Learning UX on the streets
How Street Fighter 6 is elevating the genre’s UX
A look into how Street Fighter VI paves the way forward by reinventing its user experience.
This article is the final installment of a 3-part series on the UX of fighting games. Although this piece can stand on its own, I recommend reading the previous two articles on Guilty Gear Strive and Street Fighter V.
- Fighting games’ UX holds the genre back — A case study into Guilty Gear Strive’s UX
- Fighting games’ UX holds the genre back — A case study into Street Fighter V’s UX
- How Street Fighter 6 is elevating the genre’s UX
As of writing this, Street Fighter 6 has been out for a little over a month now and has already sold 2 million copies. This is an insane metric. For reference, its predecessor Street Fighter V only sold 1.4 million copies after five months. This game has taken the fighting game world by storm, creating wide-scale interest that has far exceeded any previous benchmark for success.
I’ve personally put about 40 hours into SF6 within the first month, and I can say without a doubt that this is the best fighting game that I have played in years. More importantly, though, this is the most accessible fighting game I have played in years. Capcom, the game’s development company, has been boasting about pushing UX and accessibility to the forefront of the game so that every single person can learn how to be a Street Fighter.
In this article, I want to take a look at how SF6 creates its UX in a manner that is different from earlier games in the genre. Instead of breaking down the details, I want to look more at what UX lessons SF6 has to offer. The changes that Capcom made to their new title are things that are good for fighting games as a whole, but they also offer a lot of useful design choices for all areas of user experience.
Time to hit the streets!
Tutorials and microcopy
The first thing that a new user gets their hands on in SF6 is the tutorial. I believe it to be a strong example of microcopy that communicates the brand voice with a clear and conversational tone.
The tutorial for SF6 is very in depth. It goes over just about everything in the game, which gives it a big thumbs up from me, but something special about this tutorial is how it presents that information. The setting is a sparring match between Luke and Ryu, the new protagonist and old, but the text itself is written as if Ryu is talking to the user.
The information is direct and color-coded to make it scannable, and it has a conversation tone because, well, it’s an actual conversation!
This method of communicating information isn’t just limited to this tutorial, and is also used in the optional character guides.
The small flairs of adding text like “my friend” or “there’s no need to hold back” all add to the voice of SF6. The brand of this game is directly attached to the characters that embody it, so by filling the tutorials with this type of microcopy, SF6 is aligning its voice with its brand.
The color yellow for the important actions is also a nice choice color theory-wise, as yellow is known to inspire confidence. When a person is just getting their fighting skills under their thumbs, a little boost of confidence can go a long way toward success.
The modern menace
Classic and modern controls
A big (and controversial) change that SF6 implemented into its core gameplay is control styles. Control styles are a bit different than simply changing what each button does, they completely change how each character is controlled.
Classic controls are what every fighting game fan is used to. From motion inputs to a six-button layout, this is real Street Fighter, baby! Modern controls, on the other hand, are a completely new addition to the Street Fighter series. It forgoes a lot of the barriers to entry that the classic control type presents for new players. It only has four buttons and built-in shortcuts for motion inputs. It can even skip doing proper combos by holding down one button and mashing another. All of these advantages seem to make modern controls the superior choice, but it avoids being overpowered by dealing reduced damage compared to classic controls.
When I first heard of modern controls I was skeptical. Many fighting game developers have tried to artificially decrease the difficulty curve only for their games to develop to a state where the curve still exists. I can say now that modern controls don’t try to do this. Instead, they operate as a different set of skills altogether. Some skills carry over from classic, but modern controls provide strengths that classic does not. This means that the entire control system creates another option for users to dive into that has an easier learning curve than what was standard for the series. Making a completely newbie-friendly control system (that even some professional players use) is an excellent option to improve accessibility and provide better UX to all those who want to try this daunting game.
Usability is an important part of user experience, and modern controls are usable by all types of players.
Ok…but enough talk, I wanna punch somebody!
Matchmaking
When it comes to video games, a lot of players’ goal is to spend time competing with friends. If not, they at least want to play with other people — and this is especially true with the Street Fighter series. The scene was born in the arcades where you got the experience of playing side by side with your fellow gamers. That experience can’t be completely replicated online, but it’s still very important to a game’s longevity that you can use the product to its full potential at all times. What that means is that a game that offers online matches has to make those online matches run smoothly. I can absolutely say that SF6 accomplishes this, and in a revolutionary way.
SF6 implements a type of online matchmaking called rollback netcode. It’s a bit different from the standard online connection — instead of lagging whenever a connection is poor, rollback netcode predicts what a user is doing and displays it to the opponent until the connection stabilizes. If the prediction is correct, the game continues to run seamlessly. If the prediction is incorrect, the game will rollback the last input and snap back to the correct action. This all contributes to a more seamless experience for all users, and can allow for smooth connections from across different continents.
In addition to the great online connection, there is also a built-in contingency just in case the match is unplayable due to poor connection or other technical difficulties. If both players consent, the match can be rendered as a no-contest ruling where nobody wins. All of this contributes to a good user experience as it caters to all online connections. Not every person in the world is going to have a good internet, and not every person in the world has friends on the same continent as them. It doesn’t matter where in the world or what McDonald’s wifi you’re using, Street Fighter is made for everyone.
A new era for fighting game UX?
If anything is to be pulled from this series of articles, it’s that fighting games deserve good UX. The genre is historically known for its inaccessibility and huge learning curve, but it doesn’t have to be.
We’ve already come a long way from the arcades to where we are now, and with the revolutionary changes made with Street Fighter 6, it seems that fighting games are capable of teaching all of us some good UX principles.
With that in mind, I think we’re in good hands after all.
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