It’s hard to believe, but Street Fighter 4 has been around for seven years now, spanning an entire console generation with multiple iterations of the popular fighting game released to fans. With development now wrapped up after the launch of Ultra Street Fighter 4, attention has now turned to the upcoming PS4 and PC exclusive, Street Fighter 5.

While Capcom continues to slow-drip information about the next fighting game in the franchise, the development team on the project has begun to tease fans about what they can expect from the next iteration of the long running franchise. If hard-working producer Yoshinori Ono has his way, the game will exceed fan expectations.

In an interview with Edge Magazine, Ono provided a bit of insight into the development of Street Fighter 5, highlighting where the team is in the development phase. While normal gameplay tweaks are taking place, Capcom is focusing more on growing the existing fanbase by providing something unexpected and fresh for players to experience.

“We’ve been working on Street Fighter 4 for the past seven years now. There’s been a lot of rebalancing and so on, but the game is still going strong, even today.” says Ono to Edge. “All this means that, with Street Fighter 5, we have a fantastic opportunity to create something with a larger scope, a game that encompasses all that Street Fighter has become in the last few years, but which also expands on that to become something it has never been before as well.

So now we want to create something that nobody is expecting. It’s going to be a title that caters to fans, of course, but one that also invites completely new players onto the scene. Street Fighter 4 was about reviving a passion. Street Fighter 5 is about growing that passion.”

Ono then went on to compare the development cycles between Street Fighter 4 and this new entry. The producer remains a critical figure to the series, having a hand in many of the Street Fighter games since Street Fighter Alpha 3, but he has also unfortunately been subject to development-related stress in the past. With this new project underway, that doesn’t appear to be the case this time around.

“I’ve worked on many different projects within Capcom, but in my career here, the greenlight process for Street Fighter 5 was comfortably the most straightforward. This game was probably a hundred times easier to get off the ground than the previous one,” he explains. “The passion around Street Fighter is currently such that the internal team within Capcom has been incredibly eager. There have been far fewer obstacles and far less stress.”

Considering how long this franchise has been running, and also the high number of recent re-releases of Street Fighter 4, hearing that the development team is highly enthusiastic about Street Fighter 5 is always a good sign. Still, there’s a lot gamers don’t know about the title outside of the initial gameplay reveal during the Capcom Cup back in December, so until more information is given, fans will have to take Ono at his word.

According to reports, development on Street Fighter 5 is still early, so it’s not terribly surprising that details such as modes and characters in the game have been few and far between up to this point. With only three confirmed fighters so far and not much else to go on, gamers should expect to hear and see a lot more about Street Fighter 5 during E3 this year.

Street Fighter 5 is expected to release sometime in 2016 for the PlayStation 4 and PC.

Still another year till they release this game. Lets hope its good.

and the online part for pc will be shit as usual!

I hope it's good.

Street fighter 5 will be about car racing. Yep, nobody was expecting that.