Tekken 8 Reveals 'Emergency' Patches as Player Backlash Spirals Out of Control

Very rarely seen a backlash of this magnitude aimed at a fighting game. I don't play as much Tekken 8 as I'd like to these days, but after watching videos and streams of Season 2, I can totally understand the frustration.

Some truly mad decisions are being made by the Tekken balancing team. Not even sure what it is they're trying to accomplish.

I stopped playing this game ages ago (it pales in comparison to Street Fighter 6), but I'm playing a local tourney over the weekend and I main Paul lol.

Rage over video games is always funny to me.

But, sure, since people who bought this game feel this way, it's a good thing the Taken team is doing something to fix the problem they caused.

It has been pretty wild to watch from the outside. I only play Tekken very casually with friends every now and then but it seems like the community is in an absolute uproar about this update. Granted the fighting game community complains a lot but this definitely feels different from the norm.

It wasn't a fighting game but the last time I saw a community this upset with an update was way back on Uncharted 2 1.05 patch. That version number lives rent free in my head to this very day. I hated that balance update so much. 😂

I played this at launch for around an hour but something felt off and haven't returned to it

@Korgon holy ***** I remember that. I stopped playing it after that. For the first few rounds I was like wtf is wrong…. Why is it like this? Then I saw the update notification.

My local Tekken community got super angry with this S2 patch lol.

I asked them what's the problem and they showed me clips of multiple characters doing infinite / unblockable loops with massive chip damage lmao.

I'm not sure what happened with Tekken team. I heard Harada gonna retired and left Bamco this year. But if they didn't fix this asap then a lot of Tekken players gonna jump ship to other games. A lot of Tekken players from my local community already jumping to SF 6 and they have a great time with the game haha.

@PuppetMaster I'm half hoping some of the dorks in my local - and very small - FGC do jump ship as they're all glued to T8 and poor ol' SF6 hardly gets a look in!

Heck, they play Strive more than 6 lol.

It’s crazy how this all blew up. At least the development team will do something about it though.

I will never know why devs enact such sweeping balance changes to games (SP games being the worst, particularly when they nerf something so bad its now useless), sometimes ages after launch, and expect people to me happy. Sure, fix 'broken' things/moves/'weapons' , but thats not what we are talking about here.

@HRdepartment
Yeah it was such a shame because I was soooo hooked to that multiplayer up until then. They tried to patch it somewhat back to what it was before but they never did quite get it there.

Ever since then, whenever I see 1.05 anything I wince a little bit! 😄

@Rich33 I'm still trying to figure out why CDPR decided to change how The Witcher 3's perk/build system works in the new gen versions. Which came out, you know, eight years after initial launched.

All it seemed to do was ruin builds for Death March difficulty and didn't make the game any more fun.

I still can't grasp the reasoning for trying to buff or nerf a character in a fighting game. Years ago a game would just come out and, for better or worse, the devs would just leave it be and move on to something else.

@Deadp001 It's just how fighting games have changed in terms of business model.

Professional, competitive play is now a huge draw thanks to how easy it is to actually watch tournaments online; the rise of esports has changed everything with regards to sponsors and funding.

So now, fighting games have to be kept 'balanced' to ensure the credibility of competitive play. If the game looks unbalanced during professional matches, it's a bad look for the game and its developer / publisher. Advertising goes out the window.

Updates and patches are a necessary component of how the modern fighting game model works. They're basically live service games, complete with seasonal DLC. They cost a lot more to make and maintain, but they make much more profit over time (assuming the game is good!).

@MrPeanutbutterz
I never played the PS5 version, but dev teams seem to do it so often these days - they nerf key parts of peoples builds / strategies out of all existence when something only needed a tweak, or inexplicably create massively overpowered mechanics.
Your example does sound quite extreme on the time from launch front though!

As someone who has been playing T8 as his main fighting game for the past year...I'll be putting it to the side for the foreseeable future.

They literally acknowledged offense was already really strong and said for Season 2 they wanted to offer more options for defensive play...the patch drops and they doubled down on high damage offense with safe and/or plus on block strings/stances that also can lead into 50/50 mix ups....

Like what? They said one thing and literally did the opposite. Mister "Don't ask me for s***" should spend less time blocking people on twitter who criticize Anna's new hairstyle maybe actually pay attention to what the fans have been trying to tell him for the past year.

@MrPeanutbutterz Possibly your local has strong nostalgia with Tekken like they spent a lot of their childhood times with Tekken, which i can guess either T3 or T5. So they can't moved on from T8 and just coping with the flaws.

@Deadp001 Years ago when internet is still a dream, if devs wants to balance character and add new mechanics / character / stage, they must release a full game that has the update. You can look at multiple version of SF II, GG X, BlazBlue, Virtua Fighter etc.

But that practice is quite a burden for the FG community because they must spend more money just to play the same game that has better balance or new mechanics.

@Rich33 Extra baffling when it's a single player RPG like Witcher!

@Deadp001 Years ago the devs would go through multiple iterations to have a balanced game. Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition, Street Fighter 2 Turbo are all fundamentally the same game, save for balance changes and a few new moves.

Even when we got games that didn't have iterative versions like SF2, we still ended up with games that aren't the vanilla releases, like say how the PS1 version of Tekken 2 is actually a port of the first revision of the arcade game, plus a few other console-specific tweaks.

Nowadays this stuff - which is decided upon from telemetry of millions of people playing the game, is deployed as a free patch. Which means everyone is on the same base version of the game and the player base stays together.

@PuppetMaster Haha, I'm the oldest there, and have a fond memory of getting Tekken 3 for my birthday after school one Friday evening... now I'm wondering if any of the rest of them were even alive when T3 came out!

At the end of the day the devs for Tekken are still doing way more than the devs of Dragon ball sparking zero👀

Cause DB sparking zero was literally left out to die. Especially on steam 💀🙄

@MrPeanutbutterz So your local are mostly young gamers who's possibly not yet born when Tekken 3 came out? That's pretty interesting. Usually a lot of young gamers are not into fighting games because the learning curve is a bit more difficult compare to mainstream games like COD, Valorant, Fortnite, etc. But i guess with Modern control that simplify the input can attract them to play fighting games.

But your local kinda the opposite of mine. Here the guys are mostly born in the 80's or early 90's haha. Many of them loves SF and Tekken but Tekken is a bit more dominant.

@ShogunRok chaos brother chaos 😉

@PuppetMaster Upon doing the maths, some of the guys there are about as old as the Tekken franchise itself (so early 30s now), but weren't playing T3 when it originally came out. And as you mentioned, some of them grew up with a copy of T5.

Everyone plays classic controls! A bunch of them got into gaming in the PS3/360 era, and instead of the CoD route, they got their competitive kicks from SF4/BlazBlue/VF5.

Like none of them are playing fighting games as long as I have been (by virtue of my "old fart" status), but even the youngest member has been playing them for over a decade at this stage.

Maybe it's cos I'm not at that top level but I've been playing Tekken since the PS1 days and I'm still really, really enjoying Tekken 8 online!
Maybe there's some moves that need to be looked at and hopefully these patches will fix them but it's still the best game in the series by miles and my favourite out of all the latest fighting games from the different companies.
For me Street Fighter 6 online started to become out of my league after the first year so stopped playing that and Strive is the one I will always go back to play but rarely online.

This always happens when the developers do not play their own game. Many such cases

So all the fan goodwill is Gon it seems...

I personally don't understand the big problem. I am not really into fighting games but generally fighting games need to remain competitive so they both keep existing players and add new players who still have a chance against veterans.