A Bad Week For Fighting Games

6 April 2025

I hadn’t really seen myself writing this sort of reactive news based post, but the last week or two in fighting games have been pretty interesting. I wanted to get some of it written down, plus my own reactions, as a time capsule of sorts. At some point in the future I’ll get to look back and say, “Remember when Trump was second by second dismantling human rights and destroying the economy? Oh, and Tekken was kind of bad too.”

Tekken 8

For the large majority, Tekken 8’s Season Two update was the big news this week. I’m not a giant Tekken head, I only picked up Tekken 8 a couple of weeks ago, and before that have played it about as much as anyone who knows someone with a PS2.

Before trying to learn what Tekken was all about, my impressions of the game were that it had a successful launch, and that's pretty much it. I believe people were unhappy with the microtransactions, and the way they rolled out the store; but otherwise I had thought it had built up a rather positive playerbase. I have since found out that this isn’t the case.

The short version is that the design philosophy behind Tekken 8 is all about aggression, with many moves and mechanics being given armour properties, and guessing right in many 50/50 situations will lead to giant combos that absolutely decimate health bars. For many, this style of play felt oppressive, and deemphasised most of the defensive mechanics they had come to love in the previous games. Coming into this patch, the development team held multiple interviews and live streams where they said as much. They admitted to over tuning aggression, and that they wanted to bring back some of the more defensive aspects of the series.

Ouch!

Season Two launches and wow. Players are upset. I know that Steam Reviews are not the greatest metric for a player bases feelings, but I struggle to think of a recent patch dropping that had this much negativity attached to it.

Seemingly doubling down on aggression, the patch has the exact opposite design mentality to the one the developers were talking about. When I think about Tekken I imagine playing with the 3D space, sidestepping attacks and retaliating with my own cool combos etc. Instead, most of my play time has me approaching it like it’s a 2D fighter, and the changes in Season Two almost encourage that. With an increase in moves that hit sidesteps, and stance based 50/50’s, it’s a hard game to want to play/learn seriously.

I’m not particularly upset, I only recently started playing, but for long time fans, or even those just playing since the launch of Tekken 8, this one has to sting. Looking forward to seeing what changes the team can make while obviously maintaining their aggressive vision. I know I wouldn’t want to be in their position! Best of luck gang!

City of the Wolves

Now for the real big news, and a content warning for some heavy stuff including sexual assault and violence. SNK announced that Cristiano Ronaldo will be coming to City of the Wolves. When I posted my thoughts about the first beta, I had a brief mention about SNK being ninety-six percent owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, linking to an article where a representative from SNK stated that it “It has no effect on our creative output”.

This was obviously bullshit then, but if you needed more proof now, why else would Cristiano Ronaldo - a self admitted rapist - ever be added to their game. I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence, I’m not SNK, but it hardly takes a genius to see this as an attempt to whitewash Saudi Arabia’s political image. Look at this massive investment in games. Wow, how fun and cool! What Human Rights violations? What fucking murder?

And sure, Ronaldo is without a doubt one of the most famous people on the planet, but I can't imagine this was a decision that SNK made independently, not when Ronaldo’s team is also majority owned by Saudi’s Public Investment Fund. I have to say, pretty crushing. I was excited for City of the Wolves, but I absolutely will not be supporting anything SNK going forward.

Not taking a break, one week later and SNK are back to announce Salvatore Ganacci will also be joining the roster. This seems to actually have been the breaking point for most people looking forward to City of the Wolves. Being generous, I can assume that they didn't know about the Ronaldo “allegations”, and so for them, they just see two real people being introduced to a sequel that they've been waiting the last twenty-five years for. Where you could reason away that Ronaldo is here because of his incredible fame and the perceived massive audience he'll bring in, Salvatore Ganacci is comparatively a nobody. To many people, he is just a man who also happens to now be inside one of their video games. Brutal.

I do wonder how many sales this will bring in versus the number they’ve lost. It’s anecdotal but you don’t have to look far to see the hype is deflated. With so many reasons to be upset, take your pick of human rights, rape, or just a universe you enjoyed or took seriously looking more and more stupid, City of the Wolves is shaping up to be real shit.

2XKO

Coming in with a different kind of roster problem, 2XKO producer, Tom Cannon, and director, Shaun Rivera, jumped on a Sajam stream to rather casually announce that they were planning on launching with ten characters. If you didn't know, 2XKO is a two v. two tag fighter, and so ten fighters is pretty shocking. The immediate damage control is that they had to make a choice between launching sooner with ten characters or launching later with more, and that they felt that getting the game out and in people’s hands was better.

Seven characters in their latest update

I agree, but I am a little confused. 2XKO was originally announced as Project L roughly six years ago. I appreciate that fighting game characters take a long time to design and balance, but surely this can’t have been the desired outcome. Launching your new big fighter with so few characters has to be a development fumble. Instead, the plan is start with ten and then rapidly push out new characters, all while people can actively play the game and offering up their feedback etc.

Realistically though, how fast can they meaningfully add new characters to the game? There are a lot of people sort of hand waving this away as “It’s Riot! They have the resources to pump the roster up quick”, but if that was the case, why would the game only launch with ten characters? Why not launch with more, and then continue to add characters at a rapid rate? If they have this mythical ability to be producing balanced and fair characters, at a pace that no one else can, why haven't they been doing that? Most games dev teams and budgets scale way back after launch, so what does that mean for 2XKO? Is this a case of game development being hard, and making these kind of long-term timeline predictions incredibly difficult? A lot of questions that we’ll have to wait to get the answers to!

Street Fighter 6

I might as well finish up by giving a special mention to Street Fighter 6. The game has largely managed to stay out of the bad news cycle by taking the strategy of not saying or doing anything. In a sort of twist, Capcom’s crime is not saying enough, at a moment when it’s player-base seem ravenous for any news regarding costumes, Elena or the upcoming Season Three, Capcom have stayed tight lipped!

What a normal outfit, see no problems here

Going back a little further, I personally have a problem with Mai’s inclusion, and the casual sexism that she’s brought to the game and the community surrounding it, but I think I’ll give that its own dedicated post at some point.

So that’s fighting games recently. Fingers crossed it can only improve from here!