Tekken 8 Has Been Officially Announced

Like many others who saw the tease for the next Tekken project last month at EVO, I assumed the next time we would hear about it would be at The Game Awards in December. That’s why I was surprised along with many others to see Tekken 8 officially announced at the start of the recent State of Play.

The trailer focuses on a fight between Jin Kazama and Kazuya Mishima, the current biggest father and son rivalry in the series after the events of Tekken 7. Although many assumed that the high graphical quality and camera cuts meant it was a cinematic made for the sake of the trailer, a PlayStation blog post confirmed that this was taken from the work-in-progress story mode on the PlayStation 5 and is not pre-rendered. A big purpose of the trailer was to highlight the graphical quality of the game such as with the character models and the stage itself.

Katsuhiro Harada, the Chief Producer at Bandai Namco Studios, said the following about the project: “The team at Bandai Namco Studios has been hard at work to bring groundbreaking new features to Tekken 8, pushing the feeling of power in battles continuously further by harnessing the power of the latest generation of consoles. We can’t wait to show you more in the months to come!”

We do know the game is being made with current generation hardware in mind. The version of the trailer being shared by Bandai Namco confirms that Tekken 8 will be on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam. There’s no telling what new features mentioned by Harada could be at this time, but the cinematic attack that Jin performs at the end does look a lot like a Rage Art from Tekken 7.

Given that the trailer ends with a simple “stay tuned” message, it’s difficult to say when we’ll see more about Tekken 8. It seems unlikely that we’ll see it so soon at the ongoing Tokyo Game Show. A showing, however, at The Game Awards still seems like a distinct possibility. At the very least, considering that Tekken 7 received a potential final update and that the Tekken World Tour finals will be held in February, it’s likely we’ll see updates for the upcoming next entry then.