STACK #151 May 2017

FEATURE GAMES

Tekken 7 ’s campaign will serve as the conclusion to the Mishima Saga; the story of the family feud between Heihachi Mishima, Kazuya Mishima, and Jin Kazama. Players will also find out the origins of the Devil Gene. Not to mention Street Fighter ’s Akuma has an additionally important role…

• Tekken 7 is out June 2

interesting not only for the people playing, but for the people watching as well,” he adds. Harada-san is aware that those familiar with the series will know what to look for in fights. "We’ve tried to make it more exciting and easier to understand for people who aren’t perhaps as familiar with Tekken. Some of the game

Moreover, the publisher is always trying to make the game more accessible. “We try to keep the veteran players happy by adding new costumes for some of their favourite characters, and for the newcomers we add new playable characters so they don’t feel so out of the loop. We also keep in mind that veteran players may have honed their skills particularly to one character, so we try to translate that into the new instalments as well as adding new mechanics.” With such a cemented

mechanics are geared choices, for example the super slow motion – obviously for the player it’s very exciting in the match, but the people watching also get that same sort of rush." There's also the addition of the online tournament mode. "It’s fun for not only the super-high-tier players that we have, but also for a group of friends that might want to get together and have a tournament of eight people to find out who’s the best," he explains. "The gameplay mechanics and the way we develop the game have definitely been more recently geared to the competitive gaming scene.” As with previous

a shift in the trends of games in general, that players are wanting to play games for longer, and are expecting more content after launch." The team plans to support the new game a little longer than previously. "We might look at things like new modes or characters, or even balance changes, for a longer period than what we may have done in the past – perhaps even in the form of a season pass. We’re also trying to put more effort into tournaments. We’ve done some in Japan and the US in the past, and it’s important to us to be able to help out people who are organising their own as well.”

community around fighting games in particular, esports and tournaments are always a huge focus in development, and Tekken 7 is no different. “Esports as a category is a bit of a buzzword,

The way we develop the game is definitely... more geared to the competitive scene

instalments in the Tekken series, you can expect a

especially for games like Tekken,“ notes Harada-san, who sees the fighting game genre as something of a proprietor of

bunch of post-release content. Harada-san hints that Tekken 7 will include the most post-launch

content of any Tekken game to date. “With past instalments, we’ve had time- release mechanics where characters were added or unlocked a little further down the track. That was only ever up to maybe two months after launch, because we did it for free and we didn’t really

the competitive gaming phenomenon itself. “Fighting games have always had their own scene where people like to compete against each other of their own accord. People would gather in a certain location and battle against each other to see who’s the best. Therefore, a lot of effort has been put into developing Tekken for that kind of audience, and to make sure it’s up to standard for a competitive environment. "More recently, with Tekken 7 , more of a focus has been put on making sure it’s

have enough resources available to go further than that. More recently, we’ve seen

53