How was your SF6 Closed Beta Experience?

Have lots to say about how incredible my experience was in the beta.

Most importantly, netcode might even beat out ArcSys's rollback. There was matches that felt fine and I noticed they were near 200 ping?! No idea how everything was still easily reactable on that type of ping. And considering there was no jitter - even when going cross platform - that tells me that the netcode seems to work with wifi just fine.

Lobbies are the most successful use of a "virtual arcade" that I've ever seen. Gives an actual sense of community and gave some similar vibes to actual arcades in the 90s - hop on a machine in the middle of the room if you're looking for an opponent, or find a quiet corner if you're trying to practice lol. Something as simple as having actual chat easily accessible adds so much, just being able to type GG/etc after a set. It's actually an environment where you could make friends, which is more than you could have said about the lobbies in other recent games. And it was fun to get curious as to why people are gathering around a certain cab and finding pro players running sets at them.

I enjoy the new visual style, I personally hated the comical style they went with on SF4/5. They kept the 'look' of SF4 effects/animations - which I think was the strong point of the SF4 artwork- but mixed it in with their new art style which works imo. SFV characters were contracted to different random artists and it showed, there was no cohesive style. For SF6 characters, I felt they all looked great, except for some reason Chun's animations looked a little awkward to me (might be because they're so different from the past). SF6 chars felt distinct not just in look but animation while not feeling jarring or out of place. The ink blots + audio cues help distinguish the mechanics pretty well and didn't interfere in being able to read the screen.

Audio style, I saw some complaints and I do miss some classic themes, but the new soundtrack sounds more professionally produced. And it has much more of a feeling of a cohesive style. All the tracks clearly come from the same game, while having their own vibe, they fit the overall style. IMO think it's a good move, but I do hope some classic themes can be selected in the future.

Gameplay, absolutely loved it. The new mechanics seem to counteract the heavy rushdown focus of SFV and force you to actually play neutral. It's very clear that the most important skill to have is a strong neutral. While all the other FG skills are useful, the neutral is the backbone. The new mechanics seem more well designed, as they have clear strengths and weaknesses. Way too early for the people complaining about DI's balance - we can already see some players had very strong counterplay to it with some of the counterplay instantly taking ~ 4 drive bars from your opoponent- the main issue is that DI is extremely strong against you if you play the game like it's SFV and people are still running on that SFV muscle memory.

Felt like styles from extremely aggressive rushdown as well as completely passive/reactive play were all viable. After beta I felt vanilla SFV could be a solid foundation to build upon but looked forward to what future expansions might do to it, while beta SF6 is literally already a great game that feels more polished than any release they had in over 10 years.

System changes, it's nice that reversals are more easily accessible again, and makes sense for them to cost meter. Likewise it makes sense for meter to be required to become + on block. This ties everything to a risk vs reward investment. Before playing I thought meter management was going to be more stressful/limiting, but after playing it, it feels very dynamic and rewarding. It felt strange that there's no comeback mechanic at first (lol) but the mindset of having to outplay your opponent the more your behind feels great. Anti-airs felt solid and didn't have any weird issues how early SFV did. Throw reset to neutral on tech and being more punishable was a much better metagame and doesn't really make throw loops problematic.

Also surprised how well the servers withstood the beta. Except for that downtime announced in the first hours, and the tournament mode being taken down for that period of time, everything ran flawless. I did get the server message every time I entered the lobby during the evening one night, but it didn't actually cause any problems and still ran fine. I had a lot more tech issues in the recent ArcSys betas.

It exceeded my expectations in basically every way. If I had to complain about something, it's that negative edge sometimes went off when I didn't want it to, and I don't have that problem in other games. Mostly happened on Kimberly on her run special so might just be the animation timings. Relatively minor complaint considering everything else was amazing.

Capcom finally acting like a powerhouse in the fighting game world again.