Street Fighter 5

[theboss]

I'm sure there will always be characters with long combos, but these will be the exception, not the norm. Evil Ryu and Oni are both heavily dependent on focus attacks to extend their combos, so with that gone, maybe V-Trigger will be necessary to do unique and longer combos.
Instead, I think characters like Nash with a lot of Target Combos will be more common. Based on the way Cammy, Charlie and Bison play, the game will still be heavy on mixups, but needlessly long and difficult to perform combos seem to be gone.
PR Balrog was doing some pretty fancy stuff with Cammy using her F+HK knee starter after a jump-in, but nothing like a Sako Evil Ryu combo.
I think the goal is to remove the time commitment for perfecting tight 1 frame link combos that currently appear to be the only thing that separates the top of the top tier from the middle of the top tier.
Of course I agree that execution and practice should always be a part of fighting games, but there is definitely a point of diminishing returns where it just takes so friggin' long to be able to hit these complicated combos in the heat of battle in a clutch moment. At some point, that time may be better spent working on other aspects of the game like practicing punishes, learning a matchup better, or finding alternative strategies.
From a big esports perspective, it's probably not a good look from a game developers' standpoint to have matches with thousands of dollars on the line hinge on the execution of a move with a 1/60th of a second window.