Katsuhiro Harada, the brain behind the Tekken fighting game series, recently shared his thoughts on the future of fighting games and offered up some interesting views on why younger gamers fail to engage with the genre.
Speaking on the Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, Harada says young gamers' rejection of "one-on-one" game mechanics means new fighting games need a team mechanic to entice the new generation of players.
Harada and PlayStation’s Shuhei Yoshida were discussing the direction that fighting games should go in the future, at which point the Tekken creator commented he noticed that the younger generation tends to favor team-based competition.
Harada said that the older generations were comfortable with solo fighting games as they are used to such competition in the real world, where there are clear winners and losers. However, he noticed the opposite trend in younger generations.
“They’re rarely eager to engage in one-on-one showdowns. Plus, because fighting games pit you by yourself against a single opponent, you have to accept all the responsibility if you lose. You can’t blame anyone else,” he pointed out.
He then made a comparison to first-person shooter games, which are popular among younger gamers. In those games, Harada noted, winning players can claim all contributions they made to the victory while they can simply brush off losses by saying that they were mismatched with their teammates.
He then said that he’s considering how he could develop those insights into the future of Tekken.
“Maybe we could include other ways of competing, outside of the main game. For example, maybe they don’t always have to fight one-on-one. They could opt for team battles, such as 3-on-3 matches,” the Tekken overseer explained.
Right now, Harada said he’s interested in introducing these concepts to the Tekken 8 online mode, but maybe we should all get ready for the third instalment of the Tekken Tag Tournament series.