Rumor: BlazBlue Continuum Shift on leaked Famitsu cover

Then you aren't going to get this one either, because naturally, there will be another version.

Judging by the Guilty Gear franchise, yes.

That is a correct observation.

the first BB had one of the most secretive, confusing launches I've ever seen. Most Game store employees didn't even have an idea when it was out, difference in the LE release date and regular edition release date, etc. Most online websites kept a changing status on the game as well.

Then finally, they released the game on a planned date around the end of summer

Not sure why this was voted down..
Still waiting for a solid European date.

It's a sequel.
Some mechanics have changed and the story happens after the events in Calamity Trigger.

Look at the Guilt Gear line. That will explain where this is going.

Lots of weird names, random characters in the title. And occasionally, a new character (possibly DLC).

Granted, I'm a whore and bought about three of the GGXX versions.

Will I get this? Maybe if Ar Sys takes a page from Capcom and reduces the price to $40 in respect to purchasers of the first game.

@captain

I pray you're wrong. They ruined the Guilty Gear franchise. I think that's why Blaz was such a breath of fresh air. It was a return to glory for them in terms of great fighting games.

Hopefully they've learned from Guilty Gear and don't make the same mistake.

It's a "Super" version, only two new characters though, more moves for the older fighters, rebalance, new features etc.

I love Blazblue, but i´m considering a "wait and see" for future versions of the game. Fortunately i skipped SF4 and the Super version is coming soon, packed with extra content.

Well, traditionally, fighting games are designed primarily with the highly competitive players in mind. Obviously, catering to the core-of-the-core fans is a somewhat silly business plan, but that's how they do it. They build around this mindset, and later releases only compound on this.

All characters need to be well-balanced. When the original game comes out, suddenly they have the equivalent of a million QA testers playing their game, as opposed to the 10 or so they'd have during development (not including loketests). A sizable fraction of those players go online and voice their opinions on character balance, and a general consensus is amassed by the core audience about who needs to be buffed, changed, nerfed, etc.

Fighting games are kept as static releases (IE: Not patching in updates, except in dire circumstances where a game is broken) because the competitive scene needs time to learn their characters, develop new strategies, mull over the frame-data and essentially get everything they could possibly know about the character well-documented. It seems like a seriously time-consuming process (and it is), but afterwards, the development team can take all of that information and further tweak the game.

They could change the way they do things, altering a fighting game's balance a la World of Warcraft on a monthly/bi-monthly basis, but setting up the infrastructure to sync all arcade and console copies of the game up would take much time and money to get right. It's much easier for them to take all the information gathered in a past release, rebalance the game, add a few new characters and put new stories/cutscenes/features.

tl;dr - Fighting games pander to fighting game fans to the Nth degree, mostly because they're fighting game fans themselves. Most players don't see just how far down the rabbit hole goes when it comes to character balance in one of these games. QA Leads from other genres would probably cry like babies if they were tasked with balancing a fighting game.

...wtf?

FPS games do this. Call of Duty is a good example. What major improvements were there from COD4 to MW2? Not that many really. Both games also use the same engine.

Fighting games just appear more obvious in rehashing, but really nearly all genres do this.

It's not an ISO... it's an executable. It's a Windows-based PC application.

ISO = backup image of a disc (CD, DVD, etc.)

The More You Know
―――═══≡≡≡☆

It's actually the full version that leaked. This would just be a confirmation of a console port.