Read on Twitter
FWIW I read the 4Gamer Ishiwatari interview ( https://www.4gamer.net/games/472/G047266/20191128034/). If I had to paraphrase my takeaway, it's that Strive is going to be more of a two-player game, and that the decisions they're making to get there involve both weaker oki and less complicated midair fighting.
Both of these things are significant sources of fighting game complexity. Strong oki + defense tests a player's knowledge and practice time. Big screens with lots of midair clashes test a player's knowledge of attack interactions across a wider set of potential locations.
As an example, a lot of Melee's depth comes from the highly varied neutral, which tests execution skill, matchup knowledge, and reads so heavily that player skill tiers are very hard to overcome without much of the combo-skill tests that traditional FGs have.
This is what I got out of the comparison between a shogi-style game to a mahjong-style game --to welcome new players, they're aiming for a game where the skill gaps between players are a bit more permeable. I've seen this described as "randomness" but I think "variance" is better
When the set of possible game states in your game is very big, player knowledge is a big determining factor in who wins. As you shrink the set, knowledge gaps get narrower, and so the game is more heavily decided by other factors. This is what going from SF4 to SFV felt like.
Now the thing about SFV was that it wasn't necessarily just the variance that players were reacting to, it was the source of the variance -- it had some core gameplay changes that significantly changed how SFV neutral worked, rewarding neutral less and risk management more.
This is a tricky thing for FG players because we typically rely heavily on consistency in competitive results to tell us that we're getting better. If you've got a set of people you play with consistently, over time, you'll sort them into groups like "Can/can't beat" "6:4" etc.
When consistent success is slippery, it can be really hard to stay motivated. It becomes harder to reliably invest your FG time as a player to maximize your ability and results. Instead, the game "feels random".
Whether Strive feels random or not is dependent on its neutral IMO.
Whether Strive feels random or not is dependent on its neutral IMO.
Because they're shooting for a smaller play space, neutral is going to be less about big movements and more about knowing attack interactions/ranges and reading risk patterns.
Probably why some of the early footage had legit footsies going on in some matches.
Probably why some of the early footage had legit footsies going on in some matches.
It's gonna be uncomfortable for lots of Xrd/+R players, just because those are games where we've invested a lot of time into it and the skill stratification makes us feel like that time has paid off. Jumping into Strive will likely feel like a hard reset, and that's the point.
I wouldn't fault anyone for not wanting to go through the process of being a new GG player again, and especially for one that might never feel like it rewarded you for your dedication the way that your preferred GG does. To be honest, that feeling is one of the best parts of FGs.
But I do think that if the neutral is good, Strive will feel like the best kind of FG crack. It'll be a tough line to walk and it'll undoubtedly take a lot of iteration and polish well after launch to get it to a good place, but I think their intentions are promising.
In street fighter terms, Strive could very well be GG's SFV.
Or it could be our Third Strike.
Or it could be our Third Strike.
What third strike did was drastically simplify the range-based gameplay of classic SF games (where neutral was often defined by projectiles and AAs in any given matchup) with Parry. Parry created a lot more variance, shifted around the skill checks, and forced players to adapt.
How you feel about this comparison is generally related to how much you like classic SF neutral lol
