The Last Word

DANIEL WILKS has been in early access for 39 years

Oh Street Fighter, why do I still love you so, even when your latest iteration is more of a tease than a real game? Street Fighter V is emblematic of a problem that is pervasive in PC gaming – the all too common failure to launch in a meaningful or even finished manner. In the case of Street Fighter, even though the server problems were apparent during the beta weekends, the game still launched with severe connection problems, something that wouldn’t be so bad if there was any meaningful single player content or if players were even rewarded in a meaningful way for what they did offline. None of those were the case. SFV launched with a laughably constrained story mode, a survival mode (that offers rewards after beating thirty consecutive opponents), local versus matches and online multiplayer. Of those four modes, one is hilariously lacklustre, one is boilerplate, one is sometimes inaccessible and one is sitting on a couch playing with a mate, which is always great.

A single player challenge mode is being added as DLC in March (it could be available now), as will the first DLC character, Alex, but I would question why this is coming as DLC. Why not launch the game with some form of single player content? Capcom is essentially releasing a day one patch intended to make an unfinished game complete but releasing it a month after the fact. Capcom is also apparently “considering” making an arcade mode for the game – something that has been a mainstay of the series since its inception. Actually, scratch that. The arcade mode has been the core of the series since its inception. Aside from local multiplayer, the arcade mode is the heart and soul of the Street Fighter franchise. To launch a new Street Fighter game without even a cursory arcade mode is more than a little odd. And then to claim that they are hoping to grab new players with the latest game makes the lack of single player content even stranger.

Why is it that the game has come out with so little actual content only to have some of it patched in around a month after launch? Why was this January release window so important that Capcom had to release the game in what can only be politely described as content impaired?

For an indie team, their game is everything. They literally have everything riding on that one title

Looking at the release schedule, there are no games on the horizon that Street Fighter had to beat to market, and the distance between the release of its closest competitor, the content-rich Mortal Kombat X, means there’s no overlap when it comes to competing for sales. Was it dropped to fit into a sales quarter to make the books look good for Capcom? If that’s the case why not wait the extra month so that there’s a little more content available in the base package? Surely that would still fit into the quarterly cycle. It’s all very strange to me. There are some suggestions that Capcom may have rushed the launch due to its esports push with the Capcom Cup. If that is truly the case then the claim that the developer is looking to grab new players looks even more spurious.

Compare the release of Street Fighter V to that of another game reviewed this month, Grim Dawn, and you see the polar opposite when it comes to a launch. Grim Dawn has been in development forever (or around six years at any rate). The tiny team behind the game has used community feedback and a huge number of playable builds (31 before launch) to test mechanics, hone gameplay and generally quality assure everything about the game, so that when it finally launched it was not only feature complete but all but bug-free.

The scale of the two projects is obviously different - one is a massive AAA title from a prestigious studio and lineage and the other is an indie game made on a much smaller budget by a small team, but when it comes to financial impacts of getting the game out I would argue that there is more riding on the launch and success of Grim Dawn than SFV. For an indie team, their game is everything. They literally have everything riding on that one title, so making sure that the launch is smooth is vitally important. With a AAA title from a massive developer/ publisher, there’s more money involved, but the impacts of a single game aren’t felt as strongly. They have the backing to roll out day one patches, content updates and server fixes after launch, but smaller developers and indies have to get things right before launch otherwise things go to hell in a handbasket.

Unfortunately I don’t see anything changing for the positive. As budgets increase and shareholders need to be appeased, more and more games from big publishers are going to find their way to the PC far earlier than they should, feature incomplete or unworkable at launch. Due to the nature of the PC, and the fact that the vast majority of content is now digitally delivered means that day one patching and slow feature drip-feeding is not only becoming par for the course, but expected. Why release a game in a finished state when you can patch it up afterwards. Why release all the features on day one when you can hold some back to be added as a free download later, hopefully convincing gamers that you’re adding value rather than completing the core experience? Hopefully I’m just being old, bitter and cynical and flashing back to the days of physical media rather than digital distribution, but I fear that’s probably not the case. The bigger gaming gets, and the more money that is poured into it, the more we’ll see this kind of launch.