Unless they want to run their new Capcom Pro Tour year still running on Season 2
It’s been a bit less than two months since Mai Shiranui hit Street Fighter 6, but players are eagerly awaiting what’s coming next to the flagship fighting game.
Despite Capcom Cup 11 going down a few weeks ago, there was no news of Elena in sight, and their window of opportunity to show her off seems to rapidly be closing.
We’re nearly at the end of March now, but we should be seeing the final DLC character of Season 2 very soon.
This is judging by Capcom’s previous release and buildup handling of SF6 thus far as well as some external factors that have to be taken into account too.
Normally, the developers would have basically as much time as they’d want to fit into that “Spring 2025” release window, however, there’s something else on the calendar that should demand their attention too.
Evo Japan 2025 is set to take place from May 9–11.
Why that’s important is the big event will also kick off the Capcom Pro Tour 2025 season as its first offline Premier tournament.
It’d be a rather unprecedented move for Capcom to begin their Season 3 event run still using the Season 2 version of the game.
As far as we know, that’s never really happened in the modern Street Fighter landscape, and it’d be a weird move to do now.
Considering we expect the Season 3 balance changes will come with Elena like they did for Season 2 with Akuma, that’s not a lot of time for players to get acclimated with the new version of SF6.
The norm is to expect at least two weeks of prep time before a big update should be used at a major like this, so that limits the amount of time Capcom comfortably has left too.
That would put the presumed cutoff date for Elena’s update to be around April 25, which is just a month away.
So that would be the latest we currently expect the capoeira fighter to be released.
And then we also have to take into consideration the amount of time Capcom likes to take in the leadup to their DLC character launches too.
Looking back at Mai, her teaser trailer dropped earlier than usual on December 5 while her gameplay trailer was shared on January 13 while the character herself launched on February 5.
That’s a full two months, which was around the same for Terry, but we’re more used to seeing all of that go down in around a month to a month and a half.
There has been a time, though, that Capcom expedited that process back with M. Bison, who was teased and released in less than three weeks.
So if Capcom goes that route again, that means we’d have to see Elena’s teaser by around April 4 to make everything fit.
And then there’s the presumed Elena Arrives Fighting Pass that would start at the beginning of April too, but we saw with Mai that Capcom is willing to release those after the character is available too.
Assuming then Capcom keeps up with some of their norms here, we’re expecting to see Elena sometime within the next week or so.
But perhaps they will pull the unprecedented move of starting their new Capcom Pro Tour year still running on SF6 Season 2 since there’s nothing technically stopping them from doing so.
If that ends up being the case, we may not see Elena at all until Evo Japan and then release her in late May to early June, which would still fall within the Spring launch window.
Although late May would also put her up too close to Combo Breaker 2025 on the CPT too.
But we suspect they’ll want to get out what they’ve been cooking sooner rather than later.
Source: Event Hubs
