Rivals on Switch is getting a massive update today! We’re packing in improvements from 6 patches from over the last year into one mega-patch that brings all kinds of fun updates and upgrades to the game for our console players.
On top of this already great news, the game is also on sale on both Nintendo Switch and Steam for 50% off from 6/29/23 10AM PT – 7/13/23 10AM PT. It’s the perfect time to check it out on the eShop for yourself or share with a friend.
Patch Highlights
More Customization: You can now personalize premium skins! This applies to all alternate skins from the milestone system.
More Balance: Balance changes have been applied across the cast, especially for the 4 newest characters to help keep them fun and fair.
More Stage Variants: A bunch of stages now have fun visual changes during the last stock. New large variants of Crystal Oasis and Highdive Hideaway for doubles and 4-player modes have been added.
More Bugfixes: We broke out the flyswatter and fixed a swathe of gamebugs as well as Switch specific bugs reported by the community.
Detailed Patch Notes
If you’d like to read the detailed patch notes for everything that went into this update, please refer to the articles below. Changes listed in these patches are all included in Switch update 2.1.5.5, with the exception of changes related to features not available on Switch such as Steam Workshop and rollback.
The notes above include bugfixes that apply to both PC and Switch, but here are some additional Switch-only issues that we’ve also fixed specifically for this update:
Fixed an issue that caused a game crash when choosing an alt stage online.
Attempting to view replays from online matches using certain character/custom color combinations should no longer cause a crash.
Custom colors should now show up properly for both players online.
Fixed various Abyss Mode rune issues related to Orcane rune M, Maypul rune C, and Mollo runes G, D, and J.
This year we’re excited to introduce the eighth season of the Rivals Championship Series. Eight years is a long time running for any esports league, and certainly a long time for a small indie game that had big competitive goals. This season has us feeling a bit sentimental as we look back on past years, while at the same time our studio is working on the future of the Aether franchise with Rivals 2. We want to take this opportunity to thank all of the players, fans, and tournament organizers that have taken part in the past or supported the RCS in any way. Attending events, viewing streams, grabbing skins that help fund events, or even just talking about the RCS online has helped it come to life. As we gear up for season 8, here are the details for how everything will look:
Events
RCS Season 8 has seven unique tournaments ranging coast to coast and traversing the world wide web. This season we’ll be following a similar format to previous years, focusing on one event per month spanning from July 2023 to our Finals in January 2024. We’ll be kicking off Season 8 with 3 events this summer – an online event, a massive community-ran sequel, and the return of a Goliath.
The Season 8 kickoff is shaping up to be a diverse representation of the North American competitive scene while the second leg is largely composed of events yet to be announced. Let’s take a look at our full schedule as it stands:
As always, the RCS will see a healthy injection of developer support including the completion of our Champion skin line, paid DLC skins with profits going directly to prize pools, and travel vouchers to our January Finals. This season we’re looking to release Champion Skins for Pomme and Hodan at the first and last online events respectively, while aiming to unveil all new paid skins for characters such as Olympia, Kragg, and more to pump up pot bonuses across the board. Our RCS Season 8 shop will be kicking off soon, but for now you can sign up for the July Online Major and get the Pomme Champion skin for free by simply competing.
Travel vouchers this year will look a bit different than the previous seasons, reserving just one spot for the top player on our leaderboards and a second wildcard voucher for the highest standing points-holder that has never attended an in-person Finals before. Competition for these vouchers is expected to be stiff as our previous King of Rivals, CakeAssault, has shown some rare vulnerability to some familiar faces at GoTE 8 this past weekend. Gear up and get ready for a fight!
While our news today is entirely concerning the North American region, community members from EU and World regions should stay tuned for more news as we are get closer to Season 8’s kickoff.
Rankings
Each season brings new structure, and with that comes new guidelines to qualify for our annual Top 50 Rankings. RCS Season 8 has seen the magnificent return of the community circuit, the Grassroots League, which aims to connect the North American community and eventually carry the torch through events across the region by utilizing the power and resources of the dedicated and talented individuals responsible for some of the most influential community-ran events in the scene. We love to see that passion and have a system this year dedicated to ensuring their Showcase Events count for the Rivals Top 50 Rankings.
Our Top 50 Ranking requirements and event weight are as follows:
A minimum of four total events, two of which MUST be RCS (meaning two can be either RCS or GRL Showcase).
RCS events will carry the highest weight, with the Finals weighing the heaviest and the others being based on attendance size and strength.
GRL Showcase events will be considered anywhere between high to low weight, with their individual strengths and weaknesses being evaluated by our Top 50 panel.
GRL Opt-In events will NOT count for rankings, though they do provide GRL points for their own league’s leaderboard, so check them out if you can!
Rivals esports has proven to be a cornerstone of our community, bringing out passions, rivalries, and every emotion imaginable over the course of seven years. Since Season 1 and our emergence into the competitive world, we’ve seen the eras of Ralph, FullStream, CakeAssault, Xaro, and CakeAssault’s return in his current unrelenting reign. Over the years we’ve spanned continents, built up to share stages with the greatest Smash legends in the world, and have repeatedly broken our own attendance records with what we consider to be the best gaming community in the world (no bias).
If you’re shooting to aim high on the rankings for season 8, make sure to sign up for RCS events here. Grassroots League has already ran three Showcase Events and has plenty more on the docket so be sure to check out their page here for qualifying events as well. We can’t wait to kick off another amazing season of Rivals esports!
We have a patch focused on fun updates to share with everyone today, adding some really cool changes to several stages! You may have noticed our favorite fishy monarch, The Troupple King, hanging out and judging you during last stock situations recently over on Troupple Pond. This patch builds on that by adding last stock visuals to seven more stages to add to the excitement.
We’ve also updated Olympia’s and Hodan’s stages with new large variants, along with addressing a niche but important ceiling teching bug. Check out our stage focused update in all of its glory:
Several stages now have visual changes for last stock: Neo Fire Capital, Treetop Lodge, Blazing Hideout, Tempest Peak, Forest Floor, Spirit Tree, and The Endless Abyss.
A last stock variant for Troupple Pond was also added into the game in a recent hotfix.
Added large variants for Crystal Oasis and Highdive Hideaway for doubles and 4-player games:
Bugfixes
Teching off of the ceiling now clears the dodge buffer, which will prevent unintended airdodges after teching.
Previously, holding a direction while ceiling teching off of Kragg rock, Air Armada, etc would force an air dodge while having no directional input would allow players to act normally out of a tech.
Fixed a visual bug that made Summit Kragg’s snow appear too low in playtest.
RoA/CEO Ring no longer displays old versions of character profiles on the big screen.
Selecting a random stage no longer selects banned stages.
In 2020 along with the addition of Steam Workshop to Rivals of Aether, we also included a Workshop feature called “skins”. Skins are fairly self-explanatory if you’re familiar with the term already; they’re cosmetics that can potentially replace all of a characters’ sprites and sounds while keeping gameplay pretty much the same. Instead of having to make a Workshop character from scratch, this feature let creators use our original characters as templates to do everything from re-sprite to re-code our fighters in new and exciting ways.
Up until today only our first 14 characters had this feature. Today we’re back with skin templates for all four of our newest members of the Rivals cast – it’s only fitting that characters originating in workshop are given back to the community!
For those not familiar with Steam Workshop, it is essentially a community hub for creations and modifications that allow you to create you own characters, stages, buddies, game modes, and skins. You can check out the Steam Workshop for Rivals of Aether right here. If you’re interested in creating your own characters, be sure to check out the Intruduction page in our Steam Workshop Modding Manual for all of the information you need to get started.
New Templates
The following templates for every character contain all of the sprites they use, as well as scripts with every animation-related variable you can change and attack scripts for all of their attack properties.
Here are the brand new templates for Mollo, Hodan, Pomme, and Olympia:
Basic skins are meant to be purely cosmetic; changes are restricted to things that don’t affect actual gameplay, and can generally be safer to use in tournaments and a more competitive setting. This modding option is perfect for artists and people that simply just want a new look to their favorite Rival. Since 2020, there have been some great basic skins of characters, ranging from partial re-sprites to complete overhauls of entire characters.
Here are just a few fantastic examples of what our community has already accomplished with basic skins:
An advanced skin allows you to essentially create variants of the character with edited moves and properties. Advanced skins mean that your imagination, spritework, and coding can create pretty much anything you want! Over the past few years, the community has created everything from hilarious to experimental and everything in-between.
Here are some great examples of what our community has created since 2020:
Welcome to the North American RCS Season 7 Top 50! Each year we look back on the previous competitive season and the players who influenced our scene by creating a Top 50 Players list. The rankings are created by a community panel that considers data from across the season to construct a comprehensive list that highlights our top players and their accomplishments.
View more articles in the Season Seven NA Rankings Series:
“How to tell if your washing machine is from Japan.”
10. darai
Kicking off our top 10 is the Sunnyshore tournament organizer, event photographer, and highest ranked player on the West Coast. Darai has been playing Rivals since 2017, but only started competing seriously at the start of 2020. Darai’s Season 7 propelled him to new heights as he placed in the Top 8 at five different tournaments, three of which were Premier tier, and won Back In Blood 5 after an intense eight game Grand Finals. Make sure you keep an eye on him as he’s already won the first event of Season 8, and enter his next Sunnyshore event when registration goes live as part of Grassroots League.
“Try to do good, recklessly.” – Alsnapz
9. Akashi
The player most likely to mess up our commentary schedule jumps up from 33rd in Season 6 to 9 in Season 7! Akashi approached this season with a goal of broadening his comfort level with competition, focusing on entering every event with a small goal, and leaving with a new one. As it turns out, this approach complemented his playstyle extremely well, as he was able to gradually upset player after player while securing 3rd place at Heat Wave 5 over ZeeBee and 4th place at The Big House 10 over Penguin. Akashi’s climb throughout Season 7 was nothing short of meteoric as he continuously struck down opponents as the underdog all the way up to Genesis 9, where he placed 7th and then commentated Top 6 on the mainstage the next morning. As Season 8 revs up, you can catch Akashi helping with events, commentating, and even doing voiceover work and writing for Stats of Aether.
“Hey it’s me, your washing machine. I’m from Japan.”
8. CheesyPotato
CheesyPotato is another top 10 player who has actively created amazing experiences outside of the game. CheesyPotato has worked on everything from start.gg web extensions, to an entire website dedicated to the history of Rivals Esports, all while finding niche and experimental in-game advanced techniques to attempt to push the meta. CheesyPotato only missed Top 8 twice in Season 7 out of the the 10 brackets she attended, never placing below 9th and even winning Sunnyshore over the likes of darai, Wai, and Plastic Dinos. Despite the impressive results and unwavering consistency, CheesyPotato feels that she did not improve as much as she had hoped this season and she hopes to focus on active thinking and dealing with pressure while on the big stage.
“YES I DO ACTUALLY WORK AT MCDONALDS ITS AWESOME”
7. Kusi
Coming in at seven is the best Ori & Sein main in the world. Kusi placed 5th at five of his six events, placing 4th at GOML 2022. His consistency in Season 7 was immaculate, only dropping a single set to someone ranked below him and one more to a former hidden boss known as Halite. School and work has been a main priority for Kusi as the season dragged on, but that did not stop him from making the top 10 rankings and shutting the door on countless competitors trying to break through to the Sunday stage. Next season, Kusi wants to aim for #1 but has the specific goal of defeating the elusive ZeeBee Mollo.
6. Xaro
Xaro lands at number six this Season after placing Top 3 in all three offline events he attended and Top 8 in both Online Premier events. Xaro held an impressive 6-0 game count over ZeeBee in offline events and was one of only two players to take multiple sets off of Seggo in Season 7. As Season 8 kicks off, Xaro has his eyes set on an ambitious goal that not many have achieved over the years, winning an offline major.
“My friends are awesome :)”
5. Penguin
Penguin is a legend in the Rivals community, known for his nearly perfect doubles record and his ability to push the best player in the world to his breaking point like no one else ever has. During Season 7, Penguin moved out for college and is using the opportunity to see friends and enjoy the social aspect of events more. Season 7 may not have been up to the competitive standards a titan like Penguin normally holds himself to, but he was one of only three players to take a set off of CakeAssault, one of three players to beat Soulrifle211, and still placed in the Top 8 of each of the eight offline tournaments he attended.
“Corruption’s such an old song that we can sing along in harmony, and nowhere is it stronger than in Albany.” – Hamilton (Nonstop)
4. ZeeBee
Moving up two spots from Season 6, ZeeBee became an entirely new threat in Season 7 as he balanced his character pool around a new main – Mollo. ZeeBee put down the Kragg partially through the season and began to really refine a character that seemed like a counterpick at first. Before long, ZeeBee was able to take a set off of CakeAssault, get consistent wins over Kusi and Penguin, and placed 2nd at The Big House 10 and 4th at Genesis 9.
“Please for the love of god nerf Forsburn.”
3. Soulrifle211
One of the youngest and most passionate competitors in the game took his electric popoffs to every stage possible, placing in the Top 3 at every Premier event he attended. Soulrifle211 was able to take at least one set off of every player he played this season other than CakeAssault, and only lost to three players in his seven events. We have yet to see Soulrifle211 take first at a major, but at this rate it is only a matter of time until he breaks through the seemingly unbreakable wall set up by CakeAssault.
“#3MSWEEP”
2. Seggo
Seggo made history at Heat Wave 5, becoming a part of an exclusive club consisting of a handful of players that have won an offline RCS Major. Seggo has long proven himself to be a top player threat and even won three different community events in Season 7, but there was something different about his magical run at Heat Wave 5. This event not only cemented Seggo in history due to his win, but also spoiled the #CakeSweep movement that had seen CakeAssault nearly demoralizing any and all competition as he ruled over Season 7 with an iron fist. Following up his magical run, Seggo was out to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no fluke involved in his victory, beating CakeAssault at PPS and taking another set against the king of Rivals before finishing 2nd at the Genesis 9 Finals.
1. CakeAssault
CakeAssault, the king of Rivals is once again here to defend his throne in what seemed like a sure thing up until his fall at Heat Wave 5. Immediately after the Heat Wave 5 loss, CakeAssault dominated the December RCS and proceeded to trade the RCS Gold online brackets with Seggo, putting all eyes on what would happen at the Genesis 9 finals. CakeAssault entered the Genesis Top 6 from the winners side for the first time ever, where he would meet and fall to Seggo in a shocking Winners Finals before coming back with a vengeance to take the finals and once again cement himself as the best player in the world.
CakeAssault entered 12 different brackets, placing first place in 10 of them, and 2nd in the remaining two. His domination is hard to comprehend as even his most fierce opponent could not hold a candle to the pure fire pumping through his veins. CakeAssault’s 1st place in Season 7 marks the fourth time he has topped our rankings.
Thank you everyone for a phenomenal Season 7. We cannot wait to see what comes next.
