Tekken 7 Boss Talks Rage-Quitting, Possible Nintendo Switch Version, Guest Characters, And More

After a delay, the fighting game Tekken 7 is finally coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on June 2. Ahead of the launch, GameSpot had the opportunity to sit down with series producer Katsuhiro Harada to discuss the upcoming game and some topics surrounding it.

First, we asked about guest characters. Before getting on his flight to Sydney, Harada asked his Twitter followers to send in their guest character requests. He received many, but one that stood out was Kazuma, one of the main characters in Sega's Yakuza series.

Don't necessarily expect Kazuma to come to Tekken 7 soon or ever, however, as Harada pointed out that guests characters can be a complicated matter. Bandai Namco would have to work out a deal with Sega in the case of Kazuma or any other publisher for a different guest character. A company might want to do a deal to promote an upcoming release, so timing is another factor that matters.

Going back to Kazuma, Harada said he was not aware that Western gamers were even aware of the character, so he was surprised to see so many call for him to be in Tekken 7. But again, don't get too excited just yet--"There are a lot of hurdles to overcome" for all guest characters, Harada said.

One high-profile example of a guest character in Tekken 7 is Street Fighter's Akuma, who was confirmed for the game back in 2015. You can see Akuma in action in Tekken 7 right here.

Also in our interview, Harada talked about the possibility of Tekken 7 coming to Nintendo Switch. Don't expect that to happen. Harada and producer Michael Murray, who translated the interview, have not even been able to get their hands on a Switch as of yet.

"Officially, we can't really comment on that because our company has strict policy about which titles we talk about for Switch," Harada explained. "But personally, we've been so busy with trying to master up Tekken for the current platforms that we haven't really had enough time to study the hardware. We couldn't even buy it--it was sold out every time we went to look for it."

Bandai Namco is one of Nintendo's partners for the Nintendo Switch, with Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 one of the titles that the publisher is bringing to the system.

Below are some further highlights from our interview with Harada, while you can read what he had to say about PS4/Xbox One cross-play here:

On Rage-Quitting:

"You can't keep someone from physically pulling out the LAN cable, so the only thing you can do is make them not want to do that by having some kind of penalties. Although we can't really go into that at the moment, we do have penalties planned for that. We don't want to go into a lot of detail right now because the hackers and such will already start about thinking of ways to circumvent that. But we do have plans to implement some penalties."

On Feedback From Arcade Edition:

"Tekken has always followed the pattern where we release first in the arcade and then we polish up the game according to user feedback. But even more than individual player opinions, we look at the data to kind of decide what changes need to be made to the game. That occurs constantly throughout the process in the Arcade. For Tekken 7, specifically, the income was quite good. The income is kind of a barometer of what people think about the game, but it was one of the best in the series right out of the date. But the arcade, it's not so prevalent in the west in Europe or the US, but those players are watching on the internet; matches and stuff.

They were saying the characters costumes were the same as past installments, which was done intentionally to establish the characters, but they said it didn't feel as fresh because of that. The same costume designs. And also the look of the game; it doesn't look so drastically different than past installments. So for Fated Retribution, which was an update to the arcade edition, we made a lot of additions to the costumes for the existing characters. And also changed the filter to make the dark areas more dark, the light areas more light to give it more contrast to have more visual appeal."

On Post-Launch Support And DLC

"As far as post-release plans, we can't really talk in a whole lot of detail now because that's something that our marketing teams around the world are still trying to come to consensus on. The game itself, we finally just got the master as well so. One thing we can say is in the past, Tekken after release, we had the system where we had some characters that would be unlocked gradually for two or three months after launch, but that was as much as we could do at that time. But this time, Tekken 7 is the first that is going to have DLC, paid DLC, and a Season Pass. This allows us to keep the team available for making changes and updates to the game for a longer span--over a year or so. We plan to support the game for a longer period this time."