Since its launch back in June, Street Fighter 6 has been suffering from some very real input issues. Numerous players have reported dropped inputs when Drive Rush comes into play, getting random moves that were unintentional, and trouble with performing reversals on wake up (including supers).
The game’s latest update, which makes way for Outfit 3 and some other additional content, also brought with it some game mechanic improvements as well as bug fixes for 13 different characters. Among the changes, though, one very important alteration was made to wake up attacks that seems like it might be the fix players have wanted and needed for one of the game’s more glaring issues.
Capcom released the patch notes for the latest update last night, and listed in this set of notes is a change to the wake-up recovery input buffer.
What even is a “wake-up recovery input buffer” anyway? In layman’s terms, this change extends the window of time you have for your inputs to work when you’re getting up from a knockdown.
The wake-up recovery input buffer window is important because a very common situation that constantly happens within every Street Fighter 6 match ever played is the one where a player knocks the opponent down, and then the opponent has to try and defend themselves from the offensive pressure the other player can put into play as the opponent is getting up.
In the fighting game community, we call the state of being knocked down, then getting up and recovering “wake up,” and one of the big input issues players have been finding with Street Fighter 6 over the last six months is an inability to consistently perform reversal moves on wake up.
The timing there felt abnormally tight, and when you mix in the online landscape and lag, doing something like, say, a wake up super to stop your opponent’s pressure could often result in your character not getting their move and you eating an attack (and full combo) anyway.
The official change from the patch notes reads as follows: “Changed the input buffer time when recovering from 4 frames to 7 frames.” Once again, in layman’s terms, this means that the window of time you have for your input to properly register has been extended, so now you should see your wake up attacks come out more consistently when you attempt them.
Hitting training mode this morning, I ran some quick tests to see if I could feel this change in action. I performed 30-40 wake up supers and seemed to get them every time I did, and though it could just be placebo effect at this time, I did feel like that strictness on timing has been eased and that my supers were coming out more consistently.
I’ve also seen others on social media come forward and report that wake up supers feel easier to do now. We won’t know for sure how well this change stacks up until we jump into the online space and run some matches, but the early findings appear very promising for this change.
Capcom is slowly, but surely, targeting Street Fighter 6’s input issues and making improvements. Prior to this fix for wake up attacks (which has been a major thorn in the side of players everywhere), the company put a fix into place for the unintentional supers players were seeing while fighting.
Before the A.K.I. update in September, it was very common to see many different characters perform a super when simply walking back and forth, then going for a special move, or sometimes just for trying to perform a simple special move on its own. To combat this, Capcom made the input recognition frames for supers shorter, making it so that you have to perform supers tighter and faster — which seemed to properly address the issue.
At this point in time, two of the three major issues with inputs appear to have been addressed. Now we can only hope that Capcom will take a closer look at the delay raw Drive Rush causes that often results in the timing of your inputs being messed up and the wrong move (or nothing) coming out.