Fighting Games Fri… Saturday: A Zoom Around the Table

With the cancellation of the Evo 2020 Online event thanks to sexual harassment allegations levied at CEO Joey “Mr. Wizard” Cuellar, fighting game developers lost their best and biggest venue to make announcements this year. The answer to this was, of course, to create their own. This is primarily why a fighting game roundtable with discussions and announcements occurred last night, which featured production heads from several fighting game development teams. It happened at the start of the same weekend in which Evo 2020 would have taken place if it wasn’t cancelled due to the pandemic, and what would have been the final weekend for Evo 2020 Online if it wasn’t for the aforementioned issue. It would have been difficult, illogical, and somewhat dangerous to assemble all the developers together thanks, again, to the pandemic, so the talk happened over Zoom, livestreamed for everyone to see.

A fair range of topics were covered over the first hour, but juicier topics were barely touched upon. Fighting games are only getting more popular, and fanbases for select titles have increased despite (or perhaps because of) the pandemic happening. The most pressing topic in fighting game development, online play and the differences between delay-based and rollback play (the latter of which is far better), was barely addressed. I’m aware the idea for this was to be a calm and civil discussion and that rollback can be a touchy topic thanks to intense fan desires for it, but it was still worth having in greater depth.

There were announcements made on the stream, though nothing compared to those from previous Evo events. The pandemic is hampering development for some teams, while others would rather make announcements on their own time.

SNK announced the newest Samurai Shodown character earlier in the week: Guest character Gongsun Li from Chinese MOBA title Honor of Kings. She’ll be the second guest character in a row when she arrives next Wednesday (following the Warden from For Honor), but it’s tough to complain when she’ll be free. It was announced on this stream that a third season of DLC is coming, but character announcements will be made at a future time. The reveal of The King of Fighters XV, confirmed during last year’s Evo, will also be saved for a future time.

Team Ninja didn’t have anything to announce for Dead or Alive 6, which might be dead, outside the game’s DLC being on sale. The newest and possibly final character, Tamaki, will be available in the free-to-play Core Fighters version. Fighting EX Layer was updated with rollback netcode for PS4 and PC last night, a point they were vague about when it was rumored two months ago. But no one’s complaining.

Capcom confirmed that a free trial version of Street Fighter V with all 40 characters playable will arrive on Wednesday, August 5th. Characters for the fifth and final season will be announced on a special Street Fighter stream on that day at 1PM ET, an event announced before this stream began. As Tekken producer and director Katsuhiro Harada said, hopefully nothing leaks before then.

The first big-time announcement was the reveal of Setsuka in Soulcalibur VI, the third character coming as part of the game’s second season. Her addition to this game isn’t a surprise to most fans, but it’s nonetheless the long-awaited return of a character who’s been MIA from the series since Soulcalibur IV. She’ll come alongside an update that will include battle adjustments for every character, the “Murakumo Shrine Grounds” stage, a new episode for Groh in the story, and classic costume parts for Setsuka’s outfit customization. The option to prevent armor destruction will also be included for anyone who could do without all the fanservice that brings. All of this will arrive on Tuesday, August 4th.

The extremely snarky Katsuhiro Harada confirmed that a fourth DLC season for Tekken 7 is coming, which will include more characters, new techniques for the main characters, and gameplay system updates. A teaser was included for a character who might be Kunimitsu, who was a lot of fun to play in Tekken Tag Tournament 2. The online play will also receive updates, though whether this will involve rollback netplay implementation remains to be seen. Given what Harada has constantly sworn by, I have little faith. It will, however, include a Wi-Fi indicator for players to see if they’re going up against a Wi-Fi player — or Wi-Fi Warrior, if you prefer. Harada explained how the developers were hoping for the first updates in this fourth season to be ready now, but that pesky pandemic got in the way.

There were no Dragon Ball FighterZ announcements made, but like Capcom and SFV, they’ll be announced on a special livestreamed show later this month. There are still three more characters due for release in the current DLC season.

The last announcement was from Arc System Works, which announced two new characters for Guilty Gear -Strive-. Leo Whitefang is returning from the Guilty Gear Xrd games, after debuting as a DLC character in Xrd -Sign-. His design looks largely identical, but he wears white pants instead of black and orange ones with thigh-high boots, and keeps his jacket open. The biggest surprise was the long-awaited reveal of the mysterious black character from the reveal trailer nearly one year ago, whose name is Nagoriyuki. He’s a vampire who wields a huge samurai-like blade in battle. His design is great, though not flawless. I’m not the biggest fan of his lips or blue eyes, the latter of which is too common a mistake for black or dark-skinned characters in video games, even though liberties are sometimes taken with anime-style designs. I hope these issues are fixed with an otherwise great design before the game releases.

Speaking of that: -Strive- will now release in early 2021 after being delayed from fall 2020. In addition to PS4, it’s also coming to PS5 and PC. The next character reveal won’t come until October.

The announcements during this roundtable were nothing compared to those made at prior Evo events, for understandable reasons. Thanks to the pandemic hindering game development (and everything else) around the world, especially in Japan, this was close to the best they could provide at the moment. I say “close to” because it’s clear some developers would rather make announcements when they want to, as the SFV and DBFZ teams have chosen to do. They will all hopefully adjust to socially-distant development until the pandemic ends, but it won’t be a replacement for normal development conditions.

The roundtable format worked out well. It would be nice if they all did this again in the near future, and didn’t make this a special one-off occasion in lieu of Evo. If they do return, I hope they address more pressing and “difficult” topics like increased fighting game character diversity and representation (not only in terms of race, but body types) and the need for rollback online play. This opportunity shouldn’t be passed up, but there’s a good chance it will be.