As the first major showing for Street Fighter V, Capcom spent last week’s E3 2015 conference talking up their product to a variety of publications. The folks at Dengeki Online recently caught up with producers Tomoaki Ayano and Koichi Sugiyama to pick their brains about the next installment of the classic fighting franchise, and learned some pretty insightful things on their goals for the title.
Everything going into Street Fighter V at the moment has been put there to accentuate the individuality of each character. Because V-Skills don’t expend any meter, they can be used to further set someone like M. Bison and his iconic Psycho Power apart from the other members of the cast. Much of the dictator’s design has been reworked for this new installment to highlight that aspect of his background, and the rest of the roster, too, has some piece of themselves boosted to give them more personality.
That being said, players can also personally add to that uniqueness with the way they play. Using V-Gauge for something like extending combos or keeping it stored to bust out a V-Reversal at an opportune moment all depends on how a competitor approaches certain situations, and each character appears to have numerous options that will be handy for a variety of playstyles.
As for how they’ve chosen the current crop of characters, the producers mentioned that they have tried to find a good balance between mainstays–like Ryu and Chun-Li–and those that didn’t appear in Street Fighter IV. So far, that’s led to the return of Charlie Nash and Birdie, and we may see more surprises down the line. Don’t expect a cast as large as Ultra Street Fighter IV, however; while they are considering community popularity as they choose characters, Capcom is also taking the game’s competitive aspects into account and trying not to overwhelm players with too many choices.
Although Street Fighter V currently appears to run at the same speed as its predecessor, many have noted that the title simply feels faster, and that’s no coincidence. According to Ayano and Sugiyama, increasing the upcoming title’s tempo is one of their main goals, and one of the ways they’ve done so is to put emphasis on offensive play. This can be seen in the higher damage output as well as input changes for moves like Sonic Boom, which is now a quarter-circle motion instead of a charge.
Finally, they said Capcom has no plans to hold arcade location tests at this point in time. While this doesn’t rule out the possibility of an arcade version being released, they are content to hold a closed beta in Japan in order to gain feedback from the community as well as test their proprietary ‘Kagemusha’ netcode and server load.
Street Fighter V is scheduled to launch sometime in spring of next year. If you speak Japanese, you can check out the entirety of Dengeki’s interview here.
Source: Dengeki via Jun-ichi11, translations courtesy of USD
