In almost no time at all, the 3rd location test for Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- has started and will be going on this entire weekend! Since the second location test, there have been two characters announced: series veteran Eddie, who is back to his old Zato-1 name for some reason, as well as a completely new character named Bedman. Bedman is voiced by Hikaru Midorikawa, a very popular voice actor who many ASW fans will remember as the voice of Akihiko in Persona 3 and P4Arena. Bedman has impressive range and is unique in being the only Guilty Gear character with an 8 way airdash.

On the side of system changes, instant kills have been added to the game but reportedly they are only animated for Sol and Ky: instant kills for other characters just immediately make the “Destroyed” screen appear. Blitz Shields have had a slight input change: instead of pressing any two buttons for the high version or down + any two buttons for the low version, the two buttons now must be hard slash + any button other than Dust. There is a new mechanic called Hellfire: reportedly, it powers up all Overdrive moves and only activates when the player’s life is low, indicated by a flashing portrait. One mechanic that wasn’t really clarified before was Instant Blocking: it is not listed in the Xrd website system page and was not tested by many of the location test attendants. But Kedako has confirmed that IB is still in the game.

The last new change is a cosmetic one: previous location tests recycled character voice clips from Accent Core, but now the new re-recorded voices for every character have been added in to the game.

I will be updating this post throughout the weekend as more information becomes available.

Here is a list of sites currently running articles on this 3rd wave of location tests, with lots of nice pictures.
4gamer (has screenshots and character portraits without text)
4gamer 2
Radio Kaikan (tons of images of Bedman and Zato)
Gamer (lots of Bedman and Zato, as well as images of Sol and Ky IKs)
Dengeki

Aristobule has began uploading camera videos on his Youtube account.