Few things can generate more discussion among fighting game players than a developer altering a game’s gameplay. Upsetting the careful balance between the game’s characters can have a dramatic effect on the way it’s played.
But it’s rare that a developer makes such changes without first announcing them, and even rarer for it to claim they were accidental. Such is the case with Capcom and their premier fighting game franchise, Street Fighter.
Players detected potential changes made to two characters in the recently updated Ultra Street Fighter 4. Both characters, Decapre and Rolento, were among the new additions to the game’s latest iteration.
They discovered that Rolento’s ability to combo certain moves together had been nullified, while Decapre’s charge time, or the time a player must hold one directional input in order to “charge” a special move, had increased.
The changes were apparently part of a patch released on Aug. 8. Capcom’s official patch listing made no mention of changes in character balance, leaving players to assume that it had either been unintentional or an attempt at stealthily altering the game.
The former possibility seemed more likely given that players would quickly be able to pick up on any hidden changes, as they immediately demonstrated following the patch’s release.
Capcom confirmed that the changes were accidental, though it did not offer details as to how they had managed to accidentally make such changes to multiple characters in the game.
In confirming the changes, Capcom also mentioned on their official Japanese blog that the developer was considering an immediate follow-up patch to reverse the changes made to the affected characters.
In the meantime, players have continued to search for more unintentional alterations.
