Balancing a fighting game has to be one of the most daunting tasks in the entirety of the development process. With so many interconnected variables, the long term effects of even the smallest changes can often be next to impossible to accurately predict, and making 20-50 unique characters feel like they all play relatively fair with one another is something we, more or less, have never really seen.
I’d argue that Capcom’s work on Street Fighter 6 is the best we’ve seen yet in this particular avenue (as it should be given the three and a half decades worth of preceding trial and error) but as we grow closer to the proposed annual balance overhaul we should take into account a particular change they’ve made in their approach. MC Mura details this out nicely in one of his latest videos.
Moreso than any other franchise entry before it, Street Fighter 6 is intricately linked on multiple levels of gameplay. Developers aimed to give every maneuver a purpose, working in tandem with others to create interesting scenarios where players can conspicuously make decisions that will lead to either victory or defeat.
We can see tons of intentional and interlocking checks and balances in the global Drive System mechanic as well, as the obvious value of Drive Meter and the choices to spend your own while manipulating your opponent’s also lead to the same kind of aforementioned scenarios.
The game is by no means perfect, of course, and as certain characters have floated to the top of tier lists the interconnected nature of so many moves makes proposing changes difficult. Drive Rush seems overpowered in some characters, sure, but what’s the solution?
If you change the speed, distance, or cost of Drive Rush, you risk disrupting combo sequences that are both not problematic and essential to a given character’s game. It’s not to say that this mechanic can’t or shouldn’t necessarily be altered at all, but doing so can easily have an unforeseen butterfly effect of sorts that could wind up causing more problems than it fixes.
Another way of saying it might be to point out that altering the utility of moves simply isn’t a precise enough approach for the intricately woven web that is SF6. We’ll surely see changes to frame data and hitboxes, as we have already a bit in the Ed patch that included a few balance alterations, but developers have cleverly set themselves up with another means of tweaking that’s much more honed in.
This has everything to do with damage scaling, something developers have worked with plenty in the past, but not quite like in SF6. In this game, individual moves have unique scaling properties meaning Capcom can alter their overall impact without changing their utility at all.
What’s more, this is even more efficient than simply tuning damage up or down, as it may be that a particular move (let’s say a crouching medium kick) is only overpowered when it’s used in the context of combos. A problematic move can be tweaked so that it leads to less damage in the specific scenario (as a combo starter) but still retains its current nature as a standalone poke.
Already we saw them use unique scaling alterations in a good bit of their nerfs for JP as well as Chun-Li’s aerial Lightning Legs. Mura goes into more detail and shows off more specific examples of this clever tool in action in the full video below.
Check it out and let us know in the comments if you, like we, think we’ll be seeing a lot more scaling nerfs when the major balance update hits in the coming months.