Two upcoming balance patches, and prior staff now in charge of tuning and adjustments
During Evo Japan 2025, Bandai Namco announced an absolute ton of new content and updates coming to Tekken 8, and for good reason, as numerous people criticized the game’s Season 2 update resulting in overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam.
Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada said that while there was a new team in place for Tekken 8’s balance previously, they’ve been replaced by the prior staff who balanced some of the previous games.
“[Tekken] 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,” Harada said.
One of these members is none other than Kohei ‘Nakatsu’ Ikeda, who was in charge of tuning the battle balance in Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Tekken 7.
Because of the deluge of new content and various updates, you may have missed that two balance updates are scheduled for Tekken 8. The first will be arriving in about two weeks, on June 3, 2025 and will be addressing the defensive side of the game.
Players have felt that defensive options are heavily underwhelming in Tekken 8, and getting the series back on track to what it has seen in the past should be an ideal scenario for players and Bandai Namco.
Considering that Nakatsu handled balance for the previous two games in the franchise — Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Tekken 7 — and that he is giving his personal sign off to every detail of the battle balance and tuning, it’s reasonable to expect that Tekken 8 will change to more closely resemble these prior entries in the franchise.
Also, there’s yet another balance patch in the works from Bandai Namco, with a general release date of the summer time, which falls between June 20 to September 22, 2025.
With the pace that Bandai Namco is currently pushing out updates, and with new people being in charge of adjusting the game’s balance, Tekken 8 is going to look quite a bit different here in the near future.
The update coming in about two weeks will be version 2.02, while the patch in the summer time will change the game to version 2.03. You can read the version 2.01 updates that were released last week as well.