Rollback and Crossplay Confirmed for Tekken 8

Tekken 8 has been making a lot of waves since its announcement. The gameplay changes look interesting and both the visuals of the environment as well as the characters themselves look wonderful. As fun as it has been to see snippets of the new Tekken game, there has been some concern when it comes to how the online aspect will be handled.

With so many fighting game series embracing rollback, either through retroactive updates or for new entries, the Tekken series has remained an outlier. Technically Tekken 7 has rollback, but it’s commonly agreed that the implementation left a lot to be desired. Crossplay is another online feature that’s been gaining more headway, with Street Fighter 6 being the biggest upcoming fighting game to have it. This has also led to some expectations from Bandai Namco’s fighter, and now we have a confirmation of both from a slightly unexpected source – Twitter.

already installed it, and it already has what you want. The reason WHY we don't make big announcements like cross-play is Cuz even if we make big announcements, people like you will only say things like, "waaaa! That's normal in this day and age."
So shut up & sit the hell down. https://t.co/ZA1ZKMV9gC

— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) April 9, 2023

Back in February, it was announced that Arika would be helping with the netcode for both Tekken 7 and Tekken 8. Due to their experience crafting the well-received rollback netcode for Fighting EX Layer, many assumed this meant that we could finally see a decent implementation. That was the extent of what we knew about the game’s online experience, but thanks to a series of (somewhat cheeky) tweets from the Tekken series game director Katsuhiro Harada, we know that rollback netcode has already been added.

Crossplay was also confirmed in a few earlier tweets. Harada even went further to mention that he had wanted crossplay during previous console generations, but agreements simply couldn’t come to fruition for 3rd party developers. Due to how much the Tekken series has stood out for not having these advancements in recent years, fans have felt a little uneasy about whether they’d adopt them. There’s no saying that they’ll be implemented perfectly, but this is certainly news to be excited for.

Crossplay? Of course I will.
BTW
When the previous generation consoles were released, I had already proposed crossplay between the two platformers. However, at that time, they were at odds with each other over their mutual interests (and P2P security issue) & repeatedly refused. https://t.co/I8b38YfePh

— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) April 9, 2023