Arc System Works moved fast. Just four days after Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls launched on August 6, the developer pushed a sizeable 10 GB patch to the PC version, directly targeting the stuttering, frame drops, and crashes that had been making the game nearly unplayable for a chunk of the playerbase.
The PS5 version launched to a largely positive reception. The PC version? Not so much. Players flooded forums over the opening weekend with complaints about inconsistent frame rates, input lag, and sudden crashes. Fighting game content creator Maximilian Dood went as far as uninstalling the game after experiencing severe stuttering and lag, which tells you exactly how bad things were.
What was actually breaking the game on PC
Here's the thing: the problems weren't just vague "optimization issues." The patch notes spell out two specific culprits that were hammering performance.
First, the game was running unnecessary audio processing during matches, which kept CPU usage abnormally high throughout play. Second, and this one is particularly frustrating, the game was constantly polling for available audio inputs even when nothing had changed. Those repeated checks were directly causing the sudden frame drops players kept reporting. Neither of these are exotic hardware compatibility problems. They're software bugs that should have been caught before release.
The patch also fixed a separate issue where selecting certain screen resolutions would trigger frame rate drops, and improved the auto spec detection system so the game actually picks a graphics profile that fits your hardware rather than defaulting to settings your machine can't handle.
What the patch actually changes
The full list of PC fixes breaks down into three main areas:
- CPU load reduction: Fixes for high CPU usage during startup and unnecessary audio processing during matches
- Sudden performance drops: The audio input polling bug has been addressed
- Frame rate drops: Fixed for certain resolution selections
- Auto graphics quality: Improved detection to better match your system specs
On top of the performance work, the patch also addresses a couple of non-PC bugs. A battle settings issue where restarting the game would reset customization items and colors back to default has been fixed, as has an online lobby bug where switching attack button display to action icons caused some buttons to stop responding during open lobby mini-games.
Early reactions and what's still missing
Player response to the patch has been cautiously positive. Reports of smoother performance and reduced input lag are coming in, which is a good sign given how rough the first weekend was. That said, Linux support remains completely absent, and there's been no word on when or if that will change. For Linux players, this patch does nothing.
The game that arguably set the standard for Marvel fighting games in terms of card-based strategy was Marvel's Midnight Suns, which took a completely different approach to the Marvel license. Tokon is going the traditional tag fighter route, and the core gameplay on PS5 has been well-received enough that fixing the PC version matters. This isn't a game people want to abandon.
Four days is a reasonably fast turnaround for a patch of this scope, and identifying specific bugs like the audio polling issue rather than releasing vague "stability improvements" is the right way to communicate with players. Whether the fix holds up under real-world conditions across a wider range of hardware configs will become clearer over the next few days.
For players who want to get more out of the game while performance issues continue to get sorted, the Marvel's Midnight Suns guides and broader gaming guides at GAMES.GG cover Marvel gaming strategy in depth.
