In what is perhaps the biggest news for Skullgirls 2nd Encore since the release of physical copies in Japan, Lab Zero has announced what appears to be the final update to their flagship game.
This patch–promised to bring the lobbies found on Steam to consoles–is said to “come with a number of general bug fixes, as well as minor gameplay fixes, tweaks, and balance adjustments.” Some of these bugs and tweaks have been shown off in the Steam version of the game, such as the best-of-five function to quick match, as well as improved replay functions. The replay feature has not been stated to be coming to consoles, however.
As far as the new animations are concerned, it was stated that there were “new intro animations being created” for Skullgirls Mobile, the mobile fighting game that uses Skullgirls sprites. There was new art spotted in the trailer for that game, and some new palettes, but only time will tell which assets will make their way over from the mobile game.
Improvements to the Vita version of the game were also mentioned. There are a few issues with blurry text and textures, due to the small screen; Lab Zero stated “we can’t promise that this will be improved in the lobbies patch, but please know that we’re considering every option at our disposal.”
The mention of balance changes is particularly interesting: there haven’t been any balance changes since the Robo-Fortune patch over a year ago, so there’s been a lot of time for Lab Zero to think about rebalancing. While it is stated that the changes will be minor, Skullgirls is known for massive patch notes. The Endless Beta–which has been in place for Skullgirls since the beginning–is currently being used to test out the aforementioned changes. You can read the whole patch notes here, which contain ten pages of incoming updates. These changes are said to be simply experimental at this point, so none of them are definite–and there are said to be even more changes coming soon.
The final bombshell was the announcement of an English physical release for Skullgirls. Thanks to Arc System Works, it’s already happened for our friends in Japan–but it would be great to have a stateside version. It went unsaid whether or not a collector’s edition was planned, like Japan’s Skullbox.
Source: Skullgirls; ArcSys