Bandai Namco Announces Tekken 8 Winter Update and Season 2 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 09 December 2024 / 3,300 Views
Bandai Namco has announced the winter update and Season 2 for Tekken 8.
The winter update will improve the photo mode, add bonus levels to the Fight Pass, more customization slots, customized characters in the main menu, Tekken fan art in-game, and the 30th Anniversary Fight Pass.
Season 2 will feature system and major balance update, new moves for all characters, and the next Tekken World Tour.
View the winter update and Season 2 trailer below:
Tekken 8 is available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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I need them to release a complete edition with all of the characters.
I'll second that. As long as they continue with this model, Tekken 7 will be the last one I will likely ever purchase. A shame since I have been a fan since the very first one. At least I have Tekken Tag 2 the last good Tekken in my opinion.
Edit - I'll add that dropping Team Battle hurts the chances of a future purchase as well. I cannot imagine it was that hard to implement and it was my friend and I's favorite way to play. The better player went random and the weaker player picked their roster.
Announcing the new season and no doubt season pass before even announcing the final character of this season? Apparently it's going to be at TGA and many are expecting a guest, which is a shame really. People are craving certain classic characters and after the bank they made with Heihachi, only a guest can top it. The customisation items are honestly quite bland in my view and adding moves isn't needed, they need to rebalance certain characters.
Harada himself said that tekken fans want classic characters more right now and that they aren't really considering guests just yet. Tekken fans have a habit of ignoring everything the devs say because they troll sometimes but this is one situation where they really should listen. it's in the dev's best interest that people not expect a guest when there isn't going to be one.
I believe you're refering to a tweet of his from May 17, 2023. That was before launch, and it may have implied that the launch roster would be without guest characters. One guest per DLC season seems reasonable.
And it is a bit odd that they all but confirmed Anna with some teases in the trailer for next season, making it seem as if she will be part of that season. Why not tease the next (and last) character from this season?
I think this makes a strong case for the next character to be something more exciting.
Harada said the same thing at teh beginning of this year and said the same thing this past october in an interview. he's reiterated that they aren't thinking about guest characters every time its come up.
Also historically they always say ahead of time whether a season pass includes guest characters or not. geese and noctis were advertised as "guest character1" and "guest character 2" prior to their reveals.
While true, Harada also said "Heihachi is completely dead." Which wasn't true as here we are.
Not sure I trust his words. I'm not sure what I'd want really, for classic characters, there are so many missing but if they kept adding them, those characters become paid DLC forever it seems, no worthy of ever being main characters anymore even though they are well loved, more than a lot of the roster.
But I agree with the last sentiment, wording is key.
I assume beginning of the year is referring to a tweet from January 26 (launch day) where he said "we have not yet decided anything about guest characters"? I wouldn't categorize that as being "the same" as the first comment. Which was essentially a definitive "no" to having guest characters appearing for a certain period. Here it's just that decsions have not been made yet. But they can be made shortly after that comment.
I think we can all agree that the decision to feature guest characters at some point has already been decided long before the game even launched, because of how successful they were for Tekken 7, contributing to its record sales.
So what decisions is he referring to here?
It could be that they are in the process of deciding which character to chose, and at which point they want to add the character.
Winter ends in March 20. So 1 year and almost 2 months after that tweet was made. That may be enough time to create a new character for a company of Namco's resources.
Especially if they have worked with that company before for a collab in Tekken 7, and already figured out the process.
Weaving Akuma into the main canon and universe of Tekken was probably a more delicate than usual process. But no other guest character was like that.
As for them historically specifying if characters will be guest characters in the season pass before revealing them, I don't remember if that was the case for the first season.
The oldest Season 1 DLC trailer I can find is called "TEKKEN 7 DLC #1 Launch Trailer" and it has a link in the description to where you can buy the Season pass.
That video is from August 24, 2017, which is before Geese or Noctis were revealed. And it doesn't mention the characters in any way, but is still selling the Season pass.
Regardless, if plans for the characters that will be part of a season are not set in stone by the time they promote the season pass for sale, they wouldn't specify whether they will be guest characters or not.
Before the game goes gold, they are more busy and can't focus on work for DLC.
Work on DLC content can be sped up after work on the core game is done, since they can then move resources over to focus on DLC.
I'm not sure which October (2024?) interview you may be referring to though.
Could you copy and paste the exact quote you're referring to so that I can find the article?
“On the other hand, guest characters are good for bringing in people who aren’t necessarily Tekken fans, and broadening the audience. Although we’re not currently thinking of them at the moment, because people are still asking for Tekken characters, at some point, there might be a time we decide to do something like that. The licenser has to want to do so, and the timing has to match up as well, so it’s really hard to say.”
this is an interview with The Sun and after heihachi. so after heihafchi he maintains that tekken characters are their current priority and also calls back to previous statements he made emphasizing that guests are difficult because both parties need to agree and the timing needs to match up. it sounds like they are trying to make a deal for guests by this point but nothing has gone through yet.
But the season passes yes always did specify either though statements or the roadmaps. Harada stated prior to launch that classic characters would not be included in the tekken 7 season pass . and the eventual roadmap did clarify they were guests. Negan was announced at the same event as season 2 but notably his slide on the roadmap was totally unique and different from those of the tekken characters before and after they made his reveal. Producer Michael Murray brought this up again for season 3 to say that guest characters will have special slides liek negan so when there's nothing like that you know the character is either a return or new tekken original character.
I see. Since it turned out to be a guest character (Clive from FF16), let's evaluate the information provided based on that knowledge.
For starters, although maybe not relevant this time, I want to point out that while the interview was published in October, it appears to have been conducted at a prior time. Specifically "while he (Harada) was visiting London".
Presumably this was around mid July, since the Tekken World Tour had an event in the UK at that time. (Although I suppose it's not out of the question that it was during a prior visit, and the interview got delayed for some reason.)
Presuming it was no earlier than July 2024, which is the month Heihachi was set to be revealed (he wasn't mentioned in the article though), they should be fully decided on who the next character after Heihachi will be. Especially now that we know that Clive will be early access playable three days from now.
I don't think 5 months is enough time to decide upon and build Clive to a playable state.
So I see two options for that statement.
Either it sounds less vague and more conclusive than you'd expect due to something lost in translation. Perhaps in Japanese it could be interprited as not being on their minds because such a character isn't out yet. Therefore they are only really thinking about their immediate concern right now, which is Heihachi.
Option number two is that it was intentionally more misleading so that people would be less likely to suspect it.
Similar to how he claimed that Heihachi is 100% dead.
Or just for standard PR purposes.
I'm often reminded of how Miyamoto said that they had no plans to remake Majora's Mask, I believe a few months before it was revealed. And this was asked of him partially due to a Majora mask being spotted in A Link Between Worlds, and people wondered if it may be a hint as to what was next.
Either way, at times it's best to look at what they do more than what they say. The main hint suggesting a guest being that they'd spend premium money on a Game Awards trailer slot, when they presumably only have a character to show, since they already revealed the Season 2 trailer a few days ago.
Hard to imagine a legacy character warranting that, and they could have showed it off at the TWT finals "for free".
As for transparancy for Season passes, when you said "Harada stated prior to launch that classic characters would not be included in the tekken 7 season pass " did you mean this quote?
"Also, we do not sell classic Tekken characters, Paid DLC will be special content. With this system, we can do free updates and support for a long time.
This is what I've been saying in an interview article (I have talked about it in several interviews before, so please read it)."
This was said in a tweet seemingly in January 2017. 6 months before the first DLC character, Geese, was revealed.
I see two ways to interprit this.
Either at this point they had no plans to bring back any more legacy characters. Thus they could not possibly be for sale.
Or (more likely imo) there was a policy change in between his comment, and when they started selling the legacy characters as DLC.
I strongly suspect the latter for two reasons.
Harada mentioned how he has talked about this before, and I remember he said back during TTT2 that he didn't hink core elements such as characters or stages should be sold for money as DLC. Instead they were added for free over time.
I don't know if he still believes this during Tekken 8 since cost of development has increased a lot, and it may no longer be feasible to add them for free. Especially when the roster keeps increasing with every new game, and you can only add so many characters to the base launch roster.
However, the second reason I believe this was a policy change in the middle of Tekken 7 is that Harada on his show Harada's Bar has talked about how they changed CEO's in recent times and how he didn't like some of their decisions. This may very well have been one of those changes.
Because even if Harada perhaps thinks some legacy characters have to be be sold separately today, he didn't seem to think so mid Tekken 7's development, when he made that statement in 2017.
Some good thoughts, in the end I think it's simply Harada says one thing but Namco want something else. There was rumours of TTT2 having all new characters for nothing as part of it's budget as apparently it got a lot, mainly because T6 did really well however TTT2 failed so 7 got less of one, which is why it felt like many features were lacking compared to 6.
In the end, it's mostly a ruse. For T7 they were clear, as you mention with passes, "this is a guest character" but the whole won't charge for classic characters soon changed once they realised people are willing to pay for it. Namco win out in the end. So come T8...well, who's going to sell more as a classic character than one of the characters that basically inherently part of the game?
There is a problem with characters as DLC, it's pay to win, a practice most gamers hate even if companies don't care and are willing to do. I'm sure if Harada has compete creative control we might have all character for free, or earnt via in game credits, we would even have free updates and Harada would be as bendy with the truth as he is but money talks.
With Clive being added, it certainly is. I know people like to joke about Tifa printing money but if Namco went to SquEnix and said we want Tifa, SquEnix have no intention of giving her as they've got FF16 to sell. Last time was the same story, Noctis was added. SquEnix are promoting FF16 not selling a licence of a character to make money in Tekken.
Eitherway, let's put this as best I can.
I will never get to play Zell in a fighting game.
Theres now a YT video called "TEKKEN 8 x FINAL FANTASY XVI Dev Talk" that answers a few of our questions or presumptions.
For starters, we learn here that it was the Tekken team's initiative to suggest Clive. The FF16 team responded with enthusiasm, and offered the Tekken devs to learn more about Clive before going through with it. So they invited them over to play the latest build of the game from the beginning, for 3-4 hours per day over the course of several days.
The Tekken team meanwhile brought their latest build of Tekken 8 over there and let the FF16 devs play it at the same time.
It's an interesting video. I suggest checking it out. There's a Part 2 now as well that I'm about to watch.
But the second key info we got from it is that they decided on Clive before FF16 was released.
So at least 6 months before Tekken 8 launched.
Meaning when Harada said "we have not yet decided anything about guest characters" they had in fact already decided on who the first one would be.
Perhaps it was not meant be sound quite as conclusive as it did due to something lost in translation. But it does seem like he wanted to mislead rather than be ambiguous.
Either way, I think it will serve as a good reference point in the futurte when people speculate about whether or not Guest characters are around the corner, that despite them denying it, it may still happen. So best to focus on behaviour over words.
As for DLC characters being pay to win, I think the problem is easy to solve. Simply allow everyone to practice against the DLC characters in training mode to learn the matchup. It shouldn't be hard to implement.
I think Guest characters are usually too costly to reasonably give them out for free permanently in a game like this. And perhaps legacy characters have gotten to that point as well to some degree due to increased development costs, since the base launch roster can no longer reasonably feature every character in its history.
But Harada at least felt differently in 2017. And has expressed disagreements with CEO's they've had come and go.
Recently he responded to how people said he has lost weight, and he alluded to that this was due to overworking and stress. This will be his last Tekken game, he said.
He's done a lot for the series and the fighting game community for decades. For gaming in general even. He deserves to rest.
