Tekken 8 will have cross-play and rollback netcode
Katsuhiro Harada, the director of Tekken 8, has confirmed a number of highly requested features for the game, including rollback netcode, cross-platform play, and more. If you were thinking this information would come from a trailer or an interview or even a blog post, you’d be wrong. Harada just… tweeted it out.
Harada confirmed the new features in a series of seemingly agitated tweets, some more abrasive than others, but overall informative. Right in the sweet spot. The first big announcement was the addition of rollback netcode, the gold standard for fighting game netcode that minimizes lag and ensures everyone is on a level playing field.
In response to a Twitter user asking about the feature, Harada shot back “already installed it, and it already has what you want.” He went on to confirm cross-platform play in the same tweet.
“The reason WHY we don’t make big announcements like cross-play is Cuz even if we make big announcements, people like you will only say things like ‘waaa! That’s normal in this day and age.’,” he said, “So shut up & sit the hell down.”
An earlier tweet explained why cross-platform multiplayer was impossible in previous entries in the series, spilling some tea on just how things were going in the industry at the time.
“When the previous generation consoles were released, I had already proposed crossplay between the two [platforms],” Harada said, “However, at that time, they were at odds with each other over their mutual interests (and P2P security issue) & repeatedly refused.”
That lines up with what we know about cross-platform play, with both Microsoft and Sony objecting to the feature at various points over the last decade. It seems both eventually came to accept it, though, as cross-platform multiplayer has become more and more common over the past few years.
Harada, who’s been the series director for Tekken at Bandai Namco for over 25 years, also said that Tekken 8 would have a lot more characters at launch than Street Fighter 6, although he affectionately referred to the game as “Capcom-san” rather than naming it directly. So far only 12 characters have been confirmed for Tekken 8, a few less than Street Fighter 6 at 18, but there’s still plenty of time for more announcements.
He also said that PC players who want to play with high-resolution graphics should probably invest in high-end gear, saying that “if you want to play 4K native, the higher the specs, the better”. He said that players who are worried they won’t get an optimal experience on PC should probably play on console instead, as the experience is likely to be a lot more consistent there.
Another tweet confirmed that the Tekken team at Bandai Namco was in the middle of alpha testing, but that there would be a public beta at some point down the line. He stopped short of saying when that would be, or when the game would release, but it sounds like development is progressing along very well.
Tekken 8 is set to release at some point on the future on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PCs, and PlayStation 5, and will be built in Unreal Engine 5.
