Street Fighter V Producer: 'We Lowered the Bar for Entry as Much as Humanly Possible'

One of Capcom's key goals for Street Fighter V has been to make it as accessible as possible to all players. "When we talked about making Street Fighter V, we wanted to make sure we lowered the bar for entry as much as humanly possible," producer Yoshinori Ono told GameInformer.

"One way we did that is to take care of it on the system level. What we wanted to do was eliminate the gap between really, really strong players and new players as much as possible. We wanted to make it so that almost everything you learned in the previous title got thrown out the window – at least as much as humanly possible. In doing so, we ended up narrowing the gap between really strong players and new players. It’s a very small gap now."

"The new system is the V-System where you’ve got V-Trigger, V-Reversal, V-Skill and that’s something that’s totally new and has never been in a Street Fighter game. So even if someone has been playing Street Fighter for a very long time, they have to take the time to learn how to use it in the game. It’s exactly the same for someone that’s new. That’s really the goal to lower that gap and we do it through this new V-System."

"If you think about it, the way that you do a V-Skill is the same way you did a focus attack in Street Fighter IV. Even in that title, people were pretty comfortable with that being easy enough for them to actually do and have fun with. I think we’re in a pretty good place in terms of being able to do that and it should be easy enough because it’s pretty much the same, but what we will see is that people will probably start sitting down and learning how to utilize the V-Trigger and digging into the V-Systems. That’s what we’re really going to start seeing a gap in terms of how quickly people will actually grow faster and mature in their ability as a player.

"But in the very beginning, I’m making it so that it’s equal play. Everyone’s starting on the same game board. It’s a clean board, and everyone’s starting. That’s really the idea behind starting on one point on a very basic level. What I’m going to have fun watching is kind of seeing over the next couple months is how people approach the game and see how quickly some people start differentiating themselves as a player."

Street Fighter V releases on February 16th in North America and Europe, and on February 18th in Japan for the PlayStation 4 and Windows PC.