Street Fighter 6’s Modern Controls aren’t cheating – if you’re mad about them, you need to get training

Probably the hottest topic in online gaming in the coming weeks, if not months, will be a never-ending, exhausting debate over Capcom’s biggest new reveal for Street Fighter 6: Modern Controls.

A big departure from the established Street Fighter status quo, Modern Controls has a considerably lower barrier to entry in terms of execution, but it’s also been balanced with its own set of shortcomings. Despite that, some people are naturally crazy as hell.

Wonderful gaming salt compilation account. scrubs he’s already changed his avatar to the modern control icon, albeit backwards, turning that ‘M’ into a ‘W’, as he’s inundated with examples of the abundant salt mines opening up in response to the new modern control scheme. This is only from the open beta. With the full game out, it’s going to get much, much worse.

If you haven’t tried it, modern controls are designed to better fit one controller and to simplify the Street Fighter experience. Typically, Street Fighter has three punch buttons and three kick buttons, representing light, medium, and heavy punches. There are also unique normal and special moves, which are activated by pressing the stick in a certain direction or performing a certain move, such as the quarter circle forward (down-forward) plus punch for a fireball, or the move in Z shape (forward-forward). down-forward) with a punch for an uppercut. Modern controls change all that.

Instead, it has a light button, a medium button, and a heavy button. The game adjusts the moveset for each character, which means you can’t choose to specifically throw a kick or a medium punch, for example. Medium will do a specific move when you’re standing or crouching, and that’s it. The specials, for their part, are executed with a single button and one direction, in the style of Smash Bros.

Like Ryu, for example, a fireball is shot by simply pressing Triangle/Y. An uppercut is Y with the stick tilted forward. Because there are four directions (neutral, left, down, right; up is jump), that means you’re limited to just four special moves. Characters that have more than four, which is a lot of the cast, simply lose access to any other specials. Also, specials activated this way, without the more complicated inputs, deal 20% less damage.

And finally there is the most controversial point: the automatic combos. This is where you can hold down the right trigger and hammer light, medium, or heavy, and get a basic four to five hit combo chain. Usually these auto combos end in an Overdrive Art (previously known as EX moves), meaning they burn up valuable meter. Three Overdrive Arts deplete his meter, removing his ability to parry, cancel, or speed up, key mechanics for survival. Also, if your opponent blocks and you don’t stop the auto combo sooner, you will leave yourself extremely vulnerable to a massive counter.

Basically you lose a lot when you use modern controls. The optimal combined paths are not available to you, even if you are entering buttons manually, since you don’t have access to all the moves. Account management is arguably a major headache. And its overall damage output is lower. But this does not mean that modern controls are sent to the trash.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Like almost everything in Street Fighter (or any other half-decent fighting game), the use of modern controls is situational. Some characters in some matchups and situations will inevitably be pretty sick with them. There’s already a lot of buzz around ‘Modern Guile’. And while manual combo potential is dented, it’s not dead. Capcom seems to know this too: all characters have combined tests for the modern and classic control schemes, and the later modern tests have some pretty complex inputs of their own.

And this is the point, isn’t it? it’s a choice. Eventually we’ll see modern players in Capcom Cup and Evo top 8; It is unavoidable. The game has been carefully balanced around it. And then it is valid. Going into in-game chat to tell someone they’re an auto combo scrub is silly. After all, they were doing 20% ​​less special damage and had access to about half of their character’s natural moveset, so surely your manual combos should have been good enough to keep up.

Also, let’s be real; this kind of thing is part of the fighting game meta. People play around with the ‘door’ shape their staff has and choose ‘silent buttons’ so your opponent can’t hear or react to your inputs. Hitboxes and keyboards have skyrocketed in popularity. And Street Fighter has long reveled in choice, picking between Supers, ISM, or V-Skills and every other mechanical system over the years. As always in competition, it’s whatever you can do to gain an advantage. In some situations, modern controls can be just that. In others, they can be a setback.

I’m a stick player and I like my traditional entries. I’m not an amazing player, but I’m decent – when I was a regular SF5 player, I hovered around Super Gold. But I do respect modern controls, and I’m really excited about how it will provide an opportunity for more players to become familiar with the nitty-gritty of SF6’s features and some of the deeper elements of the metagame. I’ll battle someone with modern controls the same way I would any other player. And if I lose, I’ll think about how to remedy the loss in the same way too.

Also… Are they cool? I made it a point to play almost the entire World Tour campaign on a controller with modern controls, and I enjoyed it. I can see the advantages of this, and I might even keep a modern version of a particular character in my back pocket, for an emergency change of pace, in the future.

Veteran players shouldn’t fear this new control scheme, and it shouldn’t be a mark of shame for those who want to use it. It’s just another hurdle to prepare for and overcome: and that’s what street fighter is all about. If it helps even a new player to engage with the game on a deeper level, you’ve accomplished your mission.

Plus, it’ll be worth the laughs from the inevitable salty in-game chat alone.