After taking over games like Fortnite as well as other free to play titles and the mobile market, battle passes are becoming more and more prevalent in premium console games including fighters.
Bandai Namco recently revealed that Tekken 8 will be the next fighting game to jump on the battle pass bandwagon, which isn’t surprising, but probably won’t make many players very happy.
During the latest Tekken Talk Live, the developers unveiled the Tekken Fight Pass that’ll be coming in the next update to the game alongside Eddy Gordo on Monday, April 1, which you can find the patch notes for here.
This comes after the previous major patch added the Tekken Shop, which was already a way for Bamco to offer up free and premium items to players for a limited amount of time (on top of the actual Season Pass too).
It seems the Tekken Fight Pass will work as expected from others by leveling up the pass by completing daily and weekly missions through online matches with levels giving out different rewards to those dedicated enough for those who grind through them.
There will of course be free and premium versions of the pass with the paid one offering better rewards though pricing has yet to be revealed.
Like Street Fighter 6, however, it sounds as though the Tekken Fight Pass may end up paying for itself since the premium pass will also reward Tekken Coins, which will presumably be used to buy the pass — though how much they’ll give back also remains to be seen.
As for what’s going to be offered, the visuals shown during the presentation indicates new character costume pieces, new avatar costume options, profiles, titles, unique health bars, character panels and potentially more items.
Up until this point, battle passes in fighting games have largely failed to justify their existence to players in what they offer versus how much time and effort it takes to complete them — and many would probably argue they don’t have any real justification in premium fighters at all.
I’d say the only one I’ve experienced thus far where it felt like the battle pass was an alright fit was MultiVersus, but that’s because it was already a free to play title with mostly simple missions to complete.
Even that didn’t feel the best, however, because the game was still in beta (and was then pulled down) while also not offering any premium currency for completion to buy the next pass — which is a pretty standard incentive for premium passes across basically all genres that use them.
Capcom’s Fighter Passes feel mostly superfluous because nothing they really offer ever impacts the core gameplay experience since there’s nothing like character costumes / colors and just limited to things like avatar items, titles, music and camera backgrounds. At least it pays for itself upon completion though.
Mortal Kombat 1 doesn’t have a battle pass per se, but it does have very similar limited time content through its Invasions seasons and timed offerings in the premium shop, which many players have been complaining about since launch for the grind (in Invasions) and high prices (for premium costumes).
The one I’d argue so far has the best bang for your buck offerings is actually Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising considering they add unique character colors, weapons and actual character skins, which was pretty much unheard of in modern Arc System Works-developed games to this point, though it is more expensive at $8 USD for the premium pass.
Longtime Tekken Project Director Katsuhiro Harada has previously defended the monetization practices by stating that development costs have skyrocketed with Tekken 8 reportedly costing three times as much to make compared to even Tekken 7 while game prices have only increased themselves by $10.
Could Bamco create a battle pass system that’s rewarding and engaging enough to players without feeling like it takes too much advantage of their limited time? Sure, it’s possible, but we haven’t really seen an application that’s made a lot of people happy yet.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) offerings are a weird idea to try and bring into fighting games where players spent over a decade simply going onto like the PlayStation Store and purchasing anything extra they wanted without worry of it being gone the next day.
With Capcom, Cygames, Warner Bros. and now Bandai Namco embracing the battle pass for fighting games, we only really have SNK and ArcSys left (since they just developed Granblue for Cygames) as the only major publishers who haven’t jumped on board outside of indies.
We’ll know a lot more about hte Tekken Fight Pass in the coming days when we can better gauge its offerings.
Though we don’t know for sure yet, Tekken 8 will probably fall in line somewhere around SF6’s $5 pass or Granblue’s $8 — or however many Tekken Coins you’ll have to buy.
Bandai Namco starts talking about the Tekken Fight Pass around the 58-minute mark in the Tekken Talk Live broadcast, which you can see below.