During the recent Killer Instinct world cup held at PAX South the developers Iron Galaxy announced a new character arriving with Season 3 as well as a long list of balance changes.

The latest character to be added to the Season 3 roster is Kim Wu, a "martial artist, design student and demon ass-kicker". Here's the announcement trailer and even if you're not interested in the character I'd still recommend you give it a look:

Along with Kim Wu's announcement came a blog post detailing Iron Galaxy's approach to balance and the upcoming changes. Here's the short version:

"We want to encourage player creativity in playstyles, setups, and combos. Playing any character in KI should be a way to express yourself. The things you find aren’t just flashy, they are practical for in-match use.

We want to further tune the concept of Risk vs Reward within our Combo and Breaker systems, and on each individual character. This is a significant balance shake up, so anything can happen!

Remember – the rebalance is a sum of all parts. System changes, character changes, etc.   Don’t think about a change you see and how it would act against a S2 character, as that will tell you the wrong story. Take it all in, try not to panic, you’ll be playing it very soon and we look forward to your feedback."

While I am absolutely terrible at fighting games I can tell you with great certainty that Iron Galaxy holds a lot of love for Killer Instinct and its balance. The reason I say this is because the tweaks proposed in the post are mostly small (a 10% here, a 5% there) so even though some characters are going to get the smacked down with the nerf bat it won't feel like your favorite character is being taken away.

Not to mention that even characters that got the heaviest of nerfs also gained a couple of quality of life fixes, or straight up buffs to their unused combos making them weaker overall but more compelling to play. If you're interested in the full patch notes head over here though I'm giving you a fair warning right now, if you go down that rabbit hole you'll be in there for a while.

The release date for Season 3 & the PC version of Killer Instinct haven't been announced yet though Iron Galaxy did say they have some more exciting news to share in the coming days so keep an eye out for that.