Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls director Kazuto Sekine apologized on September 14 for the fighting game's troubled launch on PC and laid out the development team's next balance priorities, according to IGN. The statement appeared as a short social media post and as a longer blog post on the game's Steam page.
Sekine said the team had been encouraged by how players received the game's content, but acknowledged that the launch period was affected by stability issues on PC. He apologized for the frustration those problems caused and said work on improving the PC version is ongoing. IGN noted that the problems were severe enough at release that fighting game streamer Maximilian Dood uninstalled the game during a live broadcast.
We also recognize that the launch period was impacted by stability issues on PC, and we sincerely apologize for the frustration this has caused our players.
Inputs and assists
The first area Sekine identified is input handling. He said certain inputs, including attacks performed out of aerial dashes or Free Flight, sometimes registered incorrectly or not at all. The game currently uses a six-frame input buffer when a button is held, and the team intends to change how inputs are processed so that, in certain cases, an action comes out even when the button is not held.
The second concern is how often players call assists and tag characters in and out. Sekine said the game was originally balanced around constant tagging and that current play has exceeded the team's expectations in that respect, while acknowledging community concerns that it now happens too frequently. The team plans to lengthen the cooldowns on certain assists and switches, which he said is meant to preserve rushdown while creating more time for neutral play. He said the team is looking to implement those changes in updates as soon as possible.
Sekine said changes to overall character balance will be minimal for now. He described the game as being in a discovery phase and said it is still too early to modify character traits, particularly because the assist and tag adjustments will themselves affect how the game plays.
The statement follows earlier remarks from producer Takeshi Yamanaka, who apologized for the PC version's problems in an August interview with VGC and said regaining players' trust would be extremely challenging. IGN reported that Arc System Works released an update addressing many of the PC issues after the game's Steam reviews dropped, and that the studio has communicated regularly with the fighting game community in the weeks since.