Terry Bogard is the latest character to join the Street Fighter 6 roster via the Year 2 Character Pass. The patch that made him compatible for all players also applied a number of relevant balance adjustments to the cast.
By this point, many players have already concluded that Terry Bogard ranks on the lower end of the tier list. In a recent video upload, BST|Daigo Umehara recently discussed some interesting topics such as modern controls, character balancing in Street Fighter 6, and even Terry Bogard.
“The overall skill level right now has far exceeded the developers’ expectations, I guess,” begun Daigo. “Which makes it seem like, at this point, balancing the game is just a dice roll. Because they just have no idea how skilled the players will prove to be. It’s beyond the control of the creators.”
Ultimately though, the strongest characters in a game like Street Fighter 6 tend to be the most popular. As such, Daigo notes that the game developers can make a character popular by making them really strong.
“If they want a certain character to be popular, they have to make the character so obviously strong, or players will betray their expectations,” continued Daigo.
However, Daigo then applies some amusing logic about the design philosophy behind Terry in Street Fighter 6. Since he’s the first guest character in Street Fighter 6, perhaps the developers didn’t want him to be stronger than Capcom characters.
“Terry? I’m not sure what their intention was with him,” declared Daigo. “I wonder what they were thinking with Terry. I guess maybe they couldn’t justify having him outclass Capcom’s own characters. They tried hard to be careful about that, and look how he ended up.”
In the end, Daigo concludes that more frequent updates could potentially solve these sort of balance issues, but he also notes that this could prove to be expensive for Capcom.
Earlier this year, Street Fighter 6 Director Takayuki Nakayama mentioned plans for smaller balance patches rather than just a big yearly update. To an extent, Capcom has been fulfilling that promise, but perhaps they’re still happening too infrequently for players’ tastes.
As noted by Daigo, it’s not really possible for developers to anticipate exactly how strong or how weak each character will be upon their release. This is why balance updates can be so important.
Check it all out in the video below: