Tekken 8 is getting crossplay - something Harada has wanted for years
Announced on Twitter, game director Katsuhiro Harada has good news for Tekken fans.
The game director for Tekken 8 has announced on Twitter that the upcoming Bandai Namco fighting game will have crossplay, something he claims to have wanted since the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One.
According to Harada: "At that time, they [Sony and Microsoft] were at odds with each other over their mutual interests (and P2P security issue) & repeatedly refused." These days though, with crossplay being more accepted between competing consoles, it seems it'll finally happen.
Harada has a long lasting history of interacting with the online Tekken community on Twitter, offering information to eager fans, rewtweeting fan art, and famously telling more obnoxious personalities not to ask him for s**t. They even made a shirt!
Obviously, crossplay is good for any multiplayer game. However, for highly competitive games like Tekke, it's incredibly useful. Usually, the wider community of a game like Tekken, Street Fighter, etc. identify the most popular platform and move there en masse. Without crossplay, this could leave those with only a single platform isolated from the majority of players.
So, it's good news for Tekken fans. The genre as a whole has seen a wave of technical improvements over the past few years including crossplay and better netcode infrastructure. While some games like The King of Fighters XV and Guilty Gear: Strive are still struggling with their online experience, we're starting to see a slow but steady move towards a technically sound genre.
Is there a game out there you'd like to see crossplay added to? Are you hype about Tekken 8? let us know!