Street Fighter 6: Challenger Series Design Preview

The Street Fighter 6 challenger series is coming soon, scheduled to release July 18th of this year!

In the lead up to the design of this challenger series I spent some time reviewing past Street Fighter products to get a feel for what we might want to do in this series. After seeing how prior products tended to focus on the wider universe of Street Fighter we concluded that we really wanted to capture the modern era this time. Specifically, we would do what we could to make this, not just another Street Fighter series, but a Street Fighter 6 series.  

Our creative experts were going to handle the look and feel to nail a Street Fighter 6 set, but there were three particular strategies we employed to capture the most recent entry in our gameplay.

The first, and easiest, was choosing the characters. Luke and Jamie are emblematic rivals of Street Fighter 6 and this would be their first opportunity to show up in Universus, ushering in the new era. Finding who to pair with them was crucial. It had been a good while since our last Street Fighter set, so, much like Street Fighter 6’s own roster, we employed some universally recognizable faces to maintain familiarity with the Street Fighter everyone knows. Stylistically and story wise, Ryu was the best partner for Luke, and Chun-Li is the kind of mentor Jamie needs to get his act together.

The next thing we did was look at what was special about Street Fighter 6 compared to other games in the series. That was clearly Drive.

[Drive 1- Commit 1 foundation or spend 1 momentum.]

Drive in Street Fighter 6 is a supplementary power gauge that begins each round full and gradually replenishes over time. The Drive Meter is used to pay for a variety of Drive specific game mechanics including parries, cancels, and counter attacks. Attacking a blocking opponent may deplete the Drive Meter, and once you’re out of Drive you enter a state of vulnerability until it makes its way back to full.

The momentum system in UFS was originally designed to represent the various types of super meters found in fighting games, but a resource used to pay for a variety of techniques, replenishes itself over time, and leaves you vulnerable when depleted sure sounds a lot like your foundations! We’ve used committing foundations as a mechanic since the earliest sets, and rather than just codify that with a new word we expanded upon it during testing, eventually allowing you to consume Momentum in a pinch. This lets the mechanic be familiar, but new. We’ve used the drive mechanic on various cards to represent things like parries, cancels, and counter attacks, just like Street Fighter 6.

[Much like in SF6, if you are out of Drive (foundations) a Burnout might force you to commit your character, making you extra vulnerable.]

Lastly, we made sure the content within the decks was identifiable as Street Fighter 6. We used moments from the story to build our foundation base, and we pulled moves directly from the game to design our attacks.

When it came to our returning heroes, we highlighted new tools they gained in Street Fighter 6.

Attacking during your RIVAL’s turn!?

Reversals are an iconic part of fighting games, particularly Street Fighter. So, we felt like we really should include something that represents that game play—Attacking into a rival may result in a counterattack on your turn.

Each deck features one attack with potential to be played during the rival’s turn, harkening back to the reversal mechanic of Universus’ past.

This is not confirmation that we will or will not do proper Reversal keyword attacks in the future, but you can consider that we do not currently have plans to make this a widespread thing.

Thank you for letting me ramble on about the design process, and look forward to the release of the Street Fighter 6: Challenger Series on July 18th!