A new Killer Instinct update (3.10) in five years has been deployed to celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary.
The most recent update for the Xbox One title from developers Double Helix and Iron Galaxy was released five years ago, and the fighting title has now received a new update packing numerous balance updates. This latest update is based on player feedback over the years, and although the changes might be minimal for some characters, some address issues that have been bothering competitive players. “We’ve been given the rare opportunity to do one more tuning pass after all this time, so we secretly recruited a few of KI’s strongest and smartest players to get their feedback on what minor adjustments they’d want to see”, the developers wrote on the official website of the game.
The team adds, “The goal of this balance update is to reduce the frustrations some of the game’s strongest characters provide, while also giving a little love to the characters who tend to struggle even after 5 years of player effort.”
While there are changes to many characters, there are some characters who haven’t received tweaks, including Sabrewulf, TJ Combo, Kan-Ra, Riptor, Hisako, Cinder, Shadow Jago, Arbiter, Mira, and Kilgore. According to the team, these characters are already very strong, and other characters needed the changes more. Also, the team didn’t want to apply tuning just for the sake of changing things up. “Firstly, the changes to other characters will impact their matchups, so you’ll find that some of their hardest matchups have gotten easier”, the developers explained. “Secondly, we didn’t want to make risky changes just for the sake of making changes, so we carefully considered community feedback when deciding which issues to tackle.”
You can find the full list of tweaks and changes on the game’s official website here. Killer Instinct is available worldwide now for Xbox. Whether we’ll ever see a new installment in the series remains to be seen – back in 2021, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that he’s keen on doing something with the IP but Microsoft needs to find the right opportunity and development team for it. ““I will just say, Matt [Booty] and I have discussed many times [Killer Instinct] and where we would like to go with it and it’s not out of our minds that—it might be out of our minds—but it’s in our hearts and in our minds that we want to continue to do something with KI”, Spencer said in 2021.
