“If you notice, some people will say ‘yeah, we need to teach people how to play the new game,’ and then they’ll have a lengthy tutorial where you go through the menu and select everything, and it teaches How do you play a new game,” said Tekken 8 producer (and long-time Tekken advocate) Michael ‘Mishimaikeru’ Murray.
“In Tekken, this is [veteran developer] Katsuhiro Harada is particularly annoying. “He always said ‘You have to learn the game by playing the game’ and ‘We can’t just have straight tutorials. You have to have fun playing the game.”
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This philosophy is evident throughout Tekken 8, a game that had an almost embarrassing level of content on disc at launch. In addition to the modes expected in a post-Mortal Kombat One of the most powerful modes and the most beginner-friendly training mode I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. I’ve been playing since the mid-90s!
The mainstay of this training package is the innocuous-sounding “My Replays and Tips.” This was a feature introduced later in Tekken 7’s life (during Season 2) that allowed you to relive battles while leaning in to say “Shh, you could have dodged” or “Hey, you know you “You can interrupt” the enemy’s combo at this time, right?
In Tekken 7, this suite of features is not fully utilized by mid- and low-level players. But this is one of the most fascinating and useful training kits I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. For Tekken 8, it’s getting something of a complete overhaul – Bandai Namco has squeezed every bit of power out of the current-gen console architecture to make it even better.
“It’s true that when you play a fighting game, there are a few ways to get better: one of them is to increase your damage output, so you spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how to do that – or how to reduce it. Damage output. “So we launched ‘My Replays and Tips’ as another way to look at this and figure out how to do it,” said Tekken 8 director Kohei Ikeda. ” [optimise damage output and reduction]. If you do those two things, obviously, you’re going to get better as a player. ”
But it takes a lot of effort to do this, and there’s a lot of terminology and technical data that novice or even intermediate players can parse at a glance. “We want to reduce the intensity of the game cycle,” Ikeda continued. “Getting advice and being able to practice your options on the spot…that’s probably the most efficient and best way to get better as a player. So we want people to be able to use this tool effectively, in real achieve better results in the competition.”
Let’s say you play as the King (obviously the best Tekken character). You like to do a nice juggling combo, but you always go for his aerial mid-air combo; it looks cool and is flashy. But that’s not the best way to continue his string. Muscle memory can be a killer in fighting games, and My Replays and Tips will give you real-time options to identify weaknesses in combos during a match and practice alternative options with the press of a button. buttons (even suggesting inputs and options for you).
“When we talked about developing this tool, efficiency was the core idea behind it,” Murray explains. “But I remember when I was trying to become a better player, Jun Yasuda (aka Hoshi M ishima, Tekken combat adjustment director) said ‘you need to look at your replays’. It was really painful – I didn’t want to Do it!
“First you have to look at it and then you have to realize what you did wrong. That’s a lot! But now you just watch the replay and the computer tells you exactly what you did wrong and then it lets you practice on the spot . It’s a lot easier and a lot less effort than anything we’ve done in the past.”
Yes, this mode does exist in Tekken 7, but according to Ikeda, it was “late last generation.” “But it’s easier [to develop] Now, with SSDs and everything else, we have an improved version of what we saw in the last game of Tekken 8. Transfers between hardware and short cycle times make it responsive and better as a learning tool, as well. “
In Tekken 7, the replay tool shows you what you did wrong, and that’s it. But with Tekken 8, Ikeda, Murray, and the rest of the development team made the game more interactive, more dynamic, and—as Harada no doubt loved—more fun.
“So when you’re in a situation like this and you screw up, instead of just saying, ‘Hey, this is what you’re supposed to do,’ it makes you try something like, maybe you can’t box, but Will stand aside – try something else,” Ikeda said. “Then you’re free to practice in that space for ten seconds. With the new generation of consoles, we can do that easily.”
In theory, this is a clever way to help the “single player only” genre hedge against more powerful AI opponents. In fact, it’s even better in a way, allowing you to bury bad habits and reinforce good ones in an easy, seamless way. It’s a training suite that almost mimics a “Big Brother” vibe; having someone better than you sitting next to you, gently encouraging you, ultimately making you good enough to compete in the legendary network of tension that Tekken created. Climb the rankings in the environment.
“My Replays and Tips” is a boring name, but it’s a truly innovative, easy-to-access feature that no one should miss because it’s buried somewhere at the bottom of the menu. This is just one of the many features that make Tekken 8 look like 2024 “Game of the Year” material, even so long before release.
Tekken 8 will finally be available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on January 26, 2024.
