The wait continues
Much of the fighting game community has been pumped to finally see what the King of Fighters 15 will look like after years of waiting, but it looks like everyone will have to keep that anticipation for a while longer.
SNK announced today that they have postponed the announcements for KOF15 and Samurai Shodown Season 3, which were originally to take place tonight.
The trouble of an announcement came through SNK’s official Twitter account, where it states that both disclosures no longer take place as previously planned.
No official reasons or replacement dates were included in the SNK post, although I apologize for the last minute delay.
This sudden change of direction seems rather strange, given that SNK continued to send a tweet about the event even later this morning, with other company representatives doing the same two hours before the postponement. The announcement also dropped to 1:30 local time in Japan.
The developers promised to unveil the first trailer for King of Fighters 15 more than a month ago, after releasing a short teaser video showing some early conceptual art for a handful of characters.
We sincerely apologize to all those who were looking forward to the announcements. We will inform our fans as soon as the new date and time have been confirmed and we will appreciate your good understanding. #SNK
– SNK GLOBAL (@SNKPofficial) January 6, 2021
Coming favorites like Kyo, Benimaru, K ‘, Leona and Shun’ei were all included in the December teaser, and now the waiting time to see them in action is once again turned into a question mark.
In addition to KOF, the company would also reveal the first two characters from Season Pass 3 of Samurai Shodown, one of the fighters being a crossover from another SNK series, The Last Blade.
SNK producer Yasuyuki Oda has previously said that it is working to make KOF15 the ultimate masterpiece of the series and that it is working to use “new technologies” for development, but concrete details about the project are still scarce.
First revealed to investors at the end of 2018, King of Fighters 15 will not be announced to the public until EVO 2019, where only one logo was displayed, with SNK pretty much silent radio on the project later this winter.
This also comes just weeks after another strange piece of news from SNK, the company planning to launch a new console at some point in 2021, which is probably NeoGeo 2 – a system that is said to be a semi-platform -open for games and a successor to the original NeoGeo released in the early ’90s.
King of Fighters 15 is preparing to be a direct sequel to KOF14, which was launched in 2016 and marked the beginning of SNK’s new impetus to conquer the HD and 3D fighting games market.
SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy and Samurai Shodown have followed suit in recent years, although many have been looking forward to a new KOF all the time.
Unfortunately, everything is now back in the language with whatever comes out of the studio, but we can hope that this delay will be a short one.