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!
As much smack sfv gets, it did improve on what sf4 did and it certainly revitalized the brand over the past few years. If anything i think its faults wil be what will make sf6 such a knockout its already proving to be. I think sfv will dethrone sf3 as the blacksheep of the series though i doubt sfv has the outlasting potential to bring us another moment 37 someday though. The biggest thing sfv will be talked about fondly years from now are all the crazy costumes we got more likely lol 😄
I think sf6 will be worse because of all the negative nancies about 5. Sf5 was far better than 4 as a fighting game, but 4 was more popular, and there was a pandemic in the middle of sf5. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. There's no perfect street fighter, and nostalgia blinds people, but I think 5 is the best SF so far except SF3 3rd strike. They added the reversal, the shift, the priority system with crush counters, the skills and the triggers, and all of these things I liked; all were character specific. SF6 without a priority system and crush counters will be a lot like a KOF game or something- very fast paced and a lot of button mashing. And all of the things that I mentioned are gone from 6 so far at least. It seems like 6 may just be an updated version of sf4 with a red move a blue shield and a green quick movement skill and all are universal skills for everyone... this to me is a step backwards from what 5 was and is.
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.
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
this sounds like laura in a nutshell, and this is coming from a guy who watched SF4 from vanilla to ultra but on and off for sfv (But watched the evo finals this year)
@WegraX Basically people didn't like that you had to think more on offense instead of being able to OS every defensive option, hated that the game came out in a unfinished state, and didn't jive with the early Vsystem
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.
He did mention the netcode for a couple seconds but yeah if the netcode was actually decent there might have been more life in the game early on. I'm glad companies are finally realizing that having a great online helps keep your game alive and people playing...who would have thought lol
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.
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.
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.
Yeah for me that was the worst part for me, it should've been multiplat idc what money Sony gave them. It was a double edge sword. Yeah it was the best selling SF game but at what cost, I mean SF6 is shaping to be the better game with multiplat so it's gonna sell better
I know this is months old, but to correct one part: SFV had a PS3 Legacy Controller option. I believe it was one of the first newer fighting games to implement the feature at the time.
@@aeolusedge8575 It indeed was there as a day one patch, thank you for correcting me. But I know I personnally couldnt get my stick to work through legacy and it was the same for several friends of mine.
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
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.
Even aris said that one of the factors in tekken 7’s success and growth in community is because of capcom dropping the ball with sf5. In our local community, most of the people played tekken and I was basically the only sf4 player who frequented the game center while the rest of the 15 or so sf4 players would only drop by if there was an event, so I knew some of the tekken guys there. Ffw a couple of years later, they were surprised that i was on a tekken 7 cabinet. I told them I didn’t really like 5 so I switched to tekken 7 and that’s how i became a part of our local tekken 7 community.
Thing is I think the bigger hero to the story was the success of Mortal Kombats Reboot. For many fighting game titles were Taking Ls. Soul Caliber, SF, and there was one more fighting game that took a L but it escapes my memory. But point was Mortal Kombats team basically laid down the hallmark standard of what we want for a good fighting game launch. 1-A decent story and good character design, for the world we are fighting in, while pros may not give a fuck, the vast majority of casuals eat up good lore for breakfast. This is what brings in the fan artists, the cosplayers, the youtubers, which is essentially your free advertisement. 2- A good spectate mode to watch good players or our friends. This has become a staple in all competitive games 3-Good arcade challenges. While I for one never cared for arcade modes and challenge modes, I always either did story modes or player vs player, I am well aware the huge portion of casuals LOVE this shit. 4-Vault unlocks. A fun thing about fighting games is unlocking things, in the past it use to be characters, but honestly this is a system we can't go back to even if we wanted to. Selling characters is simply better for both casuals and the pros. For Casuals they might not have time to do weird obscure challenges to unlock characters, for pros they dont wanna spend that time, they just wanna buy their main and master it. But what MK showed, is unlocks can be more than just characters, it can be art, it can be trophies, it can be hidden story confirmations. There is a lot of things you can put in a vault lock to unlock through challenges. MK reboot wrote the book on what should be in a fighting game before its deemed worthy for launch, and Capcom thought they could just half ass it. But no this woulden't work, fans tasted the good shit and they weren't going back to water.
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.
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.
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.
i hate to say this but ppl really should know by now that buying vanilla SF titles is a bad move unless ur competing for a tournament, they always do frustrating small roster resets for every new SF title they launch unless its a collab title
I loved playing Juri in SF4. I recently just got SF5 and was trying her out the other day and I actually hate how she plays now. I thought maybe I was just misremembering how she was in 4 or something. I'm really hoping she's a lot better in 6
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.
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?
HUGE. I don't have the data to back this up, but I strongly believe SFV being poorly received was a net positive for every other fighting game out there, particularly the smaller ones. Suddenly the bulk of people who did or would have played SFV had good reason to try something else. I'm an example of that, I got into GG and KoF instead of buying SFV because of the bad press and I've only recently started playing it again (its great), had it had good press ages ago I'd have bought it first
Ironically, SFV made a lot of the same boo-boos with the initial roster that SFIII did. SFIII was "Ryu, Ken, and a bunch of freaks," and everyone hated it. And here in SFV we have "Ryu, Ken, Chun, a couple of returning favorites, and a bunch of obscure characters that were last seen in the lower tiers of the Alpha series. Oh, and Necalli, a villain who somehow manages to make Seth seem interesting in comparison." Not great, and most people were underwhelmed.
@@Darkkfated Those "low tier Alpha characters" were the most requested characters by the community in the final days of IV. Mika, Karin and Nash were all requested characters and people hoped to see them in the spot that ended up being taken by Decapre as last IV character.
This is definitely something that has been discussed a lot,but i'd say the timing of how bad the sfxt launch was, combined with the game's lack of other console ports other than PS or PC,crappy promotional material compared to the previous installment,lack of single player options,lacking gameplay and horribly small roster,and the whole story mode shinanegans that happened definitely hurt the game's reputation and overall sales as well as favor in most of the players. I mean,i was someone who was very into USF4,and i didn't even hear crap about sfv until Juri was released lol. It was bad,and honestly a miracle that in the end capcom was able to save the game and make it into a pretty good ass game considering what the had. SF6 is definitely gonna kill the game once that releases though lmao
@@Joofthesoup Ur reason is the one that's thrown into trash The game was broken, the physics were weird, and it was very horribly unbalanced, also the unnecessary DLC can be earned through just playing the game Yeah, you wanted me to elaborate so I gave you just that
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.
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.
@@eduardobrigas4177 My bad, I reread my comment and saw how it was misread. I added "of the year" to make it more clear. Thank you for catching that, I actually appreciate the feedback :D
Every SF veteran knows that SF5 was a game designed to attract new players (newbies lol), Capcom wanted to make it a fighting game version of DOTA 2, so they can make more money turning the street fighter series into a service based E-sport competition game. So they can charge gamers $30 every 6 months for new characters and costumes instead of making a 100% completed game for $60. The input is over simplified, the pace is ultra slow, and the mechanics are terrible. They even "pause" the game when you activate "V-skills" to fit the skill of newbies, which is a joke for anyone good at fighting games. Another reason that SF5 was terrible is because Capcom turned street fighters from fighting game into a guessing game since SF5, I forgot how many times I see players with little skill won with jab, grab, jab, jab, grab. I understand that Capcom tried to make SF5 more exciting for streaming and the E-sport scene, but they weakened most defensive options, and favorited offensive play style way too much.
A game with few modes and limited player freedom with the worst mechanics in a street fighter game evolved into a game with more modes and still has limited player freedom and the worst mechanics in a street fighter game… Obviously I’m not counting SF1 since the competitive scene of street fighter started at 2, but nah I can’t say this game is any good still. It’s like it took out everything that made Street Fighter fun. It’s like the same thing they did with Mortal Kombat 11 but even worse.
@@jesuspernia8031 you have to admit that vskill is one of the coolest mechanics that adresses one of street fighter's long term issues: polarizing matchups. By allowing you to pick between 2 extra special moves it can help give a character better options in matchups that have historically been terrible
Lol no, v skills suffered the same as vtriggers for most of the roster. Majority of Vskills are fundamentally the character i.e. Laura's dash/overhead, then they added a second skill just to add it or it completely negates the reason to pick VS1 anymore. Same with triggers
I mean this was never a thing lol. Games were never normally released this half-baked. That started later with fighting games after developers started leaning so heavily on DLC content & sales. Yes Street Fighter games always had tons of versions, but it was never intentional like they do nowadays where they give you 10% of the game with 90% coming later (exaggerating but you get the point). An early taste of this was how Capcom packaged Street Fighter X Tekken with the DLC already encoded on the disc but locked behind a paywall. So everyone was paying full price for an incomplete / partially locked game and it pissed off a lot of fans.
I kinda thought you'd mention the netcode issues and that one time they almost installed a rootkit on the PC version and disabled the the Netcode Mod fix someone in the community made. Also Story Mode showing up 3 months late?
It's incredible just how much controversy this game generated in its early days. Like the rootkit stuff which was a real bad look. SFV is in a good place now but the only thing that's a shame is that what we have now feels like what we should have had in 2016 (except the dlc characters)
Having 16 characters at launch this day and age is just a "hey we're gonna supply dlc for years", which means, more money from the fan base. Most don't like that.
I love SFV and tbh I think its has a lot of personality and polish a lot of other fighting games on the market don't have. Tbh I think this vid could've been more brutal 😅 you didn't even go into input delay, netcode, the root kit, throw loops, etc
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
Wow for someone new at fgc (2018 was the year I understood and love fighting games) that's a lot negative for SFV than I thought, I only thought were the lack of characters and maybe the visuals but it's way deep wow.
My analogy to SFV complements itself with your Necali vid, in that it looked promising in the beginning but it was ultimately booooring despite patching with some additions
i love this game, i been saying that for the last 6 years, but i never pretended it was perfect or anything, i was there at the beggining and i left for DBFZ for some good 2 years, also because DBFZ is probably my top 3 fighting game, but yes it was rough! You were generous enought to did not mention how bad the netcode was(now its just ok) and the rootkit issue, today i totally recommend this game specially because its always on sale and worth the money
year 1 honestly nobody cared about the netcode. People were just happy to have rollback, and the rootkit issue honestly didn't effect sales in any real way, just people being loud for the sake of being loud. Wasn't great sure, but its not anything that created any real impact
@@rooflemonger RN the game still has one sided lag that can be forced upon you. For many reasons including the other player mashing. Has that effected sales? No but it's yet another valid reason why people hate this game.
@@Wiktorino1984 yeap, I know and I like it, did were satisfied with season 1? I'm glad they added a lot of characters and things to the point pretty much everyone has a character to play... I agree a game has to be released complet and SF6 will be, but I still want many many seasons of content for that game too.
For me personally the big problem SF5 had (and still has to an extent) is 1: the insanely high damage everything does and 2: how stupid safe block strings there are. It's so easy to just get into positions where you have to block 5, 6, even 7 mixups at a time because you just cannot punish anything on block. It was especially egregious on launch and has gotten better but there's still a lot of that. And because damage is so high you only need to guess wrong a couple times for a round to be over. In the early days of Street Fighter 5 it wasn't uncommon at all for a Cammy or Bison to trap you in the corner and you were done. They could just keep you there forever until you tried pressing any button and you were put in the ground for it with no opportunity for counter play at all. I still think that moves are generally too safe on block, and damage is still ludicrously high but it's been dialed back enough that matches are at least enjoyable and you can find gaps in your opponents offense to take your turn back so to speak. Street Fighter 6 looks to be addressing BOTH these problems. Very few moves are plus on block, and the damage has been scaled back dramatically so even if you do end up getting pressured and punished, the round isn't just over because you had the audacity to block a move. VERY excited for the next iteration of Street Fighter, I will be SO glad to put 5 behind me lol.
I think the small roster on Street Fighter V’s launch isn’t as much of the issue as the characters that got excluded. Remember, everyone was complaining about how Guile and Blanka and Honda weren’t in the base roster and didn’t come back until DLC, and the negative press that came from the series-defining characters missing out. Granted, SF6’s base roster isn’t that much larger than 5’s, but I think it hasn’t gotten as much flack due to having all the World Warriors from the jump (plus Cammy and Deejay), at least from the perspective of the general public. Also I’d say the newcomers in 6 generally being more well received than 5’s base newcomers helps (Rashid is the only unanimously liked one: Laura’s got some mixed reception, FANG is mostly hated but has a small dedicated fanbase and everyone forgot about Necalli).
I jumped into SFV a few days ago after playimg for the first time a couple of years ago, and now, unlike last time, I'm having lots of fun. In fact, I watched your guide yesterday lol. Coincidence? 🙉
Disconnection issues were frequent in the launch days here in Australia I remember. It was even difficult to play survival mode as frequent internet dropout would cancel survival mode during mid play despite it being an offline mode in effect.
Yeah lots of Street Fighter content on the channel right now! Mostly cause.... everything else is so dry lol, as mentioned in the recent community post. Whenever that lastest DLC hits for strive rest assured there will be full coverage, whenever there is news for Project L we will talk about it, but for now in lieu of news, I can find stuff to talk about SF wise, so SF it is 👁 (also expect an indie fighter showcase soon...)
The hype for SF6 has gotten me back into Street Fighter V and I'm motivated to try to struggle to get out of bronze eventually. Also using it to transition into using a button box (snack box micro) since my 40 year old wrist is busted at this point and my inputs were kinda garbage to begin with. It's also now gotten me very invested in watching pro tour and I'm now kinda obsessed with Street Fighter League.
You sound like a great fit for the FGC Boomers Discord! (discord.gg/fgcboomers) 30+ year old FG players, with a pretty big SFV population, and a bunch of us use stickless controllers due to wrist/arm issues.
It always baffles me when people say 16 characters is a “small” roster starting out. For a team-based game, sure but 1-on-1 fighters used to have 12 (2 of them bosses) as the norm and 16 is already plenty by comparison. I really can’t help but think people are spouting from their rears when they complain about roster sizes. ...or maybe I’m just old-fashioned.
You have to remember that we'd all just come off the back of SF4's hype, success and because a lot of people felt negatively towards V on launch, they'd go back and compare to IV. IV had 25 characters on launch [19 on the arcade version but nobody outside of japan and certain arcades played that version] and here we are, with a sequel that lots of people felt was a step back at the time with a notably smaller roster.
16 is a good starting point. 16 can still be too few to have a character that completely resonates with you. 16 is also very few in the context of online play. 16 matchups is few enough to be like “damn i feel like i see these characters all the time” whereas with a larger roster you can be like “oh shit i forgot this dude was even in the game”
Simple, SFV was rushed out the door in a suboptimal state. Granted, the game is a great package now. But it took years for SFV to get to that point, & you only get one chance at a good first impression. Though if nothing else, Capcom clearly learned the right lessons going into SF6. As for roster size, 16 characters made from scratch is to be expected. Even SF6 isn’t that far above launch SFV. The complaints ultimately came down to the content.
I didn't like crush counters and the universal dp sf6 should keep every dp button invincible to everything and not make every button invincible to a specific attack. I got use to punishing dps and but people complained about it then making each button invincible to certain attacks wasn't a great choice.
Basically thats it for me. I do think its good, but now especially with SF6 on the horizon its a bit long in the tooth for me to want to invest significant time into it.
@@rooflemonger First of all, you get super double special gold points for saying "long in the tooth," and I have another huge freaking problem with this game. Zangief sucks, and I just can't have that.
I remember being so excited for SFV back in 2015. I had just come off 100 hours learning SF4 with a friend and still getting my barrings on fighting games as a whole to actually learn them. I was all set and ready to buy the game at release and commit to learning it. Then the game came out and everyone said how awful it was. I basically avoided the game and never got into any fighting games since I had stopped playing SF4 around that time. I did finally pick up SFV a few months ago on sale since I wanted to get myself more familiar and ready for SF6 in June since I want to learn and commit to it. SFV is decent. It's not bad but it definitely doesn't get me excited like 6 does. Something about 5 just feels a bit boring to me unless you're playing more of the recent roster.
No chip damage kills outside of super chip + v-trigger comebacks devalued comebacks and killed the hype for me as a viewer. They became almost manufactured, imagine if the same applied to 3rd strike would evo moment 37 be remembered as such a legendary moment?
In their defense, it was too far into SFV's life to make adding better rollback(cause it does use rollback) to the game. It's much more costly to change netcode after a games run, because a lot of that stuff is baked into the animations/inputs/etc. The game is balanced around both offline and how netcode works. So adding a new netcode in a lot of cases requires the game to be "rebuilt" around the new one. Which is extremely time consuming and costly brecause of it. My assumption is, thanks to the development of SF6, there just wasn't any incentive to retrofit a game on it's last legs. Especially when they expect most of the playerbase to make the switch.
@@valeoncat13 The better part is, there was a fan patch that made the rollback actually playable. What did Capcom do immediately after? PATCH THE GAME SO THE NETCODE FIX ISN'T POSSIBLE.
netcode discussion wasnt really on the table til partway into year 2. Its an issue sure, but at the start it was met with nothing but praise for the most part.
@@elneco4654 they patched the game incorporating the netcode fix something even hifight and Altimore stated. The netcode has issues but let's not start lying about it
@@starlord1521 Netcode was the issue. They patched the game of course, and made it worse and unplayable for others. I remember that clear as day. That's why I dropped the game. What is El Neco lying about?
I remember I was super excited for SFV, but I didn't have a PS4 for a long time and my potato laptop at the time couldn't run it. I do remember hearing people's disappointment with the game which painted a picture in my mind that it wasn't worth playing. But I picked up SFV around the time Sakura was added and I had fun!
First impressions are everything, and the launch was a joke. That said, they got their shit together and eventually it became an all timer in my opinion. I’ll take the Champions Edition of SF5 over this early version of SF6 all day long.
If we dont talk about monetization when we talk about why SFV was poorly received, then we arent being genuine. The truth is that SFV slow development was due to the fact that the intention was always to sell features over time.
I love SFV as it is now. I hated SFIV so much at launch that I didn't even look at SFV until I just so happened to play it at an arcade last year (just after Oro and Rose released.)
there was also what it did to the fgc as a whole, going from basically 8 years of community growth with the release of sf4 after the post-sf3 "dark ages" and the decline of arcades outside of asia, with great attendance numbers for the big tournaments, lots of new fgs coming out, the revitalization of older games with newer players, livestreaming taking off, community content (like the excellent adventures for example) etc. it was pretty much "an era of prosperity" for the fgc, and sf5 kinda hit the brakes on all of it. Not immediately though, I think sf5 at evo 2016 still has the highest entrant number of any fighting game tournament, but it was supposed to "carry the torch" from sf4, and its failure to do so even affected fgc-adjacent communities like smash which started to stagnate a bit post-2016. mvci certainly didnt help much either
Thank you for the lesson. I bought SF5 at launch but as uber casual i was severely disappointed with its lack of single player or arcade mode. also lack of little characters stories too.
I love zangief in this game so much. I love his air and ground grabs, his normals, his skills and v triggers. I love his voice acting and his animations. His super definitely was weak, but planting trees still felt great. I've mained him since the day the game came out in it's bad state and I can't wait to see him in 6. Sad he was deleted from the game when Abigail came out.
After playing so much Gief in the Versus series, seeing this neutered version with no "charging at you while armored" command grabs, no "pluck you out of the air" command grab, and no Green Hand just makes me sad. I miss the rallying cry of "Fino! Atomeek! BUSTERRRRRRR!!!"
@@nonuvurbeeznus795 News to me, I've never seen either used in any footage I've watched. Are they just not viable in high-level play or something? All you see in tournaments is pokes, lariats, v-trigger, and SPDs.
I think that one of the big issues of SFV's launch is that people not only were frustrated with learning the game mechanics (which were very flawed back then) but they didn't have their main to rely on, so it felt very unwelcoming to play
I really didnt like how .. "surgical" SFV feels, especially in the beginning. Only certain combos were allowed to work and only in specific ways. "This button would lead exactly into this one other button" and nothing else. Everyone did the same combos. If you wanted to utilize your knockdown advantage there was exactly one way to do it. "Buffer this button and dash up" or whatever. At times I felt like I was just working my way through a flowchart over and over and over again. I didnt really felt engaged at all, neither with the game nor my opponent, just "did as I had to". I was missing the option to "free style", figure out my own combos, my own mixups. Everything felt like it was setup to work in a specific way by the developers and nothing else was allowed or would even put me at a severe disadvantage.
No mention of V-Shift, one of the greatest and nuttiest mechanics in fighting game history? V-Shift changed the game a lot, man, and for something that was so radical, it's astonishingly well balanced.
@@rooflemonger Fair enough. Just thought it warranted even a cursory mention, considering how nuts, yet somehow functional it is. Maybe a separate video dedicated to V-Shift? I would love that. Could be I'm the only one who thinks V-Shift is an all-time great mechanic, though. Anyways, thanks for a very good video.
@@petertromp8786 V-shift is not well balanced. It basically makes zoners and neutral focused characters way stronger while killing grapplers. It's a lopsided mechanic that only really benefits one group of characters.
Street Fighter had a lot of issues and a lot of them were fixed, but the biggest one that has many people still feeling sour about the game has not gone away. One of the most famous nicknames for the game: Guess fighter 5. The feeling that whether you win or lose comes down to chance in a lot of interactions still remains. The best players are successful cause they can mitigate these scenarios and force it on their opponents, so it still happens at every level. For the casual/low-level player it happens literally all the time... and its not fun. ...oh, and the netcode is still ass.
going from usf4 to 5 was kinda jarring, it felt more restrictive especially in early days and it took so long for it to find its footing that it already put many people off myself included. once it got there it was great hopping in with seth and rashid was incredibly fun but it took a long time to get there
Extremely shocked you didn't bring up a word about the netcode. All the stuff you mentioned was valid, but the thing that made me personally quit was the absolutely abysmal netcode. Credit to Capcom for putting rollback in their game before being asked to, unlike Arcsys and SNK, who both had to not only be begged, but even when they did, did so begrudgingly. However, that doesn't take away the fact that instead of using what is proven, Capcom tried to make their own and botched it hard. That in itself would not be a problem if they also didn't block players who actually fixed their code (within 30min of working) and forcefully subjected everyone to their inferior offering. I stuck with the game for the first year because I was having fun, but I just could not stomach the poor online. Between that and Tekken 7, DBFZ, SC6, Smash, and BBTAG, I very nearly lost all hope of being able to play fighting games online and was about to give up on playing them ever again until Strive (and Skullgirls) came along and saved me. There is also things like the immense input delay at the start, and the in-game ads that they put into the game at the end.
Personally, for me, there were a few reasons why I wasn't super into the game, like the character design, the major changes to a bunch of characters that I played, but the reason I quit was the input delay. It was so noticable for me that it felt like playing with lag, which just made the game feel worse than all the other fighting games out there, so I just stopped playing it.
A number of things make me glad I found this genre when I did... Growing up with it would have been nice but I'm barely mature enough for the salt now lol, so I don't mind coming in late. But I'm also glad I didn't play sfv til 2020! It's been a pure joy especially with falke by my side.
The whole sf5 situation si so absurd to me.yeah i get the hate it got in its first year,but in 2023 sf5 with all content? A superb game.but of course everyone just likes to ride the hate train,just because.
I've played Ultra SF4 for years and love it. Bought SF5 and was amazed to see only 12 characters available from about 40! Each has to be earned with fight money which takes literally forever! Chances are you won't ever unlock everyone.
V-Triggers are the biggest reason I struggled to get into the game even in its best state, when I started playing was halfway through its lifespan and I tried it again when people considered it good and I got arcade edition upgrade for free, V-Triggers were just such an unenjoyable mechanic that I couldn't enjoy the game overall
SFV is decent now I must admit. However, there are still fundamental issues with the mechanics and gameplay. Being a SF4 player, I just couldn't find the same fun factor and satisfaction in SFV. I'm just waiting for SF6 now.
The game can be forgiven for anything except the main thing - netcode and overall stability of the game. Each online round is a new game, each new opponent is a new timing for everything (sf5 is the only game in which there is a situation where you are clearly sure that the game itself takes place before or after the picture is drawn on the screen; if you adapt that you win but this is terrible for overall skill growth bc this is a set of new competencies that is not needed in principle anywhere, even in SF5 itself outside of a bad online connection) Offline or in an ideal connection, this is a great game from 2 or 3 year for sure. But since there wasn't much to do besides grinding the ranking - the overall impression is still terrible, especially for the first serious fighting game due to the problem described above.
There where 4 Major issues that made me sell the copy of Vanila SF5 I bought on PS4. 1. Freemium mechanics on a paid game. The whole "you can get the new content in-game, but it'll be painfully slow unless you pay" and "Get a ton amount of the currency early from 1 time rewards, and everything dries up after that unless you pay" mechanics are stuff you only see on Free2pay mobile crap. 2. Bare bones. You can't get more bare bones than that. You said it! 3. Censorship before, during and after it's release. Nothing rises my buyer's remorse more than finding out the product is censored. 4. No complete retail version. Dispite feeling that the game owns me money for buying it at launch, and having miniscule content, expecting me to pay or suffer to get more, I was ready to jump right back once a complete edition was released. I like collecting my games after all, and you can't make a collection out of digital licenses. All updated editions after that had the hatefull voucher and their unsold vanila disks inside.
Street Fighter V’s launch serves as a necessary lesson for ALL fighting game developers: Fighting Games is a genre you need to do right, take your time, miss your yearly fiscal year if you have to, I guarantee it will pay off and win everyone over in the end. At the very least Capcom would look at this game and learn from its shortcomings to not only improve the game but take these missteps to heart when developing Street Fighter VI and now EVERYONE is excited for the game.
V triggers are a comeback mechanic, and that sucks, but they're less egregious than Ultras from SFIV. And though they didn't emphasize this enough in the mechanics, you could earn them by using your V skill, not just by getting hit. Another thing that sucked about the game was that there were no chip kills except for with supers, and supers shared meter with far more useful EX moves, so too many games came down to a slog where one or both characters are alive on a magic pixel fishing for the last hit. There were two things that made me hate the game though. 1) The netcode was bad, and in 6 years, they never found it worth the investment to fix it. 2) I've heard people refer to this game before as +2 Fighter, because you kind of just had to memorize which moves your opponent had that were unintuitively +2 on block; if you didn't, you'd get blown up in just a couple of interactions, and the round is lost. A lot of the other fighters I play have universal defense mechanics like pushblock, Fautless Defense, and whatnot (which the Drive system in SFVI seems to mimic to some degree as well) to handle these kinds of scenarios that are otherwise knowledge checks, but it just made SFV completely unfun to learn until you overcome these knowledge checks. They added V Shift later, which may have solved this problem for me, but at that point, I had no interest in returning to the game's terrible online experience.
You haven't mentioned that 3/4 of the roster is paid DLC. I played quite a lot of SF5 in the beggining trying to force myself to like the game and I could afford like one or two characters with fight money.
My biggest issues with the game are actually the slow walk speed, long blockstun, and stubby normals compared to SF4. You essentially couldn't walk out of pressure and whiff punish, making it WAY more important that you know all the frame data. The awful medium punch "bonk" sound as I call it became forever ingrained in my memory from playing SF5
The change in managment likely had an effecton, or was a symptom of, the dev focus shifting more to appease the players of the game rather than the sponsors of the game
I think the only bad thing about this game that never got fixed was the netcode, it's definitely not as bad as before, it's functional. But booting up SFV is hard when you're used to silky smooth GG strive.
My biggest problem with 5 has always been the lack of creativity. With very few exceptions, the devs designed each character to have one optimal way to play them, and one only. If you look at 4, the difference in Daigo's Ryu versus Valle's or Choi's or Jyobin's is very apparent; there was no "correct" way to play the character for optimal results. Whereas most characters in 5 have obvious uses for each button, linear BnBs that require no execution, a priority system that takes out trade combos and a bunch of other interesting interactions you had in 4, almost universal hitboxes which removed character-specific combos, stubby normals with little recovery, etc, etc, the game just didn't have the sense of discovery after the first week or so. The main times the meta develops is when balance patches drop. 5 has obviously come a long way to fixing some of these issues since launch, with the final season's cast all being really interesting with a lot of depth, but fundamentally, 5 is a game which pushed e-sports hard, while significantly reducing the skill gap from previous games. Those two choices do not work together. I can only imagine what game we could have gotten if Matsumoto and Nakayama had more say in direction from the start. After all these years, 5 is finally the game it was trying to be all along, but that's still a game I have little desire to play. I am incredibly optimistic for 6. Everything so far looks incredible.
Freedom of combos and such are good for fun, but linear paths for optimization isn't necessarily a bad thing. It leaves more room for the ''game-within-the-game'' to emerge, that chess match that occurs between each interaction that branches off into the other possibilities. There's plenty of hype to be had watching pros hit those 1-frame links in SF4, but those realms of skill in execution are a huge gap away from everyone else, whereas getting routes off was accessible to a lot more people in 5 if you put in the time to understand how the system worked.
@@Knifegash I agree that the chess-match aspect is very important, and I'd say 4 has a lot more of that than 5. You have many more options (invulnerable backdashes, meterless reversals, crouch-tech OS, better buttons, focus-backdash, etc) which you have to account for during any interaction. All of these things have counters (except for the bullshit backdashes lol), and the decision on how to pressure is a lot more nuanced than using one dedicated plus-frame medium to stagger or shimmy with. Also, one-frame links add more decision making, because you often have to choose between going for the really hard combo that kills, versus the guaranteed one which leaves the opponent with a smidge of health; it's not purely a spectacle thing. 6 having universal parry, generally negative normals, drive reversal and the like seems to be attempting to expand the decision space once again, minus some of the BS 4 had. I don't know much about 3rd Strike, but I'm pretty sure that game had a similar thing with the different types of parries and such. I'm probably oversimplifying 5 here, but I hope I made sense lol.
@@innocenthedgehog8367 SF4 has all of those mechanics going for it, but a lot of it gets thrown out of the window before it comes down to whatever invincible move you have that can chip. EX moves to chip to death became a huge problem, this fact is uncontestable and something they've worked to address in 5 and even 6. There's also the ridiculous scaling which actually punished going for lengthy combos as an offensive tactic and made it more about forcing the opponent into a state where they were not attacking you. And I actually can't believe I'm seeing someone defending crouch-tech OS, arguably an unpatchable glitch. Furthermore, 4's roster is mostly redundant due to wack tiers, it is always so refreshing to see a varied list of characters in tournaments in 5 due to actually good balancing. I don't think universal parries are going to count for a whole lot in 6, it seems very weak unless you get a frame perfect parry. I liken 5 as a sequel to 3S, and 6 as a sequel to 4 in terms of match flow.
@@Knifegash I don't understand why chip-kills are a problem. Crouch tech gets bodied by frame traps. Minus normals seem to offer a great opportunity for reads in 6. I press st.LP and I'm -1; if I think the opponent's going to challenge me, I can do a parry to punish their counter normal, but if they predict that, they throw me and get PC damage. If I think they're going to press a button, I can chain two jabs together which will beat that and give me a CH conversion. If they predict I'm going to chain the jabs, they can parry and punish me. This is obviously all theoretical, but I see potential for some very interesting mindgames here. And 4 definitely has wack balancing, no arguments there. But I think that's a side-effect of having characters with very different tools. I don't see a perfectly balanced fighting game as one where every match-up is 5/5; I see it as one where every character excels in particular match-ups. 4 definitely doesn't accomplish this, even if it tried. Elena, Yun, Akuma, Evil Ryu are absolutely busted.
I love Street Fighter but the small roster kept hurting it and is why I always prefer The King Of Fighters because part of the reason why is the roster is always big and I always had more moves to work with for each Character.
For me the 1st issue I had was the art style. Between banana hair Ken and lion King Akuma I didn't even want to play my old mains because I couldn't stand to look at them. The fact the tekken 7 had a better Akuma than SFV is really messed up.
My biggest gripe was how limited the combos were :-(. When the game first came out and the combos were so toned vs down it really put me in a sad place LOL... Versus how Street fighter 4 combo system allowed you to be more free
@@rooflemonger lol that's my point... Only two characters could really do long combos like that. To be more specific.. let's use RYU as an example. I get that every game is different so all the same combos will not work. In sf4 he could do two c.lp into low roundhouse... Or 3 c.lp into low roundhouse.. he could do c.lp c.mp into low roundhouse.. LOL you get my point and he can do other simple things like that and have way more combos than the Sfv Ryu... And that's without fadc. In sf5 you can only connect maybe two normals into a special and that was it and if you tried to go for a third hit usually it'll push you far away unless you had a media attack to start the combo. The game definitely has more combos now but in the beginning the lack of made me really dislike the game
@@bljacks5 but its not only two characters; they're just examples. Gill, Dan, Juri, Oro, Chun-Li, Rose, Akira, and probably more I'm forgetting also have hella saucy combos.
@@Eman-vp6ju he's talking about the beginning of Street fighter 5 when those characters were first released. And I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying characters didn't have good combos I'm saying the freedom that Street fighter 4 had in their combos is missing in Street fighter 5 combos
I wholeheartedly accepted SF5 at launch, issues aside I felt the gameplay was a pretty natural evolution of what had been built since USF4. But the crush counter fishing and V trigger disparity really killed my enthusiasm for the game as we (quickly) figured out the cheap shit. And the character expression was just not there, devs definitely designed each character with a flowchart in mind. Then Season 2 came and robbery meta happened, game was nigh unplayable at that point. I was also really hoping the addition of new V-skills and V-triggers would really spice up the game, but at least initially it felt like a nothing burger update. Winners like Guile won more with the initially busted VT2, and Ryu got.... another parry for his VS2. Never touched the game since that update but always kept up with the events, I'm glad it's in a better place now but I cannot say that my overall experience with SF5 has been positive.
I prefer characters to be from different parts of the world representing different fighting styles. I liked the concept of Rashid and Laura, but not so much the others. The others are just too wacky and weird for me. Loved the concepts of El Furte, Juri, and Hakan in sf4. Jamie in sf6 is the kind of new character I'm interested in
@@Lucy2Juicy Lol, yeah I knew some might feel like that. I just like that Fuerte and Hakan have styles that are grounded in what region they come from. Yeah their gameplay is unusual, but I think their designs are parts of what sf is about to me. I like it when the developers build a new character around a region's culture/fighting style
@@casual_C While I love wrestling, Lucha libre and might like what Hakan is into I'd say the designs are the worst and least SF about them. One looks like a creature, The other a template of a Wrestler given Cooking as a theme like a bad Vince McMahon style jobber
@@Lucy2Juicy I care more about the representation of different fighting styles. Turkish oil wrestling: check. Lucha libre: check. The minor details don't matter to me. One likes cooking? One has a big family? Ryu hates spiders? Ok, whatever. As for looks, Blanka is green. Hakan's look is not much of a big deal to me. How they play is what's really important
@@casual_C Fair to say but if true the detail of too wacky wouldn't have came up. Every SF bar SF1 allows you to play as many different martial art styles, but normal and made up. However I can agree with the general idea of variety in styles.
Pretty much nailed it rooflemonger, I would argue the majority of game and why this games pretty dead was all the games system mechanics. V triggers Vskills crush counters are absolutely terrible for a game like street fighter leave that comeback mechanic shit to marvel. or atleast Deserve the comeback mechanic. Not pushing 1 button altering the entire game-play experience gross.
Just to hang a point on the launch roster, I really didn't think of it as anything out of the ordinary for a Street Fighter game, and I think fans really have short memories when it comes to that. SFII had a starting roster of 8, and by the SSFII Turbo it had 16, 17 if you count Akuma. Alpha immediately followed that and had a starting roster of...10 characters; 13 if you count secret playable characters again. In Alpha 3 (home versions) it ballooned up to I think 39 characters. But we'll count Alpha 2, since only that was released when they moved to SFIII; Alpha 2's final roster was I think 19. Then came SFIII, which boasted a measly 10 characters again. By 3rd Strike it got up to 19, the same as Alpha 2 but way below Alpha 3. Finally, SFIV launched with 19 characters, and years later got to the 44 being referenced in this video. So sure, SFV's starting roster of 16 is less than SFIV's, but just like every other game in the series, it eventually blew up (to the point it boasts the most characters of any game in the series), and just like every other game it launched with less characters than the game that preceded it.
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!
As much smack sfv gets, it did improve on what sf4 did and it certainly revitalized the brand over the past few years. If anything i think its faults wil be what will make sf6 such a knockout its already proving to be. I think sfv will dethrone sf3 as the blacksheep of the series though i doubt sfv has the outlasting potential to bring us another moment 37 someday though. The biggest thing sfv will be talked about fondly years from now are all the crazy costumes we got more likely lol 😄
I don’t agree. It’s hardly “good”. Better sure 😢
I think sf6 will be worse because of all the negative nancies about 5. Sf5 was far better than 4 as a fighting game, but 4 was more popular, and there was a pandemic in the middle of sf5. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good.
There's no perfect street fighter, and nostalgia blinds people, but I think 5 is the best SF so far except SF3 3rd strike.
They added the reversal, the shift, the priority system with crush counters, the skills and the triggers, and all of these things I liked; all were character specific. SF6 without a priority system and crush counters will be a lot like a KOF game or something- very fast paced and a lot of button mashing. And all of the things that I mentioned are gone from 6 so far at least. It seems like 6 may just be an updated version of sf4 with a red move a blue shield and a green quick movement skill and all are universal skills for everyone... this to me is a step backwards from what 5 was and is.
@@greytoeimp it's good now
@@cthulhu888 In no way shape or form is it an improvement on SFIV
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.
perfect analogy 😂
I just recently bought Champion Edition. I've heard of a lot of these issues, but damn, some of it's even more embarrassing than I thought.
Emotional
In that case sf5 was a junky giving bj's at a street corner for 5 bucks
@@itsmellslikeupdog you are so lucky 2012 - 2016 when sf5 launched was such a fucky time to be a fighting game fan you are so lucky you came now
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
this sounds like laura in a nutshell, and this is coming from a guy who watched SF4 from vanilla to ultra but on and off for sfv (But watched the evo finals this year)
I have no fucking clue what you just said
@WegraX Basically people didn't like that you had to think more on offense instead of being able to OS every defensive option, hated that the game came out in a unfinished state, and didn't jive with the early Vsystem
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.
And that the console versions were basically paywalled to even do any online stuff.
He did mention the netcode for a couple seconds but yeah if the netcode was actually decent there might have been more life in the game early on. I'm glad companies are finally realizing that having a great online helps keep your game alive and people playing...who would have thought lol
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.
Necalli promised nothing and delivered less
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.
But people forget that Guilty Gear Strive released with even less characters than launch SFV.
@@Kara-de5cz They had the same amount.
@@noboty4168 Nope, Strive had 15 characters at launch, before Goldlewis released.
@@Kara-de5cz guilty gear has a way smaller budget
@@godrickthegrafted7583 Every character felt unique . But with sfv every character felt bland .
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.
Holy shit, I actually forgot that the game was a PS4 exclusive. lmao
Yeah for me that was the worst part for me, it should've been multiplat idc what money Sony gave them. It was a double edge sword. Yeah it was the best selling SF game but at what cost, I mean SF6 is shaping to be the better game with multiplat so it's gonna sell better
I know this is months old, but to correct one part: SFV had a PS3 Legacy Controller option. I believe it was one of the first newer fighting games to implement the feature at the time.
@@aeolusedge8575 It indeed was there as a day one patch, thank you for correcting me. But I know I personnally couldnt get my stick to work through legacy and it was the same for several friends of mine.
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
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.
Even aris said that one of the factors in tekken 7’s success and growth in community is because of capcom dropping the ball with sf5.
In our local community, most of the people played tekken and I was basically the only sf4 player who frequented the game center while the rest of the 15 or so sf4 players would only drop by if there was an event, so I knew some of the tekken guys there. Ffw a couple of years later, they were surprised that i was on a tekken 7 cabinet. I told them I didn’t really like 5 so I switched to tekken 7 and that’s how i became a part of our local tekken 7 community.
Thing is I think the bigger hero to the story was the success of Mortal Kombats Reboot. For many fighting game titles were Taking Ls. Soul Caliber, SF, and there was one more fighting game that took a L but it escapes my memory. But point was Mortal Kombats team basically laid down the hallmark standard of what we want for a good fighting game launch.
1-A decent story and good character design, for the world we are fighting in, while pros may not give a fuck, the vast majority of casuals eat up good lore for breakfast. This is what brings in the fan artists, the cosplayers, the youtubers, which is essentially your free advertisement.
2- A good spectate mode to watch good players or our friends. This has become a staple in all competitive games
3-Good arcade challenges. While I for one never cared for arcade modes and challenge modes, I always either did story modes or player vs player, I am well aware the huge portion of casuals LOVE this shit.
4-Vault unlocks. A fun thing about fighting games is unlocking things, in the past it use to be characters, but honestly this is a system we can't go back to even if we wanted to. Selling characters is simply better for both casuals and the pros. For Casuals they might not have time to do weird obscure challenges to unlock characters, for pros they dont wanna spend that time, they just wanna buy their main and master it. But what MK showed, is unlocks can be more than just characters, it can be art, it can be trophies, it can be hidden story confirmations. There is a lot of things you can put in a vault lock to unlock through challenges.
MK reboot wrote the book on what should be in a fighting game before its deemed worthy for launch, and Capcom thought they could just half ass it.
But no this woulden't work, fans tasted the good shit and they weren't going back to water.
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.
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.
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.
i hate to say this but ppl really should know by now that buying vanilla SF titles is a bad move unless ur competing for a tournament, they always do frustrating small roster resets for every new SF title they launch unless its a collab title
I loved playing Juri in SF4. I recently just got SF5 and was trying her out the other day and I actually hate how she plays now. I thought maybe I was just misremembering how she was in 4 or something. I'm really hoping she's a lot better in 6
@@ADreamingTraveler I played in both SF6 betas. Juri was lots of fun there, much more than in SF5!
Do you not remember sf4 having a small roster too? People forget
@@WeirdEdz bruh the SF4 base roster had 25 characters compared to SF5 base roster with 16.. I hate when people just be saying shit
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.
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?
HUGE. I don't have the data to back this up, but I strongly believe SFV being poorly received was a net positive for every other fighting game out there, particularly the smaller ones. Suddenly the bulk of people who did or would have played SFV had good reason to try something else. I'm an example of that, I got into GG and KoF instead of buying SFV because of the bad press and I've only recently started playing it again (its great), had it had good press ages ago I'd have bought it first
Ironically, SFV made a lot of the same boo-boos with the initial roster that SFIII did. SFIII was "Ryu, Ken, and a bunch of freaks," and everyone hated it. And here in SFV we have "Ryu, Ken, Chun, a couple of returning favorites, and a bunch of obscure characters that were last seen in the lower tiers of the Alpha series. Oh, and Necalli, a villain who somehow manages to make Seth seem interesting in comparison." Not great, and most people were underwhelmed.
Before you got in to SFV what Fighting games did you main? Reason I ask because most people transition from SF4>SFV felt a downgrade.
@@zfranke3dome only because of some anime endings and combos ?
@@Darkkfated Those "low tier Alpha characters" were the most requested characters by the community in the final days of IV. Mika, Karin and Nash were all requested characters and people hoped to see them in the spot that ended up being taken by Decapre as last IV character.
This is definitely something that has been discussed a lot,but i'd say the timing of how bad the sfxt launch was, combined with the game's lack of other console ports other than PS or PC,crappy promotional material compared to the previous installment,lack of single player options,lacking gameplay and horribly small roster,and the whole story mode shinanegans that happened definitely hurt the game's reputation and overall sales as well as favor in most of the players. I mean,i was someone who was very into USF4,and i didn't even hear crap about sfv until Juri was released lol. It was bad,and honestly a miracle that in the end capcom was able to save the game and make it into a pretty good ass game considering what the had. SF6 is definitely gonna kill the game once that releases though lmao
It was rushed
Elaborate
@@Joofthesoup I don't need to
@@hassanabdullatif5861 then your reasoning thrown into the trash
@@Joofthesoup Ur reason is the one that's thrown into trash
The game was broken, the physics were weird, and it was very horribly unbalanced, also the unnecessary DLC can be earned through just playing the game
Yeah, you wanted me to elaborate so I gave you just that
@@hassanabdullatif5861 but he didnt present any reason, just asked
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.
All that had to be done to correct it was allow your bar to drain or end their trigger.
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.
Same, my copy is somewhere gathering dust. Never touched it in years
SFV was launched February 2016
@@eduardobrigas4177 My bad, I reread my comment and saw how it was misread. I added "of the year" to make it more clear. Thank you for catching that, I actually appreciate the feedback :D
You definitely didnt have much fun playing sf4 then 😂
Every SF veteran knows that SF5 was a game designed to attract new players (newbies lol), Capcom wanted to make it a fighting game version of DOTA 2, so they can make more money turning the street fighter series into a service based E-sport competition game. So they can charge gamers $30 every 6 months for new characters and costumes instead of making a 100% completed game for $60. The input is over simplified, the pace is ultra slow, and the mechanics are terrible. They even "pause" the game when you activate "V-skills" to fit the skill of newbies, which is a joke for anyone good at fighting games. Another reason that SF5 was terrible is because Capcom turned street fighters from fighting game into a guessing game since SF5, I forgot how many times I see players with little skill won with jab, grab, jab, jab, grab. I understand that Capcom tried to make SF5 more exciting for streaming and the E-sport scene, but they weakened most defensive options, and favorited offensive play style way too much.
The transformation this game had is crazy
A game with few modes and limited player freedom with the worst mechanics in a street fighter game evolved into a game with more modes and still has limited player freedom and the worst mechanics in a street fighter game…
Obviously I’m not counting SF1 since the competitive scene of street fighter started at 2, but nah I can’t say this game is any good still. It’s like it took out everything that made Street Fighter fun. It’s like the same thing they did with Mortal Kombat 11 but even worse.
@@jesuspernia8031 you have to admit that vskill is one of the coolest mechanics that adresses one of street fighter's long term issues: polarizing matchups. By allowing you to pick between 2 extra special moves it can help give a character better options in matchups that have historically been terrible
Lol no, v skills suffered the same as vtriggers for most of the roster. Majority of Vskills are fundamentally the character i.e. Laura's dash/overhead, then they added a second skill just to add it or it completely negates the reason to pick VS1 anymore. Same with triggers
@@30yovegan34 there are defo some examples of bad ones like that, but Capcom tries to keep them equally strong so there's an actual choice
from super shit to just plain shit, so huge
I hate that it takes several years for a game to get just right, only for it's predecessor to be announced shortly after.
I mean this was never a thing lol. Games were never normally released this half-baked. That started later with fighting games after developers started leaning so heavily on DLC content & sales.
Yes Street Fighter games always had tons of versions, but it was never intentional like they do nowadays where they give you 10% of the game with 90% coming later (exaggerating but you get the point). An early taste of this was how Capcom packaged Street Fighter X Tekken with the DLC already encoded on the disc but locked behind a paywall. So everyone was paying full price for an incomplete / partially locked game and it pissed off a lot of fans.
I kinda thought you'd mention the netcode issues and that one time they almost installed a rootkit on the PC version and disabled the the Netcode Mod fix someone in the community made. Also Story Mode showing up 3 months late?
It's incredible just how much controversy this game generated in its early days. Like the rootkit stuff which was a real bad look.
SFV is in a good place now but the only thing that's a shame is that what we have now feels like what we should have had in 2016 (except the dlc characters)
Not really, season 3 should've been what we had in 2016
Having 16 characters at launch this day and age is just a "hey we're gonna supply dlc for years", which means, more money from the fan base. Most don't like that.
A lot of it was the graphics and general art direction too. It has gotten a lot better over the years but the first couple years it looked terrible.
i started playing this with a friend and we have been having a blast.
I love SFV and tbh I think its has a lot of personality and polish a lot of other fighting games on the market don't have. Tbh I think this vid could've been more brutal 😅 you didn't even go into input delay, netcode, the root kit, throw loops, etc
yeah the biggest things that came to my mind was input delay and throw loops lol
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
Sf4, known for honest characters like Elena and Yun
Wow for someone new at fgc (2018 was the year I understood and love fighting games) that's a lot negative for SFV than I thought, I only thought were the lack of characters and maybe the visuals but it's way deep wow.
My analogy to SFV complements itself with your Necali vid, in that it looked promising in the beginning but it was ultimately booooring despite patching with some additions
i love this game, i been saying that for the last 6 years, but i never pretended it was perfect or anything, i was there at the beggining and i left for DBFZ for some good 2 years, also because DBFZ is probably my top 3 fighting game, but yes it was rough! You were generous enought to did not mention how bad the netcode was(now its just ok) and the rootkit issue, today i totally recommend this game specially because its always on sale and worth the money
year 1 honestly nobody cared about the netcode. People were just happy to have rollback, and the rootkit issue honestly didn't effect sales in any real way, just people being loud for the sake of being loud. Wasn't great sure, but its not anything that created any real impact
@@rooflemonger RN the game still has one sided lag that can be forced upon you. For many reasons including the other player mashing. Has that effected sales? No but it's yet another valid reason why people hate this game.
They makes to many season passes and sell game in little parts. Capcom never changes final version is great but we suffer too long time.
@@Wiktorino1984 yeap, I know and I like it, did were satisfied with season 1? I'm glad they added a lot of characters and things to the point pretty much everyone has a character to play... I agree a game has to be released complet and SF6 will be, but I still want many many seasons of content for that game too.
For me personally the big problem SF5 had (and still has to an extent) is 1: the insanely high damage everything does and 2: how stupid safe block strings there are. It's so easy to just get into positions where you have to block 5, 6, even 7 mixups at a time because you just cannot punish anything on block. It was especially egregious on launch and has gotten better but there's still a lot of that. And because damage is so high you only need to guess wrong a couple times for a round to be over. In the early days of Street Fighter 5 it wasn't uncommon at all for a Cammy or Bison to trap you in the corner and you were done. They could just keep you there forever until you tried pressing any button and you were put in the ground for it with no opportunity for counter play at all. I still think that moves are generally too safe on block, and damage is still ludicrously high but it's been dialed back enough that matches are at least enjoyable and you can find gaps in your opponents offense to take your turn back so to speak. Street Fighter 6 looks to be addressing BOTH these problems. Very few moves are plus on block, and the damage has been scaled back dramatically so even if you do end up getting pressured and punished, the round isn't just over because you had the audacity to block a move. VERY excited for the next iteration of Street Fighter, I will be SO glad to put 5 behind me lol.
Exactly. This game is all about block stun and getting dizzy into a death combo
I think the small roster on Street Fighter V’s launch isn’t as much of the issue as the characters that got excluded. Remember, everyone was complaining about how Guile and Blanka and Honda weren’t in the base roster and didn’t come back until DLC, and the negative press that came from the series-defining characters missing out.
Granted, SF6’s base roster isn’t that much larger than 5’s, but I think it hasn’t gotten as much flack due to having all the World Warriors from the jump (plus Cammy and Deejay), at least from the perspective of the general public. Also I’d say the newcomers in 6 generally being more well received than 5’s base newcomers helps (Rashid is the only unanimously liked one: Laura’s got some mixed reception, FANG is mostly hated but has a small dedicated fanbase and everyone forgot about Necalli).
Why would someone complain about Blanka not being in the roster?
@@mousefire777 Because it’s Blanka. He’s an iconic character to the series and it would feel weird if he’s not there.
@@infiniteon1834 Dan and Sakura are at least as iconic and they aren't toxic as fuck to play against
I jumped into SFV a few days ago after playimg for the first time a couple of years ago, and now, unlike last time, I'm having lots of fun. In fact, I watched your guide yesterday lol. Coincidence? 🙉
🐵
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
Sf5 biggest mess up was probably the state it released in. Its in a great and solid state now and has a huge roster
Disconnection issues were frequent in the launch days here in Australia I remember. It was even difficult to play survival mode as frequent internet dropout would cancel survival mode during mid play despite it being an offline mode in effect.
I remember before SFV came out, they said they wouldn't come out with multiple versions of the game like they did with IV. Well...
Yeah lots of Street Fighter content on the channel right now! Mostly cause.... everything else is so dry lol, as mentioned in the recent community post. Whenever that lastest DLC hits for strive rest assured there will be full coverage, whenever there is news for Project L we will talk about it, but for now in lieu of news, I can find stuff to talk about SF wise, so SF it is 👁 (also expect an indie fighter showcase soon...)
The hype for SF6 has gotten me back into Street Fighter V and I'm motivated to try to struggle to get out of bronze eventually. Also using it to transition into using a button box (snack box micro) since my 40 year old wrist is busted at this point and my inputs were kinda garbage to begin with. It's also now gotten me very invested in watching pro tour and I'm now kinda obsessed with Street Fighter League.
You sound like a great fit for the FGC Boomers Discord! (discord.gg/fgcboomers) 30+ year old FG players, with a pretty big SFV population, and a bunch of us use stickless controllers due to wrist/arm issues.
It always baffles me when people say 16 characters is a “small” roster starting out.
For a team-based game, sure but 1-on-1 fighters used to have 12 (2 of them bosses) as the norm and 16 is already plenty by comparison.
I really can’t help but think people are spouting from their rears when they complain about roster sizes.
...or maybe I’m just old-fashioned.
I agree for the most part, however it still was a major complaint early on.
I mean, when you have Smash Ultimate spoiling people with a 70 character roster at launch, the bar gets set pretty high to the general public.
You have to remember that we'd all just come off the back of SF4's hype, success and because a lot of people felt negatively towards V on launch, they'd go back and compare to IV. IV had 25 characters on launch [19 on the arcade version but nobody outside of japan and certain arcades played that version] and here we are, with a sequel that lots of people felt was a step back at the time with a notably smaller roster.
16 is a good starting point. 16 can still be too few to have a character that completely resonates with you. 16 is also very few in the context of online play. 16 matchups is few enough to be like “damn i feel like i see these characters all the time” whereas with a larger roster you can be like “oh shit i forgot this dude was even in the game”
Simple, SFV was rushed out the door in a suboptimal state. Granted, the game is a great package now. But it took years for SFV to get to that point, & you only get one chance at a good first impression. Though if nothing else, Capcom clearly learned the right lessons going into SF6.
As for roster size, 16 characters made from scratch is to be expected. Even SF6 isn’t that far above launch SFV. The complaints ultimately came down to the content.
I didn't like crush counters and the universal dp sf6 should keep every dp button invincible to everything and not make every button invincible to a specific attack. I got use to punishing dps and but people complained about it then making each button invincible to certain attacks wasn't a great choice.
I think SFV is currently a good game even though it's not for me.
Basically thats it for me. I do think its good, but now especially with SF6 on the horizon its a bit long in the tooth for me to want to invest significant time into it.
@@rooflemonger First of all, you get super double special gold points for saying "long in the tooth," and I have another huge freaking problem with this game. Zangief sucks, and I just can't have that.
They should re-release it for multi platforms. It blows my mind Capcom hasn't thought about the sales this would bring them.
@@DonYoGi8331 I think they should have had a PS5 port of SF5 like how USF4 did when released for PS4 a year before SF5.
@@solidmage1720 they should do a Xbox and PS5 port to hype up the release of SF6.
I remember being so excited for SFV back in 2015. I had just come off 100 hours learning SF4 with a friend and still getting my barrings on fighting games as a whole to actually learn them. I was all set and ready to buy the game at release and commit to learning it. Then the game came out and everyone said how awful it was. I basically avoided the game and never got into any fighting games since I had stopped playing SF4 around that time.
I did finally pick up SFV a few months ago on sale since I wanted to get myself more familiar and ready for SF6 in June since I want to learn and commit to it. SFV is decent. It's not bad but it definitely doesn't get me excited like 6 does. Something about 5 just feels a bit boring to me unless you're playing more of the recent roster.
This has been an absolutely AMAZING resource for approaching the cast. These insights let me get a good grasp on JP.
SFV is pretty much the definition of “Haha take my throw the game” Which is both boring to play and boring to watch.
I loved how long it took to unlock one of very few characters..That was a lot of fun.
100K FM grind is ridiculous.
No chip damage kills outside of super chip + v-trigger comebacks devalued comebacks and killed the hype for me as a viewer. They became almost manufactured, imagine if the same applied to 3rd strike would evo moment 37 be remembered as such a legendary moment?
I think the biggest reason is obviously the netcode. My only gripe with Capcom concerning SF5 is not giving it a next gen upgrade with better netcode.
In their defense, it was too far into SFV's life to make adding better rollback(cause it does use rollback) to the game. It's much more costly to change netcode after a games run, because a lot of that stuff is baked into the animations/inputs/etc. The game is balanced around both offline and how netcode works. So adding a new netcode in a lot of cases requires the game to be "rebuilt" around the new one. Which is extremely time consuming and costly brecause of it.
My assumption is, thanks to the development of SF6, there just wasn't any incentive to retrofit a game on it's last legs. Especially when they expect most of the playerbase to make the switch.
@@valeoncat13 The better part is, there was a fan patch that made the rollback actually playable. What did Capcom do immediately after? PATCH THE GAME SO THE NETCODE FIX ISN'T POSSIBLE.
netcode discussion wasnt really on the table til partway into year 2. Its an issue sure, but at the start it was met with nothing but praise for the most part.
@@elneco4654 they patched the game incorporating the netcode fix something even hifight and Altimore stated. The netcode has issues but let's not start lying about it
@@starlord1521 Netcode was the issue. They patched the game of course, and made it worse and unplayable for others. I remember that clear as day. That's why I dropped the game. What is El Neco lying about?
I remember I was super excited for SFV, but I didn't have a PS4 for a long time and my potato laptop at the time couldn't run it. I do remember hearing people's disappointment with the game which painted a picture in my mind that it wasn't worth playing. But I picked up SFV around the time Sakura was added and I had fun!
First impressions are everything, and the launch was a joke. That said, they got their shit together and eventually it became an all timer in my opinion. I’ll take the Champions Edition of SF5 over this early version of SF6 all day long.
If we dont talk about monetization when we talk about why SFV was poorly received, then we arent being genuine. The truth is that SFV slow development was due to the fact that the intention was always to sell features over time.
I love SFV as it is now. I hated SFIV so much at launch that I didn't even look at SFV until I just so happened to play it at an arcade last year (just after Oro and Rose released.)
As a casual fighting game player my experience felt like a free to play game. It's something I expect from games these days.
there was also what it did to the fgc as a whole, going from basically 8 years of community growth with the release of sf4 after the post-sf3 "dark ages" and the decline of arcades outside of asia, with great attendance numbers for the big tournaments, lots of new fgs coming out, the revitalization of older games with newer players, livestreaming taking off, community content (like the excellent adventures for example) etc. it was pretty much "an era of prosperity" for the fgc, and sf5 kinda hit the brakes on all of it. Not immediately though, I think sf5 at evo 2016 still has the highest entrant number of any fighting game tournament, but it was supposed to "carry the torch" from sf4, and its failure to do so even affected fgc-adjacent communities like smash which started to stagnate a bit post-2016. mvci certainly didnt help much either
I'm sure smash and traditional fighting games have no relationship. Smash had/has DLC issues aka Bayonetta and Steve.
Thank you for the lesson. I bought SF5 at launch but as uber casual i was severely disappointed with its lack of single player or arcade mode. also lack of little characters stories too.
I love zangief in this game so much. I love his air and ground grabs, his normals, his skills and v triggers. I love his voice acting and his animations. His super definitely was weak, but planting trees still felt great. I've mained him since the day the game came out in it's bad state and I can't wait to see him in 6. Sad he was deleted from the game when Abigail came out.
After playing so much Gief in the Versus series, seeing this neutered version with no "charging at you while armored" command grabs, no "pluck you out of the air" command grab, and no Green Hand just makes me sad. I miss the rallying cry of "Fino! Atomeek! BUSTERRRRRRR!!!"
@@Darkkfated but Gief has a charging armored command grab and a mid air command grab
@@nonuvurbeeznus795 News to me, I've never seen either used in any footage I've watched. Are they just not viable in high-level play or something? All you see in tournaments is pokes, lariats, v-trigger, and SPDs.
I think that one of the big issues of SFV's launch is that people not only were frustrated with learning the game mechanics (which were very flawed back then) but they didn't have their main to rely on, so it felt very unwelcoming to play
Ever since Cammy debuted in Super Street Fighter 2, she’s been my main.
Having "main" is stupid!
They hyped Necalli up, just to instant kill him in the Story😂😂😂😂
I really didnt like how .. "surgical" SFV feels, especially in the beginning.
Only certain combos were allowed to work and only in specific ways. "This button would lead exactly into this one other button" and nothing else. Everyone did the same combos. If you wanted to utilize your knockdown advantage there was exactly one way to do it. "Buffer this button and dash up" or whatever.
At times I felt like I was just working my way through a flowchart over and over and over again. I didnt really felt engaged at all, neither with the game nor my opponent, just "did as I had to".
I was missing the option to "free style", figure out my own combos, my own mixups. Everything felt like it was setup to work in a specific way by the developers and nothing else was allowed or would even put me at a severe disadvantage.
True Sf4 and Sf3 and Sf2 and I think also Sf Ex Series let's you make your own Combos
No mention of V-Shift, one of the greatest and nuttiest mechanics in fighting game history? V-Shift changed the game a lot, man, and for something that was so radical, it's astonishingly well balanced.
the game was out for like 5 years before v-shift was a thing. Not really in the purview of the video.
@@rooflemonger Fair enough. Just thought it warranted even a cursory mention, considering how nuts, yet somehow functional it is. Maybe a separate video dedicated to V-Shift? I would love that. Could be I'm the only one who thinks V-Shift is an all-time great mechanic, though. Anyways, thanks for a very good video.
Check out kof? 😂😂😂
@@sidneysun3865 I love KOF.
@@petertromp8786 V-shift is not well balanced. It basically makes zoners and neutral focused characters way stronger while killing grapplers. It's a lopsided mechanic that only really benefits one group of characters.
Street Fighter had a lot of issues and a lot of them were fixed, but the biggest one that has many people still feeling sour about the game has not gone away. One of the most famous nicknames for the game: Guess fighter 5. The feeling that whether you win or lose comes down to chance in a lot of interactions still remains. The best players are successful cause they can mitigate these scenarios and force it on their opponents, so it still happens at every level. For the casual/low-level player it happens literally all the time... and its not fun.
...oh, and the netcode is still ass.
Too many safe moves, stubby normals, awful comeback v-trigger system, a lot of hitboxes seem...weird. Never want to play that game again
going from usf4 to 5 was kinda jarring, it felt more restrictive especially in early days and it took so long for it to find its footing that it already put many people off myself included. once it got there it was great hopping in with seth and rashid was incredibly fun but it took a long time to get there
Extremely shocked you didn't bring up a word about the netcode. All the stuff you mentioned was valid, but the thing that made me personally quit was the absolutely abysmal netcode. Credit to Capcom for putting rollback in their game before being asked to, unlike Arcsys and SNK, who both had to not only be begged, but even when they did, did so begrudgingly. However, that doesn't take away the fact that instead of using what is proven, Capcom tried to make their own and botched it hard. That in itself would not be a problem if they also didn't block players who actually fixed their code (within 30min of working) and forcefully subjected everyone to their inferior offering. I stuck with the game for the first year because I was having fun, but I just could not stomach the poor online. Between that and Tekken 7, DBFZ, SC6, Smash, and BBTAG, I very nearly lost all hope of being able to play fighting games online and was about to give up on playing them ever again until Strive (and Skullgirls) came along and saved me.
There is also things like the immense input delay at the start, and the in-game ads that they put into the game at the end.
better question: why do people dedicate thousands of hours to a game they hate for any reason beyond that it's the current title?
Personally, for me, there were a few reasons why I wasn't super into the game, like the character design, the major changes to a bunch of characters that I played, but the reason I quit was the input delay. It was so noticable for me that it felt like playing with lag, which just made the game feel worse than all the other fighting games out there, so I just stopped playing it.
He really glossed over this point for some reason... when the game launched, that's all I remember hearing about it in reviews.
A number of things make me glad I found this genre when I did... Growing up with it would have been nice but I'm barely mature enough for the salt now lol, so I don't mind coming in late. But I'm also glad I didn't play sfv til 2020! It's been a pure joy especially with falke by my side.
The whole sf5 situation si so absurd to me.yeah i get the hate it got in its first year,but in 2023 sf5 with all content? A superb game.but of course everyone just likes to ride the hate train,just because.
I've played Ultra SF4 for years and love it. Bought SF5 and was amazed to see only 12 characters available from about 40! Each has to be earned with fight money which takes literally forever! Chances are you won't ever unlock everyone.
That launch was whack. Like half of the 16 characters like didn’t exist tier-wise
And of course, Vroom Vroom.
V-Triggers are the biggest reason I struggled to get into the game even in its best state, when I started playing was halfway through its lifespan and I tried it again when people considered it good and I got arcade edition upgrade for free, V-Triggers were just such an unenjoyable mechanic that I couldn't enjoy the game overall
SFV is decent now I must admit. However, there are still fundamental issues with the mechanics and gameplay.
Being a SF4 player, I just couldn't find the same fun factor and satisfaction in SFV. I'm just waiting for SF6 now.
We all know odd numbered SFs are the worst and Even numbered SFs are always the best ones. 2, 4,...and now 😁 6. Except sf3 si and 3S. Those were dope
3:32 Arcade mode should be standard on all Street Fighter games! I have no idea what Capcom was thinking.
The game can be forgiven for anything except the main thing - netcode and overall stability of the game. Each online round is a new game, each new opponent is a new timing for everything (sf5 is the only game in which there is a situation where you are clearly sure that the game itself takes place before or after the picture is drawn on the screen; if you adapt that you win but this is terrible for overall skill growth bc this is a set of new competencies that is not needed in principle anywhere, even in SF5 itself outside of a bad online connection)
Offline or in an ideal connection, this is a great game from 2 or 3 year for sure. But since there wasn't much to do besides grinding the ranking - the overall impression is still terrible, especially for the first serious fighting game due to the problem described above.
V is in such a great place, I don't want to start this journey over again! I hope you're right and 6 is great out of the gate!
The same reason why SFxT died.
Street Fighter 4 was too good.
SF5 to SF4 is like MK11 to MKX.
V-triggers and lack of freedom
- shabby online
- loading times
- anti-air jab
- Ken's face
We all known that Ken's face was the big issue.
There where 4 Major issues that made me sell the copy of Vanila SF5 I bought on PS4.
1. Freemium mechanics on a paid game. The whole "you can get the new content in-game, but it'll be painfully slow unless you pay" and "Get a ton amount of the currency early from 1 time rewards, and everything dries up after that unless you pay" mechanics are stuff you only see on Free2pay mobile crap.
2. Bare bones. You can't get more bare bones than that. You said it!
3. Censorship before, during and after it's release. Nothing rises my buyer's remorse more than finding out the product is censored.
4. No complete retail version. Dispite feeling that the game owns me money for buying it at launch, and having miniscule content, expecting me to pay or suffer to get more, I was ready to jump right back once a complete edition was released. I like collecting my games after all, and you can't make a collection out of digital licenses. All updated editions after that had the hatefull voucher and their unsold vanila disks inside.
I didn't hate it. I hate how it was launched and how bare bones it was.
The input delay was the biggest issue for me on release. Felt like playing while stuck in mud, it was gross.
Street Fighter V’s launch serves as a necessary lesson for ALL fighting game developers: Fighting Games is a genre you need to do right, take your time, miss your yearly fiscal year if you have to, I guarantee it will pay off and win everyone over in the end. At the very least Capcom would look at this game and learn from its shortcomings to not only improve the game but take these missteps to heart when developing Street Fighter VI and now EVERYONE is excited for the game.
V triggers are a comeback mechanic, and that sucks, but they're less egregious than Ultras from SFIV. And though they didn't emphasize this enough in the mechanics, you could earn them by using your V skill, not just by getting hit. Another thing that sucked about the game was that there were no chip kills except for with supers, and supers shared meter with far more useful EX moves, so too many games came down to a slog where one or both characters are alive on a magic pixel fishing for the last hit. There were two things that made me hate the game though. 1) The netcode was bad, and in 6 years, they never found it worth the investment to fix it. 2) I've heard people refer to this game before as +2 Fighter, because you kind of just had to memorize which moves your opponent had that were unintuitively +2 on block; if you didn't, you'd get blown up in just a couple of interactions, and the round is lost. A lot of the other fighters I play have universal defense mechanics like pushblock, Fautless Defense, and whatnot (which the Drive system in SFVI seems to mimic to some degree as well) to handle these kinds of scenarios that are otherwise knowledge checks, but it just made SFV completely unfun to learn until you overcome these knowledge checks. They added V Shift later, which may have solved this problem for me, but at that point, I had no interest in returning to the game's terrible online experience.
SF4 > SF5
You haven't mentioned that 3/4 of the roster is paid DLC. I played quite a lot of SF5 in the beggining trying to force myself to like the game and I could afford like one or two characters with fight money.
My biggest issues with the game are actually the slow walk speed, long blockstun, and stubby normals compared to SF4. You essentially couldn't walk out of pressure and whiff punish, making it WAY more important that you know all the frame data. The awful medium punch "bonk" sound as I call it became forever ingrained in my memory from playing SF5
The change in managment likely had an effecton, or was a symptom of, the dev focus shifting more to appease the players of the game rather than the sponsors of the game
That's very unlikely, the game had been constantly improving since it was released, the management only changed like last year or something.
I think the only bad thing about this game that never got fixed was the netcode, it's definitely not as bad as before, it's functional. But booting up SFV is hard when you're used to silky smooth GG strive.
My biggest problem with 5 has always been the lack of creativity. With very few exceptions, the devs designed each character to have one optimal way to play them, and one only. If you look at 4, the difference in Daigo's Ryu versus Valle's or Choi's or Jyobin's is very apparent; there was no "correct" way to play the character for optimal results. Whereas most characters in 5 have obvious uses for each button, linear BnBs that require no execution, a priority system that takes out trade combos and a bunch of other interesting interactions you had in 4, almost universal hitboxes which removed character-specific combos, stubby normals with little recovery, etc, etc, the game just didn't have the sense of discovery after the first week or so. The main times the meta develops is when balance patches drop.
5 has obviously come a long way to fixing some of these issues since launch, with the final season's cast all being really interesting with a lot of depth, but fundamentally, 5 is a game which pushed e-sports hard, while significantly reducing the skill gap from previous games. Those two choices do not work together. I can only imagine what game we could have gotten if Matsumoto and Nakayama had more say in direction from the start. After all these years, 5 is finally the game it was trying to be all along, but that's still a game I have little desire to play.
I am incredibly optimistic for 6. Everything so far looks incredible.
Freedom of combos and such are good for fun, but linear paths for optimization isn't necessarily a bad thing. It leaves more room for the ''game-within-the-game'' to emerge, that chess match that occurs between each interaction that branches off into the other possibilities. There's plenty of hype to be had watching pros hit those 1-frame links in SF4, but those realms of skill in execution are a huge gap away from everyone else, whereas getting routes off was accessible to a lot more people in 5 if you put in the time to understand how the system worked.
@@Knifegash I agree that the chess-match aspect is very important, and I'd say 4 has a lot more of that than 5. You have many more options (invulnerable backdashes, meterless reversals, crouch-tech OS, better buttons, focus-backdash, etc) which you have to account for during any interaction. All of these things have counters (except for the bullshit backdashes lol), and the decision on how to pressure is a lot more nuanced than using one dedicated plus-frame medium to stagger or shimmy with. Also, one-frame links add more decision making, because you often have to choose between going for the really hard combo that kills, versus the guaranteed one which leaves the opponent with a smidge of health; it's not purely a spectacle thing.
6 having universal parry, generally negative normals, drive reversal and the like seems to be attempting to expand the decision space once again, minus some of the BS 4 had. I don't know much about 3rd Strike, but I'm pretty sure that game had a similar thing with the different types of parries and such.
I'm probably oversimplifying 5 here, but I hope I made sense lol.
@@innocenthedgehog8367 SF4 has all of those mechanics going for it, but a lot of it gets thrown out of the window before it comes down to whatever invincible move you have that can chip. EX moves to chip to death became a huge problem, this fact is uncontestable and something they've worked to address in 5 and even 6. There's also the ridiculous scaling which actually punished going for lengthy combos as an offensive tactic and made it more about forcing the opponent into a state where they were not attacking you. And I actually can't believe I'm seeing someone defending crouch-tech OS, arguably an unpatchable glitch. Furthermore, 4's roster is mostly redundant due to wack tiers, it is always so refreshing to see a varied list of characters in tournaments in 5 due to actually good balancing. I don't think universal parries are going to count for a whole lot in 6, it seems very weak unless you get a frame perfect parry. I liken 5 as a sequel to 3S, and 6 as a sequel to 4 in terms of match flow.
@@Knifegash I don't understand why chip-kills are a problem. Crouch tech gets bodied by frame traps. Minus normals seem to offer a great opportunity for reads in 6. I press st.LP and I'm -1; if I think the opponent's going to challenge me, I can do a parry to punish their counter normal, but if they predict that, they throw me and get PC damage. If I think they're going to press a button, I can chain two jabs together which will beat that and give me a CH conversion. If they predict I'm going to chain the jabs, they can parry and punish me. This is obviously all theoretical, but I see potential for some very interesting mindgames here.
And 4 definitely has wack balancing, no arguments there. But I think that's a side-effect of having characters with very different tools. I don't see a perfectly balanced fighting game as one where every match-up is 5/5; I see it as one where every character excels in particular match-ups. 4 definitely doesn't accomplish this, even if it tried. Elena, Yun, Akuma, Evil Ryu are absolutely busted.
I love Street Fighter but the small roster kept hurting it and is why I always prefer The King Of Fighters because part of the reason why is the roster is always big and I always had more moves to work with for each Character.
For me the 1st issue I had was the art style. Between banana hair Ken and lion King Akuma I didn't even want to play my old mains because I couldn't stand to look at them. The fact the tekken 7 had a better Akuma than SFV is really messed up.
My biggest gripe was how limited the combos were :-(. When the game first came out and the combos were so toned vs down it really put me in a sad place LOL... Versus how Street fighter 4 combo system allowed you to be more free
well thats character to character really i'd say. SFV Guile or Seth can easily match the most insane stuff SF4 can put out.
@@rooflemonger lol that's my point... Only two characters could really do long combos like that. To be more specific.. let's use RYU as an example. I get that every game is different so all the same combos will not work. In sf4 he could do two c.lp into low roundhouse... Or 3 c.lp into low roundhouse.. he could do c.lp c.mp into low roundhouse.. LOL you get my point and he can do other simple things like that and have way more combos than the Sfv Ryu... And that's without fadc. In sf5 you can only connect maybe two normals into a special and that was it and if you tried to go for a third hit usually it'll push you far away unless you had a media attack to start the combo. The game definitely has more combos now but in the beginning the lack of made me really dislike the game
@@bljacks5 but its not only two characters; they're just examples. Gill, Dan, Juri, Oro, Chun-Li, Rose, Akira, and probably more I'm forgetting also have hella saucy combos.
@@Eman-vp6ju he's talking about the beginning of Street fighter 5 when those characters were first released. And I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying characters didn't have good combos I'm saying the freedom that Street fighter 4 had in their combos is missing in Street fighter 5 combos
SFV launch was so bad I stopped playing fighting games for like 3 years. If that was the direction FGs were going I wanted nothing to do with it.
same i quit for 5
just getting back into everything
Love this game. It has its flaws but now it's a great game now
I wholeheartedly accepted SF5 at launch, issues aside I felt the gameplay was a pretty natural evolution of what had been built since USF4. But the crush counter fishing and V trigger disparity really killed my enthusiasm for the game as we (quickly) figured out the cheap shit. And the character expression was just not there, devs definitely designed each character with a flowchart in mind. Then Season 2 came and robbery meta happened, game was nigh unplayable at that point. I was also really hoping the addition of new V-skills and V-triggers would really spice up the game, but at least initially it felt like a nothing burger update. Winners like Guile won more with the initially busted VT2, and Ryu got.... another parry for his VS2. Never touched the game since that update but always kept up with the events, I'm glad it's in a better place now but I cannot say that my overall experience with SF5 has been positive.
I prefer characters to be from different parts of the world representing different fighting styles. I liked the concept of Rashid and Laura, but not so much the others. The others are just too wacky and weird for me. Loved the concepts of El Furte, Juri, and Hakan in sf4. Jamie in sf6 is the kind of new character I'm interested in
Did you say too wacky, but like El Fuerte and Hakan? Is that what I just read?
@@Lucy2Juicy Lol, yeah I knew some might feel like that. I just like that Fuerte and Hakan have styles that are grounded in what region they come from. Yeah their gameplay is unusual, but I think their designs are parts of what sf is about to me. I like it when the developers build a new character around a region's culture/fighting style
@@casual_C While I love wrestling, Lucha libre and might like what Hakan is into I'd say the designs are the worst and least SF about them. One looks like a creature, The other a template of a Wrestler given Cooking as a theme like a bad Vince McMahon style jobber
@@Lucy2Juicy I care more about the representation of different fighting styles. Turkish oil wrestling: check. Lucha libre: check. The minor details don't matter to me. One likes cooking? One has a big family? Ryu hates spiders? Ok, whatever. As for looks, Blanka is green. Hakan's look is not much of a big deal to me. How they play is what's really important
@@casual_C Fair to say but if true the detail of too wacky wouldn't have came up. Every SF bar SF1 allows you to play as many different martial art styles, but normal and made up. However I can agree with the general idea of variety in styles.
Pretty much nailed it rooflemonger, I would argue the majority of game and why this games pretty dead was all the games system mechanics. V triggers
Vskills crush counters are absolutely terrible for a game like street fighter leave that comeback mechanic shit to marvel.
or atleast Deserve the comeback mechanic. Not pushing 1 button altering the entire game-play experience gross.
street fighter V allows average players to perceive they're good players with the V system, footies in V absolutely stink.
Just to hang a point on the launch roster, I really didn't think of it as anything out of the ordinary for a Street Fighter game, and I think fans really have short memories when it comes to that. SFII had a starting roster of 8, and by the SSFII Turbo it had 16, 17 if you count Akuma. Alpha immediately followed that and had a starting roster of...10 characters; 13 if you count secret playable characters again. In Alpha 3 (home versions) it ballooned up to I think 39 characters. But we'll count Alpha 2, since only that was released when they moved to SFIII; Alpha 2's final roster was I think 19. Then came SFIII, which boasted a measly 10 characters again. By 3rd Strike it got up to 19, the same as Alpha 2 but way below Alpha 3. Finally, SFIV launched with 19 characters, and years later got to the 44 being referenced in this video. So sure, SFV's starting roster of 16 is less than SFIV's, but just like every other game in the series, it eventually blew up (to the point it boasts the most characters of any game in the series), and just like every other game it launched with less characters than the game that preceded it.
It's still the best SF game to me, love this game 💝.
I got a Steam Deck a few weeks back and never played SFV. Looks like it runs well on the Deck so I will likely pick it up very soon