According to Katsuhiro Harada, they can pass the blame to others when they lose, which makes you wonder when Tekken Tag Tournament 3 will be released, since it is also a team fighting game in a metaphorical sense…

In the latest episode of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, Harada was interviewed by PlayStation icon Shuhei Yoshida. Yoshida had an interesting question: how do you think the 1v1 fighting game genre could evolve in the future? Harada said that they need to find a way to create more team-based tournaments, as this would appeal to younger age groups.

“It seems to me that the way fighting games are played has evolved over time, with the generations. In Japan, and probably in most of the world, my generation is a big one. It is a large part of the population. This has made our society competitive. When you applied to school or for a job, there was always a lot of competition. Because of that, people of my generation prefer definitive outcomes, a clear winner and loser.

This is true for people in and around their 50s. But most young people today are the opposite. They rarely want to engage in one-on-one showdowns. And because fighting games pit you against a single opponent, you have to take full responsibility if you lose. You can’t blame anyone else. In team-based shooters, if players win, they can say they won because of their own contributions, but if they lose, it’s because they were paired with a lousy team,” Harada said.

Yoshida said that some games give out some kind of prize to each player. Harada then turned to how the concept could be modified: “I’m not saying that we should suddenly turn a fighting game into a puzzle game or a real-time strategy game. I think there’s still a demand for that kind of game, that kind of hand-to-hand combat. But maybe we could include other types of competition outside of the main game. For example, maybe they don’t always have to fight one-on-one. They could opt for team fights, like 3-on-3 fights.

I think we might want to incorporate that into the official rankings of the online mode. Maybe team matches could have positions within a team, something like the order of teammates in judo matches. Right now, in Tekken Online, each player fights alone, fight after fight, just trying to climb the ladder. Maybe with more varied modes based on things like teams or regions, it could also add more meta-gaming,” Harada added.

3v3? Well, Tekken Tag Tournament was something like that…

Source: VGC