Back in the beginning of November, a look at Street Fighter V gameplay revealed that fighter R.Mika had her signiture buttslap taunt toned down. While she still went through the action to some degree, the camera angle made it unseen. There was plenty of speculation as to why the character was toned down, but no official reason from Capcom, but it seems like they are willing to talk about it – all someone has to do is ask.
Apparently, Capcom made the decision to tone the entire game down and focus less on actions like buttslaps in order to appeal to a larger player base. On top of that, they didn't want the player base to be turned off by the game.
“Our objective with ‘Street Fighter V’ is to start over from zero”, explained series producer Yoshinori Ono to UOL Jogos (Portuguese). “We want the professional players and the casual fans of the series to return, but we also want to reach those who have never even touched a fighting game. So we can’t have something in the game that makes people think, ‘This is not acceptable’”.
Street Fighter veterans may have become used to the sexual nature of some character taunts or actions, so the removal can leave players feeling betrayed by the developer. Capcom wants players to know that they didn't change the game due to outside pressure, it was entirely their own decision.
“We didn’t make any change because of external influences”, explained Ono. “Those changes came up internally. We decided to remove that because we want the biggest possible number of people to play, and we don’t want to have something in the game that might make someone uncomfortable”.
The game won't be entirely foreign to veterans of the series, as they won't be removing everything that could leave people uncomfortable – but they are definitely taking a different approach to the game's design.
“Probably we won’t be able to remove everything that could offend someone. But our goal is, at least, to reduce that number as much as possible so that they think ‘Ok, there is this issue here, but it is within the limits’. We want that everyone can play and enjoy without worrying about anything else”, he says.
[Translation by myself and compared to NeoGaf translation for accuracy (finally, my Portuguese came in handy!)]
