The founders of EVO (Evolution Championship Series), Tom and Tony Cannon, have teamed up with former Street Fighter IV design advisor Seth Killian to make a free-to-play fighting game for PC called Rising Thunder.
It’s designed to be accessible to more people than most fighting games tend to be. This is being managed by getting rid of hefty inputs for special moves and assigning them to a button instead. This means that you don’t need to spends hours, days, and months learning button presses in order to play competitively.
Instead, the game focuses more on the other important aspects of fighting game competition, such as reactions and decision making. This change is reflected in the game’s controls primarily being designed to be playable on keyboards – it can still be played with a fighting stick or a controller.
As said, Rising Thunder will be free-to-play, with the only purchases available in the game being tied to cosmetic items only. It will also be entirely focused on competitive online play rather than single player scenarios. The fighters are all robots and include one that turns temporarily invisible but only on the opponent’s screen – this is an ability that only works given the game’s online design.
Luckily, with it being online-focused, Rising Thunder has Tony Cannon working on it, who came up with GGPO, which is used in many modern fighting games for online play due to it allowing near lagless online play.
You can sign-up for Rising Thunder’s technical alpha over on its website.
