mono games

Launching a fresh install of Street Fighter 5 in 2022 is a nightmare

Fredrick

Video games are a great medium because they often find new ways to amaze and impress by offering worlds and experiences you could never have imagined.One thing I can never imagine is the process of launching street fighter 5 as a new player. What a nightmare!

I’m not talking about being beaten up online and then sending you a message telling you to “learn 2 blocks”; I’m talking about the simple process of launching the game for the first time after purchasing it and downloading or ejecting the disc. I mean, seriously, what a mess.

I’ve had Street Fighter 5 installed on my PC almost all the time since this month 6 years ago, before its 2016 release. So I haven’t been through much of a fresh install, except when I’m fiddling with what’s inside one of my arcade cabinets. However, this week, I was toying with a new PC gaming hardware and had a reason to perform a fresh SF5 install on that machine, and… What the hell is this fresh?


This is the process when you start the game:

  • First, you must agree to the End User License Agreement. beautiful.
  • Then, Capcom’s Privacy Policy. cool.
  • Then it will tell you that the title update is downloading. The download completes almost instantly.
  • SF5 doesn’t ask you if you want to do a tutorial; it just puts you right into the story sequence.
  • This story sequence is followed by a tutorial fight – although you can skip this by pausing and pressing skip fight.
  • …which leads to another story sequence. OK.
  • Then there’s another fight, again skippable.

Well, it’s a pain, but all of this is important stuff if you’re a new player. The tutorial teaches basic but important Street Fighter concepts like how to block, so it’s really, really important. Not everyone is an experienced veterinarian who just installed on a new machine, I get it.

So, not bad, right? right. but! This! Yes! only! This! Start!game then throws twenty Full-screen commentary for various systems. twenty! Some of them even have multiple pages.

Basically, these screens are designed to show up when new features are added to Street Fighter 5; they pop up once and explain something new to you. They will never show up again. But, for some reason, Capcom never reconsidered those — so when you launch Street Fighter 5 now in 2022, you’re getting five years of updates to the interpreter all at once and have to sit there It feels like an era is over with all these labels.


To make matters worse, some of these interpreters contain overlapping content, not even relevant to the vast majority of players. You have to sit through the following endless screens with blank expressions and stunned, like you’re trapped in a glitchy infinity, but worse:

  1. “Street Fighter V’s Cyber ​​War” – Explaining How Online Works
  2. ‘Save data warning’ – don’t close the game while saving, idiot
  3. “About Quests” – How to interact with weekly challenge quests
  4. ‘Change music’ – how to set your music settings
  5. “Disconnected during online matchmaking” – what happens if you quit in anger
  6. “New CFN Features” – Explains Friends, Blacklist, Timeline, and other features that were added to CFN years ago
  7. ‘About adding BGM from the store’ – gosh, the second explanation is that you can now buy music and then make changes in the previous music related panel.This was added a long time ago, probably in the 1980s
  8. “About Extra Battles” – extra battles, a limited spin challenge battle, how it works
  9. “About changing Warrior ID/Family” – states that you can now change Warrior ID and Family area, a feature added a hundred years ago
  10. “About Arcade Mode” – Explains Arcade Mode, a feature that was added to the 2018 version of the game, basically a genre staple that everyone understands or just starts it up oh god please stop
  11. “About the Master League” – Literally telling players that a new top rank has been added to the game, which has nothing to do with 99% of players, as if you make up here you might be fighting for the top 32 in the tournament
  12. ‘About Team Fighting’ – How to play team fighting mode, added to the game when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth
  13. ‘Battle Lounge Connection Restrictions’ – Explains how to block people with poor connections to your online lobby
  14. “About the New and Improved Survival Mode” – Survival Mode came out when SF5 was released, but at some point Capcom significantly improved it.This explains the changes, it’s not relevant to anyone who didn’t play the game in 2016 or 2017 or whatever
  15. ‘About Fighting Chance’ – An explanation of the loot crate system in SF5. Long live! !
  16. ‘About the Ultimate Master and League of Warlords’ – If you want to compete for the top 8 in EVO, here are some top online rankings that the vast majority of players will never see.cheers
  17. ‘Dojos’ – Because SF5 tried every service game idea its developers could muster, Dojos is a customizable stage that you can fill with items from loot boxes.Before the forbidden fruit of Eden was consumed, they were added to the game
  18. ‘The Grid Stage BGM Additions’ – If you use training mode, happy days – you can now change the music during the training phase. Definitely worth reporting to new players. really.
  19. “Sponsored Content” – just in case you were wondering, yes, this is an ad in the game you paid for. Screw you! (You can turn them off, though – but they add bonuses when they’re on)
  20. ‘Health Warning’ – Please don’t die while playing our game

…then when you load into the game, the title update finishes installing and restarts right away, which is fun. The title update is necessary, but the way it dumps you into the menu and then whips the controls to restart the game before you can choose anything is the real “chef’s kiss” terminator at the end of this massive mess.

In all fairness, the above is impressive in a sense. Not just how stupid Capcom is not trying to simplify and fix this, but to see how much stuff has been added to Street Fighter 5. It launched as one of the weakest fighting games I’ve seen, but ended years of experimenting, expanding, and now honestly one of the better value fighting suits on the market. Hopefully this is an important learning experience for bringing lessons and concepts to Street Fighter 6, which needs to be a huge hit if Street Fighter is to maintain its primacy of the genre.

Check out this list and you can see how hard Capcom has worked on Street Fighter 5 throughout its lifespan. After the game was initially teased and taunted in many theaters, Capcom could be forgiven for cutting losses and moving on, as they did with Street Fighter X Tekken and Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite – but in SF5 they stuck with it , and redeemed the game. Check out all these added features and tweaks – it’s not everything they’ve changed over the years!

And yet… dammit, developers. come on. No one installing this game for the first time wants or needs to see this. They want to jump in and play arcade mode, or maybe that silly but funny movie story. You can sort them out bit by bit, flagging them when people open relevant menus. Or just get rid of some of them because that’s too much.

To my surprise, when Capcom rolled out the Champion Edition update a few months ago, it didn’t rethink this information overload. It’s a small thing, but as the saying goes, little things make up life. If Street Fighter is to keep up with Mortal Kombat and Riot’s fighting game ambitions, they’ll also need to address these issues. Hopefully this, and many other lessons in SF5, are taken to heart.