The producer of Bandai Namco's upcoming Tekken 8 confirms the game will launch with two important features to its online infrastructure. Tekken 8 is a highly anticipated release among the fighting game crowd, after the last mainline game wrapped up its post-launch support last year. To get fans ready for the next battle to take place in the long-running franchise, Bandai Namco has been revealing a number of details regarding the upcoming fighting game. Producer and director of the series, Katsuhiro Harada, has recently shared some more information about its online functionality.Many fans know Harada to be rather open and communicative with his audience. This can be seen with the Tekken producer's Twitter account, where he answers quite a lot of inquiries from fans. However, much like PlatinumGames figurehead Hideki Kamiya, he is a bit infamous for trolling fans and having little patience for those who bug him about repeated questions. He however is receptive to those interested in his games and will answer genuine questions, such as confirming two online features for Tekken 8: rollback netcode and crossplay.Crossplay is an important feature in multiplayer games, where it allows players to take each other on regardless of what system they own the game on. Harada confirms Tekken 8 will have crossplay after being asked on Twitter. He also recalled that he tried multiple times to include crossplay in the past, but was rejected each time due to the competitiveness between the PlayStation and Xbox brands, along with P2P security issues. He notes that the companies didn't actively support third-party crossplay either, stating that the hurdles were "quite high" as well.
The other big online feature that will be included with Tekken 8's launch is rollback netcode. Many fighting games nowadays live or die by their online infrastructure, with rollback netcode helping cut down on delay and latency during an online match. Several fighting games have switched over to using it, such as the upcoming Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, and King of Fighters 15, just to name a few. Harada also confirmed this feature in response to an inquiry posted after the crossplay tweet.
Some of his other replies on Twitter reference some memes that the Tekken producer is famous for, such as "shut up and sit the hell down," along with "don't ask me for s**t," especially when he answered a question that's been asked multiple times in the past. There are still some insightful answers here and there, such as expectations for Tekken 8's roster, along with the confirmation the game is still doing closed alpha tests.
Tekken 8 is in development for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
