Leaks and data-mines are commonplace in the current video game landscape, but there’s reasons why we say you shouldn’t always believe them.
Take Tekken 8 for example. They had a pretty solid-looking leak for its first year of DLC, but Heihachi Mishima’s recent decision to stop being dead again threw more than a wrench into that idea, which excitingly means we no longer know what’s coming again.
Heihachi was unveiled on the Evo 2024 mainstage as the third DLC character for Tekken 8, and while it’s not very surprising for fans to see the head of the family of jerks to rise from the ashes for like the third time now, he was still a surprise.
Many players who’ve been following the game since before even the release were expecting someone else.
Data-miner shootmans uncovered what ended up being pretty accurate info in the files for Tekken 8’s Closed Network Test that pretty much revealed the rest of the launch roster early, but there was more.
Text was also discovered that directly pointed to Eddy Gordo and Lidia Sobieska as well with their fighting styles and countries of origin, who ended up being the first two DLC characters for the game.
The data contained even more info with similar descriptions to the first two like Muay Thai, Thailand, and Australia.
This is 100% Lidia. Couldn’t find a fighting style, but doesn’t matter. She was sort of a T8 character trapped in T7 I think. pic.twitter.com/DqbtHJ5tju
— :thinking: (@shootmans) January 27, 2024
This pointed to Marduk and Tekken 7 newcomer Fahkumram being the remaining DLC characters of Season 1, but neither of them showed up at Evo. It was Heihachi.
Bandai Namco apparently did a good job of not letting the elder Mishima leak considering the only files pointing to him that were discovered were for some basic textures.
Heihachi returns 4 matches, but they’re for a texture of his cartoon logo and its corresponding Unreal Engine material. So basically, it looks like it’s a texture on a wall somewhere or maybe a cosmetic. Example of the logo on this beanie for sale that I found on Google images. pic.twitter.com/lsF33z6KO1
— :thinking: (@shootmans) July 29, 2023
It doesn’t seem likely that this was a late pivot from the Tekken team to switch things up from the leak considering how much time it takes to develop a new character now although it’s still a possibility since the initial data-mine happened around six months before release.
Eddy and Lidia would have been too far along, but perhaps they had just enough time to swap out the latter half of the Year 1 DLC to keep fans surprised.
One aspect that makes us doubt that possibility, however, is the fact that Heihachi appears to be heavily involved in the upcoming story expansion for the game, which probably required even more planning in advance.
…and we also have Australia as a country of origin for a character. pic.twitter.com/2l1lG40w2q
— :thinking: (@shootmans) January 27, 2024
So now we don’t truly know who the fourth DLC character is.
Marduk and Fahkumram are still likely candidates for sure, but it can’t be both of them now.
There was of course the PlayStation Store “leak” last year too with the likes of Armor King that turned out to be fake.
That one also had Roger the boxing kangaroo, which Director Katsuhiro Harada recently said would not be coming back — although it’s not like he hasn’t already lied about Heihachi.
We’re not now claiming these initial data-mines were faked or anything, however, but showing that we shouldn’t be taking lines of text in a game document as true confirmation of what’s being worked on / coming.
When you have full-on character models allegedly being pulled from the files like MultiVersus did recently, that’s a bit different.
But even still you should take every supposed leak with as much salt as your doctor allows.
Heihachi and the new story chapter for Tekken 8 are slated to come later this Fall, and who knows what’s going to happen beyond that now.