Both King of Fighters XV and Samurai Showdown are gearing up for a big 2023, announcing their early-year plans as a follow-up to several big announcements during this year’s EVO tournament.
King of Fighters XV, which was released on Feb. 14, will launch season two in January 2023. This content update will bring new characters, character updates, and much-desired crossplay functionality developers SNK announced today.
The first new DLC character will drop in January. Shingo Yabuki, the teenage martial arts student, will enter the fray. He hasn’t been a playable character since the aughts. This addition will be followed by Kim Kaphwan in the spring. Kaphwan is a taekwondo fighter from both Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters games. According to the trailer, there is five more season two DLC characters yet to be announced.
Another significant update will be the implementation of crossplay. There will be a crossplay beta in the spring that will launch on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
One of the surprise announcements from EVO 2022 was that Samurai Showdown, released in 2021, would be getting rollback netcode. When the game was initially released it was met with a wave of hype that quickly subsided due to poor netcode hurting players’ online experiences.
A rollback beta for Samurai Showdown will come to Steam in January. It will come to other platforms at a later date, likely in the spring, which was the timeframe given during the EVO 2022 announcement.
This shift to rollback comes as it’s slowly becoming the industry standard, with games like Guilty Gear: Strive releasing with it and the future Project L promising rollback well before even the announcement of a release date. Other games like Dragon Ball FighterZ are also introducing rollback years into their lifecycle. The change for Samurai Showdown will hopefully rekindle FGC players’ interest in the title.
