Harada: Tekken 8’s Game System Is “Still In A Bare-Bones State”

Project Tekken head Katsuhiro Harada has shared a statement about the current state of Tekken 8.

Just so we’re clear, Tekken 8 is in a very early state of development. While some other fighting games seem content to release after internal development and testing, Harada has been putting this Tekken 8 through the rigors of location testing, as fighting games used to be made.

Harada responded to a fan giving feedback from one such testing event on Twitter:

“This was only a network battle & matching test, so the game system is still in a bare-bones state.

We appreciate the many positive reviews. However, we also understand that there are many things that need to be improved, such as combos that are too long, chip damage pressure, and overly flashy multi-layered effects that make it difficult to grasp one’s own state. There will be many changes by launch, including a heat system.”

Harada here makes it clear that he’s trying to take the Tekken franchise in a direction that’s intended to be as welcoming to as many gamers as they can make it possible. Some of those choices won’t be popular with competitive gamers, and perhaps separately, fans of the classic Tekken games, but they will best fit what gamers are looking for in fighting games now.

The Heat system is the big change coming with Tekken 8, that goes further from the Rage Arts system introduced in Tekken 7. Similar to bar systems in 2D fighting games, Heat is a blue bar below the player’s life bar. There are different ways to activate Heat, and different effects, but these may change as the game undergoes development.

The most interesting effect of Heat is that each character gets different enhancements to their abilities that are unique to them. It gives the players extra reason to study how each character works, perhaps to also encourage them to try different characters at the same time.

 Harada’s other concerns are more practical. While crowds used to gather to find out how long you could extend combos for the original Tekken Tag Tournament in the arcades, today we understand that long combos can be boring and/or frustrating to newer players. Subsequently, chip damage can be good or bad for different fighting games. For Tekken, it’s a betrayal of their old system, where players on a neutral position can depend on autoblock.

Lastly, Harada is willing to even make Tekken 8 less visually interesting, as a necessary compromise to make it more playable.

In any case, at this point we can’t even all play Tekken 8 anyway. But as it stands now, it seems Harada is willing to lean towards engaging more casual players to get everyone playing Tekken.

Tekken 8 is planned for release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.