It’s hard to read people on this game because there are very few control moves in the game and the game is made to be very binary with its options. This beats that, that beats this and very little nuance in between.
It becomes so that a linear player like myself who is always trying to read the opponent… I’m always one step behind. Like I see a player do option A so I think…
Ok I’m going to do option B which beats option A next time, but my opponent does something to beat my option B… normally in most fighting games this doesn’t happen. Because my option B will be a multitude of things. But in sf5 in its simplistic form and the way the moves interact with respect to priority, many of the options either aren’t there, or are very weak. So now when I see option A, a lot of times it’s “smart” to simply not adapt to fast to my opponents obvious blocking mixups.
Combine that with lack of control moves ( a control move would be a move that does moderate to small damage that can control your opponents options without itself being super risky… example is sf4 ryu cr.mk. Worst that can usually happen is it gets wiff punished by a sweep, usually. But it can’t be jumped over and it has good range for keeping the opponent out of crossup range… in other words it’s good at controlling your opponents options and the space they can attack from). There simply aren’t many moves that are like that in sf5 and the few that ARE like that do next to no damage. So people largely don’t have access to them, or can ignore them.
But usually the best you can do is a random button. Most buttons have something that will outright beat them, so footsies becomes very “random” with the players doing footsies “mixups” randomly trying to find a pattern or a spacing where the opponent becomes predictable.
In the oldschool however, there weren’t nearly as many viable ground buttons… so you could play neutral as if only playing against like 1-3 moves. And generally speaking the move that won wasn’t this beats that, but this spacing beats that spacing. So it was all about spacing for footsies before, but now it’s more about differentiating buttons and switching up timings.
In practice it doesn’t feel very fulfilling because it very largely feels random… it isn’t “RANDOM” per se, but the element of randomness is there in a much higher percentage than what older streetfighters were about.
And then add in the “turn based” aspect of the game and it becomes even worse. It becomes hard to read people because every time you do something to train them upclose, you get pushed out or put at frame disadvantage. A lot of my oldschool reads were momentum based. So I like make my opponent block a couple of things then I see the y like to do this so I keep momentum and punish that. But in sf5 I can’t usually keep momentum at all so I can’t force tendencies. I always have to give my opponent breathing room after every blocked gambit.
It’s like a boxing match with 2 second rounds. Ding ding, both boxers move towards each other, make a couple of plays at feints or actual punches, then… ding ding back to your corner and wait for 5 seconds… ding ding… both boxers come out do a couple of things… ding ding… back to your corner and wait.
Over and over and over again. Like it’s just sporadic interaction and offense then back off for awhile into sporadic offense for a second binary box neutral.
Hard to out think people in these situations because the game is deadset on allowing people forever and a day to sit there and think about shit if they happened to block any offense.
But I’m working on being more observant of the opponent so it can help me win, and also aim to change something if I feel that I’m scared of the opponent, because chances are very high that I’m going to lose if I feel that way.