Street Fighter V was originally released at the beginning of the current console generation. Throughout its life cycle, there have been both ups and downs, with the game overall getting relatively good support throughout the years. Most recently, it has expanded to 40 characters, 30 stages (34 if you count the 4 DLC stages), and a huge variety of costumes with the game's latest release, Street Fighter V: Championship Edition. It closes out the major additions being made for the title and is similar to 2018’s Arcade Edition which added a second V-Skill for every player, but this time around, each character has been given a second V-Trigger which adds a new layer of possibilities that players could manipulate. However, even with all these welcoming updates, there have been ongoing issues that continue to upset the community.

In Street Fighter V: Championship Edition, players receive everything the game has to offer outside of the DLC stages. This includes all characters and costumes including the most recent addition to the game, Seth. For those who are unfamiliar, Seth is the main antagonist of Street Fighter IV. Street Fighter V, however, takes place between the events of Street Fighter IV and III (I know, I know - it's weird).

A welcome feature that was implemented into SFV was a story mode for each character, but these are incredibly short. Playing through Seth's story, they are reawoken in a new body and try to find M.Bison to seek their revenge. By the end of the story not only do they not succeed in their goal, but the story itself just ends abruptly. This is a common trend for every fighter's story, which makes me question why it was added in the first place even now four years later.

Since the beginning of Street Fighter V, the game has dealt with poor netcode causing half of online matches on average to stutter, making it frustrating to play. In recent weeks, it got a point where a fan put the problem into their own hands. In early January, a modder known as Altimor on Reddit made a slight change in the netcode for PC creating a dramatic fix to the ongoing issue. PC players were later able to update the game with the new netcode, but even with that in mind, it did not fix everything. The new netcode only works for PC and when playing online, both players must have the new netcode for the fix to go in place. Additionally, the Altimor fix broke cross-play functionality between PS4 and PC players.

On February 12, Street Fighter V Executive Producer Yoshinori Ono announced on Twitter that Capcom is working on a netcode adjustment for a later release. Six days later, that patch came out and the results are muddled, to say the least. Looking through Reddit posts, some players say that it is a good improvement, some say it's the same, while others say that it is worse. Along with the update, players are now unable to use the unofficial Altimor code.

Looking from Capcom's perspective, it makes sense why they went with this decision even though it may not be the one fans want. Street Fighter V will be partaking in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and Capcom likely wants the game across both platforms to be on equal footing leading up to the event this summer. That being said, if Capcom was aware of the Altimor patch and saw the positive results, you'd think that they would just make an official update with that code. It is a complicated issue on top of the continuous online problems that Street Fighter V has had since launch.

The most fascinating part is that Ono believes that the netcode situation has progressed very well. During an interview with Eurogamer in November of 2019, Ono said, "We definitely learnt a lot from launch, the main thing being our netcode - we took a lot of heat for the quality of that. It's easy to look back now and say we got through it, but it was a tough period. We had to do a lot of work to improve that and get it to where it is today." Now I'm not saying that online experiences from launch to now are 1:1, as there has been a mild improvement, but it is definitely not where it needs to be.

For the more casual Street Fighter players or those who are looking to get into the series, now is easily the best time to jump in. With everything that you get for such a reasonable price, there couldn't be a better time. It is just a shame that throughout its time, Street Fighter V has continuously dealt with online play struggles, which is such an important part of a fighting game to get right. Even with its problems, SFV is a very good fighting game that could have been great. I just hope as its doors begin to close and we inevitably get Street Fighter VI, it can start off on much stronger footing.