Double Helix Games has no plans to force periodic downloads on players to keep the Killer Instinct roster balanced. Instead, these changes will be delivered automatically through the cloud.
"All of our variables that go into how a character behaves are going to exist basically in the cloud," said producer Torin Rettig in an interview with Game Informer. "Without having to content update or patch the game at all, we can just go in on the cloud and tweak these variables without the player having to know."
"Our vision is for it all to be behind the scenes, so it won't require any official title update download," added Rettig. "Basically the game checks for the latest version of the gameplay's parameters and automatically updates if it's a new version. No download or confirmation dialogue necessary and the files themselves are so small you'd never notice the difference."
Despite this, Rettig notes that there will be larger patches for Killer Instinct. New characters, for instance, will require that players manually download a chunk of data too large to be pushed through the cloud.