The King of Fighters 15 and Samurai Shodown Delayed
Much of the fighting game community has been excited to finally see what The King of Fighters 15 will look like after years of waiting, but it looks like everyone will need to keep that wait alive for a while longer.
Today, SNK announced that they have postponed the announcements for KOF15 and Samurai Shodown Season 3, which were originally scheduled to take place tonight.
The bummer from the announcement came via SNK's official Twitter account, where they state that both messages no longer work as previously planned.
No official arguments or dates for the replacement were included in the SNK post, although they do apologize for the last-minute delay.
This sudden change in direction seems rather strange, given that SNK continued to tweet about the event this morning, and other representatives of the company did the same two hours before the postponement. The announcement was also made at 1:30 local time in Japan.
The developers promised to show the first ever trailer for King of Fighters 15 more than a month after they released short teaser, which showed some early concept art for several characters.
Returning favorites like Kyo, Benimaru, K', Leona, and Shun'ei were included in the December teaser, and now the wait time to see them in action has turned into a question mark again.
In addition to KOF, the company was also set to reveal the first two characters of Season Pass 3 from Samurai Shodown, with one of the fighters being a crossover from another SNK series, The Last Blade.
SNK producer Yasuyuki Oda has 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 specific details about the project are still missing.
First revealed to investors in late 2018, King of Fighters 15 won't be announced to the public until EVO 2019, where only the logo was shown, and after that, SNK didn't give any information about the project until this winter.
It also happened just a few weeks after another strange news from SNK that the company plans to release a brand new console at some point in 2021 , which is possibly Neo Geo 2 - a system that is said to be a semi-open platform for games and the successor to the original NeoGeo released in the early 90s.
King of Fighters 15 is set to be a direct sequel to KOF14, released in 2016 and marked the beginning of SNK's new push to take over the HD and 3D fighting game market.
SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy and Samurai Shodown have followed suit over the past few years, though many have been looking forward to the new KOF all along.
Unfortunately things are back in limbo right now with everything coming out of the studio, but we can hope this delay will be short.