Tekken 8 Fires Entire Balance Team After Nightmare Season 2 Update

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The second season update for Tekken 8 sparked an unusually high amount of criticism towards the franchise. In response, the developers have decided to reassemble their top team and transfer the team responsible for the update away from the project.

Though initially welcomed with enthusiasm, Tekken 8’s evaluation ratings dropped significantly on all platforms following the release of the Season 2 update, which included more than 1500 modifications. Unfortunately, a large number of these changes did not operate as planned, leading to numerous issues and effectively causing the game to malfunction.

Despite prompt efforts by the developers, a growing apprehension surfaced among dedicated Tekken enthusiasts that the release of Season 2 had steered the franchise down a path they weren’t fond of, making it challenging for the current team to rectify this change in direction.

As a dedicated gamer, I’m thrilled to share the news: The developers of Tekken 8 have made a wise move by reuniting the A-team! Game director Harada has confirmed that the team responsible for the Season 2 balance update isn’t the original one. Now, they’re bringing back the veterans to take charge and iron out any lingering issues in the game.

Tekken 8 brings back core developers to fix Season 2

In the world of live games, it’s not uncommon for an update to fall short in certain aspects. Sometimes, these games may go through lulls, making the good times even more enjoyable. Currently, Apex Legends is going through such a phase, as its developers are altering their approach to character design in an attempt to attract players back.

But Tekken 8 Season 2 is different.

1) The game received an unprecedented wave of negative reviews on Steam, as countless players expressed their displeasure by posting reviews. Due to this, many content creators stopped working on the new title and instead started recreating earlier versions of Tekken to maintain their work and satisfy their own gaming needs.

Instead of grumbling about it while continuing to play, the game’s patch was so poorly accepted that players chose to switch to different games instead. This is quite unusual in the live service sector, leading the developers to hurriedly release emergency updates and issue public apologies for Season 2.

Approximately a month post the release of S2, Harada disclosed that the team responsible for crafting this patch received dismissal from the project due to its response.

Director Harada shared that the past eight weeks were tough due to working with a new team for combat and adjustments, but we’ve reverted the team structure back to our familiar members. Moreover, Director Nakatsu, who is dear to us all, now has the opportunity to thoroughly inspect and endorse each detail of tuning (previously he was pressed for time as general manager, but now he provides final approval for every aspect of battles and tuning). This, according to Harada.

So, if the core Tekken development team wasn’t working on Season 2, who was?

As a passionate gamer, I’ve gotta share some insights about Tekken 8. This epic game wasn’t solely crafted by Bandai Namco, but also partially by Arika Studios. While the main developers worked on the core aspects of Tekken 8, Arika played a significant role, especially in creating later content updates for Tekken 7. It’s quite possible that they were responsible for Season 2, with the core team focusing elsewhere. Regrettably, it seems they were removed from the project.

Harada has openly expressed his intention to create Tekken 9 as his final contribution to the Tekken series, aiming for its release during the upcoming console generation within the next few years. This ambition is reinforced by his recent tweets following the announcement of this shift in development, indicating that he plans to retire from the series after a few more years.

If the main group was handling that project, it would be logical to delegate T8’s updates as they did with the previous game. But, when considering those who might work during the pre-production phase of a new Tekken game, it’s unclear how this could impact the development of the future title if it’s already in production.

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2025-05-10 02:02