Street Fighter 6 Beta and the Direction of the Game

Understanding the Street Fighter Series as Capcom's Reaction to Criticism

For the last two decades, each Street Fighter game has felt like a reaction to the criticisms of the preceding game. This is not a bad thing! I'd much rather have a developer be responsive and try to improve things for each new iteration of a series. I think this is a useful framing though—when trying to understand where Street Fighter is going, it's important to understand the path the series has taken.

In Street Fighter III, people liked the idea of parries but were put off by the execution needed to use them effectively. Parries also largely eliminated zoning from the game, which feels weird given the Street Fighter series invented the fireball. People also didn’t like how Capcom largely abandoned legacy characters, only bringing back Ryu, Ken, Chun-li, and Akuma.

Street Fighter IV tried to hit each of these things like they were working through a bulleted list. The focus attack mechanic was intended to be a more user-friendly parry that didn’t invalidate zoning. They also leaned hard into legacy characters—at launch, the arcade version of Street Fighter IV had the entire cast of Street Fighter II with just a handful of newcomers alongside them.

SFIV was well-liked and played an important role in growing the fighting game community, but plenty of people had issues with the game. For most of the game’s lifespan, set play was very strong—knock downs would give the attacker an extremely strong mix-up situation, and if successful, the mix-up would lead to another knockdown and it would loop into itself. This escalated as people discovered unblockables (which Capcom tried to address through adding delayed wakeup).

While set play was strong, SFIV could feel like an overly defensive game in some situations. The crouch tech OS really weakened normal fighting game offense. The game also had no input buffer, and you had characters like Sakura who were pointless to play unless you could consistently hit one frame links. For a game that was trying to be more accessible, this felt out of place.

Street Fighter V is easy to understand through this lens of reacting to the previous game. SFIV had zoning and lots of people don’t like zoning, so characters like M.Bison and Nash in SFV have tools to negate projectiles completely. Capcom added an input buffer so that there were no one frame links. They got rid of the crouch tech OS so standard strike/throw offense could exist again. They also had multiple wake-up timings for the defender to use to weaken set play.

Of course, SFV had plenty of criticisms—for the first chunk of the game’s life, the characters and their game plans were very homogenous, and for the most part, their game plans were pretty simple and straightforward. This got a lot better with later seasons of the game (especially after Yoshinori Ono left Capcom). 

Most of the SFV’s issues weren’t related to the actual mechanics of the game. At launch, it was missing lots of standard fighting game features and modes. The game had terrible input delay and has ongoing netcode issues. To their credit, Capcom stuck with the game and addressed nearly every issue (with the exception of the netcode), but the game’s rocky start really set back the growth of Street Fighter as a competitive staple in the fighting game community.

Street Fighter 6—The Next Step on the Path

Street Fighter V launched as a $60 retail game, but it was a terrible value proposition. I really do think it was intended to be free to play, but the idea was scrapped at the last minute, so Capcom ended up charging full price for something that didn't justify it. This presented kind of a fork in the road for Street Fighter 6. SF6 could either actually be free to play, or it could be really full-featured at launch to justify its retail price tag. Capcom opted for the latter, which I talked about in a previous post.

I think the big question at this point is where SF6 is headed mechanically. Because people’s criticisms of SFV were largely about things outside of the mechanics of the game itself, SF6 feels like the first Street Fighter title in a long time where Capcom has had a blank slate, without a strong need to design around complaints about the previous title. They’ve taken a kitchen-sink approach and tried to include mechanics from a bunch of previous Street Fighter titles, and it's difficult to predict where the game will end up as a result of this.

The Drive System

The drive system is a bunch of different ways you use and interact with the drive gauge at the top of the screen (right beneath the health bar). It has six chunks, and you start each round with a full drive gauge, so you immediately have access to the whole toolbox. If you run out of drive gauge, you go into burnout, where you lose access to all the drive system mechanics, take chip damage, and attacks against you cause additional blockstun. Let's look at the different ways you can spend this meter.

Drive Impact

Input: HP+HK

Cost: 1

Compare with: Focus Attack (Street Fighter IV)

You do an attack that gets two hits of armor from the first frame you activate it, so it will blow through lots of attacks. On hit or block in the corner, it can lead to good damage since it causes a wall splat. If it hits as a punish, it causes a crumple and you get a combo mid-screen also.

If your opponent is going crazy using this, there are obvious counters. You can do your own drive impact (the second drive impact will always win since its armor will last longer). You can also neutral jump and then punish with a jumping normal as you fall after the drive impact has whiffed. At lower levels, people probably aren’t going to react and punish it consistently though, so this mechanic seems like it’s shaping up to be The Scrub Killer™.

Drive Impact makes certain “standard” Street Fighter stuff like Ryu cr.MK xx hadouken much weaker (since you can drive impact between the cr.MK and the hadouken). Even at higher levels of play, it may remain important, beating certain pokes (on reaction or prediction), invalidating certain specials (being able to Drive Impact through on reaction), etc. It also becomes scarier against an opponent in burnout, since they can no longer counter with drive gauge mechanics like their own drive impact or parry.

Drive Parry

Input: MP+MK

Cost: 0.5 (more if you hold the buttons)

Compare with: Parry? (Street Fighter III)

Parry is kind of two separate things that each need to be considered on their own. 

Regular parry: generally, parry will not affect frame data when compared with blocking. If Chun-li’s st.MP is +1 on block, it’s still +1 on parry. What parry does do is cover all possible blocking options. With parry, you don’t have to guess whether a move is a cross-up or whether it hits high or low. You also can block during parry recovery, so you can never be punished for attempting a parry unless your opponent throws you (it’s likely pretty low risk against characters without command grabs).

If you time your parry well so that it parries something in the first two frames of activation, you get a perfect parry. Perfect parry has just one frame of recovery, so you can punish tons of stuff. When you perfect parry, your opponent also can’t cancel their attack into anything, so your punish is guaranteed.

Because perfect parry has just a two frame window, I think it will take time for even high level players to begin to consistently take advantage of it, but I think it could end up eventually being game-defining. For example, if you can perfect parry on wakeup (you have to time it properly, so this isn’t easy), you can punish a lot of meaties. Similarly, if you’ve blocked something where your opponent is +3, you can attempt to perfect parry them trying to take their turn with another quick attack with their plus frames. Perfect parry has the potential to really disrupt how we think of turns in a Street Fighter game.

Drive Rush

Input: →→

Cost: 1 (from a parry) / 3 (from a normal)

Compare with: FADC (Street Fighter IV)

Drive rush lets you cancel a parry or a special-cancellable normal into a fast and far-moving forward dash. If you do a normal out of drive rush, it gains additional frame advantage. In the SF6 beta, nearly every normal is negative on block, so drive rush seems key to prolonging pressure, though this is balanced by its three bar cost.

Parry into drive rush costs a lot less meter though, so you can do parry (whiff) into drive rush for 1.5 bars. This means every character in the game can spend 1.5 bars to have a pretty crazy mobility option. There is also some slowdown during drive rush, so you can do this to have more time to visually assess a situation and react to stuff (similar to how you could use YRC in the Guilty Gear Xrd series).

Overdrive

Input: Your normal special move input + one additional punch or kick

Cost: 2

Compare with: EX moves (Street Fighter EX/III/IV/V)

Street Fighter games have had EX moves for a while now, where you could do an enhanced version of a special move. For example, EX fireballs usually have quicker startup/recovery and have two hits, so they can blast through a regular one-hit fireball. In previous titles, you used a chunk of your super gauge to do this, but in SF6, it’s tied to the drive system. What’s new here are the meter management considerations rather than the actual utility of the moves (weighing EX move use vs. other potential uses of drive gauge).

Drive Reversal

Input: → HP+HK

Cost: 2

Compare with: Alpha counters (Street Fighter Alpha), V-Reversals (Street Fighter V)

While blocking, you can do an attack to push your opponent away to gain some space. They’re negative on block (universally -8 maybe?), but on hit, they knock your opponent down and reset to neutral. Because the input for Drive Impact is HP+HK, if you attempt a Drive Reversal and you aren’t actually blocking anything, you’ll get Drive Impact instead. You could potentially OS this deliberately, but this also might mean using your meter on something you didn’t intend.

Conclusion

It remains to be seen how all these systems tie together and what high level play will ultimately look like, but I think this is shaping up to be a very different game from previous Street Fighter titles. System mechanics seem much more at the forefront, so character-specific stuff might end up taking a backseat this time around. In general, it seems like a more complex game than we’re used to (especially when compared with something like launch SFV). With so many things being tied to the drive gauge, resource management is going to by key (I like this sort of thing enough to have made a whole video about it, but I'm not sure how it'll land with the playerbase at large). Obviously I'm also not sure how much will change between now and release—this will be an interesting(embarrassing?) post to revisit 6+ months after the game actually launches.