Ultra Street Fighter IV

[joeplus]

http://www.capcom.co.jp/sf4/system.html

[lewismistreated]

Vidjo.

English.

New System #1: Ultra Combo Double!

Before the match starts you’re able to choose between your Ultra I and Ultra II combos. In Ultra we’ve added a third option, “Ultra Combo Double.” As the name suggests, once you’ve built up your revenge gauge you’ll be able to use either Ultra combo! The downside to this is that the Ultra will do less damage than it normally does.

Here’s a screenshot of your Revenge Gauge when you’ve selected the Dual Ultra Combo option.(Why the “W” you may ask? Well, doesn’t a “W” sound a lot like “double?” …No? Well, we’re working on it!)

Having both Ultras available will give you new ways to press your opponent, limit their options, and expand your fighting strategies.

New System #2: Red Focus Attack

This is a feature that strengthens the Focus Attack system.

It uses up Super meter, but can absorb multiple attacks. Since it uses meter you’ll have to put some careful thought into how you use it. As the name implies you can distinguish it by its red glow. Just like the regular Focus Attack, the Red Focus Attack can also be dash canceled.

Our vision is that Dual Ultra Combos will give you more offensive options, while the Red Focus Attack will give you more defensive options.

Can you think of how these system changes will affect things for the current 39 characters? And that’s not even taking into account the new characters! Things are about to get interesting!

I’ll be releasing more details about the new systems on this blog and the official site so be sure to keep checking in.

But before I wrap things up for this week’s entry, I’d like to show you the finished poster for the arcade version of Ultra SFIV.

We’ve got the main character, Ryu, at the forefront and a mix of new and old characters behind him. The lightning strikes gives you the feeling that an “Ultra” fight is about to take place!

Well that’s my Ultra SFIV news for this week. Hopefully I can bring you more new info in the near future!

Game changer. Because the game is quite literally being changed.

[ah]

Red parry still loses to armour breaking moves.

It kind of seems designed to discourage jumping in and pressing buttons?

Othr than that, I guess there are a few rare situations where you can now red parry to focus through attacks rather than just blocking them. It surely won't make much difference to zoning because you'd have to guess a two hitting fireball was coming to react with with red parry instead of normal parry, and then your bar's gone. Same thing with using it to beat out random dragon punches/messiahs, etc, surely you'd have to have a great read on that random attack to avoid wasting your bar, and then what do you even get from it - a slightly more guaranteed punish than just blocking and waiting to punish during recovery? Maybe it's just to discourage people picking Rose ultra 2? Haha and Dhalsim ultra 1 setups? Strange.

The dual ultra thing is... also strange. I'm not sure, but I think if it only does half damage I might be okay with being guaranteed eating a half damage blizzard (it actually looks like it might still be a bit higher than half damage in that video, mind) if it means I'm also guaranteed not to be eating a full damage blizzard later on. Me being scared of blizzards doesn't necessarily make it a good idea though! Hmmm.

The whole thing feels a bit BlazBlue: Chronic-new-mechanic-acquisition-syndrome-phantasma. Hopefully lots of stuff will come out of the location tests.

I really want to know how they fixed the unblockable thing. Something like freezing you in place for the first frame woken up, so it make no difference to your positioning if you're holding back or forward? Presumably also changing wakeup hurtboxes so they all stay in one place during the rising animation? Interesting. I wonder if it will have any other unexpected effects.

[joffocakes]

Oh man, Red Focus absorbing three attacks in that video there. If it uses meter and is suffers from the armour breaking weaknesses as a normal focus then it shouldn't be too overpowered (and I'm sure all the grey life risk will still be a big factor) but characters who rely on multiple hits to punish focus will struggle far more than some of the other characters. Chun Li for example, and Guile, who doesn't have quick access to his armour breaking flash kick to use it on reaction.

I wonder if the recent talk of delays in development are related to the nightmare of balancing so many new matchups to take the two ultra thing into account? I think it will be a hard thing to adjust the damage for because you'll have to consider the Ultra's worth as a threat as well, whether it's landed or not. The fact all characters' Ultras were designed to be separate motions when they were added back in Super makes me think it was something considered even then.

One thing I don't like about the Ultra option is that it adds an extra layer of complexity to the game for new players before the match has even begun. I've always appreciated how SFIV brought back that surface simplicity to the genre and I don't think those potential barriers will help attract new players.

It's good that unblockables are removed. I don't mind an opponent having the advantage and pressuring me after a knockdown but getting a full free combo, unscaled, is a bit wild.

I was kinda hoping to see some more cosmetic changes in that video; menus, character select, things like that. I guess this video was more of a reaction to the fact the information leaked earlier in the week than a planned official update.

Still; STREET FIGHTER!

[joffocakes]

I guess the option of red focus will mean Bison having to look out for it during his corner pressure game. An incorrectly guessed armour break psycho crusher and he'll corner himself.

I wonder how it will fare against regular focus? If they make the level 3 charge time longer then a level 3 regular focus oughta win. Even if red backdashes to safety they'll have that meter loss.

I don't know what I'm rambling about. I'm on a bus.

Combofiend seems so lovely.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Red focus seems a bit wild, because it will hurt some characters so much more than others, depending on the specifics. Characters like Adon and Dan, whose entire game is pretty much based around armour breaking moves anyway, won't really be affected by it all that much. Is red focus a big indirect buff to Dan, then? I think they'll have to tweak which attacks are/aren't armour breaking, perhaps.

Also dual ultras, even with damage scaling, is surely a massive buff for characters with 2 viable ultras. Bipson still might as well not bother choosing either.

Rufus can still accidentally combo into his ultra 1 for free, and now he gets to shut down zoning too. Gen has 4 ultras, which is frankly unncecesarry. I'm picking up gen.

I bet some clever dick comes up with a way that you can do option select one ultra and if it doesn't come out you get the other one, or something.

[JLM]

I was hoping both of those rumours were untrue as I don't think either of them are remotely necessary. WIll obviously wait and see how they turn out, but this is not the news I wanted at all. Dang.

Also re: Adon, I think red focus beating his standing roundhouse means it may not be such a win for him in the end.

[IgTerminals]

Aw shit!

[mayor_mike_haggar]

What kind of bothers me is them saying "don't worry, both ultras won't be broken, we'll scale the damage", when the damage isn't the issue, it's having loads of options that's the issue. Which is why upping damage/lifebars has always been a fairly poor way of balancing.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

http://evo.shoryuken.com/2012/08/21/thinking-about-design-options-as-the-greatest-resource/

That's basically all my of arguments as to why two ultras is a rubbish system mechanic.

[joeplus]

The two-ultras thing is quite exciting, although I can see why it's dividing opinion. Seems like it'll absolutely fuck with the balancing and metagame. Sounds like decent news for Rose, unless the damage reduction also applies to any combos from U2. Also seems good for all the grapplers and I guess Ken and Rufus come to mind too.

[IgTerminals]

Still no Guile news. Why?!

I dunno. This could be good. Red parry actually looks very nice, and correct damage scaling could make the W selection work really well. Reminds me of Skullgirls tho: choose two for half health/damage, one for max.

Also I've always loved the Japanese use of W to mean double.I hope it stays as W.

I am remaining optimistic.

[JLM]

Yes Haggles, that's the crux of it for me. Making them do less damage is similar to how Seth has low health because he is an atrociously designed character who has far too many options. It just about works and stops him winning all the time but it doesn't make him any less dumb. Also if you could c&p the stuff from your SRK link I would be most grateful as it has recently been added to the blocked list. I can't imagine anyone else at work has been visiting it, which is a bit worrying. Hopefully norwichphotos won't raise any red flags!

[IgTerminals]

Haggar and Jellum: I... am... remaining... optimistic...!

(They're gonna fuck it up, aren't they?)

[ah]

Ohhhhhh, "double U"! Thanks Ig.

[imp]

Ohhhhhh, "double U"! Thanks Ig.

Yeah, I don't know why Capcom didn't explain it like that. AMATEURS!

(It would have been a hashed explanation, the U has nothing to do with Ultra really, they just see W as shorthand for "double".)

I'll have a W burger, please!

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Here you go jellum. Beware, there are many references to magic the gathering. Which obviously we're all far to cool to play.

In Magic: The Gathering, there is a card called Ancestral Recall which allows you to spend one mana to draw three cards. It was printed as a part of a “one for three” cycle that let you spend one mana on a variety of things like three life, three damage, so on so forth. However, it was the only card in the cycle that was eventually elevated to “power nine” status, one of the nine strongest cards in MTG history. Why? Because drawing three cards effectively gives you three more options and options are easily the most valuable resource in Magic. As Magic evolved, the most powerful and broken cards routinely ended up being the ones that gave you more options, allowing you to do more things than your opponent and execute your strategy most efficiently.

So what does this have to do with fighting games? Well, like Richard Garfield in the early days of magic, we have not yet grown to think of options as a resource, or if we have we certainly do not put the right value on them. This flawed point of view is what eventually causes huge gaps in character balance. Essentially, “tier lists” are made based on which character has the most options in the most situations.

Let me give you an example. When was the last time you said “man, this character can do everything, but their health is so low they are easily bottom tier.” My guess is never. Yet there is a very common example of characters with high health and high damage that routinely end up at the bottom of fighting game tier lists. I’m talking about the low tier forever grappler.

I’ll draw another parallel here. There is a common misconception that raising a character’s health and damage can compensate for their lack of options, and to a certain extent this is true. A character with more health can afford to make more mistakes. At low levels of play, this makes grapplers absolute powerhouses, because both players are making tons of mistakes. Few combos are being executed and so the grappler’s high health and high damage will let them win in a button mashing competition.

In Magic, there was a card called Necropotence which allowed you to trade life in for more cards. On face value, this actually doesn’t seem like a good deal and at low level play, it wasn’t. Newbies’ decks weren’t strong enough to take advantage of the card advantage Necropotence gave you. As a result, they would pay life to get cards, only to have their face stomped in by a simple and more straight forward big strong dumpy creature strategy.

Sounds kind of similar right? Well, Necropotence was eventually powerful enough to get banned in Magic: The Gathering, because at high level play it was hard to stop. Experienced players built their deck to make every card count so having more options was eventually far more valuable than having more life. By building up an impenetrable defense, an offense that won the game before you could be touched, or creating some combo that ended the game outright, life totals simply never entered into the equation. Opponents with decks that did more damage and conserved more life never matched the sheer speed of a Necropotence deck. It didn’t matter if you were going to eventually be able to cast fireball to kill your enemy in once shot, because you never got the chance to do it.

Similarly, in the case of the low option grappler, high life and high damage begins to matter much less when you get to high level play. Oftentimes, combos nearly completely invalidate a grappler’s higher health. Whereas it takes several extra small hits to kill a high health character, at most it will take, maybe, one extra combo. In fact, half of the time, it doesn’t even take an extra combo at all. The entirety of the grappler’s extra health is made up for by simply executing standard BnBs. As a result, they aren’t actually allowed to make that many more mistakes, while they still suffer from an overall lack of options. It doesn’t matter that they can, eventually, get in on the opponent and deal a tremendous amount of damage all at once. If they never manage to get in on the opponent then their high damage and 35 cents will get them a phone call… if they can still find a payphone.

Grapplers aren’t the only characters to suffer from option deficiency. Examine, if you will, the case of Ryu. In every Street Fighter game that Ryu has been in, he has never fallen to bottom tier status. That is because, to an extent, Ryu can do everything. He has a good DP, a projectile, a hurricane kick that moves him, normals that cover all angles of attack, and supers that work well with the rest of his tools. He is a jack of all trades and master of none and this has solidified him at the top or near top of the tier list for all Street Fighter games. But then Marvel comes along and this same character suddenly becomes much worse. Why? It’s because Marvel opens up a whole host of other options. Air-dashing, screen long beam projectiles, flight canceling, and more supercede Ryu’s middle of the road toolset.

In fact, the ultimate example of why health doesn’t matter is Phoenix from Vanilla MvC3. Phoenix had absurdly low health, far lower than any other character in the game. However, it was X-Factor LVL 3 Dark Phoenix that made her such a threat, so much so that no one ever really stopped to think about how low her health was. Marvel 3 evolved to be mostly a one-touch death game anyway. So it didn’t matter if you were landing that one touch on Phoenix or Wolverine, that one touch was going to equal a dead character. Dark Phoenix broke the rules by absolutely requiring two good touches if you can activate her. This combined with ludicrous speed, power, and all the attack and mobility options in the world made her hard to stop. So how did Capcom handle her nerf in Ultimate? While they may have reduced her health slightly, they also reduced her options. They allowed her to do less, and with the addition of side TACs reducing meter, characters with meter reducing specials, and an overall nerf to X-Factor in general, they managed to defang her, while barely touching her health at all. In the end, the true power of Dark Phoenix lied in her options, and to this day people remember the nerfs to her aerial action count far more than the nerf to her health

Though we have come a long way from the early days of Street Fighter II, many developers still don’t seem to fully understand this concept of options being the most valuable resource, and it’s possible that they never will. MTG still prints unbalanced cards and thus fighting game developers will most likely continue to make unbalanced characters. Bad matchups will always be part of the art of the fighting game. Even now in P4A, which is certainly more balanced than many games of our past, suffers from this problem. Kanji, a fairly powerful grappler, can barely take on characters like Mitsuru or Elizabeth. Both have easy answers to all of his tools and his opponents need to make stupid mistakes in order to allow him to get in and deal damage.

It could be argued that games that don’t rely on life as a balancing tool eventually create better grapplers and “strange” characters overall because they focus on options first. Goro Daimon is widely used in King of Fighters XIII and Cerebella is widely used in Skullgirls. Both have essentially the same amount of options as any other character in the game, those options are just different. They focus on grabs over attacks but they both still have lots of mobility. They don’t have higher life totals than the opponent, and so they can’t rely on “making more mistakes.” They have to play just as solid as the next guy who is playing an agro or keep-away team.

When you look at any popular fighting game, it’s obvious that the character’s with the most options always creep to the top of the tier list. In fact, that’s about the definition of top tier. A character that can simply do more than another will always come out on top, even if their damage is crap. This is not to say health and damage cannot be used to balance a game, but it is to say that health and damage should be entirely secondary to what characters can do. However, one thing is certain. Life, damage, and options are not equivalent and developers need to stop treating them as such.

[Goemon]

Sim gets a 2 hit MK…Couple of weeks later everyone gets multiple absorbing focus attacks!

I can see Sim being super low tier as his zoning game will get completely blown up by Red Focus. Of course it depends what it will take to do it, which we haven’t been told yet.

I now have a morbid fear of Zangief. I always thought that EX green hand causing knockdown was a little too powerful because if you don’t have good wakeup options you’re pretty screwed. This is now especially heightened by the fact that he can have both ultras stocked, which make an ever bigger guessing game to get away

As Haggar says the day they figure out Ultra 1 /Option select Ultra 2, Zangief would be god tier.

[JLM]

I really don't like how brainless that 50/50 is.

At the moment if Gief has ultra 2 there's a mix up that goes: SPD - > Jab green hand - > SPD or blizzard. SPD does less damage than blizzard, so it's on the Gief to condition the opponent, see which one has them more scared, see what their tendencies are and make the right read. The threat of blizzard can make them eat two or three SPDs. The threat of eating two or three SPDs can make them eat a blizzard.

With both stocked it's SPD - > jab green hand - > churn butter and flip a coin.

Even with the damage adjusted to stop it being an instant round winner, it's still too stupid for my liking.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

So basically, as far as I can imagine, every single character that has two viable ultras which work in different situations/cover two different options in a specific matchup, should probably ALWAYS pick the two ultras, because even if they do a bit less damage, it's just so much more powerful.

That's the metagame completely changed anyway.

[JLM]

Also that post with the Magic analogies is very good and I agree with it. Cheers for that.

[cale]

Quick things:

Red focus sounds fun if only for the fact that I love focussing.

Gief's u2 catches backdashes too, right? Having both ultras would be barking.

Nate, me and our friend Fred spent most of the night playing Volgarr the Viking yesterday. Amazing, amazing game.

I still need to write up Heggwest thoughts. So much fun was had!

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Also dhalsim is basically going to own gief for free now.

He's got Catastrophe as a get off me/mix up and he's got shangrila to catch gief if he ever dares to try and jump over a fireball. And he can armour break non red focuses.

[Goemon]

Also dhalsim is basically going to own gief for free now.

He's got Catastrophe as a get off me/mix up and he's got shangrila to catch gief if he ever dares to try and jump over a fireball. And he can armour break non red focuses.

Unfortunately Catastrophe isn't a 'GTF off me' move. If you stand over Sim and he does it on wakeup all you have to do is mash lariat, grab, SPD after the ultra flash and you will beat it clean (grab is true for any character) as it takes a while to become active. It's good for trying to create a bit of space with gief bearing down but with the damage nerf on multiple ultras I'm not even sure Gief would be that bothered by it.

It's a bit of a wonky matchup with either Sim zoning Gief completely or Gief getting in and Sim is dying within seconds. Now that Gief has EX greenhand knockdown again, I fear for Sim's safety.

[Camel]

Who fancies a seriaaaaas ft10/20/30 against my Dhalsim or Honda? I could do with some feedback after my terrible showing at HW.

Unfortunately Catastrophe isn't a 'GTF off me' move. If you stand over Sim and he does it on wakeup all you have to do is mash lariat, grab, SPD after the ultra flash and you will beat it clean (grab is true for any character) as it takes a while to become active.

Yeah, Ultra at point blank is a free throw.

Ultra 1, teleport behind, IA Ultra 2 could be a nice set up

[Fitzcarraldo]

I'll forgive all these changes if they just add stage select in training mode.

[JLM]

Online rematch button. Online training. I'd go along with almost any other changes if we got one or both of those.

Also give T. Hawk a gun, obviously.

[andygt]

Why did they do all that work with buffs and nerfs to characters based on AE 2012 to then go and introduce two new system mechanics. And 5 new characters.

If this is released on time and isn't a total mess I will be surprised.

I'll forgive all these changes if Guile ends up God Tier.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

On the plus side, maybe you can do RFADC's at the cost of even more meter, to make combos that bit less meter efficient.

Also the snackish special will now be the most powerful setup in the game.

[joeplus]

It'll be fun trying to Red Focus people's multi-hit Supers and Ultras. Just a shame so many of them break armour!