EVO 2020 Online Line-up

The biggest fighting game tournament in the world, EVO, revealed its final line up for 2020. The announcement comes with a number of changes to the top games and new open tournaments as well. EVO moved to an online format after cancelling its live event at the Mandalay Bay this upcoming August. EVO 2020 Online starts in July and runs through the entire month.

EVO is moving online but the main games are mostly unchanged. Dragonball Fighterz, Tekken 7, and Street Fighter V have top billing. Granblue Fantasy Versus, Samurai Shodown, Under Night and Soul Calibur VI join them as premier games. Joining these tournaments are three new open brackets featuring some lesser known games. Killer Instinct, Skullgirls 2nd Encore, Mortal Kombat 1 and Them's Fighting Herds are all included in this year's event. Mortal Kombat fans should be very excited as the game originally didn't make the EVO 2020 cut.

The additional games have reputations in the FGC for having superior netcode. This means playing matches online should have less latency and input lag as some of the other games. Netcode is a source of contention for online fighting games, as the margin between correct and incorrect inputs can be fractions of a second. The state of each game's online systems is a source of worry for gamers. For instance, no one wants a grand finalist to get disqualified for disconnecting.

Speaking of internet concerns, there's a couple of major games missing from the new event. Smash Ultimate, as a result of its poor online connectivity, is not included in this year's EVO. Leaving Smash out couldn't have been an easy choice for EVO organizers. The game saw the most Twitch views at EVO 2019 and was finally starting to garner good will with the FGC. Similarly, Marvel vs Capcom 2 also misses the cut, mostly for being a much older game with older online infrastructure.

EVO 2020 Online begins July 4th with matches every weekend until August 2nd.