Street Fighter 6 has completed its first lap around the sun with a powerful momentum as fans continue to enjoy what’s currently in front of them and anticipate the exciting new additions that’ve only started rolling out. With all this attention turned in the game’s direction, Director Takayuki Nakayama recently sat down for an interview with Famitsu to both reflect on a successful first year and begin setting expectations for a fruitful second.
We’d like to hone in a bit on the former as Nakayama had some interesting things to say about Street Fighter’s Drive System, a bold new mechanic that now only allows players to better manipulate the characters on screen, but also reflect how they themselves are feeling in real time.
The interview was conducted entirely in Japanese and so we offer appreciations to Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor for the English translation.
Street Fighter 6’s Drive System reaches into just about every corner of the fighting game experience as players manage a meter gauge that allows them special abilities in the arenas of offense, defense, and maneuverability. Spend your gauge effectively and you can manipulate the entire fight in your favor, but misuse or fail to predict your opponent’s manipulations and you can find yourself locked out of half your arsenal of tools.
“[I]t was a long repetition of trial and error and the result is a system which shows the emotional state of both the players and the characters, which was an unexpectedly interesting turn.” — Takayuki Nakayama
Though we wouldn’t go as far as to deem it perfected, the Drive System is clearly a success as it simultaneously grants players the freedom to approach the fight from the angle they choose while juggling with intent all the relevant variables that go into a fighting game back and forth.
That’s a good thing, too, because Street Fighter 6’s intrigue is directly tethered to the integral system, and too big a failure here would almost certainly mean a failure for the game overall. Developers at Capcom surely spent tons of time trying to ensure the Drive System would check all the right boxes, but it turns out they were even more successful than they had initially thought.
Famitsu comments on this to Nakayama, noting how various players can approach the same character in different ways and all find enjoyment in the process. The Director responded to the idea of this being evidence of a fundamentally well-made game.
“Thank you. For example, just looking at how players handle their Drive gauge, you see a lot of individuality there. That’s something we aimed for as far back as the original planning stage of development,” said Nakayama.
“You have players who will willingly put themselves in burnout by using all of their Drive gauge aggressively in order to put the pressure on the opponent, but then you also have players who will actively avoid burnout and be more defensive with their Drive gauge usage. There’s also players who will conserve their Drive gauge depending on where the opponent’s Drive gauge is at. It’s a system which brought out more playstyle variety than we had even imagined.”
Indeed you always have to be mindful of both your and your opponent’s gauges, but so many times we’ve seen how easy it is to get lost in the heat of the battle and wind up manifesting frustration, timidity, or other feelings directly through our use of the gauge because of how quickly it becomes part of our in-game identities.
Perhaps you’ve had one too many interactions not go your way and you so throw caution to the wind and start spending your gauge on aggressive forward movements and expensive OD enhancements. Other times you realize you’re on your back foot and go too conservatively into a “playing not to lose” mode, and wind up freezing up when your foe launches into a Drive Rush or Drive Impact that you then fail to react to.
Famitsu notes how the Drive gauge’s effectiveness goes beyond character ability and can actually depict the very spirit of player behind them.
“In fighting games, you want to try to limit the amount of different gauges as much as possible,” continues Nakayama. “The more you add, the more you have to understand to interact with the game’s mechanics which leads to it becoming harder to wrap your head around it all. What we wanted to emphasize with the Drive gauge was that it’s the emotional strength or focus of the characters.”
“In [Street Fighter 5,] we had a stun gauge which filled up the more you got hit and once it was all filled up, your character would be immobile for a certain amount of time. For someone who’s used to it, it’s easy to understand but it felt a bit too much like a ‘game system’ rather than a naturally occurring thing, so it might’ve been a bit hard to grasp for some, I think.”
“So with that in mind, we thought of something like ‘you lost your focus for a moment, and that sucker punch made you dizzy’, something where the stun happens in one hit and is easy to understand. Wanting to create something like this is what led us to the original prototype for the Drive gauge. From there, it was a long repetition of trial and error and the result is a system which shows the emotional state of both the players and the characters, which was an unexpectedly interesting turn.”
Do you agree with this sentiment about Street Fighter 6’s core mechanic and the multilayered, satisfying ways it allows players to express themselves and explore the game? Let us know in the comments where you feel like the system shines the brightest as well as areas you think need to be tended to by developers.
We also got a bit about the upcoming Season 2 roster additions from Nakayama in the same interview, so be sure to check out that story if you haven’t read it already.