The Fighting Game Sequel Problem

Fighting games are easier (though still extremely hard) to update than do sequels to. When you're making Street Fighter II: Champion Edition your roadmap for what needs fixing is tons of open player reaction to what's wrong with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. When you're making Street Fighter III you have to impress everyone who has spent years getting used to the general flow of how Street Fighter II works. I want to look at the things that contribute to these reactions, what can mitigate them, and what intensifies them.

When a fighting game sequel comes out, a true sequel, it's fighting years of inertia set by itself. Oftentimes a new game is used as a chance to fundamentally rethink any given character's kit, their general set of moves or playstyle. These can be subtle changes that nevertheless drastically alter how they're played because the new engine just doesn't work the same way. An example of this would be Ryu and Ken's fireballs being markedly less useful as a tool to control the opponent's movement in Street Fighter III. The addition of the parry to the game's mechanics means the opponent can just stay where they are and not only not take damage or have to meaningfully react to the fireball, but actually gain super meter. Instantly a fundamental aspect of how these characters are played in II has shifted, creating a domino effect on how the rest of their gameplan has to shift. Sometimes though it's because of fundamental alterations to how they function or what kind of playstyle they're meant to have. To keep the SF examples rolling as it's the one I have the most knowledge of, Vega (Claw) from Street Fighter V went from being a character who only had moves that had to be charged (i.e. hold back for 1 second then press forward to activate) to moves that had quarter circle inputs (i.e. down, down + forward, forward plus punch or kick to activate a special move) and his "wearing claw vs not wearing claw" became a freely changeable stance rather than a debuff for getting hit too much, meaning players now had to learn many new aspects of how his attacks functioned now that he was supposed to intentionally swap between them. This represents a huge shift in how the character is played. Other times a character may go from being a close in attacker to a keep away zoner if the developers are feeling spicy. Fundamentally these changes create a sense of betrayal for returning players, the character looks similar but they can't feasibly be played the same way. These changes are important because the new system mechanics will inevitably force changes, underplayed characters need overhauls if they're going to come back, and plenty of other reasons, but changes will inevitably alienate a loud portion of any audience.

A common complaint with a true sequel to a fighting game is often that they launch unbalanced. This clash of a dozen or so reworked characters, redone system mechanics and engine changes has produced something less balanced than the culmination of years of iteration and subtle balance tweaking. Of course most games tend to end up more balanced than their predecessors in the long term but it's hard to convince many players of this. Street Fighter V as of its most recent updates is generally more balanced than Ultra Street Fighter IV was at the end of its lifetime, developers have generally gotten better at this over time, but new systems are rough to come to grips with and inevitably unseen cracks will show when the scale of people playing goes from internal testers to the outside world. It's understandable to not want to play this new weird frontier but it's essentially an unfixable problem, the people playing the new game contribute to making sure the newer versions are able to be as good as they can be.

How fixable is this? I'm not actually convinced it's fixable at all, the only way forward is to essentially have a strong enough brand to weather the anger of the hardcore players and to not focus your entire gameplan on pleasing them out of the gate. Street Fighter V was hobbled out of the gate because of the state it launched in, hoping to get it into the hands of competitive fans in time for that years tournaments. There wasn't much for the casual crowd and the competitive crowd treated it with venom for both these and other issues. The game spent a good half its viable lifetime trying to restore its reputation. The only major game that launched to general fan acclaim in the past few years would probably be Tekken 7 and that's using "launch" in huge air quotes, the console version 95% of its audience played first was built on the back of seeing how people reacted to its arcade exclusive launch version. The loss of the arcade really hurt the capacity of a new fighting game to be out of the gate popular with the largest portion of its audience. The only other way to avoid this isn't really replicable, it's to launch and gain an explosion of casual or new players of such magnitude that the discourse can't be dominated by people who obsessively played the prior game. Street Fighter IV had this benefit, the nostalgia purchases brought in tons of new players with little expectation for how the game "ought" to work. Super Smash Bros also relies on this, while generally some lipservice is paid to Melee players (please I beg all of you to learn to play on something that's not a GameCube controller) it's selling to an audience that probably throws on the game occasionally at parties or with friends. Smash deemphasizes its competitive community in part as a defense mechanism against the kind of damage overemphasizing competitive players can do.

Really though, that's the thing, it's healthier to approach a new fighting game not as a competitive spectacle because chances are it's not ready to be one yet. Play it competitively if that's how you have fun with fighting games, but know that it'll probably be worse at it than the one you just put aside. A new fighting game's a sandbox, an untested set of of tools waiting to be discovered. Maybe that set of tools ends up being unsuited to your playstyle but that's something that only comes out with experience. The latest game is an immature environment for competitive play even if it is something you end up liking. I guess the answer is less that this is something that developers can really fix and more something that requires players to be ready to sometimes switch back to the old game without talking about how the new one is terrible for x y and z. Chances are if it was made by a company like Namco or Capcom or ArcSys it won't be terrible for long, even if it never becomes what you want.