Capcom hasn't said too much about Street Fighter 5 since announcing it in December. In a new interview, franchise producer Yoshinori Ono broke the silence and shared a few hints about what we can expect from the new-gen fighting game.
Ono told Edge that Street Fighter 5 will build on the foundation from SF4. He says it's going to be larger than the older game as a result:
We’ve been working on Street Fighter 4 for the past seven years now. There’s been a lot of rebalancing and so on, but the game is still going strong, even today. All this means that, with Street Fighter 5, we have a fantastic opportunity to create something with a larger scope, a game that encompasses all that Street Fighter has become in the last few years, but which also expands on that to become something it has never been before as well. So now we want to create something that nobody is expecting. It’s going to be a title that caters to fans, of course, but one that also invites completely new players onto the scene.Street Fighter 4 was about reviving a passion. Street Fighter 5 is about growing that passion.
The other big difference that Ono mentioned between the two games is that Street Fighter 5 was a "hundred times easier" to start than SF4.
"The passion around Street Fighter is currently such that the internal team within Capcom has been incredibly eager. There have been far fewer obstacles and far less stress."
It's hard to imagine Capcom ever putting up resistance to a new Street Fighter, considering it's one of their biggest franchises. The years of Street Fighter 4 re-releases make it easy to forget the near-decade wait for the base game, though. The Capcom brass were skeptical of making another numbered sequel in the series back in the early 2000s. It's not surprising that their attitude would change after they made millions off SF4, Super Street Fighter 4, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition and Ultra Street Fighter IV.
Street Fighter 4 will be released on PS4 and PC. Due to an exclusivity deal hammered out by Sony and Capcom, the game won't be debuting on Xbox One. The game will allegedly launch next Spring.
We don't know much about the content of the game. The early gameplay footage did confirm that long-time characters Ryu and Chun-Li will be part of the roster, along with a redesigned Charlie Nash.
