Why did so many people hate Street Fighter V?

Street Fighter is a beloved franchise worldwide, but not every single entry has been a hit. Street Fighter V specifically, has had quite the journey. Most consider it a good game now, but it certainly was not always that way, in fact it was met with much derision and hate in its early years, so lets talk about some of the reasons why so many people hate issues with SFV!

0:00 - Intro & SFV starting roster
2:46 - Lack of Casual Content & esports
6:41 - Crush Counters & V-Trigger
11:15 - Things improved over time

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#gaming #streetfighter #sf6

[Rooflemonger]

SFV is straight up a good game now, and the transformation its had over the years has informed Street Fighter 6 which for the most part has near universal praise going on at the moment. However SFV was a very rocky boat at the start, and it garnered a lot of criticism and honestly, quite fairly so. So lets talk about why SFV had so many issues in the early days, and what was done over time to help fix it!

[JCintheBCC]

I jumped in at Champion Edition, and, honestly, never knew about all this until I got more into the FGC. It's like finding out about your partner's wild history years into the relationship.

[AgelessObsession]

As someone who was deeply involved in my local scene during the SF4 days and fell off completely at the start of SF5, one thing I think this video overlooked was how offense changed.

SF4, infamously, had a lot of ways to escape pressure. FADC shoryu was unpunishable until Ultra, backdashes had a ton of invincibility, and any grappler could blow you up with a 1 frame grab if you were overzealous. In addition most Ultra combos were also reversals, and so the potential of someone blowing you up for 'smart' pressure was constant.

SF5 corrected for this in the other direction, perhaps overly so. Command grabs had actual startup now, so mashing them in pressure was no longer an option. Backdashes were counter hit punishable. And infamously, season 2 removed the invincibility from non-EX shoryus across the entire cast.

This meant that when someone forced you into the okizeme game, finding a safe way out was extremely difficult. In early seasons this was even worse because there were throw loops that allowed the attacker to make their grabs meaty, so even mashing a jab would still lose out.

It was also a very lopsided guessing game. The reason 'take the throw' became a memetic piece of advice is because if you got stuffed out of your throw tech, you were guaranteed to eat a full crush counter combo that would end with you in the exact same position.

This was all happening alongside other changes that made the neutral/poking game a lot less prevalent. Fireballs in SF5 were much weaker than the previous title, along with most characters getting some sort of anti-fireball option in their kit (Cammy's backfist, Gief's flex, Rashid's roll etc). Even if you managed to play footsies for 80% of the round it was very easy to lose one interaction and then get vortexed to death by characters like Mika or Laura.

A lot of this got ironed out in later seasons by making buttons less plus, adding proration to crush counter combos so they were less devastating, and adding V-Shift to give the defender more ways to interact. Offense is still very strong, but more attacks have lingering hurtboxes that allow whiff punishing to be more consistent and viable. It's still not my game of choice, but I think it's a huge improvement over where it was on release.

tl;dr surely he won't grab me the fifth time in a row-GODDAMMIT

[gentlemanjared]

They did absolutely nothing to promote Necalli. He's supposed to be this terrifying eater of souls and he just jobs and jobs. Then isnt even the boss in his own debut.

[Carlitonsp]

On the roster size: KOF14 also released around that time. It literally had a roster of 3 times the size of SF5's. It also had character endings for every team, which SF5 didn't have at the start.

[ngubod]

Im really surprised you didn't mention anything about the netcode. Or maybe it was already super obvious. For me it was the biggest issue when I got the game because there was nothing to do offline so the only thing to play was ranked but there was the whole 7f of input delay online AND the horrible netcode AND the constant server disconnects that just crippled the game. That sound the game makes when someone RQs used to plague my sleep.

[Lestakeo]

A few things I think I didnt hear in the vid ;
- the game came out without legacy controller settings. Stick users coming from PS3 and 360 had to buy a new one in order to play.
- for at least 6 months after release the invite system did not work. I couldnt create a room and invite my friends.
- the game came out with a ton of delay input, especially on PS4, which made some moves unreactable. At the top of my head (I could be wildly wrong), Nash's dash was 17 frames and the game had something like 14 frames of delay input.
This delay input rendered zoning impossible and made people fish for a crish counter. It was touched upon in the vid but it was not gracious to see people spam hp/hk in the hopes of hitting something.
- the game was a PS4 exclusive on consoles, cutting itself from a large part of the playerbase, given for years the majority of players in SF4 were on the Xbox 360.
- the game had stuff in it that simply did not work. The rooms and invites being broken was horrendous but other stuff like the battle statistics (how much you defend or you attack) did not work for years. Why even put it in the game in the first place ?
- the rollback was awful. Rollback may be fantastic on paper but this one was to this day the worst implementation of one I've seen. Infuriating.
- lack of defense mechanics. Backdash were not invincible, and worse would get crushed if you were hit by hp or hk. It would take years before V-shift were a thing.

People around me would rage about having paid the game but not having a story mode, I forgot the details by now but they complained about stuff that Capcom was open about not being there and would be coming in the future. So I defended the game, for years. But 2 to 3 years in I burned myself on it and to this day I still can't stomach it. It is a shame. At least SF6 beta looked fun and it seems that the game will have more content in it at launch than SFV a few years in. I could also play with my friends and the rollback seemed good. Right out of the box, the beta is miles from the horrible beginnings of SFV, that makes me hopeful.

[shaunmcisaac]

It's not just stuff that was fixed in the 1st couple of years.
1) The crush counter buttons that are +OB. "Why is Bison smiling? cause he's always positive derp derp derp ."
2) Akuma getting buffs to the weaker part of his toolkit in patch after patch because they wanted to balance the two triggers/vskills, instead of admitting that one was BS
3) Urien never really being dealt with, esp. with respect to things like tackle into Aegis.
4) Cammy and Karin being allowed to be roughly 100x better than 90% the rest of the cast.
5) Abigail's unblockable that did, no joke, literally 1000 damage if you tried to contest it. Wake up jab / jump out? Eff you, dead character. Oh and this can start from a command grab.
6) Lack of serious defensive options, at least until V Shift in season five. Most good characters have Oki set ups that covered quick rise and back rise with frame perfect timing. So you were constantly in strike / throw / shimmy mix ups that were frame perfect. Guess wrong and you eat a counter hit combo for a dead character.
7) The ass-easy offense in general. Lots of things are calibrated to be EXACTLY +2 after a particular set up. There is nothing organic, very little that has to be spaced, etc. And guess what being +2 does for you? Well, your opponent can't hit a button because you'll counter hit them if you strike, and a throw will interrupt someone that happens to have a 3 frame jab. So your opponent is left with very weak things like "delay tech" and "take the throw."
8) Fang nerfs, Cammy buffs for like two straight seasons. Because the internal tester team had a god-tier FANG and the Cammy tester played by rolling his face over the sticks. So that was generalized to assume FANG was a broken "SSS Tier" even as he saw limited to zero public tournament success. Cammy? Yeah, she sent multiple people to CapCup.
9) Don't even get me started on Rashid.
10) Matches that were dominated by simple button presses. For most of season 3 and maybe 4? Abigail beat Zangief 9-1 with standing jab. Good times.
11) Rage Quiting denies your opponent LP
12) One sided rollbacks, and the netcode in general
etc etc

[justbuildgunpla]

I hate that it takes several years for a game to get just right, only for it's predecessor to be announced shortly after.

[UMAtronic]

I think my biggest positive with the game is probably the new characters, there wasnt actually any i can say i actively hate. The main negative i have with this game is how it feels to do combos. Dunno why it just feels a bit odd to me. Not exactly satisfying.

[metalgamer]

The transformation this game had is crazy

[DabbinHarambe]

I have a vivid memory of playing SFV the December of the year it first launched. My mom had bought my cousin a copy of it for Christmas, and after all the gifts were opened, we went to play it together like we did with SF3TS and SFIV. After only 30 minutes of just fighting each other, I asked my cousin if he was having fun, and he looked at me with a face that said it all: He didn't want to be rude and say he wasn't having fun, but that's what he felt. I felt so bad for him and my mom, who didn't know any better, and we just haven't played SFV since then.

[DJmouchi]

The way SFV released was unforgivable, but probably a net good for the FGC as a whole. A lot of older FGC players basically only played SF and other SF related games, with a lot of old fighters not being taken seriously. Capcom made so many early missteps with the game that the FGC stopped being Fighting Games by Capcom and hordes of people started actually looking at other fighting games seriously. Lots of players jumped ship for a variety of reasons, and good chunk of the people that stuck around were either in it for the money or their love of SF trumped any misgivings they had with V. I was in r/kappa during the first season or so of SFV and saw tons of people drop the game for stuff like Tekken and Xrd. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say the FGC of 2022 wouldn't be the way it is now without Capcom shitting the bed so hard.

Thanks, Capcom. Your initial fuck up was so bad, the FGC flourished looking for better games to play!

While they have improved a lot later on (I think around season 3-4 was when the really started to regain people's goodwill and become a legitimately good game) and SFVI looks like it might be a banger right out the gate, it cannot be understated how badly SFV's initial release and first few years were. It was boneheaded decision after boneheaded decision (like, y'know, 𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂 𝒓𝒐𝒐𝒕𝒌𝒊𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔) and going from that to the state they're in now is legitimately impressive.

[Bipumasta]

Honestly, my main gripe with SFV was with its roster. It felt awfully small compared to SFIV and all of my mains were gone (Rufus, E. Honda) or had been butchered so badly by the development team that they had lost all the tools that made them fun or viable (Juri). It was also so terribly balanced that a good chunk of the few characters available during Season One were just barely playable: Zangief was a mess, F.A.N.G. was incredibly fun but not super viable and you knew the balance had to be really crappy when Ryu, the poster boy character, was bottom tier. It just felt like a downgrade from SFIV in every way, even visually it was less appealing.

[sakumaFR]

Sometimes I do wonder if SFV lost its audience the same way SF3 did. I got into SFV last year so I didn't experience the disappointment that others had but I imagine it could have been at the same level as SF3. It's also possible that a larger new audience has been gained due to esports but if it did launch at the beginning as a good game, how much bigger would the SF audience be right now?

[goldenbrandon]

After going back to sf4 it’s noticeable how much less stressful, taxing, volatile and random the gameplay is. I actually feel like I’m winning due to good reads and strategy and losing due to my opponent outplaying me. In SFV it’s just so random with all of the brain dead blow up mechanics

[phdbot]

With Street Fighter 5's horrible launch, my friends and I held off on getting the game until it started to become decent. By Arcade Edition, I enjoyed what I tried of it despite its flaws.
Last time I enjoyed it however was playing the "Mysterious Mod" with one of my friends. Incredible mod someone made and gave every character new moves, buffs, and even added a new mechanic that goes by "V-Cancel" which can be cancelled into a unique move at the cost of 1 V-gauge.

[thNEWhypro]

small point I'd like to add for VT

EVERYTHING V-trigger offered coulda just been worked into the normal meter, or coulda been more focused on V-skill usage. But instead, its inclusion as basically another meter added an arbitrary barrier to what could've been a more open game with more options

I had those feelings and thoughts before SF6 was announced, and now with Drive Gauge acting as an almost complete antithesis to that idea, it makes me think the folks at Capcom felt the same.

[thetoondevil]

I was a big Street Fighter fan, I remember getting the 360 just so I could get SF4 when it launched. And it was kind of the same story with SFV.
But I was hugely disappointed when the game launched. I kept the game in hopes that it would get better but it took soo long to get there.

While it's good now, I can't help but still have that sour taste with the game.

[XEPHOURIA]

You're the first channel that I've ever found from googling 'beginner's guide' or 'how to' and proceeded to binge watch and thoroughly enjoy