There is still a lot we don't know about the upcoming Virtua Fighter game, which was first revealed at The Game Awards last month. Since that announcement, we did see more footage of the new installment in the long-running fighting game franchise during NVIDIA's keynote conference at CES 2025, but there are still a whole lot of unknowns at this point in time.
In a recent interview with Famitsu, Sega executive Masayoshi Yokoyama and new Virtua Fighter project producer Riichirou Yamada discussed more details about the project providing interesting insights such as the fact that there's a widespread perception about the series that it is very hard to play. While it's still very early, the developers did touch on the subject of post-launch DLC and how that might ultimately be structured.
Thanks to the translation work of our very own Nicholas "MajinTenshinhan" Taylor, we can read more about what the developers had to say within this interview.
When discussing characters and which ones might be joining the new game's roster, Famitsu asked about what post-launch DLC might look like. Specifically, they asked if the upcoming title would utilize a season pass or something along those lines to add more fighters to the playable cast.
As previously stated, it's very early for such talks, but Yamada did provide an interesting answer regardless.
"A paid season pass or similar details aren't something we've entirely decided on yet, but since we're making a modern game..." the producer began. "I think the way we think about a season pass is also something that might be entirely different from how other games are doing it.
"But, I will promise that we're focusing heavily on making the fighting game portion itself fun, which is likely to be the end content for beginner players," Yamada concluded.
The developers of the upcoming project have talked a good bit about what Virtua Fighter, at its core, is all about. A large part of that is innovation, and the team behind the new game is definitely keeping that in mind as they move forward with development.
Based on what Yamada said about the potential season pass model, it will be interesting to see what approaches are made in that regard as the post-launch DLC model is fairly similar across the board when it comes to major modern fighting games right now.
However, we can't really talk about DLC before talking about the actual game's release. Famitsu also asked when we might be seeing the new Virtua Fighter actually launch (knowing full well the developers can't give much information on that just yet), and after confirming that they can't say anything significant on that front, Yamada did follow up with another interesting response.
"I touched upon this earlier, but this new Virtua Fighter isn't just a sequel, but something where the development hurdle has been quite high," the producer began. "We've been [repeatedly] scrapping and building it, and even the earlier subject of 'what about the controls' is something we didn't decide upon for a whole month. And there's a whole mountain of things like that.
"Having said that, we're living in an ever-changing world so spending years upon years developing it... Is something we don't want to do. We want to release it as soon as possible while not compromising quality or compatibility.
"Although the Ryu ga Gotoku Studio is working on several titles at once, don't think we're doing it just in our spare time, we're working full power on this new Virtua Fighter so please look forward to it!" Yamada stated.
While the new Virtua Fighter game is likely still pretty far away at this point, it is nice to hear that the team making it doesn't want to go too long without it launching.
We do, however, have Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. launching later this month, so that will have to tide fans over for a bit until the brand new entry in the series comes.