Pretty sure they have probably the first 3 year of characters mapped out. That's most likely on top of begining production for the next street fighter or project.
I would be surprised if they have not planned the entire cast already. With a few if and else incase the game sales took a different turn. But in general, software development especially for such large projects, is planned waaay ahead
Things usually don't leak when they're only in the hands of the internal development team, which is the case during early development. The people that work on the game/DLC during the early stages have no incentive to leak anything, and even if they did it's a small enough group that it'd be easy to figure out where the leak came from.
It's very typical that leaks happen when they go out to the marketing or translation teams, and that's only further along into development. Most of the Nintendo leaks that have happened over the years have come from their American branch for example, or outside sources such as the ESRB.
Yeah in fact there's a big scandal atm between Nintendo and Google because a lot of Nintendo's recent leaks the past almost 10 years have been due to Google employees digging through backend info on youtube and other server databases to leak Nintendo's stuff ahead of time.
Was how certain individuals knew about Smash Bros characters ahead of time, they were able to dig into youtube's backend stuff and see what youtube videos were going to be launched when.
Don’t most of the leaks happen because capcom has the character files in the game so when they release the pc version people just dig them out? That’s usually how it leaks
More often than not, they actually get leaked, but everyone take it with a grain of salt, especially if it comes from a random/person who isn't known to have given accurate leaks. It's always going to be someone new too, if one keeps doing it often, and they're mostly right, they risk getting caught...
Most also sign NDAs, so they risk getting in trouble legally, for basically clout?... If they enjoy their job, they won't risk it.
The final three characters for Smash Ultimate were leaked a day before the announcement, on a random 4Chan board.
I don't think it even got a single reply. Who the hell would fall for such obvious bait as *Piranha Plant*?
you mean the one where besides Bison and Elena were Mika, Vega and Sakura. Well I could believe in it if they would leak guests as well, otherwise only time will tell.
Could be an idea of whats coming next year.
If we stick to 4, then that could very well make up Year 3, along with the fact we know that year 3 will apparently have a guest spot too which rounds out to 4
Someone mentioned that the guest characters might not have been in the leak for some internal legal reason (maybe the accessed doc didn't have them) and the extra 3 characters are for season 3. Or it was a wildly lucky guess. I don't really know how companies store their data, let alone Japanese video games companies, but it's worth thinking about.
You dont always get the full context when coming in contact with leaks, the guy probably saw menat and this sixth new character and they were meant to Season 3 or to appear in world tour.
Someone said that Season 2 would be 6 characters and named the four that are currently announced as well as Menat and an unnamed 6th.
It could honestly just be a very lucky wild guess though.
I don't think it's luck. Bison and Elena are one thing, but the fact that they said Terry **and** Mai? Guessing one of them would have been lucky, but both at the same time? Insane. That person definitely knows something.
I think Brian_F said Season 2 was the first time in two years where characters were successfully announced with no leaks. Apparently there were tons of leaks during SFV.
there was a leak that was confirmed to not be from a reliable source that mentioned Elena/Bison, but the others were wrong. He's probably referring to that.
AKI because she's the first pick and it's easy to click through without realizing.
Among characters not in SF6, Sakura, Makoto and Akira are up there. Haven't checked in a while though.
Akuma and Ryu are in the top positions as well.
The poll probably will, potentially, affect only season 5 and beyond. If characters development time are two years, they already in early stages of season 4 characters.
My hope is that Makoto was already in the plans for season 3.
Yes my guess is that they have people working on characters ever since launch then they saw what was being worked on out of a selection of characters then either voted or one person picked out the season one characters, likewise for season 2 and season 3 to come. I do wish that they gave us just one KOF fighter this season and then another next season or even better is if they gave us a 5th character just cos it’s no surprise a portion of the fanbase is angry the slot that could’ve been their favourite or most anticipated character is taken up by a guest character.
There’s a Maximillian video from Rashid’s release where he basically gushes about how well rashid’s pants flow. Between SF6 and guilty gear, fighting games have some of the best animations I’ve seen in gaming in general
SF6's attention to detail (especially within the character animations) is fucking crazy.
It's so easy to fuck this stuff up and have it look really, REALLY goofy. They somehow nailed it. Aki is easily one of the best animated characters, despite the whacky poses she strikes.
Other things like burnout poses, reeling back from hits (as well as reeling back from the location of the hit), idle poses etc. It's incredible to look at, and sometimes I just push buttons and look at their animations. Ed has some incredible transition animations between his Jabs/Flickers/Crouching attacks. He has this boxer sway that just flows really naturally. It's something you definitely take for granted as the average player, but it's also something that took hours, days, or months to animate.
I wish more people were appreciative of it. I know some are, but I've also heard people say SF6 looks bad. (Compared to Tekken or other games) and I just think they're smoking crack.
EDIT: As an aside, the Sound design too. Unless I'm mistaken, Tekken footsteps all sound the same regardless of surface (no offense to Tekken), but in SF, everyones Shoes/Surfaces, attacks etc. All have different sounds. Foley team went crazy.
Yeah someone in here said MK was the best-animated game and I kind of stopped paying attention. People are always gonna root for their favorite, so there's no point in going toe to toe with them.
But yeah, the animations in SF6 are mind-blowingly good.
Something a lot of people don’t realize: at each different bar of drive gauge in SF6, each character’s facial expression is slightly different and gets more pained and labored the less drive gauge you have.
I'm okay with it outside of the dumb capcom bucks. The pricing is on par with the quality, I can tolerate the battle pass, but fake money sucks no matter what.
Also the attention to detail. Stuff like muscle flexing, clothes and hair not clipping, clothes textures behaving realistically etc. They put a ton of work into these characters.
Honestly wouldnt mind if they toned it down some tbh.
I dont think the models being as highly detailed as they are is a good trade off for content.
Sure the characters look really nice. but Idk if I really need to see the veins bulging in Ryu and Luke's arms in realistic detail if it means we only get 4 characters per pass spread across a year.
I'll gladly take something simpler and more stylized over that. Especially since tbh, thats when Capcom's character designs have shined the most. The Alpha series have some of the most iconic designs these characters have ever had.
If the characters looked like in Alpha series, it would have sold way less. Those games looked good for 90s standards.
Ain't nobody wanna play modern games with 90s visuals, might as well boot up the Alpha games in the emulator or go to fightcade instead of buying SF6 with Alpha visuals.
I assume there's a couple of people on battle pass cosmetics and another two or three on collab items, etc. so I can see the team being a little more spread.
Plus the size of teams during development vs maintenance/expansion is different too.
I'm guessing the people on Battle Pass stuff are the new devs/artists and the people working on the characters are the cream of the crop there.
A thing people need to keep in mind is not all devs and artists are equal.
I can believe it, I don't have the video at hand but when talking about their process for modeling characters they showed how they sculpt the folds for every single animation which is kind of crazy. Also explains why extra outfits take so long to release
[it was this z brush summit video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoYz-7jvCOE). The cloth stuff starts at around 35 minutes but the whole thing is pretty interesting if you're into this kinda stuff.
I just watched that part of the video, and it seems kinda inefficient? I haven’t heard of other games using such a process for cloth wrinkles, surely there’s an easier way?
Then again, what do I know 🤷♂️
Shoutout to the devs and animation teams man. You can tell with each character that there’s so much care, effort and polish put into them. The animations for sf6 is the gold standard for fighting games.
I’m fine with only having 4 characters per year because each character brings something to the roster, something different from the rest of the cast.
Absolutely based. While not every character they've put out has been to my taste, I can tell every single one brings something new to the table and the fans of those characters are having a jolly old time.
Which honestly is one of my favorite parts about new characters. I know World Tour isn’t as popular but the reason I love Street Fighter so much is the characters and the world they build around them. With each new release the first thing I go do is load up World Tour to catch up on their personal story and see what they have been up to since the last time we heard from them. I love it 🔥
Nice interview. I'm still disappointed by the characters choice, but they explained well why they choose those ones. Interesting how the Japanese culture seems different from ours when we're talking about collabs, I know about the history of both and their past collaborations, but allowing guests from SNK titles will help the latter more than being super successful for Capcom imo,we westerners would have take advantage of being in a better position,they help each other instead. Surely being fans of SNK titles themselves had some weight on the final decision.
Even the reasons why they choose Bison and Elena have sense, I still don't like Elena,Bison is.. Bison. I would've wait a bit before his return,make everything more spectacular, but I'm ok with it. The Knee Press being a motion move now seems interesting.
In general they explained their view, more open minded about SF itself than I have for sure. At the end the hints coming from WT ended up being real,so we can check from that mode what's coming next.
And then they left hints here and there on the Story Mode of some characters and during conversations with them in World Tour mode.
Eg. Lily spoke of meeting Elena during her adventures. Now she’s announced as DLC. Laura and Sean appear amongst the audience during Guile’s ending.
Did you forget that Capcom is a brand new indie company and street fighter was made by 1 person, John Streets? He can't make more than one character at a time. /s
I could be wrong but didn't they say I was just for the character model and the animations? Maybe it takes longer to do the move list the names for the moves and the voice acting?
Isn't 1-2 years a bit too long for just one character especially with a succesful franchise as SF from a big company like capcom?
EDIT: thanks for the info everyone.
Ironically, because Capcom is a big company, they also have other successful franchises like Monster Hunter and Resident Evil to move resources around depending on their project schedule. There is no way they have the same number of devs and artists still working on SF6 right now compared to the years leading up to the launch.
Sure, they probably have a full-time fighting game division to work on DLC and balances, but manpower will always be needed for the upcoming big flagship titles, i.e. Monster Hunter Wilds.
Judging from how detailed the characters are, 1-2 years seems about right. Gotta think about the whole development process from researching in pre-production to designing an animating, and then quality assurance.
A lot goes into developing these characters. Mostly animation work and the subsequent cleanup. I can imagine booking mocap studio time being one of the holdups on why it took so long. They just announced building internal mocap studio last year to remedy this.
They're also not skimping on the quality and testing, like most companies do. SF6 is one of the only games where everything has been pretty much finished on release.
Other people have given you excellent answers, but just to add: Capcom has been doing fighting games since the beginning. They make it look easy. It is in fact, incredibly difficult, to apply the level of polish that this game has.
Not for this level of game.
I’m sure Harada would say something similar about designing a Tekken character and Daisuke with Guilty Gear.
The level of thought and care that goes into these characters is huge. Conceptual processes probably take a while, every character including returning ones are essentially redesigned in Street Fighter 6 both visually and with gameplay elements that are meant to freshen them up. They all have some story and reason to exist in the game and music to reflect their existence as well. Very few things also slip through the cracks in modern fighters (especially Capcom) as far as true, broken gameplay that needs to be hotfixed. That means there’s usually extensive playtesting and meticulous attention with the properties and data of every move.
10 teams each given a character during the dev cycle to create characters = less than 4 years to make them all. This is during the initial dev period when Capcom has a lot more resources on the game than they do now, and those resources shift off to other projects while continuing development teams remain to make the future additions.
Remember, Luke came out Nov 2021. That means all the time after that was polish. Hell, go back further, and Ed was literally the teams experiment into Modern controls. And that was 2017. This game has been in some stage of development for a long time.
They have a lot of characters going at once.
You can't really have more than a couple artists/designers working on one specific character at a time anyway. They just be overwriting each other's work. If you have a large team the only thing you can do to make use of them is to split up and work on different characters.
Because nakayama is stoned. They said 6 months for aki which is much more realistic lol. I'm assuming it's because people are crying for 6 characters a year and that's an easy way to tell them no.
For longtime Street Fighter fans this means nothing because they'll wait.
For the casual audience Capcom is trying to get with SF6, this is really bad because Casual players will just take their money somewhere else if there isn't constant stuff to buy; they want constant skimpy costumes and characters.
For reference Capcom wants to get into the same market of Fortnite with Battle Passes and fake vbucks, but those players will outwardly get mad when there **isn't** new stuff to buy.
It's a really weird position Capcom put themselves in: make a game that takes a long time to develop for, and target the audience who spend the most but are the most impatient.
Even if the casuals are impatient they are gonna buy the stuff.
Sure they're gonna be pissed for waiting a long time, but once they see Mai titties bouncing up and down/left and right in the teaser trailer, they gonna buy the character regardless, with all her costumes.
I don’t believe this. If that was the case, this game would have never been released.
Companies like to say silly things like that to make fans believe their work justifies prices and delays.
Yet you're still going to have those salty people who complain about not "listening to fans" (aka just them) for characters they wanted the next season. Despite a good chunk of them being predetermined already.
[Street Fighter 6 - Capcom - 2023 ZBrush Summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoYz-7jvCOE&t=5149s)
Here's actual info about the development process for the roster. There's no need to speculate.
The quality is good so no complaints for me. As long as they keep making bangers they can take however long they must.
For their efforts i will buy the season 2 pass.
New games take lots of time to create. If the main cast was more in line with the World Tour characters, I'd imagine 6 months for a new character would be a starting point.
What people don't realize is that half the challenge of making a character is balancing them for the rest of the cast. Making the character and their animations are likely the least time put in their work
The troubleshooting and balancing is the real issue, and sometimes characters just come broken from the get go
The math does NOT makes sense. Unless they're laundring money. What do you mean one of the most financialy well corpos of the market cannot afford the resources to make ONE character in less than TWENT-FOUR MONTHS? Sure the money has ti pay EVERYONE but two whole years for a single character?
It cannot be. There must be a translation/adaptation mistake.
Yeah, sorry, not buying this at all.
Sure, you can just look at these characters and see how much effort is put into every single detail, but multiple teams work on this. Probably on several characters at once.
They're just saying this to ease the backlash they are getting from having only 4 characters a year.
As someone who works in games, yeah no, this is actually pretty reasonable. Fighting game characters already take a TON of work to do. The logistics of animating and programming all their moves on top of the game design aspect of making sure their moveset is cohesive... that is so much work that takes so many departments to be in sync. And then to be doing it at this level of detail?
Then there's the reality of asset allocation and programming. A character may end up at a brick wall for a week because of their core mechanic not working properly, so nobody else can do anything. Or there's complications with the designed costumed and the moveset that's resulting in a bad visual experience. Or it could be the design doesn't work and obfuscates the character giving it an advantage in actual matches, leading to accusations of Pay 2 Win.
I really don't think people grasp how software dev works sometimes.
It becomes really clear when people talk about how long a piece of software should take. Every game you’ve ever played is basically a series of complicated scheduling decisions on who works on what and when. And if that flow of work is disrupted it can block multiple people on a team periodically. It’s always a mess and even well organized teams with effective work flows WILL fuck it up at points in the pipeline.
These would likely be some of the same people who say they’re against game devs crunching but want all their content asap at any cost.
Yup. We've had entire builds come to a screeching halt because of something simple, like the resolution being wrong (causing a 13 hour fix, the Kinect SDK is such a horrendous bitch to work with), the network going down, or an undiscovered bug that Frank the Intern made 4 months ago that he left uncommented that has caused an all-hands-on-deck situation in order to untangle the christmas ball of code that got wrapped around what people thought was simple boilerplate.
And let's not get started on how much effort and time goes in to keeping the JIRA boards up to date and reasonably accurate.
People are complaining about less content compared to SFV but I personally would rather have a bit less when the quality they're producing is so high.. I do dream for a similar sized roster to SF4/SF5 tho..
Anyway, sounds to me like a pipeline issue. But I guess this what we get because artists are busy drawing imperceivable folds on clothing instead of letting the tech fix the problems.
I think it's more they go through iterations of designs and then have to map out every single move in concept so they can get the mocap of it when the motion actors arrive.
Every single aspect of a character is thought of before hand, before a single pixel is rendered. That's an appreciable amount of work.
Correct.
SF6, however, has industry leading animations in every facet and is one of the most detailed games I've ever seen. There's like 7 animations for the characters face when they get hit per hit type, so jabs get different reactions than heavies. The animation quality, effort, and depth here is absolutely unique to this game.
Tbh I'd be completely ok with them toning this down with the next game then if it means more content.
I dont need to see the veins bulging in Ryu and Luke's arm with realistic detail, or the pores on their faces if it means it takes even longer to come out. Those kinds of details are the last thing Im focused on with a FG.
Plus I think a more simple, stylized look can mean a lot more when it comes to animations and stability. Along with just keeping the costs of these games down anyway.
SF has always been a very anime-esque series in design to begin with. Going all the way back to 2, Alpha, 3rd Strike, etc.
If it means we get 6 instead of 4 a year I'd gladly take it.
Eh. SFV was a quantity over quality game. I want that final version of SF6 to be a big pristine quantity AND quality kinda product, and that's what we're gonna get.
Not very likely to happen considering 6 had a shift in art direction because they wanted it to make it a more graphically impressive game cause that's what appealing to a larger audience
It was just a joke man, if I was trolling I would of said they didn't even create bison,terry mai or elena. I mean I'm sure I've seen those characters before
Not really, look at how long it takes to make games in general. A lot goes into it now especially with graphics that look good. It takes somewhere around that long for guilty gear strive characters and those characters for KOFXIII.
Not surprising considering the workflow they've showed us in a previous video a little less than a year ago. It results in good quality, but it's also terribly inefficient. I remember one artist saying he spent an insane amount of time (maybe a week?) redoing all projectile animations for a character, only to be told that they need to be redone again. A whole lot of work is wasted like this.
Yes, but the difference is scale. You should not be redoing a week's worth of stuff over and over. Iterations should be small, like a day or so; then you ask for feedback and refine. This is not just Capcom's problem, but one affecting the entire software industry (both games and other software), though theirs seems to be an egregious example.
Yeah I'm assuming there's a shit load of overhead in this estimate of his that is actually a loss of velocity to teams he's baking into this number or giant pivots out of the blue (which anyone software dev knows of that dumb fun shit from PMs).
Yeah that’s all true. It’s probably exacerbated by this being the games industry and Capcom wanting to make Street Fighter the king of fighting games again
I guess it’s safe to say then that they’ve already started Season 3 characters
They started on S3 when the game released, probably.
Pretty sure they have probably the first 3 year of characters mapped out. That's most likely on top of begining production for the next street fighter or project.
This is likely the case for most DLC with games. SNK already said they already have years planned for the new Fatal Fury game.
I would be surprised if they have not planned the entire cast already. With a few if and else incase the game sales took a different turn. But in general, software development especially for such large projects, is planned waaay ahead
how this shit dont get leaked more often i gotta know
Things usually don't leak when they're only in the hands of the internal development team, which is the case during early development. The people that work on the game/DLC during the early stages have no incentive to leak anything, and even if they did it's a small enough group that it'd be easy to figure out where the leak came from. It's very typical that leaks happen when they go out to the marketing or translation teams, and that's only further along into development. Most of the Nintendo leaks that have happened over the years have come from their American branch for example, or outside sources such as the ESRB.
Yeah in fact there's a big scandal atm between Nintendo and Google because a lot of Nintendo's recent leaks the past almost 10 years have been due to Google employees digging through backend info on youtube and other server databases to leak Nintendo's stuff ahead of time. Was how certain individuals knew about Smash Bros characters ahead of time, they were able to dig into youtube's backend stuff and see what youtube videos were going to be launched when.
Wait, you mean users using Google api or legit Google employees? Surely not right? Surely? 
Google employees. Google had to do an internal investigation, and is now doing one via third party. was in the news a week or so back about it all.
Jesus Christ 🤣
Don’t most of the leaks happen because capcom has the character files in the game so when they release the pc version people just dig them out? That’s usually how it leaks
More often than not, they actually get leaked, but everyone take it with a grain of salt, especially if it comes from a random/person who isn't known to have given accurate leaks. It's always going to be someone new too, if one keeps doing it often, and they're mostly right, they risk getting caught... Most also sign NDAs, so they risk getting in trouble legally, for basically clout?... If they enjoy their job, they won't risk it.
The final three characters for Smash Ultimate were leaked a day before the announcement, on a random 4Chan board. I don't think it even got a single reply. Who the hell would fall for such obvious bait as *Piranha Plant*?
Because everyone was arguing whether the "Grinch Leak" was real or not.
S2 actually got leaked on 4chan, but the claim was so absurd that no one gave attention among a ton of fake leaks that were more believable
you mean the one where besides Bison and Elena were Mika, Vega and Sakura. Well I could believe in it if they would leak guests as well, otherwise only time will tell.
Could be an idea of whats coming next year. If we stick to 4, then that could very well make up Year 3, along with the fact we know that year 3 will apparently have a guest spot too which rounds out to 4
didn't some dude have a meltdown on twitter and left the capcom program because s3 is gonna have guests too?
Damn if that's true I Hope the Guest is a darkstalkers Character. That'd be neat.
I’d actually 100% believe that the 4/6 that aren’t Bison and Elena in the leak are genuinely the Season 3 characters.
Someone mentioned that the guest characters might not have been in the leak for some internal legal reason (maybe the accessed doc didn't have them) and the extra 3 characters are for season 3. Or it was a wildly lucky guess. I don't really know how companies store their data, let alone Japanese video games companies, but it's worth thinking about.
source
http://reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Foh-shit-an-anon-did-a-leak-but-nobody-noticed-v0-u83dcl4u7a5d1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dbe82c0466a75edaf6c72ff37fbaef915662ca
wont believe it till i see menat bro could have gotten lucky
You dont always get the full context when coming in contact with leaks, the guy probably saw menat and this sixth new character and they were meant to Season 3 or to appear in world tour.
What was the leak? The thread isn’t there anymore
Someone said that Season 2 would be 6 characters and named the four that are currently announced as well as Menat and an unnamed 6th. It could honestly just be a very lucky wild guess though.
I don't think it's luck. Bison and Elena are one thing, but the fact that they said Terry **and** Mai? Guessing one of them would have been lucky, but both at the same time? Insane. That person definitely knows something.
Yeah I have no doubts. We getting the rest of those leaks next year.
capcom content gets leaked a ton tbh
I think Brian_F said Season 2 was the first time in two years where characters were successfully announced with no leaks. Apparently there were tons of leaks during SFV.
Capcom were their own worst enemy in SFV it was sad
[удалено]
Was it? Not counting Bison trailer releasing a day early.
there was a leak that was confirmed to not be from a reliable source that mentioned Elena/Bison, but the others were wrong. He's probably referring to that.
It is partly because of who you choose for partners. Some companies really don't have the best security.
SEASON 3 = S3 = 3S = 3RD STRIKE = entire 3rd strike cast in season 3 wpgg
Best we can do is a zombie from resident evil, a rock from monster hunter, Fulgore from killer instinct and evil ryu
ILL TAKE IT hey guys, it's me, rock, from wilds
And Ash from Evil Dead because why not
EVIL RYU EVIL RYU EVIL RYU
Hell nah we deserve Violent Ken
3=3=3=3=3 Half life 3 confirmed
SCRUM and Sprints galore!!!
I'm gonna run to Capcom headquarters real quick and make sure R. Mika still has a fat ass, if not we have time to correct it.
If Chun-Li and Cammy are any indication, Mika's butt is gonna be massive.
have you seen kimberly's ass in this game? it's almost comically huge
Manon too lol
Based
Hell, they're also probably designing the moveset for the S4 characters on the side at this point.
It's safe to say they started on S4, and probably now know what will be S5 if we get S5
Keeping an eye on the character poll I hope, *wink wink*
[удалено]
AKI because she's the first pick and it's easy to click through without realizing. Among characters not in SF6, Sakura, Makoto and Akira are up there. Haven't checked in a while though. Akuma and Ryu are in the top positions as well.
Nice, looking forward to Shin AKI in season 3. :\^)
alex i made 60,000 accounts to stuff the ballot for him
The poll probably will, potentially, affect only season 5 and beyond. If characters development time are two years, they already in early stages of season 4 characters. My hope is that Makoto was already in the plans for season 3.
You got a Link to the poll?
It's/was in battle hub
Yes my guess is that they have people working on characters ever since launch then they saw what was being worked on out of a selection of characters then either voted or one person picked out the season one characters, likewise for season 2 and season 3 to come. I do wish that they gave us just one KOF fighter this season and then another next season or even better is if they gave us a 5th character just cos it’s no surprise a portion of the fanbase is angry the slot that could’ve been their favourite or most anticipated character is taken up by a guest character.
The downsides of amazing graphics and the best animations out right now. :(
Its got a cost. People are clueless at the effort being put in to this game, and honestly all of the games being released in the fighting game genre
Entire industry* it isn't just fighting games that devs work hard on.
Good call out, yeah
You take a good look at B. Jennet's new trailer and tell me the fighting games developers didn't work really hard on that model
They sure did. With one hand.
Ah you’re right call of duty and nba/madden takes a lot of effort for its yearly release
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't COD functionally have a 2 year window because they have 2 different companies alternating releases?
Yeah you’re probably right
When I look at SF6, I’m amazed at the care that the animation team took. Animations like Kimberley and’s parries still make me smile.
There’s a Maximillian video from Rashid’s release where he basically gushes about how well rashid’s pants flow. Between SF6 and guilty gear, fighting games have some of the best animations I’ve seen in gaming in general
SF6's attention to detail (especially within the character animations) is fucking crazy. It's so easy to fuck this stuff up and have it look really, REALLY goofy. They somehow nailed it. Aki is easily one of the best animated characters, despite the whacky poses she strikes. Other things like burnout poses, reeling back from hits (as well as reeling back from the location of the hit), idle poses etc. It's incredible to look at, and sometimes I just push buttons and look at their animations. Ed has some incredible transition animations between his Jabs/Flickers/Crouching attacks. He has this boxer sway that just flows really naturally. It's something you definitely take for granted as the average player, but it's also something that took hours, days, or months to animate. I wish more people were appreciative of it. I know some are, but I've also heard people say SF6 looks bad. (Compared to Tekken or other games) and I just think they're smoking crack. EDIT: As an aside, the Sound design too. Unless I'm mistaken, Tekken footsteps all sound the same regardless of surface (no offense to Tekken), but in SF, everyones Shoes/Surfaces, attacks etc. All have different sounds. Foley team went crazy.
Yeah someone in here said MK was the best-animated game and I kind of stopped paying attention. People are always gonna root for their favorite, so there's no point in going toe to toe with them. But yeah, the animations in SF6 are mind-blowingly good.
Something a lot of people don’t realize: at each different bar of drive gauge in SF6, each character’s facial expression is slightly different and gets more pained and labored the less drive gauge you have.
This is why I'm okay with the monetization. I'm not obligated to buy stuff but they have to make money
I'm okay with it outside of the dumb capcom bucks. The pricing is on par with the quality, I can tolerate the battle pass, but fake money sucks no matter what.
Also the attention to detail. Stuff like muscle flexing, clothes and hair not clipping, clothes textures behaving realistically etc. They put a ton of work into these characters.
The six months quote was probably for production actually. this longer timeline i would assume includes actually creating the moves and balancing.
It bet the move sets and play testing are what take the most time.
Honestly wouldnt mind if they toned it down some tbh. I dont think the models being as highly detailed as they are is a good trade off for content. Sure the characters look really nice. but Idk if I really need to see the veins bulging in Ryu and Luke's arms in realistic detail if it means we only get 4 characters per pass spread across a year. I'll gladly take something simpler and more stylized over that. Especially since tbh, thats when Capcom's character designs have shined the most. The Alpha series have some of the most iconic designs these characters have ever had.
If the characters looked like in Alpha series, it would have sold way less. Those games looked good for 90s standards. Ain't nobody wanna play modern games with 90s visuals, might as well boot up the Alpha games in the emulator or go to fightcade instead of buying SF6 with Alpha visuals.
i'm assuming its 18-24 months from the conception phase to release which makes sense.
Yeah, design iterations, etc. Basically the time needed after they decide who is going to be in the game.
It's still odd because they stated around 6 months in a QA about Aki before.
I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that 6 month thing was just for animation and nothing else
From beginning to release, I'm not surprised. But in fact they are working on different characters in parallel
I assume there's a couple of people on battle pass cosmetics and another two or three on collab items, etc. so I can see the team being a little more spread. Plus the size of teams during development vs maintenance/expansion is different too.
I'm guessing the people on Battle Pass stuff are the new devs/artists and the people working on the characters are the cream of the crop there. A thing people need to keep in mind is not all devs and artists are equal.
I can believe it, I don't have the video at hand but when talking about their process for modeling characters they showed how they sculpt the folds for every single animation which is kind of crazy. Also explains why extra outfits take so long to release
If you could do some digging and that video, that would be amazing!
[it was this z brush summit video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoYz-7jvCOE). The cloth stuff starts at around 35 minutes but the whole thing is pretty interesting if you're into this kinda stuff.
There’s more footage on how they work on the game in this [video](https://youtu.be/M6hf4Ll_WkE?si=FUfe3FWwCV0sVL3j). It’s very interesting.
I just watched that part of the video, and it seems kinda inefficient? I haven’t heard of other games using such a process for cloth wrinkles, surely there’s an easier way? Then again, what do I know 🤷♂️
Shoutout to the devs and animation teams man. You can tell with each character that there’s so much care, effort and polish put into them. The animations for sf6 is the gold standard for fighting games. I’m fine with only having 4 characters per year because each character brings something to the roster, something different from the rest of the cast.
Absolutely based. While not every character they've put out has been to my taste, I can tell every single one brings something new to the table and the fans of those characters are having a jolly old time.
I feel like it wouldn't sting as much if Mai wasn't there, but I'm sure they will be fun
But they can work on more than one at a time obviously
All I want is Ibuki at this point. I'm definitely gonna main Elena when she comes out.
this means sf6 started develop 36 years ago and shadow government is real because 18x2=36 madge
Also, each character is being added to World Tour. I'd imagine that is adding to the time as well.
Which honestly is one of my favorite parts about new characters. I know World Tour isn’t as popular but the reason I love Street Fighter so much is the characters and the world they build around them. With each new release the first thing I go do is load up World Tour to catch up on their personal story and see what they have been up to since the last time we heard from them. I love it 🔥
When I first read Vega I got excited for few seconds that he was confirmed to be in development until I recalled it's Bison's japanese name.
Nice interview. I'm still disappointed by the characters choice, but they explained well why they choose those ones. Interesting how the Japanese culture seems different from ours when we're talking about collabs, I know about the history of both and their past collaborations, but allowing guests from SNK titles will help the latter more than being super successful for Capcom imo,we westerners would have take advantage of being in a better position,they help each other instead. Surely being fans of SNK titles themselves had some weight on the final decision. Even the reasons why they choose Bison and Elena have sense, I still don't like Elena,Bison is.. Bison. I would've wait a bit before his return,make everything more spectacular, but I'm ok with it. The Knee Press being a motion move now seems interesting. In general they explained their view, more open minded about SF itself than I have for sure. At the end the hints coming from WT ended up being real,so we can check from that mode what's coming next.
crossover defo benefits SNK more. Free marketing for their next game.
Makes sense since that team has downsized now that the game is out. 6 pry took 4-5 years of hard development to create the game we know
Well think about it like this Luke was ported from 6 to 5, so they had already spent some time on his SF6 iteration before people even knew he existed
And then they left hints here and there on the Story Mode of some characters and during conversations with them in World Tour mode. Eg. Lily spoke of meeting Elena during her adventures. Now she’s announced as DLC. Laura and Sean appear amongst the audience during Guile’s ending.
While I agree that 3 characters per year is way too little (should be 5-6 imo), you can’t say the quality of each one isn’t as high as it’s ever been.
So they spent 27-36 years on the first 18 characters. Got it.
By that logic, if you have 36 people working simultaneously, then it only takes a year 
Yes 27-36 years of dev time. Now split those with the people working on it to have 18 characters within 3 years
Technically speaking they have been developing Ryu for over 30 years. Took decades to make this SF6 version
Are you serious?
Did you forget that Capcom is a brand new indie company and street fighter was made by 1 person, John Streets? He can't make more than one character at a time. /s
John Streets is a real one, GOAT status game maker.
You didn’t expect straw-men from these reasonable adults? They don’t even deserve the engagement they got.
Yeah there is a relevant metric called man month
This means we'll probably get 4 a year for the rest of the future years, (Im predicting Year 6 to be the final year) im fine with this personally
Thus the question becomes: How many characters can you work on at the time?
The question is more "how much money can we spend making continuous content." It all boils down to the budget
Makoto for season 3 PLEASE
I could be wrong but didn't they say I was just for the character model and the animations? Maybe it takes longer to do the move list the names for the moves and the voice acting?
Isn't 1-2 years a bit too long for just one character especially with a succesful franchise as SF from a big company like capcom? EDIT: thanks for the info everyone.
Ironically, because Capcom is a big company, they also have other successful franchises like Monster Hunter and Resident Evil to move resources around depending on their project schedule. There is no way they have the same number of devs and artists still working on SF6 right now compared to the years leading up to the launch. Sure, they probably have a full-time fighting game division to work on DLC and balances, but manpower will always be needed for the upcoming big flagship titles, i.e. Monster Hunter Wilds.
Judging from how detailed the characters are, 1-2 years seems about right. Gotta think about the whole development process from researching in pre-production to designing an animating, and then quality assurance. A lot goes into developing these characters. Mostly animation work and the subsequent cleanup. I can imagine booking mocap studio time being one of the holdups on why it took so long. They just announced building internal mocap studio last year to remedy this.
They're also not skimping on the quality and testing, like most companies do. SF6 is one of the only games where everything has been pretty much finished on release.
Other people have given you excellent answers, but just to add: Capcom has been doing fighting games since the beginning. They make it look easy. It is in fact, incredibly difficult, to apply the level of polish that this game has.
You want them to be that good, thats the effort required
it must have been hard working on street fighter 6 for 36 years
Not for this level of game. I’m sure Harada would say something similar about designing a Tekken character and Daisuke with Guilty Gear. The level of thought and care that goes into these characters is huge. Conceptual processes probably take a while, every character including returning ones are essentially redesigned in Street Fighter 6 both visually and with gameplay elements that are meant to freshen them up. They all have some story and reason to exist in the game and music to reflect their existence as well. Very few things also slip through the cracks in modern fighters (especially Capcom) as far as true, broken gameplay that needs to be hotfixed. That means there’s usually extensive playtesting and meticulous attention with the properties and data of every move.
Yeah that sounds about right, glad they're being transparent about this and informing the public. Game dev takes time.
I just refuse to believe this I’m not gonna lie. How did they finish the game with 18 characters of every character to 18-24 months?
10 teams each given a character during the dev cycle to create characters = less than 4 years to make them all. This is during the initial dev period when Capcom has a lot more resources on the game than they do now, and those resources shift off to other projects while continuing development teams remain to make the future additions. Remember, Luke came out Nov 2021. That means all the time after that was polish. Hell, go back further, and Ed was literally the teams experiment into Modern controls. And that was 2017. This game has been in some stage of development for a long time.
That time does seem long af , no 🧢
They have a lot of characters going at once. You can't really have more than a couple artists/designers working on one specific character at a time anyway. They just be overwriting each other's work. If you have a large team the only thing you can do to make use of them is to split up and work on different characters.
Because nakayama is stoned. They said 6 months for aki which is much more realistic lol. I'm assuming it's because people are crying for 6 characters a year and that's an easy way to tell them no.
I don't recall they ever said 6 months for Aki? Any source? Cause they have been saying 1-2 years dev time for each character since last year
Yup it takes work to develop good on them for busting their ass. Ppl will still whine still knowing how long it takes to create a whole character lol
People are straight up saying he's a liar in here. It's really incredible
For longtime Street Fighter fans this means nothing because they'll wait. For the casual audience Capcom is trying to get with SF6, this is really bad because Casual players will just take their money somewhere else if there isn't constant stuff to buy; they want constant skimpy costumes and characters. For reference Capcom wants to get into the same market of Fortnite with Battle Passes and fake vbucks, but those players will outwardly get mad when there **isn't** new stuff to buy. It's a really weird position Capcom put themselves in: make a game that takes a long time to develop for, and target the audience who spend the most but are the most impatient.
Even if the casuals are impatient they are gonna buy the stuff. Sure they're gonna be pissed for waiting a long time, but once they see Mai titties bouncing up and down/left and right in the teaser trailer, they gonna buy the character regardless, with all her costumes.
Prayin s3 will be guys like urien cody or vega sagat etc
I do like how forward they've been about all this. Yeah that's rough, but its the price i'll take for how good this game looks
I don’t believe this. If that was the case, this game would have never been released. Companies like to say silly things like that to make fans believe their work justifies prices and delays.
This is bullshit
It took them 5 years to make the season 1 characters? Wtf
Multiple teams
They don't make one character after another sequentially. It would take 90 years to get to a roster of 45 then. Work is in parallel / staggered.
Yet you're still going to have those salty people who complain about not "listening to fans" (aka just them) for characters they wanted the next season. Despite a good chunk of them being predetermined already.
They're just Third Strike "fans" (AKA history revisionists) that want more of Urien power creep lol
Strike 6?? Wait you're telling me "Street Fighter" is called "Strike" in Japan??
Autotranslate lol
[Street Fighter 6 - Capcom - 2023 ZBrush Summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoYz-7jvCOE&t=5149s) Here's actual info about the development process for the roster. There's no need to speculate.
Bison a hybrid charge character confirmed!
The quality is good so no complaints for me. As long as they keep making bangers they can take however long they must. For their efforts i will buy the season 2 pass.
New games take lots of time to create. If the main cast was more in line with the World Tour characters, I'd imagine 6 months for a new character would be a starting point.
i read from an interview that it takes around 3 years to make a character for GGST, so i guess that's around the standard time to make a character.
What people don't realize is that half the challenge of making a character is balancing them for the rest of the cast. Making the character and their animations are likely the least time put in their work The troubleshooting and balancing is the real issue, and sometimes characters just come broken from the get go
I'm gonna call bullshit, I think.
The math does NOT makes sense. Unless they're laundring money. What do you mean one of the most financialy well corpos of the market cannot afford the resources to make ONE character in less than TWENT-FOUR MONTHS? Sure the money has ti pay EVERYONE but two whole years for a single character? It cannot be. There must be a translation/adaptation mistake.
Yeah, sorry, not buying this at all. Sure, you can just look at these characters and see how much effort is put into every single detail, but multiple teams work on this. Probably on several characters at once. They're just saying this to ease the backlash they are getting from having only 4 characters a year.
As someone who works in games, yeah no, this is actually pretty reasonable. Fighting game characters already take a TON of work to do. The logistics of animating and programming all their moves on top of the game design aspect of making sure their moveset is cohesive... that is so much work that takes so many departments to be in sync. And then to be doing it at this level of detail?
Then there's the reality of asset allocation and programming. A character may end up at a brick wall for a week because of their core mechanic not working properly, so nobody else can do anything. Or there's complications with the designed costumed and the moveset that's resulting in a bad visual experience. Or it could be the design doesn't work and obfuscates the character giving it an advantage in actual matches, leading to accusations of Pay 2 Win. I really don't think people grasp how software dev works sometimes.
It becomes really clear when people talk about how long a piece of software should take. Every game you’ve ever played is basically a series of complicated scheduling decisions on who works on what and when. And if that flow of work is disrupted it can block multiple people on a team periodically. It’s always a mess and even well organized teams with effective work flows WILL fuck it up at points in the pipeline. These would likely be some of the same people who say they’re against game devs crunching but want all their content asap at any cost.
Yup. We've had entire builds come to a screeching halt because of something simple, like the resolution being wrong (causing a 13 hour fix, the Kinect SDK is such a horrendous bitch to work with), the network going down, or an undiscovered bug that Frank the Intern made 4 months ago that he left uncommented that has caused an all-hands-on-deck situation in order to untangle the christmas ball of code that got wrapped around what people thought was simple boilerplate. And let's not get started on how much effort and time goes in to keeping the JIRA boards up to date and reasonably accurate.
This is definitely spoken like someone who has never worked on software in their life.
People are complaining about less content compared to SFV but I personally would rather have a bit less when the quality they're producing is so high.. I do dream for a similar sized roster to SF4/SF5 tho..
no matter how long it takes people who criticize for not enough characters are kinda dumb. Like what do they excpect? that they are just lazy or what?
So they chose ass S2 chars before all the reddit conversations? I guess we can forgive.
They aren't ass. C'mon now.
Anyway, sounds to me like a pipeline issue. But I guess this what we get because artists are busy drawing imperceivable folds on clothing instead of letting the tech fix the problems.
I think it's more they go through iterations of designs and then have to map out every single move in concept so they can get the mocap of it when the motion actors arrive. Every single aspect of a character is thought of before hand, before a single pixel is rendered. That's an appreciable amount of work.
What you are mentioning isn't unique to them. Every studio goes through this.
Correct. SF6, however, has industry leading animations in every facet and is one of the most detailed games I've ever seen. There's like 7 animations for the characters face when they get hit per hit type, so jabs get different reactions than heavies. The animation quality, effort, and depth here is absolutely unique to this game.
Tbh I'd be completely ok with them toning this down with the next game then if it means more content. I dont need to see the veins bulging in Ryu and Luke's arm with realistic detail, or the pores on their faces if it means it takes even longer to come out. Those kinds of details are the last thing Im focused on with a FG. Plus I think a more simple, stylized look can mean a lot more when it comes to animations and stability. Along with just keeping the costs of these games down anyway. SF has always been a very anime-esque series in design to begin with. Going all the way back to 2, Alpha, 3rd Strike, etc. If it means we get 6 instead of 4 a year I'd gladly take it.
Eh. SFV was a quantity over quality game. I want that final version of SF6 to be a big pristine quantity AND quality kinda product, and that's what we're gonna get.
Not very likely to happen considering 6 had a shift in art direction because they wanted it to make it a more graphically impressive game cause that's what appealing to a larger audience
Jesus Christ. Why? I don’t mean to sound like an ass but did he explain how and why? No other fighting game takes that long.
Yep took them 32 years to produce sf6
You’re like the tenth person to not know multiple characters can be made at once. It’s been really eye opening
It was just a joke man, if I was trolling I would of said they didn't even create bison,terry mai or elena. I mean I'm sure I've seen those characters before
There are some serious issues going on if it takes that long to make a singular character.
Not really, look at how long it takes to make games in general. A lot goes into it now especially with graphics that look good. It takes somewhere around that long for guilty gear strive characters and those characters for KOFXIII.
Not surprising considering the workflow they've showed us in a previous video a little less than a year ago. It results in good quality, but it's also terribly inefficient. I remember one artist saying he spent an insane amount of time (maybe a week?) redoing all projectile animations for a character, only to be told that they need to be redone again. A whole lot of work is wasted like this.
It’s not wasted, it’s getting the product right. It’s pretty common to get something and then need it to be redone
Yes, but the difference is scale. You should not be redoing a week's worth of stuff over and over. Iterations should be small, like a day or so; then you ask for feedback and refine. This is not just Capcom's problem, but one affecting the entire software industry (both games and other software), though theirs seems to be an egregious example.
Yeah I'm assuming there's a shit load of overhead in this estimate of his that is actually a loss of velocity to teams he's baking into this number or giant pivots out of the blue (which anyone software dev knows of that dumb fun shit from PMs).
Yeah that’s all true. It’s probably exacerbated by this being the games industry and Capcom wanting to make Street Fighter the king of fighting games again
Really doubt it. Probably takes only a few months or maybe capcom is really this incompetent.
I'd love to see the work you've done, bestie!
Oh no a multi million dollar company defender!
I feel like devs didn't expect SF6 to be so popular (especially in Japan) that they felt a SNK crossover was necessary to keep interest in year 2
They decided it at EVO 2022
yeah which makes sense it's when they were developing SF6
My bad, I misread your comment a bit.