Last weekend saw the Street Fighter 6 Closed Beta giving lucky invitees a chance to check out the hotly anticipated fighting game. In particular it showcased the exciting new Battle Hub, filled with character creation, online battling and plenty of bonus content alongside.
Here’s how Aran, Reuben and Nick found the experience.
Aran – The Rookie
I am far from a fighting game professional, and definitely a rookie as my Street Fighter 6 ranking showed. Despite this my time with the Street Fighter 6 Closed Beta was a lot of fun more often than not.
Something that really helped was that with modern controls I could perform flashy moves in succession almost as if I had a clue what I was doing. I even won a few fights! Bouncing between the characters, I settled on Juri and Kimberly as my mains. They fit my preferred fighting style – speed and primarily kick based – like the way I used to train and fight in my combat sport days.
The Battle Hub provides a good center for online matches and with plenty of stuff around it, but there are still areas that felt a bit clunky, like navigating to find ranked and casual matches. Really that was the only nitpick I have, and the netcode was excellent with no lag that I could pick up on.
Actually, my other bugbear are Ken mains. You frustrated me so much.
Reu – The Casual
If there’s one thing you’re likely to have seen from the Street Fighter 6 Closed Beta on social media, it’s the array of abominations that players have created as their avatars. Character creators are some of my favourite things in video games, and while this isn’t the most in-depth creator I’ve come across, it has all the sliders and options that you could want. The only thing that I can criticise about this creator is that, in the Street Fighter 6 art style, the avatars do end up looking a little uncanny valley regardless of how much you tinker. The full game will let you modify your avatar later, but without this option in the beta, I spent a tremendous amount of time on making my typical grumpy twink, as I do in every game. Then I messed around with the fun photo mode…
Walking into the giant Battle Hub room, it looks just like a standard online lobby, like that you would find in many other fighting games, with an array of arcade cabinets that you can sit down at to jump into matches with other players using the character you’ve selected. There’s also a shop to buy custom gear for your character, but really it’s the other things around the lobby that make the Battle Hub stick out for me.
To the left, there’s a selection of arcade machines that have retro Capcom games to play with infinite credits and potential for getting your high scores recorded in the lobby. These changed each day of the beta with Final Fight, Magic Sword, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo on the rotation. It’s a neat little reliquary to Capcom’s past and a great palette cleanser if you want to take a break from regular battling.
Then there’s the Extreme Battle cabinets, which allowed the playing of Street Fighter 6 with modifiers to the matches. I got some decent time in with the match with involving a bull charging across the screen at intervals, which would slam into the players. This added a real challenge to the fights, if taken seriously, and made the already dynamic style of play in SF6 into something actually chaotic. This struck me as a kind of good party mode of sorts, and I’m looking forward to some ridiculous matches with friends on launch.
As the Battle Hub had some booths that weren’t open during the beta, I’m expecting there to be even more to do in the mode that doesn’t rely on continuing to fight (and lose to) that Ken in the lobby.
Nick – The Expert
For me, the Battle Hub harks back to the days of old, igniting that euphoric feeling of stepping into an arcade with some mates, challenging the ‘really good player’ that you know has been there all day, honing their skills, waiting for a challenger. All of a sudden, I was twelve again, on holiday in Cornwall, staring at the Street Fighter II cabinet and getting excited at what I was witnessing. I got that same rush of adrenaline when I walked into the Battle Hub.
What’s great about the Battle Hub, is you can literally log on and find yourself in a lobby with players like Problem X or Ryan Hart, and if you’re feeling brave, sit down at the cabinet you are practising on. It’s an evolution in online fighting games that I never knew I wanted. I was able to meet up with friends, fight them, watch them fight others, take pictures with them and even find retro games in the corner. It was superb.
A giant screen at the back tells you when people are on a winning streak, also giving you the option to just sit down in front of it. I can only imagine this will be used to watch big tournament games when they start being organised properly through the Battle Hub mode. There’s a particular rush you get from being sat in live fighting events, rows of people watching the big screen. It’s such a cool concept.
Even without this, the beta showcased the creativity of players from around the world as pros finally got to show what the game can do. It was an absolute joy to watch the masters at work, using Drive Cancelling to showcase how normals changed properties, making combos work that wouldn’t work before. It was game changing.
Every character’s normal attacks are now minus frames on block and this was evident while using Ken (which I did for most of the beta). His famous ‘rushdown’ pressure isn’t the same as it once was, unless you bring a drive cancel into the mix. All of a sudden I found myself performing combos that looked like wizardry. I similarly saw people doing Ken Jinrai loops in the corner, 57 hit combo boom loops with Guile, and crazy bomb set ups with Kimberly. It’s just been three days and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what people are going to discover!
Further Reading: Street Fighter 6 makes Street Fighter fun again
One thing the beta highlighted was how strong Drive Impact is. A single use of Drive Impact only costs one bar of Drive meter to use, and as a result, players were throwing them out like candy on Halloween. This meant a lot of new to mid-level players were using it fairly offensively, which saw a big discussion around whether or not it was too strong. It’s definitely one of the strongest mechanics since SFIV’s Red Focus, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Fighting games need mechanics like this to make them fun and creative for all players, but it quickly becomes clear that Drive Impact can be countered, either being jabbed out of it or with another Drive Impact. If you get that counter Drive Impact, then your combo damage is going to be unscalable – it’s going to hurt!
Beside the Battle Hub, we were able to partially explore was how the training mode. This is going to be essential for new players looking to learn the ropes and how to properly read things like frame data. You can even turn on a bar that tells you the complete frame data as you use moves or throw normals out. It’s with this tool that people have discovered so much about what makes Street Fighter 6 tick in such a short amount of time. There’s specific drills embedded in training as well, so if you want to practice anti-airs it will put in an AI that will repeatedly perform jump attacks at you. It’s so good!
This, accompanied with everything else we’ve seen so far, is going to do so much to expand the FGC, and amazingly, there is still more to come. More characters, World Tour and even more offline modes like Arcade ladder, is definitely going to make Street Fighter 6 an all timer.
Street Fighter 6 is in development for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4 and PC, with a release expected in 2023.
