Street Fighter V is official and it now has a proper gameplay trailer showcasing Ryu vs. Chun Li to prove it.  A few points:

- It will be console-exclusive to PS4
- It will support cross-platform play between PS4 and PC
- It is looking pretty great

From early appearances it looks graphically to be a refinement of SFIV, but a finely detailed and much-improved refinement at that.  The muscles on Ryu really pop, and more than that his model just looks much more life-like than his Hulk'ish SFIV version.  (Some still shots make it easier to take in the finer details.)  The special move effects look slick as always, but my favorite moment of the trailer is when Chun Li nails him with a simple reverse kick at an upward-tilted, nicely dramatic camera angle.

There's much that remains to be seen, but if the full character roster looks as good as this early preview they may have a system-seller on their hands (speaking for one Street Fighter fan at least).

Since visuals are about the only thing to comment on, I'll say that while it's an improvement over IV's direction, it still doesn't appeal to me. While being less Hulk-ish is a step in the right direction, they will still apparently look like plastic action figures; the lighting in the first few screenshots are favorable, but the lighting in the fourth screenshot (Ryu's Hadoken closeup) makes the models look unnatural, and I found that distracting in IV. Similarly, I never understood the ink swash effect; the artwork and special effects evoke an ink-on-paper look, but the character models and backgrounds don't even bother. Instead of the "living drawing" look they initially seemed to be going for, it just looked like characters were spewing ink out of nowhere. I much prefer the look of the Street Fighters in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and wish they'd go back to that aesthetic. Maybe they're saving that for SFA4... ha.

The console exclusivity bit doesn't really bother me in that if I buy another current console it'd be a PS4, but it's a little surprising. I assumed that "exclusive" meant "timed exclusive" but since your link references a partnership with Sony, maybe it really will be. I wonder if 360 sales of the game were significantly less than PS3/PC, or if Sony's payoff was significantly high. It's nice to see cross-platform compatability, though.

I guess this means USF4 is the final edition of Street Fighter IV... or maybe the PS4 port will throw in a dash. I guess I'll be giving that a go in the near future.

I'm quite disappointed that they're repeating the SFIV look again.

I mean, every Street Fighter series so far has had its own unique style: even within the 2D games, 2, 3, and Alpha all look (and play!) very differently, and of course 4 looks completely different as well, so it's a shame they're just doing something they did already.
Makes it look more like SFIV-2 than V, if you know what I mean.

Then again, maybe the mechanics are completely different, who knows?

Yeah, I agree that a more fresh art style would be welcome. Although the game will be playable for the first time next week, I have a feeling that the final release is still a long way out, so hopefully further refinements are in the works.

As for the exclusivity, while vanilla Street Fighter V is slated to never land on Xbone, it will be interesting to see if that exclusivity extends to the endless future iterations. What about Super SFV, SFV Turbo, Ultra SFV, SFV EX+a? Will the entire SFV line be PS4/PC exclusive or just the first one? We shall see.

It's also interesting to note that Phil Spencer said that he would look into doing something for Xbone fans to make up for that fact that SFV isn't coming to his platform. I wonder what that means. Will he go after another third party franchise (besides Tomb Raider) and make that Xbox exclusive?