What We Learned From the Tekken 8 Closed Network Test

Bandai Namco Entertainment and Katsuhiro Harada started promoting Tekken 8 in a major way since last year’s announcement, and now, after almost a year, we finally were able to lay our hands on it. The game’s Closed Network Test was rolled out in two waves: first, PlayStation 5 owners got their access, and a week later, Steam and Xbox players joined in. We were among the latter, and after playing the game for the whole weekend, we can say that Tekken 8 is good but needs a lot of work. Let us explain.

Before the CNT even started, Harada reminded everyone that this isn’t a beta of any kind, and the only useful feedback the developers need is the network one. However, this doesn’t mean we can’t judge the state the game’s in at this stage of its development. And by the looks of it, the stage is quite early.

One of the first things that caught our attention is that you can’t disable the game’s forced upscaler; you can only select which technology will be used to do this. The game doesn’t even state which DLSS version is included in the build. Nor does it state what each option in the Rendering Scale menu means. The game looks obviously better than Tekken 7, but it’s still quite blurry. However, there’s no doubt that the developers optimized the game to the bare minimum of what’s usable for the CNT, and even the beta will have more options.

The gameplay itself is where the meat of the game is, and the direction they are going for is noticeable at a glance. The heat mechanic allows for even further skill expression, and the offensive options are even stronger. Backdash felt slightly weaker than it was in Tekken 7, while sidestepping was a bit more responsive. However, this could have been just a placebo effect. Defensive options seem to be relatively similar, but considering how powerful our new shiny Heated toys are, every mistake feels much more costly. When you’re opened up, the punishment is severe, even when the opponent doesn’t know a single optimal combo. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can attract more newbies with its promise of accessible fun – or so the developers hope. On the other hand, this can be utilized to perfection by the top players, so stomps can feel even harsher. Still, the game balance isn’t something we should pay much attention to in the Network Test. Many characters deal way too much damage, some have weird interactions and can even do infinite loops. Still, the game is responsive enough, and it just feels like Tekken we’re all familiar with.

What doesn’t feel like our familiar Tekken, however, is the new simplified control option. Many fighting games are making admirable efforts to allow new players to pick up the game and feel comfortable playing it even without any prior experience. Street Fighter 6 is the shiniest new example of it, where the Modern control scheme is viable even at the highest level of play. Tekken 8’s simplified controls, while an upgrade over what we had in the previous game, however, fall quite short. You’re limited to just a few options, heat activation and air combo. They don’t allow you to transition into learning the game because the moves you’re able to perform are often sub-optimal and quite unsafe.

However, this is still a step in the right direction. Unlike Tekken 7, we now have a functional tutorial, and the ability to see the key moves of the characters instead of just taking a plunge into the entirety of the movelist could also help. This leaves us with the netcode itself, which was the main meat of this CNT. Sadly, it’s not perfect. This isn’t a big problem right now – this test was a test precisely for Bandai Namco to see how their netcode is handling the load. It’s smooth enough, but even Europe-to-Europe connections had some stutters. There’s also this peculiar option to change how the netcode works. The default option feels similar to Tekken 7, with its increased delays over unstable connections. The new “Prioritize Responsiveness” option generally feels better and, on paper, sounds like a go-to rollback option to minimize the delays. Many of the netcode stability issues could also be attributed to the performance of the game on PC, with its Unreal Engine shader compilation and PC specs in general. This much was confirmed by Harada himself on Twitter.

Another issue is the state of Wi-Fi connections, which are far inferior to the wired ones, and cause wild stutters and freezes in the game. It seems like the team is very much aware of this, and we should see an improvement in the release version of the game.

We won’t make any far-going conclusions until we play the full game, but in the world where GGPO-based games are extremely smooth and proprietary rollback solutions of SF6 allow us to play Australia to Canada, we would simply love to see Tekken do better. 

Another issue we faced in Tekken 8 CNT was just how long the matchmaking usually took. Even with thousands of players participating in this playtest, we sometimes had to wait upwards of ten minutes for the match to pop up.

Still, the positives of this CNT far outweigh the negatives. It’s not just the same Tekken but with a fresh coat of paint – new systems feel deliberate in their implementations and work well for the goals they were made for, and the gameplay is still snappy and responsive.

As Harada stated numerous times already, this wasn’t a beta, and we absolutely shouldn’t treat it as such. What we saw was a slice of the development process of the upcoming game that could entertain us for more than half a decade, and we were lucky enough to become a part of said process. We’ll reserve all our final judgment for the time when Tekken 8 is officially and fully released.