I don't hate the devs, but I'm glad that pandering to the FGC is not working.
I don't think pandering to the FGC was the problem with SFV.
SFV is easy for beginner, it's the easiest Street Fighter game ever released. No 1 frame link, combo are brain dead easy, characters have almost no variation on normal moves, CA on reaction are more cruel than SFIV ultra sometimes etc. I'm what you can call a veteran Street Fighter player and I never had the feeling that the game was made for me, it's clearly made to be easier than SFIV, which was already easier than SF3.3. A lot of people are just upset about the lack of single player content and are happy to link SFV failure with it, but I don't think it's the case.
As a long time Street Fighter fan, here's my quick input :
- The art-style is repulsive to me, more than SFIV that already made my eyes bleed a lot in 3000h of playing it.
- The feeling is wrong and the pacing of match is atrocious, it revolve too much on the most boring mechanic ever made in fighting game : counter hits.
- Characters moveset is more limited than before (characters doesn't even have a different animations/properties from close-hit and the air-options are very limited).
- Normal move are slow and have huge recover, especially on guard, making the footsie game boring. Most of them lack range, which limit your options to 2 or 3 moves in footsies.
- Footsie game is slow, but once a hit connect, even randomly, it's often a 40% damage combo, making you even more careful.
And I could go on and on about what make this boring to play and boring to watch for long time Street Fighter fan.
I would have forgive SFV many things if it was fun to play, but after many hours playing it, I came to the conclusion that it was not. That's the main problem of SFV to me, it's a bad tuned fighting game at its core. SFIV was a bad fighting game, no doubt, but it had something that made you play again and again, despite knowing it wasn't good.
