Street Fighter V designed to be accessible to all players, not just fighting pros

The intimidation of learning a new and complex game is something Capcom hopes it has eradicated with upcoming release Street Fighter V.

The challenge, series developer Yoshinori Ono, is trying to achieve this while also staying true to popular older entries that championed complexity and depth.

Looking at Street Fighter III, it’s very well-known that it’s a master class title, it’s a masterpiece in and of itself, but the game got to a point where it was so high level that only masters could really play each other,” he told Game Informer. You had to be an expert to be able to even have a chance at playing that game after a certain point.

Games are supposed to be something that you enjoy and have fun between lots and lots of people. That’s a very basic thing. That’s what a game is supposed to be. So when they said Street Fighter III is done and that the Street Fighter brand was done because that was the absolute highest level, that did not sit well with me because games are supposed to be fun and it’s supposed to be played by a lot of people.

I wanted to give that feeling where you come back and it’s like you’re playing Street Fighter II on the SNES, so when I came on-board and I talked to the team and I said that we’re making Street Fighter IV, everyone on the dev team was giving me all these proposals that were trying to go beyond Street Fighter III again! It was like, ‘Oh no, guys. Don’t do that please! Here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to use today’s technology and make Street Fighter II.’”

That same mentality, Ono added, has informed upon his team’s approach to Street Fighter V.

When we talked about making Street Fighter V, we wanted to make sure we lowered the bar for entry as much as humanly possible,” he added. What we wanted to do was eliminate the gap between really, really strong players and new players as much as possible. We wanted to make it so that almost everything you learned in the previous title got thrown out the window – at least as much as humanly possible.

In doing so, we ended up narrowing the gap between really strong players and new players. It’s a very small gap now.”

Street Fighter V will be released on PS4 and PC on February 16th.