Tekken 8 is on the brink of becoming a much changed game. The title's huge Season 2 update is imminent; it's out next week on the 1st April (the jokes write themselves with that one), and the potential overhaul has a lot of players worried for the fighter's future.
In a nutshell, Season 2 seems to be bolstering aggressive, pressure-pushing mechanics that many would argue are already overtuned in the base release. The fear is that by making these highly offensive tools even more deadly, the development team is greatly reducing Tekken's overall nuance.
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In essence, a lot of these attacks — especially when used in the game's divisive Heat state, in which characters can enter a powered-up form at almost any time once per round — force the other player into a frustrating guessing game.
Are you going low, or are you going mid? Guess wrong, and that's probably half of your health bar gone in just a few seconds. This kind of hyper aggressive meta is often seen as problematic, especially when it comes to high level play, as it tends to strip away Tekken's in-depth defensive options.
But here's the thing: Bandai Namco hasn't published Season 2's full patch notes yet, and so the Tekken community is just piecing things together based on what's been said in the developer's latest deep dive video. It's still a bit too early to be jumping to any concrete conclusions.
Still, the evidence is starting to mount — and there's a genuine anxiety growing amongst more dedicated players. Popular Tekken content creators, like TheMainManSWE and PhiDX have been weighing in with a similar nervousness — and places like the Tekken subreddit are just absolutely packed with doom and gloom.