Cain the Punisher Breaks In!
Hello, Duelists! Duels of Fortune's newest update is OUT NOW, featuring our newest fighter: Cain the Punisher!!
Cain is a powerful, long-range character who aims to bait out committal actions from the opponent and punish them (heh) with his gigantic attacks! He may be slow, but between his deadly chain-axe, fire breath, and control over magma, his range and power are enough to snuff out any opponent he faces with terrifying efficiency.
Cain will be the final new character of 2026, as the rest of the year for us will be primarily focused on Story Mode development! We hope you enjoy Cain and look forward to the impending beginnings of Story Mode!
Included in this chunky update is:
- A new fighter, Cain the Punisher!
- A new stage, Paradise Road!
- A brand-new look for the Back Alley stage!
- 3 new costumes for existing characters!
- 3 new Missions!
- New tutorials!
- LOTS of balance adjustments and bug fixes!
We've also made a short video to show off everything in visual form! Check it out below!
And you can scroll down through this post to read the full patch notes for yourself! Characters who've received balance changes will have a short blurb summarizing what's changed and why. Enjoy!
NEW FIGHTER
- Cain the Punisher joins the fight! This savage, ancient warlord uses his vicious chain-axe and his dominion over fire and earth to brutalize his foes with deadly precision, stopping their every move before they can even make it.
Costumes
- Added a new costume: Warlord Cain (Unlocked by beating Arcade Mode as Cain)
- Added a new costume: Fisherman Cain (Unlocked by beating the Mission "Gone Fishing")
Game Audio
- All hit sounds have been modified to make them louder and punchier! There is also some slight pitch variance on each hit sound now. This also applies to knockdown and explosion sounds
- Music volume has been lowered across the board, as it previously could drown out the sound effects even when the two were set to the same volume level
Visual Effects
- Adjusted the way hit spark effects are placed so that they can no longer appear completely detached from a character’s model
Burst
- Increased the horizontal knockback of Break Burst
- Reduced the vertical knockback of Break Burst
- Break Burst knockback is now dynamically adjusted depending on where the opponent is relative to you, such that it always attempts to leave the opponent roughly the same distance away from you
- Hitting a Break Burst now removes the opponent’s ability to perform a forward air dash until they touch the ground
- Fixed an issue where Break Burst did not always correctly lock out the opponent’s forward air recovery
Throw Break
- Increased the distance both players are pushed back after a Throw Break occurs
- The player who broke the throw now recovers very slightly faster than the player who initiated the throw
Block
- Removed an antiquated mechanic in which breaking an opponent’s guard would dramatically increase the hitstun they received
CPU Fighters
- CPU opponents now decide to use Blast Burst depending on the hitstun scaling of the combo, rather than the number of hits dealt
- Fixed an oversight where the player could force a CPU opponent to taunt
Hard Knockdown
- When a move would have granted Hard Knockdown, but couldn’t due to the Hard Knockdown cooldown timer being active, it is now signified by a unique yellow knockdown spark
- Fixed an oversight where the Hard Knockdown cooldown timer did not reset after a Training Mode reset
Knockdown
- Implemented measures to try and prevent an issue where hitting a character on the same frame they entered knockdown could result in incorrect knockback
Dash
- Implemented measures to try and prevent an issue where characters would not receive knockback if they were hit while landing from an air dash
Landing Lag
- Fixed an issue where hitting an opponent during their landing lag caused their hitstun to be delayed
UI
- Fixed an issue where having a round end in a draw (via timeout) caused the fade-to-black effect between rounds, as well as the “Ready?”, “Fight!”, and “KO” pop-ups, to no longer appear
Miscellaneous
- Implemented measures to prevent characters from being treated as “in the corner” when they are midscreen
- Fixed an issue where characters would wait a frame after hitstun ended to turn to the face the opponent
Character Select
- In Versus battles, the stage select screen now shows the icons of both fighters in the top-left corner, as well as the current win counts
- Fixed an issue where attempting to change a character’s alt colour or costume while their render was still loading could cause it to remain stuck loading until the selected costume or character was changed again
- Fixed a visual issue where both players could appear to have selected the same alt colour for the same costume, if they were both hovering the choice before confirming. The player who confirms their choice last is now forced onto a different alt colour
Lore Journal
- Added new lore entries:
- Cain the Punisher (Unlocked by beating Arcade Mode as Cain)
- Aimee Field (Unlocked by playing 5 matches on Paradise Road)
- Paulita Sunday (Unlocked by playing 5 matches on Paradise Road)
- Big Barry (Unlocked by playing 10 matches on Paradise Road)
- Tor Tellini (Unlocked by playing 10 matches on Paradise Road)
- Ava Myini (Unlocked by playing 10 matches on Paradise Road)
- Updated Shoto Kanji’s lore entry to correct some outdated information
- Corrected an error in Zombie-Man’s lore entry
- Fixed an oversight which prevented you from viewing the Desktop costume when viewing Azutron’s lore entry
Settings
- When adjusting audio levels, you no longer have to press a button to select an audio channel before adjusting it
Training Mode
- Fixed several issues with the “Allow KO” setting in Training Mode, most of which caused the dummy to be able to recover from hitstun after being KO’d
- Fixed various issues with the Block Type dummy setting
- Fixed an issue where the dummy’s Block Type would not update when their state was set to Jump
- Fixed an issue where the dummy’s Block Type would not update if the On Recovery setting had been previously altered
- Fixed an issue where the dummy’s Control Type could be overwritten by its Block Type (i.e. a dummy set to Crouch would instead stand up if their Block Type was set to High).
- Fixed an issue where a dummy set to grab on recovery would perform their walking animation in place until the player entered their grab range
Combo Trials
- Sylvan - Fixed an oversight which caused the forward input version of “Security!!” (Neutral Special) to not trigger a successful combo step
Tutorial
- Added a new tutorial to the Basic section:
- Anti-Air Attacks
- Added new tutorials to the Character section:
- Captain Shiverskull
- Cain the Punisher
- Character: Annie - Updated the tutorial to take place on Dasteel Workshop, now that the stage is hopefully fixed
- Character: Rattlebone - Updated the tutorial to include a section for his new Spinal Axe angles
- Character: Rattlebone - Fixed an oversight which caused the Chivalrous Spirit (Down Super) section to be impossible to complete
- Adjusted the minimum text scaling size for tutorial objectives
Mission Mode
- Added 3 new Missions:
- Gone Fishing (Page 2)
- Digital Dogfight (Page 2)
- The Shadow's Fright (Page 4)
- Rolling Heads (Page 2) - Fixed an issue where the Mission version of ERROR’s head projectile would stop being able to hit the opponent after hitting enough times
- Punchick Party (Guest Page) - Fixed an issue where the horde Callowman did not animate correctly upon being KO’d
- Fixed an oversight where completing 50% of missions on the Guest Page caused the game to alert you that boss missions are available, despite no boss missions being present on the page
NEW STAGE: Paradise Road
- Outside the massive Silver Stadium, everyone has congregated as the Duels of Fortune tournament is just about to start! Lots of faces both new and familiar make up the crowd here. Can you spot them all?
- With stage hazards enabled, the playable area expands for a much larger stage than usual!
Back Alley
- The Back Alley stage has received a complete remake to help it fit in better with the more recent city stages!
- Due it being somewhat iconic, the original Back Alley has been left in as a stage variant, now called Back Alley (Legacy)
Silver Stadium Lobby
- The new NPCs Tor Tellini and Ava Myini can now appear on this stage if their lore entries are unlocked
- Big Barry's lore entry must now be unlocked for him to appear on this stage
Dasteel Workshop
- Fixed a memory leak that could cause extreme slowdowns and crashes when playing on the stage for too long
- Please let us know if you still experience this issue, especially if you play on a lower-end PC
Sylvan’s Office
- Fixed an issue where the stage’s floor model was placed higher than the actual floor collision
Necromancer's Keep
- Made a potential fix to an issue where characters could sometimes slide after being hit by specific moves on this stage
Stage Hazards
- Fixed an issue where landing on a platform while attacking sometimes caused your character to remain in the airborne state
| One of Annie’s least-used moves was her Neutral Super, in part because of how strong her Down Super is, and in part because the move wasn’t meeting expectations even in a vacuum. We’ve decided to rework this Super into the ultimate “get off me” tool, becoming more effective when Annie is cornered and dragging opponents away from her. It should also now be able to deal more consistent damage in general. |
| Rattlebone’s Spinal Axe has received a glow-up! It now travels along its arc much faster and can even be thrown at multiple angles on the ground, making it a more versatile tool for neutral and keepaway. |
| Shoto's Hair Style - Upper Cut move always felt a bit out of place in his moveset, so we've given it some new functionality! It can now be jump-cancelled on hit to lead to air combos, and even hits multiple times to let it blast through most armoured attacks! |
Trash to Treasure (Down Super)
| Red was often able to gain enough Rage from Breaker Barrage to always use the Rage follow-up afterward, even if he had no Rage before using it. He can no longer do that! |
| Azutron has always been a fundamentally strong character, and we don’t think we can do much to change that without neutering him completely. Our goal with these changes is simply to address the character’s most obnoxious aspects, limiting his ability to perform ambiguous mix-ups off a Hard Knockdown, and reigning in the potential length of Holo-Jail combos. His general damage values have also received slight adjustments. |
Grab
| Baron's held Crouching Heavy proved to be a bit too difficult to deal with in certain matchups due to it being active for a while and recovering very quickly. Both of these aspects of the move have been adjusted here. |
Miscellaneous
Barrel O’ Pain (Neutral Special)
| Lance's special bullet types are now quicker to load, making them take up less of your zoning time. His grenades also now deal reduced blockstun, as Lance could abuse them to keep the opponent blocking for a long time. |
Costumes
| Gritallica was an unexpectedly popular choice in the recent tournament, as it was discovered he was capable of pressure sequences that were very difficult for the opponent to deal with. We’ve hit the problem moves with some nerfs, but also sped up his soul eating to encourage more freeform use of his soul abilities. |
Training Mode
Costumes
| Doodle's Fourth Wall is a useful tool that was oftentimes just a bit too committal to set up, so we've reduced the startup time to help with this. His counter now also ignores Armour to ensure you will always be rewarded for landing it successfully. |
| We've tweaked ERROR's flight in the hopes of giving it some more use cases, particularly by making it so ERROR will no longer automatically land when flying close to the ground. Combined with allowing Jumping Light to be used during flight for a new in-flight Overhead option, we hope this will make flight feel like more of a focal point in ERROR's toolkit. |
| While extremely high damage is a crucial part of Johnson’s identity as a character, we found that his access to his most explosive combos was far too free compared to the rest of the cast, especially for a character who is meant to be resource-dependent. We haven’t taken away Johnson’s damage completely, but we’ve made it so that he has to give up more resources to reach the same heights. This is in addition to adjusting some specific moves to make them more intuitive and/or fit them better to their intended roles. |
| We've given Ember more incentive to use her copy abilities by increasing the damage she deals with them! Her Ayall Anvil attack has also gotten some quality-of-life buffs. |
| While Globule receiving very little Linseed from getting hit was an intended weakness, we believe that we may have stifled her a bit too much in this regard, so we've adjusted the numbers to be a bit more reasonable. We've also fixed a bug that was causing her to earn less Linseed than intended when getting hit by big-damage attacks. |
Over the Ledge (Air Down Heavy)
