Despite barely qualifying as a series (it's only had two games), Killer Instinct 1 and 2 are still considered great fighting games with a fairly dedicated fan base given the limited amount of games. So obviously, there's a lot riding on developer Double Helix to ensure that they'll make the free to play Killer Instinct on the Xbox One follows the bar set by its predecessors. However, it seems the fans want more than just a quality game, and they weren't shy about getting into specifics.
Double Helix recently released a bar graph, seen above, showing some of the more eccentric requests fans had for the fighter, which range from understandable (classic tunes remix and original stage graphics from the first KI game), very hit-the-nail-on-the-head character design (beautiful African American female fighter), and all the way to why-would-that-matter (fighters should make eye contact).
You can see from the chart that some requests were obviously more favored than others, but one thing everyone seemed to tell Double Helix over and over is right at the top of the chart, "Don't screw it up."
I'm surprised some of the fan requests weren't a bit higher in demand, like "special multiplayer modes" and "character select music theme." In fact, a lot of the requests revolved around the original game's music, and rightly so, the soundtrack was considered good enough to be packaged with the SNES port.
Popping in the Killer Instinct on the SNES was a guaranteed good time in my younger years, so I'm looking forward to this game, though, as it's a free-to-play title, I'm also trying not to get my hopes up too much.
As noted, when Double Helix's Killer Instinct hits Xbox One, it will launch with only one playable character (Jago). Gamers will have to pay if they want more options. Producer Torin Rettig tried to justify this decision saying, "Most fighting games that come out are disc based games where you get a huge cast of awesome characters, but it is a massive cast. Some games have anywhere between 30, 40, even 50 characters...You just only have so much time to get good at so many characters. So we wanted to take that into consideration and release the game in a way that took that into consideration and allowed players to get in and play the game at the level that they want to play it."
Other characters announced include Glacius, Sabrewulf, Fulgore, Spinal, and Cinder. You can check out our hands on with Killer Instinct from E3 here.
