I am unable to muster any excitement for this. SF4 and 5 demonstrated, painfully, that Capcom is just adrift and doesn’t really know how to make a SF game anymore. And this trailer, for what little it reveals, looks like another step in the wrong direction.
After Capcom broke it’s promise with SF5 that all characters would be readily unlockable through in-game methods without additional microtransactions, I just don’t feel I can trust them again. They’re going to make me try to spend triple digits just to get the complete roster. (Technically, you can unlock the full roster via in-game methods, but the cumulative cost is so high relative to the ways to earn the needed points that it’s a practical impossibility.)
Characters in the early SF games had, well, character. They were a collection of mildly offensive, yet endearing national sterotypes who were for some reason engaged in street fighting. The new characters in SF4 and 5 (and even 3) are mostly bland and forgettable. And the overall vibe has shifted to a brash, commercial, in-your-face MMA thing instead of street fighting. (It’s not like the street fighting thing ever made much sense, but this MMA stuff is just offputting.) Unfortunately, this trailer seems to double down on the MMA vibe.
Gameplay is probably where Capcom is most lost. SF4/5 headed very far in the direction of what David Sirlin calls “uncontested skill.” It’s all execution and no strategy. Just hit your opponent with something for which the appropriate block can only be guessed, then lard on an enormous amount of undefendable damage when they guess wrong. Lather, rinse, repeat. All that stuff started out as unintended artifacts of game mechanics in SF1/2, and it made sense to lean in to some of them a little bit in later games (e.g., the old 3-hit L->M->H combos were a small reward for not button mashing), but they reached the point in SF4/5 where they ate the rest of the game. Another complaint is the centrality of the half-baked special mechanics that have dominated every game since SF3 (parry, focus, V-shit) but have never actually been good enough to deserve appearing in the next game. Again, by making this junk so central, Capcom eroded what used to be the core SF gameplay down to near nothingness.
For my money, the series peaked at Alpha 2.
