Street Fighter 5: 8 Improvements Capcom Must Make
7. Waiting Times
Nobody likes load times. Street Fighter, however, does.
Once you've booted the game, you'll have to wait for the game to connect to Capcom's servers, and then it'll load the main menu after a few minutes.
Then you enter matchmaking at the menu, or go into some single player mode and enable automatic matchmaking. If you choose the latter, you'll still be met with loading screens for character select and loading a stage.
And then once you've met your match, you sit at a black screen for a few minutes- and then it flashes white to show the match-up screen, WHICH BECOMES ANOTHER WHITE SCREEN OF LOADING.
While writing this article, I booted up SFV on my PS4 and tested it myself with a stopwatch. From the moment you press X at the PS4 menu, it took me 2 minutes and 30 seconds to actually reach the main menu, and 45 seconds just to load the VS. screen, once it actually made a match-up.
10 more seconds were spent staring at a pure white screen while the stage loaded.
In a game like Street Fighter, getting to the actual game should take seconds in total, but right now, it feels like the loading screen is the biggest boss itself.
Just staring at black screens can be 45% of your time online. Let that sink in.