Tekken is one of the most popular fighting game franchises that has enjoyed huge success and has a massive community. There are nearly a dozen games in the franchise, and Bandai Namco Entertainment released the latest title, Tekken 8, earlier this year after a wait of nearly nine years.
The game has received critical and commercial success, with a critic score of 90 on Metacritic and a user score of 8.1. However, despite the success of the game, Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada is worried about the future of one-on-one fighting titles, and the young players are the ones to blame.
Tekken’s Katsuhiro Harada Has Doubts About the Fighting Genre
Katsuhiro Harada joined PlayStation‘s Shuhei Yoshida on the latest episode of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, where he shared his thoughts about the Tekken franchise and the future of fighting games. When asked about how one-on-one fighting titles should change, Harada said that the games will have to feature team-based gameplay.
He said that fighting games have evolved with the generations in how they are played. He cited the example of applications to a school or a job. He added that his generation, “folks in and around their 50s,” is what makes a “competitive” generation, as there was a lot of competition with people wanting “definitive outcomes, a clear winner and loser.”
He further added that young players are not interested in one-on-one fighting games because they don’t want to take the blame for losses. Here’s what he said:
But most young people nowadays are the opposite. They’re rarely eager to engage in one-on-one showdowns. Plus, because fighting games pit you by yourself against a single opponent, you have to accept all the responsibility if you lose. You can’t blame anyone else.
He further added that team-based gameplay is what is popular among young players, and this is something that the games have to crack so that they are appealing to the younger generation. He added that young players like to blame “lousy team” when they lose, and that’s why team-based shooters are so popular.
This Team-Based Play Could Bring a Change in Fighting Games
Building upon his comments, Katsuhiro Harada said that he has been thinking about how to bring more younger players to the fighting games. However, he added that this does not mean that a fighting game would be turned into “a puzzle game, or a real-time strategy game.”
He said that there is still a demand for hand-to-hand fighting games, and there might be new games to accommodate young players outside of the main game so that players do not have to play against one another, and they could opt for team battles, 3v3 matches, and online mode with official rankings.
Explaining this, Harada further said that the team matches may have “positions within a team” with something like the teammate order in “Judo matches.” He added that with more “varied modes” in Tekken that are based on regions or a team, “it could add more meta-gaming as well.”
What are your thoughts about Katsuhiro Harada’s comments? Are you playing Tekken 8? Let us know in the comments.
