It may seem like a stupid idea but I honestly think something like a dash meter could be very useful in this game. One backdash or 2 forward dashes deplete your meter and it takes about 10 seconds to refill meter.
Either that or make dashes how they were in sf4 where they didn’t really go very far and were slower to boot.
I totally agree that the game is basically the ability to shut those options down consistently.
The problem is that it’s extremely low level play, but extremely powerful.
Unlike rote mixups where you have to actually get an advantaged position, and can be denied that position, the dash/jump/long range move neutral in sf5 is available to any and everyone.
It becomes very low brow and isn’t fun much at all. This is basically how go,d in Australia functions and if you don’t have good enough reactions to consistently shut it completely down, you stay gold, even if you have shimmies and good combos it doesn’t really matter if you can’t shut down low level neutral.
I’ll see if I can dig out my post but what you guys are describing I called out just after the first month of the game. It’s not a mistake how anything works in SF5, it’s been very carefully thought out by someone with a design goal in mind. Combofiend wasn’t wrong when he said the game was about commitment. It’s whether you accept or enjoy that playstyle and the reason again is so that the games feel closer and also something that Daigo said - people just want to push buttons.
The basic model of SF5 is to make it deliberately hard to react so you have to pre-empt which in turn allows CC to flourish and the answer to Crush counters is to jump… then it just works in a circular motion from there.
In early S1 you could easily make the case you had to commit. Which is fine. The problem is that it feels like some characters have to commit while others get to just do what they want till it works.
I don’t like those odds. Capcom-Unity comments sections have been bitching about arcade mode for over a year. Capcom seems to give zero fucks about content that doesn’t yield money. I don’t think they can sell arcade mode. So yeah…