'The game is really balanced' - Capcom doesn't foresee any Street Fighter 5 characters needing specific adjustments or tweaks

Posted by John Velociraptor Guerrero • June 22, 2016 at 7:34 p.m. PDT • Comments: 169

One of the main goals for Street Fighter 5's development team was and is to create a roster of characters that are all viable, and to do so without having to tweak them after initial release.

If you've played through the life of virtually any fighting game, you know that character adjustment is a staple of the genre. Sometimes initial designs are just too powerful, and this leads to more frustrated complaining than competitive excitement. (The code to play as Old Sagat in Super Turbo is ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ jab/fierce.)

Even the more modern Street Fighter 4 saw five different iterations, each of which had a handful of nerfs and buffs to most every one of the game's characters.

The goal is not to make every fighter exactly the same, but rather to make every fighter a viable contender. We're hoping to avoid having the same three characters win every tournament, and really, SF5 hasn't disappointed in this avenue.

We asked Peter "Combofiend" Rosas at E3 if there were any specific moves or characters he as a Capcom representative is looking at tweaking, and the short of his answer was:

"No, not in particular... the game is really balanced."

This is in regards to both strong and weak SF5 cast members. Now of course the community has some pretty popular opinions on tier list rankings. Chun-Li and Ryu are widely regarded as the best, while F.A.N.G and Zangief are very consistently regarded as the worst.

Be that as it may, it's erroneous to think we've completely unpacked this game already. Even titles like Super Smash Bros. Melee are still evolving after 15 years on shelves.

There are some sources of information we can look at for the time being, and it seems that's exactly what Capcom is doing.

"When we look at our pool of online data, we notice that character win ratios are about even across the board. We look at tournament results, they seem to be fairly varied," said Fiend.

"Right now the meta is still developing, characters are still being developed, and we're watching that closely. But at this moment in time, we're pretty pleased with how the entire game is shaping up."

Talk around the marketplace changes very quickly. Recall how overpowered people were calling Guile after we first discovered his insane V-Trigger combos? Yet now many are saying he's sub-par, and players like YOMI|Dieminion are concentrating on building up other characters for tournament play.

Which mode of thought is true? Maybe neither, but Capcom's decision to revisit game balance only once every year is a refreshing take on the modern fighting game approach.

Allowing meta development to run its course allows for dedicated members of the community to really delve in and discover answers to seemingly unbeatable moves and characters.