This Friday, it’s not only Mass Effect 3 that launches, but the long-awaited mash-up of two fighting franchise heavyweights as well, in Street Fighter X Tekken. Of course, it’s going to be available on competing platforms, complete with exclusive characters and DLC lined up in order to woo players over.
Sony has quite a few of those exclusive characters ready and willing to fight on their version of SFxT, leaving the Xbox 360 version out in the cold. Except that some of those unique brawlers are actually already on the disc, just waiting to be unlocked.
YouTube user SoulReaperTTG somehow managed to hack an early version of the Xbox 360 disc in order to access what should have been currently Vita exclusive characters, fighters which would have eventually been shared on the PS3 version of SFxT before the Xbox 360 would be able to download them later in the year.
Posting on Eventhubs, SoulReaperTTG showed how the exclusive characters were included with their various prologues and endings, which were all moving art images without text.
On-disc content has never sat well with fans before, who feel that consumers should not have to pay extra for something that is already on the disc that they have already purchased.
While the PS Vita has 12 exclusive characters available for their version of the game, it was expected that Capcom would release them as DLC in the future, but they’ve been sitting idle on core platform versions of the game all along.
Capcom responded to the criticism with the following press release;
By including these 12 characters on the disc, the idea was to ensure easy compatibility between players who do and do not choose to download the characters when they arrive as DLC. For example, not buying costumes in the Street Fighter IV series means you will not see the costumes when playing another person who did buy them; on-disc characters avoid this issue and allow everyone to participate in the update without additional patches or hiccups.
The update also saves on file size – instead of a massive download, there will be a much smaller unlock that brings the new content to the surface.
This move also furthers our desire to avoid a “Super” version of the game down the road. Everything you need to enjoy this game for months (and years) to come will be accessed by the retail disc available this week. When the DLC update does come, it will inject new life and excitement into the game by unleashing 12 new fighters into the wild.
Wait, Capcom isn’t planning on releasing an annual hyper-duper-super awesome version of the game, like they do with their other fighting franchises every year? Now that’s newsworthy. What say you, more milking from Capcom in order to ring out some more dollars from obsessed gamers, or are they justified in handling the release of their content in any way that they see fit?
Street Fighter X Tekken arrives on PS3 and Xbox 360 this Friday, with a PC version scheduled for later in the year, alongside the PS Vita.
Last Updated: March 6, 2012
