I guess it’s not too surprising that Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, Arc System Works’ new anime fighter pitting Marvel heroes against each other, is having a rough launch on PC. The game’s open beta struggled on the platform, and that was only a couple of weeks prior to yesterday’s launch. The bad word of mouth has seemingly caught up to it, as the game has launched with just a little over half the day-one players on Steam that Dragon Ball FighterZ, also developed by Arc System Works, had at launch in 2018
Tōkon’s player count on Steam landed at 24,498 on launch day, compared to the 44,303 peak that FighterZ had in 2018. This is a Sony game and thus is also on PlayStation 5, so it stands to reason that there’s a not-insignificant number of people playing on console. But those who have played on Steam have been reporting issues and dropping low user reviews on the platform.
Since the open beta late last month, players have been reporting that the game is oddly very demanding on PC, which some have theorized may be in part due to the game requiring a PlayStation Network sign-in, and thus running more backend programs that are eating up CPU and memory. Kotaku’s own tests of the open beta, however, show the game is just demanding on its own.
“For instance, the game often hogged upwards of 95 percent of my CPU and occasionally as much as 5,000MB of my PC’s physical memory,” Lewis Parker wrote for Kotaku of his experience with the beta. “Six separate versions of the PlayStation PC SDK Runtime application also booted when starting the game, although these had very minimal impact on my CPU and memory.”
Now the full game is out and it doesn’t sound like performance troubles have improved much in the two weeks since the testing phase. Linux users seem to be especially having trouble running the game.
“This game is horribly optimized and they should have pushed the PC release date back until they figured this out,” a Steam user review reads. “I play Tekken and SF6 on Ultra and never dip under 60fps. This is sad because I want to rec this game due to the amount of fun it is but realistically its in such a bad spot atm. Wait for a hot fix before purchasing.”
This morning, Arc System Works put out a statement thanking fans for playing on launch day, and noted it is “investigating” problems with Tōkon’s PC version, but didn’t note any specific issues it was looking into.
Tōkon Warriors,
Thank you for an amazing launch day! Seeing you all jump into the fight has been unreal.
We’re aware that some PC players are experiencing performance issues.
The team is actively investigating these reports. Please keep your feedback coming in, it helps.
See you in the game!
For whatever it’s worth, some PC players have noted they haven’t been having any kind of performance issues, so your mileage may vary. But it sounds like if you’re getting the game on PC, you’re rolling the dice. After around eight hours of playing with friends on launch day, I haven’t had any major performance issues playing on PS5 beyond the occasional online lag.
