After playing enough fighting games you naturally develop sensitivities and intuitions for how they feel and flow, and since the genre is so often explored on a frame by frame basis, our tuning tends to be extremely precise. Street Fighter 6 players have been experiencing what many are calling dropped inputs as it seems the game deviates, at times, from traditional feel and flow.
Frustrations surrounding inputs have been fairly prominent since the game launched back in June, and still continue here some four months later. The community has been exploring what exactly is going on, and while we don’t have all answers, we are now able to highlight a handful of various input issues and begin to understand what they are as well as what they aren’t.
Catalyst, DreamKing, and I put these issues under the microscope as we explore why it feels like we often experience incorrect moves, eaten inputs, (which actually isn’t really what’s going on) and other similar scenarios.
Overly Lenient Input Windows
The first of these we discuss seems to stem from the amount of leniency Street Fighter 6 gives in terms of the amount of time players have to hit all necessary inputs for a particular special maneuver.
Lily might be the most regularly affected character here and so we use her as an example, but many players have expressed this issue being present for most all fighters across the roster.
Certain sequences will naturally include a few different special moves throughout, and Lily’s bread and butter knock downs into her Wind Clad power up is something she’ll do in just about every round.
After you knock an opponent down with a Condor Spire (quarter circle forward + kick) you can instantly perform her Wind Clad buff (quarter circle backwards + punch) and safely store a stock, but all too often players will get other special moves instead of the aforementioned Wind Clad buff.
This appears to be because SF6 is actually too lenient with how many frames it will accept between each of the necessary inputs for specials, and thus when players accidentally hit an extra stray input or two with their control sticks, it’s enough to completely change the desired special move.
Drive Rush and “Eating” Inputs
The other major complain people tend to have surrounds the Drive Rush mechanic, specifically because performing freezes the screen for a split second. It seems as though inputs can be eaten if they’re performed during or near this screen freeze, but that doesn’t exactly seem to be the case.
As explored in detail by The Big Nasty Kail, the game gets a little weird as the Drive Rush freeze interacts with buffer windows. To understand this, we need to first appreciate buffer windows.
Characters will enter locked out animations many times every round, as every time they perform an attack, are in block/hit stun, or perform a maneuver like dashing, jumping, or even standing up, there is a period where inputs are simply not allowed and thus will not manifest on screen.
All of these situations have a buffer window at the last few frames where, although a character is still stuck completing an animation, players can begin inputting their next maneuver so that their character will perform it the moment they’re free to do so.
This all takes place in the span of just a few sixtieths of a second, but muscle memory keys in with extreme precision and many have frustratedly found their characters not doing maneuvers inputted during buffer windows.
This seems to be because the Drive Rush screen freeze also slightly delays the timing of when a given buffer window begins, meaning that players are likely inputting command a tad too early.
It’d be one thing if this was a consistent happening that were predictable enough for players to adapt to while playing Street Fighter 6, but use of Drive Rush varies heavily, and thus consistency becomes all but impossible.
There are multiple other facets of the input discussion we get to in the full Talk and Block discussion below.
Check it out and be sure to share your thoughts and personal experiences in the comments (please copy them into the comments of the YouTube video directly on YouTube as well) as we continue to ask developers to roll out more quality of life fixes on the inputs front.
We’ve included timestamps if you’d like to jump around to particular points in our conversation. If you enjoy what you hear here, be sure to check out our Talk and Block playlist for similar discussion on other fighting game topics.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Airing out Frustrations
06:13 – Getting incorrect moves
11:03 – Street Fighter 6’s move priority hierarchy
15:08 – Why it feels like Drive Rush eats your inputs
19:14 – Should we accept, or hope/ask for alterations from Capcom?
24:17 – Pros/Dangers of changing Drive Rush