Fighting Game · Features

V2 Features — Fighting Game (Unreal Engine 5)

The complete feature inventory and product-shaped scope for Fighting Game — an unreal engine 5 competitive fighter. Every surface, capability, and behaviour the release is expected to ship.

14sections107 minread2tables
View the V2 architectureMarkdown source
On this page

Status: V2 feature inventory
Source: derived from V2/V2_TODOS.md (implementation backlog) and inspired by the design footprint of Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Tekken, WWE 2K, EA Sports UFC, Soul Calibur, and Def Jam: Fight for New York.
Audience: design, engineering, audio, art, narrative, online services, and publishing leads scoping V2.
Date: 2026-05-12

This feature map has been decomposed into focused pages under features/. This file remains the canonical hub — it preserves every section heading (so existing features§"…" and V2_features.md#… anchors keep resolving); the in-depth, code-grounded companion pages live under features/. Start at the features page index. The runtime/package architecture is in V2_ARCHITECTURE.md / architecture/.

Purpose#

This document is the feature map for V2. It translates the V2 backlog into a product-shaped scope document and describes what V2 ships across single-player, multiplayer, online services, content authoring, accessibility, and live-service surfaces. It does not replace the backlog checklist — V2_TODOS.md remains the source of truth for completion state and agent execution order — but every feature listed here is grounded in tasks explicitly laid out in V2_TODOS.md plus the product behavior those tasks imply.

V2 is a single coherent fighting game whose experience spans the lineage of the genre's most influential franchises:

  • Mortal Kombat for finishers, Krypt, Towers of Time, and gore-as-spectacle.
  • Street Fighter for motion-input depth, Drive/V-Trigger systems, World Tour, and Battle Hub presence.
  • Tekken for 3D juggle culture, sidestep, customization, and side modes (Tekken Force, Devil Within).
  • WWE 2K for sports-entertainment match types, Universe, MyCAREER, MyGM, MyFACTION, MyRISE, and Royal Rumble.
  • EA Sports UFC for realistic MMA, stamina simulation, ground game, and GOAT Career.
  • Soul Calibur for 8-way-run weapon combat, ring-out, Guard Impact, Chronicles of the Sword, and Create-a-Soul.
  • Def Jam: Fight for New York for five-style street combat, Blazin' moves, environmental finishers, and hip-hop-driven crew storytelling.

V2's promise is not "blend everything every match" but per-ruleset feel — when a match is in MK ruleset it must feel like MK; when it's in Tekken ruleset it must feel like Tekken; when it's WWE it must feel like WWE — held together by one shared roster, one shared creator suite, one shared online backbone, and a unifying story.

Subsystem Glossary#

These are the core engine subsystems. V2_ARCHITECTURE.md carries the full glossary — the same engine modules plus the racing modules, the game-feature plugin roster, and repository surfaces. The entries below are byte-identical to their counterparts there.

Subsystem Responsibility
V2Core Engine subsystems, save game, tags registry, dev cheats
V2Gameplay GAS abilities, attributes, gameplay effects, match-state machine
V2Combat Hitbox/hurtbox, frame data, collision authority, juggle/blockstring
V2Animation AnimBP, motion matching, Mover bindings, IK, retargets
V2Input Enhanced Input, motion parser, input buffer, deterministic replay
V2Netcode Rollback engine (1v1 + 2v2 tag), client-server replication (other modes)
V2Modes Game-mode registry, mode-load orchestration, mode-specific HUD
V2UI UMG / CommonUI front-end, in-match HUD, accessibility
V2Audio MetaSounds pipeline, dynamic music, voice barks, commentary
V2VFX Niagara hit sparks, gore decals, X-Ray render, weapon trails
V2Cinematics Sequencer presets, slow-mo, finisher cinematics, replays
V2Persistence Save, profile, currency ledger, offline replay store
V2OnlineServices Login, friends, parties, matchmaking, leaderboards
V2Telemetry Event schema, batched sender, balance dashboards feed
V2Editor Move authoring widget, stage editor, frame-data inspector
V2Tests Automation specs, gauntlet drivers, golden replay harness

Cross-Reference Convention#

Throughout this document, bare §N and §N.M references resolve to V2_TODOS.md (the backlog has 138 numbered top-level sections and ~1000 numbered subsections; it is the only V2 doc with section numbering used as hyperlinks). Explicit doc-prefixed references appear where ambiguity matters:

  • §80 → V2_TODOS.md §80 (Compliance Deep) — the default convention.
  • §52.8 → V2_TODOS.md §52.8 (Live-service operations cadence).
  • deps§57 → V2_DEPENDENCIES.md §57 (Hardware Peripheral SDKs).
  • arch§"<anchor>" → V2_ARCHITECTURE.md by section anchor.
  • features§"<anchor>" → this document, by section anchor.

V2_features.md and V2_ARCHITECTURE.md use named anchors, not numbers, to avoid duplicating the TODOs numbering scheme.

Repository Surfaces#

This table maps V2's repository / package surfaces to their target paths; ### Product Surfaces in Part 1 covers the player-facing UX surfaces. Target paths are created by the TODOs that first reference them.

Surface Target Package / Path
Game client V2/ue/ (UE5.5 project, multi-platform)
Marketing / web shell tile apps/oshun/web/src/app/v2/
Standalone web surfaces apps/v2/web/
Esports / tournament toolkit apps/v2/esports-tools/
Online services backend apps/v2/ (cloud)
Balance authoring spreadsheets V2/balance/
Build & release tooling V2/ue/Build/, V2/tools/release/ (planned — not yet created)
Localization workspace V2/ue/Content/Localization/V2/ + V2/loc/ (planned — not yet created)

Table of Contents#

Part 1 — Foundations & Promise#

Part 1 frames what V2 is: the product promise that holds seven fighting-game lineages together and the player- and developer-facing surfaces V2 ships across. The launch and exit criteria that gate release close out the document in Part 9.

V2 Product Promise#

V2 must ship as one product, not seven. The product should:

  • Deliver per-ruleset feel that matches each inspirational source on its own terms — no compromise blends.
  • Hold those rulesets together with one shared roster, one shared creator suite, one shared online backbone, and a unifying story.
  • Make rollback netcode the default for 1v1 and 2v2 tag modes, with frame-accurate determinism and ≤ 8 frames of rollback under typical conditions (≤ 100 ms RTT). Multi-fighter rollback runs at 60 Hz for 2v2 active fighters per side; 3v3 tag and Royal Rumble / ≥ 30 in-ring modes ship on client-server with rollback-emulated input prediction rather than full rollback. Modes outside the rollback envelope (Battle Royale 100-player, World Tour, Battle Hub, Convoy free-roam, Heist, World Boss) ship on client-server with dedicated servers.
  • Ship complete launch content across every advertised mode — no "coming soon" panels.
  • Provide first-class single-player content (Story, MyCAREER, MyRISE, Universe, MyGM, MyFACTION, GOAT Career, Tekken Force, Devil Within, Chronicles of the Sword, Def Jam Story, World Tour, Battle Hub) that each stand on their own as a ≥ 10 hour experience.
  • Honor the audience: MK gore is opt-in/opt-out and locale-aware; UFC sim is faithful; WWE booking depth respects the genre; SC weapon depth is honored; Tekken juggle culture is preserved; SF motion inputs are unsmoothed; Def Jam soundtrack feel is preserved.
  • Treat the creator suite — CAF (Create-a-Fighter), CAW (Create-a-Wrestler), CAS (Create-a-Soul), CAA (Create-an-Arena), CAE (Create-an-Entrance), CAM (Create-a-Moveset) — as a first-class product surface, not a checkbox.
  • Deliver cross-play and cross-progression across PC, PS5, XSX, Switch2, Steam Deck.
  • Degrade safely under offline, partial-net, weak-grounding, low-bandwidth, controller-loss, mid-match-disconnect, and provider-outage conditions.
  • Launch only with automated verification, observability, runbooks, release gates, rollback plans, and post-deploy monitoring in place.

Product Surfaces#

Game Client#

V2 game client includes:

  • A persistent main menu front-end built on CommonUI, with Play, Modes Hub, Roster, Customize, Store, Settings, Extras, and a ticker showing online presence and matchmaking state.
  • A Modes Hub funnel that surfaces every single-player and online mode in a taxonomy by ruleset (MK, SF, Tekken, WWE, UFC, SC, DJ) and by experience (single-player career, online competitive, social hub, creator suite).
  • An in-match HUD that auto-switches per ruleset (Drive bars, stun meters, rage indicators, Hype/Blazin' segments, kickout meters, octagon stamina rings, Soul Charge gauges) and a HUD-scale + reduced-motion variant.
  • A photo mode entry point reachable from any cutscene pause and any post-match screen.
  • A replay viewer with editable camera and timeline, exportable to MP4.
  • An in-game changelog feed and "what's new" surface.
  • Hard parental controls for gore tier, profanity filter, online chat, community content visibility.

Marketing / Web Shell Tile (apps/oshun/web/src/app/v2/)#

  • V2 tile on /explore inside the shared Lilith/Oshun shell.
  • /v2 route that consumes @oshun/shell-core, @oshun/auth-client, @oshun/developer-portal, and @oshun/persistence.
  • Roster, modes, news, patch notes, esports, and store content enter through shell-owned Oshun data surfaces rather than a standalone CMS stack.

Tournament Toolkit (apps/v2/esports-tools/)#

  • Bracket builder (single elim / double elim / round robin / Swiss / GSL).
  • Match scheduler and result reporter.
  • Broadcast overlay generator (lower thirds, brackets, score overlays).
  • Anti-spoiler delay knob for finals.

Online Services Backend (apps/v2/)#

  • Auth (platform + cross-platform), friends, parties, presence.
  • Matchmaking queues per mode (Casual / Ranked / Tournament / Crew / Royal Rumble lobby / UFC PPV public / Battle Hub instance).
  • Leaderboards, replay cloud, ghost-data store, cosmetic store.
  • Community content moderation pipeline.
  • Telemetry ingest and balance dashboard feed.

Part 2 — Combat & Game Feel#

Part 2 covers the moment-to-moment fight: the layered combat systems, the defensive vocabulary, the game-feel tuning that makes each ruleset hit like its source, the per-ruleset feel definitions, and the tag-team and Kameo partner systems that extend combat to two fighters per side.

Core Combat Systems#

V2 combat is layered. The layers below activate per ruleset.

Universal Layer#

  • Gameplay tag taxonomy covering stance, status, action, cancel, style, ruleset.
  • Attribute set spine covering vitals (Health, Stun, Stamina, Drive, Heat, Hype, Resolve), movement (walk/dash/jump/sidestep), and combat (damage multipliers, throw-tech window, counter-hit multiplier, juggle scaling).
  • Frame-data spine: every move carries startup / active / recovery / on-hit / on-block / cancel-window / hit-reaction-tag and is editable from one spreadsheet source of truth that drives runtime data tables.
  • Hitbox / hurtbox engine with per-frame keyframe table on every notify segment, hit-priority resolution, same-attack hit-once registry, and trade resolution.
  • Block / chip-damage / counter-hit / whiff-punish surface across all rulesets, with per-ruleset constants that change the feel.

Striking Layer#

  • 2D-style motion inputs (QCF/QCB/DP/RDP/HCF/HCB/360/720/charge), negative-edge, double-tap, plink, just-frame.
  • Combo system with juggle scaling, wall splat, wall bounce, ground bounce, stage transitions, counter-hit state, whiff-punish window.
  • Striking finishers (Critical Arts / Rage Arts / Critical Edge / X-Ray / Fatal Blow / Blazin') gated by per-ruleset meter rules.

Grapple Layer#

  • Universal command throws with input motion, throw-tech window, crouch tech, air throws, counter throws.
  • Wrestling layer: clinch, tie-up rock-paper-scissors, grapple chain, body limb-damage map, pin / submission mini-games (configurable: mash / bar-stop / timing / breaking-point / grid), object usage (chair / ladder / table / kendo / sledgehammer / mic / belt), and the full WWE stipulation library (the canonical list is in the ### Per-Ruleset Feel WWE Ruleset section).
  • MMA layer: stamina simulation per limb, takedowns (shoot, body lock, trip, throw), sprawl defense, ground position state machine (full guard, half guard, side control, north-south, back mount, mount, crucifix, turtle, sprawl), ground-and-pound, submissions (rear-naked, guillotine, kimura, armbar, triangle, heel hook, americana, kneebar, anaconda, D'Arce, omoplata, gogoplata), cage interaction, doctor stoppage, 10-point must scoring, weight classes and rankings.

Weapon Layer#

  • 8-way run weapon combat with vertical / horizontal / kick / guard inputs, Guard Impact (repel / deflect / resist), Soul Charge, Critical Edge, ring-out and ring-out resistance, weapon disarm (cinematic-only).

Street Layer#

  • Five-style mix (Streetfighting / Wrestling / Martial Arts / Kickboxing / Submissions) with diminishing returns past two styles.
  • Environmental finishers at stage hotspots (subway track, electric fence, fire pit, glass wall, barbed wire, brick wall, bar counter, dumpster, car hood, wood crate, chain-link fence, arcade machine).
  • Blazin' meter (4 segments) and Blazin' moves driven by crowd hype and taunts.
  • Crowd-as-participant with shove-back and rep gating.

Finisher Layer#

  • MK finisher window (Finish Him! prompt + 5s input window).
  • Per-fighter Fatality 1, Fatality 2, Stage Fatality, ≥ 4 Brutalities, Friendship, Mercy, Babality.
  • Gore-tier setting (Off / Mild / Standard / Extreme) with locale-aware defaults.
  • X-Ray skeleton renderer (translucent skin + bone stencil overlay) with per-bone break states.

Defensive Options Library#

V2 collects the genre's defensive vocabulary into a per-ruleset toggleable library so each match plays in the defensive grammar of the family it's emulating:

  • Parry (3rd Strike): block input on hit-frame; no chip; attacker stunned.
  • Just Defend / Just Block (KOF / Garou): 0-chip block on perfect block frame.
  • Faultless Defense (Guilty Gear): meter-cost air-and-ground guard with pushback / chip mitigation.
  • Instant Block (Tekken): block input released and re-pressed on first contact for reduced blockstun.
  • Push Block / Advancing Guard (MvC): directional + buttons while blocking pushes attacker away at meter cost.
  • Burst / Reversal (Guilty Gear): one-shot defensive panic at burst-meter cost.
  • Counter Assault / Alpha Counter (Marvel/Alpha): block + special → counter out of blockstring.
  • Guard Cancel (KOF): cancel block into a roll / blowback at meter cost.
  • Hold / Strike / Throw Triangle (DOA): RPS reversal layer used in WWE clinch and as a Soul Calibur "Reversal-Heavy" optional layer.
  • Negative Penalty (KOF): inactivity penalty preventing turtling.
  • Reversal Edge (SCVI): cinematic RPS clash at meter cost.
  • Drive Reversal (SF6) and Burnout state.

Combo grammar: damage proration / starter scaling, tornado state, Roman / Fast cancels (meter-cost cancel on any frame), kara cancels (1-2-frame normal-cancel into special / throw extension), ukemi (forward / back / neutral ground techs with i-frames), no-tech vortex setups, reset state warning, scaling reset on wallsplat / stage transition / finisher.

Advanced movement: Korean Backdash Cancel, Wave Dash, Crouch Dash → iWS, 8-way step cancel, Tiger Knee motion, dash-cancel registry per fighter.

Control schemes: Classic (full motion-input fidelity), Modern (assisted single-button specials with 80% damage scaling, ranked-eligible), Dynamic (fully-assisted, ranked-locked), Easy Fatalities / Easy Combos (accessibility / casual; token-gated or non-ranked).

Attack property tagging: every move carries AttackProperty bits — Low / Mid / High / Overhead / Crossup / Anti-Air / OTG / Unblockable — plus throw class flag, punishable-on-block flag, hit-confirmable flag, side-swap flag. Editor Validator blocks new moves without property data.

Game Feel: Hitstop, Hitlag, Camera Shake#

V2 centralizes game-feel mechanics into one tunable system so each ruleset hits like the source it's emulating:

  • Hitstop / Hitlag / Sakkin: per-move freeze frames on hit-confirm, counter-hit bonus, block hitstop, crush counter / punish counter emphasis frames, weapon clash sakkin on heavies. Curves authored per ruleset and per damage tier (MK aggressive, SF6 conservative, Tekken juice, SC moderate, UFC realistic, WWE broadcast).
  • Camera shake: per-hit shake curve keyed on hit-reaction tag; per-ruleset intensity multiplier; per-fighter personality. Reduced-motion accessibility override.
  • Slow-mo / Freeze-frame: KO slow-mo with camera ride, finisher freeze-frame hold + zoom + tint, Reversal-Edge clash slow-mo, mid-combo emphasis freeze on heavy launchers.
  • Screen tint / vignette / chromatic ramp: counter-hit flash, low-HP vignette, comeback aura, state-specific tints (Devil / Soul Charge / Heat / Blazin' / Burnout).
  • Tunability: feel curves authored in V2/balance/feel/, previewable in editor utility widget, side-by-side replay harness for cross-ruleset comparison.

Per-Ruleset Feel#

V2 ships seven first-class rulesets, plus crossover rulesets.

MK Ruleset#

  • Stamina meter, X-Ray / Fatal Blow, Krushing Blow alt-hits, Wake-up Roll, Finisher Window with stage Fatalities and per-fighter Fatalities, Brutalities triggered by hidden conditions, Friendships and Mercies.
  • Towers of Time live-modifier engine with hazard hitboxes, attribute multipliers, ability cooldown shifts.
  • Krypt vault with 3D first-person exploration on a haunted crossover-realm hub.

SF Ruleset#

  • Drive Gauge (5 stocks), Drive Impact, Drive Parry, Drive Rush, OD Specials, Drive Reversal, Burnout state.
  • Critical Art at L1/L2/L3 with invincible L2 and cinematic L3.
  • Battle Hub social-lobby presence with avatar customization, hub matchmaking, Game Center cabinets, custom rooms.
  • World Tour open-world mode across three cities with master training, side quests, mini-games, day/night, weather.

Tekken Ruleset#

  • 8-way movement, sidestep i-frames, backdash cancel, hopkick / launcher / juggle culture, wall splat, wall break, stage break to new floor.
  • Heat system (1 activation per round) with enhanced specials, Heat Smash super, chip-on-block.
  • Rage state at low HP with Rage Drive and Rage Art.
  • Ki Charge / Power Crush armor moves.
  • Stance switching per fighter (flamingo, 5-styles, etc.).
  • Tekken Force side-scrolling beat-em-up with co-op.
  • Devil Within 3rd-person action-adventure with transformation form.
  • Ghost Battle from uploaded replay data.

WWE Ruleset#

  • Pin (3-count) and submission (grid / breaking-point / mash) mini-games, weight detection, body limb-damage map.
  • Object usage and the canonical WWE stipulation library: Cage / HIAC / Ladder / TLC / Casket / Buried Alive / Last Man Standing / Inferno / I Quit / First Blood / Iron Man / Money in the Bank / Battle Royal / Royal Rumble / Hardcore / Tornado Tag / Triple Threat / Fatal 4-Way / Elimination Chamber. This list is the single source of truth; the Grapple Layer and other sections reference it.
  • Crowd reaction system driving commentary line selection and momentum.
  • Three-voice commentary stack (play-by-play / color / cameo).
  • Royal Rumble 30-entrant ruleset with 90s timed entries and over-the-top-rope elimination, plus 50-entrant Endless Rumble.

UFC Ruleset#

  • Realistic stamina per limb; head movement (slip L/R, lean back, duck); clinch entry; takedowns and sprawl defense; ground position state machine; ground-and-pound; submissions (per position).
  • Cage interaction (mount fence, fence-press, cage walks, back-to-cage).
  • Doctor and ref stoppage; 10-point must scoring with judge AI; weight classes and rankings.
  • Fight Night / PPV booking mode (Vegas, Abu Dhabi, NYC, Rio, London, Saudi Arabia) with walkout, intros, post-fight presser.

SC Ruleset#

  • 8-way run, vertical / horizontal / kick / guard, Guard Impact (repel / deflect / resist), Soul Charge, Critical Edge.
  • Ring-out detection, ring-out resistance, per-stage ring rules.
  • Chronicles of the Sword turn-based tactical campaign on hex grid.
  • Create-a-Soul with weapon-style selection (locked discipline by default, Custom Style permitted with stat penalties).

DJ Ruleset#

  • Five-style mix, environmental finishers, Blazin' meter and Blazin' moves, crowd-as-participant momentum, custom soundtrack with dynamic music shifts per match.
  • Def Jam Story / Street Career with crew offers, rival arcs, club venue progression, shop system (clothes, jewelry, hair, tattoos, vehicles, apartments).

Crossover Rulesets#

  • "MK with SC ring-out": MK base + ring-out stages.
  • "SF6 with Def Jam environment finishers": SF base + hotspot finishers.
  • "Tekken with WWE stipulations": juggle-heavy fights inside cage / ladder.
  • "UFC with SC weapons": weapon-eligible MMA fight (collector-only, novelty).
  • Other matchups expanded via DLC.

Tag Team & Assist Mechanics#

V2 ships full tag mechanics for crossover rulesets and dedicated tag modes:

  • 2v2 (SF X Tekken / Tekken Tag 2 / MvC).
  • 3v3 (MvC / KOF).
  • Trinity (Tekken Tag 2's Trinity anchor).
  • Mechanics: Tag-Cancel, Snapback (forced opponent tag-out with off-screen HP recovery), DHC (Delayed Hyper Combo across partners), Assist Call (single-move with cooldown), Cross Assault (simultaneous on-screen attackers, meter cost), X-Factor / Pandora (temporary power-up state at HP cost), Baroque / Duo cancels.
  • Per-fighter HP visible for off-screen partner; tag-out regenerates partner HP slowly (configurable).
  • Multi-fighter rollback supported at 60Hz (2v2 active fighters per side).
  • Online queues: tag ranked, tag co-op (2 players per side), crew battle (3v3 KOF-style single-elim).
  • Per-team theme music; tag-cancel / DHC matrix per pairing in the move catalog.

Kameo Partner System#

V2 ships an MK1-style Kameo partner option distinct from full Tag (features§"Tag Team & Assist Mechanics"):

  • Pick a Kameo partner (second fighter, off-screen except during assist animation).
  • 3 button-mapped Kameo assists per fighter with cooldown and meter cost.
  • Kameo health depletes from being hit during assist; refills slowly when un-summoned.
  • Ruleset-toggleable: enabled in MK ruleset at launch; crossover rulesets opt-in.
  • Separate ranked queues: ranked-Kameo vs. ranked-no-Kameo.

Part 3 — Game Modes#

Part 3 inventories every mode V2 ships: the single-player and sports-entertainment careers, bonus and mini-game modes, training and replay surfaces, match-flow variants, the AI Director that paces them, and the large standalone modes (roguelike, battle royale, specialty combat, karaoke, arcade suite, world boss).

Game Modes#

Single-Player Core#

  • Arcade Mode — Classic 8-fighter ladder per selected ruleset, mid-ladder rival fight at slot 4, sub-boss at 7, final boss; per-fighter ending cinematic (specified in the ### Per-Character Side Stories, Arcade Endings, Story Theater section); difficulty Beginner → Master; score grades D-S; online leaderboards.
  • Story Mode — 12-chapter, ~10h cinematic story with 3 branch points yielding Light / Dark / Path-Three endings. Per-chapter playable POV with 3-5 fights and 2-4 cutscenes. In-fight cutscenes, QTE-style interactive cutscenes, finisher integrations as narrative beats. New Game+ unlocks.
  • Klassic Tower / Towers of Time / Endless / Survivor / Test Your Might / Test Your Sight — MK-style towers, live-updating modifier rotations.
  • Survivor Mode — infinite consecutive matches with HP carry-over.
  • Tournament Mode — single / double / round-robin / Swiss; up to 32.

Single-Player Mode Expansions#

  • Krypt / Reward Vault — 3D first-person crypt explorable hub on a crossover-realm island. Chest content table, currency system (Koins, Hearts, Soul Fragments, Krystals), puzzle gates (shrine of bones, forge, seance). No real-money loot boxes; premium currency itemized and capped.
  • Battle Hub — Avatar lobby with cabinet stations, Game Center retro arcades, photo booth, DJ booth, mission boards, daily/weekly challenges, 100-player shards with friend-priority sharding.
  • World Tour — Open-world avatar mode across 3 cities with master training to learn special moves, side quests, mini-games, day/night, weather, dynamic events, vehicles, parkour.
  • Tekken Force — Side-scrolling 3D beat-em-up across 3 chapters of 4 stages × 5 sub-areas; co-op local + online; score leaderboards.
  • Devil Within — 3rd-person action-adventure with single hero, multi-level dungeon, Devil form transformation, light platforming and bosses.
  • Konquest — MK-lineage open-realm action-RPG campaign: the player explores a connected set of crossover realms in a 3rd-person traversal mode, completes faction quests and NPC objectives, fights ruleset encounters that unlock as the story advances, and earns Koins, gear, and roster unlocks. It is a longer, exploration-driven companion to the linear Story Mode (≥ 10 hours), with branching faction allegiances that feed the relationship matrix; playable solo or in 2-player drop-in co-op (couch and online).

Sports-Entertainment Modes#

  • WWE Universe — Weekly TV + monthly PPV booker sim, auto-book + manual override, rivalry generator, championship management, brand splits, injuries, simulate option.
  • MyCAREER (WWE) — Create-a-character career across 3-5 in-game years with branching narrative, brand jumps, faction joins, championship runs, social-media simulator.
  • GOAT Career (UFC) — Amateur-to-UFC climb with camp management, weight cuts, injury management, press conferences, belt defenses, GOAT score, hall of fame on retirement.
  • MyGM / Promoter Mode — Run a brand: roster from a pool, weekly shows, ratings/attendance/merch/ticket revenue, contract budgets, rival GMs, multi-player MyGM (up to 4 GMs).
  • MyFACTION — Card collector with Bronze → Pink Diamond rarities, faction battles, faction-vs-faction weekly tower. No real-money loot packs at launch.
  • MyRISE — Story-driven Hero / Heel branching career arc with voice-acted cutscenes and persona unlocks.

Battle Royal & Multi-Fighter#

These are the multi-fighter elimination match types. "Battle Royal" here is the WWE-lineage small-roster elimination match and is distinct from the 100-player "Battle Royale" mode (see ### Battle Royale: 100-Player Fighter / Vehicle / Hybrid in Part 3) — the two are spelled one letter apart on purpose.

  • Royal Rumble — 30-entrant timed-entry over-the-top-rope ruleset, plus a 50-entrant Endless Rumble.
  • Battle Royal (MK 4-player FFA / UFC tournament / DJ street royal) — last-fighter-standing variants.

Strategy / RPG#

  • Chronicles of the Sword — Turn-based tactical on hex grid; 20-mission campaign; missions end in 1-3 SC-ruleset fights; hero leveling, equipment, weapon mastery, party members; branching chapters with moral choices.

Street Career#

  • Def Jam Story — Single-player career from parking-garage fight club through tournaments; 5 crew offers locking signature mentor and theme; rival betrayals; club venue progression; girlfriend / partner sub-arc; custom soundtrack management; reputation system; shop system.

Online Competitive#

  • Online ranked 1v1 per ruleset; online casual 1v1; tag-team 2v2 / 3v3; 4-player FFA; Royal Rumble lobbies; UFC PPV public events; Battle Hub cabinets; Custom Room (1v1, 2v2, 4-corner tournament, Fight Request).
  • Cross-play across PC, PS5, XSX, Switch2; opt-out per platform policy; KB+M opt-in pairing.

Crew / Faction Cross-Mode#

  • Form a crew (player + 3-7 fighters) usable in Universe, MyGM, Def Jam Story, online crew battles.
  • Per-crew theme, colors, entrance, hand sign emote.
  • Crew XP, crew leaderboards.

Photo Mode, Replay, Spectator#

  • Photo Mode reachable anywhere with rotation, DOF, filters, frames, stickers, capture, save, share.
  • Replay Viewer with editable camera, timeline, MP4 export, social upload.
  • Spectator Mode with overlay, drawing tools, freeze, slow-mo, name plates, score overlay.

Bonus Modes & Mini-Games#

V2 honors the genre's tradition of bonus / non-canonical / silly modes. Each is a short, self-contained loop with its own scoring and leaderboard; none are ranked-eligible, and all are reachable as Battle Hub arcade cabinets.

  • Classic bonus stages: SF II car destruction, SF II barrel smashing, and Tekken Force board breaker — fixed-timer destruction challenges scored on objects cleared.
  • Tekken Bowl (ten-frame bowling with per-fighter signature animation) and Tekken Ball (attack-charged volleyball where a charged hit raises ball damage).
  • MK Test Your Luck rolls a random modifier stack before a fight; Test Your Strike is a combo-trial against a static dummy scored on damage.
  • SC Tower of Lost Souls is a floor-climbing reward stage with escalating rewards per floor; Trial of Devil is a boss-rush with permadeath fighter slots — a defeated fighter is locked out for the rest of the run.
  • Boss Rush chains ruleset-specific bosses with an HP-carry-over option; Super Boss offers SNK-style deliberately-unfair fights for challenge runs.
  • King-of-the-Hill / Endless Versus is a rotating-defender mode: the winner stays, challengers queue.
  • Capture-the-Flag is an experimental crew mode built on stage-hotspot hold.
  • Death Race is a Def Jam-inspired environmental-finisher race through a club stage.

Unlock and access. Bonus modes unlock via Krypt chests, Tower clears, or seasonal events; any bonus mode a player has not unlocked through play can be made default-available as an accessibility accommodation rather than gated behind grind.

Training, Trials, Tutorials#

V2 training is a first-class product surface. It includes:

  • Dummy programming: state set (stand / crouch / jump / block-mode / tech-mode / wake-up action / counter-hit toggle), action recorder (8 slots × 60s, loop / random / sequential, trigger on hit / block / whiff / neutral), behavior presets (Aggressive / Defensive / Throw-Happy / Reversal / Random), per-frame step (1 frame, N frames, step-to-next-hit).
  • Display tools: hitbox / hurtbox viewer, hit-active trace, frame-data overlay, input display, damage display, meter display, hitstun / blockstun bars, reset-opportunity flag, whiff-punish window highlight.
  • Stage / position: corner / mid-screen / behind / wallsplat / knockdown / jump-arc / custom resets; HP / meter reset options; reset on first hit for execution drills.
  • Combo tools: auto-loop on success, combo length / damage limit indicator, best-combo tracker, just-frame marker, slow-mo replay.
  • Replay Takeover from training: load any replay, pause at any frame, take over either side; "Save Last Match as Lab Scenario" preserves both fighters' state for further practice.
  • Practice-during-loading: match-load screens host an ad-hoc dummy practice space, auto-yielding when match is ready.
  • Multiplayer training lobby: invite a friend or coach; coach can pause both clients, annotate frames, drive dummy commands, push notes.
  • Per-ruleset training presets surfacing the mechanic drills most relevant to each ruleset.
  • Specialized trainer modes: Frame Trap Detector, Option Select (OS) Detector, Hitconfirm Trainer, Anti-Air Trainer, Wakeup Trainer, Cross-up Trainer, Throw Shimmy Trainer, Reaction Time Trainer, Combo Damage Optimizer, Defensive Option Chart overlay.
  • Customizable training HUD: drag-drop overlay layout, profile-saved layouts, shareable as code.

Mission Mode and Tutorial Curriculum include:

  • First-Boot Tutorial (30 min, opt-in) covering universal mechanics.
  • Per-ruleset Tutorial (8-12 lessons per ruleset) covering ruleset-specific mechanics; completion unlocks Combat Trials for that ruleset.
  • Per-fighter Combat Trials: 20 trials per fighter (bread-and-butter combos, special-cancel chains, super combos, character-defining tech, expert-tier).
  • Mission Mode: 80-120 curated missions across defensive, offensive, combo, mixup, anti-air, cross-up, throw, finisher conditions.
  • Daily Mission rotation (3-5 per day) cross-linked to Battle Pass.
  • Character Mastery track per fighter (1-30 levels) unlocking intros, victory poses, color slots, lore pages.
  • Tutorial-on-demand when telemetry shows repeated failures of a specific mechanic.

Replay Theater, Takeover, Spectator#

  • Replay capture on every match (deterministic header + per-frame input stream, RNG seed, cosmetic manifest); ≤ 1MB / 5-min budget.
  • Replay Viewer with scrubber, chapter markers (round start, big hits, combos, KOs, finishers), per-frame step, 0.25× – 4× playback, free-cam, hitbox / hurtbox / input / frame-counter overlay toggle, side-by-side compare.
  • Replay Takeover (SF6 / KOF feature): pause at any frame, choose either side, sim resumes with the player in control.
  • Sharing: cloud save with per-account quota, share by code, public Replay Pool browsable by fighter / ruleset / rank tier, community upvote / favorite, MP4 export via in-engine MoviePipeline.
  • Network Spectator: up to 8 in-match observers (tournament-mode raises cap), TO-controlled anti-spoiler delay, director-cam, broadcast lower-thirds, picture-in-picture.
  • Photo Mode anywhere SP-pause is allowed: rotate camera, DOF, filters, frames, stickers, capture, gallery, cloud sync, social share.
  • Replay → Ghost Data: one-click export to Ghost Battle pool and master training feed.

Match-Flow Mode Variants#

V2 ships canonical match-flow variants as explicit modes:

  • Local Versus (1P vs 2P) + Versus CPU + CPU vs CPU (attract) + Hot-Seat + Couch Co-op + LAN play.
  • Time Attack: fastest arcade / tower / survivor completion per fighter per ruleset; leaderboards.
  • Score Attack: most points in fixed time / ladder; ruleset-specific scoring rules; leaderboards.
  • Wager Match: stake Fighter Coins or cosmetics; ranked-ineligible.
  • Friendly / Dare Match: custom stipulation + best-of-N; friend-challenge flow.
  • Handicap Match: asymmetric counts up to 4; HP + meter handicap.
  • First Blood Mode: one decisive hit per round; per-ruleset definition.
  • Boss Battle + Boss Rush with HP carry-over option.
  • Sparring Mode: damage-free collaborative lab work.
  • Iron Man Match + Best-of-N online tournament dare.

AI Director, Adaptive Difficulty, Smart Matchmaking Tuning#

V2 ships an AI Director above per-CPU-bot Adaptive AI: the Director observes session-level player behavior (recent win rate, session length, frustration indicators) and tunes CPU difficulty / encounter pacing / loot drop rate in single-player modes only.

  • Director state machine: Calm → Build → Climax → Recovery.
  • Per-mode Director tuning for Arcade, Towers of Time, Tekken Force, Devil Within, Konquest, Def Jam Story, MyCAREER.
  • Director-mode boss fights with cinematic max-challenge + crowd-hype audio.
  • Director never active in ranked / tournament.
  • Adaptive difficulty per mode: step-down suggestion after 3 losses; step-up after 5 perfects; rubber-banding option (default off; non-ranked); frustration-aware tutorial trigger.
  • Per-skill-bucket CPU model: bots match player's rolling-average MMR.
  • Smart matchmaking tuning: connection-bias matching, anti-stomp pairing for smurfs, friend-priority for parties, off-peak cross-region tolerance widening.
  • Per-player tendency profile observed over sessions (stored alongside Save Game, never shared cross-account); drives CPU response tendencies + Smart Help training suggestions.
  • Director cinematic moments with climax line bank per fighter.
  • EU AI Act transparency: Director discloses operation + opt-out toggle + per-player profile DSR honored.

Marathon, Endurance, King of Iron Fist, Signature Event Modes#

Each signature event ships as its own UGameFeaturePlugin, scheduled onto the live-service calendar and removable after its window closes.

  • Marathon Mode is a 24-hour charity-aligned event where the community competes for the longest single-session streak; tier rewards land at 4 / 8 / 12 / 18 / 24 hours, and the mode auto-pauses after 6 continuous hours to protect player health.
  • Endurance Tower is a 50-fight chain with HP carry-over between fights and rare drops weighted toward deeper floors.
  • King of Iron Fist Tournament is an 8-fighter elimination ladder across the full launch roster, with a per-fight cinematic and a per-fighter ending illustration awarded on a win.
  • Signature event modes dramatize each franchise's marquee event: WrestleMania-style PPV with an 8-match card (WWE), UFC International Fight Week (UFC), SoulCalibur Mishima Cup as a 16-fighter Weapon Master tournament (SC), an EVO-style Top 8 with broadcast overlay, and Def Jam Crew Wars as a 4v4 crew elimination event (DJ).
  • Horde Mode pits 1 boss against a 3-4 player crew in boss-rotation co-op.
  • Speedrun Race sends 2-4 players racing through the Arcade ladder in parallel, with a broadcast view showing a timer and per-racer stats.

TO stipulations. A limited-fighter-pool stipulation restricts the selectable roster for TO-curated events; a random-roll roster option assigns fighters per event; and a Death Match stipulation runs a single round of sudden death with a per-ruleset definition of the decisive condition.

Roguelike Adventure Mode (Hades-style)#

Hades-inspired run-based permadeath mode where the player picks a fighter and progresses through a procedurally-generated dungeon of fight encounters; death resets to hub; meta-progression carries between runs.

  • Run length 30-60 min; per-encounter difficulty escalates with depth; cinematic boss every N-th room.
  • Procedural room graph with combat / boon shrine / shop / boss-gate rooms; per-room enemy roster from V2 fighter pool + procedurally-tuned AI difficulty; per-room hazard / modifier library; per-room reward fork.
  • Boon library: per-fighter ability modifiers (Freeze on hit / Bleed / Stun / AoE) with per-rarity tier (Common → Legendary) and per-boon synergy bonuses (Freeze + Stun = Frostbite mega-stun).
  • Hub world: persistent between-run hub with NPC dialogue + lore progression + meta-currency spending (permanent upgrades — more boon slots / better starting equipment / additional starting health / additional revives).
  • Per-realm cinematic boss (5-8 per complete run) with unique mechanics + lore payoff + post-fight dialogue; per-boss Heat-tier difficulty multipliers.
  • Per-fighter narrative arc (10-30 runs to complete primary arc) with true ending unlocked at max difficulty.
  • Co-op Roguelike (2-player online or local couch) with shared boons + shared meta-progression.
  • PvP Roguelike variant (parallel runs, first to clear final boss wins, ghost overlay shows opponent progress).
  • Daily Run with same procedural seed + global leaderboard + cosmetic top-N reward; weekly Heat challenge with elevated difficulty.

Battle Royale: 100-Player Fighter / Vehicle / Hybrid#

  • Fighter Battle Royale (100 players, last fighter standing): open-world arena with shrinking ring; per-zone hazard activation as ring contracts.
  • Vehicle Battle Royale: 100-vehicle race-to-survive on shrinking-ring map with combat racing mechanics; last vehicle running wins.
  • Hybrid Battle Royale: 50-fighter + 50-vehicle teams with crossover get-out-and-fight triggers (cross-ref features§"Racing × Fighting Crossover: Fighter-Driver, Get-Out-and-Fight").
  • Shrinking ring with 4-6 contraction phases over 18-25 minutes + per-phase weather / atmospheric shift + per-phase hazard activation.
  • Loot tier: Common / Rare / Epic / Legendary with per-zone density + per-zone exclusive loot + loot crates guarded by AI mini-boss.
  • Squad mode (Solo / Duo / Squad 4) with revive + voice chat + ping system.
  • Match flow: cinematic drop sequence (skydive / drop-pod) → 1-2 min warm-up → mid-match dynamic events (Power-Play / mini-boss / supply drop) → endgame cinematic crown.
  • Per-BR-match Battle Pass XP; per-season exclusive cosmetics; ranked BR ladder per mode + tier.
  • Director-cam auto-cuts to highest-action player; auto-generated highlight reel post-match.

Specialty Combat Modes: Boxing Sim, One-Hit-Kill Sword#

  • Punch-Out Boxing Sim: pure-boxing ruleset with realistic stamina + punch types + per-opponent pattern recognition; per-round 3-minute clock + corner advice + scorecard; cinematic intro (weigh-in + bell + ref check); Boxing-only fighter pool + Career Boxing arc (climb to world title).
  • Bushido Blade-style ruleset: weapon-based combat where any clean hit can be lethal; per-stance system (high / mid / low) with RPS counter; per-weapon type (katana / nodachi / wakizashi / naginata / spear / dagger); per-stage interactive elements (trees / pillars / running water / sand / wind); no HP bar (visible damage state); per-fight ceremonial respect-rules.
  • MK One-Hit Tournament: Bushido-meets-MK with single-hit-kill MK roster + weapons + cinematic slow-mo on KO.
  • Per-region boxing rules variants (WBA / WBC / IBF / WBO / Olympic amateur / Bare-Knuckle / Mexican-rules).
  • Per-fighter weapon-master class: deep weapon-specialty training arc with lore + mastery progression.

Karaoke & Music Rhythm Mode (Yakuza-Style)#

  • Karaoke Mode (Yakuza-inspired): per-fighter sings a song with rhythm-based input (timed button presses + sustained held notes + tilt for vibrato); per-song scoring (pitch accuracy + timing precision + style flair); per-fighter signature theme song + 2 alt-character songs; per-locale song library with localized + licensed music.
  • Rhythm-Combat Fusion: combos must hit on rhythm beats matching soundtrack tempo with per-beat-on-time multiplier boost and off-beat penalty; per-stage rhythm-aware ambience with visible beat indicator.
  • DJ Booth Mode (Def Jam deep): player controls DJ for crew during match; per-turntable-input affects crowd reaction + meter regen + combo timing bonus; ≥ 50 tracks at launch with BPM/genre tagging; per-DJ-mode 1v1 DJ battle in Battle Hub arcade cabinet.
  • Music Gallery extension with per-account unlocked track playlist + jukebox UI for Battle Hub / Garage / Apartment ambient music; per-player playlist creation + share as code.
  • Soundtrack visualizer mode with reactive Niagara VFX driven by audio FFT analysis.
  • Karaoke broadcast to Battle Hub stage with audience emote reactions; cross-platform karaoke ranked queue with per-song leaderboard.

Arcade Mini-Game Suite: Pinball, Air Hockey, Mini-Golf, Darts, Pool, Cooking#

  • Pinball: per-fighter / per-faction themed tables with bumpers + ramps + flippers + multiball + per-table authored bonus mode + leaderboard + tilt mechanic.
  • Air Hockey (2-player local + online competitive) with arcade puck physics + per-paddle customization.
  • Mini-Golf (18-hole + 9-hole + per-fighter themed courses) with per-club selection + per-course leaderboard + community-designed courses via in-engine editor.
  • Darts with per-fighter throw style + per-board variant (501 / cricket / 301 / round-the-clock) + tilt-and-release physics.
  • Pool / Billiards with per-table-size (8-ball / 9-ball / 14.1 / snooker) + per-cue physics + per-cue customization.
  • Cooking Simulator (Yakuza-inspired) with per-recipe multi-stage timing-based cooking + ingredient sourcing from in-world economy + per-recipe leaderboard + cosmetic-only buff dishes.
  • Photo Mode Tournament with community-submitted captures + monthly themed competition + community + jury voting + cosmetic prizes.
  • Tekken Bowl extension with per-fighter signature bowling animation + per-alley themed environment + per-bowling-rank ladder.
  • All mini-games available as Battle Hub arcade cabinets with per-cabinet leaderboard + 1 Fighter Coin per play (free for ambassadors / pro players).

World Boss, Community Raid, Async Community Events#

World Boss. A massive AI boss carries a single HP pool shared across the entire community for a 7-day event window. The boss's shared HP is gameplay-inert during any individual match — a player fights it in a normal deterministic match, the match's frame-deterministic combat computes that player's damage locally, and that damage is submitted to the server after the match ends, never applied inside the rollback loop. Clients receive shared-HP updates by server push for HUD display only. Per-contribution validation runs the match's golden-replay hash through the cheat classifier before crediting the account, so a tampered submission is rejected without affecting any live match. Rewards tier on personal damage and on community completion (Bronze → Mythic), with a per-event exclusive cosmetic for the top-1% of contributors; each boss has a unique mechanic gimmick, a cinematic intro, and per-cycle state changes.

Async Raid. A 12-24 player raid runs across asynchronous per-player time slots inside a 1-3 day window, so players in different time zones contribute to the same raid; a quarterly signature raid ships a themed boss and a lore arc.

Community challenges. A weekly time-limited goal (e.g. "the community deals 1 billion damage to boss X within 7 days") grants a community-wide cosmetic on completion; a per-region community split awards a per-region exclusive cosmetic. Daily community goals grant a reward applied to every participant.

Coordination and visibility. A crew-coordinated world boss attempt puts 8-32 players in a shared instance with a co-op damage bonus. A server-tracked community-aggregate dashboard shows total match count, Battle Pass progress, tournament participations, and per-region state.

Part 4 — Characters, Roster & Story#

Part 4 covers the roster and the narrative around it: character presentation, the launch roster and content inventory, the per-fighter signature library, side stories and arcade endings, stages and their lore, the relationship matrix, account progression and codex, and the director-commentary content layer.

Character Presentation: Intros, Banter, Win Quotes#

V2 honors the Injustice / MK11 standard of character-presentation depth:

  • Per-character pre-fight cinematic: walk-in, pose, stance, voice-line.
  • Per-matchup pre-fight banter: fighter A vs. fighter B trade 1-3 unique voice-lines specific to the matchup; mirror matches receive their own uniquely-authored mirror dialogue.
  • Per-stage intro variant when applicable (WWE arena vs. MK pit vs. DJ club).
  • Round-specific intros (final round, comeback round).
  • Mid-fight bark library per fighter triggered by counter-hit, throw, parry, low-HP, combo-of-N, finisher armed / missed, with cooldown / priority rules.
  • Win / loss / draw quotes (≥ 30 win, ≥ 15 loss, ≥ 5 draw per fighter), context-selected by opponent / ruleset / finisher used / perfect round / comeback / time-out / ring-out / pinfall / submission / KO / double-KO.
  • Per-matchup win quotes when fighter A beats fighter B specifically.
  • Lore Page / character bio per fighter with bio, style, signature moves, rival list, faction, concept art, alt-costume gallery — unlocks via match play / trials / missions / tower clears.
  • Entrance presentation (deeper than intro): WWE-style ramp walk, Tekken-style stage-arrival, MK pit-summon, SF6 hub-arrival, DJ club-strut — with custom music slot.
  • Codec / between-round bites (Tekken 7-style press conference snippets).
  • Post-fight victory cinematic (pose hold with skippable photo capture), UFC presser, WWE mic moment.

Roster & Content Inventory#

Roster#

  • Launch roster ≥ 60 fighters covering archetype diversity, including original characters and partner-IP fighters (licensed individually).
  • Per-fighter content: ≥ 4 special moves, ≥ 2 supers, ≥ 2 finishers, intro / victory / defeat montages, voice bank, theme music, ≥ 4 alt costumes, ≥ 3 alt taunts.

Stages#

  • Launch stages ≥ 30 across all rulesets:
    • MK pits + hellish realms (≥ 5).
    • SF urban / international + dojo / cathedral (≥ 5).
    • Tekken stages with stage breaks and multi-floor (≥ 5).
    • WWE arenas + cage / HIAC / ladder rigs (≥ 5 base).
    • UFC Octagon variants (≥ 4).
    • SC arenas (ring-out + walled + multi-tier) (≥ 4).
    • DJ NYC clubs and street arenas (≥ 4).

Movesets#

  • Universal pool ≥ 200 moves usable in CAW / CAM.
  • Style-locked pools: Wrestling ≥ 80, Martial Arts ≥ 80, Kickboxing ≥ 60, Streetfighting ≥ 60, Submissions ≥ 50, Weapon styles ≥ 40 each.

Cosmetics#

  • Wardrobe library ≥ 500 items at launch; decals, masks, hair, jewelry, scars, dirt, accessories, weapon trinkets.

Per-Fighter Signature Library#

Every roster fighter carries a deep signature library:

  • Signature animations: idle (8-12s unique loop), ≥ 3 taunts, intro pose, victory pose (3 variants), defeat / KO animation, knockdown / wake-up variation, slip / dodge / sidestep variation, air-recover, pursue, wake-up dust.
  • Signature audio: per-fighter impact stings (≥ 8 unique), signature crowd chant, footstep variance keyed to footwear / armor, real-time vocal exertion layer driven by stamina, signature theme music with 3 dynamic variants.
  • Signature VFX: low-HP / comeback aura, weapon glow / trail, finisher VFX kit.
  • Signature stage reactions: cinematic close-up shader, throw-receiver react, hit-by-specific-move react (rival-specific recoil).
  • Authoring discipline: per-fighter signature checklist at V2/balance/fighters/<fighter>/signature-checklist.md; QA cert pass verifies every roster fighter has every item. (Status 2026-06-12: checklists exist for all 60 launch-roster fighters, generated from the catalog with an explicit legend — a checked item attests the catalog-defined requirement; each checklist's "Asset authoring" section stays unchecked until real animation/audio/VFX assets exist, and the QA cert audit task remains open.)

Per-Character Side Stories, Arcade Endings, Story Theater#

  • Per-fighter Arcade ending: 60s cinematic + 5 illustrated panels + 30s narration; Ending Gallery in Krypt; canonicity tagged for Story.
  • Per-fighter Side Story: 1-2-hour standalone cinematic + 3-5 fight chapter with distinct premise (revenge / redemption / comic / training / mystery / romance / betrayal / mentor).
  • Cross-character Side Story crossover events with branching POVs.
  • Story Theater: revisit any unlocked cinematic / Character Episode / Side Story / Arcade ending; alt-language audio + subtitle overrides; director's commentary toggle.
  • Branching narrative chooser UI: branch tree visualization after Story completion; branch retry; New-Game+ rewards for all branches.
  • Per-fighter Title Progression: per-character title tree equipped on Profile Card; titles per ruleset.
  • Behind-the-Scenes / Mocap Gallery + Concept Art Gallery.

Stage Lore, Per-Fighter Signature Stages, Day/Night, Particles, Crowd#

  • Per-fighter signature stage designation with associated lore, music, crowd voice, particles, lighting (Lin Kuei Temple / Suzaku Castle / Mishima Dojo / Ostrheinsburg Crypt / etc.). Stage-on-character-select preview. Story / Side-Story climax fights auto-select signature stage.
  • Per-stage lore page with history, faction, ambient creatures, cinematic camera presets, easter eggs.
  • Per-stage day/night cycle for outdoor stages (Dawn / Day / Dusk / Night / Midnight); per-time-of-day lighting; weather + time-of-day combinations.
  • Per-stage atmospheric particles: snow / dust / ash / ember / fog / mist / pollen / fireflies / petals / paper / smoke.
  • Per-stage crowd density: WWE arena (10K+) / UFC (2K) / DJ club (300 with individual reactions) / MK pit (no crowd / monster crowd) / SF6 Battle Hub (avatar-driven) / SC (medieval). Per-individual reaction gestures (throw the rock, stand-up applause, phone-up record).
  • Stage destruction lifecycle with persistent state + multi-floor transition + stage-out cleanup.
  • Per-stage commentary lines referencing stage lore + interactable callouts.

Per-Fighter Rivals, Relationship Matrix, Cross-Character Timeline#

  • Per-fighter primary rival (reciprocal pairing) driving Arcade mid-ladder rival fight, Story banter, lore page references.
  • Per-fighter secondary rivals (2-3 per fighter) for Side Stories, Konquest, per-matchup banter.
  • Relationship matrix typed per pair (Ally / Friend / Rival / Enemy / Mentor / Student / Mentor-Betrayed / Family / Romantic / Cordial / Indifferent); asymmetric relationships supported.
  • Master cross-character timeline covering pre-Story chains, Story beats, Side Story events, Arcade ending canonicity per branch, post-credits scene hooks, DLC events; per-fighter timeline view in profile.
  • Faction-to-faction relationship (Lin Kuei vs Black Dragon / Special Forces vs Brotherhood / etc.) drives Universe / MyGM / Konquest / Faction quest content.
  • Cross-fighter ending convergence: certain Arcade ending + Story branch + Side Story completion combinations unlock post-credits cross-character cinematics.

Fighter & Account Progression, Codex, Encyclopedia#

  • Per-fighter XP & Mastery (1-30 levels per fighter) with transparent unlock list (intro / victory poses, alt-color slots, voice lines, lore pages, finisher variants, profile-card titles, Mastery 30 signature finisher kit).
  • Mastery boost events tied to seasonal themes.
  • Per-style mastery (Def Jam) independent track per equipped style.
  • Account level 1-100 with Prestige loop P1-P10; per-Prestige profile flair; account-level rewards at every 5 levels; long-form goals (1000-win, all-Arcade-endings, all-Side-Stories, Master-in-3- rulesets) granting unique titles + animated badges.
  • Codex / Encyclopedia browsable from main menu: per-fighter / per-stage / per-faction / per-weapon / per-special-move / per-style / per-ruleset / per-historical-event entries with 200-500 word lore + art + audio + diary attachments + transparent unlock conditions + replay link to the cinematic that established it.
  • Unified Quest Log: Story + Side Stories + Daily / Weekly / Seasonal challenges + Faction Quests + Career milestones + Achievement progress all in one filterable list.
  • Reward Inbox: claim-all + per-item-claim with auto-claim toggle for low-value rewards.

Director Commentary, ADR, Origin Comics, Cinematography Library#

  • Per-cinematic director's commentary track (over Story / Side Story / Arcade ending / Character Episode cutscenes); per-mocap behind-the-scenes commentary; per-character writer commentary.
  • ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) pipeline: scheduled per-quarter sessions for live-event dialogue; per-locale ADR coordination; ADR for narrative DLC.
  • Per-fighter origin comic mini-series (3-5 issue digital comic per fighter); in-game comic reader in Codex; per-issue unlock condition via Mastery + Side Story; physical comic release (Founders Edition).
  • Cinematography library: per-scene reference mood-boards + lighting-fixtures library + per-scene LUT (Look-Up Table) + per-scene depth-of-field preset + per-character cinematic eye-light + volumetric atmospherics (god rays / light shafts / haze / fog).
  • Per-character internal monologue voice-over option for Story cutscenes (toggleable + per-locale cultural adaptation).
  • Per-character family tree + cross-IP licensed lore documented in Codex.
  • In-engine Cinematography Editor (Sequencer-based authoring tool) with cinematography library + LUT + lighting fixtures + DOF presets pre-loaded.
  • Per-season story DLC plan (2-4 hours of narrative content per season + per-DLC ADR + cinematic + comic mini-series + new character episodes).

Part 5 — Creator Suite & Personalization#

Part 5 covers V2's first-class authoring surface: the Creator Suite (create-a-fighter / wrestler / soul / moveset / arena / entrance) and the personalization layer of custom championships, profile cards, and match history.

Creator Suite#

  • Create-a-Fighter (CAF) / Create-a-Wrestler (CAW) / Create-a-Soul — Body morph sliders (≥ 50) wired to vertex deltas; FACS-based face sculpt (≥ 100 targets); face-from-photo import via MetaHuman pipeline (where licensed); ethnicity-neutral skin tone spectrum; gender expression independent of body archetype.
  • Wardrobe / Accessories — Item library with tops, bottoms, footwear, outerwear, gloves, hats, masks, eyewear, jewelry, weapons, banners, scars, dirt, tattoos, decals.
  • Decal Editor — In-engine pixel/vector editor with layers, blend modes, projection mapping. Upload to community gallery (moderated).
  • Create-a-Moveset — Select base style and overlay individual moves from a curated catalog keyed by motion input slot; per-move cost weight with total weight budget enforcing balance.
  • Create-an-Arena — Modular stage builder: floor templates, walls, ceiling, hotspots, lighting presets, weather, crowd presets, music slot, interactive object placement with collision and pickup metadata. Upload to community gallery.
  • Create-an-Entrance — Entrance editor with ramp / curtain / aisle / pyro / lighting / camera-cut / pose / mic moment, with music slot; assignable per fighter and per show.
  • Style Assignment — Pick 1-5 fighting styles with diminishing returns past 2 (DJ logic); per-style mastery tree (passive bonuses, signature moves, taunts).
  • Loadout & Save — Save loadout to slot (≥ 10 per user); export/import as code or QR; apply per mode separately.
  • Color Edit (16-slot) — per-costume Tekken 7 / SC6 / KOF-style color palette with 16 addressable slots per item, HSV picker, saved palette gallery, per-slot metallic / roughness / dirt / wear / emissive sliders; shareable as code.
  • Logo / decal painter — vector primitives + curve tool + moderated image upload; cylindrical projection; saved decals shareable.
  • Voice pitch slider for CAW (±12 semitones over equipped voice bank); multilingual announcer pack selection per fighter.
  • Variation System (MKX / MK11 Kustom Variations) — per-fighter ability / passive card pool with slot budget; 3 designer-curated Tournament Edition variations per fighter at launch; share custom variations as code.
  • Style-Mix Presets — drop-in "Brawler / Striker / Grappler / Submission Specialist / Weapon Master" presets for Def Jam Custom Style.
  • Extended Body Sculpt — bone-scale rig, per-region muscle definition, layered tattoo painter with symmetric mirroring, optional face-from-photo via MetaHuman pipeline, groom-based hair with strand color / dye gradients.
  • Community Content Gallery — In-game gallery for CAW / CAS / CAA / CAE / Movesets / color palettes / decals with moderation queue, ML pre-filter, human review SLA, per-region content rules, player flagging.

Custom Championships, Profile Cards, Match History#

  • Create-a-Championship (WWE 2K-style): main + side plate templates, metal type, strap leather, gem / logo / nameplate slots, community logo upload (moderated). Belt prestige tier (World / Heavyweight / Inter-Continental / Mid-card / Tag / Hardcore / Women's / Cruiserweight). Title History tracker per belt: reign log with holder, dates, defenses, lineage tree. Bindable per Universe brand / MyCAREER arc / MyGM promotion.
  • Profile Card / Title Card (Tekken 7-style): visible to opponents pre-match. Banner image, avatar pose, equipped title text, win streak, rank icon, faction badge, preferred fighter portrait. Card unlocks via challenges, milestones, faction quests, tournament results.
  • Match History & Stats: last 200 matches default + full history; filterable by mode / ruleset / fighter / opponent / outcome / date / rank. Per-fighter stats (win rate, avg match length, favorite combo, most-used finisher, KO ratio, perfect rounds). Per-stage stats. Win-streak indicators with visual flair. Personal best leaderboards. Rank history graph. Per-matchup history. Achievements / trophies with hidden unlocks for discovered tech.
  • Save integrity: auto-backup last 3 saves, restore prompt on corruption, save export / backup, save migration framework versioned per record.
  • Auto-save after every match in long-mode careers; Quick-resume save-state on app-switch / suspend.

Part 6 — Online, Multiplayer & Esports#

Part 6 covers everything networked: online services, network quality and private rooms, cross-platform social and moderation, esports and tournament tooling, streamer / speedrun / coach modes, the ranked season, the pro circuit, and local and online co-op multiplayer.

Online Services#

V2's online backbone handles auth, social, matchmaking, ranked, replays, store, and moderation behind one API gateway. Service-level targets are explicit: matchmaking tickets resolve p50 ≤ 12 s and p99 ≤ 35 s at 5× expected launch concurrency, auth p99 ≤ 200 ms, replay upload p99 ≤ 8 s for a 10-MB file, and per-region availability ≥ 99.9%.

Auth and social. Platform and cross-platform auth, friends, presence, parties (≤ 8), and invites run through the gateway; a session is a short-lived JWT (15 min) plus a rotating 30-day refresh token.

Matchmaking and ranked. Per-mode queues (Casual, Ranked, Tournament, Crew, Royal Rumble lobby, UFC PPV public, Battle Hub instance) use TrueSkill2 / Glicko2 with region weighting, a ping cap that widens over wait time, and role-preference balancing for tag and 4-player. Each mode has a seasonal ranked ladder with placement matches and promotion / demotion thresholds; leaderboards are global, regional, and friends-scoped.

Replays, ghosts, reporting. Cloud replay storage supports share-by-code, a cloud library, and local download; ghost data is the replay encoded for Tekken Ghost Battle and World Tour master training. In-game reporting feeds a moderation review console with an appeal flow. Cross-play and cross-progression bind to one publisher account root.

Anti-cheat. Four layers run together: EAC / BattlEye / platform-native client drivers; server-side input-rate and attribute-integrity validation (input bursts > 240/s flag, mismatched gameplay-effect application invalidates the match); ML classifiers for smurf, win-trading, coordinated-throw, and geographic-anomaly patterns; and a replay-based investigation pipeline. The server re-simulates 1% of matches end-to-end and flags any frame drift. Severe or repeat offenders take an HWID ban; every flagged match is forensically logged. Classifier output prioritizes review queues but never issues automatic discipline.

Post-match and handshake. The post-match screen offers Quick Rematch and Rematch with Character Change; Player Match and Custom Room support first-to-N set scoring. A pre-match handshake measures RTT, jitter, and packet loss, stamps them into the match record, and warns on Wi-Fi or mobile-hotspot / 4G/5G connections where the platform API exposes connection type; a per-account network-reliability score feeds the ops dashboard.

Network Quality, LAN, Server Browser, Private Rooms#

Netcode selection. A 1v1 match begins with the pre-match handshake; if RTT, jitter, and loss are good the match runs full rollback at 60 Hz with a ≤ 8-frame rollback budget. Borderline conditions run a hybrid of rollback plus a small input-delay buffer; RTT > 150 ms or sustained rollback pressure runs delay-based netcode with an N-frame buffer. If a rollback match sustains rewinds > 8 frames for ≥ 30 s, the client makes a one-time offer to switch to delay-based; declining in ranked converts the match to a no-contest rather than forcing a degraded fight.

LAN tournament mode. UDP-broadcast peer discovery runs with no internet dependency, keeps a LAN-only ranking ledger separate from the online ladder, and auto-enables when the client detects a registered tournament-venue Wi-Fi SSID.

Dedicated server browser. Primarily a PC surface (and console where TRC permits), the browser lists public servers filterable by region, mode, ruleset, latency, and player count. A host configures ruleset, stipulation, fighter restriction, password, AFK-kick, and a rotating map list; server moderation tools let the host manage the room.

Custom Room / Private Lobbies. Rooms support 1v1, 2v2, 4-corner, tournament, Battle Royal, and Royal Rumble formats with ≤ 16 participants plus 8 spectators and optional password gating. An in-room queue runs winners-stay-on, losers-rotate-out, or randomized seating; per-room match settings are host-controlled; spectators get an in-lobby training space so a waiting player practices instead of idling.

Cross-Platform Social, Reporting, Bans, Appeals#

  • Cross-platform friends list via publisher account; platform-native friends visible with icon; merge-duplicate prompt.
  • Cross-platform party (≤ 8), voice + text chat persistent, party-up matchmaking, deep-link invites via Discord / platform DMs / share code.
  • Reporting categories: Cheating, Harassment / hate speech, Sexual content, Threatening behavior, Custom-content abuse, Profanity / chat abuse, Trolling / griefing, Rage-quit / DC abuse, Impersonation, Spam. Auto-attach last 5-min replay + last 100 chat lines + screenshot.
  • Text + voice chat moderation: per-locale profanity / hate-speech filter; voice via real-time STT → ML classifier; flagged voice quarantined for review; opt-out requires age verification.
  • Mute / block lists synced cross-platform.
  • Ban tiers: warning → 24h chat mute → 24h matchmaking ban → 7d → 30d → permanent; transparent escalation criteria.
  • Appeal flow: in-game form + email, ops review within documented SLA, visible in account history.
  • Account integrity: 2FA (TOTP + optional hardware key), recovery flow, lost-device handling, region-change cooldown (90d), account merge with consent + per-platform progression preservation.

Esports & Tournament#

Tournament administration. A TO badge account runs an admin tool that builds single-elim, double-elim, round-robin, Swiss, or GSL brackets, assigns seeds, schedules matches, drives broadcast, and auto-reports results; DQ, no-show timeout, and round-extension override are TO controls. The TO uploads a per-tournament rule file; the rule snapshot is stamped into every match's replay header so the conditions a match was played under are auditable forever.

Tournament Edition Settings. A tournament locks the game to classic controls only, default stages and costumes only, no Mercy / Friendship / Babality, a forced side, and TO-set finisher on/off. Each event freezes to a specific patch plus a Kustom Variation subset (cross-ref features§"Creator Suite"). Tournament context also overrides rage-quit handling — any quit forfeits the match.

Spectator and broadcast. Spectator mode supports up to 8 in-match observers (tournament mode raises the cap), TO-controlled anti-spoiler delay, director-cam, picture-in-picture, side-by-side stick cam, drawing tools, freeze, slow-mo, name plates, and a score overlay. A caster-facing broadcast HUD toggles health bars, meters, frame counter, input display, character bios, headshots, and lower thirds from a manual control surface. Output integrates with OBS / NDI / Spout, and a public broadcast SDK publishes a documented JSON websocket schema for third-party overlay developers. Replay markers and clip-cut feed a post-match recap reel.

In-game tournaments. Battle Hub Crown Tournaments run inside the client with a public bracket, auto-progression, a side-stream per match, and a public leaderboard, so a player enters a real bracket without external tooling.

Result integrity. Results are server-authoritative — V2 pulls results from Smash.gg / Start.gg / Challonge / Battlefy / Tournament.app and cryptographically verifies each against the replay hash before it counts for Crown Points; a client cannot push a fabricated result. A community tournament toolkit gives player-run events the same auto-result reporting. An esports portal on the marketing site aggregates schedules and standings.

Streamer, Speedrun, Coach Modes#

  • Streamer Mode: hide handle + region, "Opponent" placeholder in HUD, disable voice chat default, suppress profile photo / status, blur lobby chat from non-friends, suppress capture-aware notifications.
  • Stream-Safe Music automatically swaps licensed tracks for cleared analogues; per-track license-flag metadata; auto-on in Streamer Mode.
  • Coach Mode in training (features§"Training, Trials, Tutorials"): friend joins as opponent or coach; coach can pause both clients, annotate frames, run dummy commands, push notes.
  • Async Coaching: coach attaches annotations to a submitted replay; player is notified and watches annotated replay.
  • Speedrun Support: built-in run timer for SP modes; per-mode split definitions; pace tracker against personal best; LiveSplit (PC) integration via local websocket; leaderboard ingest from speedrun.com partner program (read-only).

Ranked Season Architecture#

  • Season length: 90 days; per-region overlap with global cup events.
  • Placement matches: 10 at season start; MMR seed from prior season.
  • Off-season 2-week tournament cycle with sandboxed MMR.
  • Season rewards: cosmetics, faction XP, profile-card titles, exclusive emotes per top-rank tier.
  • Hidden MMR (Glicko2 / TrueSkill2) drives matchmaking; never shown.
  • Visible Rank tiers: Bronze / Silver / Gold / Platinum / Diamond / Master / Grandmaster / Legend.
  • Hysteresis prevents rapid promotion / demotion oscillation.
  • Rank decay above Master tier on 14-day inactivity.
  • Provisional rank for new accounts (25 matches before public icon).
  • Retention bonus for consistent weekly play.
  • Cross-platform unified MMR pool with platform-icon-labeled leaderboard.
  • Crown / Pro Tour overlay: tournament + ranked + invitational points; year-end Grand Final invite.
  • Sandbagging / throwing detection; match acceptance / decline rate tracked; coordinated-throw detection for tournament play.

Esports Pro Circuit, Broadcast Extras, Wildcard / Roulette#

Pro Circuit structure. A per-region calendar (NA, EU, JP, KR, LATAM, SEA, India, MENA) runs a qualifier → regional final → world final progression. Across the year a cross-region series runs 4-6 majors plus monthly regionals; Crown Points accumulate from every official and partnered event and gate world-final qualification. Crown Points are formula-weighted by round, region, participant count, and a season decay — a deeper finish at a larger event scores more — and year-end totals invite the field to the Grand Final.

Prize pools. Each region's prize pool is funded from a cosmetic-sales pool plus sponsor commitments, with the contribution percentage disclosed.

Broadcast extras. A spectator emote system (clap, gasp, boo, cheer, heart, shock) bursts on-screen with caster-controlled visibility; a spectator hype meter aggregates reaction velocity and drives both the broadcast overlay and highlight-clip selection. Casters run polls through a Twitch Extension and an in-broadcast cosmetic wager (no real money) for viewer participation. A per-fighter caster cheat sheet auto-displays at character select.

Wildcard / Roulette / Mystery. Variant stipulations include random fighter per round, spinning-wheel fighter selection, random ruleset switch, an All-Fighter Tournament rule (each fighter usable once per set), and a Crew Battle wildcard reveal mid-bracket. Each variant's results-eligibility is set by the tournament rule file.

Operations. A searchable tournament archive indexes every event by event, fighter, player, and year. The Esports Operations team runs a live-event on-call schedule, the TO badge program, per-event LAN-play certification, and a per-event integrity attestation.

Split-Screen, Couch Co-op, Local Multiplayer, Hot-Seat#

  • Split-screen 1v1: vertical or horizontal split with per-side HUD + per-side controller config + 60fps target preserved.
  • Couch co-op in Tekken Force / Devil Within / Konquest / Story: drop-in / drop-out + per-fighter pairing.
  • 4-player local FFA on shared screen or 4-way split.
  • Hot-seat mode with per-account stat tracking even on shared controller.
  • Local-vs-LAN distinction clarified per mode.
  • Local match XP attribution to each account.
  • Per-side accessibility independence (one side classic + one side assisted; per-side rumble independence for adaptive controllers).

Co-op Online: Story / Tekken Force / Devil Within / Konquest / Crew Co-op#

  • Story Co-op (2 players): play through Story with a friend; per-chapter cinematics played for both; per-fight 2v2 or 2-vs-CPU-pair.
  • Tekken Force / Devil Within / Konquest Co-op online with shared instance handoff + session host migration on disconnect + per-player loot share.
  • Crew Co-op online (3v3 / 4v4): friend-stack vs another crew with team shared HP + per-crew lineup voting.
  • Co-op party matchmaking (party of 2-4 queues together vs another party) with MMR-balanced + per-platform input-method labeling.
  • Async Ghost co-op: load a friend's ghost as a co-op partner.
  • Co-op tutorials explaining shared-objective semantics + per-player input ownership + drop-in/out rules.
  • Assist player carry: stronger co-op player carries less-skilled; difficulty scales to stronger, credit goes to both.

Part 7 — Live Service & Community#

Part 7 covers the post-launch product: live service and DLC, the battle pass and faction system, creator partnerships, the companion app and public API, the seasonal calendar, community features and support, per-platform store and region-aware pricing, AI commentary, brand partnerships, and the per-account vault.

Live Service & DLC#

V2's post-launch content ships as UGameFeaturePlugin packages so a fighter, stage, or mode can be installed, activated, hot-swapped, or removed without a client patch. The Year-1 calendar runs on a fixed cadence: a monthly balance patch (data-only hotfix where possible), a quarterly content drop (cosmetics + one new tower season + one new Krypt area), and two paid DLC fighters per year minimum, all authored by @v2/maat-live-service-calendar over @maat/strategy.

Year-1 roadmap and editions

  • Paid DLC: 4 character packs (each: 1 fighter + 1 stage + ≥ 4 alt costumes + per-fighter signature library) and 1 mode-expansion DLC. License-conditional guest fighters ship one-per-plugin (V2Mode_CelebrityGuest_<id>) carrying per-skin rights metadata so a contract expiry removes exactly that plugin.
  • Free updates: balance patches, new stages, new tower content, new tutorials, and accessibility improvements never sit behind a paywall.
  • Editions: Standard; Deluxe (Standard + Year-1 DLC fighters + alt-costume bundle + premium currency grant); Ultimate (Deluxe + cosmetic packs + contracted early-access). Pre-order adds pre-load entitlement + cosmetic + announcer pack + emote pack with a transparent itemized list. Founders Edition is a limited physical run with art book, soundtrack, and optional statue.
  • Free Weekend / Demo: limited roster (8 fighters) + 1 mode (Arcade); progress earned carries forward on full-game purchase.

Plugin lifecycle and the no-coming-soon rule

A DLC plugin moves through authored → certified → staged → live → (sunset). Staged plugins download in the background and unlock at the calendar date; a sunset (license-expired) plugin is delisted from the store, its fighter is disabled in matchmaking, and existing replays that reference it fall back to a placeholder skin rather than failing to load. Every advertised mode ships content-complete at launch — no "coming soon" panels (cross-ref features§"V2 Product Promise").

Public Test Build and premium currency

  • PTB is an opt-in branch carrying balance patches 2 weeks before live; ranked is suspended on PTB and PTB MMR never writes to the live ladder.
  • Premium currency (Krystals) is itemized with no surprise mechanics, no real-money loot boxes, and a configurable daily spend limit; @maat/finance owns spend, refund, region-aware pricing, and regulatory caps.

Edge cases: a patch that fails canary analysis triggers automatic hotfix rollback to the prior signed manifest; a player who owns a sunset guest fighter keeps purchased cosmetics in the vault but cannot select the fighter; offline clients run the last cached hotfix values and reconcile on next sync.

Battle Pass, Daily/Weekly Challenges, Faction System#

Battle Pass. Each 90-day season runs a 60-tier pass with a Free Track and a Premium Track. Tiers unlock via Pass XP earned from match play, daily challenge completion, weekly missions, Story / tower progress, and faction quests; a full-completion player clears 60 tiers in roughly 50-60 hours of varied play, so the pass is finishable by a non-daily player inside the season. The Premium Track grants only cosmetics, lore unlocks, and emotes — no competitively relevant item is ever paywalled (cross-ref features§"V2 Product Promise"). A tier-skip purchase is itemized in premium currency. Battle Pass progress is cross-progression state (cross-ref features§"Online Services"); a season that ends mid-match credits XP from that match before the rollover. Unclaimed end-of-season rewards drop into the Reward Inbox rather than being forfeited.

Daily and Weekly Challenges. 3-5 daily challenges and a smaller weekly set are issued from a server-driven manifest keyed per-fighter, per-mode, and per-mechanic (e.g. "land 10 anti-airs", "win a round in MK ruleset"). The client attaches the match's deterministic replay as evidence; the server validates completion against the replay so a challenge cannot be spoofed (cross-ref features§"Online Services" anti-cheat). Dailies rotate at 00:00 player-local; weeklies rotate Monday. A challenge that becomes impossible (its fighter is a sunset guest) is auto-swapped for an equivalent on next refresh. Daily Mission rotation cross-links to the Battle Pass so one objective set feeds both.

Seasonal Events. Themed limited-time modes (Halloween Krypt Tower, Esports Crown qualifier, Anniversary event) are scheduled by the live-service calendar with a per-region override that auto-hides culturally inappropriate themes.

Faction System (MKX-style). A player picks one of five launch factions (Lin Kuei, Black Dragon, Special Forces, Brotherhood of Shadow, White Lotus) at first launch. Every match contributes faction XP to a faction-wide global leaderboard; a weekly faction-vs-faction event ranks the five factions and grants the winning faction's members an exclusive cosmetic. Factions unlock faction-exclusive cosmetics, finishers, intros, banners, and lobby emotes. Switching faction carries a 7-day cooldown and forfeits the current week's contribution, so the weekly event cannot be gamed by hopping to the leading faction.

Character Mastery runs 1-30 levels per fighter, unlocking intros, victory poses, color slots, and lore pages; Mastery 30 grants the signature finisher kit (cross-ref features§"Fighter & Account Progression, Codex, Encyclopedia").

Twitch Drops, Creator Partnership, Community Tools#

Twitch Drops. During partnered events, watch-time on a participating channel accrues a drop entitlement against the linked V2 account; the reward surfaces in the profile's reward-claim flow and is granted as cosmetic-only items. Account linking is a one-time OAuth step; an unlinked viewer is prompted before drops accrue. Drops never grant gameplay-affecting items.

Creator partnership. A YouTube/Twitch creator-code system lets a player attribute a store purchase to a creator (the code applies at store confirmation; the attribution is transparent and changeable). Curated tutorial and combo videos embed in-game, linked from the relevant fighter's move list and from the settings tutorials panel, so a player stuck on a mechanic reaches a vetted video without leaving the client.

Community tooling.

  • Discord rich-presence publishes mode / ruleset / matchmaking state, and lobby invites deep-link back into the client.
  • In-app bug reporter captures a screenshot, the session trace-id, and a reproduction-steps template, filing directly to the support backend; severe reports (crash, exploit) are auto-prioritized.
  • Canny-style feature voting runs on the official forum backed by the feedback database; the community team triages on a published cadence and links shipped items back to the originating vote thread.
  • Roster Reveal Trailer pipeline scripts in-engine MoviePipeline sequences for monthly DLC reveals, rendered from the same deterministic build the live game runs so the trailer cannot misrepresent the fighter.
  • Community tournament toolkit lets players run brackets with auto-result reporting verified against replay hashes (cross-ref features§"Esports & Tournament").

Companion App, Public API, Wiki, Roadmap#

Companion app. A shell-native iOS / Android companion app delivers frame data, codex queries, ban appeals, and second-screen and coach modes out of game. Second-screen mode receives a low-bandwidth live stream of the opponent's move list and frame data during a match; it is cosmetic-only and has no gameplay effect. Coach mode lets a coach attach annotations to a submitted replay, which the player then watches. Push handoff routes match-end, party-invite, tournament-round, daily-challenge, and Battle-Pass-tier events to APNS / FCM with per-category opt-out. The app is read-only out of game — it is not a play surface and is excluded from cross-play.

Public API. A public REST API exposes player stats — rank, match history, win rate, faction info, Crown Points — gated by a per-account public-flag, plus webhooks for tournament organizers. Auth is OAuth 2.1 with PKCE; third-party apps register through the developer portal for per-app scopes. Rate limits are 100 req/min for an unauthenticated app, 1000 req/min for a registered app, and 30 req/min per account on personal data, so a scraper cannot exhaust the service.

Knowledge surfaces. An in-game wiki and glossary live at /v2/wiki and /v2/glossary, backed by cited RAG answers covering frame data, per-ruleset mechanic explanations, and strategy terms (hitstop, hitlag, kara cancel, OS, shimmy, frame trap, parry, ukemi), with curated tutorial video embeds and a downloadable cheat-sheet PDF. An in-game roadmap at /v2/roadmap tags each item confirmed / planned / exploratory and delivers updates via an opt-in email digest.

Developer and modding. A developer documentation portal publishes the API reference, tournament-tool API, broadcast SDK, modding policy, code of conduct, terms of service, and privacy policy, alongside an open-sourced Discord bot template. The PC modding policy permits cosmetic mods offline and integrates Steam Workshop for them, but gameplay-mod tampering is ranked-banned.

Loading, Splash, Tips, What's New, Notifications#

First-boot sequence. On a fresh install the client plays studio / publisher / engine logos, then rating-board acknowledgment screens, a photosensitivity warning, and a health & safety warning where the region requires one. An age confirmation gate runs per region law (cross-ref features§"Parental Controls, Age Gating, Time-Played"), followed by a one-time personalization wizard that sets language, controller, accessibility preset, and control scheme. The wizard is re-openable from Settings; declining it falls back to platform-locale defaults. After every patch, a "What's New" splash shows 3-5 headline changes with screenshots or video, a link to full patch notes, and a roadmap teaser.

Loading screens. Per-mode loading screens rotate per-fighter portrait art and a tip system of ~200 launch tips keyed per-ruleset, per-fighter, and per-mechanic, each translated per locale. Match-load screens additionally host a practice dummy (cross-ref features§"Training, Trials, Tutorials") that auto-yields when the match is ready, so wait time is never dead time.

Notification center. A toast queue plus a persistent drawer surface friend online, party invite, tournament round, daily challenge complete, replay shared, faction quest, cosmetic shop restock, and patch-available events. Each category is individually toggleable; toasts are rate-limited (1 per 2s) and overflow into the drawer rather than stacking on screen. Streamer Mode auto-suppresses capture-sensitive notifications while a capture session is detected.

Help and onboarding. Context-sensitive, controller-input-aware tooltips attach to every UI element. First-time-played modes show skippable in-mode help bubbles. Smart Help watches telemetry and surfaces a targeted help bubble — or a tutorial-on-demand prompt — when a player repeatedly fails a specific mechanic.

Cosmetics-only daily bonus and credits. A 7-day rotating Daily Login Bonus grants cosmetic-only rewards; the streak resets gracefully with no FOMO penalty and no gameplay-affecting reward. The title screen rotates a roster spotlight with seasonal music; menu music is themed per ruleset and mode. The end credits roll lists every team member, mocap performer, VO cast member, composer, partner, and licensor, and is searchable and browsable from the main menu.

Live Service Calendar: Seasonal Themes, Anniversary, Charity, Console Tie-Ins#

The live-service calendar is a single authored timeline (cross-ref features§"Live Service & DLC") that schedules every dated event and exposes a player-facing widget with a 6-month forward view and an opt-in email digest.

Seasonal themes. Monthly themes — Lunar New Year, Valentine's, IWD, Cherry Blossom, Star Wars Day, Pride, Summer Festival, Anniversary, Halloween, Diwali, Thanksgiving, Winter Holiday — each carry per-season cosmetics. A per-region override auto-hides a theme that conflicts with local cultural or legal context rather than shipping it everywhere; missing region data defaults to hiding the theme.

Anniversary. Each Year-N anniversary ships a free content drop (1 free fighter + 1 free stage + 1 free cosmetic bundle), throwback events, a livestream with the next roadmap reveal, and commemorative profile flair for accounts active during the window.

Charity. An annual charity event partners with one of AbleGamers, Special Effect, Stack Up, EFF, ACLU, or an FGC charity prize-pool match. The donation percentage is disclosed, an in-game progress meter tracks the running total, and a charity stream collaboration anchors the event.

Console tie-ins. Tie-in plans for PS5 Pro, Switch 2, Xbox Series new-revision, Steam Deck OS updates, and next-generation VR (PSVR3 / Quest 4 / Vision Pro) are documented and scheduled against the calendar.

Re-engagement. A 60-day-inactivity trigger grants a returning-player reward and sends a lapsed-player email; a Free Weekend runs every quarter. Re-engagement messaging is bandwidth-throttled — at most one reactivation email per lapsed player per 30 days, and the player can opt out per channel — so the system never becomes spam.

Reveals and community events. DLC reveals run a 4-6 week reveal-to-launch window. Player-voted bi-monthly events, creator-pitched events, and community-led tournament series with cosmetic prize support feed the calendar. A year-end retrospective publishes hours-played, pick rates, tournament highlights, charity totals, and content-drop counts.

  • Editorial spotlights: Player of the Week, Crew of the Month, and Replay of the Week are community-team picks; each spotlight grants the featured account a flair cosmetic and surfaces on the in-game News widget.
  • Community galleries: an Art Gallery (player-created decals, arenas, CAWs, belts) and a Video Gallery (clips) present a curated, moderated subset with one weekly featured selection; every gallery entry links to the creator's profile. Submissions pass an ML pre-filter and a human review queue before they appear (cross-ref features§"Creator Suite" community gallery).
  • Devs-to-players channel: an announcement channel capped at ≤ 3 posts per week; each post localizes to all launch locales within a 24-hour SLA.
  • Newsletter: opt-in signup delivers a per-region monthly recap email and mirrors into the in-game News widget; unsubscribe is one click.
  • Player-meetup discovery: an opt-in map surfaces per-region FGC events with a subscribable .ics calendar feed; location data is opt-in and never shown for accounts that have not enabled it.
  • Discord links are per-region, each staffed by a per-region community team.
  • Public player journal: a per-account markdown-supported journal, moderated on the same pipeline as gallery submissions; a player can keep it private or publish it to their profile.

Per-Platform Store Features & Region-Aware Pricing (PPP)#

V2's store is per-platform-store-native: each platform store keeps its own consumable, entitlement, refund, and family-share semantics, surfaced through a thin IPlatformStore adapter. The platform store is the exclusive path for any item that grants gameplay state on that platform; non-item flows (coaching marketplace, donations, esports prize pools, companion subscription) route through Stripe / Adyen and are explicitly TRC-permitted.

Per-platform integration. Steam (achievements, trading cards, screenshots, broadcasts, Workshop, controller config, Remote Play), Epic Games Store (achievements, EOS mod.io), Microsoft Store (achievements, Game Pass option), PSN (trophies, Share Play, party voice, PS Plus option), Xbox Live (achievements, Smart Delivery, cloud save), and Switch 2 (My Nintendo, Friend Share, save cloud) each integrate through their native SDK.

Region-aware pricing (PPP). Baseline price is multiplied by a per-region purchasing-power ratio (regenerated quarterly from IMF + World Bank per-capita data) and rounded to the nearest platform-allowed price tier. The per-region price is ceilinged at baseline and floored at ratio × 0.4 to block inversion attacks; the ratio refreshes quarterly only, so a player sees a stable price for ≥ 30 days. The client shows local-currency price plus the baseline equivalent for transparency.

VPN-region-shop detection. Account region (set at first purchase, verified at age-gate), session region (geo-IP), and payment region are compared; if more than one disagrees for ≥ 90 days, a soft purchase block prompts the player to either confirm a permanent region change (re-verify age, accept the new region's content rules and rating) or cancel — V2 never silently applies a different region's rules to the same account. Known business-traveller patterns are whitelisted. Account region locks at first purchase with a 90-day cooldown.

Sales, subscriptions, refunds. Sale events align with each platform's calendar (Steam Summer/Winter/Lunar/Spring, PSN Days of Play, Xbox seasonal, Nintendo eShop). Game Pass / PS Plus catalog inclusion is a documented negotiation option; a free-to-play conversion is roadmap-only for year 2+. Each platform's refund policy and per-region statutory rights are honored; per-account refund history is visible, and a refund-after-N-hours-played pattern raises an anti-abuse flag.

Customer Support, Community Ambassadors, Hall of Fame#

Customer support. A support portal (in-game + web) opens tickets routed by a priority-tier SLA: P0 (account compromise, payment dispute, harassment-in-progress) gets first response ≤ 1 hour and resolution ≤ 24h; P1 (cheat report, ban appeal, payment failure) ≤ 8 hours / ≤ 72h; P2 (cosmetic loss, friend-list bug, UI bug) ≤ 48 hours / ≤ 14 days; P3 (feature request, general feedback) ≤ 7 days first response. Per-region hours, per-locale agents, a knowledge base, and live chat (PC + web) back the portal. The feedback database links bidirectionally with Canny-style feature voting.

Community ambassadors. A vetted ambassador program operates under a transparent code of conduct with per-region rotation; ambassadors carry an ambassador-only flair and receive early-access TO consultation. A separate coaching-certification program issues a certified-coach flair, tracks a per-coach rating, and supports paid coaching through platform-compliant payment rails (cross-ref features§"Streamer, Speedrun, Coach Modes").

Hall of Fame. Tournament champions, all-time-record holders, and community legends are inducted into a Hall of Fame rendered as an in-engine museum hub with Krypt-style first-person navigation, inductee statues, trophy cases, and a per-fighter wing. Induction is a server-recorded citation event. Pro-player contracts for sponsored top players publish transparent qualification criteria, and retired pros keep a pro-retired flair.

Player input. An in-game survey widget collects structured post-patch and tournament-specific feedback; PTB beta enrollment is an opt-in toggle.

AI-Generated Commentary, Highlight Reel, Per-Match Analysis#

V2's AI features are all off-rollback: they read match telemetry and produce audio, subtitle, text, or video output that never feeds simulation state. Every shipping AI service carries an EU AI Act Model Card and an on-screen machine-generated label.

AI play-by-play commentary. Real-time and post-match commentary is generated from match telemetry with per-fighter and per-matchup narrative awareness; text is synthesized to speech in the player's preferred announcer voice, per locale. Real-time KO commentary targets ≤ 800 ms from the gameplay event to audio; on a miss, the client falls back to a pre-recorded bank keyed by (cue, ruleset, commentator, seed) so a slow generation never leaves dead air. Commentary is opt-out in Settings.

Auto-edited highlight reel. After a match the system selects the top 3-5 moments (longest combo, counter-hit punish, Power-Play, dramatic comeback, KO) and auto-edits them with cinematic camera and a music swell. Before sharing, the player can trim, filter, swap music, and add a caption; export formats are MP4, GIF, and vertical 9:16 for mobile. Reel generation targets ≤ 90 s for a 5-minute match. Every export passes the NIL gate (cross-ref features§"Replay Theater, Takeover, Spectator") — a reel containing an expired-rights fighter is saved locally but blocked from online share.

Per-match analysis. An analysis screen breaks down damage by move, combo structure, per-meter usage, and per-corner-pressure win rate, plus a per-mistake-frame timeline with matchup-specific advice ("you missed 5 throw techs in round 2"). A rolling per-fighter strength/weakness summary aggregates recent matches.

Auto-clipping and chat translation. Best moments auto-clip into a per-account clip library with an AI-suggested caption and title; the library shares to friends or the public moderated clip gallery. Community chat supports real-time per-message translation across locale boundaries with a manual override.

Post-launch procedural dialogue. AI-generated per-fighter dialogue for DLC seasons is always manually reviewed before deployment — generation accelerates authoring but never ships unreviewed lines.

Real-World Brand Partnerships, Celebrity Guests, Venue Tie-Ins#

Every brand, celebrity, and venue partnership runs a contract lifecycle (term / royalty / removal clause) and a partnership ethics review before it ships; license-conditional content is isolated to one plugin so a contract end removes exactly that content.

Brand sponsorship. Brands occupy authored slots in open-world signage, vehicle decals, and racing sponsorship, allocated by a transparent brand-fit score; a per-region brand-pool variant swaps brands per market. Launch partners span Red Bull, Monster Energy, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and Logitech G. A brand-themed Battle Pass season runs once per year with brand involvement disclosed on the season screen.

Celebrity guests. A per-season celebrity guest — a real-world musician, actor, or athlete — ships as a limited-time DLC fighter in its own V2Mode_CelebrityGuest_<id> plugin, governed by a per-celebrity NIL contract with a removal clause and a per-region content variant. Each guest carries a unique signature library (intro, taunt, victory, lore), a themed fighter kit, recorded VO, and a themed Battle Pass tier reward. On contract expiry the plugin is delisted; owners keep purchased cosmetics in the vault but the fighter is disabled in matchmaking, and replays fall back to a placeholder skin.

Venue tie-ins. Real-world iconic venues — Madison Square Garden, T-Mobile Arena, Tokyo Dome, Suzuka Circuit — license as in-game stages with venue-flavor commentary; each ships per-venue under a licensing-conditional manifest with a removal clause and per-region availability.

Physical and event tie-ins. Pop-up V2 events at conventions (E3, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, PAX, EVO) issue an in-game tie-in (promo code, cosmetic, or commemorative flair); per-event physical merchandise syncs with an in-game cosmetic. A per-quarter brand-sponsored limited-time mode (Red Bull Aerial Stunt, Monster Energy Drift Cup) ships brand cosmetics plus a leaderboard.

Ethics gate. A community-advisory board with sensitivity readers and cultural reviewers signs off every partnership; a partnership that violates community standards is rejected regardless of commercial value.

Per-Account Vault, Lifetime Replay Archive, Ghost Data Archive#

The vault is the player's permanent cloud-side collection. It holds every owned cosmetic (skins, weapons, banners, titles, emotes, vehicles, custom designs) with no slot cap, organized by folders, classified by tags, and searchable with a query language; a per-tier display upgrade unlocks through Account Level. The vault is cross-progression state — it survives platform switches and account merges.

Lifetime replay archive. Every match replay is preserved cloud-side and searchable by mode, fighter, opponent, date, outcome, and rank. A favorited / pinned subset stays at the top; the player can export any replay to a local file or to MP4 within the per-replay export budget. Replays referencing a sunset guest fighter still load with a placeholder skin (cross-ref features§"Real-World Brand Partnerships, Celebrity Guests, Venue Tie-Ins").

Lifetime ghost-data archive. Every Time Trial, Canyon Duel, and training-mode lab-session ghost is preserved, shareable as a code, and loadable as an opponent in any ghost-supporting mode.

Lifetime stats. Per-fighter win rate, per-stage win rate, per-matchup history, per-rank history across all seasons, and career-spanning achievement tracking are preserved permanently.

Sharing, backup, transfer, inheritance.

  • A friend can browse your vault cosmetically (no editing); per-vault privacy controls gate visibility.
  • A daily snapshot writes to immutable cold storage; an accidental deletion is recoverable via restore-from-backup.
  • On a cross-platform account merge, vault items are de-duplicated, transferred, and written to an audit trail (cross-ref features§"Cross-Platform Social, Reporting, Bans, Appeals").
  • An optional estate-planning inheritance lets a player designate a beneficiary to receive vault contents on documented passing; the transfer requires verified identity, beneficiary readiness, accepted delegation evidence, and an immutable transfer audit record.

Part 8 — Racing Component#

Part 8 covers the full AAA racing component V2 ships as a peer genre to the fighting game: the vehicle framework, career and race modes, the vehicle roster and racing online, the racing × fighting crossover, vehicle and pit-crew authoring, free-roam and heist modes, demolition derby, sports-vehicle modes, and the persistent open world.

Racing Component: Overview & Integration#

V2 ships a full AAA racing component as a peer genre to the fighting game, drawing on the lineage of the genre's most influential franchises:

  • Need for Speed: Most Wanted for Blacklist career progression and police pursuit.
  • Split/Second for Power-Play environmental hazards.
  • Blur for pickup combat racing.
  • Death Race for weaponized vehicles.
  • GRID for sim handling and flashback rewind.
  • Need for Speed: Carbon for canyon duels, crew progression, and drift scoring.
  • Need for Speed: Underground 2 for deep vehicle customization and open-world exploration.
  • Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit for the cops-vs-racers asymmetric mode.
  • WipEout / F-Zero / Star Wars Episode I for off-road / rally, motorcycles, and futuristic anti-grav pod-racers — additional vehicle classes beyond the street-racing core.

V2 racing and V2 fighting share one roster, one online backbone, one cosmetic shop, one Battle Pass, and one profile + match history + currency ledger. Crossover modes feature fighter-as-driver, vehicle-on-vehicle melee, and get-out-and-fight transitions.

Determinism boundary. Racing does not run on the fighting game's rollback netcode. Continuous-physics solvers (hovercraft, bike-lean, drift) are not bit-identical across CPU vendors under cross-platform float modes, so racing ships on client-server with input prediction: the Chaos vehicle solver runs server-authoritative, the server replicates pose to every client, and client-side prediction smooths only the local pose and never resimulates physics. The fighting game's "bit-identical" promise is replaced for racing by "server-consistent outcomes across all clients within one frame of replication latency." Cheat detection therefore runs server-side on the authoritative state.

Launch scope:

  • Vehicle roster ≥ 70 vehicles across cars / bikes / off-road / futuristic / specialty / police.
  • Tracks ≥ 40 across circuit / sprint / drift / drag / off-road / rally / canyon / sky / desert / city / futuristic.
  • Racing-side career arc with ≥ 30 hours of single-player content including Most Wanted-style Blacklist progression, Carbon-style territory wars + canyon duels, NFSU2-style hidden parts hunt.

Vehicle Framework, Physics, Tracks, Customization#

  • Vehicle data spine: per-vehicle stats (top speed / 0-60 / handling / braking / mass), chassis archetype (Compact / Sedan / Coupe / Supercar / Hypercar / Muscle / Tuner / Truck / SUV / Rally / Buggy / Monster Truck / Sport Bike / Cruiser / Pod Racer / Hover), drive-train (FWD / RWD / AWD / 4WD / hover), engine + RPM model with torque curve, transmission (manual / auto / sequential) with manual shift bonus, suspension model per-vehicle tunable, tire model with per-compound + per-surface friction + temperature + wear.
  • 5-tier damage model: Clean → Scuffed → Damaged → Wrecked → Totaled with material-blend visuals + per-tier performance impact (sim ruleset) + cinematic catastrophic destruction. Cosmetic-only damage option in arcade ruleset.
  • Vehicle physics & handling: continuous Arcade-Sim dial; per-ruleset default; assists library (ABS / TCS / Stability / Steering Assist / Auto-Brake / Racing Line / Cornering Suggestion / Anti-Spin / Auto-Counter-Steer); drafting / slipstreaming + side-draft + bump-drafting; NOS / nitrous; wet / weather grip multipliers; deterministic physics for online sync.
  • Track categories: Circuit (closed-loop, lap-based), Sprint (point-to-point), Drift (scoring), Drag (straight-line), Speed Trap, Eliminator, Time Trial, Knockout, Pursuit / Patrol, Open-world cruise.
  • Open-world Metro City with ≥ 8 distinct districts (downtown neon NFSU2 vibe / sun-baked desert Hot Pursuit / canyon cliffs Carbon / rainy port Most Wanted / harbor-bridge NFSU2 / industrial / suburb / airport).
  • Per-track racing line authored + AI-line override; per-track sector splits + leaderboards + hazards + photo-mode hot-spots + spectator-cam positions.
  • Vehicle Customization (NFSU2 depth): body kit slots, autosculpt geometry deformation, paint system with multi-tone schemes + 8 finish types, vinyl / decal painter with layered blend modes + projection mapping, wheel customization (≥ 200 rim designs at launch), neon / underbody glow, window tint, exhaust tip, license plate, hydraulics, sound system, hidden parts hunt in open world, test drive before purchase.
  • Performance tuning: engine swap, ECU tune, turbo / supercharger, NOS capacity + injection rate, transmission gear ratios, suspension tune, brake upgrade, drivetrain conversion (limited), weight reduction.

Racing Career Mode (Most Wanted + Carbon + NFSU2)#

  • Single-player career arc (≥ 30 hours): climb a Most Wanted-style Blacklist of 15 named rivals + Carbon-style crew progression + NFSU2- style open-world exploration.
  • Per-rival event (signature: sprint / circuit / drift / drag / canyon duel / pursuit); win unlocks rival's signature vehicle + customization parts + story chapter.
  • Per-rival cinematic (pre-race trash-talk + post-race defeat).
  • Territory war (Carbon-style): claim a territory by winning its signature race + defending from rival-crew challenges; per-territory perks + bonus currency.
  • Heat system (Most Wanted-style police escalation): Heat 1-6 with per-level cop loadout (patrol → sergeant → federal → corvette → SWAT / rhino-truck → helicopter siege); cooldown via safehouse / paint change.
  • Reputation system: per-event style points (drift / takedown / drafting / cop-evasion) feed reputation tier.
  • Final Blacklist boss event: cinematic canyon-duel finale + career-ending cinematic.

Race Mode Variants, Police Pursuit, Combat Racing, Power-Play#

  • Race mode variants: Circuit Race + Sprint + Drag (perfect-launch / perfect-shift bonuses) + Drift (angle × line × speed × duration × multiplier-chain scoring) + Time Trial (ghost lap visible) + Eliminator (last-place out per N seconds) + Speed Trap (radar stations) + Knockout (lap-based last-place-out) + Outrun (NFSU2 1v1 in open world) + Race Day tournament + Custom Room.
  • Police Pursuit System (Hot Pursuit + Most Wanted): cop AI personalities (Pursuit / Patrol / Block / Helicopter / Federal), heat-level escalation (Heat 1-6), PIT maneuver + spike strips + roadblocks + helicopter spotlight + cinematic SWAT siege; pursuit-completion conditions (evade / busted / takedown); Cops vs Racers asymmetric online mode with separate Racer + Cop ranked ladders.
  • Combat Racing (Death Race + Blur Power-Ups): Blur-style pickup library (offensive Bolt / Shunt / Mine / EMP / Shockwave + defensive Shield / Phantom / Repair + utility Boost / Drift-Boost / Wormhole) with 3-pickup stack limit; Death Race vehicle-mounted weapons + lethal damage model with cinematic flaming-vehicle KO + gore-tier-gated; environmental hazard pickups; Combat Racing ruleset toggleable per match.
  • Power-Play / Track Events (Split/Second): Power-Play meter built via drafting / drifting / proximity / clean-driving / takedown; Level- 1 minor hazard / Level-2 medium destruction / Level-3 dramatic track-altering event (bridge collapse / building topple / sinkhole / runway jet collision) re-routing track; per-track Power-Play library of 4-8 events per level; counter-Power-Play; per-track authoring in Track Editor.
  • Autolog social-rivalry (Hot Pursuit-inspired): friend's race time + score auto-surfaces as challenge target; friend-beat notification + one-tap revenge match.

Drift / Canyon Duel / Drag / Off-Road / Bikes / Futuristic Pod-Racer#

  • Drift scoring: angle × line × speed × duration × multiplier-chain; drift mode variants (Solo Drift Run + Drift Battle 1v1 lead-follow + Drift Tag-Team 2v2).
  • Canyon Duel (Carbon-style): 1v1 cliff-edge race with Defender half (lead-time = score) + Attacker half (close-time = score); falling off cliff = instant loss; cinematic camera + dramatic music; per-canyon track ≥ 3 at launch.
  • Drag Race scoring: perfect-launch bonus + per-shift perfect-shift multi-chain bonus.
  • Off-Road / Rally: long-travel suspension + per-surface friction (dirt / mud / sand / snow / gravel) + jump physics + co-driver pacenotes (per-locale localized); rally event modes (Stage Rally / Rally Cross / Hill Climb / Dirt Drift); off-road vehicle classes (Buggy / Truck / SUV / Rally / Monster Truck); ≥ 5 rally tracks at launch.
  • Bike Racing: lean-angle physics + wheelie / stoppie inputs; bike-on-bike hand-to-hand combat at speed; bike classes (Sport / Naked Sport / Cruiser / Adventure / Supermoto / Electric); bike race modes (Circuit / Sprint / Drag / Drift / Off-Road / Pursuit / Combat); bike customization library; mixed-class bike-vs-car option.
  • Futuristic / Anti-Grav / Pod-Racer Mode: hover physics with thrust + lift vectors; magnetic track adhesion for high-speed cornering / loop-the-loop; per-track speed bands; energy weapons + shield bands; pod-racer chassis with dual / triple / quad engine pods + per-engine throttle independence + energy-field-breakdown catastrophic destruction; ≥ 3 futuristic tracks at launch.

Vehicle Roster, Racing Online, Esports, Replay, GRID Flashback#

  • Vehicle Roster: ≥ 40 cars (Tuner / Muscle / Supercars / Hypercars / Exotics / Specialty) + ≥ 15 bikes (Sport / Naked / Cruiser / Adventure / Electric) + ≥ 10 off-road / rally + ≥ 8 futuristic / pod-racers + ≥ 8 police vehicles. Per-vehicle rarity tier (Common → Mythic) with Mythic vehicles featuring signature livery + unique handling + signature engine note. Per-roster-fighter signature vehicle (cross-ref shared roster).
  • Racing Online: per-mode matchmaking queues (Circuit / Sprint / Drag / Drift / Combat / Power-Play / Pursuit / Canyon Duel / Time Trial / Crew Battle) with separate Racing MMR from Fighting MMR; per-mode ranked ladder (Bronze → Legend); cross-play across PC / PS5 / XSX / Switch2 with input-method labeling (wheel vs gamepad vs KB+M); cross-progression via publisher account; Autolog rivalries; custom rooms with full ruleset customization; per-mode max players (Circuit / Sprint up to 12 / Drag 4 / Drift 8 / Combat 8 / Power-Play 12 / Pursuit 6 / Canyon Duel 2); server-side anti-cheat with per-section physics-impossible-time detection.
  • Racing Esports & Broadcast: per-region racing pro circuit with Crown points; spectator camera presets (trackside / chase-cam / hood-cam / cockpit / orbital / replay-cam / director-cam); per-lap split overlay + per-race position graph + per-driver telemetry overlay; in-broadcast cosmetic-wager + caster polls; Racing Championship Season (8-event series with cumulative leaderboard + grand prix finale).
  • Racing Replay (deterministic capture ≤ 2MB per 5-min race; determinism gate in CI): race timeline scrubber with sector splits + lap markers + key events (overtakes / crashes / Power-Play / pickups); per-driver track-camera lock + free-cam + telemetry overlay + minimap + position graph + side-by-side compare; GRID Flashback time-rewind (limited uses per race; ranked = 0; tournament TO-configurable); Photo Mode (cross-ref); racing ghost data export per Time Trial / per Canyon Duel; MP4 export via MoviePipeline.

Racing Audio / VFX / Crew / Garage / Apartment Hub#

  • Racing Audio Deep: per-vehicle engine sound bank (idle / cruise / mid / high / redline / shift-cut / throttle-blip / decel-pop / backfire) with per-engine character (V8 muscle / inline-4 turbo / inline-6 NA / V12 supercar wail / rotary RX-7 buzz / V-twin cruiser / Boxer / electric whir); per-exhaust upgrade sound profile; per-surface tire-noise; brake-disc squeal; Doppler-shifted engine + 3D positional audio; per-track ambience; per-mode racing soundtrack (≥ 60 launch tracks across rulesets); dynamic music stack; custom soundtrack import; per-vehicle audio captured in replay.
  • Racing VFX Deep: per-tire smoke scaled by slip ratio + surface; spark VFX on chassis contact / curbs; brake-disc glow + per-rotor temperature; per-collision debris (glass / plastic / metal / panel fall-off); damage decals progressive (scuff / paint scratches / bullet holes Death Race / soot); wreck explosion VFX (gore-tier gated); speed-aware motion blur + speed line overlay for futuristic mode at speed-band activation; NOS / boost VFX (blue-flame backwash + screen-edge color shift); Power-Play event VFX library; anti-grav engine glow + per-vehicle aura color + per-vehicle trail; 5-tier vehicle damage shader blend; weather VFX (rain on windshield / dust storm / snow accumulation / fog volumetric).
  • Crew system (Carbon-style): recruit 3-5 AI crew members per-specialty (Blocker / Scout / Fabricator / Drafter / Mechanic) with per-crew-member backstory cinematic + loyalty meter affected by treatment + race outcomes.
  • Garage hub (NFSU2-style): explorable garage with up to 10 vehicle slots; per-vehicle lift / inspect / customize / repair / refuel / tune; per-garage decoration (posters / neon / tool wall / lift colors / floor texture); per-garage upgrade tiers with more slots / more equipment / faster repair.
  • Apartment hub (Def Jam-style): customizable living space with trophy showcase + photo-mode gallery + vehicle-key wall + crew-photo wall + signature graffiti tag display; per-apartment upgrade (studio → loft → penthouse) with per-tier decor budget + story arc unlock.
  • Friend-Garage / Apartment visits: invite friends to view your Garage / Apartment cosmetically.

Racing × Fighting Crossover: Fighter-Driver, Get-Out-and-Fight#

  • Fighter-as-driver: each roster fighter can drive any vehicle; per-fighter signature vehicle unlocked via Mastery + Side Story; per-fighter driving personality affects AI behavior; per-fighter pre-race banter + per-matchup driving-context lines.
  • Get-Out-and-Fight mode: in crossover events, vehicle KO (totaled) triggers cinematic where driver exits + engages in melee combat against opponent in chosen ruleset (MK / SF / Tekken / WWE / UFC / SC / DJ); per-race-stage fighting arena (track stretches / off-track areas) with environmental finishers eligible; winner returns to vehicle / claims opponent's vehicle; loser eliminated from race.
  • Vehicle-on-vehicle melee (Combat Racing + crossover): vehicles ram with intentional melee impacts combo-ing via fighting-game GAS system.
  • Crossover signature event: cinematic race-then-fight chained events.
  • Per-fighter Get-Out cinematic: walk-out + signature stance entrance.
  • Shared cosmetic store: Fighter Coins + Racing Coins both spendable on shared store items.
  • Shared Battle Pass with both fighting + racing rewards.
  • Crossover ranked queue with separate MMR.

Racing Compliance, Trophies, Anti-Cheat, Accessibility#

Licensing. Every licensed vehicle carries a per-manufacturer contract with term, royalty, removal clause, and a damage-portrayal clause. Damage-tier permissibility is per-manufacturer: a licensed luxury brand may permit only cosmetic damage, so its vehicles never visibly deform past the Scuffed tier, while original-IP vehicles run the full 5-tier model through to Totaled.

Content rules. Per-region racing variants adjust cop visuals for the China publisher SKU, restrict combat-racing weaponry where required, switch the speed-limit display between km/h and mph, and localize number-plate format. V2 depicts no drunk or impaired driving anywhere, and outside the Death Race ruleset cops are "incapacitated", never killed.

Trophies and anti-cheat. A per-platform racing trophy/achievement plan covers per-mode, per-vehicle-class, per-rank-tier, and special-condition unlocks. Racing anti-cheat layers per-section physics-impossible-time detection (a sector time below the physically achievable minimum flags), the replay-determinism gate, and tuning-cheat detection against the trusted hotfix bounds.

Peripherals. Wheels from Logitech, Thrustmaster, Fanatec, Hori, and MOZA are supported with per-vehicle force-feedback tuning (cross-ref features§"Hardware Peripherals Deep").

Accessibility. The full assist library is toggleable; an auto-throttle mode serves motor-impaired players; difficulty steps down after consecutive losses; and a reduced-motion racing camera clamps motion blur and camera shake.

Vehicle Designer & Pit Crew Minigame#

Custom Vehicle Designer. Players design vehicles from scratch: autosculpt geometry shaping, a custom engine bay, transmission tunnel, and suspension, plus engine-layout authoring (cylinder count, arrangement, turbo), and custom paint, decal, vinyl, and wheel designs. A per-component balance budget caps the build — engine, aero, tires, and weight reduction each carry a cost ceiling and the designer rejects a build whose total exceeds the budget — so a custom vehicle cannot out-stat the curated roster. Each design saves to a per-vehicle slot and exports a shareable Base32 code carrying an account watermark and creation nonce; codes never expire but are revocable per-account on moderation. A design is ranked-eligible only after it clears originality review (verified against the IP/brand database) and a manual approval pass; until then it is offline-only.

Pit Crew Mechanic Minigame. A timed repair/tune loop runs per-action mini-games — tire change, oil change, engine swap, wheel alignment, suspension tune — with a per-crew-member specialty bonus. It integrates with sim-mode racing as pit-stop strategy and supports Coach-Mode-style co-op pitting where a second player runs the pit while the first drives.

Telemetry and showcase. A per-driver telemetry dashboard records average lap time, best-of-3, fastest sector, fuel, and brake-wear per race, and surfaces a per-driver style classification into matchmaking. Every track supports reverse and mirror variants. A Vehicle Showcase mode frames a vehicle with cinematic camera and auto-pose presets and exports to MP4.

Convoy & Free-Roam Multiplayer Lobby#

The free-roam lobby places 8-32 players into open-world Metro City to cruise freely on a client-server instance. Instances shard per region with friend-priority sharding so a party lands together, and each instance runs a synchronized day/night cycle and weather state shared across every player in it.

  • Convoy formation lets 2-8 players lock into a shared waypoint with automated formation driving; an active convoy grants a crew cosmetic bonus, and NPCs initiate convoy challenges.
  • Player-meet hot-spots per district (parking lots, under-bridge hangouts, a scenic overlook, the harbor pier, a drift-practice lot) give cruisers a place to gather.
  • Cruise photo session captures a cooperative multi-player pose.
  • Social affordances: open-world text chat, a proximity-limited voice radio, a cosmetic horn, and a flash-headlight gesture that initiates a challenge.
  • Co-op cruise objectives (escort cargo, outrun a rival convoy, tag-team Power-Play training) give the lobby light shared goals.

Cruise mode has no ranked progression — it grants cosmetic and XP rewards only — so the social space stays low-pressure.

Heist Mode: Stealth, Driving, Fighting#

Structure. Heist Mode is a multi-stage co-op mission for 1-4 players that chains stealth, driving, and fighting in one run. The stage machine is Recon (stealth + observation) → Approach (drive + evade) → Infiltration (stealth or breach + fight) → Extraction (drive away + police pursuit + crew defense + Power-Play opportunities) → Resolution (cinematic outcome). Each stage has an explicit fail-state and a retry budget; ≥ 3 failures in a stage branches the run into an alternate outcome rather than ending it.

Roles and AI. Each crew member fills a role — Hacker (stealth + hacking minigame), Wheelman (driver), Muscle (fighter), Strategist (planning + assists) — with a per-role mini-game per stage. Stealth AI guards run a Patrol → Suspicious → Searching → Alerted → Combat → Lost-Sight → Patrol state machine; difficulty scales guard count and perception radius.

Stealth-vs-fight payoff. A stealth bypass grants a 1.5× loot multiplier; a full-combat clear grants 1.0× plus bonus combat XP; mixed outcomes scale linearly between the two — so a clean run pays more but a loud run is still viable. A heist payout grants large currency, rare cosmetics, signature vehicle unlocks, and a faction-influence boost; a failed heist still pays a partial amount but spikes the heat level and costs crew loyalty.

Co-op and access. Each heist has 3 fixed branch decision points. Online 4-player co-op assigns roles, migrates the session host on disconnect, and splits loot equally by default with an optional Robin-Hood modifier (the top contributor may voluntarily share more); a rage-quit forfeits that player's share. A solo heist fills empty roles with AI crew at 75% rewards. A per-quarter signature heist (Casino, Bank Vault, Yacht, Train Robbery, Stadium Concert) ships as a themed limited-time event with a cinematic narrative arc.

Demolition Derby, Vehicle-Hijack, Fight-On-Vehicle#

  • Demolition Derby: arena mode 4-16 vehicles fight in enclosed bowl until one remains; per-vehicle HP + collision damage + melee weapons; per-arena type (classic bowl / figure-8 / industrial yard / stadium / parking-garage multi-level); 2v2 / 4v4 team derby option.
  • Vehicle-Hijack mid-race: in Combat Racing crossover, attempt to hijack opponent's vehicle when alongside; input-RPS for control; success = attacker takes opponent's vehicle and position.
  • Fight-On-Vehicle: cinematic fighting on a moving vehicle (Tekken Heihachi-on-motorcycle inspired). Per-vehicle Fight-On-Vehicle compatibility (convertibles / trucks / bikes / pod racers) with per-vehicle fight-stage authored. Per-vehicle environmental finisher (toss into traffic / ram into pillar / throw into chasm).
  • Mad-Max-style truck/bike chase combat: one player drives heavy truck pursuing 1-3 bike-rider opponents; bike-riders attack truck (climb-aboard finisher / lasso pillar); truck rams bikes off road.
  • Convoy Raid co-op: 2-4 player attacker crew vs AI convoy defending valuable cargo with per-cargo type variety.
  • Crossover ranked queues with separate MMR per crossover queue.

Sports Vehicle Modes: Soccer / Stunt / Crash / Trackmania#

  • Vehicle Soccer (Rocket-League-inspired): 3v3 / 4v4 cars vs ball with arcade physics (high-spin / boost-jump / aerial play); per-arena variant (rectangle / dome / multi-tier / hoops / volleyball pitch); ranked Soccer queue; per-fighter signature Soccer cosmetic.
  • Vehicle Stunt Mode (Tony Hawk-inspired): vehicle-acrobatic combo scoring with per-trick library (manual / jump / spin / flip / grind / wheelie chain); per-stunt-arena with ramps / half-pipes / canyon jumps / rails / airfield; Stunt-mode leaderboards.
  • Burnout-Crash Mode: score-based crash damage with chain-reaction CrashBreaker mechanic; ≥ 20 authored crash junctions (intersection / highway merge / downtown / underpass / airport / mountain pass); per-vehicle Crash variants.
  • Trackmania-style Time Trial: ultra-short laps with hard-platforming racing (loops / jumps / wallrides / vertical walls / impossible turns); per-track ghost line + global leaderboard; per-medal tiers (Bronze / Silver / Gold / Author); Track Editor + community track-of-the-day.
  • Per-mode ranked ladder separate from main racing; per-mode signature events.

Persistent World Economy, NPC Schedules, Crime Rate#

Persistent economy. The open world runs a server-side market that ticks once per hour. Per-cosmetic supply/demand shifts a daily shop rotation off community-wide purchase data — a high-demand rare item costs more, a slow seller drops — and vehicle parts rotate on the same supply model. An anti-bot classifier watches for rapid alt-account farming and pump-dump manipulation on player-driven prices; a flagged account is blocked from the market. World-state, including market participation, persists per account across cross-platform play.

NPC schedules. Each NPC runs an authored daily routine — commute, work, lunch, leisure, sleep — and NPC schedules tick every 5 minutes. Per-district population density varies by time of day, NPCs react to the player, the player's vehicle, and faction allegiance, and an NPC may host an interactable mini-quest or act as a vendor.

Crime rate. A per-district crime gauge aggregates player and NPC criminal activity over 24-hour windows; cop spawn density follows the gauge, and per-district faction influence shifts the crime profile. An extreme crime rate triggers a district-wide police-lockdown cinematic.

Events and ops. A dynamic event rotation uses a per-day random seed shared across players for fairness, with a per-event rare-item drop pool. An economy ops dashboard tracks inflation, deflation, cosmetic-price distribution, inventory turnover, and crime-rate trends so live-ops can detect and correct runaway prices.

Part 9 — Platform, Production & Compliance#

Part 9 covers everything that makes V2 shippable and lawful: parental controls and accessibility, localization, telemetry, display tech and performance, asset budgets, patching and DRM, studio production, the compliance and privacy program, balance and engineering operations, studio wellness, VR / AR support, and hardware peripherals. It closes with the launch-readiness gate and the V2 exit criteria.

Parental Controls, Age Gating, Time-Played#

  • Age gating at boot per region law (COPPA US, GDPR-K EU, Korea GRB time-limits, China minor-account daily 1h limit, Australia / NZ ack screens).
  • Platform parental-control integration: Sony Family Management, Microsoft Family Safety, Nintendo Parental Controls, Steam Family View.
  • In-game parental dashboard (PIN-gated): toggle online play, voice chat, text chat, UGC visibility, custom-content download, cosmetic-shop spending limit, daily playtime limit, weekend-only mode, bedtime auto-shutoff. Per-child gore-tier and finisher-disable overrides.
  • Weekly time-played reports (in-game + email) with per-mode + per-fighter breakdown; parent-visible reports for child accounts; optional playtime nudge after N consecutive hours.
  • Real-money spending limits per account (daily / weekly / monthly); parent-set per-child PIN-gated caps; per-region maximums where law requires.
  • Disclosure: loot-box / surprise-mechanics disclosure (V2 has none — explicit statement), in-game purchases summary (lifetime + last 30d), refund flow per platform policy, health & safety warning screen.

Accessibility#

V2 ships accessibility as a first-class product surface with documented VPAT-style report at V2/docs/accessibility/. Key features:

Visual

  • Colorblind palettes (Deuteranopia, Protanopia, Tritanopia, Achromatopsia).
  • High-contrast HUD; HUD opacity slider; HUD scale 75-150%.
  • Reduced-motion mode (disables aggressive camera shakes, slow-mo, KO flash); reduce-screen-shake slider.
  • Photosensitivity / Epilepsy Safety: flash-frequency limiter on KO slow-mo, X-Ray cinematics, lightning VFX — opt-in enforcement at max 5 flashes/second per WCAG 2.1.
  • Dyslexia-friendly font (OpenDyslexic / Atkinson Hyperlegible bundled).
  • Big text mode (1.5× / 2× / 2.5× UI scaling).
  • Outline opponent / hit zone high-contrast silhouette in 3D modes.

Audio

  • Subtitles with size / background / speaker tag; commentary subtitle toggle; closed captions for crowd / SFX.
  • Mono audio, per-ear balance, adjustable audio ducking for tinnitus-friendly play.
  • Audio cues for: finisher window, parry timing, throw-tech window, counter-hit landed, wake-up frame 1, super flash, X-Ray flash, Blazin' ready.
  • Visual indicator for audio cues (closed-caption-style flash for hearing-impaired players).

Input / Motor

  • Full button rebinding with single-button special-move macros (assist mode; ranked-eligibility flag flips off when active).
  • Modern / Classic / Dynamic control schemes (SF6-style); Easy Fatalities / Easy Combos (token-gated or non-ranked).
  • Hold-to-press toggles for grapple / Blazin' / submission grid.
  • Auto-block, Auto-parry, Auto-tech assist tiers; per-tier ranked-eligibility flag.
  • One-handed control scheme.
  • Adaptive controller hardware profiled: PlayStation Access Controller, Xbox Adaptive Controller, Logitech Adaptive Gaming Kit, Hori / 8BitDo / Razer / Victrix / MadCatz fight sticks, hitbox / stickless layouts, mouse + keyboard with SOCD cleaning (last-input-wins / neutral / up-priority).
  • Eye tracking (Tobii / PSVR2) for menu navigation assist.

Cognitive

  • Pause-anywhere in single-player.
  • Practice-during-loading (free-practice during match load screens).
  • Quick Restart in training / arcade / tower.
  • Slow-down option (50% / 75% game-speed multiplier; non-ranked).
  • Rubber-banding option in SP CPU difficulty.
  • Tutorial-on-demand prompts when telemetry detects repeated mechanic failures.

Screen reader / menu narration

  • UI-element TTS narration; CVAA compliance for voice / text chat; party-chat speech-to-text caption availability where platform supports.

Verification

  • Accessibility preview / try-it on the setup screen.
  • Per-feature short-video explainer accessible from the settings page.

Localization & Voice-Over, Region Rating Variants#

Locales. V2 launches in 18 locales: English (US/UK), French (FR/CA), Spanish (ES/LATAM), Portuguese (BR/PT), German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Arabic (UI; VO under consideration), Hebrew (UI), Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. All strings are externalized; the UI supports RTL layout for Arabic and Hebrew and a font fallback chain so a missing glyph never renders as tofu.

Voice-over. A VO recording pipeline runs composition → recording → loudness normalization → Opus encode → per-fighter bank version, with budgeted iteration and pickup sessions. Per-fighter VO banks ship for ≥ 8 locales at launch; remaining locales are subtitle-only with a documented VO patch plan, and per-fighter banks hot-swap on patch without a full reinstall.

Region content. Per-region content rules — gore reductions, finisher swaps — are stored in a RegionVariant data asset, and a region-specific cook produces a tagged SKU per region; missing region data defaults to the most-restrictive profile. Region rating variants: Germany (USK 18, gore-restricted), Japan (CERO Z, reduced dismemberment), Russia / CIS (legal branch), China (separate publisher SKU, skeletal / political-symbol filter, minor time-limit), Saudi Arabia / GCC (alcohol / gambling adjustments), Korea (GRAC chat filter, loot-box disclosure), Australia (ACB R18+), New Zealand (OFLC R18), and Brazil (DJCTQ 18 + Portuguese BR VO).

Telemetry, Analytics, Balance#

Event schema. Telemetry covers match start / end, move usage, damage dealt and received per move, combo length, meter usage, finisher trigger rate, rage-quit, crash, and frame-budget exceedance. Events publish on canonical v2.match.*, v2.cosmetic.*, and v2.player.* topics — there is no V2-only ingest endpoint. A per-session sampling rate is randomized from 1-100%, but crash and cheat events are always sampled at 100% so a safety-relevant event is never dropped to sampling.

PII handling. A per-field PII allowlist strips raw IP, raw device fingerprint, and real-name fields at ingest so they never reach the analytics warehouse; per-region routing keeps EU / JP / KR / LATAM / CN player data in the correct residency zone. Telemetry opt-out persists across a save reset and is documented and localized in the privacy policy.

Balance analytics. Dashboards surface pick rate, win-rate-on-hit, win-rate-on-block, frame-data drift, and hot/cold character heatmaps. A balance change goes through an A/B framework on the PTB branch before live, with a rollback path; an ML recommender flags a candidate buff/nerf only on a ≥ 5,000-match sample at the target rank tier with a ≥ 5 pp win-rate delta and ≥ 0.95 matchup confidence, and a designer reviews every recommendation — none auto-applies.

Diagnostics. Ghost data capture and sharing are opt-in. The crash reporter is symbolicated; dev builds run in-the-loop fault injection to exercise crash and recovery paths before they reach players.

Display Tech, Performance, Platforms, Cert#

Display Tech#

  • HDR10 / HDR10+ / Dolby Vision with in-game calibration wizard.
  • VRR / Variable Refresh Rate support across PS5, XSX, PC.
  • 120 fps mode on PS5 / XSX / PC at reduced resolution.
  • 240 fps mode on PC for high-refresh monitors at low settings.
  • DLSS 3.5 + Frame Generation (NVIDIA RTX 40+); AMD FSR 3 + Frame Generation; Intel XeSS 2 with Frame Gen.
  • NVIDIA Reflex + AMD Anti-Lag 2 for input-lag reduction.
  • Hardware Ray Tracing (shadows, reflections, AO) per platform; optional Path Tracing preset for high-end PCs.
  • Variable-Rate Shading (VRS) Tier 2 on PC / XSX where supported.
  • DirectStorage 1.2 + GPU decompression on PC / XSX; equivalents on PS5 native SSD I/O.
  • Ultrawide 21:9 / 32:9 / 48:9 support with FOV-safe HUD bounds; multi-monitor span detection.

Performance#

  • Targets:
    • PS5: 4K/60 standard, with PS5 Pro 4K/60 + RT shadows + 120fps mode at 1080p.
    • Xbox Series X: 4K/60; Series S: 1440p/60.
    • Switch2: 1080p/60 docked; 720p/30 handheld with quality drop.
    • PC: 1440p/60 baseline on RTX 3060/4060, with high/ultra settings for high-end GPUs.
    • Steam Deck verified.
    • Cloud streaming (GeForce NOW, Luna, xCloud) where contracts permit.
  • Frame-time budgets: gameplay 4ms, anim 3ms, render 8ms, audio 1ms, network 0.5ms, GC ≤ 1ms incremental.
  • Loading: cold-boot ≤ 30s on PS5, mid-session match load ≤ 8s.
  • Cert: PlayStation TRC, Xbox XR, Switch2 lotcheck, Steam Deck verified, Microsoft Store cert.
  • Anti-cheat compatibility per platform.
  • Trophy / achievement plans across all modes, avoiding forced grind for basic completion.
  • Rating boards: ESRB M, PEGI 18, CERO Z, USK 18, ACB R18+, GRAC, with regional content adjustments.

Asset Budget & Streaming#

  • Per-fighter budget: principals ≤ 80k tris LOD0, mid-roster ≤ 60k, crowd ≤ 25k; LOD chain to LOD3 / impostor. Texture memory ≤ 64MB at 4K pack, ≤ 32MB 2K base, ≤ 8MB 1K Switch2. Anim package ≤ 80MB per fighter. Audio bank ≤ 50MB per locale.
  • Per-stage budget: ≤ 4M tris LOD0; texture ≤ 256MB at 4K pack; GPU stage ≤ 4ms at 4K; audio ≤ 30MB per locale.
  • Streaming pool sizes: PS5 / XSX 4GB, PC scalable to 8GB, Switch2 1.5GB.
  • Asset chunking: per-fighter chunked into character / voice / base-costume / alt-costume / cosmetic-pack chunks for incremental install + DLC.
  • LOD strategy: fighter LOD0 active in-camera; LOD1 mid-range; LOD2 menu; LOD3 / impostor for crowd. Crowd via instanced static mesh + bone-animated impostor at distance.
  • Asset audit weekly: orphan assets, oversize assets, missing LODs, missing skin weights, redundant material variants.

Day-One Patch, Hotfix, Quick-Resume, Crash Recovery, DRM#

  • Day-one patch + pre-load: ≤ 5GB day-one budget, ≤ 2GB typical patches, 48-72h pre-load window where platform permits, per-region staggered rollout, mandatory minimum-version check.
  • Hotfix system: server-driven balance hotfix capability for data-only changes within anti-cheat-trusted bounds; signed + versioned manifest; hotfix rollback capability; tournament-mode hotfix freeze at TO snapshot.
  • Quick-resume / app-switch: Xbox Quick Resume, PS5 instant-resume, Switch2 sleep-wake, PC sleep-wake.
  • Mid-match crash recovery: SP auto-save + resume; online ranked graceful disconnect with crash-vs-rage-quit attribution via crash reporter.
  • Background download during play with bandwidth throttling option.
  • DRM / Anti-piracy: Denuvo or equivalent at PC launch (removal-plan window 6-12 months post-launch); platform-native anti-piracy on console; cooked-asset integrity check at boot (safe-boot mode on failure).
  • Crash rate dashboard with release-gate threshold (≤ 1% crash rate per session per platform).

Production: Studio Ops, Mocap, VO, Composer, IP / NIL / Licensing, Stunt#

V2 is a multi-year, multi-studio production gated by a Greenlight → Alpha → Beta → Gold-master milestone sequence; each gate has documented exit criteria, and a post-launch first-30-day plan follows Gold.

Studio organization. An org chart is documented per discipline (design, engineering, art, animation, audio, narrative, VO, QA, release, ops, marketing, legal, accessibility, localization, esports ops). External studios integrate per discipline under master service agreements with asset-delivery SLAs and IP-assignment clauses. Per-fighter staffing rotates: each principal fighter gets a dedicated mini-team while mid-roster fighters share a pool team.

Mocap pipeline. Mocap studio operations cover a booking calendar, a stunt-double roster, SAG-AFTRA union compliance, insurance, and on-set medic and safety protocols. The data pipeline runs capture → cleanup / contact-root repair → retarget to the V2 skeleton → curve/keyframe edit → engine import; every capture first clears active consent and a NIL link before ingest, and a revocation blocks future processing for dependent clips. Session footage is archived for the behind-the-scenes gallery.

Voice and music. VO is cast per fighter per launch locale (≥ 8 locales), scripted from the dialogue spreadsheet, recorded on a booked booth schedule with a pickup-session budget and a per-locale VO director; per-locale banks are versioned and hot-swap on patch. A lead composer plus per-ruleset sub-composers produce ≥ 60 unique launch tracks including per-fighter signature themes and license-cleared hip-hop for the DJ ruleset; the music library is DMCA-safe, with per-locale remixes where culturally appropriate, and the soundtrack releases as a separate consumer product (vinyl / digital).

Rights. Original characters carry trademark and copyright; licensed guests sign term / royalty / removal-clause contracts; real-world fighters sign NIL agreements with hide-on-request; stunt performers receive credit and residuals. A per-jurisdiction publicity-rights review runs, and estates may opt likenesses out. Music and SFX clear mechanical, sync, and master rights with hip-hop sample-clearance, and only commercial-use (non-royalty-bearing) SFX libraries are used. A per-asset rights manifest is verified at cook so no asset ships without cleared rights or original-IP status. Brand partnerships ship with disclosure requirements and per-region visibility caps.

Compliance Deep: GDPR / CCPA / DSA / DSAR / Data Portability#

V2 honors data-subject rights as a first-class product surface:

  • Per-account data subject rights UI: Access, Rectification, Erasure, Portability, Restriction, Objection — operational in 30d (EU) / 45d (CCPA) SLA.
  • Granular consent management with explicit, withdrawable opt-ins per processing purpose.
  • GDPR compliance (DPO designated, lawful basis documented, 72h breach notification, EU-only data residency option).
  • CCPA / CPRA + state-level US privacy laws (CO / VA / CT / UT / TX / MT) with Do-Not-Sell / Do-Not-Share opt-out.
  • EU DSA: Statement of Reasons API for moderation actions, Trusted Flagger program, semi-annual transparency reports, out-of-court dispute resolution path, systemic-risk assessment.
  • EU AI Act compliance for adaptive AI, AI commentary, anti-cheat classifiers, and AI generation pipelines — each service has a V2/docs/ai/model-cards/ Model Card hosted by @nous/safety and a conformity audit export owned by @themis/accountability.
  • Per-region data residency: EU / Japan / Korea / LATAM / China-publisher-SKU separated storage; cross-region transfer mechanism documented (SCC / BCR).
  • In-game DSR form with 2FA auth; @v2/themis-privacy-dsr-routing sends Access / Erasure / Portability / Rectification through @themis/privacy and @oshun/data-residency; portability JSON export includes full profile / match / telemetry / cosmetic / friends / replay metadata; erasure preserves anonymized aggregates where lawful.
  • V2 audit routing: moderation, anti-cheat, and DSR publish canonical events through @oshun/audit-platform; V2 publishes and Oshun retains and exports the investigation-ready audit record.
  • V2 service observability: every apps/v2/* package and the V2Services Unreal module wire @oshun/metrics and @oshun/tracing as required from day one; the observability path is off rollback.
  • Concordia substrate composition: anti-cheat appeals, tournament-result disputes, and crew conflicts use @v2/concordia-substrate to compose @nous/cooperative-bargaining, @nous/preference-inference, @nous/agreement-search, @nous/concordia-sealed-memory, and @iris/concordia-assistant plus @oshun/concordia-integration and @kuanyin/concordia-restorative while @concordia/* remains planned-only. Iris scaffolds appellant / arbiter dialogue through party-isolated prompt contexts and sealed private-context refs; Oshun routes privacy-projected Concordia events into V2 nav, audit, and telemetry descriptors; Kuanyin gates high-impact anti-cheat appeal restorative circles behind safety checks. @oshun/config owns external launch exposure through ENABLE_V2_CONCORDIA_SUBSTRATE, which defaults disabled while internal off-rollback composition checks continue.
  • Cookie / consent banner on web (TCF 2.2; granular per-category opt-in).
  • Children's data minimization + per-region minor protections (COPPA / GDPR-K / Korea GRB / China minor / Australia eSafety / Quebec Bill 25).

Balance Operations: Tier List, Matchup Chart, Public Frame Data#

Published tier and matchup data. Each major patch publishes an official tier list with rationale and suggested counters, plus a per-rank-tier sub-tier-list because what is strong at Bronze differs from what is strong at Master. A matchup chart is auto-generated from match-result data with per-rank-tier variation and an optional per-stage variance view.

Public frame data. Complete runtime frame data publishes to the /v2/wiki, /v2/glossary, and /v2/roadmap knowledge pages and the companion app, backed by cited RAG answers, plus a raw CSV download and a per-patch frame-data diff visualizer. The published data is exported from the same spreadsheet-of-truth that drives runtime data tables, so the public frame data and the live game can never disagree.

Patch cadence and process. Buff/nerf changes ship on a monthly-major, bi-weekly-minor cadence. A 2-week balance freeze precedes each major, during which a pro-player feedback channel runs a pre-patch consultation. Each fighter keeps a public changelog at V2/balance/changelog/<fighter>.md, and a 2-week community comment window opens after every patch. An ML balance recommender proposes candidates with telemetry justification but is designer-reviewed and never auto-applied; the A/B framework validates changes on the PTB branch first.

Player feedback. An in-game balance survey runs post-patch, with additional tournament-specific polls feeding the balance team.

Engineering Polish: PSO Pre-Cache, Shader Pre-Warm, Asset Pre-Load#

  • PSO pre-cache at first launch enumerating every shader / pipeline state used in first 5 minutes; per-platform PSO blobs shipped pre-compiled; per-driver-upgrade rebuild.
  • Shader pre-warm dummy-rendering every variant; per-cosmetic-pack pre-warm on load.
  • Asset pre-load on save-game open + smart pre-load based on player session pattern.
  • Adaptive server tickrate: 60Hz default → 30Hz under load; rollback always 60Hz sim; ranked / tournaments 60Hz mandatory.
  • V-Sync default-on for console; VRR auto-toggles when a variable-refresh display is detected; NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2 are enabled for input-lag reduction; triple-buffered render with frame-pacing tooling.
  • Async asset streaming + async save during match (low-priority worker thread).
  • Background services (Battle Pass tier-up, Mastery level-up, Achievement progress, Friend list refresh) on dedicated worker thread; background download with bandwidth throttling.
  • Dev-only performance overlay + per-platform Performance Mode preset.
  • Per-session telemetry sampling randomized 1-100% with crash + cheat events always 100% sampled.

Privacy-by-Design, DPIA, Sub-Processor Registry, Extended Per-Region Compliance#

  • Privacy-by-design documentation per feature + per-feature DPIA for features touching identifiable / sensitive data + privacy review gate at every release-gate.
  • Public sub-processor list with 30-day notice for new additions + per-platform DPA.
  • California AB 2273 (AADC) compliance for minor accounts (data minimization, default-private privacy, no profiling, no dark patterns).
  • Quebec Bill 96 French-language + Quebec Bill 25 data subject rights compliance.
  • Brazil Marco Civil + LGPD compliance.
  • Italy lottery-law / Belgium loot-box ban / France in-game advertising disclosure compliance (V2 has no loot boxes; transparent disclosure).
  • Quarterly privacy review by DPO + legal.
  • Erasure audit trail with anonymized retention.
  • Privacy ops on-call rotation for breach response.

Studio Wellness: Crunch Policy, Mental Health, Sensitivity Reading, DEI#

  • No-crunch commitment: 40-hour-baseline week with documented exception process + mandatory comp time; weekly hours monitored; PTO mandatory minimums + carryover caps; weekend / holiday work prohibited except for designated on-call.
  • Mental health support: EAP + crisis line + mental health days separate from PTO + trauma-informed workplace for staff handling sensitive content.
  • Sensitivity readers per cultural / ethnic / gender / religious / disability identity for narrative + character / costume / lore review; per-fighter cultural review sign-off documented.
  • DEI consultancy partnership for hiring + content + community management.
  • Accessibility consultancy partnership (AbleGamers / similar) with per-feature review gate.
  • Transparent compensation bands + bonus / equity / royalty structure documented.
  • Zero-tolerance harassment policy with anonymous reporting + independent ombudsperson.
  • Remote / hybrid work with time-zone respect + async-first culture.
  • Wellness budget per employee + studio-wide quarterly wellness day.
  • Realistic scoping discipline: feature scope is sized to the staffed, no-crunch schedule, and milestones are descoped rather than crunched when estimates slip — protecting both shipped quality and team health.

VR / AR Support: PSVR2 / Quest 3 / Vision Pro#

  • VR ruleset compatibility matrix: racing rulesets all VR-eligible; fighting rulesets toggle-able with motion-sickness considerations.
  • PSVR2 (PS5) with 4K-per-eye 120Hz mode + foveated rendering + eye tracking + DualSense Edge as motion controller.
  • Meta Quest 3 native VR with hand tracking + per-frame async-time-warp + cross-buy with PC.
  • Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality with passthrough + gaze-and-pinch input + spatial audio Atmos integration.
  • PC VR (SteamVR + Oculus + Windows MR) with per-platform render scale + per-platform input mapping.
  • Comfort modes: vignette during turning + snap-turn + per-player comfort level; per-vehicle cockpit cam with authentic VR head-tracking; per-mode VR HUD layout with minimal elements as physical 3D objects.
  • Vision Pro mixed-reality: vehicles drive on player's real-world floor via passthrough; fight in player's real-world room.
  • AR companion experience for spectator tracking a friend's match on TV / phone screen.
  • Cross-play VR vs non-VR opt-in for non-ranked; per-input-method labeling in matchmaking.
  • Per-platform VR cert (Sony VR TRC + Meta Quest Store cert + Apple Vision Pro cert) + per-platform comfort review + epilepsy / motion-sickness compliance.
  • VR-specific accessibility: seated mode + one-controller mode + voice-activated menu + subtitle positioning customizable in 3D space.

Hardware Peripherals Deep#

  • Per-wheel vendor SDK (Logitech G-Series / Thrustmaster / Fanatec / Hori / MOZA / Cammus / Asetek SimSports / Simucube) with per-vehicle FFB profile authored + per-vehicle FFB tuning UI (gain / dynamic-range / linearity / damping / spring / friction) + Direct-Drive specific scaling.
  • Per-pedal vendor SDK (Logitech / Thrustmaster / Fanatec / Heusinkveld / Asetek Invicta / Simucube Active Pedal) with per-pedal calibration + pedal load-cell support.
  • H-Shifter / Sequential shifter SDK (Logitech G PRO / Thrustmaster TH8A / Fanatec ClubSport SQ V1.5 / MOZA HGP) with per-vehicle eligible shifter + reverse-engagement input.
  • Handbrake SDK (Logitech / Thrustmaster / Fanatec / MOZA / Heusinkveld) with per-vehicle handbrake (drift Carbon-style / rally off-road).
  • Button box / Sim rig support (Fanatec Podium Button Box / Cube Controls / Stream Deck integration / SimVibe / ButtKicker tactile feedback).
  • Per-fight-stick vendor SDK (Hori / 8BitDo / Razer Kitsune / Victrix Pro FS / MadCatz MK1 Fightstick / Qanba / Mayflash F500) with per-stick optimal layout suggestion.
  • Adaptive / accessible controllers: PlayStation Access Controller + Xbox Adaptive Controller + Logitech Adaptive Gaming Kit + Quadstick (mouth-operated for severely motor-impaired).
  • First-launch calibration wizard for detected peripheral; profile save / share.
  • Community FFB profile gallery with player-tuned profiles + rating + comment system.
  • Per-vendor partner program with early-access + launch tie-in marketing.
  • Per-controller-class ranked pool (Wheel + Pedals vs Gamepad in tournament mode) with per-pool assists baseline.
  • Per-platform peripheral TRC with per-peripheral cert pass.

Launch Readiness#

V2 launches only when every gate below is satisfied; the gates are verified, not asserted, and a failed gate blocks the launch date.

Feel and netcode. All seven inspirational rulesets are verified to feel like their sources by an external playtest staffed with veterans of each franchise. Rollback netcode delivers 1v1 play at ≤ 100 ms RTT that is indistinguishable from local play at ≤ 30 ms.

Content completeness. Every launch-day mode delivers a complete experience with no "coming soon" panels. Story, MyCAREER, MyRISE, Universe, MyGM, MyFACTION, GOAT Career, Tekken Force, Devil Within, Chronicles of the Sword, Def Jam Story, World Tour, and Battle Hub are content-complete. The roster is ≥ 60 fighters, stages ≥ 30, and ruleset coverage spans all inspirational families.

Stability and operations. Internal dogfood has run ≥ 60 days across every mode and platform; a closed beta has hit measurable targets for concurrent peak, matchmaking time, rollback frame distribution, crash rate, and anti-cheat false-positive rate. A network stress test has passed at 5× launch-estimated concurrency. Accessibility, performance, security, anti-cheat, observability, runbooks, canary analysis, rollback triggers, and post-deploy monitors all satisfy their launch gates; a per-platform and per-service rollback plan is in place, and the day-one patch is staged.

Compliance. Rating boards have approved the build with regional content adjustments cooked per region, and critical-journey verification has run across every advertised mode.

Oshun Ecosystem Integration: Companion App, Public API, Knowledge Surfaces#

V2 ships as a first-class citizen of the wider Oshun platform rather than a walled-off game. Three surfaces bind it to the ecosystem, and all of them stay strictly off the deterministic gameplay path.

Public companion API. A read-mostly public API is served from apps/oshun/web/api/v2/ (typed request handlers) through apps/oshun/web/src/app/api/v2/ (the Next.js route adapters) under the /api/v2 base path. The contract is generated from libs/openapi/v2/companion.yaml and consumed through the shared @oshun/openapi client so third-party tools, the in-game wiki, and the companion app all read the same typed surface.

Mobile companion app. The companion app lives at apps/oshun/mobile/v2/ and is composed from existing platform libraries — @oshun/shell-core for the app shell, @oshun/auth-client for cross-progression sign-in, @oshun/concordia-integration for the shared identity substrate, @oshun/trust-safety for reporting and moderation entry points, @iris/agents for the conversational help agents, and @sophia/client for knowledge lookup.

Sophia knowledge surfaces. The in-app wiki, glossary, and public roadmap are answered by @sophia/client retrieval-augmented generation, and every answer renders inline source citations so players can trace a claim back to the authoritative frame data or design doc.

No-Stub commitment. Every surface listed across this document ships fully implemented at launch — no placeholder screens, no "coming soon" panels, and no mocked backends standing in for real services. A surface that cannot meet that bar does not ship in the advertised mode list until it can.

V2 Exit Criteria#

V2 is complete when every section in V2_TODOS.md is fully checked, including P2/P3 full-vision expansion sections, AND the adversarial scan turns up zero actionable hits AND launch-readiness drills have run across every target platform. See V2_TODOS.md §138 for the launch gating checklist and V2/docs/agent-execution.md for coding-agent workflow.

Status (2026-06-12): clause 2 is pending — no launch-readiness drill has run on any platform; the repo holds a UE C++ source skeleton with a single .uasset and no cooked or packaged builds, so the drill clause cannot yet be satisfied. Concurrency gates in §138 are sized against the planning assumption of 100,000 CCU launch-estimated global concurrency (5× = 500,000), adopted 2026-06-12 against SF6/MK1-scale launch peaks; revisit at beta.