SNK was poised to officially reveal their newest title, The King of Fighters XV, and the next batch of DLC for Samurai Shodown with the Season 3 Pass. However, at the eleventh hour, SNK decided to pull the plug and has indefinitely postponed the reveal for both titles. This sudden change of plans has caused quite a stir in the fighting game community, most of whom were all prepping themselves for the possible gameplay trailer of the brand new King of Fighters game, as well as the upcoming characters for Samurai Shodown.
As of this writing, SNK has not provided an official reason as to why these reveals were postponed at the last minute. The company did apologize to the fans and promised that they will inform us when a new date and time has been confirmed. This past December, SNK teased The King of Fighters XV reveal by showing art sketches of returning fan favorites which included Kyo, Benimaru, K, Leona, and Shun’ei. As for Samurai Shodown’s Season 3 Pass, we were expecting two new fighters, one of which would be a crossover from another SNK franchise, The Last Blade.
The King of Fighters XV will be the newest iteration of the storied fighting game franchise and is a follow up to The King of Fighters XIV which initially launched in 2016 for the PlayStation 4. Samurai Shodown launched in the Spring of 2019 and was generally well-received with some fighting game fans praising it for staying true to the old-school fighting game series. SNK had been regularly updating it with the standard Season Passes, which introduced new fighters as DLC.
However, one of the more unique storylines that involve SNK is that they’re working on brand new home console. The new system is scheduled to launch sometime in 2021, and it’s possible that the company wants to somehow incorporate some of their new titles into this system. How this will work is anyone’s guess, but hopefully, we’ll hear more about that sooner than later, as well as the eventual reveal of The King of Fighters XV and the Samurai Shodown Season 3 Pass content.