Street Fighter 6 modders are hard at work – months before the game is out

Modders are already hard at work creating custom skins for Street Fighter 6 characters, months before the game is released. Whether they're classic throwbacks, recolours, or something altogether more bizarre, the Day Zero SF6 scene is wild with cosmetic fervour.

While this is a testament to just how broken open the beta version of Street Fighter 6 is, it’s also a great sign of health for the game’s Wild West of character customisation. Those who’ll create the coolest and most deranged visual alterations are already cutting their teeth.

But first, some background. For a few months now players have been able to download cracked Street Fighter 6 beta files online, referring to the beta being cracked open for everyone to play. With those files downloaded, anyone can jump into training mode with a limited selection of characters at their fingertips. With third-party software like Parsec, you can even play online. It’s inside this playground of possibilities that the pre-gold grinders, combo creators, and potential pros are hard at work.

But there’s also room for those who want to lift the lid of the game some more and tinker about with the assets inside. Enter the Street fighter 6 modding community; an even smaller subset of a niche group of pioneers and early birds. This flock has creativity at its heart, sharing their work and advice with each other in Reddit threads and Discord servers.

Take Alexia from Brazil. At 23 years old, she began learning to mod with both Street Fighter 5 and Street Fighter 6 around two months ago, focusing initially on model swaps before diving into more complicated work.

“I saw the game [and] I was pretty excited, I've been a Street Fighter fan since I was a kid, but i wanted to make more things for male chars since they almost get nothing from modders.”

Alexia continued: “At the moment I'm trying to learn how to weight paint and transfer, I'm doing a teacher Chun Li mod, and also planning on modding Kyo Kusanagi (from the King of Fighters series) over Luke, since they share the same seiyuu (voice actor).”

But why would a newer modder, one who is still learning the ropes, start with Street Fighter 6 now – before the game is released? Why not wait for launch? Aside from the aforementioned excitement for the game, Street Fighter 6 is apparently easy to mod compared to other games. And we can thank RE Engine for that. It’s the same foundational software you can find at the heart of numerous other modern Capcom titles, and the reason that modern Monster Hunter games, Devil May Cry, and the new Resi games look as good as they do.

It’s thanks to the RE Engine that other modders – those more experienced with a variety of prior Capcom titles – have been able to make the leap over to Street Fighter 6 so easily. One such person, Haise Sasaki from Columbia, made the leap with modding in mind. Although they’ve been having such a good time with the game that they applied for the second beta the official way.

“Since most of my modding skills are in Devil May Cry 5, I got used to how the game works — it just helps with the file formats, since texture and material types change per game,” explains Haise. The creator has worked on a vast number of games, including Jojo: Heritage for the Future on Fightcade, before moving onto Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, Metal Gear Rising, Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 8, King of Fighters 15, and a handful on non-Capcom titles, too.

Whereas before they mostly ported skins across games (or reskinned characters as anime girls), they’ve since gone all-in on Street Fighter 6. Early on, they recreated the Street Fighter 5 Juri costume on the returning character, altered Chun Li to have both long hair and her rad-looking CPT costume from SF5. From there it got wilder, with a Chun Li nostalgia costume, hololive Vtubers, a 2b costume from Nier Automata... and Lightning McQueen from Cars. Wheels and all.

Both Haise and Alexia are planning on keeping up with their current adventure in pre-release modding for now, with the later hoping to use the game to kick off a YouTube channel with her work. These are just two of a dedicated sub-community, and their presence right now marks an interesting future for the game, at least on PC.

What history has shown us is that, with enough time, fighting game players on PC can go ham with custom character costumes. Follow me through the past to Street Fighter 4’s 'Vanilla Sagat' or 'Optimus Prime Ryu'. These took time to create as people had to power through a learning curve necessary to bring their stupid ideas to life. That curve can be tackled now, and the common Street Fighter 6 player may have access to the wide world of wacky s**t, as well as genuinely cool looking costumes, far sooner than anticipated. Lightning McQueen may just be the beginning of a long legacy of player-made content.

The watchful eyes of the Capcom top brass only know what’ll be released in the coming months, made available to you and I when Street Fighter 6 releases later this year. But it’s a certainty that a passionate few will continue grinding away behind the scenes, playing around in the game’s gears, to keep things interesting.

For more Street Fighter 6 content, check out the recent DMCA strikes Youtubers covering recent footage were hit with.