Street Fighter 6 has been in the hands of the masses for just over six months now. Since its launch back in June, there has been a lot — and I mean A LOT — of discourse about the game’s meta and its characters.
One thing I think everyone can agree on is the fact that there is just so much to learn about this game and so much to consider at all times. However, everyone has their own ideas on what needs to be changed for the game’s first big balance update, and though many people might disagree with me, I believe that the answers we seek don’t lie in massively changing the game’s core mechanics, but instead can be found in altering the game’s characters instead.
Allow me to begin making my case by covering some of the biggest game mechanic complaints we’ve seen from people in the community and players from around the globe.
Going all the way back to the beta tests for Street Fighter 6, easily the biggest complaint I seemed to come across was that of Drive Impact (DI) and it being too strong. As players got their first crack at the game and had little experience with it, Drive Impact proved to be very powerful right out of the gate and saw players struggle to react to it properly.
The big fear at the time was that DI would remain very hard to react to, and the benefits you got for landing a successful one were way too much. Some players quickly called for nerfs saying it needs to be easier to react to, that you shouldn’t get as much damage from it, and some even called for an increase in Drive Gauge usage as one bar felt like too little of a requirement for such a strong maneuver.
1 min of Xiaohai (KNOWN FOR HIS GODLIKE REACTIONS) getting battered by Drive Impact in a long set vs Gamerbee on Sunday.
During the set he ate/blocked WAY more than he countered.
“DI will be easy to react to!”
So, you have better reactions than XIAOHAI?! O.o#StreetFighter6 pic.twitter.com/BdiqGNc3z0
— Emezie Okorafor (@emezie) October 12, 2022
After several beta tests and then launch, it felt like people who had complaints about the game had mostly moved on from Drive Impact and shifted their focus over to Drive Rush (DR). The main culprit here was raw Drive Rush, which can be performed for one bar of Drive Gauge and sees your character swiftly (most of the time) dash across the screen and gain a +4 frame advantage on any attack that hits or is blocked.
Once again, the major complaints were that raw DR was way too strong, that it was far too abuse-able in the neutral, that the offensive pressure and damage you got from it was broken, and once again, there were calls for an increase in how much meter you needed to use it.
What’s interesting about these two mechanics and the complaints they received early on is that, after some time, they both became far more normalized than what they initially were. It is very rare to see players ever complaining about Drive Impact anymore on social media these days, and though it is still a thorn in people’s sides, complaints about Drive Rush also seem to be down.
As we gained more experience using these mechanics in battle, better learned what situations they’re most often used in, and conditioned ourselves to not only expect them, but bait them, both Drive Impact and raw Drive Rush (the former more than the latter) have become much more reasonable to deal with. In the case of the latter, raw Drive Rush is still a very strong tactic to use in neutral, but it now gets checked so much more often at the highest of levels and even gets stuffed out actively at the general competitive online level too.
The evolution of Street Fighter 6’s meta and the community’s perception of it has been an interesting ride, and keeping a close eye on what the people have been feeling and saying, it seems as though after Drive Rush people collectively moved on to Perfect Parry as their main focus. Once again, this game mechanic started out as something in the beginning and has become something very different here at the six month mark.
Early on, Perfect Parry was a technique that simply was not being used often at all. The timing for it is strict, so not only was it hard to pull off as players were unfamiliar with move timings, but the heavy damage scaling that comes as a result steered people away from exploring it. Some threads on Reddit and Steam even saw players asking for it to be buffed in the first couple months of the game’s lifespan.
Ask several pro players and prominent FGC heads about Perfect Parry right now, however, and they’ll tell you that the mechanic is ridiculously strong and likely needs to be nerfed. Don’t just take my word for it, though. Below you can see one of the many tweets from one of the best Street Fighter 6 players in the world, Punk, sharing how he feels about Perfect Parry.
Id pay top dollar for capcom to remove perfect parry from SF6
— Punk (@PunkDaGod) September 11, 2023
The point I’m making here is that Street Fighter 6 has proven to be a game that holds solutions to some of the biggest problems players have with it, but we need time to find them and adjust to them.
I also believe that we frequently see top tier characters pulling off incredible feats using the game’s mechanics, and it is far too often that the blame is cast on the game’s mechanics and not the character’s unique strengths and abilities. Not all Drive Rushes are created equal. Not all Drive Impacts are created equal.
If Capcom nerfs Drive Rush’s speed, distance, and/or meter requirement as a whole because Dee Jay and Juri’s are way too fast and travel too far, then characters like Zangief, Lily, and Manon are going to get much worse at staying in the game and getting back to a decent spot to mount their offense — which are crucial to their gameplan. Not only that, but making what seems like a simple change of upping the Drive Gauge requirement for a raw Drive Rush would heavily change how this game is played, restrict combo-ability and player expression, and potentially cause a ripple effect throughout the entire game’s meta.
Instead of doing that, though, some of the biggest offenders in Street Fighter 6 should be looked at more closely and toned down. Characters like the fairly unanimous big three — Ken, JP, and Luke — not only stand high above others in tournament placement representation, but in the highest ranks online as well.
I also imagine that if someone asked you, off the top of your head, to name five things about specific characters that are frustrating to deal with in Street Fighter 6, you can name them quickly and they’d likely be pretty close to what the people around you are saying. OD Amnesia, heavy Dragonlash Kick, Dee Jay’s raw Drive Rush, Luke’s crouching medium punch, Jinrai Kicks, and random Sumo Smashes are just some of the things that people often complain about, and for the top tiers like Ken, Luke, JP, Dee Jay, Chun-Li, and company, the aforementioned list is very conservative when it comes to things about these fighters that people take issue with.
With a game like Street Fighter 6 where it appears that the answers are always there, even if we can’t see them yet, it feels like making major changes to the game’s mechanics would hinder what is turning out to be a very deep and very strong competitive fighting game. In a vacuum, raw Drive Rush is broken, Perfect Parry is broken, and Drive Impact is broken. But all together, with the sum of all parts, Street Fighter 6’s mechanics work well and make a lot of sense.
If your opponent is hitting you with random Drive Impact too often, throw out cancel-able normals, bait it, and counter DI them. If they’re raw Drive Rushing too much, stand a little further back and stop them in their tracks with one of your faster, longer-ranged normals. If they keep Perfect Parrying you, stop going for meaties and throw them instead for a devastating Punish Counter.
With the better characters in the game, however, even though there are answers to their best tactics it can still feel like it’s too lopsided in their favor in a lot of situations. It really feels like some characters simply have too much at their disposal or get way more than others out of the game’s universal mechanics.
What’s also interesting about the juxtaposition between the strong characters and strong game mechanics is that knowing the answers to both has yielded different results. Learning how to better deal with Drive Impact and Drive Rush has made them feel more regulated (and I suspect the same will happen with Perfect Parry), but knowing how to fight the stronger characters in the game hasn’t seemed to stop them from dominating tournaments or seen them get any weaker. In fact, characters like JP, Ken, and Luke have only gotten stronger over the last six months.
The answers to dealing with Street Fighter 6’s universal mechanics are there, but what we’ve learned in the first six months is that they take time, effort, practice, and research to find — as they should in any good fighting game. With Street Fighter 6’s first major balance update, I hope Capcom targets the characters that are clearly in need of nerfs (and those who need buffs) first before making large, sweeping changes to the mechanics.