The Skullgirl herself is finally here - Marie is now playable in her Alpha state for Season Pass holders!
NOTE: The Linux version of Marie's Alpha is not available just yet due to some final bug fixing and polishing that is needed for that build. As soon as that build is ready, Marie will be available on Linux too. Thanks for your patience.
In classic Skullgirls tradition, Marie will arrive in an unfinished state with a few work-in-progress "sketchy" frames. As mentioned in our "State of the Game" post shared earlier, Marie is much further along compared to previous characters due to her fully releasing on Skullgirls Mobile first before the Steam alpha.
Read more details about her release and other changes below!
HOW COMPLETE IS MARIE?
Marie has all of her moves, voice acting, and sound effects in this build. Some of her moves still don't have fully cleaned up frames, but everything should be pretty functional. We expect she will need additional tuning, bug fixing, and balancing just like every other character during their Alpha period.
You can report bugs in our official Discord, or our official forum in the Marie section.
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/skullgirls
Skullheart Forums: https://skullheart.com/
HOW DO I SELECT MARIE?
Characters in their Alpha phase are currently only available to Season 1 Pass holders. If you don't own the Season 1 Pass DLC, you won't be able to use Marie yet. You can pick up the Season 1 Pass here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1557981/Skullgirls_Season_1_Pass
Once you have the Season 1 Pass DLC, launch the game in BETA mode by pressing the green PLAY button on Skullgirls 2nd Encore from your Steam library page, then selecting "Skullgirls Beta (Marie Alpha)". You can also launch the game in BETA mode by navigating to the in-game Options menu, and pressing "Switch To Beta".
In BETA mode, you can pick Marie on the character select screen as normal!
HOW CAN I BUY HER DLC SEPARATELY?
Once Marie's Alpha phase is over, her individual character DLC will go live in Early Access on the Steam store. This will allow you to play Marie during her Early Access Beta phase without owning the Season 1 Pass.
For Marie, we expect her Alpha phase to end and her Early Access (Steam only) phase to start once all of her animations are fully complete and colored. We're currently targeting December 2023 for this date.
WHEN WILL MARIE BE FULLY RELEASED ON ALL PLATFORMS?
While we were originally targeting December 2023 for Marie's full release on all platforms including consoles, it is likely that her release will be pushed back to sometime early in the new year of 2024.
The finalized version of Marie with all her bells and whistles needs to be submitted to all console platforms much earlier than December 1st in order to have a chance at releasing before the holidays, since most platform support teams will be unavailable. It's very unlikely that all of her art will be fully finalized by that date, so Q1 2024 is our anticipated release date at this time.
WHEN WILL BALANCE PATCH CHANGES START?
You may have noticed a lot of buzz about balance changes on our official forums or in various online communities. The balance patch discussion is humming along and we're making changes as we speak to prepare the first build that will contain them.
We don't have enough of these changes ready at this time for a substantial first balance patch build, so we're going to wait a little bit longer until we have more changes to release all at once. You can expect to see changes start to arrive before the end of the month.
Full Update Notes
Marie
- Added Marie as a playable character.
- Added 19 color palettes for Marie, with many more to arrive in future updates.
(... Note that since palette 7 is unlocked by completing her story mode, it cannot be obtained at this time, and is just a duplicate of her original palette for now.) - Added Marie's stage, Hilgard's Castle.
- Added Marie's stage music, "All That Remains" composed by Darren Malley.
Other
- Adjusted visual effects and lighting when characters are impacted by palette adjusting VFX, such as Parasoul's fire effect, Annie's galaxy space dust effect, Robo-Fortune's electrification effect, Black Dahlia's freeze effect, etc. Flickering lights involved with these effects should be less distracting, and character's themselves are no longer impacted by stage lighting conditions.
- When declining a match in Quick Match, or recently finishing a match with a player, you will no longer match with that player again for a few minutes.
- When kicking a player from a lobby, kicked players can no longer join the lobby again immediately after.
- Integrated some previously unused voice lines for older characters when fighting against Marie. Some are used for boss Marie, playable Marie, or both.
- Fixed a bug where Black Dahlia would not flinch when getting punched in the face by Cerebella during pummel horse. She's tough, but not THAT tough.
- Adjusted the position of the timer on character select when playing online.
(Build version 3.6.0)