You read that correctly, it’s not an early April Fools joke. Bandai Namco is getting geared up for a new Tekken 8 update. This new update is bringing new store items, Eddy Gordo, a battle pass, and a slew of balance changes. What exactly can we expect in this new update? It’s a lot, so let’s get to unpacking.
First off, let’s discuss the elephant in the room. Yes, Tekken is going to have a battle pass, predictably named the Fight Pass. Players will now be able to unlock various items seasonally. This will add daily tasks that will move you forward incrementally in said pass. While it is a paid feature, there will inevitably be free unlockables too. On the store side, there will be new “Cyber Pack” skins for all characters and a legacy skin for Yoshimitsu.
Some smaller quality of life improvements are expected to be implemented as well. To deal with bad connections, all online matches will be invalidated should the connection quality dip below certain standards. Which means no more lag switching. However, for intentional disconnects, you’ll still have to stick to reporting those players. Furthermore, before a match begins, you will be able to see if the stage was set to random or not. There are also expected bug fixes and fine-tuning of the game itself.
Character and Interaction Changes
Now for the meat and potatoes of this update. There’s a hefty amount of balance and interaction changes that will be applied to gameplay. While “balance” isn’t the most correct term here, there is going to be a focus on buffing characters who “haven’t been able to fully showcase their uniqueness.” Low parries are being fixed, allowing more characters to smoothly perform them. The Special Style is being adjusted as well, preventing misinputs from being as common. Different combo scaling issues, hit response behavior, and numerous stage interactions will also be fixed and tweaked. Character changes seem to be happening across the board as well, and man, are there are a lot of those.
First thing’s first, no, King is not getting nerfed, yet. While some of his moves and his hurtbox during his Jaguar Sprint have been adjusted in the opponent’s favor, it doesn’t seem like he’s going to be much easier to deal with (sorry King haters). To put it in broad strokes, most characters frame data has been adjusted to balance out options for both the player and the opponent (in most cases), many hurtboxes have been changed for certain moves, and damage scaling has been changed for a lot of moves and combos.
I’m no Tekken scholar by any means, but luckily all the changes and reasons for each one are included in the patch notes here.
