

I know people are saying to wait for Tekken 7 and as a big Tekken fan, I've been waiting for years. It's slated for "early" 2017 but this game just seems to not want to come out. I'll believe it when I see a release date (and even then I'd doubt the initial date). You could wait for that game, but you might be waiting for a long time.

That's what I decided to do. Man it's a good looking game.

Unfortunately it's not that huge, be prepared to wait a while at times for matches. This is more a problem with the matchmaking system being slower than SFIV as opposed to not being a lot of players around.

There's around 500,000 CFN accounts which paints a bit of a grim picture of how many copies the game has sold, and a fraction of those are active. Considering you have to make a CFN account when you boot up the game it seems a little bit alarming to have only 500-600k.

Here's hoping they can speed up both the match seek & loading times in 2017.

(and even with these caveats, it still has more players than any other fighting game)

I wouldn't bank on Capcom supporting it through to 2020. The game hasn't sold well at all and if 2017 doesn't turn things around I could see support being phased out quickly. It's going to depend on how much money Capcom are making from eSports as the game definitely isn't raking in cash.

I wonder what the total number actually is, they say they "shipped" 1.4 million, but that doesn't mean anything about what actually sold. I wouldn't doubt it sold under 1mill total, however i could see them making a bunch of that money back with their dlc sales so I wouldn't totally disregard them supporting it until 2020.

@technician: you have been so helpful! I went with SFV and enjoyed the little time I've spent with it so far. It really does feel good - I'm excited to get to know the characters and find one to main. I plan on finding GB networks/lounges/groups to play with as well.

Cool! Glad to hear you like it so far. In terms of GB networks/lounges/groups they are all outlined in the first post of the Fighting Games General thread, but here they are for reference:

• Discord - https://discord.gg/nGXFQg2
• PSN Community - Keep Fighting and Nobody Explodes
• Steam Group -Keep Fighting and Nobody Explode (at no point during creation did they warn me the "s" was going to be cut off...)

Honestly it really pisses me off that they still haven't said a fucking word about the broken lobby searching or the one sided lag problem with the netcode.

Since February 2016, connection bars and country flags in battle lounge search often don't load. This means you have to constantly join lobbies and leave to try and find a good connection/someone from a nearby country (because the bars/flags DO work when you are in a lobby).

It's a nightmare, it takes me over half an hour to find matches sometimes because I keep joining people in Asia or the US instead of Europe. Sometimes I wanna grind out sets in battle lounges instead of ranked to learn characters but this awful system makes that frustrating.

The one sided lag is a whole other controversy that shouldn't be an occurrence in a fighting game, or any game really.

11 months later and Capcom haven't acknowledged either of these issues. One sided lag was found in a beta in 2015.

Tweets like this from Capcom calling people critical of the game 'haters' is nonsensical. Capcom USA have been doing an abysmal PR job.

Street Fighter deserves better than these clowns.

@wynnduffy: Are you in the Discord? There's some good EU/UK representation in there, could be easy to get some lobbies going if you are having problems finding matches.

People keep telling me to do that, so far I've been relying on my friends who are all around my level (super plat). I find the netcode to be really inconsistent and frustrating though. A lot of cases of one round being fine, then extreme lag etc. I really hope they fix it. Even MKX has better netcode after the XL patch. -_-

@wynnduffy: We do have a couple of super plats and plats in there although I think they are mostly US players. There are some ultra and super gold EU players in there so they probably wouldn't be too far below your level.

As for the netcode I do agree that it isn't always great and has room for improvement. Although that tweet you linked was calling people haters, I think the confidence could be a good sign. Let's see if they back up their words with actions.

SFV was a mistake.

All praise SFV.

GLORY BE TO GOTY 2016!