Originally at first, I thought that it was no big deal of whatever characters they included in both version, but today I think otherwise. As wierd as it sounds, SFIV has the least amount of original characters introduced in a Street Fighter series, much less than SFII, Alpha, EX, and SFIII. I Capcom made a mistake in introducing most of the SFII characters, they could’ve AT LEAST just included Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Akuma, though a few more wouldn’t hurt, but they had too many.
Also they shouldn’t have included ANY of the characters from Alpha and SFIII. Even Sakura shouldn’t have been included. It’s rather disappointing that there were no original characters were introduced in SSFIV, instead they add ones from other SF series, though Adon is tolerable because we never seen him since SFI. As for Final Fight characters, why the hell did they add Guy and Cody from Alpha again, why not characters like Mike Haggar and Lucia?
This is definitely something that has occurred. I think Capcom wanted to not take the same risk they did with 3s (which was almost an entirely new cast) as not including old characters generally upsets players initially. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion.
They really took it to an extreme though. I wonder how many people would have been upset if T Hawk or Adon wasn’t included.
when you implement an ENTIRELY new character, you have to consider how they will act. What type of hit boxes, what type of character design, combos, damage potential, etc…
This takes a lot of work and a good bit of thinking. People want diversity and you have to come up with new shit that’s not broken. Adding characters like cody\guy are easy fill ins. Their character design have already been done once, they can transfer into the EX system just fine and their character design aren’t so broken that they would dominate the game. This heavily cuts down on the development time and in the biz, time = money.
take a character like juri who was probably tinkered with for a good bit of time. Understanding her matchups, giving her good tools but not dominating ones, making sure her hit boxes weren’t broke, nerfing genei jin as much as possible etc… this crap is time consuming.
Then take a character like guy. All you have to do is make him relative to all the other characters in the game. His character design is already done. Just small tweaks to make him fit into the ssf4 system. Much easier by comparison.
Im just curious as to where capcom goes from here… Do they pull another SFIII and create a game with mostly new characters? Do they use the SFIV formula and add a few new characters to the old cast, and if so, which characters stay/go?
After SSFIV Capcom are gonna have a tough task mustering up a roster for SFV.
Go with all old characters and keep that nostalgic feel,but the game therefore becomes more stale
Or
Bring in a mostly new cast and risk alienating every one who only loved SF becuase they liked playing the world warriors(in other words 3s)
I think a cool roster for SFV would be:
Ryu
Ken
Chun
Akuma
Guile
Sagat
Zangief
Alex
Rolento
These characters represent all the different playstyles of traditional streetfighter,and have a nostalgic and gritty SFII feel to them.The rest of the roster should be 12+completely new characters to keep SF fresh.
You listed 9 characters, four of them are fireball/uppercutt types. Switch out three of them for Sim, Rog, and Vega and maybe you might have something there.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all the other famous FGs franchises keep a “core” of at least 5-10 characters that will be in every game? KoF, SS, GG, Tekken, VF, SC etc. All of those games have at least a few characters or a complete rooster that just kept growing up with newcomers. Sure we get a character/s missing for a version or even more, but usually those are the minor ones.
I don’t think SF should get “another 3s” with 80% of a new cast, but at least 4-8 if not more newcomers on a new game of the series should be fine
As for the existing rooster
Cosmetic changes. Change their outfits and look from game to game or just improve the graphics in a noticeable way
Different systems and mechanics. This is what we care about really. People don’t want to play the exact character they played in the last game, but with enough changes of the gameplay no one will complain because the playstyles will be totally different. If it wasn’t like this I guess the FG community would’ve hated the SF2 crew so much considering most of them appeared in 10-20+ games
We need a game were everyone is over-powered like GG or Mvc2, give them regerating health bars like DS’s and make Sakura one of the main characters and the Evil “bison possed” Cammy the villian. Ryu will be the secret midboss and of course the guy that was actually behind Bison will the true villian and secret end boss.