Trading Punches With The Producer of ‘Street Fighter V’

We go toe-to-toe with gaming guru Peter Rosas about his brand-new fighter.

With Street Fighter V released into the wild today, you’re probably too busy pulling off combos and Hadouken-ing each other to slow down and read a web post, but hear us out. Maxim sat down with Street Fighter V Associate Producer Peter Rosas to unleash some burning questions about the red-hot game. Check it out below, and don’t forget to bone up on our review of Street Fighter V. The short version? You’re gonna want to join this Fight Club.

From a development standpoint, from what can easily be considered the best franchise in the business, what makes a fighting game “good?” 

There are quite a bit of factors that make a fighting game “good,” such as the music, graphics, game balance, etc. The most important factor however, is whether the game is fun or not. That said, what’s fun in fighting games is winning. So when we set out to create Street Fighter V, we looked into what it is that prevents players from winning and what type of challenges are acceptable to them on their way to winning. By taking in those factors, we believe we’ve made a game this is ultimately fun for everyone.

Street Fighter V is meant to appeal to new players while keeping loyal fans happy. How do you keep the game accessible while maintaining the complexity that seasoned veterans require?

The approach that we’ve taken with Street Fighter V is to make it so that all players can access the deeper abilities of their characters through easy input actions (pressing two buttons simultaneously). To maintain the complexity that our seasoned players desire, we made it so that each of the abilities is quite different from one another. This allows unique, character-specific strategies to develop, which will keep our seasoned players engaged and challenged.

How are the character rosters chosen what process does the team go through when selecting a starting lineup, and how do you decide who is relegated to DLC/expansion waves?

 Characters are chosen through a pretty in-depth selection process. First, we looked at our mainstays (like Ryu and Chun-Li) and add them into the core roster. Then, we looked at the most highly-requested characters and added them as well. Lastly, we looked at which fight styles have been lacking and whether there was an opportunity to add them to Street Fighter V or not. If so, we added them. We also got a ton of community feedback, so that was extremely helpful to us as we finalized our roster.

Once we had all of the characters that we wanted in the game listed, we then decided what would be a good starting number of characters as sometimes too many characters can be daunting when the title releases and too few could make the game grow stale quickly.

What is it like to develop a product that you know intimately, then release it to the world and have them discover so much more about it?

It’s a bit scary, but also really exciting. With so many minds at work, all trying to figure out ways to use the engine to their advantage, there’s always the real possibility that the players can find something that we may not have tested for. But as scary as that is, that’s also the exciting part. We want to know what it is that players find, and more importantly, what was their thought process when they found something we didn’t so that we know what to look for in the future.

What would you say it is that drives the Street Fighter team?

Passion for the brand and passion for the community. Everyone on the team is very passionate about Street Fighter and as such, it ensured that we made a game that we could all be proud of; a game that would leave its own mark within Street Fighter’s legacy. Additionally, because the team has great passion toward the fighting game community, it ensured that the game that we made was one that was complex enough to meet the community’s needs, but accessible enough to grow it.

Will we ever see Edmond Honda again? I can’t bear the thought of another Street Fighter title without him (absent from SF3).

We’ll just have to wait and see. Last time I checked, he was too busy eating his chankonabe to make time for a street fight.