Fantasy Strike Makes Its Accessible Fighter Free To Play

Developer David Sirlin of Street Fighter fame has announced that their latest project, Fantasy Strike, will be free to play, effective immediately. The fighting game, released on PlayStation 4, PC and Nintendo Switch, was previously already available at a budget price, with another gradual grace period during its stint on Steam Early Access.

 

In a post on the PlayStation blog, Sirlin explains that a free model was always the plan. The core tenet of Fantasy Strike is to create a fighter that looks purely on the fundamentals found in every game of the genre. This is "the" fighting game for accessibility concerns. As a result, the game has no special inputs, instead having all characters on an equal playing field of attacks and super moves. Therefore, Fantasy Strike puts more emphasis on precise timing and anticipation of the rock papers scissors mechanism. Sirlin stipulated that to get the game to a free model, the studio would however have to sell a format that allowed them to work on a complete product, which they've now done.

In the free version of Fantasy Strike, players will receive most of the package, including online play, a practice mode and artificial intelligence (AI) fights. Two new characters are added to the roster as well, which free users can access.

Naturally, Fantasy Strike will still sell a portion of the content. For one, there will be cosmetics available for purchase, though existing owners will have ownership of 60 complimentary colors. More importantly, Fantasy Strike will sell a core pack for the free version of the game. With that pack comes an arcade mode, a boss rush, but also local versus play that is not available normally. Again, existing customers will have these modes available to them.

Lastly, a Fantasy+ subscription comes to the fighter. This service gives players a replay system for their games, as well as the ability to watch other replays.

There are a few more details to the free conversion of Fantasy Strike, like an experience system. Fantasy Strike has cross-play across its systems. A tournament is planned this week to usher in this new model.
 

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed
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