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Tekken 8 is losing the matchup against its own community right now, with its second season being met with near-universal criticism, tanking its recent Steam review rating all the way to Overwhelmingly Negative.
Currently, only 14% of reviews made in the last 30 days are positive, while its overall rating is still Mixed as Steam has flagged the whole thing as a review bomb incident. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, though—sure not every thumbs down is inherently insightful, but it’s clear the choices made for season two are not liked.
Some of that boils down to the fact that, as a whole, Tekken 8’s direction has been all-in on aggression and offensive gameplay. It couldn’t be any more different to Tekken 7 which, by the end of its run, favoured incredibly defensive and turtle-y gameplay, though I maintain that was too far in the other direction.
But the community hasn’t exactly been endeared to Tekken 8’s more combative mindset, and for a moment, it seemed like Bandai Namco recognised that. Streams leading up to season two’s changes seemed to have people convinced that the developer was going to put a greater emphasis on defensive gameplay.
Except, it didn’t really do that at all. In fact, it’s seemed to do the complete opposite. Characters who seemed to be ripe candidates for nerfs, like Bryan, were instead buffed, with fans feeling as though the roster has largely homogenised into coin-flip movesets rather than diversifying each fighter with distinct weaknesses.
“No-one literally no-one asked for these changes, even new players never asked for more offense in a game that clearly lacks defensive options and is easy to mash buttons and win like in most Tekken games,” the top negative review on Steam currently reads.
Steamer and competitive Tekken player IncosiderateRaccoon also left a Steam review which reads: “The developers do not understand the characters they design. They see that the character has strengths and weaknesses and continue to not let them have this weakness. Instead, they homogenize the character to be like the others making them overtuned.”
The backlash hasn’t died down in the days since the patch’s release, which seems to have prompted director Katsuhiro Harada to quickly address the situation on Twitter. “It is clear to me that the result is a disconnect between what the community wants and the tuning results,” he said in response to a thread between producer Michael Murray and a myriad of fans.
He continued: “We have our Battle & Tuning team working around the clock to read through all the feedback logs from the community and work on future policies and changes for the better.”
It’s a relatively short and diplomatic response right now, and I can imagine things aren’t very fun at the Bandai Namco offices right now. While the developer has promised to address some game-breaking behaviour—mostly relating to issues with moves from Paul and Jack-8 right now—it’s unclear how long it’ll take for any major overhauls to fix the stuff people are most upset with right now.
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Kurt Indovina
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