Tekken 7 Info Dump: Rage Quit Penalties, Cross Play, And More

Tekken pro­duc­er Kat­suhi­ro Hara­da recent­ly sat down with Gamespot to dis­cuss Tekken 7. The inter­view cov­ered many top­ics rang­ing from cross play and rage quit penal­ties to guest char­ac­ters and how they improved the game. 

Tekken 7 has actu­al­ly been playable for some time through arcades and improve­ments are being made. Hara­da states that improve­ments are made from indi­vid­ual opin­ions, but most of it is based on game data. 

“But even more than indi­vid­ual play­er opin­ions, we look at the data to kind of decide what changes need to be made to the game. That occurs con­stant­ly through­out the process in the Arcade. For Tekken 7, specif­i­cal­ly, the income was quite good. The income is kind of a barom­e­ter of what peo­ple think about the game, but it was one of the best in the series right out of the date. But the arcade, it’s not so preva­lent in the west in Europe or the US, but those play­ers are watch­ing on the inter­net; match­es and stuff.”

One of the more unique changes is the num­ber of cos­tumes and the visu­al look of the game. Accord­ing to Harad, west­ern fans found the game to look too sim­i­lar to past install­ments. Name­ly the char­ac­ter cos­tumes were said to be the stick­ing point for many. 

“They were say­ing the char­ac­ters cos­tumes were the same as past install­ments, which was done inten­tion­al­ly to estab­lish the char­ac­ters, but they said it did­n’t feel as fresh because of that. The same cos­tume designs. And also the look of the game; it does­n’t look so dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent than past install­ments. So for Fat­ed Ret­ri­bu­tion, which was an update to the arcade edi­tion, we made a lot of addi­tions to the cos­tumes for the exist­ing char­ac­ters. And also changed the fil­ter to make the dark areas more dark, the light areas more light to give it more con­trast to have more visu­al appeal.”

Since the game will have online mul­ti­play­er there will be new prob­lems that need to be address such as rage quit­ters. While Hara­da did­n’t go into details, he stat­ed that there will be penal­ties for peo­ple who quit online matches.

“You can’t keep some­one from phys­i­cal­ly pulling out the LAN cable, so the only thing you can do is make them not want to do that by hav­ing some kind of penal­ties. Although we can’t real­ly go into that at the moment, we do have penal­ties planned for that. We don’t want to go into a lot of detail right now because the hack­ers and such will already start about think­ing of ways to cir­cum­vent that. But we do have plans to imple­ment some penal­ties.”

Cross play between con­soles and PC has long been a top­ic for Hara­da. He has been in talks with both Sony and Microsoft for “quite some time” and has “cham­pi­on the cause” for cross play between PS4 and Xbox One. Despite his efforts, it seems that there won’t be cross play due to the two com­pa­nies’ secu­ri­ty and gen­er­al policies.

“Until there is some kind of progress between the first-par­ties adapt­ing their secu­ri­ty poli­cies and just pol­i­cy in gen­er­al regard­ing online, to allow that, it’s not going to be viable at this time. It’s not to say that’s the case for­ev­er. But until they change their poli­cies, there’s not a whole lot we can do.”  

 Harad recent­ly asked fans on Twit­ter for guest char­ac­ter sug­gests. By far the most request­ed char­ac­ter was Kiryu Kaza­ma from the Yakuza series. Hara­da stat­ed that this came as a sur­prise because he was­n’t even aware that the west was espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in the Yakuza series or the character. 

Regard­less of fan feed­back Hara­da said that all guest char­ac­ters will have to over­come obsta­cles. In Kaza­ma’s case it would require Bandai Nam­co to work out a deal with Sega. Then ide­al­ly the release would line up with the inter­est of both com­pa­nies such as the release date for a Yakuza relat­ed product. 

Oth­er post launch DLC is planned how­ev­er no exact details are giv­en on what exact­ly they will con­sist of. Paid DLC and a sea­son pass will be avail­able. This will in turn allow the devel­op­ers to sup­port the game for longer, at least a year accord­ing to Harada.

“As far as post-release plans, we can’t real­ly talk in a whole lot of detail now because that’s some­thing that our mar­ket­ing teams around the world are still try­ing to come to con­sen­sus on. The game itself, we final­ly just got the mas­ter as well so. One thing we can say is in the past, Tekken after release, we had the sys­tem where we had some char­ac­ters that would be unlocked grad­u­al­ly for two or three months after launch, but that was as much as we could do at that time. But this time, Tekken 7 is the first that is going to have DLC, paid DLC, and a Sea­son Pass. This allows us to keep the team avail­able for mak­ing changes and updates to the game for a longer span–over a year or so. We plan to sup­port the game for a longer peri­od this time.”  

Final­ly with the release of the Nin­ten­do Switch some are won­der­ing if Tekken 7 might be released for the sys­tem. Unfor­tu­nate­ly it seems that a Switch release is not very like­ly although it has not been offi­cial­ly ruled out.

“But per­son­al­ly, we’ve been so busy with try­ing to mas­ter up Tekken for the cur­rent plat­forms that we haven’t real­ly had enough time to study the hard­ware. We could­n’t even buy it–it was sold out every time we went to look for it.” 

In oth­er news a trail­er high­light­ing the var­i­ous fea­tures and game modes of Tekken 7 was released. It is cur­rent­ly only avail­able in Japan­ese how­ev­er a trans­lat­ed trail­er is expect­ed to release next week.