The father of Tekken has given a rational explanation for why cross-play was left out of Tekken 7 and will surely be in the new game.

Tekken 7 launched in 2017 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC (and hit arcades two years earlier!), didn’t have cross-play, so there was no way for a player fighting on PlayStation 4 to challenge a friend who mashed buttons on Xbox One. But there was a suggestion to do so, and it was pitched directly to publisher Bandai Namco by Katsuhiro Harada, the franchise’s producer (and Tekken 7 director). The company didn’t need convincing, but the “two platforms,” which Harada didn’t name, were not interested in his idea…

“Cross-play [in Tekken 8]? Of course! When the previous console generation was released, I proposed cross-play between the two platforms [PlayStation 4, Xbox One]. However, at that time, they were at odds with each other over their mutual interests, had peer-to-peer security issues, and repeatedly refused. Remember when they announced they were open to cross-play a few years ago? They didn’t actively support third parties then, and the hurdles were quite high. There are still some problems left, but it will be possible,” Harada wrote.

Hopefully, the idea of having only PlayStation-PC and Xbox-PC play together is a thing of the past. After all, in a fighting game, it doesn’t matter where you play (Denuvo can indeed cause stuttering on PC, and Harada mentioned it before!). Still, it’s essential to know each other’s fighting styles better so that you can win because it’s almost impossible to have stuttering (on PC, it can still happen).

Tekken 8, announced in 2018, runs on Unreal Engine 5, and while no release date has been announced, it may launch sometime this year (and then maybe in arcades here first, with a “home port” coming later?). There will also be rollback netcode…

Source: WCCFTech