It’s been eight years since Street Fighter V hit PC. As you might recall, the fighting game landed with the poise of someone shattering both kneecaps on impact, as complaints about a small roster of characters and barebones story mode – to be filled in later with DLC – were made more egregious by a number of technical issues, including bugs and online issues caused by its wobbly servers.
“In many ways, it’s the perfect fighting game, an easy 10, but it is woefully lacking in some areas,” Andi wrote in our own review at the time. “Hopefully, this botched launch doesn’t put too many people off sticking around, because when Street Fighter is at its best – when you’re learning, improving, competing and winning – there are very few games that even come close.”
Street Fighter V ultimately managed to regain its posture over the subsequent months and years, adding a cinematic story mode and dozens of additional characters across five seasons of DLC before wrapping things up shortly after the reveal of Street Fighter 6 with a final Definitive Update in 2022.
With Street Fighter 6 now out, marking a true moving on from its predecessor, Capcom took the opportunity to mark the eighth anniversary of Street Fighter V’s release by apologising to players for the messy launch while also celebrating how far the game came afterwards.
“From the beginning to the middle of the release, there were network issues, lack of content, etc…” the developers wrote on TwiXer. “We are truly sorry for the content that did not meet the expectations of many of you.”
The team added that they “did a lot of self-reflection” during Street Fighter V’s early life, resulting both in the expansion of Street Fighter V – with the evolution of its fighting system to include V Skills and V Shift, and a filled-out roster of 45 characters in all – but also the experience to help make Street Fighter 6 a better game. By all accounts, Street Fighter 6 seems pretty darn good, so it seems it paid off.
There’s a happy ending for Street Fighter V too, in that its player count has apparently increased “significantly” since Season 4 in 2020, with the game still attracting hundreds of thousands of players today according to the studio.
“Above all, the most important point was that I was able to apply this reflection to [Street Fighter 6],” the developers wrote. “I once again feel that the past eight years have been spent together with everyone.”
“After the disastrous launch that was Street Fighter 5, seeing Street Fighter back on top form again just feels right – and I’m extremely excited to see what the next year of content updates can do for a game that already feels this mechanically polished at launch,” Lewis said of Street Fighter 6 in our review, praising its story mode in particular for being “the best story mode in any fighting game I’ve played” – quite the redemption arc from the lambasted offering of its forebear.
