During the Indie Showcase on Friday at Evo 2023, Dan Fornace, the Studio Lead at Aether Studios, took to the stage to talk about their upcoming title, Rivals 2. The game, which is scheduled to launch in 2024, has already revealed five of the Rivals that will be in the base roster when the game launches: Zetterburn, Wrastor, Ranno, and Kragg, who are all returning from the studio’s original game, Rivals of Aether; and a new original character to Rivals 2, Fleet. As part of their Evo presentation, Dan unveiled the latest character coming back from Rivals of Aether: Maypul!

Players familiar with Maypul will recognize her plant companion, Lily, who returns as a part of the Sylvan Watcher’s moveset. Much like in the original game, Maypul’s gameplan is centered around planting Lily on the battlefield and using her speed and special moves to apply a seed debuff to the enemy and combo them into her floral friend to set up for a strong finisher. However, she also brings some new tricks to Rivals 2 including two more plant friends named Terry and Poppy.

For a complete breakdown of Maypul in Rivals 2, check out their full dev panel from Evo 2023. 

As part of their presentation, the studio also announced that they are teaming up with High Horse Entertainment to provide SnapNet, their server-based rollback netcode solution, to Rivals 2 to deliver players an optimal online experience. Unlike other fighting games that use peer-to-peer connections, SnapNet is optimized to reduce latency for both one-on-one and multiplayer battles! 

We can’t wait to learn more about Rivals 2 as we approach its planned 2024 release. To keep up with the latest news from Aether Studios, be sure to follow them on Twitter! If you want to watch the full Indie Showcase from Evo 2023, you can find all of the panels and presentations on the Evo YouTube channel.