Freak Fighter 6 Just Got Freakier…

Let's go. Street Fighter got a genuinely cool update, quote unquote update that's going to be happening relatively soon regarding freaks, which leads us to some cool opportunities to potentially do some freak spectating. I wonder how they're going to balance it out because the size of freaks is very important, right? can have a substantial impact on how they fight. So, I'm kind of curious how that's going to work. What are we talking about? Street Fighter 6 is getting a massive Avatar sort of quality of life update. And I'm guessing it's because so many damn people are messing around with Avatar stuff still to this day that there is ample reason for them to do it. Somebody reminded me that this is what you asked for. I'm like, what did I say? Apparently, one of the things that we wanted was like Avatar matchmaking. We talked about it like a long long time ago where it's like how cool would it be if you could take your own custom character and fight against other custom characters and you could do that but the lobby situation was very iffy. What if you could do that and like even the playing field in some way to fight other people so that it wouldn't be massively imbalanced like not an Injustice 2 problem where your custom characters were like way too beefy for each other and you would just like waste them in a few hits. No, no. There needs to be like a a barrier. you can only be like in one spot to match against each other. So, apparently we were requesting that like three-ish years ago. It looks like it's actually happening. Freaky but fair. Random match. Here comes a new actually shows your [ __ ] Avatar random match. Look at all this. There's Dude, you're literally searching for opponent. Wow. It has matchmaking. This is very surprising to me because the last thing I thought a three years ago you said it's been that long. It's been just about three years ago. Yeah. The last thing I would think a fighting game would want to do is to segregate its matchmaking player base between people that want to use their crazy characters and normal gameplay. But I guess they do. Here comes a new challenger. John Capcom. This looks crazy. Damn. Okay, this looks dumbass fun. I mean, oh, this dude's doing Ingrid moves. Fight against each other players using any combination of fighting style and special moves you like. All right, which is ideally one of the big aspects of building a character in uh John World Tour mode. In this mode, all fighter stats are fixed, all gauges are maxed out, and all accessory slots are unlocked. Okay, so do I still have to play through world tour to do it? Curious, dude. Do not Wow. Change matchmaking, control settings, other customizations in battle. So, it has its in avatar room. It says it up here above my whole ass head. Um, it is an entirely dedicated matchmaking function. Like dedicated, dude. That's a big commitment. Earn avatar points for completing random avatar matches. Avatar points. Play in random avatar matches to get special colors. Wow. There's in there's normal game rewards. Is avatar points like their ranking system? Bro, they have an avatar ranking system now. become a master freak. Avatar combos are nutty. No, I know. I have a couple friends that play the heck out of this and they're fighting game fans, right? Fight in CPU battles against various masters to learn their styles and acquire their special moves. That's kind of neat. So, it even has single player stuff. Avatar Arcade. Fight against your favorite master as many times as you want. So you just fight against the master now instead of having to go through the world tour and and feeding them coffee and trinkets and [ __ ] right? Defeat different masters to max out acquisition gauge and unlock outfit two for that master. What? Damn, there's a lot of content in here. What the hell? There's actually rewards for this [ __ ] This is the world tour experience but streamlined. Yeah, it's what it seems like. And you can literally buy their moves. Wow. Okay. What is this? Pick up some rewards at the end. Street Fighter 4 ending zero of Wow, they stuck in the endings from previous. Is it all? What the? Huh, bro? Street Fighter 1 ending. Street Fighter 2, three, four. What? Ingred EX color. She looks like a demon. Fight in a string of continuous battles against masters and other characters from World Tour. And then you get Ken's ending from second impact. Here comes an intruder. Bro, what the hell is this? Holy crap. Hydrogen bomb versus coughing baby. I want to watch it again. Holy crap. Lady, chill. He works at a Starbucks. Holy [ __ ] Available on May 28th. Is that the same day as Ingrid? That's Sun Octopus. Yeah, like Sun Octopus is the crazy ass motion, right? In the old Capcom Allstars game. She's the one that had like the insane literal octopus motion. Anyway, yeah, this all seems like we kind of uh had a very very early game cycle prediction that this is eventually where this goes. This is eventually like how this breaks down. You if if the Avatar stuff resonated so much with the audience, which it's been a longgoing presumption, that has been the case that the majority of people that are engaging with all of this Avatar free costume stuff is actually engaging with it and buying it. And it's contributing to one of the reasons why the game is not getting as much uh traditional competitive content as much as you would like. Whether it's in the form of balance adjustments, even though those are very different things, and additional costumes, those are just taking a very long time. Everything about this, from my impression, as somebody that has almost literally zero experience of playing any Street Fighter 6 outside of just ranked matches. Uh, this seems very cool. This seems like this gives me a reason to want to try it out in some way because, yeah, the big expansive world tour mode is something that I've never really gotten into and it's a lot now. And now that there is so many characters now that there's so many areas and things that have been added, it feels like, all right, maybe they're seeing that and they want to give people a reason just to jump in and try all the crazy freak stuff in a way that makes sense. Yeah, we can easily have like freak freak fights and commentate freak fights and [ __ ] So, I think this makes a lot of sense. However, I immediately knew where this was going to go and it's just because Street Fighter 6 is a game that is very different than Street Fighter 5. It is not servicing just one side of the audience, you know, like one one aspect of Street Fighter is no longer once the game has been out for a few months just specifically that are people really into this [ __ ] or people that just dropped off, right? It seems like at least from numbers and [ __ ] it seems like people want to jump in and continuously engage with Street Fighter as a game that is not its like ranked or player matchmaking, you know, and just to have fun with it. This does not necessarily represent people playing the game in a way that will never contribute to the actual play of Street Fighter as a game, like as a as a core game experience, right? Like the the competitive side of it. I think that's backwards AF thinking. Number one, the reason is any content that's in a fighting game is to get you to bridge the gap. Maybe you only played freak mode freak [ __ ] for the longest time and then you're like, "Oh, well, I can play other characters with my freak. I love my freak, dude. My freak is freaking awesome. So, I'll maybe I'll try playing some other people. And then they play some other people. Guess what? They might have this thing called fun. They might have fun with it. Especially if there's like a matchmaking to it. Other people that suck. Other people that are just doing the same [ __ ] They might have fun with it. They might be like, "Damn, this freaking freak [ __ ] is actually kind of fun. Wonder how much fun the normal game is." I wonder I wonder if the normal game just jumping into player matches and matchmaking just with uh Ken or Ryu or some [ __ ] I wonder if that's fun. Everything that is in a fighting game exists to bridge the gap from somebody that will never ever ever play this game. Seriously, in any way possible to just thinking just maybe I like this so much, maybe I'll try. Maybe, just maybe I'll try and just maybe it's not a guarantee that you're going to have fun, but maybe you'll have fun. Maybe it'll actually be something you'll want to play some more of. Anyway, that's my take on it. That's my take on the majority of fighting games that have single player content, right? The everlasting question of where's the costumes has kind of been answered. The exuberant amount of players populating Street Fighter 6 daily isn't just ranked and player match enthusiasts. It's people playing with their avatars and freaks against other avatars and freaks. And now they get even more. And of course, like I granted it's Twitter and we're not making this in a Twitter response, but there's a a very large amount of people that think that uh this takes away from the competitive side of the game, that these things do not coexist with each other, that one removes something from the other, which is a very modern way of thinking. And I'll just say that's not the case, dude. Like the team on Street Fighter 6 that has been making the single player content and the DLC single player content is not the same people that are making the costumes for everything else. Dude, it's not. We had a big standard of what this was going to be from Street Fighter 5 because it was just inundated with costumes. Dude, there were so many costumes it would make your head spin in Street Fighter 5. It literally it literally kept the game afloat for years. Street Fighter 6 does not need to do that, right? Street Fighter 5 was a game that had very little content outside of that stuff for quite a while until it eventually got it. It makes sense to me that Street Fighter 6 is already making a [ __ ] ton of money. It's got a [ __ ] ton of players. People think that the resources taken from one thing is not contributing to that of the other. All the people that are usually doing that [ __ ] dude, are probably busy making other fighting games. Could literally be happening right now. They could be making, no [ __ ] another fighting game in the background right now. Like, it's it's hard to believe that Capcom would not be doing that. Granted, every single game gets a DLC and a postgame support squad of folks that are going to continue to work on this, to make this, to do new things, to add characters, to add single player content, to add costumes, all that kind of stuff. And that likely is only so big. The question is, why isn't it bigger? I think it just boils down to something very simple. This stuff probably makes money. That's it. a lot of competitive mindset or people that only play the game for the sake of playing the game through ranked and stuff like that. It'll be very hard for them to see because it feels like when you're at the echelon of like the fighting game community, much less a competitive side of a game, it makes you feel like you're really important cuz you've put so much time you put you've put so much time into it. You've had so much of an it's had so much of an impact on you. You've had so much of an impact on it. So, you feel like your voice matters more. And unfortunately, I'm here to break it to you. It's just not the case. And unfortunately, it represents such a small amount of people that are engaging with the game that it's like you can't ignore the people that are playing this [ __ ] like crazy. There's a lot of other people that are trying to play this stuff. It's like if there is 70,000 people engaging with your game a week, there is a top 1,000 of them that are just continually and consistently playing, but the other side is having issue. the like let's say the the top 30 to 40,000 which represents a huge amount of these aren't coming back as frequently as possible then you'd start to start thinking about why are high levels doing fine they're they seem to be relatively cool with all this stuff you know I'm not saying that's directly the case you have to look at it from the perspective of like how for what side do we actually appeal towards our audiences and I think the costume thing the freak costumes especially is the number one indicator where the priorities lie it's the number one indicator where they keep making these things. They keep having all this stuff. There has been so many godamn freak costume additions to this game over the past few years that it's insane, dude. They only have so much to work with and they are obviously prioritizing one. And I think there's a reason why that is. And this trailer cements it in my mind.