Last year, Capcom said they were paying attention to how “everybody handles story related content, and we will be doing things differently this time around for Street Fighter V,” adding that more details would be available at a later date.
With less than one month to go until launch, those details are still under wraps, but Producer Yoshinori Ono told Hadoken that at least a prologue will be included on day one:
The team is aware of the high demand for a story mode. With SFV, at launch, we’ll be offering a prologue which introduces players to the characters and the world of Street Fighter V. As for the type of large-scale narrative everyone is hoping for, we’ll have more details to announce in the very near future, so please stay tuned.
Later asked if SFV will include anime prologues and endings by famous anime studios, as seen in Street Fighter IV, Ono said, “With Street Fighter V, we’ll be focusing more on the fighting game side of things and we have a different art style this time around, so we hope you like what we have for players with this new iteration of Street Fighter.” An example of this could be seen in the above tutorial video.
In terms of post-launch updates to SFV, Ono says Capcom’s policy is “not to release an incremental lineup under the ‘Super‘ label,” as they just want to expand “upon the core product and offer game updates for free.”
Street Fighter V will include 16 characters on February 16, with six post-launch fighters coming in 2016. “The following year and beyond, we’d like to keep offering new characters and content to keep the game feeling fresh and exciting,” Ono said. “But as for an exact number of characters that SFV will reach, that’s still to be determined.”