This weekend saw Bandai Namco host the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour 2020 Finals, the culimnation of the past year of tournament battles in the fast-paced versus fighter. At the event, FighterZ producer Tomoko Hiroki announced some exciting new additions for the game for this year - additions that will be relevant to casual fans but that will also massively shake up how the game is played at a high level on the esports scene.
Firstly, the game is to get a full third season of downloadable content, aka the FighterZ Pass 3. This will add five new characters to the game. The first, Kefla, arrives on February 26th. The second, Ultra Instinct Goku, lands sometime in Spring 2020. The three characters beyond that haven’t yet been announced or confirmed, nor have their release dates. This content will come to all versions of FighterZ - so PS4, Xbox One, Switch and PC. More immediately exciting to the Dragon Ball FighterZ esports scene, however, is the addition of the “Z Assist Select” system, an all-new free extra for the third season of the game. The Z Assist Select system is simple: in DB FighterZ, you can call in a character to ‘assist’ you; when you summon them they appear on-screen and perform one attack before disappearing. The Assist Select is exactly what it sounds like - rather than each character having one single assist attack, players will now be able to choose between three different assist selects on the character select screen. This means you might choose a different assist depending on your team composition or the team or play style of your opponent. With every meber of the cast having three different assists, this adds a significant amount of depth to the game. This system might sound familiar to fans of team-based versus fighters - and that’s because Marvel vs. Capcom 3 had an almost identical assist select mechanic. There’s no shame in that, however - Dragon Ball FighterZ borrows a lot from MVC3, and it’s arguably a better follow-up to that game than Capcom’s muddled Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite.
The aim of the new updates, producer Tomoko Hiroki explains, is to “deliver users a fresh experience” - to change enough of the game that the whole game feels renewed. That means new characters, new features, and even a new user interface. Bandai Namco also say that throughout this third season of the game and its esports tour, the company will consider making mid-season changes - something it hasn’t done before. The initial adjustments to the game balance hope to enable more player comebacks to prevent one-sided games. You can learn more about the overall changes from Hiroki herself in the video embedded above.
