Excellent new interview with Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada. In the interview Harada speaks candidly about Tekken’s gameplay, history, and gives us some new information about Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (NETplay for ARCADE?!)
The most interesting excerpt to me:
Today, many game series have left the arcades and gone consumer only, but Tekken continues to debut new instalments there. Do you feel this is still an important sector for the franchise, and Namco?
It is indeed a very hard place to be, especially these days. The consumer world is a place where you buy a game once and that’s it. The arcade is about a coin, a 100 yen coin. If a game feels bad on your first play, it’s over. This is a very harsh but great place to learn. You could just put Kuma on both side of the fight in Tekken and I’m sure you’d achieve game balance, but that wouldn’t be much fun. The true balance is between the fun and the stats that come with characters and to master this, there is no better place than the arcade. You can’t find any better testers than the people in those arcades because they understand those issues very well.To achieve a great balance, you often release the game and gather the feedback. You do then an update based on what you learnt. It can be done via an online software update or what we call a major update, which is no less than a new version of the game like the Dark Resurrection or Bloodline Rebellion. You release a strong concept first and let it be beaten by users. What remains is something that has been polished and rounded on the corners and edges. That result is what you want to bring to the consumer world, it is our way. So yes, the arcade is a very important place for us and especially for this franchise.
Sounds like we can expect a Tekken Tag Tournament 2:CR or similar…
Click here for the full interview
Comments
6 responses to “Harada Interview with Edge Magazine”
Harada just confirms what Rain said in his interview…
Rain : First is T6BR, second is T4. I don’t know many things about T2 and T3. TTT had bad balance, and hard to beat master for novice. T4 was really fun, but noone played it in Korea.
T5DR had good balance and fun, but still hard to beat master for novice.
T6 is like a lottery. In T6, sometimes novice beats master by lucky hopkick and magic 4. I love the fact. In my opinion, fun is come from unexpected and surprise things. Always master beat beginner, why we organizing tournament, just give the prize money to best player. :]
we see other good players beating top players sometimes in t6br because the characters are more balanced. back in TTT1, T5,0, T6.0, etc, the best player with the broken character was the best player, like jang iksu, he was the best cus he was the best player with the broken mishimas, same with nin’s broken steve in T5.0 and holeman with his broken kazuya in vanilla T6, he was 3 time royal rumble champion. they were almost unbeatable like jang iksu cus those games were BROKEN! now that T6br is balanced with the characters, the other masters with other characters have a chance of beating masters. not because T6br is random as Slips and other ttt fanboys keep insisting. otherwise we would’ve seen knee, nin, jdcr, etc losing to novice players, but we don’t! If bryan was broken in ttt1, knee would’ve been the best player. sorry my english is bad, i’m japanese. do you also agree with me, rip?
It is true that in the past, the best players with the most broken characters generally came out on top. For example, in 5.0 the top broken characters were Steve, Nina, Bryan and top players of those characters came out on top (Crow @ Evo). DR was considered much more balanced and Arario won Evo with Jack. Tekken 6:BR is interesting because there are so many characters that come out on top. Player skill seems to matter less, which is why there is no single dominant player. This is also why a lot of people say that the game is too random. Whether thats because of the overall damage, the crush system, rage system or something else I’m not sure.
Thats an interesting point. The ‘random’/’easy’ factor really does seem to draw bigger crowds and bring in more people – Street Fighter 4, Texas Hold Em Poker, etc. The top players still win more than they get randomed out too, but the overall experience is easier to get into
slips, tomhilfiger and other ttt1 fanboys are idiots for saying ttt1 is superior than T6br cus the best player always win in ttt1 and T6br is random cus we see other top players winning. LOL they haven’t realise that the reason jang iksu was the best was because he was the best player with the broken mishimas so the other players who were as good as him who were using mid, low tier characters, didn’t stand a chance against him. and slips, jop, etc were only winning in u.s. cus there were no mishima players as good as the koreans and japanese. sorry i called them idiots. but it’s true!
rip, player’s skill still matters, that’s why the best players mostly win tournies. they only lose sometimes to other good players. and the T6br is much deeper than ttt1, etc. so it’s harder for top players to ascend to the next level. they get stuck and other new comers become better cus of youtube, they get easier access to korean and japanese videos, they learn, study their opponent, and tutorial videos like levelupyourgame, they learn how to take advantage of frames and complete list of frame data, these weren’t available before. that’s why we see more good players, but players like knee, nin, jdcr. etc are just as skilled as jang iksu if not more skilled.