The waiting continues
Much of the fighting game community was pumped up to finally see what The King of Fighters 15 will look like after years of waiting, but it seems like everyone has to keep up with that expectation for a while.
SNK today announced that they have postponed the announcements for KOF15 and Samurai Shodown Season 3, which were originally scheduled for tonight.
The disappointment of an announcement came via SNK’s official Twitter account, where they claim that both revelations are no longer taking place as previously planned.
No official reasons or replacement dates were included in SNK’s post, although they apologize for the delay at the last minute.
This sudden change of direction seems rather odd as SNK continued to tweet about the event until this morning, while other company representatives did the same two hours before the postponement. The announcement also fell at 1:30 a.m. local time in Japan.
The developers had promised to unveil the very first trailer for King of Fighters 15 for over a month now, after releasing a short teaser video showcasing some early concept art for a handful of characters.
Our apologies to everyone looking forward to the announcements. We will notify our fans once the new date and time is confirmed and appreciate your understanding. #SNK
– SNK GLOBAL (@SNKPofficial) January 6, 2021
Returning favorites like Kyo, Benimaru, K ‘, Leona and Shun’ei were all featured in December’s teaser, and now the wait to see them in action is again a question mark.
In addition to KOF, the company would also reveal the first two characters of Samurai Shodown’s Season Pass 3, with one of the fighters being a crossover from another SNK series, The Last Blade.
SNK Producer Yasuyuki Oda previously stated that they are working to make KOF15 the ultimate masterpiece of the series and that they are working on using “new technologies” for development, but concrete details on the project are still scarce.
King of Fighters 15 was first revealed to investors in late 2018, but it wouldn’t be announced to the public until EVO 2019, where only a logo was shown, and SNK pretty much radio silence on the project until this winter.
This also comes just a few weeks after yet another strange news from SNK, with the company planning to release a brand new console sometime in 2021, which may be the NeoGeo 2 – a system that is reportedly a semi-open platform for games and a successor to the original NeoGeo released in the early 90’s.
King of Fighters 15 is gearing up to be a direct sequel to KOF14, which was released in 2016 and marked the beginning of SNK’s new foray into the fighting game market in HD and 3D.
SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy and Samurai Shodown followed suit in recent years, although many have also been eagerly awaiting a new KOF all along.
Unfortunately, everything is now back in limbo with everything coming out of the studio, but we can hope that this delay is short.