This week we have guest writer Timi Merriman-Johnson filling in for Ed Smith’s Invisible Walls. Ed will be back in two weeks. Enjoy!
There is a rather odd phenomenon that seems to take place within the world of fighting games. This can quite easily be seen in Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise. The developers release a game: Street Fighter II (1992), and then re-release the exact same thing soon after – often with a few extra characters, and some sort of hyperbole affixed to the title: Super Street Fighter II (1993). Over time, this practice has enraged many a fighting game supporter, as they feel that their hard earned cash is being siphoned away from them due to all the relentless iterating. As Capcom was relatively young when Street Fighter II was first released, this begs an important question: why would a developer seek to alienate the very audience they depend on? This, dear friends, is a question of balance.
At its inception, if there’s anything the Street Fighter franchise was recognised for, it was for its wild and wacky cast of characters. Created by a Japanese development team, it’s very amusing to see the way they chose to represent other cultures in their work. I would go as far as saying that many of these representations could easily be perceived as mildly racist. What saved Capcom from coming across as offensive was the way they managed to maintain an equal distribution of ridiculousness amongst the cast. Take Dhalsim, the meditating, levitating contortionist from India. Problem? Also, why not make him breathe fire? Must be from all the curry he eats. Or how about Dee Jay, the gleeful, kickboxing capoeira fighter from Jamaica. The devs even made sure to give him a pair of maracas to whip out and shake around during his post-match celebration.
Despite how bizarre some of the characters are, Capcom are to be applauded for continually striving to ensure that their cast of Street Fighters are as diverse as possible. Who wants to play a game in which all of the characters are the same? However in striving for diversity, any fighting game development team runs the risk of affecting character balance. A fighter may be given an uppercut that just so happens to beat out the special moves of a significant portion of the roster. There may be another character with the ability to perform an ‘infinite’; an unending string of moves that can be performed until a KO is reached, or until the time runs out. Because there is only so much playtesting a development team can carry out prior to release, fighting games often go out with undetected imbalances. In the hands of consumers, further game-breaking exploits are likely to be found by individuals who have much more time on their hands than the developers could ever hope to have.
Before the days of digital distribution and online gaming, the only real way to deal with character imbalance was to hope that players found a way around it, or to release a more complete, fairer version of the game. Capcom obviously favour the latter, hence the reason why to date, there are six different versions of Street Fighter II across multiple platforms. Capcom do need to tread carefully though. In this day and age given the technology available to us, and a much wider audience base, consumers are much less accepting of the business practises of old. To the disbelief of their fans, Capcom still continue to iterate with full (albeit discounted) retail releases of their current day releases such as Street Fighter IV and the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Many feel that such a practice is greedy and unjustified, given the fact that in-game exploits can now be fixed via DLC. Who knows, very soon Capcom may find themselves trying to strike a completely new type of balance. In striving for financial gain, Capcom now run the risk of negatively affecting the relationship they have with their fans – a problem that would take much more than a patch to fix.
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I don’t think kids back then really cared how many iterations of SFII there were. They never had to pay for the updates out of their own pockets; that was the arcade owner’s job. To them, a credit was only a quarter regardless of whether they were playing World Warrior or Super Turbo.
With that out of the way, I’m not entirely sure what the point of this article is. Are you trying to tell people that fighting game developers update their games to balance it? If so, congratulations on earning the Captain Obvious award.
Don’t mind the first poster, I understand your point completely.
I like how you drew attention to the offensive portrayal of cultures within the game, that’s an issue that many people are not fond of discussing.
Anyway, I do feel that Capcom’s release of different iterations of the same game way back when is not the same or for the same reason as what they do today.
Street Fighter 2 Turbo was released because I was tired of getting my ass kicked by Balrog without being able to feel the thrill of using him myself. I was tired of watching with jealousy as Vega climbed the fence in the background, something my beautiful Chun Li could never hope to do. The old school releases were released to offer more characters and provide a new way to play, there was no issue of balance as all the characters back in the day were balanced as long as you knew how to use (or fight them).
Marvel vs Capcom suffers from imbalanced characters and no amount of new character releases will change that. Adding new characters doesn’t fix a broken game. Hawkeye and Ghost Rider were introduced but that doesn’t mean that my Dante and Wesker are any less devastating.
No.
New characters are being released with the sole purpose of making more cash.
The videogame industry has now entered the world of corporations and big business; they do not care about what you want or think until you give them hell.