Street Fighter V: A Preliminary Thread

[Xno Kappa]

As for defense, we already know SF4 had the most amount of defensive options ever. Scrubs complained endlessly because they're fucking scrubs. Great players used these defensive options, and had ways to deal with every one of them.

Complaining about back dash and crouch tech is like complaining about head movement and shoulder rolling in boxing. 100% scrub mentality.

Then I guess most pros and people in this thread were scrubs. I guarantee you there's a quote/tweet/post from most players you'd claim legit complaining about this at one point or another.

SF4 is an awesome game that revived the genre, but let's chill with the rosy colored revisionist bullshit.

[Spider-Dan]

No one gave a fuck about the FGC, tourneys, etc when SF3/MVC2/GG was running the scene.

And no one cared about fighting games at all before SF2.

The number of SF players is MINISCULE now compared to what it was during SF2 days. Now, if you want to say that there are more tournament players, sure... but then you've undermined your own position, as SF5 set a record last year and will probably set another one this year.

It's absolutely ridiculous to look at the game that REVIVED some of the fighting game market (SF4) and place it above the game that CREATED that market in the first place (SF2), especially when SF2's market was bigger. In order to arrive at the conclusion of SF4-as-greatest-game-ever, you have to somehow ignore SF5's record tournament entrants, ignore SF2's MUCH larger sales/revenue/playerbase, and ignore MVC2's longevity as a no-updates FGC flagship.

Discussing the greatest fighting game ever starts at second place, because if you have a game in first place that does not have "Street Fighter II" in the title, you have disqualified your own opinion via ignorance.

[Krandor]

Saying that SF4 is the greatest competitive fighting game ever is like saying that Apple is the most important company in the history of the telephone.

Truth.

SF IV is a very important game for fighting games both in terms of the competitive scene and for developers/publishers, but at best I'd put it at 3rd in best fighting games of all time (behind SF2 and Soul Calibur), without even bringing my own personal preferences into the matter

[Weltall]

Did you not even READ what you quoted from JCVD? He clearly stated "COMPETITIVE" fighter. The entire discussion was about COMPETITIVE fighting game. I don't believe he ever once said SF4 is the greatest fighting game of all-time, above SF2 in general. He is 100% correct in his statement.

Also, Virtua Fighter 2 was leaps and bounds above Soul Calibur, @Kran.

[Spider-Dan]

Please explain how "competitive" fighter changes the discussion.

Do you mean tournament playerbase? Then SF5's 2016 makes it the greatest fighting game ever.
Do you mean total playerbase? Then SF2 beats almost every other fighting game combined.

[Xno Kappa]

I don't believe he ever once said SF4 is the greatest fighting game of all-time, above SF2 in general.

I'm pretty sure he's said it a few times in his occasional RKO outta nowhere rants in the past lol.

[Krandor]

Did you not even READ what you quoted from JCVD? He clearly stated "COMPETITIVE" fighter. The entire discussion was about COMPETITIVE fighting game. I don't believe he ever once said SF4 is the greatest fighting game of all-time, above SF2 in general. He is 100% correct in his statement.

Also, Virtua Fighter 2 was leaps and bounds above Soul Calibur, @Kran.

If you're talking purely in terms of competitive play then yeah, drop Soul Calibur.

Also, seeing you give even a partial shout out to Virtua Fighter warms my soul. Fuck I want that series back so bad.

[Weltall]

Let's see, "Discussing the greatest fighting game ever starts at second place, because if you have a game in first place that does not have "Street Fighter II" in the title, you have disqualified your own opinion via ignorance."

No one, minus you, was ever discussing the "greatest fighting game ever" until you started on it. And if you're referring to SF2's playerbase as "competiitve", outside of some Jersey/NYC/California/Japan arcades, no one was competing in that shit. It sold a lot because videogames of that caliber were new at the time and people loved playing SF2 at the movie theater, pizza joints, and go-kart and minigolf arcades. Every kid in my neighborhood had SF2, but they sure as fuck weren't "competing" in it. Big difference.

And yes, I was around the scene as long as you or longer., before you start with that nonsense again.

[Weltall]

I'm pretty sure he's said it a few times in his occasional RKO outta nowhere rants in the past lol.

I don't keep up with his rants in the past. This particular conversation started a single page back, about the time this fool took his post entirely out of context and ran with it.

[Krandor]

We could go full pants on head retarded and bring up the fact that Melee has had a consistent tournament presence for well over a decade if we wanted to argue about strongest competitive scenes.

[Weltall]

But then we have to argue over whether or not it is a fighting game, so let's agree not to.

[Spider-Dan]

Smash is not a fighting game.

If you want to talk about competitive fighting game numbers in tournament entrant terms, then all you SF5 haters should shut up, as it is quite literally the "greatest competitive fighting game ever." But since his rant was specifically AGAINST SF5, I took that to mean that we aren't simply counting tournament entrants to determine what "competitive fighting game" means.

So I'll repeat myself:

- SF2 for sales/revenue/playerbase (and creating the genre altogether)
- MVC2 for single-release tournament flagship longevity
- SF5 for tournament entrants

None of those games are SF4.

[Weltall]

Repeating yourself does nothing in your favor.

SF2: Something had to to come first. It was a great game for the time, but I already pointed out why sales were so high. The "competitive" scene was certainly not close.
MVC2: 150-300 people kept it alive for many years. I was one of them. Yay?
SFV: EVO numbers will always grow. When a game is new, esp a mainstay SF#, initial majors will see huge numbers (see Final Round), regardless of how awful the game is (see SFV). This is 95+% because SF4 got people traveling, COMPETING in fighting games, and watching fighting game streams. Almost every major that is NOT EVO had a dwindling viewership compared to the previous year when SF4 was highlighted as the main event. I could find the chart, but I've got to go to lunch. I'll look later.

I'm actually expecting SFV entires to be lower than last year at EVO, which would be the first time this has happened since SF4 vanilla released. Possibly ever? I don't know the SF3 stats to state otherwise.

[Moridam]

i don't really get the conflation of number of tournament entrants with quality as a competitive title. it's precisely the same as claiming a song's importance in the musical canon based on how many singles it sold.

it should come as no surprise that SF5 is drawing more competitors, because there's been a dramatic upswing in prize support from the publisher (along with the accessibility subject which has been discussed ad nauseam already). more people entering the field has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the competitions are worth watching.

[Bweigelt]

SF4's popularity explosion had nothing to do with the quality of game, it blew up because it was one of the first fighting games that was accessible. You suddenly had easy access to arcade sticks and online play. Using that as evidence for it being the greatest competitive fighting game is ridiculous. If mvc2 had come out at the same time with the same options to play it, nobody would even be talking about SF4. It had a huge advantage over everything that came before it. I'm not trying to say it wasn't a great game, but it's certainly not the greatest competitive fighter ever.

[Spider-Dan]

SF2: Something had to to come first. It was a great game for the time, but I already pointed out why sales were so high. The "competitive" scene was certainly not close.

This "competitive" crutch is pretty flimsy. There is no non-competitive way to play an arcade game in which the winner stays on and the loser has to pay to keep playing. You are either talking about tournaments, or you are not.

MVC2: 150-300 people kept it alive for many years. I was one of them. Yay?

MVC2 maintained its spot as a flagship tournament game, without updates or revisions, for longer than any other fighting game in history.

SFV: EVO numbers will always grow.

That kind of blows up the primary argument for SF4's greatness.

Wasn't your criticism that SF5 is dumbed down for the filthy casuals? Seems like that is a desirable strategy if the goal is to simply grow the number of people entering tournaments (and as Moridam just said, that's a sketchy metric for "greatness" in the first place).

Is the argument here that SF5 has decimated the tournament scene? No, because that argument is provably false. The SF5 haters are taking their reasons why they don't like SF5's playstyle and trying to extrapolate it into SF4 somehow being the greatest "competitive" fighter. Analysis of gameplay aside, there is no reasonable metric that points to SF4 as the greatest "competitive" fighter, even though it had the huge advantage of unlimited free(ish) online play.

SF4 was an important game that revitalized fighting games. It deserves a lot of credit for reviving a genre that SSF2 and SF3 murdered. But to compare it to CPS1-era SF2 is lunacy. Add up the sales of all versions of SF4 on all platforms combined and you get less than 3/4ths of the sales of the SNES SF2 releases... and that is completely ignoring the arcade impact of one of the biggest arcade games ever released.

To put it another way:

SF4 is responsible for the incredible growth we see today, not SF2.

Just because SF2's (much larger) explosion took place 25 years ago, that doesn't make SF4's growth magically more important. The Chicago Cubs are not the "greatest baseball franchise ever" just because they are the most recent champs.

[JeanClaudVanDamme]

I will address this debate later.

Anyone who argues against sf4 being the greates competitive sf ever will fucking lose by a landslide.

At worknow right now.

[Xno Kappa]

Maybe this shit will stop going in circles if someone can actually quantify "competitive" with something other than anecdotes.

[Lucavi]

Ya'll niggas need Jesus. Or starvation, so you can start caring about something that actually matters. This Nerf-or-Nothing cock-waving battle is routine, but Christ, guys.

When you've resorted to "I've been on the scene longer than you!" bullshit, you've absolutely run the legs off of whatever argument you're involved in.

[JeanClaudVanDamme]

Maybe this shit will stop going in circles if someone can actually quantify "competitive" with something other than anecdotes.

I will break down exactly what competitive means in a bit.

In this category alone, nothing comes close.