They did say that they were changing up how they do stories for SFV
Maybe they're changing it up from the usual segregated story arcs for each character and made a unified narrative for all the characters to fall under
Yeah, they're actually being secretive about how they're doing the story and more importantly about WHEN it takes place in the canon. They said they'll go into that later and "have been paying attention to competitors" or something in regards to storymodes. People have noticed that all the characters have a very noticeable Shadaloo connection this time around, so people are thinking this is Shadaloo's fall, or them gearing up with a confrontation with Gill's Illuminati.
I wonder if this game will try to do a soft reboot on the series somehow. Retcon some stuff and change the timeline.
I don't know about a soft reboot since it's visible they're moving forward, but I definitely think we'll see some adjustments, summarizing and cleaning up of how things went around SF3.
I would really like to see Capcom present a great story for SF this time around. There's is a library of stuff out there that's barely represented in the games, and some of it is questionable in how it fits modern canon or begging to be expanded upon. Mistranslation has created confusion for so many important elements that it's made things so weird and confusing;
on SRK some of us are looking over what's out there and things like Rose and Bison sharing the same soul, seem to be false, but rather, Bison may have been Rose's master at some point, but no "purging the good half of his soul business", the infamous Shun Goku Satsu apparently has been mistranslated all this time (Goku doesn't mean hell afterall) and it doesn't LITERALLY drag the opponent to hell.
Also, following the path of things affecting the canon the biggest; it seems as of SF4 some retconning was done with the "After the Events of SFII" shorts to show how the SF universe stands now. It looks like SF2 and SFA3 were combined, Bison faked out the world with a self destruct and Akuma and Bison have never fought, let alone have the former kill the latter.
So I would love them to open the game or at least have a length story mode intro that takes us through the story thus far kind of like MKX, with Ryu narrating the high points of the series:
-Pre-SF1: The SNH, Goutetsu's death and Akuma's spiral into darkness
-SF1: Victory against Sagat
-SFAlpha 2: The influence of Shadaloo becomes more public and starts to interfere in people's lives, brief mention of some of the plot points
-SFAlpha 3+ SF2: The fullscale threat of Shadaloo is known, Bison is at his strongest, he's kidnapped girls across the globe for the doll project, Sagat's been changing his alligience, the SF2 tournament is held at some point over this years spanning arc, everything descends into chaos in the finals and various fighters take on Bison, Bison fakes his death, and he and the rest of the Heavenly Kings disappear.
SF4: S.I.N. Has broken off and is doing its own thing, becoming a bigger threat. Seth is made known, world thinks Shadaloo is dead, only a few fighters know Bison is alive, heroes wipe out S.I.N.
Now here's the problem. The latest game looks like it's at a point where it could be RIGHT at the beginning of a Pre-SF3 point, though it could be after 3S, it's impossible to say at this point. Regardless of what happens, I can see retconning being done to SF3 to one, move it forward in the now ambiguous timeline (it's no longer the 90s, they're going for a sliding time scale if Viper's phone is any indication) and to condense or even change the sequence of events.