Marvel Tokon's Open Beta Unlocks 15 Fighters and Story Chapters the Same Weekend Sony Hits Comic-Con

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls runs a 72-hour open beta from July 24 to 27 on PS5 and PC, and Arc System Works is holding back very little: 15 of the 20 launch fighters, ranked and casual online, training, local play, and the first three chapters of Episode Mode. Those chapters follow Spider-Man's Amazing Guardians team and mix comic book panels with playable matches, which makes this the first public look at how the game tells its story, ten days before the full release on August 6.

Fighting Avengers bring Captain America, Iron Man, and Black Panther. Unbreakable X-Men field Storm, Wolverine, Danger, and Magik. Amazing Guardians run Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Star-Lord, and Peni Parker, with Ghost Rider and Blade for the Samurai Outriders and Doctor Doom plus Magneto for the Knights of Doom. Five fighters stay hidden for launch. The lobby system with its 16 avatars is also in, so the beta doubles as a server stress test.

Sony presents Tokon at San Diego Comic-Con during a 45-minute panel, and the convention runs July 23-26, almost exactly the beta window. Anyone who watches the panel can download the game and play the same evening. That's the kind of funnel most publishers only talk about.

Sony and Arc System Works have floated up to ten years of support for Tokon if the launch lands, and the roster has already grown from eight characters in last September's closed beta to twenty at release.

I keep coming back to how unusual this much beta access is for a fighting game a week and a half before launch, since the genre norm is three or four fighters and no story content at all. I read it as Arc System Works betting the game sells on hands-on time rather than trailers, and after the tagging changes players praised in earlier tests, that bet looks reasonable.