The soul-destroying grind to unlock Street Fighter 5 character colours
Back to Survival!
Street Fighter 5 has a real problem with the way it forces players to unlock character colours.
The fighting game sees two colours per character unlocked from the start. To unlock other colours, you have to soldier through Survival mode.
Here's how it works: to unlock colour three for a character, you have to defeat Survival easy difficulty with that character. That involves surviving 10 rounds.
To unlock colours four, five and six for a character, you have to defeat Survival normal difficulty with that character. That's 30 rounds.
And to unlock colours seven, eight, nine and 10, you have to defeat Survival hard difficulty with that character. That's, wait for it, 50 rounds. It's hard. Really hard.
So, to unlock all colours for a character, you're looking at playing through at least 90 rounds of Survival mode. And that's if you win all the rounds. You won't, particularly on hard difficulty. Survival gets incredibly tough. You will end up losing a round, and when you do, you have to start all over again. The process is so laborious, PC players have turned en masse to trainers that do the work for them. PlayStation 4 players, however, have no choice but to get stuck in.
Now, that's bad enough. But this week Capcom released a major update for Street Fighter 5 that made alternative costumes and a few new colours for original costumes available to buy from the in-game shop.
It soon became apparent that character colours are tied to each costume. So to unlock the colours for a new alternative costume, you have to soldier through Survival mode all over again, with the same character, while wearing the new threads.
Players are faced with having to play at least 90 rounds of Survival mode every time a new costume comes out. Given Capcom will no doubt release many costumes for each character over the course of Street Fighter 5's life, players are looking at having to pump hundreds of hours into Survival mode to unlock all the colours. That's ridiculous, and already the Street Fighter 5 community has voiced its anger.
Street Fighter 5's colour unlock system is in stark contrast to that of predecessor Street Fighter 4, which granted colours through sheer playtime with each character.
So, what's to be done? Players are calling on Capcom to overhaul Survival mode, itself roundly criticised for being little more than a depressing grind against the computer. Here's one suggestion, taken from r/StreetFighter, that makes a lot of sense to me:
Many predict Capcom will sell the difficult to obtain colours for real-world money when Street Fighter 5's Zeny shop finally opens (it was supposed to open this week, but was delayed). Wouldn't that be nice?
Meanwhile, players who enjoy changing the colour of their character each time a new costume is release are faced with a fresh hell.
Image courtesy of Eventhubs.
