14 DAY TRIAL // Ultra Street Fighter 4 is almost here, that is if you're not in Japan, in which case you might already be enjoying it in arcades. If you are, know that some of the world is envying you right know.
However, wherever you may be, you're probably still interested in the balance changes that are coming in the large content update.
Peter Rosas, the Fighting Game Community specialist at Capcom USA, or ComboFiend, as the some might know him, has acted as Associate Director of Battle Design on Ultra Street Fighter 4 and as such has maybe the best insight into how the acclaimed fighting game works.
He has revealed on the PlayStation Blog that the entire reason Ultra Street Fighter 4 was made was because of the ever-mounting requests from fans, who wanted all the characters to be balanced and to stand a chance of winning at the highest levels of play.
He has said that the gap in power between the highest and the lowest characters was very noticeable, and that the bottom five characters had almost zero chance of ever winning against a skilled opponent.
Capcom started a massive feedback gathering campaign, involving the entire community and collecting over 20k comments from the western audiences and 12k from Japan, and then went through the entirety of them in order to see which requests came up most consistently, what changes made sense, and what the players ultimately wanted from the game.
He has offered two such examples, pointing out the fact that, while some of the requests were indeed legitimate, others would have simply further broken the balance of the game.
"Chun-Li players asked for Chun-Li’s life to be boosted to 950, as her defensive attacks have been rather lacking since Super Street Fighter IV. After reviewing the defensive attacks in question and the case presented by Chun-Li players, we agreed that this change was warranted and put it in the game," Rosas states.
"Another change came from Makoto players, who requested that her Hayate punch have little to no recovery on block as they were tired of being punished. As Makoto is primarily an offensive character, allowing her yet another way to be almost unpunishable was a recipe for mayhem. After reviewing this change, we had to pass on it for the greater good of the game," he explains.
Other requests were more outlandish and even ended up confusing the developers, introducing offensive abilities to defensive characters and vice versa. They ended up implementing some of them, in order to provide players with more options when using their favorite character, while still keeping things fair for everyone involved.
Ultra Street Fighter 4 is coming out on the PlayStation Network and on Xbox Live on June 3, followed on August 8 by the PC version and the retail editions for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms.