Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix Gameplay, Part 1: Design Goals
This article is reprinted with permission from Capcom Unity.
Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix was originally going to be a graphical update of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but along the way some magic happened. HD Remix is now a completely new Street Fighter game—the 6th installment in the SF2 series. It also includes an arcade perfect gameplay version of SSF2T with new art and music. You’re actually getting two games in one.
For years, I’ve been a care-taker of the franchise, helping to present the games in the best way in Capcom Classics Collection 1, 2, and Remixed. Now I have the honor and burden of improving upon what I consider the very best Street Fighter game ever: Super Turbo. So many have said it’s impossible to improve upon the polished gem of ST, but as Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” so Capcom and I felt that it was worth taking a shot.
Here are the design goals:
1) Make the game easier to play—more inclusive rather than exclusive
2) Make the game even more balanced for tournament play
3) Add fun as long as it doesn’t interfere with #2.
Easier Controls
Inside Street Fighter, there is a wonderful battle of wits, but many potential players are locked out of experiencing it because they can’t Dragon Punch or do Fei Long’s flying kicks, or whatever other joystick gymnastics they require. I’d like to reverse this trend. There’s only so far I can go with this and still call it SF2, but wherever I could, I turned the knob towards easy execution of moves. Let’s emphasize good decision making—the true core of competitive games—and get rid of artificially difficult commands.
This will get more players interested in the game, eventually leading to more competition. It will also get players past the awkward beginner phase faster and into the intermediate phase where the interesting strategy starts to emerge.
Easier Moves Overview
• Dragon Punch timing more forgiving
• 360s alternate motions
• Tiger knee motions removed
• Mash moves easier
• All 3 button moves changed to 2 buttons
All Dragon Punches are easier because the timing window to perform them is no longer random—you now always get a 15 frame window rather than a random number between 8 and 15 (and you only had a small chance of getting 15 in the original game). 360 motions are easier because they no longer require you to hold up and accidentally jump. Spinning Pile Drives can now be done by half-circle forward, then back + punch or half circle back, then forward + punch. There is a lot of leeway on these commands so that they can still be done from defensive crouch, and the old 360 commands still work too.
Most commands ending with diagonally up/forward have been changed to much easier motions. Sagat’s Tiger Knee is a Dragon Punch motion now (as it is in later games). Cammy’s Hooligan Throw and Fei Long’s Flying Kicks are now fireball motions (qcf + p and qcf + k, respectively), so no more accidental jumping frustrations.
The “mash moves” require less mashing. That means it takes fewer button presses to activate Chun Li’s Lighting Legs, Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap, and Blanka’s Electricity.
All moves that required three simultaneous button presses now only require two. This is specifically to make the moves easier to execute on a gamepad (as opposed to an arcade joystick). Because of the way you hold a gamepad, it’s easier to hit the jab + short buttons together with your thumb than it is to hit the jab+strong punch buttons. For this reason, there are a lot of jab+short commands now. Zangief’s kick lariat, Vega’s single defensive flip, Blanka’s hop, and T.Hawk’s aerial dive can all be done with jab+short *as well as* the original three button commands. Zangief’s punch lariat and Vega’s double defensive flip can be done with either strong+forward, fierce+roundhouse, or the original commands. Dhalsim and Akuma’s teleports only require two punch or two kick buttons now, as does Balrog’s turn punch (but don’t worry, you can’t charge turn punch while having access to fierce and roundhouse at the same time).
All of this taken together means that it’s easier than ever to get your moves to come out, especially on a gamepad. These changes alone increase the fun factor of the game quite a bit, especially for T.Hawk, Cammy, and Fei Long because their moves were so hard to do before.
Balanced for Tournament Play
Super Turbo is a delicate ecosystem, so changing anything can affect game balance a lot. Because there’s so much potential to wreck things, we need a plan that leverages all the knowledge we have about high-level play over the last 13 years. I picture a flat piece of wood with 100 indentations on it and 100 marbles. If we have 90 of the marbles resting in the right indentations, we wouldn’t want to violently shake the whole thing around in hopes of fixing the last 10.
After over a decade of tournaments, we know which characters are the best (Balrog and Dhalsim for sure, and Old Sagat in the US and Vega in Japan, with Chun Li as an honorable mention). We know which characters are the worst (Cammy, Fei Long, T.Hawk, Zangief, and Blanka). And which are in the middle. My goal is to buff up the worst characters so they reach the middle (or upper middle at best). Next, buff the middle characters slightly, but not so much that they become top tier. And finally, leave the top tier characters intact. In other words, the idea is to compress the tiers so that the difference in power between the best characters and worst characters is much smaller than before.
This approach gives us some margin of error. I’m shooting to make the previously weak characters about 2nd tier, but if they end up a little worse than that, they’re still be much more able to win than before and if they end up a little stronger, there’s some wiggle room before they overshadow the top tier.
Keeping the top tier at about the same power level is a good idea for a few reasons. First, we have a very solid idea of how powerful a character needs to be to be top tier (same as always!). Next, to use my last analogy, rolling around fewer marbles is better, so it’s safer to leave the top tier than it would be to bring them down in power and have no idea who’s good anymore. Also, as I said when I rebalanced Puzzle Fighter, we already know what the game felt like with the previous top tier characters, and it was fun, so it’s better to balance the game around that power level than a new, lower power level. And finally, to restate that, there are so many games that try to fix *everything* and nerf everything to such a low power level that even though things might be “fair,” they are no longer fun. I call this the Marvel vs. Street Fighter syndrome.
That said, there are some nerfs to the top tier. It sounds like I just contradicted myself, so I want you to understand this important distinction. Imagine that a top tier character has 10 awesome things about him or 10 ways to win. If we really wanted to nerf his power level, we would make all 10 of these things, say, 20% worse. (We’re not doing that, don’t worry!) But what if one of those 10 things is so abuseable that it can be repeated over and over pretty mindlessly, leading to shallow gameplay? This is a case where I think we can remove or tone down that 1 option and leave the other 9 just as strong as ever. This does not even necessarily reduce the overall power level of the character—it just forces the player out of repeating loops and into other more interesting options.
There are several of these situations in Super Turbo, and rather than trying to muck with every possible one, I think it’s just safer to remove the repeatable abuse from the top tier characters only—the abuseable stuff that can often decides matches. The various tricks from the worse characters never added up to enough power to dominate anyway.
It’s ironic that as a player, I seek out exactly these kinds of repeatable, mindless moves, yet as a designer they are what I’m trying to remove (again, from the top characters only). The list of toned down things is very, very short in comparison to the list of new, powered up stuff, so I think that fun factor is going up in addition to the compressing the tiers for balance.
In the coming weeks, I’ll detail the changes for each character in this new version of Street Fighter. I know you’ll find it easier to play, and I hope you find even more strategic and with fewer lopsided matches than ever.
–Sirlin
You can post comments here, but if you want a response, you have a better chance at Capcom Unity.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:20 am
First!
And anything that makes Fei Long more viable, I approve of.
Good article.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:20 am
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptSuper Turbo is a delicate ecosystem, so changing anything can affect game balance a lot. Because there’s so much potential to wreck things, we need a plan that leverages all the knowledge we have about high-level play over the last 13 … […]
November 13th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Mhh… I know this is kind of off-topic, but I’ve heard many people say that Street Fighter is too chaotic or fast for them. Any plans on adjusting that somehow in the future…?
November 13th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
[…] click here for full story […]
November 13th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Trotim, i don’t think Street Fighter is chaotic at all, especially to games like Guilty Gear and Marvel vs. Capcom. Street Figther is a well paced game, and it takes tons and tons of strats and practice, but i don’t believe it is chaotic in any way.
Sirlin, how’s the playtesting for this going to work? Is there going to be a group of players coming in to look for bugs?
November 13th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
[…] Sirlin placed an interesting blog post on Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix Gameplay, Part 1: Design Goals.Here’s a brief overview:HD Remix is now a completely new Street Fighter game—the 6th installment in the SF2 series. It also includes an arcade perfect gameplay version of SSF2T with new art and music. You’re actually getting two games in one. … […]
November 14th, 2007 at 2:23 am
David Sirlin: Good work on the proposed changes you’ve announced so far (including the Ryu changes in part 2). It’s always good to see a game dev talking openly about his likes, dislikes, and reasoning. I look forward to playing the next big revision of SF2!
On a similar note, I have a question to ask out of curiosity. No doubt you’ve seen the divisiveness that the rebalancing of SFHD’s Remix mode is causing, not only on fighting game sites like SRK but also elsewhere, such as on Kotaku (not that Kotaku opinions are generally well-thought out, but it’s an example). Do you find it overwhelming? Does it bother you at all?
November 14th, 2007 at 6:42 am
*Hopes Fei Long and Cammy get some good buffs*
Good job not touching the top tier characters. Too many developers alienate their community by nerfing the top picks.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Wow, this is very interesting!
So that I understand: you are going to weaken the most abusable moves from characters that typically win in tournament settings due to them already posessing a wide assortment of tools that should allow them to stay at the top tier?
I’m just wondering how difficult it must be to accoplish that. For example the first thing that came to mind for me was “how would I play O. Sagat with a slower tiger shot?”. I mean, you change one abusable tactic and suddenly the character will be played quite a bit differently, and maybe no longer win matches he or she used to win. Didn’t his uppercut lose cleanly to some moves in the game? So would you then make his uppercut have more priority or something, or just slow down the shots and let the experts test the matches? Where do you begin and end with such balancing? I’m not trying ot be ciritcial, it is simply interesting to me to see how you would go about it.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Oh, and by the way, I think you idea to make the difficult moves easier is a great idea.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
great to hear sirlin.
I just wish it was coming out for the wii.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:53 am
[…] sourced here […]
November 15th, 2007 at 5:51 am
[…] more here […]
November 15th, 2007 at 6:51 am
[…] mark oehlert wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptHere are the design goals:. 1) Make the game easier to play—more inclusive rather than exclusive 2) Make the game even more balanced for tournament play 3) Add fun as long as it doesn’t interfere with #2. Easier Controls … […]
November 15th, 2007 at 7:10 am
I hope you start getting into specific changes in time to get feedback. The general philosophy is difficult to critique.
That said, as I posted on SRK and won’t repeat here, the Ryu fake fireball sounds like a bad idea to me for a variety of reasons.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:41 am
wow, some pretty interesting comments on capcom-unity as well. can’t wait for part 2!
November 16th, 2007 at 6:27 am
“you now always get a 15 frame window rather than a random number between 8 and 15″
For reference, how many frames are there per second? 24?
November 16th, 2007 at 6:50 am
Usually it’s 60. I can’t say for certain about ST though, since it’s not a game I play much.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:23 am
If at all possible, could you take into consideration of making SPDs doable with only a half-circle motion instead of adding that needless extra back or toward at the end?
November 16th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
I love the idea of cleaning up some of the bizarre move motions - they convinced me not to play Fei Long when I first picked up the game. I also think that revisiting Super Turbo to clean up the balance and whatnot is wonderful, and I’m excited to play the new version.
I really hope something similar to the SPD motion change has been done for the 720 supers and the “Flash Kick” supers, which I always found nearly impossible to pull off correctly in ST and much easier in other games.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
This sounds wonderful. I’ve been waiting for this quite awhile. Now I’ll start waiting for you to polish every single (competitive) game I’ve played in the past.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
For those who don’t know, part 2, rebalancing ryu, is on capcom unity as well.
I just wish a wii version was coming out… I picked my console for the new Smash Bros, it’d be nice to have more fighters than that and guilty gear available :)
November 19th, 2007 at 12:49 am
I too love the idea of balancing bizzare moves. Being something of a GGXX player, I STILL have no idea what some of the moves indicators mean. I know that limiting super moves like Dizzy’s big blasts has some benefits, but especially on a cheap non-arcade pad controller, some are just impossible to pull off, and limited gameplay fairly hard.
November 19th, 2007 at 2:41 am
Sirlin, I love what your doing, but your making SPD WAY too simple!!! You turned it from a hard to pick up but awesome move to something as simple as pot buster. It was a little more motion then a tiger knee before (which is not too hard). However, thank you for keeping the old 360 motion for those of us that have SPD down to muscle memory. But if your simplifying the 360, what about 720s? I don’t want to worry about walk up to 720 shenanigans.
Another thing, are you going to make renda cancels easier? For example, Ken’s 2 x c. short xx super, do you have do c. short, c. short, 2 x qcf short~punch or will it cancel like the latter street fighter games? I’m all for that if you didn’t put it in yet (it will make Guile way easier to use).
Also, if your going to make it easier to do things, and keep the game fun, are you going to nurf the evil ST AI? I know most people want to play online, but that AI is seriously evil. Many people have problems with it on easiest setting.
Normalizing the frame in which you can perform dragon punch sound like a good idea to me. I feel that it’s better to keep things consistent rather then certain things having random properties. I don’t like the random damage in ST. It’s hard to notice, but it can be the difference between a KO, and zero vital.
To forty: 1 frame of animation is about 1/60th of a second. So 15 frames is about one fourth of a second.
To Robyrt: You have to set up 720s; you can’t just pull them out of nowhere. And here is how to do the double flashkick super way easier then they show it. instead of charging down back, to down forward, to down back, and then up forward + kick. Instead, just charge down back, then do a reverse tiger knee. It may seem weird, but it works.
To Usagi: That is excessively simple for spd, take what you’re getting and like it.
November 19th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Oh, the other thing i forgot to mention, for the mashing inputs (Honda hands, and chunli lightning legs) do you think you can put in the controlled mashing method of cvs2? Such as you can press any combination of punch or kicks, and the 5th button determines the type of move that comes out. I.e. your chun-li, and instead of mashing the same button, you press lk, mk, hk, lk, hk really fast. And hk lighting kicks will come out in a very controllable manner.
P.S. Ryu’s Feint hadouken is adding too much! I agree with James M, and many other SRKers.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:58 am
“Many people have problems with it on easiest setting.”
*Raises hand in shame*
November 20th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I love the changes being made.
I’m assuming the new 360 shortcut was the easiest way of dealing with the inconsistency inputting Zangief’s 720.
I like Sagat’s knee being a DP motion… it just feels right to me. I was surprised Cammy and Fei’s specials were made DP motions instead of HCF. No worries, though.
The three button moves being changed to two surprised me as well. I thought a punch and a kick was an interesting choice instead of just two punches or two kicks. Stick players tend to have little trouble dealing with three button inputs, and pad players have macros. SF pad players don’t hold their controllers the way Tekken-heads do because they already need two of the shoulder buttons. I thought most pad players *like* the macros!
I think the less-mashing idea for Honda/Chun/Blanka is brilliant. I wouldn’t want it to come out faster, but the idea of improving the activation’s consistency is awesome.
All this news has been keeping me off-the-wall fever-pitch excited. It’s just way too cool and I think about it so often it’s probably unhealthy.
December 1st, 2007 at 12:26 am
I like a lot these changes. But Sirlin, answer me: in the case of one or another change messes the game, would be possible correct it with a patch or something? (I’m asking just for curiosity…^^)
December 27th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
I appologize first for any “necromancy” in replying to this entry, but it was appropriate.
I’m hoping that at some point you’ll go into the scoring system. After all, the game is meant to be played online, and the leaderboards will glow with bragging rights for the highest score. That being said, I always thought that “classic” street fighter had a somewhat broken point and bonus system where a sloppy player could get a much higher total score than an efficient one. Did you have any thoughts? I mean, we don’t all enjoy multiplayer on the level that you do…
Say, will there be a tournament ranking on XBL?