Tekken 8 Desperately Wants Players To Get Good

At the recent TGS, Tekken 8’s development team revealed a lot of information during one of the Tekken Talk sessions on September 22. Most of these changes focused on providing players opportunities to get good at the game without relying on external sources or putting extra effort into the practice mode.

Tekken has always been a highly complicated fighting game compared to others of the genre. Each character has hundreds of moves, and the 3-dimensional stage enables lateral movement against the opponent, allowing the player to dodge some of the moves. All of this is different from most 2D fighting games, such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter.

There’s a lot to learn in Tekken 8, but not everyone can pour out hundreds of hours in the game. Bandai Namco appears to understand that and is trying to create new ways for players to improve quickly. It is a different approach than the one Capcom used for Street Fighter 6, where they introduced Modern Controls, which removes the execution requirement from moves, making it so that you can use complicated moves by pressing one button.

Bandai Namco’s beginner-friendly approach focuses more on letting the players improve themselves by giving them more opportunities to learn instead of making everything easier for its players. And it is exactly how it should be. Making everything easy won’t do good to anyone, and it will just make things boring, as Tekken is all about fighting and improving.

Super Ghost Battles

Tekken 8 will introduce a new game mode called Super Ghost Battles. This game mode utilizes the power of AI. You will be able to download the ‘ghost‘ of any developer and your own self to practice against it. This game mode, at its core, is just like the regular Player vs. CPU game mode. However, the CPU here uses your patterns, habits, and inputs.

It is expected that you’ll be able to play Super Ghost Battles using ghosts of pro players as well, allowing the players to improve by practicing against the best. Imagine being able to play against the top players in the world and practice against them; this game mode turns that into a reality. But, for now, all of it is just speculation.

If this game mode works as expected, it will be huge. We might also see similar modes in other fighting games, so it won’t be wrong to say that these Super Ghost Battles hold the potential to revolutionize how we see CPU vs. Player in fighting games. The Player vs. CPU gameplay in Tekken 7 is as disappointing and further from playing against real players as possible. Even at the hardest difficulty, the AI would rarely block a move.

For now, we’ve yet to see Super Ghost Battles in action. It does look promising from the gameplay demonstration clips, but we won’t know till we get our hands on it. If it really is as massive as the Tekken devs are making it out to be, then it will produce opportunities for players of all skill brackets to improve and get good at the game by playing against the very best.

Interactive Replay System

In Tekken 7, we can watch the recorded replays of our matches. These replays give us hints on what to do in some situations. For example, these replays will display the hint of whether a move can be dodged by ducking or if you can punish the opponent for using a specific move. However, the player is unable to take control of their character inside the recorded replays to try the recommended technique to counter the move right away.

Tekken 8 is set to bring an enhanced version of replays to the table. As pointed out by TKN GMR, these replays will give the control back to the player for about 10 seconds, putting them back in the situation to try out the recommended technique immediately. This replay takeover feature removes the need to go back to the practice mode and set up the opponent in a specific way to recreate the situation and learn to deal with it properly.

#TEKKEN8 My Replay

During replay, you can take control of your character for 10 seconds and intuitively practice “on the spot.” For example, a performing a counterattack, squatting against the middle and upper attack, or interrupting by lateral movement. pic.twitter.com/0SMqVgAwtb

— TKN GMR (@tkn_gmr) September 22, 2023

It can be fairly annoying to scroll through hundreds of moves of a character you’re unfamiliar with just to try to recreate the situation that gave you trouble in Tekken 7. Either that or you have to go to YouTube to look for a way to deal with the said situation. This new replay mode in Tekken 8 solves all of those issues by helping the player improve in an easier, and less tedious way without having to rely on YouTube or any other external source.

New Ranked Rules

Additionally, as it was revealed at the TGS, the new ranked mode will feature a best-of-3 match setup instead of infinite rematches. Tekken is a game where sometimes you have to play several matches in a row with an opponent to figure them and their character out. That is because each character in Tekken is unique and comes with a huge number of different moves, so just playing 2 to 3 matches against them isn’t enough to grasp their whole deal.

That is one thing Tekken 7 does better than Tekken 8. The first-to-2, or best-of-3, match setup may work well in games like Street Fighter 6 or Guilty Gear -Strive- because the roster is much smaller and each character has a smaller number of moves and tricks, but in Tekken, it can take a lot of time to get used to it.

Not to mention that Tekken is home to many gimmicky characters, which require the player to have knowledge of dealing with their opponent character’s gimmicks in a specific way. Just playing 2 to 3 matches against such an opponent isn’t enough to figure out these characters.

However, the new Tekken replay system might help players figure out how to deal with these issues in an effective way without doing infinite rematches. Furthermore, you can download the AI ghost data of your opponent and continue to practice against that to learn to deal with both the opponent player and their character at the same time.

Takeaway

Bandai Namco is really looking forward to helping Tekken 8 players grow and improve. All of these new quality-of-life features are exceptionally helpful for new players as well as franchise veterans. It is also a relief to see that Tekken 8 isn’t going in a direction where they make everything easy just so more people can play the game; instead, they’re trying to help the new players grow.

It is how it should be, and every other fighting game should follow the same approach. Yes, making the game more accessible for new audiences should be a priority, but they don’t have to take away what fighting games teach the best, and that is to learn, improve, and move forward.

Tekken 8 is set to receive a Closed Beta Test starting from October 20. We’ll be able to try most of these features then. According to Bandai Namco, the registration is currently ongoing. The players who had previously signed up for the Closed Network Test in July can access the Tekken 8 CBT without re-registration. The fighting game will be released on January 24, 2024, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PC.