Tekken 8 gamescom Interview with Katsuhiro Harada and Michael Murray

Tekken 8 had some exciting new announcements at gamescom Opening Night Live earlier this year, with Shaheen, Steve, Leo, Dragunov, Yoshimitsu, and Kuma becoming new confirmations for the upcoming game’s base character roster, as well as the reveal of the Arcade Quest story mode, where players will compete against NPCs as customizable avatars participating in the King of Iron Fist Tournament. Like we mentioned in our gamescom recap, Bandai Namco also had a booth at gamescom proper, with some press showings we were able to attend.

Today, Bandai Namco published an interview with the series producers Katsuhiro Harada and Michael Murray.

They spoke about their expectations and feedback from the Closed Network Test, their favorite new additions in Tekken 8, story and Arcade Quest modes, as well as the importance of the game being accessible to the newcomers:

Katsuhiro Harada: “Of course, this is something that we focused on while developing TEKKEN 8. You may think that you need to learn how to play before you play the game, but you can jump in and play Arcade Quest without the need to learn anything before or asking others to help you out.

Arcade quest is where you experience your character grow as a TEKKEN player, which is different from the classic story mode with TEKKEN characters. After you play and finish the Arcade Quest, You will have a strong base of TEKKEN knowledge and know how to enjoy matches.

That’s why the arcade Quest is the perfect mode for newcomers.

You can also use the new special mode by pressing the L1 button. That way, the controls are switched to shortcuts that let you do all kinds of actions. You can freely switch from normal controls – arcade style – to special style with one button. You can use this feature to get better.

I really recommend that newcomers try it out."

Michael Murray: “I would just add as well that it is quite interesting when we were trying out the special style, some of our marketing staff who aren’t really TEKKEN wizards, they put on the special style and they were actually doing quite well against more experienced people.

Not only it is a set preset of moves, it actually changes. If you’re in rage or you have access to the Heat State, the combo route actually changes to give you the optimized action for that particular situation.

So it is a really cool feature to check out.”

Tekken 8 is launching on January 26th, 2024, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.