Tekken 8 replaces their entire balance team after disastrous Season 2 update

Tekken 8’s Season 2 update resulted in a near unprecedented level of backlash for the series, and the devs have responded by bringing back the A-team and swapping the team who made the patch off the project.

Despite being very well received at launch, Tekken 8’s review scores plummeted across all platforms after the Season 2 update released with over 1500 changes, many of which didn’t function as intended and literally broke the game.

Even after swift action from the developers, concerns rose among hardcore Tekken fans that Season 2’s launch led the series so far in a direction they didn’t like that it’d be difficult for the current team to fix it.

Tekken 8’s developers agreed, and they brought the A-team back. According to game director Harada, the team that worked on the Season 2 balance update isn’t the same one that developed the original game. Now they’re getting the old devs back in the hotseat to get the game fixed.

Tekken 8 brings back core developers to fix Season 2

In the realm of live service titles, it isn’t exactly rare for a patch to miss the mark in some areas. Some games will have down periods, the likes of which make the highs that much sweeter. Apex Legends, for instance, is experiencing that right now, with the dev team completely changing their philosophy on how characters are designed to try and win players back.

But Tekken 8 Season 2 is different.

It had the worst review bomb cycle of any fighting game in history, with thousands of players flooding the Steam reviews to voice their distaste. Content creators quit and began emulating older Tekken titles to get their fix and keep making content.

Many dedicated Tekken fans opted to emulate Tekken Tag Tournament 2 instead of playing the new title in the series due to how much they disliked the Season 2 patch

Rather than complaining about it and still playing, the patch was so poorly received that people wound up going and playing other games. This is extremely rare in the live service space, and it resulted in the devs drafting emergency hotfix patches and publicly apologizing for the Season 2.

Now, over a month after S2’s launch, Harada has revealed that this patch’s reception resulted in the team that was working on it getting booted off the project.

“8 was challenging in some aspects with a new team for battle & tuning, but we have returned the team structure to the members of the past. In addition, the director, Nakatsu, who we all know and love, is now able to check and approve all tuning in detail (he was short on time as general manager, but now he gives final approval for every detail of battles and tuning),” Director Harada explained.

So, if the core Tekken development team wasn’t working on Season 2, who was?

Arika was a side development team responsible for helping with content from Tekken 7’s later content updates

Tekken 8 was co-developed by a studio by the name of Arika. This team helped with some aspects of T8, but they also handled some of the later content updates for Tekken 7. With Harada referring to a “new team” handling the bulk of the work for Season 2, there’s a good chance Arika was the one. Although, there is still a chance that it’s a different team internally at Bandai Namco as well.

Harada has said publicly that he intends to make Tekken 9 his last game in the series, and that he wants to have it ready for the next console generation in a few years. This is supported by recent tweets after he announced the change in development, saying that he plans to stop working on the series in a few years’ time.

If the core team was working on that entry, it’d make sense to outsource T8’s updates like they did with the prior game. However, with the people who would potentially be working through the pre-production phase of a new Tekken game, it isn’t clear how this may affect the development of that future title if it’s in production.