Street Fighter 6 New Battle UI Update Leaves a Lot to Be Desired

The recent Street Fighter 6 update that happened on 16th of December brought some minor balance adjustments, but also several new features. Like the new dynamic commentary from Amaki Pururu, as well as the new customizable Battle UI that brings over HUDs from previous Street Fighter entries.

It's a great feature on paper. The default HUD for Street Fighter 6 does a fine enough job, but it's not especially good looking. It's kind of odd that a game that wants to lean in on hip-hop aesthetic has this sort of "retro" minimalist UI dominated by neon teal and purple. 

Giving an option for something different, and adding a new category for cosmetics in the future, is always a plus. However, there is one caveat here.

A lot of players assumed that these would be available through Drive Tickets, the free in-game currency that you can earn just by playing. After all, you can buy stages with Drive Tickets, and those have a fairly significant amount of work put into them.

This, as you might have guessed, isn't the case. If you want to purchase one of the new UIs, you will have to fork out 250 Fight Coins, which costs 5 dollars to purchase.

That's not ideal, but it could be understandable if there was a serious amount of effort involved, and that is also not the case. The more you look at what's on offer here, the more issues start to pop up.

For starters, you're not even buying the full battle UI that is entirely themed after one of the featured games (which include mainline games from SFII to SFV), you only get parts of them. There aren't all that many elements in when it comes to specifically the combat UI of fighting games, and yet there are still some big omissions here.

Here are all the elements that remain unchanged when you apply different HUDs: round pips, character portraits, round and K.O. text, combo counter, punish/reversa/etc. notifications, character name text, and modern/classic icons.

Even if Capcom made new assets to recreate these HUDs at modern resolutions, it's still worth noting that they had a reference for most of these features and could've carried them over. The lack of game themed character portraits is perhaps the hardest part in all of these, since even if they replicated or reused older art, they'd also need new art for characters that weren't present in those games. With that said, the current solution is half-assed at best and often undermines the original aesthetic. This is especially noticeable in something like the SFIV HUD, where properly cropped character renders are now awkward squares with feathered edges. 

Perhaps a less expected feature, but another omission is the lack of score counters for games that had them. While it would be quite a waste of time to try and devise some advanced scoring system just for the HUD, surely they could hack together at least a basic recreation that simply carries across the intended aesthetic.

These would still be glaring issues and omissions even if these HUDs were entirely free, but with the full package costing an equivalent of 25 dollars, we should really expect more from a game that also tries to sell you individual costumes, battle pass, season pass, and comes at the base price of 40 dollars, which was 60 until the May of this year.