SNK has announced that they’ve made the decision to delay the long-awaited fifteenth title in their legendary The King of Fighters franchise. Initially slated for a mid-2021 release, The King of Fighters XV will now ship in the first quarter of 2022.
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In a statement posted on their official press site, the Japanese developer said, “The development timeline we set out to reach in the beginning has been affected by the ever-still rising cases of COVID-19 within Japan. We have made the ultimate decision in the end that the product’s quality must come first, and so with that decision comes an altered release window.”
SNK has been confirming characters for the game at the rate of one per week for what feels like at least a hundred years. Yashiro Nanakase, Yuri Sakazaki, Shun’ei, Chris, King, Mai, Chizuru Kagura, Iori Yagami, Benimaru, Joe, and Meitenkun have all made the list so far.
What they haven’t done yet, is confirm which platforms the game will be released for. Given that the game was first announced back in August 2019, it looks like SNK is going to let that kind of apparently unimportant information out whenever they get around to it. We’ll wait with bated breath for more news but as it stands, The King of Fighters XV is set to launch in Q1 2022. Probably for at least one console of some sort.
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