Ultra Street Fighter IV Almost Had Super Ultras
God is a Geek recently had a chat with Capcom’s Fighting Games Specialist Peter Rosas about the upcoming Ultra Street Fighter IV, in which he revealed a powerful mechanic that was axed during development.
As players of Street Fighter IV know the combatants have two bars; a Super Bar and an Ultra Bar (one builds as you take damage, one builds as you attack). The idea of these two bars is thus – Ultra gives players a powerful comeback, or revenge, attack when they’re losing, while the super bar can be spent on a variety of tools to augment an assault (EX attacks, Focus cancels) or can be filled up to access a character’s ‘super’ attack.
When we asked if there were any mechanics ideas that were left on the cutting room floor in the design of Ultra Street Fighter IV, Mr. Rosas had this to say;
There was one more mechanic that we were thinking of adding, in which every character was able to cancel their Supers into Ultras. It definitely created a visual impact and was truly the ultimate comeback factor due to the high damage output.
So this would have let a player launch into a Super attack, and then into an Ultra without interruption. Anyone that has played Street Fighter IV should be able to envision just how much damage this could have chalked up, even with combo degradation.
So why was this idea removed from the game? Simple, it was one mechanic too far;
We realized, however, that introducing this would give the players too many options, and it wouldn’t be as significant as Red Focus or Ultra Combo Double.
Ultra Street Fighter IV introduces a number of new mechanics to the Street Fighter IV template, most notably (as mentioned by Mr. Rosas) the multi attack absorbing Red Focus, which nips two stock from your super meter on use.
There’s also the Ultra Combo Double, which gives a character extra revenge versatility at a slight damage reduction, and delayed wake-up, which allows characters to stay on the ground an extra 11 frames.
That’s a lot to think about, and two of those new ideas are already focused on how the player can use their two meters. I get the feeling, had the Super Ultra cancelling gone ahead, that there would have been a bit of a character imbalance towards those with the best, most damaging super ultra links, and it might have made play a bit stale with fighters storing meter purely to get the damage rather than spending it on the more interesting tools.
This is just a snippet of the full conversation, so for more in depth information about the upcoming Ultra Street Fighter IV look out for God is a Geek’s full Ultra Street Fighter IV Interview that we’ll be posting very soon.
