I think this aspect of SF is by far its weakest and most neglected. It’s about time it receives some extra attention in SF5. The single player experience is very important IMO to casuals and newbies, it can also be a big stepping stone into the multiplayer and our community.
I think SF5’s Single player should at the very least include the following:
**Story Mode **- I think people underestimate what a good story mode can do to any game. People would buy ANY game if it had a really good, entertaining and well thought out story mode and Fighting games are realizing this now. Seeing something like this…
…fills me with envy and sadness that SF has never and probably will never have something this remotely entertaining, well written, and epic. In an ideal world, this mode would kinda end up like a modern day Final Fight, a game within a game. Watch and learn Capcom!
Arcade Mode - Standard single player experience, beat incrementally more and more difficult fighters in succession, face final boss/rival - get scored, graded, etc. Unlocking stuff based on your performance.
World Tour Mode - This was so much fun in Alpha 3! This is also a good way of training players by keeping the RPG elements of leveling up and perhaps unlocking more moves and specials with your character based on your level.
Training Mode - This mode in SF games has always been pretty monotonous, it should remain in the game for intermediate and advanced players who wanna try shit out (albeit it much more sophisticated and maybe more rewarding), but I think many of the beginner and some of the intermediate aspects of training mode should be cleverly incorporated in World Tour or Story mode (so that players are enjoying themselves while still learning how to play, making it feel effortless). Perhaps creating a Dojo Mode, where each character has many training objectives that must be completed in order to unlock more and more advanced techniques, bonus points if Dan Hibiki is in the background yelling stuff at you.
Single player mode should secretly teach casuals how to play the game well. This way when they actually play the game, read: not hotdog their button mashing skillaz against the CPU, they’ll be able to hold their own against a thinking human opponent.
If you’re playing a fighting game for the story, you’re doing it wrong.
Bottom line: If casuals do not possess the fighting spirit, then the FGC doesn’t need them. Lousy attitude to take, I know - but I’m tired of people who contribute nothing to the scene whining for developers to waste more time and money on aspects the competitive scene has no use for. Not to mention developers aren’t going to waste time and money beefing up the story for the inevitable Super / Turbo / Phantasma / Hardcore upgrade editions, which will just making the whinging casuals QQ more.
There are games in genres that exist, that will never be something some folks are interested in playing. I’m okay with this.
Capcom can worry about what Midway is doing, after Midway figures out how to make a decent fighting game. So, never.
I agree 100% with this, Street Fighter has always been the game to set the standard for fighting games. I hope imagine SF5 will be the game to raise the standard. Before I go into my thoughts about the story mode, I want to say I believe a 5th mode should be added which is a really good tutorial mode (not included in the training mode so it can stand out to newcomers). Something like Skullgirls, where the tutorial mode actually teaches fighting game fundamentals in addition to the in-game mechanics.
I’ve personally never played the MK or Injustice story modes but I’d heard from friends that it’s really good. Street Fighter: The Movie (game) had a story mode in it based on Guile:
So maybe Capcom can do something like that again with actual cutscenes and stuff, where the player plays as a few characters in a good story that’s canon. I know P4A has a really long story mode, but their story mode is just a giant wall of text that takes hours to go through (seriously) with occasional images shown. A good story mode should be a cinematic experience, in my opinion; a wall of text will be very off-putting for many people I’d imagine.
I’d like to see the story mode give choices to the player (and actually make it feel like it matters) similar to the TellTale games (Walking Dead, A Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones). An example I thought of (I just made up these scenarios): Chun Li chasing after 2 criminals and they both run in separate directions; which one does she go after? Or Ryu is investigating something and has 3 places he could go to, where does he go and what characters will be there?
I understand that you’re passionate about the fgc, but people do play video games casually… you know for fun? If I let my mom or 6 year old cousin play Street Fighter, I’m not going to expect to play the game outside of a casual level. Capcom is aware of the FGC and supports us, so they’ll always try to deliver a product that caters to us too; but Capcom needs to make a profit at the end of the day. I fully support Capcom if they also try to cater to the casual audience through a strong single player experience (since it’s not effecting our multiplayer experience negatively unless you consider that a waste of resources).
The topic reminds me of a polar opposite situation with Sakurai of Smash Bros who aims to remove nearly every competitive mechanic of Smash Bros with each game’s sequel.
I’ll keep my hopes up for a good story in SFV as well as awesome fighting mechanics. I may not ultimately play it for the story, but SFV has the ability to build off of everything learned in SFIV. SFIV was sort of made from scratch with entirely new graphics, so I’ll turn my head at the sub-par story. But SFV has no excuses for not fleshing out characters more deeply and having better plot development.
Totally agree with this topic. Most people like to just say “who plays fighting games for story?”, but I think that mindset is just…outdated. I think the story gives you a better understanding of the characters and makes the game more fun overall. It certainly did for me when I played Story Mode in Blazblue. Street Fighter has always been one of those games where we had to go off of personal quotes, endings, or special guides to have an idea of things.
That was fun at the time, since it gave you various possibilities to build the storyline in your mind. However, I think a more straightforward story would be much better. Luckily, Ono said he enjoyed MK9’s Story Mode so much that he would like to do something similar to that in future SF titles. This would be perfect for Street Fighter 5.
Would you guys be in favor of dropping the “tournament” arcade mode shtick (where all characters make their way to the same final boss) for a new dynamic story mode where there is no “final boss” as much as there is a narrative that includes all characters, so you get to play pretty much every one to figure out the whole story (basically MK9 and Injustice story mode).
The whole “make your way to the final boss even if your character has nothing to do with the final boss” thing has gotten really old. I prefer Alpha2’s form of story telling where every one was doing their own thing around the same time, where you travel to destinations and fight characters that are relevant to your story.
The “tournament” as a literary tool to bring everyone together is overused and outdated to be honest. I hope SF5 take risks with their single player at least.
They should have a modified World Tour mode per character, where you have to kill enemies in certain ways, using creative things like that to teach people how to play the game. They could have story peppered in throughout the mode to better flesh out the story.
Yet the latest console ports of ASW make all the recent Capcom attempts at “content” look like a joke. So nowadays THEY are the ones setting the standard and keep raising it.
I would love a detailed story this time around. I enjoy the lore of SF. More so with Juri (obviously). Though I don’t find the whole ansatkusten arc that appealing.
It isn’t actually. The set up of a story mode is completely different than Arcade mode, where as the former is a narrative and heavily cinematic the latter is just fights, we’re lucky if we get a few coherent lines of text at the end.
If there could only be one choice, I’d prefer individual character stories rather than an Injustice style story of all characters together.
They would have to make a plot involving all the characters being grouped up for an Injustice style story to work, and I don’t know if that meshes so well with Street Fighter. Street Fighter feels more of like individual motives and stories rather than a big team up of one side vs the other.
Granted it could be done. But I think a lot of the characters would simply be side-characters in the story with not as much development as if they had their own story mode. It would be cool if they had both: A central story mode where you switch between all characters, and an individual arcade mode where one character’s story is focused on.
But that’s asking a lot… Sometimes I wish Bill Gates or some other billionaire was a huge fan of Street Fighter. He could just give up some spare change to make an awesome game.
Yeah the single player experience has really suffered in street fighter probably since SF3, especially with their use of completely uninteresting and cheap final characters like Seth and Gill.
I don’t think Street Fighter is ever going to have a meaningful story, early on in the original and even in SF2 it wasn’t so bad in its simplicity, SF2 never got any more complicated than enter the dragon but as it progressed and they tried to spin it off they made the kind of ridiculous overcomplicated mess that most long runing Japanese franchises turn in to (MGS, Resident Evil, Tekken etc I’m looking at you!). A bunch of talanted martial artists get together in a no holds barred underground world fighting tournament to see who’s best - whats wrong with that? It really doesn’t need to bother with riduculous experiments of trying to pull people fighting abilities out of them or create apparent clones that aren’t even the same sex or look anything like individual they were cloned from!
I was always disappointed in the arcade mode after the first upgrade to street fighter 2 (champions edition) where you no longer got to go through the full roster and fight everyone, and more recently the big issue is with the CPU “AI” and difficulty settings.