There’s a lot of talk right now about game balance in the fighting game community as the three main AAA fighting game franchises all have their latest entry on the market today. The process of adding balance changes to a title differs depending on the developer we’re talking about, and while a company like Capcom currently has a philosophy of adding one major balance patch a year for Street Fighter 6 (though we just saw a small sampler balance patch added along with Ed), it seems that the Tekken 8 team has their own way of doing things.
Several of the game’s developers recently sat down for a “Tekken Talk” presentation in which the likes of devs such as Director Katsuhiro Harada and Producer Michael Murray sat down to share more about what’s coming to Tekken 8 down the line. During this talk, the team touched on game balance and shared some insight into how they’re currently handling it.
Through Murray’s translation, Harada explained a little bit about how the Tekken 8 team is currently thinking about game balance. Firstly, he notes that the developers are aware that fans of the game feel strongly about character balance in a variety of different ways.
Harada goes on to encourage fans to please understand that Tekken 8 was released at the same time for everyone, so there has been no advanced play testing (like what we saw with Tekken 7’s initial arcade release) to allow the dev team to address changes and issues ahead of a widespread console launch. Essentially, Harada is telling fans to please be patient as they tackle things on their end.
Patience seems to be the key here, and it looks as though the Tekken 8 team is also exercising quite a bit of it when it comes to balance changes. Harada continues on to state that even pro player opinions on character strength and tiers are actively changing, so with all of that in mind, the developers are aiming to essentially balance the game “when necessary.”
“I’m sure many people feel strongly [about the character balance] in all kinds of different ways, but please keep in mind that this is no arcade release,” Harada began through Murray’s translation. “It’s straight to console. Everyone has their hands on the game at the same time.
“Even looking at social media of pro players on the Tekken World Tour, everyone’s opinions changes on characters day-to-day. So, it’s still a bit early to say one way or the other. Please keep that in mind.
“That said, obviously we’re keeping a close eye on the game, and we’ll plan to balance the game when necessary moving forward,” Harada concluded.
Tekken 8 did just receive some character balance changes, though the developers did note that this update isn’t quite the large balance patch one would hope to be added to the game. Instead, this patch mainly addressed the behavior of some maneuvers and changed them to be more in line with what the dev team originally envisioned, though some of these changes definitely acted as character buffs and nerfs.