The wait continues
A large part of the fighting game community was looking forward to finally seeing what The King of Fighters 15 will look like after years of waiting, but it looks like everyone will need to hold on to that expectation for a while yet.
SNK announced today that they have postponed the announcements for KOF15 and Samurai Shodown Season 3, which were originally scheduled to happen tonight.
The annoyance of an ad came through SNK’s official Twitter account, where they claim that the two revelations are no longer occurring as previously planned.
No official reasoning or replacement dates were included in the SNK post, although they apologize for the last minute delay.
This sudden change of direction seems quite strange, considering that SNK continued to tweet about the event until this morning, with other company representatives doing the same two hours before the postponement. The ad also fell at 1:30 am local time in Japan.
The developers had promised to reveal the first trailer for King of Fighters 15 for more than a month, after releasing a short teaser video that showed some early concept art for a handful of characters.
We sincerely apologize to everyone who was looking forward to the announcements. We will inform our fans as soon as the new date and time are confirmed, and we appreciate your understanding. #SNK
– SNK GLOBAL (@SNKPofficial) January 6, 2021
Return favorites like Kyo, Benimaru, K ‘, Leona and Shun’ei were included in the December teaser, and now the waiting time to see them in action has once again turned into a question mark.
In addition to KOF, the company would also reveal the first two characters from 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 said that he is working to make KOF15 the ultimate masterpiece in the series and is working to use “new technologies” for development, but concrete details about the project are still scarce.
First revealed to investors in late 2018, King of Fighters 15 would not be announced to the public until EVO 2019, where only one logo was shown, with SNK practically silencing the project over the radio until this winter.
This also happens a few weeks after another strange news from SNK with the company planning to launch a new console sometime in 2021, which is possibly NeoGeo 2 – a system that is said to be a semi-open platform for games and a successor to the original NeoGeo launched in the early 90s.
King of Fighters 15 is gearing up to be a direct sequel to KOF14, which launched in 2016 and ushered in SNK’s new onslaught to conquer the fighting game market in the realm of HD and 3D.
SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy and Samurai Shodown have followed suit over the past few years, although many have been looking forward to a new KOF all the time.
Unfortunately, everything is back in limbo with anything that leaves the studio, but we can expect that delay to be short.