This Week in Games

Punching It Up

Hi folks! I hope all of you in the U.S. had a swell Thanksgiving holiday! Hopefully you're not reading this in a Black Friday line somewhere waiting for a PS5.

It's now officially the Christmas Season, where we prepare to gift, be gifted, and wait for the coming of Padoru Padoru. It's also the time when every mall, supermarket and local variety radio station decides “Nostalgic 80s and 90s music? Of course you don't want to hear that right now, you want to hear a constant rotation of celebrities over-singing annoying Christmas carols!” I've grown to loathe most Christmas songs, but there is at least one new-ish Christmas classic I've discovered lately that I'll give rotation in my (very small) holiday playlist:

(Also recommended: T.M. Revolution's Burnin’ Xmas. The original version, not the one he re-recorded later.)

Anyhow, with Christmas just around the corner, most of season's major new releases have already hit shelves, and now it's simply a matter of finding time to play them all. But even though the United States has a holiday weekend, the news isn't stopping just for us. There's a fair bit to talk about this week, actually, much of it fighting game related. Let's dig into these tasty news leftovers!

STREET FIGHTER V: THE END

It's done. After five years filled with highs, lows, rumors, speculation, and so many leaks, Street Fighter V will be getting its final character addition on November 29^th with Luke. While he's not the final content update – there will be some balance patching in early 2022 – he is the last major new addition to the game, capping off a long run for CAPCOM's flagship fighter. You'll be able to add Luke into that last character select slot come November 29^th.

CAPCOM still has plans for Street Fighter, though, as they make quite obvious in this presentation. He is, to quite numerous CAPCOM PR outlets, “A major part of the next Street Fighter project,” which is all but confirming that Street Fighter VI (or something similar) is in the works. It's also stated quite clearly that you'll be hearing something about this next Street Fighter game in 2022.

While 2022 seems like a ways off still, it's very important to CAPCOM to get it right this time. This generation of fighting games was a wake-up call: they can't simply ride established series to eSports glory anymore. Street Fighter V's notoriously bare-bones launch and slow rollout of improvements soured many, and the numerous missteps in developing and promoting Marvel vs. CAPCOM Infinite made a game that should have been a sure thing into an also-ran.

Meanwhile, Mortal Kombat XI became a sales juggernaut, while titles like Dragon Ball FighterZ, Guilty Gear Xrd/Strive, and Tekken 7 began pulling away the audience that had once tuned in to watch Street Fighter and MvC back in the early 2010s. Street Fighter isn't the only big fighting game anymore, and with Guilty Gear Strive and the upcoming King of Fighters XV pulling in a big international audience, they're in a position where they have to get it right out of the gate. I don't envy anyone working on the Street Fighter dev team right now, that's for sure.

Hey, speaking of King of Fighters…

KING OF FIGHTERS XV “OPEN” BETA ENDS WITH THE DESCENT OF AN ANGEL

Well, actually, you pronounce it “an-hel.” But still, I'm sure many are pleased with the revelation from high above that the goddess of eyebrow-raising fashion taste is once again gracing the King of Fighters tournament. Here's your trailer!

So last weekend was the “open” beta for King of Fighters XV, and it was… well, a lot of players who could play the game on PS4 wound up really enjoying it. But that whole thing about not needing PS Plus to play? Yeah, uh, whoops. Not sure what happened, but if you weren't a subscriber, you weren't going online, causing massive frustration for a lot of folks. I had to loan my partner my PS5 so he could try it out, since he'd let his subscription lapse…

…but apparently there's also an issue where the PS5 version has more input lag and rollback delay. Apparently it doesn't sync up with the PS4 version all that well, which is rather concerning for crossplay. Also, casual matches weren't working correctly. Kind of a mess all around, really. But people seem to be enjoying the game itself, at least!

Considering that KoFXV's release date is February 17^th – a little under three months away now – and content is usually locked down around this time, I'm a little concerned about the open beta problems being adequately fixed in time for launch. I know, day-one patches are a thing nowadays, but I still feel like there will be nagging issues at launch and they will, once again, hamper the new KoF's reception. I hope I'm wrong, but this seems to be a pattern with SNK launches…

DNF DUEL RESURFACES WITH A NEW TRAILER

Hey, remember that Arc System Works fighting game based on the long-running Korean online multiplayer action game Dungeon Fighter? I wouldn't blame you if you completely forgot – the game was shown very briefly last year, then went quiet as everyone's attention turned to Guilty Gear Strive. Earlier this week, though, Nexon was kind enough to tap us all on the shoulder and say, “Um, excuse me, we still have that Dungeon Fighter spinoff coming out. We've got a trailer, too.”

I mean, yeah, there's still not a whole lot of info on the actual game, but at least we know this thing's still in the works, right? It certainly looks like a modern Arc System Works fighter, with 2.5D character models and anime-inspired, cinematic special attacks. It's just really weird how much this game is not being hyped up given both the property involved and who's making it.

In fact, it almost feels like this trailer was released in response to another massive company known for free-to-play games unveiling more details about their upcoming fighter…. Hmmmmmmmmmm

RIOT GAMES IS HOLDING THAT L… PROJECT L, THAT IS

Ah, yes, here's that other fighting game we've known is in the works but didn't have much info about. This week, Riot Games released a lengthy, in-depth trailer showcasing their long-in-the-works Project L, a temporarily-titled fighting game based on the MOBA juggernaut League of Legends.

Project L is being spearheaded by Tom and Tony Cannon, brothers and developers who have a lengthy history with fighting games. They co-founded the EVO tournament series, along with developing the rollback netcode-based GGPO netcode and developing a prototype for another fighting game, Rising Thunder, before the studio making it (Radiant Entertainment) was bought by Riot.

While Rising Thunder was canned not long after the Riot acquisition, parts of that game can be seen in Project L, particularly in state-of-the-art netcode and simplified inputs for special attacks. Unlike Rising Thunder, however, Project L will be a 2v2 assist-based game, similar to Skullgirls or the Marvel vs. CAPCOM series. (It's not too surprising that the Cannons would take some MvC influence, given that much of the early-00s fighting game community was built around MvC1 and 2.)

There's still no release date for the game yet – hell, there's not even a real title yet – so it'll likely be a while before you can play Project L… but, even so far out, the mere thought of its existence is sending shockwaves through the fighting game scene. League of Legends is tremendously huge on a global scale, and if a spinoff fighting game is even somewhat as big as core LoL is, it'll be massive. And Project L will definitely be promoted: Riot Games has what we in the biz call a “metric assload” of clout and money. If anyone could push their fighting game to be #1 through sheer marketing power alone, it's Riot.

… but the fact that it's Riot will also turn some people off. Before the big reckoning of Ubisoft and the ongoing clustershart that is Activision-Blizzard's corporate fallout, Riot Games was called out for their extremely toxic work environment. Though Riot has made some steps toward improvement, there are still lingering lawsuits and controversies surrounding the company. Several folks I know on Twitter have stated outright that they aren't going to play any Riot-published fighting game until they know the company has their shit together. “Several folks I know on Twitter” is a drop in the bucket compared to the literal millions upon millions of LoL players out there, though, so I don't know how much of a difference those aware of Riot's past issues would make on Project L's success.

Regardless of your feelings on this subject (I'm definitely not playing until improvement at Riot is clear), Project L remains a looming shadow above the fighting game genre that has the potential to both grow fighting games to never-before-seen levels and disrupt many of the conventions current fighting game players hold dear: execution-based skill ceilings, grassroots community building/gathering, and – if it's free-to-play – monetization and “eSportisification.” Fighting games are in an interesting place right now, that's for sure.

NEWSBITS THAT AREN'T ABOUT FIGHTING GAMES

• Interested in beta testing the recently announced Dragon Ball survival game Dragon Ball The Breakers? You can sign up for a PC closed beta on December 3^rd and 4^th. Here's the link for North America.
• A new trailer for the recently-revealed PS4 and PS5 Neptunia game, Hyperdimension Neptunia: Sisters vs. Sisters, has dropped. The premise this time is that the various younger sisters of the CPUs (who were based on portable game consoles of the era) are warring against the “MagiPhone” for market share. Wishful thinking? Probably, but Neptunia's representation of industry dynamics isn't exactly based in fact. Anyhow, here's the trailer:
• The upcoming shooter based on Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid has a Japanese release date of March 24^th. No word on the international release that's already been confirmed, though. Perhaps this will be another case of a Japanese game having an English localization built-in that you need only swap your system's language to access?
• Epic Games has acquired Harmonix, perhaps the most famous rhythm-gaming company based outside of Japan. While they are best known for getting Guitar Hero off the ground and then expanding on the concept with Rock Band, they made PS2 cult hits Frequency and Amplitude, Dance Central (“the only reason to own a Kinect”) along with the Disney-flavored Fantasia on Xbox One (a game doomed by Microsoft dumping the Kinect right before it came out). They are now going to be making “musical journeys” for Fortnite, a fate that sounds only slightly better than being forced to work in the Call of Duty content salt mines for Activision. Sigh.

Well, I think that's all for this week. Hopefully you all enjoy this lovely holiday weekend without being swept away in a consumerist fervor! As usual, if you have any thoughts about this week's gaming news, you are welcome to chat among other gaming fans (and me) in the forums linked below. Take care, stay safe, and play games!