Marvel Tokon players are trying weird solutions to fix the bad PC port

Placebo or panacea, who can say?

It’s no secret that Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls' Windows PC port is having serious problems. Many players are running into performance issues that make the game borderline unplayable thanks to stutters and frame drops. The game’s Steam reviews are currently sitting at a dismal 40% approval, with most detractors criticizing these technical hiccups.

Because of these widespread issues, players are taking some very interesting (i.e., somewhat desperate and/or unhinged) steps to try and fix the latest Marvel game. The most difficult-to-believe suggestion — reposted by the X account WheelsFGC from an unspecified Discord chat — is that players should run Epic Games Store (EGS) once in the background, even if they are playing on Steam. Since Marvel Tokon uses Unreal Engine 5 and communicates with Epic Games’ backend services, running EGS in the background at least once is supposed to make these integrations run more smoothly. It's unclear whether this strange workaround actually does anything, as some players wrote it did the trick in the post's X comments, while others said the opposite.

Fighting game streamer Chris F surfaced another weird suggestion to fix the game's problems with microstuttering: use the software Riva Tuner Statistics Server (RTSS) to set the framerate to exactly 59.9 frames per second. While one of RTSS’s main features is limiting framerates to reduce microstutter, it’s a bit odd that setting it to 59.9 is what it takes to fix the problem. Beyond this, there’s a long list of suggested fixes: using the in-game “Set Graphics Automatically” feature, manually reloading the shaders, and so on.

While it’s hard to say if any of these fixes actually solve players’ issues with the game or if they’re just a placebo, perhaps the worst part is that even if you get the game to run perfectly on your PC, you're unlikely to have a smooth experience with multiplayer. If you play an opponent who is having technical issues, this will almost certainly affect the match. Even if the game is running flawlessly on your rig (both in terms of hardware and internet connection), an opponent's technical issues can actually cause the game to stutter more on your end than theirs. While this sounds counterintuitive, it's an unfortunate side effect of how fighting game netcode tends to work called "one-sided rollback."

The situation is so bad that prominent fighting game streamer Maximiliian Dood — who is particularly well-known for fighting games like Marvel vs. Capcom — uninstalled the PC version of the game mid-stream to play it on PS5 instead. The online tournament series Tampa Never Sleeps banned Windows PC players from competing in their brackets for the game. Others on PS5 are turning off crossplay so they won’t have to interact with these problems, cordoning off PC players like plague patients.

As for Marvel Tokon's actual gameplay, players are somewhat divided. While most enjoy the excellent visuals and the characters’ varied playstyles, others have taken issue with the game’s slow central movement and combos. Hopefully, Arc System Works and Sony will find a way to fix this poor PC port so conversations about the game can center on balance and design decisions instead of strange workarounds that might not actually do anything.