A Message from the Director

To all Tōkon Warriors,

This is Sekine, Director of MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls.

A month has now passed since our August 6th release, and I have to admit that I am amazed every day by all the discoveries and creative tactics players continue to find!

Seeing the game’s content so positively received, with players enjoying the experience and feeling inspired to keep playing, has been a tremendous source of joy for the entire development team.

However, 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. It was never our intention for players to be unable to enjoy the game as we envisioned, and we are currently making progress on improvements to the PC version so that everyone can enjoy the game to the fullest.

Today, I would like to share several points with you.

■ Direction for Future Updates

First, the development team has identified the following areas that we believe need to be addressed.

• Reassessment of Input Response

We have observed that particular inputs, such as attacks from aerial dashes or Free Flight, would sometimes not register correctly or even at all.

To address these issues, we intend to adjust the current input windows to ensure a smoother and more responsive gameplay experience.

In the current state, there is a 6-frame input buffer when holding a button. However, we intend to adjust the way inputs are handled so that, in certain cases, the action will be performed even when the button is not held.

It would be a tremendous help if you could share your feedback on any particular inputs you find unresponsive via the following link: https://marveltokon.zendesk.com/

The more specific the details you can provide, the more helpful they will be as we work on improvements.

• Overly Frequent Assists and Tags

The original vision that informed the game’s current balancing was to allow players to call a lot of Assists and tag between characters to help each other, recreating the chaotic feel of battle found in the final pages of comics.

However, thanks to the incredible amount of experimentation and optimization from our players, Assist frequency has exceeded our initial expectations, and many players have expressed concerns about their frequency as well.

Taking this into account, the development team intends to preserve those momentary instances of chaos while improving overall visibility as much as possible, as well as reducing the amount of downtime during which a player cannot input anything due to the extensive use of tags.

More specifically, we are considering adjustments such as:

Increasing the cooldown time for certain Assists and Switches.

This would allow us to maintain rushdown capabilities while also creating more time for phases of neutral play.

We are currently working to implement these ideas into updates as soon as possible.

A bit of development trivia about this: during the first iterations of the Assist system, neutral Assists required gauge to activate, something we tested in detail.

However, with this system, calling Assists during combos turned out to be the most optimal way to use them, greatly reducing the use cases for neutral Assists.

This went against the vision described above of characters jumping into battle, and also made fights very passive and the game more difficult by requiring players to constantly check their gauges.

This is the logic behind making neutral Assists consume zero gauge, and adjusting their frequency now is an extension of that prior choice.

• About Character Balance

First and foremost, fixing issues with the game remains the development team’s highest priority.

As for character balance, while we have received a lot of feedback, as of now, we believe the game is still in a discovery phase.

Discoveries continue to be made daily concerning individual characters, as well as various team combinations, which indicates to us that it is still too early to start modifying character traits.

Also, as we expect the overall battle balance to be affected by the Assist/Tag changes I mentioned earlier, any character balance adjustments we make would be minimal.

At the time of writing this message, we are at a point where there is still a realistic chance that new techniques and metas will be discovered. For now, we intend to focus on the direction I presented above, with upcoming updates centered on adjusting mechanics and inputs as soon as possible.

We intend to implement these changes at a time that will have as little impact as possible on major tournaments, including the qualifiers for the Arc World Tour.

As a side topic, I would like to share with you the latest win rates by character.

*These win rates exclude mirror match results.

These results may look surprising, but statistics show that character win ratios are stable and only have a narrow variation range (48-52%).

Looking at results by teams might yield different results, but at least it seems that individual character matchups are quite even, and I for one am looking forward to seeing how this will evolve over time.

Of course, these numbers are not everything, but I just wanted to share them as reference and as a point of discussion.

We really wish to make this game evolve not only on our own but together with our players, so thank you for your passion, your patience, and for continuing to help us make MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls a better game.

See you in the fight!

MARVEL Tōkon Dev Team