There continues to be quite a bit of debate lately sparked by fighting game legend Ryan Hart’s comments about the genre being much easier to compete in now and how current players couldn’t stack up to the best classic champions in titles like Street Fighter 3: Third Strike.
Who better to add his perspective now than another legend and eight-time Evo champ (nine times if you count Battle by the Bay) in Justin Wong with one of the most winning fighting game players of all time across a bunch of different titles talking about the new versus old.
To start things off, the competitor with like 25 years of experience says that current fighters are for sure easier to get into and learn with the more modern tools and “hand holding” in the titles themselves even with concepts like tutorials and combo trials that just didn’t really exist a few decades ago.
Couple that with social media and the internet in general making information sharing and gathering now instantaneous gives new players many more resources than ever before, but Wong doesn’t feel like all that is a knock against the games themselves.
He also points to how that has benefitted the classic titles as well with arguably more people playing Third Strike at a high level now than ever before.
Wong says, however, that much of the busted tech that was necessary to do well back in the day like crouch tech and option selects in Street Fighter 4 is removed going forward or patched out of newer entries if they do arise, which the average player does not know how to deal with.
That does lower the skill gap between top and medium level players in his opinion, however, he does take some issue with the comments about current top competitors not being as strong.
Going back to MOV’s domination in SF3, Wong feels that a lot of his success may have come from that game’s obscure tech, which he could lord over almost everyone while his performance in more modern titles has not matched up.
He also believes that if those classic games came out as is today, we’d see more very powerful top players now compared to back in the day with using Smug’s performance in Third Strike for a point as a relatively newcomer to the title.
This is only like half of Justin’s discussion about the genre, so make sure to check out his full video below to get his complete thoughts — and check out our talk on the debate here if you haven’t already.