Why Capcom is hitting the reset button and rebuilding the world’s favourite fighting game
In December 6, 2015, thousands of Street Fighter IV fans descended upon San Francisco to unite in their hatred of Blanka. Admittedly, there was also the small matter of Capcom Cup, a tournament in which the best players in the world battled for the biggest prize pot in Street Fighter history. But the Brazilian mutant has long been despised by all but the handful who play him – and, of course, Yoshinori Ono, Street Fighter’s relentlessly cheery series producer, who takes a tiny Blanka toy with him wherever he goes.
There’s always been something odd about Street Fighter’s beloved producer-cum-mascot travelling the globe with a figurine of one of its most reviled characters. There’s something even stranger in the fact that Blanka, who’s spent the past half-decade being snapped by Ono’s phone on tournament stages, at trade show booths and in airport departure lounges, is absent both from the 16-strong Street Fighter V launch roster, and the six additional characters who’ll join the fray in the 12 months following its February release.
“Well, with Street Fighter V we’re going to have multiple ‘seasons’, so maybe there’s still a chance he’ll turn up later on,” Ono tells us, with the first of many laughs, in a hotel room a short Blanka hop away from the Moscone Centre, the venue Capcom Cup shares with Sony’s PlayStation Experience event. “No one’s outright told me ‘no’ when I’ve suggested in meetings that we add him. They just say, ‘Well, maybe some other character can take his place?’”
Blanka still made it to Capcom Cup, of course. He sits on the table between us, and will later be photographed in Ono’s now-traditional tournament shot of a crowd throwing Shoryukens in unison. But Ono still has reason to be cheerful. On stage during Sony’s PSX keynote presentation, he unveiled FANG, the last of the 16 characters to be announced and one of the few Capcom had managed to keep a lid on until the proper time. The Street Fighter V marketing plan has seen more leaks than a Glastonbury Portaloo. It’s been a year-long comedy of errors that began the day before last year’s PSX, when a Capcom Japan staffer hit the YouTube publish button 24 hours early and revealed Street Fighter V to the world. Sony’s big PSX announcement had been scuppered by a single errant click of a mouse halfway across the world.
“I was the only person from Capcom Japan that came over [to PSX] for the announcement,” Ono says. “Everyone around me was from Sony. I can’t tell you the type of feeling – the crazy, horrible feeling – that was inside me at that moment, in that room. Since then, if a character has leaked, or some information gets out early, it’s nothing. I feel like I’ve become this Zen-like monk. ‘Oh, a character has leaked? OK, whatever. Let’s move on.’”
Other Capcom staff prefer gallows humour to pseudo-Buddhism. With a weary roll of the eyes, one recalls what they refer to as the “double leak”, when Brazilian fighter Laura was outed ahead of time by screenshots on one continent then, once they’d been taken down, a video on another. Many of the leaks originated in Europe, prompting SCEA CEO Shawn Layden to take Ono to one side and offer some blunt advice.
“He said, ‘I’m gonna teach you how to handle marketing,’” Ono recalls. “‘You can’t give any assets to any of the European outlets. You just can’t!’ Then, a few weeks later, just before the Brazil Game Show, someone at SCEA pushed a button on YouTube…”
Capcom’s marketing plan – a 12-month, round-the-world parade of character and feature announcements – stood no chance in an era where the press are hungry for scoops, and dataminers scour beta filesystems and swap their discoveries for Reddit upvotes. Ono and Capcom have already changed tack, announcing the post-launch roster in one go at PSX instead of gradually throughout the year (though the characters had already been discovered, naturally). Many would be disheartened at the sight of one finely laid plan after another going up in smoke, but Ono, ever the optimist, casts the leaks in a more positive light.
“It happened with Street Fighter IV too,” he says. “It’s not an issue with the marketing team not being buttoned up – they’re doing a great job. But when information falls into the hands of the media, or people outside the company, they get really excited. They can’t help themselves, and end up saying something. It shows how much they love and appreciate Street Fighter – they can’t help put the information out there. I look at it as the fate of the brand. It’s just something we have to live with. And with Street Fighter V, nearly everything was leaked. They must be getting really excited!”
They have every right to be. Ono speaks frequently of “hitting the reset button” with Street Fighter V, and Capcom is doing so in such a way that takes Ono’s travelling companion off the table, at least figuratively. Blanka is a nonsense character, built not on style or complexity but an almost grotesque level of tricksy gimmickry. And for all Street Fighter IV’s brilliance, its life as a tournament pursuit has been dogged by little quirks in the combat system that turned out to be, if not game-breaking, then game-changing.
A certain series of attacks could set up a move that was as good as impossible to block. Many characters could set up a ‘vortex’, whereby a knocked-down opponent would get up into a three- or four-way guessing game that, if they chose wrongly, would see them knocked down again and the whole sorry dance begin anew. A button technique known as ‘plinking’ (a contraction of ‘piano linking’) tricked the game engine into doubling the input window for tight links in combos. And then there was the ‘option select’, where players would rapidly input several different moves, the battle system magically picking the best option for them depending on what the opponent was doing. High-level Street Fighter IV play was absolutely, like the best fighting games, a battle of reactions, skill and wits, but it was also about exploiting the flaws in the system to the fullest.
Peter ‘Combofiend’ Rosas knows this only too well. He was a tournament player before joining Capcom. He began as a community manager but rose quickly to a design role on Ultra Street Fighter IV, ironing out some – but not all – of the battle system’s kinks. With Street Fighter V, his job has changed again, combining design duties with an associate producer role. On the tournament scene, Rosas was renowned for his aggressive, stylish play; he played the game brilliantly but honestly, known more for his fancy combos and stunning comebacks than his ruthless exploitation of a given game’s quirks. On Ultra SFIV, he was a fixer, doing what he could to address some deeply ingrained problems. His influence on the very foundations of SFV’s design is immediately apparent.
“All I really wanted for this game was that it be fun and accessible,” he tells us. “When I think of the old days, when I played Street Fighter I just popped in a quarter at the arcade and beat up whoever was standing there, right? Street Fighter IV got pretty complicated; Street Fighter III was extremely complicated. I wanted to take it back to a simpler time, and the development team agreed.”
The solution, in part, involves some deep-lying technical changes. Option selects and plinking are gone; back-dashes are no longer invincible. Hard knockdowns, which in SFIV prevent you from standing up after a sweep or throw and are the basis for most of the game’s dirtier setups, have been all but removed. The result is a more honest game at the highest standard of play. “In Street Fighter IV, what’s high-level about it is your ability to prevent the other guy from doing something,” Rosas says. “You do that through option selects, plinking, and other system-wide things that assist you. It’s like, ‘Oh, I swept you, and now let’s just play option select – whatever you do, I have an answer for it, because the game’s just picking the best thing out for me.’ That’s what Street Fighter IV is currently. With V, it goes back to me versus you, all the time.”
But even before you plumb the technical depths of SFV’s battle system, the change in style is apparent immediately. This is a far quicker, more dynamic game than its predecessor. Damage output is much higher than in USFIV, meaning even beginner players can feel powerful, while the tournament crowd are discouraged from getting the lead and then sitting back, since one hit could change everything. Looking across the cast, there’s been a clear shift away from charge characters like Guile, with quarter-circle motions preferred to forcing a player to sit still for a second or two to charge up a special move. Chun-Li, for so long a charge character, is now based on quarter-circles, with even her Lightning Legs, previously activated by rapidly mashing a kick button, remapped to the more reliable and combo-friendly Hadoken input.
And there’s a clear benefit to the game as a spectator sport. Fighting games may be the most naturally readable of all eSports pursuits – two big characters and two health bars chipping down as blows connect – but there’s plenty of SFIV that’s baffling to the uninitiated. “We’re trying to remove anything that, if you’re watching the game, just seems unnatural,” Rosas says. “Why is that guy back-dashing? Why are attacks going through him? Why is it that guy’s flashing and he ignores hits? A lot of that isn’t intuitive to a viewer, or a beginner. We wanted to make sure that everything that happens makes sense.”
After a fashion, anyway. This, after all, is a game in which men in karate suits summon plasma from the palms of their hands, a wushu fighter can do a four-second-long upside-down spin kick, and a biker powers himself up by eating a doughnut. But fantasy is fine when the systems are a little more grounded in reality and, in any case, Street Fighter V’s roster tells its own story about Capcom’s intention for the game. After 25 years, the company has finally made Ken feel like more than a Ryu palette swap with a few stylistic tweaks: he’s fast and aggressive, his moveset built around his need to close space at speed. Ryu is more restrained, slower but harder hitting. Indeed, perhaps Capcom’s greatest achievement is that every one of Street Fighter V’s 16 launch characters feels, and plays, very differently to the others.
“The concept of Street Fighter V has been to reset the entire playing field for everybody,” Ono says. “We want people to come back to a level playing field, whether they were a pro player in SFIV, a series fan, or someone who’s completely new to the genre. That led into how we designed the characters. Look at Ken – he has similar moves to what he’s had in the past, but he plays quite differently. Chun-Li’s commands have changed so you’re like, ‘Wow, this has changed a lot.’ But her DNA is still present. That’s what we’ve done to reset things – we’ve changed them, but they’ve kept their DNA.”
Much of that is, as Ono says, a matter of special-move design, as has always been the case in Street Fighter. But the real point of differentiation between cast members comes from two new systems, the V-Skill and V-Trigger. Both are easy to perform, in tune with the drive for greater accessibility – the former by pressing both medium attack buttons, the latter by both heavies. V-Skills are single moves that can be used freely throughout the fight, and provide a highly useful tool tailored to each character’s playstyle. Ken’s is a flighty forward dash; Ryu’s an SFIII-style parry. Zangief flexes his muscles and can absorb a single hit, while Cammy has a spinning backfist that passes clean through projectiles. V-Triggers, meanwhile, are governed by a meter that fills as you take hits, and when activated either powers you up for a while – boosting damage output and movement speed, perhaps – or gives temporary access to a powerful new move. Unlike its closest equivalent, SFIV’s Ultra Combo, the V-Trigger isn’t guaranteed to batter your opponent’s health bar if it connects, or leave you wide open if it misses. Instead of an all-or-nothing Hail Mary, the V-Trigger gives you the potential to turn a match in your favour – but requires that you first learn how to use it.
There’s something of a contradiction here. V-Skills and V-Triggers are simpler to perform than the system-wide Street Fighter mechanics that preceded them, but they also have more complex applications. This is a game that’s friendlier, certainly, but also requires more study. “It’s a matter of figuring out how to use the tools that are presented to you in the most efficient way,” Ono says. “People will get a sense very early on of how these moves work and what they’re supposed to do, but what’s really going to change as you grow and learn is understanding how and when to do them. In football, if you can do a stepover, that’s great – it’s an advanced technique. But if you’re just doing it in the middle of nowhere, there’s no point to it.
“In fighting games, probably the biggest stress is in making the character do what you want them to do – putting the move on the screen that you really want to see. We’ve worked really hard to make that hurdle as low as possible. It’s relatively easy to do what you want to do, but if you want to get good, you have to really put the effort in. To be able to really maximise what you do with these systems, you have to research, and study how to use them.”
Ono talks about football an awful lot – his desire for a ‘level playing field’ is no mere figure of speech. “There are tons of people that love that sport – millions and millions of people watching and playing it. But in terms of people that can reach the elite level, someone like Messi, it’s a very small percentage – maybe one out of 200 million. We have a similar situation with Street Fighter. We have about eight million copies of SFIV out there, but to make it to the level of someone like Daigo Umehara? It’s a very small percentage. But just like with football, you don’t have to be a pro player to enjoy playing the game. You might just be playing in the park on a Sunday with your friends. It’s a matter of us providing a place for you to do that, whatever your skill level. Even if you’re not Messi, you can compete in the same game Messi is playing in.”
Street Fighter V’s online component has been built around this concept, though Capcom’s recent poor form at keeping secrets means Ono only speaks in vague terms about the mechanics of how it will work. In addition to new netcode, Street Fighter V employs an overhauled matchmaking system to ensure beginners aren’t put up against killers, and vice versa. The in-game Capcom Fighters Network will let you follow and watch match replays featuring your favourite players. And outside of the game, Capcom will provide educational material to help players climb the skill levels – to outgrow the Sunday league pitch then climb the divisions, perhaps even become the next Messi. Fighting games have never been good at tutorials – either not teaching enough, or bombarding the beginner with more information than they can handle. A brief tutorial added to the PC and PS4 beta suggests Capcom is leaning towards the former, with a framework both within and without the game to provide greater understanding of how committed players can improve.
In other words, Capcom finally intends to do by itself what others have done for it in the past; instead of being buried in Twitch archives, YouTube feeds and forum posts, advanced tutorial content will be Capcom-badged and easier to find. It mirrors the approach the company has taken with its official tournament, where it has built a corporate framework around a pre-existing grassroots scene. The winner of every major tournament on the year-long pro player circuit gains automatic entry to the 32-player Capcom Cup, with ranking points earned across the season used to define seeding and wildcard places. Attracted by the largest prize pool in Street Fighter history – with $120,000 for eventual winner Ryota ‘Kazunoko’ Inoue – the best players have travelled the globe all year, and the overall standard of play has rocketed. The process has even uncovered a Messi or two. Rosas points to Keoma Moutsatsos Pacheco, a previously unheard-of Brazilian player who was the only non-American or Asian to successfully defend his home ranking tournament from the influx of foreign fighters, and finished seventh at Capcom Cup.
The process has been successful, but was also long overdue. While Riot Games was flying pro League Of Legends players around the world and Valve was crowd-sourcing eight-figure prize pools for Dota 2 tournaments, Capcom sat on its hands while small scenes across the world did all the work. “The fighting game scene has existed for decades, thanks to the passion of the fans themselves and without a lot of Capcom involvement,” acknowledges senior product manager (and the man who hands out jumbosized Capcom Cup cheques) Matt Dahlgren. “We felt we weren’t growing as fast as some other games and felt like a lot of events, while really awesome, were stepping on each other’s toes. We’ve inserted ourselves into that equation, trying to work with everyone so we can tell a better story throughout the year.
“When I first joined Capcom I would have these philosophical conversations with Seth [Killian, designer on SFIV] about the best way to manage this. We had a lot of concerns that, if we were to get involved, we could end up ruining the scene. There’d be red tape, legal restrictions, companies trying to make a profit. So we made a concerted effort to stay away. Now we’re in, we’re not stamping out these passionate tournament organisers; instead we’re making partnerships with them, trying to facilitate growth. We want things to grow, but to keep our culture grassroots, respecting how the scene came to be in the first place.”
Capcom Cup itself, however, is rather more corporate, with prominent Capcom branding and, this year, taking place as part of a Sony consumer show. Yet its new home at PSX speaks to the unique power of fighting games – this was not an event solely for fighting-game fans but for everyone, and even absolute newcomers can take their seat in the crowd and get swept along in all of the action. “Looking at a MOBA or an RTS, sure, there’s a lot of fun in joining a group and winning,” Ono says, “but is it fun to watch? It’s very hard to follow what’s going on in those matches, especially if you’re coming in at the middle.
“With fighting games, you have a lot of information on one screen, and it’s very easy to understand what’s happening. And it all happens in a small amount of time – for a football or baseball match you have to sit down for a couple of hours, but you’re not necessarily glued to the action 100 per cent of the time. It’s about those little moments: the scramble before a goal, or when there might be a grand slam. Focus suddenly spikes. With fighting games, those spikes are constant.”
Ono’s constant references to football when talking about Street Fighter are telling. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine the maker of any other eSport drawing such comparisons: for all that Dota or LOL are enormous, they’re also impenetrable, needing to be played in order to be properly understood. But it’s also a matter of ambition; of the game Ono wants Street Fighter V to be. One that does away with a lot of the overly dextrous complexity of the genre to accommodate the absolute beginners, ensuring that the game is fun on a casual level, like a Sunday kickabout. One that makes the high-level game a battle of skill and tactical nous, rather than system exploits. And one that makes it easier than ever to grow as a player.
“I want people from all different lifestyles, cultures, demographics and skill levels to be able to jump in and play, and explosively grow the playerbase,” Ono says. “Hopefully, in five or ten years, when we’re sat here again about to announce Street Fighter VI, we can talk about what actually happened. I can say that we did it – we were able to bring in all these people from all these different backgrounds, and we’ve got brand-new pro players. If I can say that, I’ll be super happy.” And if he’s got Blanka in there, he’ll be even happier.