‘Ultra Street Fighter IV’: Capcom Looking To Buff Unused Characters
Ultra Street Fighter IV won’t be just adding new characters and stages – Capcom promised during its reveal that each character in the current roster would be tuned, and now we have an idea of what sort of balancing the developer has in mind for the returning characters.
In an interview with Siliconera, Matt Dahlgren, who holds the title of “fighting game manager” at Capcom, explained that the developer’s goal isn’t necessarily to bring down characters that are considered very powerful. Rather, Capcom is aiming to make each character a competitor.
Or, as Dahlgren puts it, a threat.
“Our philosophy this time around has been to make everybody a threat,” Dahglren said, adding, “We don’t want to say these characters are the best in the game and nerf them—that isn’t fair to the players that put a lot of time and effort in learning those tactics. The super powerful characters will have slight modifications, but our real intent is to take the lesser used characters and make them an equal threat as the top tier characters.”
As an example of what Capcom plans to do with characters in Ultra Street Fighter IV, Peter “Combofiend” Rosas, assistant battle director on the game, went into detail on what sort of changes are in the works for largely unused characters such as T. Hawk.
“T-Hawk was considered [one of the] bottom five in the game. Some of the requests were to make him faster and give him more tools so he didn’t necessarily have to rely on his command throw,” Rosas explained.
“We gave people what they were requesting in terms of giving him more focus cancel options, giving him stronger attacks, and things like that. All in an effort to give him a better fighting chance against characters you usually see at the end of a fighting tournament in the top eight.”
Apart from making unused characters better overall, Rosas said that the development team is looking to address the issue of “unblockable” set-ups. Rosas didn’t explain how Capcom plans to address it, only that they’re looking into it.
Interested in seeing Ultra Street Fighter IV’s new contenders? You can check them out in action below – well, most of them. We’ll have to wait to see the fifth character.
