I’m watching CEO 2025 and there’s a match between a Bison player and a Marisa player. It’s a little uneven skill-wise in the Bison player’s favor but still respectably balanced. The Marisa player unfortunately goes into burnout while having corner advantage, and the Bison player just goes ham with Bison’s low/overhead target combos.
Of course the Marisa player could have done things better in a bunch of different areas but I don’t really like how burnout sequences play out in this game, and this one annoyed me. Burnout pressure is often a thoughtless checkmate situation and it tends to be a price paid through normal gameplay for Street Fighter 6.
The checkmate page on Wikipedia is pretty enlightening: the term comes from the Persian phrase “shāh māt” which means “the King is helpless”. I understand the modern definition of checkmate, where a checkmate is a strategy that leads to complete and undeniable victory.
I made the following video about a game I played in Age of Empires 4 when I was working my way through Gold rank to Platinum as the Rus. My macro and micro had a lot of flaws, still do, but this kind of game represents the kind of checkmate I think is good.
I had a plan to get my economy started, performed reconnaissance, acted on the information with an attack and certain unit composition, went out on the map to secure points of interest, got upgrades, and had built up a good sense that I could end the game by focusing on multiple early attacks.
In comparison, burnout state is far less interactive and nowhere near as earned due to how drive meter is mostly taken away passively through gameplay rather than through intentional aggression and baits/feints.
As the attacker against someone in burnout, you simply have a distinct advantage without much nuance, and your entire goal is to either bait a reversal out of your opponent or get them into the corner and stun them, racking up damage via chip the whole time.
Most characters have looping burnout pressure, and the attacker attempting to bait a reversal during this also gives the attacker ample time to react to forward and neutral jumps. If the defender jumps back that’s just getting closer to the other win condition of stun in the corner.
Additionally, with easily accessible knockdowns, attackers can use drive rush to enhance a meaty normal to the point where the opponent can’t do anything at all without super meter and will eat a stun from a follow-up Drive Impact.
There are some arguments for burnout being “fine” because a player can put themselves in burnout from bad meter usage, but several commonly-played characters are very effective at depleting their opponent’s Drive meter just from basic gameplay. There are also moments where a player can draw up a strategy for putting their opponent in burnout after glancing at the opponent’s Drive meter, but these moments are much rarer in practice.
Now that I know more about the genre, I have to say that while Street Fighter 5 was imperfect and only got its act together towards the end of the game’s life, stun as a consequence of interaction feels more coherent and purposeful.
Maybe not the best example in the universe, but it’s organic since I’m doing the driving in this clip as opposed to high-level gameplay where there’s inherently more respect and strategy between opponents. Once he drops his combo and I get him in the corner, the stun meter starts going up. I could always just blindly keep hitting buttons fishing for a stun, but instead I use it as an “action barometer” – as the stun meter creeps up, I know my opponent is more likely to take action.
My opinion of burnout would change if putting the opponent in it was more purposeful and long term in the context of a SF6 match, but Drive meter depletion happens too much as a passive part of gameplay rather than an active one.
I don’t have any really strong suggestions on how to change burnout, but I think I like how City of the Wolves handled it: rather than giving insaneo plus frames that can turn into a number of checkmate scenarios, just deny the player in burnout access to ex specials and defensive mechanics without any changes to frame data, forcing the defender to pick their window of opportunity. If the defender blocks too long, they get guard broken into a big-ass combo.