Posted by John Velociraptor Guerrero • November 23, 2020 at 5:17 p.m. PST • Comments: 143
When we think of a fighting game's art style, most of us immediately gravitate toward judging along such lines as aesthetic pleasure and how many beads of dirt-spotted, detailed sweat we can make out on a character's face. What we don't tend to consider, however, is the kind of information this art has to communicate in order to serve its main purpose.
The visuals don't only need to look good, they need to efficiently tell players exactly what's going on on the screen in front of them sixty times every single second. The smallest details of things like positioning, distance, and what is and isn't a threat must be discernible immediately and continuously, and character art is the number one vehicle for communicating that to audiences. With that in mind, let's consider Street Fighter 6's potential art direction.
We're all currently wondering what kind of groundwork Capcom might be using for the foundations of their next Street Fighter entry's look, and given that the title will all but certainly be on the latest and greatest consoles, (which offer fairly powerful tech upgrades from the last gen) it's easy to consider photo realism as the best way to showcase the state of the art technology.
Capcom actually began Street Fighter 5 with the intention of going this exact route back on the PlayStation 4, and we even have a few concept art images from extremely early builds of the game.
There's a reason the team wound up abandoning this style and returning to the older and familiar ways of more cartoon-like figures, though, and Art Director of both Street Fighter 4 and 5, Toshiyuki Kamei, explained precisely why during a 2017 GDC lecture.
"During the prototyping phase of Street Fighter 5 it was a time where photo realistic graphics were very popular," he starts. "We actually tried out a very different style, but one of the things we learned very quickly was that the realistic proportions in this model actually made the game much harder to play. It was really easy to go away from this style and make the decision to keep the more exaggerated style for the game."
During this same presentation, Kamei gives us an example from Street Fighter 3, the franchise entry perhaps most often praised for its gorgeous two-dimensional sprite art. He gives us a seemingly innocuous close up of Yun's outstretched arm during one of his punching animations, but then highlights some interesting truths about it.
Yun's arm is actually somewhat warped here, but looks quite natural to most of us who have been playing fighting games for a while. You'll notice Yun's hand is balled into a fist, but the small hump created by his thumb is a whopping four pixels wide. Yun's entire wrist is just six pixels wide, so the idea that his thumb being 2/3 as thick as his wrist doesn't make a ton of logical sense.
Yun's arm in Third Strike. Note that his fist is also roughly the size of his entire head.
This achieves something important, however, as it indicates to the viewer exactly how Yun's arm is situated. We can easily and rapidly tell that punching out with a vertically oriented fist, and those kinds of details can be incredibly important when identifying the exact maneuver that's coming your way (especially when so many look so similar).
When you're looking at fighting game characters as they're most commonly portrayed on screen, your point of view is somewhat pulled back from being right up next to the characters. Deforming and exaggerating shapes helps to communicate a lot of information very quickly.
Kamei also offers a visual comparison between a real life image of someone stretching out their arm for a punch and Ryu's SF5 punch animation. You can surely figure out what's going on in both images, but when you take into account being in the heat of a fighting game match and trying to use these visuals as cues for how to accurately react in fractions of seconds, the details in Ryu's image become increasingly important.
Kamei even shares an internal book Capcom has been using for years titled "Anatomy: A 'Strange' Guide for Artists." This book is essentially a collection of helpful rules and guidelines to aid developers in the creation process for fighting game pixel art. There are a ton of small but crucial issues one can run into while trying to effectively convey this kind of information in this kind of setting, and the almost ironic thing about it is that the goal seems to be to get audiences to appreciate without noticing.
It would be exciting to see just how realistic Street Fighter could get, but being reminded of just how much crucial information is being communicated through a game's art style, it sounds as though it wouldn't be worth it to sacrifice much flow for the sake of show. Perhaps, in a perfect world, developers might be able to simultaneously manage especially realistic visuals and clear indications for players, but sacrificing the latter for the former sounds like a bad deal.
We have seen NetherRealm Studios make some absolutely gorgeous visuals with Mortal Kombat 11, and the the extent that the animations in that game effectively convey the appropriate information, it's safe to say we have an example here of both having our cake and eating it.
Graphics are important, and we surely hope to be wowed by whatever direction Capcom decides to take with SF6. At the same time, they're not everything. Street Fighter has virtually always had a cartoon like style and that's become a household feature of the franchise even when divorced from all the technical reasons mentioned above. How much of the series' personality and identity is captured in this more fantasy-world delivery?
Should visual realism be a priority for SF6 in your opinion, or should Capcom just stick to their guns and do what they know works? We'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions as a fan in the comments below.
