We’ve got some new information for when we’ll likely see Akuma and potentially Season 2 of Street Fighter 6, with the evidence heavily pointing towards the end of May of 2024.
We know the next Capcom Pro Tour will kick off in June of 2024, and that characters must be out for a full week before they’re tournament eligible for the CPT.
Akuma is going to be playable in a Real Life Battle Hub in Japan the first week of May, so it’s very clear he’s right around the corner if they’re making him available to the general public. He is also expected to be released with the Season 2 balance changes, as Capcom often rolls out these types of major updates together.
A gameplay trailer for Akuma is expected to happen right around or before he’s released for the Real Life Battle Hub, as we previously saw a teaser trailer for him, and it’s unlikely Capcom would make the official gameplay footage of Akuma come from the Real life Battle Hub show floor.
Akuma will likely be coupled with a Fighting Pass too, and a design change for the Battle Hub. When that previously happened with Rashid, A.K.I. and Ed, those characters were made live from 20 to 26 days after their Fighting Passes were made available.
As such, it’s looking very likely that we’ll be seeing Akuma released officially near the end of May, on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, so it’s looking like May 27th through the 29th is the most likely window for Akuma and the Season 2 balance changes.
Timestamps
0:00 Season 2 & Akuma’s release date
3:57 Damage nerf potential for Drive Rush in Season 2
Speaking of Season 2 balance changes, we’re anticipating that the developers might incorporate some big damage adjustments to the game. The team behind Street Fighter regularly adjusts the damage characters do in the franchise, often near the time the first major balance patch is released, although it can come later in the pipeline as well.
Looking back at the history of the franchise, this has been happening regularly since the Street Fighter 4 era, where a little over a year after that game was released on the consoles, Capcom heavily nerfed a lot of the cast’s ability to do damage with Ultras, that game’s comeback mechanic.
From the vanilla release of Street Fighter 4 to Super Street Fighter 4, characters lost about 5 to 15% of the damage on their Ultras, and some of their other moves.
Similarly, two years after Street Fighter 5 was released, Capcom applied a universal damage nerf of 10% on all combos that involved a V-Trigger activation, which was one of the main ways of dealing damage and one of the most popular tactics to use throughout that game’s lifespan.
Because of the history here, and the amount of complaints about Drive Rush, there’s a possibility that Capcom will look to decrease the damage dealt in Street Fighter 6 in Season 2 with this move.
This is traditionally done by increasing the damage scaling, in other words, when you do an attack instead of doing 100% of the damage it normally does, it does 90%, a 10% damage nerf. That’s often how Capcom adjusts stuff in this modern era.
I think Capcom is going to look at two specific things in Street Fighter 6, Raw Drive Rush in neutral and Level 3s.
There have been quite a few proposals to reduce the effectiveness of Drive Rush in neutral, by giving it punish counter status, where right now it only gives counter hit status.
Raw Drive Rush in neutral has a 15% multiplier damage scaler on it, and I could see this increasing to 20% or 25% in Season 2, basically making combos that start in this fashion doing about 5-10% less damage.
Level 3s are also often the deciding factor in rounds with the way the game is played currently. People tend to clam up quite a bit once Level 3s are available, because of the extremely high damage, where you’re seeing pro players drain 60%-70% of an opponent’s life bar with these. That’s a tremendous amount of damage to deal with a single combo.
There are multiple other benefits to Level 3s as is, like draining about a bar and a half of Drive Gauge and allowing you to recover your own Drive Gauge meter while the animation plays out, so I really wonder if the damage will be adjusted on these to maybe do about 5% less overall. As is, Level 3s have an 10% immediate damage scaling property, so I could see this going up to 15% or even 20%.
While we’re discussing universal changes, it’s a lock that the cast members who weren’t touched heavily in the Ed balance update are going to get some adjustments as well, so individual changes are also going to be coming into the fold for these cast members.
It’s normal for players to get better and learn to perform longer and more damaging combos, and as such, the developers may feel the need to adjust the life that attacks drain.
This has happened regularly with the last two entries in the Street Fighter franchise, prior to SF6, so it seems likely that damage adjustments will once again be a thing headed into Season 2 of the current game.
