Ultra Street Fighter 4: lesser used characters will be just as threatening as the popular ones

Ultra Street Fighter 4's lesser used characters will become as much of a threat as the more popular ones, according to Capcom's fighting game manager Matt Dahlgren.

Speaking with Siliconera, Dahlgren said the goal this time around to to make "everybody a threat."

"We don’t want to say these characters are the best in the game and nerf them—that isn’t fair to the players that put a lot of time and effort in learning those tactics," he said. "The super powerful characters will have slight modifications, but our real intent is to take the lesser used characters and make them an equal threat as the top tier characters."

“T-Hawk was considered [one of the] bottom five in the game. Some of the requests were to make him faster and give him more tools so he didn’t necessarily have to rely on his command throw,” added Peter Rosas, assistant battle director.

“We gave people what they were requesting in terms of giving him more focus cancel options, giving him stronger attacks, and things like that. All in an effort to give him a better fighting chance against characters you usually see at the end of a fighting tournament in the top eight.”

While the majority of the changes coming were all gleaned from fan feedback, not all feedback could be used.

“What we found was sometimes there was a mob mentality where some guy would request something radical and then everybody would jump in on that and that would make the character a little too strong, so we couldn’t go with those," Rosas said. "Things that did made sense that people latched on to such as make Ken walk faster so he has a difference between him and Ryu. Because he’s supposed to have more flair, more speed, more kicks, and things like that.

"We took that in account. Ken walks faster and his Ultra 1 does a little more damage so it is more of a threat because if you get hit with it now, nobody cares, but they will care in the future.

"For Cammy, people wanted to nerf her Cannon Spike, but in doing that we would take away the flair of the character, so we couldn’t do that. We did reduce other things that gave her momentum like the heavy attacks that gave her stun and the damage on that because those are instrumental in her combos so she will have to work a little harder to get the same effect she gets now.”

“Another common theme has been unblockables and we are looking at a way of addressing that as well,” Dahlgren added.

The Ultra Street Fighter 4 update will add five new characters to Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition and come as a standalone release on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. It's expected sometime next year.