Street Fighter V Adding New Characters Monthly-Ish
Bam! Bif! Pow!
Street Fighter V [official site] is launching on Tuesday and, it's worth mentioning again, should be the only Street Fighter V Capcom ever release. No Arcade Edition. No Ultra Edition. No Turbo Tunbridge Wells Wrestlemax Edition. Just Street Fighter V, updated over time with the new characters, modes, and other things Capcom would usually package up into separate games. Some will be unlockables, with optional microtransactions to skip that. Got it? Grand?
Capcom have now detailed a little more of their initial scheduling plans, with a rough roadmap saying we should expect new face-punchers almost monthly.
So, as Capcom explain in a blog post, the first month after launch will bring the first DLC character, Alex, along with combo challenge trials and lobbies expanded to hold eight players rather than two.
Another big month is June, when that cinematic story mode will arrive.
Then the other announced DLC characters - Alex, Guile, Ibuki, Balrog, Juri, and Urien- will arrive in a yet-announce order in April, May, July, August, and September. They'll have extra costumes too. SFV's 2016 Season Pass will give folks instant access to the new pugilists and their costumes for £30, which is a large enough amount to make me wonder quite how long they'll take actual players to afford with the fakemoney earned by playing.
Beyond then... who knows! What they'll add after that is a mystery.
It is, obviously, a platform for delivering things Capcom hope you'll pay extra for, but the old model of releasing version after version wasn't great either.
The first few months do look a bit like "we couldn't finish this in time so we'll add it a bit later", but I suppose we're still in early enough days for games being released like this that it's hard to get a feel for what's 'normal'. It is a model built upon sustaining interest with a steady stream of newness, after all. What is normal, anyway? The pop band Blur and t-shirts bought in Camden all have strong words about 'normality', right?