Marvel Tōkon’s PC Open Beta Faces Major Issues

The open beta for Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls launched yesterday on PlayStation 5 and PC, and players on PS5 seem to be enjoying the new fighter reminiscent of Marvel vs. Capcom—at least after the PlayStation Network got its act together.

On the other hand, those diving into the PC version are facing some challenges, particularly with the game’s surprising CPU demands. There are countless posts on social media platforms detailing performance issues, with many users pointing fingers at the multiple Sony services that kick in when the game starts.

Given that this is an open beta, some might brush off these concerns, but with the official release just around the corner on August 6, it’s a pressing issue. I ran some tests on my setup, which includes a Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, an RTX 4080 graphics card, and 64GB of RAM. While I’m not a performance analysis expert, I can confirm that even on medium settings, Marvel Tōkon struggled on my system.

For example, the game frequently consumed over 95% of my CPU and sometimes used up to 5,000MB of RAM. Additionally, six instances of the PlayStation PC SDK Runtime launched alongside the game, though they didn’t significantly impact performance.

After letting Marvel Tōkon run for about 30 minutes, I noticed a drop in CPU usage to around 60%. This might be due to shader compilation during startup, but it’s odd that the game encounters this issue every time I launch it, not just the first time.

Even after the initial wait, online matches were still problematic. My CPU usage spiked back to 90% during these matches, which I initially thought might be a connection issue or a crossplay glitch, but it turned out to be the game itself taxing my CPU.

I can only hope this is a temporary anti-datamining measure, as many tech-savvy players speculate, because otherwise, I’m not sure how the developers will resolve these issues before launch.

On a positive note, the developers have acknowledged the performance problems in an official statement, assuring players that they are investigating the issues and working on a fix. They promised to provide updates as more information becomes available.

For those eager to grab Marvel Tōkon on PC at the beginning of August, it might be wise to hold off until the Steam reviews come in rather than jumping in on day one.