Street Fighter IV producer talks Seth

Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono spoke to Eurogamer about Seth, one of the boss characters in Capcom's upcoming beat-'em-up, last week, and hinted that he will be playable.

"Seth is indeed a new character and a boss. Seth is a really interesting character because he has connections to some other important characters in Street Fighter IV. You may have noticed of course that M. Bison is back. At the end of Street Fighter II everyone presumed that Shadowloo had been destroyed and Bison presumably had been killed. He's a hard guy to kill and he's once again returned.

"What we need to figure out as players looking at the story is why are Shadowloo back, how did that happen, how and why did Bison come back, and what is Seth's connection to that, and he's very much connected to it," Ono told Eurogamer in a video interview you'll be able to see in a Captivate 08 EGTV Special soon.

"If you look at him he's got a kind of expressionless face and a strange skin colour, he has some sort of device embedded in his stomach. He's a unique-looking character, he's clearly not an ordinary human being - there's something going on with this guy."

Seth's story will be explored in some part by the arcade version of SF IV, due out in arcades this summer, but the home version - for PS3, 360 and PC - will go into much greater depth with him, Ono said.

Interestingly, Ono told assembled hacks that Capcom would be unlikely to include any fully-animated characters without letting players control them. When pushed about this and how it relates to Seth, Ono laughed but quickly hushed up. "If people express a desire to take control of Seth, we might see a movement in that direction at some point," he said. "I certainly don't want to say much more than that - I've already said too much!"

To see what else he said, and check out our thoughts on the current Street Fighter IV code, check out our Street Fighter IV hands-on preview.