Killer Instinct won't receive Arcade Mode until Season One wraps up
But it will launch with offline play in Survival and Dojo Modes.
Xbox One free-to-play fighter Killer Instinct won't receive it's single-player campaign, Arcade Mode, until all of Season One is released.
"Our Arcade mode is going to come out when we've done the eight characters [ending Season One]," said Microsoft Studios game designer Daniel Fornace in an interview with OXM. "So once the last character comes out then we'll have Arcade."
A little background: The game will launch with six characters upon the Xbox One's launch on 22nd November, and another two will be added in the months to follow. One of the initial six fighters, Jago, will be free-to-play, but unlocking the other characters will cost £3.99 / €4.99 / $4.99 each, or you can buy a Season Pass for £16.99 / €19.99 / $19.99 and get all eight fighters - unless of course you were lucky and received a free code for all of Season One's content.
While the launch version of Killer Instinct won't include Arcade Mode, it will contain some form of offline play in Survival and Dojo Modes.
"Survival is like our endless mode," Fornace explained to OXM. "The way it works is you pick a difficulty and you go in, and you're basically playing a long chain, and after each match you regenerate health, but as you go on you generate less and less, and even if you do beginner difficulty, as you get to the higher numbers the CPU does start getting tougher, so you'll still hit a limit. You set your difficulty to where you're at - so if you set it to Champion it'll start hard and get even worse."
Fornace also noted that players will be able to spend their "Killer Points" (the in-game currency) to start at whichever stage of Survival Mode they left off at before, though this is only recommended for practice as you won't get the cumulative high score from the skipped stages. Think of it like using a shortcut in Spelunky.
"The Dojo is our big tutorial mode," Fornace added. "We're teaching you about Killer Instinct, but we're also trying to teach you about fighting games in general, and their terminology, because often you'll hear people talk about fighting games, and you know they just don't know what they're talking about."