As someone who has played ‘World Tour’ mode in its entirety, Street Fighter 6’s single-player content has everything you would need in order to onboard a new player

From the general tutorials, individual character tutorials, and combo trials in the ‘Fighting Ground’, to the missions in ‘World Tour’ that are implemented in the same way that you suggested single-player content should be Brian (do a 7-hit combo to break armor, drive impact the opponent x-amount of times, etc).  All of this exists in Street Fighter 6 currently. Just because you engage with the game from the standpoint of a competitive and long-time fighting game player who feels ‘World Tour’ isn’t for you doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for the newcomers of the genre

I think Street Fighter 6 deserves a lot more credit. It has absolutely everything minus the anti-cheat that the article mentioned. Regardless of the type of fighting game enjoyer you are, SF6 is likely to have something for you. Whether you want to button mash in the arcade mode, play an RPG in their story mode, complete all of the combo trials as a combo fanatic, it has best in class training mode for the lab monsters, it has a social aspect with the battle hub (regardless of whether you think it’s slop or not because you don’t engage with it), and so much more. Lastly this game implemented one of the best ranked systems that fighting games have had. MR has had such a grip on players. Even Strive went and implemented the same system into their game

There is a reason Street Fighter 6 is so successful. No one even talks about the in-game commentary feature. Do the majority of players engage with it? Absolutely not. But how cool is it? Street Fighter 6 is enjoying the popularity it has for a very good reason. The product from top to bottom, down to its presentation, is first-class

Other fighting games need to step it up

imo Titan Fall 2 was the best example of a single player story mode teaching you step-by-step how to play WHILE giving you a pretty solid story on top of that.

Sekiro's final boss is literally a culmination of every important mechanic the game teaches you (parrying, mikiri counter, etc). Is there a single player mode equivalent of this type of design in fighting games? SF6 World Tour feels like the closest

SoulCalibur did a pretty good job at making singleplayer content for fighting games that actually teaches you how to play. There are fights with certain conditions, like brian mentioned, where the enemy won't die unless you ring them out, or do a specific type of move. Too bad SC is dead.

Does fighting games have a design problem? Will Brian F win a major this year? WILL iDom finaaalllyyy start liking SF6 after Alex comes? FIND out on your NEXT EPISODE OF TRASH TALK _F

I'm curious if Brian actually played World Tour in SF6, because it does do a lot of things that he complains fighting games don't do.  You CAN just mash through most of it, but many of the side quests are literally designed to teach you mechanics or basics like blocking and combos.  A lot of the random NPCs on the street will do one thing only (like always block) which teaches you (through trial and error) that throwing beats block.  I never played fighting games online until SF6.  After 30-40 hours of World Tour I actually felt prepared to go fight people online.  I got some wins in the Battle Hub using everything I learned in World Tour (against people who were probably just mashing), and I kept learning from those experiences and eventually did Ranked.  World Tour literally taught me how to play the game instead of just mashing, and it was way more fun than training mode.

I’ll be honest, IDom’s comment about “ppl aren’t learning SF in World Tour, they’re trying to flirt with Chun Li” shows how little both he and Brian know about World Tour. To get more dialogue or story from the SF characters in World Tour, you have to rank up their Mastery Level which you get from fighting with their moveset. So you have to actually learn the character on some level in order to get more texts and backstory. I literally learned how to play Chun Lin for the first time because I wanted more of her texts and dialogue lol

People did care about this years COD story being shitty, it was a whole meme when it came out. Guess they missed all that lol.

I generally agree with Brian that people CAN learn, and there is a potential world where some single player mode bridges the gap, but I think hes missing a lot in the comparison to Elden Ring and difficulty.

Yes, Elden Ring is difficult, but its also very simple mechanically. There are no combos, complex inputs or mechanics to that take multiple hours to learn. For the most part, once you know the button bindings, you know the mechanics. Its pick up and play.

A more directly comparable single player genre would be character action, where they're having the EXACT same discussions we're having over here:
"Why dont more people care about gameplay? Why is our genre so niche compared to soulslikes? What are ways the genre could improve onvboarding? Why are developers dumbing down the core mechanics with things like suck to target?"

The overt, visible complexity is the main thing that scares people away from fighting games, not the difficulty or mastery process. Smash is far more palatable to people because its complexity isnt as visible on the surface level. Same with LoL and other competitive comparisons. When people are new to fighting games, they feel like theyre playing dodgeball with chess pieces. They KNOW theyre bad and they FEEL it. Meanwhile, most Bronze LoL players are convinced they could walk into a Diamond game and perform well. Gamers will be just as bad at both Smash and traditional fighters, but they still FEEL like they know what theyre doing when they play Smash. Thats the difference.

Unironically Helldivers did more for getting my friends to try fighting games than anything SF or any specific game did. They were doing DPs, Fireballs, mfing SPDs and more so quick while having war crimes happen to them. All i did was be impressed by their clean inputs and point out they were doing fighting game moves. Suddenly i got like 3 or 4 of them in SF6 fighting each other and in rank

Its always crazy hearing people act like the battle hub is just avatar battles. From my experience on the NA servers, the majority of people are playing the core SF gameplay on the main cabinets - though there is a decent minority of avatar players that congregate on the first server. IMO it is the best place to find random people willing to play longer sets (much more than casual mm in my experience) and exchange feedback/ggs afterwards.

I think the battlehub streaming would be a good idea for the general vibes in the hub if they'd just offer the same bare stream feed directly on twitch so they don't clog up the servers. Like the best case it doesn't fill up cause of japan time and there is still space for people who wanna play there. Worst case all the spots are taken up by people essentially idling to watch the stream (you can't watch if you are in a match) and its just capcom botting their player count. Like the stream is already using twitch under the hood apparently so they should just make the boneless stream available for free on twitch so that people can watch wherever they want and still leave some space for people looking to actually play in the battlehub.

“It’s the Super Bowl of your tournaments, obviously it’s going to be harder to see”. Does iDom not realize that it is the exact opposite? Or did I miss the NFL, NBA and MLB all paywalling their respective “Super Bowls”? And Brian didn’t even correct him lol what is this conversation 🤣

I think rhythm game with motion inputs or combo input along with music would be great. Properly implementing leader board and high score with it

As someone who is in the Venn Diagram of "likes singleplayer in fighting games" and also likes playing other people it is kind of crazy listening to this podcast, because SF6 already does a lot of what Brian wants.

There are a lot of enemies with very specific gameplans that require you to have counterplay. There are side missions that constantly reward you for punish countering, breaking armor or landing a 15 hit combo.

I think what World Tour specifically is missing is a way to do character combo trials or deeper training methods. The game does a pretty okay job at teaching you the basics of the game in the story, what it's lacking is a way to show a newer player a bnb combo or explaining more advanced concepts.

I have thought about the problem with teaching and a lot of it IMO comes from the idea that the player must discover the combos for traditional fighters. Imagine a minigame that teaches you a common bnb. SF6 could have had a story fight that is just JP launching waves of ghosts at you forcing some learning of jumping, blocking, and drive rush. Add on attack targets or something like Emissary had. There's tons of solutions that exist, but I think there's a design flaw that developers don't want to change, combo systems and discovery. There's a reason the combo trials don't have optimal combos or certain bnbs, they have ideas of what a button does, but only someone with hundreds of hours is going to recognize when a trial is teaching you abstract ideas like a button creating a juggle condition or has like a 11 point juggle count or something.

I think this podcast is so close to figuring out why people hate learning fighting games while completely fucking up and missing the forest for the trees.

44:48 Gameplay doesn't attract and hold a casual audience anywhere near as much as the artistic elements do

I love Idom, but I don't think he was understanding what Brian was conveying when they were talking about the Single Player content portion.

"Why play ranked?"
"To get good. Figure out how good you are compared to the world."
"Isn't that what Arcade Mode's score is for?"
"That's different, it doesn't give a rank".
"Why do I care about my rank in a mode I don't play? What content do I discover or unlock in that mode? How do I beat it?"


All of this is such a huge barrier to even getting somebody to experience the kind of conversation / social experience that is happening in every player v player fight where people are showing what they know, their opinions on good or cool moves, their favorite customizations, and sometimes some meme things like duck spam, or yoshimitsu spin spam, or trying to win with exclusively bear butt, or taunt parties, or trying to win with only parries and no blocking, trying to win every round with a Super Skyburst / Super Finisher, It's so much stuff that only works with another person and it's a quality that doesn't come across in a game that one is trying to win but expects to lose.

Honestly I think the reason some Mobas blow up even when they're way harder than fighting games is because they look like MMORPGs and people already expect those to be kinda social in addition to the gameplay.

And what I mean by social is having things like pings and behaviors that aren't strictly "to win". That kind of stuff is fun even with social anxiety in a way that being tossed into a huge chat room arcade-club simulation environment doesn't. Being dumped into a simulated club room can be off-putting compared to just quick GuiltyGear/Street Fighter match popups slotted between arcade mode matches almost like a new hidden boss challenge

"Why does it matter?" Because i want to share something i love with someone else. And hopefully, they love it too.