Project Tekken has made changes after last month’s Tekken 8 crashout.
Two weeks before their next eSports event, Project Tekken released an incredibly poorly received Season 2 Update. To sum things up, while developers promised the update would improve players’ defensive options, they found that it became worse for the purposes of competitive play. As a result, Tekken players and content creators, some of whom were lifelong fans, and some of whom are actually dependent on Tekken for their living, decided to stop playing on the game.
Katsuhiro Harada, who is Bandai Namco’s general manager for their original IPs, and game director and chief producer for their fighting games, finally shared an update on this situation, somewhat informally. Harada said this on Twitter:
(Tekken) 8 was challenging in some aspects with a new team for battle & tuning, but we have returned the team structure to the members of the past. In addition, the director, Nakatsu, who we all know and love, is now able to check and approve all tuning in detail (he was short on time as general manager, but now he gives final approval for every detail of battles and tuning).
As you all know, he originally comes from the fan community and was a writer for game magazines and strategy articles, and was also in charge of battles and tuning for TAG 2 and 7. So I don’t think there is anything to worry about in the future.
Nakatsu is the nickname of one Kohei Ikeda, who is now in Harada’s former position as game director and development producer for the Tekken franchise. His company profile shows he also worked on Tekken 3D Edition and Soul Calibur IV.
In the month since the infamous crashout, a lot of fans have been looking for a scapegoat on why the update turned out this way. In fact, Dexerto put forward a theory that Bandai Namco replaced Arika, a respected veteran studio who also worked on the much more popular Tekken 7. But Harada’s statement does not name their partner studio by name, and we didn’t find any other tweets where he confirmed this.
Tekken 8 did have some updates since Season 2, but fans are still widely unhappy with where the game is now. Harada cleared the air on Project Tekken’s future plans in another reply on Twitter:
…the Battle & Tuning team has submitted the first roms of the fix for this, and the first phase of it will be introduced in the May update. Furthermore, after that, there will be another update in June that will be related to the defensive side of the game.
It remains to be seen if the current Project Tekken team can roll the game back, but Tekken has faced a crisis like this before with Tekken 4. Considering that a lot of the people working on Tekken 8 also worked on the much more popular Tekken 7, including Arika, we believe they can roll it back and make the game fun for everyone. It’s now up to the developers to give their fans – casual and hardcore alike – what they want.
