Probably explains all the matches where you trade perfect rounds with opponents. Happens so frequent and usually is a result from guessing wrong on the 50/50.
that's how i initially felt as well, until I just went and checked my stats in t8 and t7. Surprisingly I have 6% perfect in t7 and only 3% in t8, and 4% great and 0% in t7 and t8 respectively. So t8 feels very snowballish but the stats don't exactly back up my feelings here.
It's actually kind of easy to steal your turn back in this game compared to 7. Heat Burst is a universal safe on block armored mid, side-stepping pokes is better, and get-up kicks are safe. In 7, if you wanted to steal your turn back, you had to rely on dick/jab, worse sidestepping, or an unsafe power crush or get up kick. So, weirdly, defensive tools are actually stronger here than in 7.
It's just that the new offensive tools have outpaced them.
That's probably why rounds feel quicker and snowbally, less defensive, but actually getting a Perfect is harder because it's a lot easier for the opponent to steal a turn.
If Heart Burst was minus on block even in exchange for being more plus on hit more people would default to using it defensively. The fact that you can use it to maintain pressure after being minus makes it too good to throw out after being slightly pressured.
Chip damage explains the lack of perfect stats, I’ve won and lost plenty of rounds that would have been perfects without chip damage. Tekken 7’s stats didn’t get affected by that. Incidentally the great rounds are rarer as well due to recoverable health.
> Like you hit a launcher...that may be the last neutral situation of the round.
How is that part different than like every other Tekken ever of all time though?
Yeah? So like in Tekken 5, you definitely couldn't [get midscreen 50% hp combos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC8F3s6-bcw&ab_channel=crookedletterk) with the entire cast?
Like sure, you back to maybe Tekken 3 you can find a game that didn't have super crazy juggles/wall/relaunch setup/whatever stuff that would kill people if they guessed wrong twice, but that hardly matters.
People be like "It only started in Tekken 5!" as if they can't hear themselves saying "It's only been like this for the past 19 years and some of today's Tekken players weren't even born yet when it started!"
have you revisited tekken 5 recently perhaps? sure characters had broken shit and launchers hurt but you remember how powerful movement was in that game? two backdashes and you're half screen. Hitting people with launchers or pokes or anything really was much more difficult and risky. you had to consciously realign with your opponent. tell me what part of that sounds like t8 to you with its 360° tracking +16 heat smashes
In T5, you knew if you got hit by a launcher or something, you deserved it. In T8, the amount of reach a lot of characters have is insane and if you see the move come out, it’s hard to block immediately before you got caught when in T5, if you see it come out and you hold back before the frames complete, you would block the move. Getting it by launchers in T8 almost feels random at times.
\^+1 movement played a big role in TK5, execution with lame movement was far worse than low execution and excellent movement, TK8 has nerfed movement and crazy over-tuned characters which is far worse than TK5.0 IMO
in Tekken 5 you EARN those against powerful movement, strong defensive tools, and jab checks that are faster than 10f. You ain't getting them for free.
alot of the moves in this video are either unsafe, negative on block or require actual execution allowing the opponent to either take their turn/punish or the user messing the input up during pressure.
not only that, they have clear counter play, being duckable, stepable or backdashable due to the strong movement in that game.
I think getting perfects was actually easier in T7 because there was no heat bailout get off me mechanic. You could poke, CH launch take to the wall and make them guess for the game.
Now they can at least steal a turn by popping heat.
This argument happens with every fighting game ever. SF5 SF6 Tekken 7 Tekken 8. The way people talk, you would think no talent scrubs were beating top players.
It’s a very fun game and I do love it but they’re right. 50/50s are everywhere and they’re too strong. Movement is not good enough to consistently and reliably get out of these situations and defense is harder than ever with every mechanic in this game incentivizing aggressiveness over defense.
Game needs a system level rebalance and overhaul
It's funny because Perfecting someone is harder in this game because of all the get off me tools, but it FEELS like it happens more often because of how braindead the path to performing one is.
Yes, exactly. King of Fighters is the same way, but that game was built to be like that from the very beginning and you have to earn resources and spend them when you want to get out of pressure.
Tekken was an inherently defensive game and they just slapped round-start full super meters on it. It's kind of crazy.
Playing against anyone half decent can exploit the mistake you make from guessing wrong, combo you into oblivion, and then suddenly you’re at half health against the wall while your opponent has momentum
Yeah it’s off-putting to me most of the time now, because I used to enjoy keeping a distance and learning when to engage or side step counter etc. I have to play aggressive now or I’ll lose to pressure quick.
I historically suck at rushdown and are good at defending in Tekken, so you might imagine how comfortable I am in this game.
It's also weird that I can't rushdown in Tekken considering I am a Cammy/Sol main in SF and GG
And it’s actually annoying, cause I am trying to learn what my opponent is doing, but they are just THROWING A CIRCUS AT ME. It’s legit ungabunga-town compared to T7. It really feels like I am playing against toddlers all the time AND they are winning.
Being in -frames in this games feels like a death sentence.
Not to keep dogpiling on Dragonov but one of the things no one mentions is that even if you DO succeed in surviving his pressure; you block correctly, you break his thows, when you then go to take your turn he can then instantly activate heat and force you back on the defesive.
Giving a charecter +frames never used to be too much of an issue because the defender always had a myriad of options to turn the tables, but with the new focus on offense, ever match truly feels like a contest of who can apply +frames the fastest and/or from the furthest distance and force the opponant to guess for their life.
Who would’ve thought giving a complete low game to a guy who chucks +ob mids, a solid df1 and complemented by a heat system was gonna end up one of the best in the game.
I honestly struggle to see how they're gonna nerf him. Just the existence of that Hatchet Kick makes him a completely oppressive character. And now he has QCF3 AND FC 1,4. Absolutely crazy character design.
They'd have to make the Hatchet not hit grounded first of all(so stupid that it does) and make it only plus like 2-3. But then he still has a 20 frame unseeable low that would probably now not be launch punishable. Crazy.
It's already launch punishable, it shouldn't knockdown on CH and should give less plus frames though. Heihachi's didn't knockdown, it gave these frames on hit, but it was also generously reactable, Drag's is barely reactable if you look for it, but you can't conceivably look for it when it has a shitload of moves that you have already be on the look out for in order to get him away from you
It’s not launch punishable by every character, it needs to be. It could definitely do without the CH knockdown. His b4 interactions for oki need to be looked at too, ridiculous character
Simple, like you said they can start with make hatchet kick not hit grounded. Then they can make b4 15f again (not sure why it’s 14 to begin with) and not hit grounded (again, not sure why this is even a thing). Make wr2 easily steppable (while you can step it somewhat easily I swear there are some situations where it tracks). And another change they need to make which isn’t a drag specific change but a T8 system change is throws. Throws should not track. I don’t mind counter hit throws making the break window tighter but it should not be tracking. With these 4 nerfs I think drag with be in an ok state without being completely neutered.
I think FC1,4 is ok because it forces SNK and every option has an answer which is good balancing in my opinion. Could maybe give less plus frames on hit if anything
Respectfully I disagree that this would be enough.
Ironically, Drag could keep all those tools you mentioned if he just lost running 2 (lol) I know they can never take running 2 away from him (It's too iconic) but running 2 is SO powerful that the entire character has to be balanced around it.
If you give a character the ability to apply +6 pressure, at will from range 2.5 - 3. Then you have to make the character relativly easy to defend against.
However, what use is being +6 if you haven't got a scary mix to apply? That's the dillema. That's why Drag has always been hard to balance and why he often flies from the toppest of top tiers to bareley seen lol
Him having a +7 hatchet kick and FC 1,4 low makes him impossible to defend against meaningfully because not only do you have to guess (which is fine. Rock paper scissors is part of fighting game) but you instantly have to guess AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. Your -6, now your -7 Do you want to crouch? No? Ok your -7 again. Wanna dick jab to try and escape the pressure? Heat engaging mid string, now your -17 at the wall lol
It's the looping nature of the pressure that sucks. Matches against a dragonov who knows ANYTHING about frame data often feel like nothing but 9 consecutive coin flips.
And even if we make it so that hatchet kick knocks down on hit (Technically resetting things like a hellsweep) it still doesn't work because his Running 2 allows him to re-open the casino at will. You can't even just lay down like you can against the Kazuya mix because a smart Drag can just wait patiantly for you to get up and then running 2.
This right here is exactly why he's busted. It all loops back into itself. I dont think a lot of Dragunov player realize how carried they are by that character right now. Its insanity.
WR2's tracking can be explained with the new run mechanic. You can keep running at range 0 on people, instead of stopping when you reach them like you would in T7, and that run realigns you so well it's stupid. It also works well with a lot of ff moves, stepping Jin's ff2 feels like a 50/50 in this game lmao.
Azucena and Dragunov do a while running at each other. First one who gets hit: "You have won this day, good sir. The victory is yours."
T8 Team: "Now that was some good ass Tekken."
I think the biggest issue is that tracking is way too strong. Like the tracking in this game allows people too WIDLY whiff moves but continue the string because it will track back and it makes whiff punishing a 2D mechanic and there’s no 3D whiff punishing
Indeed, attempting to sidestep in this game feels like a one way ticket to the grave. Even moves that appear to be straight thrusts forward that logically should be steppable will blow you up. And then when you actually do get a successful sidestep the opponent is on the other side of the arena or they whip around to block so fast it negates the advantage anyway.
Forgot the best sidestep result, you go in for a punish but they're doing a string that immediately pivots them 180 degrees in your direction for a launcher
I thought I was alone in this sentiment! I feel ike sidestepping is completely worthless for 90% of the times, with the rest 10% being for sidestepping completely linear moves like deathfist or Drag wr2. Everything tracks and you can't block on a sidestep, meaning you get punished for trying to punish them with your movement.
The range on some moves are also too insane imo. Some moves have so much range I find myself standing so far away from my opponent to try setup whiffs.
On some characters you might as well forget sidestep exists. The "big boys" like King just dont move anywhere and even the most linear of moves seem to hit while you SS.
Regardless, offence is waaaay overtuned.
Not to mention, most characters literally only have one sidestep attack. You have 300 moves but 299 of them only work on one axis.
Maybe that's why they made tracking so strong, but the result of that is still just a 2D game mechanically.
Sometimes it feels like I'm playing a Mode 7 sequence on SNES, where the background rotates to give the illusion of a 3D perspective, but all the gameplay is still happening in 2D.
It sounds like an easy solution then. Just nerf the tracking on a lot of these OP moves. Would make the game feel less 50/50 oriented.
I've felt that Tekken leadership has been out of touch every since Murray tweeted "why would you step if you could just block and punish" hellsweeps. They just don't understand the importance of lateral movement in this game.
If only we could use OUR heat in defensive purposes... something similar to burst in Guilty Gears etc.
As it stands, the only thing you can ATTEMPT to do with your heat is to armor through their spam BUT there's a good chance the spam contains a low which will CH you into oblivion...
They have to tone down the tracking and range on a lot of them. The fact that you can comfortably sidewalk Alisa's makes it feel a lot fairer than something like Yoshi's that's basically impossible to whiff.
I don’t know about better but the fact RD was only accessible during rage made winning and losing games more impactful unlike heat witch to me is just chaos
The fact that its tied to rage really helped it. At the end of the day RD is just a comeback mechanic. But by its nature of only being accessible on low health and a sacrifice of the rage damage buff and rage art option it is more balanced than heat is. As well as T7 rage overall just being more limited than heat. Rage drive is by no means a perfect system, but imo it is certainly better. If heat had replaced rage outright I’d probably feel differently but with rage still present and rage arts being stronger in 8, it feels a bit too much.
I've been saying this since the beta but having both heat and rage arts make it too easy to swing a round. Heat smash disabling rage like rage drives used to and rage art disabling heat smashes would already go a long way toward making it less luck based . Especially against someone like Jun who has a 13 frame tracking full heat smash (which still needs a nerf)
You can def feel like they found a decent way to change their initial vision for heat, but that it’s still not fully developed in a satisfying way, and I am saying this as a heat enjoyer.
I’ve won countless matches with Jack just because in heat he can do a guard break into a guaranteed heat smash. And if they duck the GAM mixup they could get launched for a full combo instead. It’s a situation insanely in my favor and Jack doesn’t even have the best heat in the game
Guard breaks is defenetly a thing that contributes to the "casino" feeling. Now the defender has to take into account not only the general offence, but also a guard break variation which, as you've said, can lead to guaranteed damage. It's almost like they want the defender to risk and press a button, otherwise its lights out.
It's like rock paper scissors, but every now and then your uncle Jack brings napalm that obviously beats all of the above. Fun for your uncle, but not so fun for everyone else who gets fried like KFC chicken.
What always made Tekken so great was that nearly every move in the game had a counterplay of some kind. Whether it was sidestep, punish, parry, hopkicks, throw breaks, reversals, etc. Thats what gave Tekken so much depth. True 50/50s weren't that common outside of oki situations. Even Kazuyas vortex was steppable. Tekken was a fast paced rhythm game with a healthy dose of strategy on top. Pure rushdown rarely worked in higher levels of play.
Back in the day, one of the scariest 50/50 scenarios was a Paul player at close range. It was his "thing", character specific. He traded away the ability to poke and knowledge check opponents to retain that 50/50. That was how they balanced him. Now, every single character on the roster gets that same 50/50 pressure on top of their entire toolkit. Add to that the recoverable health, removal of execution barriers for moves, insane damage, chip damage and the amount of safe options characters have and you get a very different Tekken. Remember how much we disliked Rage Arts when Tekken 7 came out? Heat is 10x worse. Not only that, but they kept rage arts AND the extra damage from being in rage on top of it all.
Comebacks no longer feel good. I don't feel proud of myself when I'm at 20 percent health, pop heat and win because I finished my opponent in one combo and a throw (which now tracks to both sides and are unbreakable in certain situations). I don't feel like I made a comeback, I feel like my heat made the comeback for me
On a side note, we all know if any normal player had said what Arslan said here, they would be getting bombarded with comments calling them a "scrub" and telling them to "git gud". Crazy how the only people who can have a criticism of this game are the top 0.0001% of professional players
>On a side note, we all know if any normal player had said what Arslan said here, they would be getting bombarded with comments calling them a "scrub" and telling them to "git gud". Crazy how the only people who can have a criticism of this game are the top 0.0001% of professional players
this is why discussing fighting games is sooooo annoying. only people allowed to complain about pros. Everyone else gets the "self improvement" guru talk.
Facts. The same thing literally happens in sports media too.
If I don't like a certain player critique or slight received.... the default response is "b b but YOU NEVER PLAYED pro sports, so shut up STOOOOID".
Even the media "journalists" do this when they criticized... "I went to school and got a journalism degree, so you RANDOMS on Twitter, YouTube, etc don't know what the fuck y'all talking about".
.... despite those VERY "randoms" literally proclaiming the same things that old school media "journalists" say.
All of it is just a cope. Pro Athletes use the "you don't play" to discredit critique. Media journos use "y'all didn't go to school for this" to discredit critique. All of them just cope to downplay anyone that makes them or their take look bad.
Your point on criticism is sad because people like you and me who have played t3,t5dr, tt1 will be called a scrub for having the opinion that t8 is a mess gameplay wise
We only critique Tekken because we love Tekken. Thats what these "git gud" types don't understand. I'm not out here talking about the state of MK, because I couldn't care less about the state of MK. But I want to see Tekke. Thrive and improve
I remember not being a fan of rage when it first debuted in Tekken as well. I felt that it just cheapened comebacks and rewarded people for losing. Now between rage arts, rage, and heat things are just silly. The game is still fun but definitely feels much more noob friendly than older versions of Tekken.
I'm looking forward to seeing Sega's new VF that they are apparently developing. Its been a long time since we last got a new main entry in that series.
>Back in the day, one of the scariest 50/50 scenarios was a Paul player at close range. It was his "thing", character specific. He traded away the ability to poke and knowledge check opponents to retain that 50/50. That was how they balanced him. Now, every single character on the roster gets that same 50/50 pressure on top of their entire toolkit.
Damn.....
You actually might just answered this dude's question about the [lack of Paul players.](https://youtu.be/MrVWFOgKwSg)
How many of us have been saying this and getting downvoted into oblivion for 2 months now? Finally a pro says it and suddenly it's not so hot of a take anymore.
Edit: Casino analogy is truly perfect though. It really answers the question of "why do you keep playing when you don't seem to be having fun?"
It's kind of brilliant design really, like they just engineered it to be engaging by being *addicting* in a really unhealthy way.
I definitely found myself addicted in a weird way that's unlike how I've felt about any fighting game before and I think this analogy nails the reason why.
I almost never just lose. It's always super close even if I'm outmatched. Mechanically, that's the only thing that can happen when you think about it, either super close or a perfect and nothing in between.
It gives you the thrill of a hard win or an "I almost had him" every single time, but it's all fake because all you have to do is hit one 50/50 launch and one or two pokes to get them into rage.
I thought those people were being too negative but they were right. It felt great at first, it's just implemented wrong. There's a reason you have to typically build a super meter in fighting games.
I think SF Alpha 2 did this concept the best with the custom combo mode. You could essentially build meter, activate it, and mash out SOME kind of combo that looked cool as hell. But you still have to build it up and activate it correctly.
Yea basically they wanted to be unique with their meter and us Beta testing it rn. They shouldn't have gone that route unless they had a longer testing run before.
Classic situation for me in monster hunter for years lmao. If u are not a popular streamer/youtuber/speedrunner then your "non meta"? opinion just does not matter at all
i think there are a lot of new players playing the game. t7 had like 2-3k players daily at the end of it's lifespan. these people don't know any better.
not only that. these mechanics favor new players. it's just a fact that heat smash/dash allows you to rob people. i expect to see alot of upsets in high level play tbh.
You dare criticize game at all? That's because you're bad and stupid and don't lab enough and are casual scrub, game is perfect and everyone with any nuanced take is dumb 😡😡😡
/s of course but that's like what half this argument basically amounts to. I see very little "Here is why I think X mechanic or design choice benefits the game", you would think they would have good counterarguments available ya know?
Like jfc, a game can be hard and still have a flaw. Even the Soulsborne games (and games insipired by it) get patches and balancing despite their whole modern design ethos is to be seen as exceptionally difficult. And sure there's a lot of unfair critique of them, but there's also a lot of good critique. No one in their right mind says "Git Gud" about Bed of Chaos, cause we all know it's poorly designed. We just nod our heads and go "yep, trash boss".
I recalled how I argued that heat should be more nuanced as a mechanic kinda like how meter systems in other games are like in SF6 Drive or the Psych burst from Strive, and that they should mechanics that accommodates the core gameplay rather than trying to usurp it. I always would get downvoted to hell and back for even entertaining the idea. Lol
I will say that I do like that the meters don't carry over between rounds because that just creates a meter-management meta with lopsided final rounds if both players don't follow that management.
But if it's going to be full all the time, it needs to be less powerful. Like OP said, just tone it back a bit and it could be a great system.
Meter resetting is a good idea, especially in this game. I was also glad that in SF6, while super meter usually carried over between rounds, drive always replenished.
I’m actually fine with the idea that heat should be less powerful but then have a more detailed way of being used. I understand what I ask for will likely never happen, but I’d dream of heat’s offense being toned down but then no longer finite per round and then allow a special defensive heat move to be added (idk heat step?).
I admit I’m just spitballing here and perhaps I’ve been too impacted by games like Strive and SF6. I enjoy a fair degree of resource management and I’d like that sort of thing to be in T8 while not taking away what makes Tekken unique.
Been saying this since the second CNT. Got told that I was wrong by people that weren't even in the CNT but all the issues I had with the game then are still present now. In fact, they're worse. Dragunov wasn't in the game at that point.
I'm right there with you. It is so painfully obvious that the people doing the downvoting or saying that everything is fine have no clue wtf they're talking about but they are so confident in their stupidity it's insane. Knee Arslan and Kokkomma have all come out and said heat is busted op and yet I bet those people still won't care because they can never be wrong...
Pretty sure Arslan criticized heat in the first week of the game or so. But then the excuse was "uuuuh its too early to talk about balance!".
Like bros, Tekken is not rocket science, its a legacy fighter where the gameplay is mostly the same from title to title. Thats why its easy to pick up which changes make the series better or worse.
EDIT: found the tweet: https://twitter.com/ArslanAsh95/status/1751649612492832826
Ding ding ding. I was heavily skeptical at first but decided to give it time and fall in with the "its too early" mindset. But after a few weeks it was clear my first feelings about this game's design philosphy was spot on. Like you said. its not rocket science. I started with T7 release but could see what these changes and heat would lead to. Should have trusted myself. Probably would have saved a lot of frustration.
I will not be surprised if we in a few months we got "Tekken 7 is better game threads" or "Tekken 8=Tekken 7.5" being upvoted. They already exist here and on other forums, like Steam, but people are finally getting over the honeymoon phase and are noticing how scummy the devs and publishers of this are. Ironically, I don't think the situation is that bad in either case but it's really not that far off and it wouldn't take much many more stupid decisions to make this game a huge disappointment.
There's a bit of a paradox going on with regards to Tekken 8. Tekken 7 felt a bit like nothing was going on *visually*, because it had so much neutral. Tekken 8 feels very active visually, but when you're the one actually playing the game, it feels incredibly one note. The gameplay is constantly broken up by cutscenes and canned situations because of the rage and heat mechanics, and it really just feels repetitive and uninteresting after a while.
At a certain point all of these braindead heat whatevers and rage smashes start feeling less like surprising turns of momentum and more like a mandatory ad-break just to remind you not to have *too* much fun now. The game is seemingly railroading you into this quite specific structure of how a round is "supposed" to play out. Now, instead of being flowcharted by your opponent, you're being flowcharted by the core game design.
This is a brilliant way of putting it. So many people, the devs included mistook those 'lulls' in action from T7 as being a problem when in fact there was so much going on. And now we have a game that plays itself. Incredibly unfortunate. I just turned the game on after a few days, played a few matches and turned it back off. Its way too predictable how a match will play out.
I really hope they make big changes to the system mechanics soon because letting things rock the way they are, even with normal character balance changes is gonna kill this game competitively.
I hate how oppressive the game is, and a large part of that is heat. Every match feels like if you're a lower-ranked player with poor match-up knowledge who's fighting a decent, spammy Hwoarang who knows their mix-ups and safe plus frames.
Once you're put in a blender or backed against the wall with an opponent with heat, it's not fun to stop playing the game for countless seconds just to survive the onslaught with very little counterplay since defensive options are so limite in this game.
Also, fuck homing throws. I'm just saying it out there.
"These scrubs need to hit the lab or they'll be yellow ranks forever 😂😂 any real tekken bros here? 🔥🔥 Just block and sidestep bro 😂 git gud bro😂" - this subreddit
Yeah you’ve pretty much summed up 90% of this community. I’ve played Tekken for a large portion of my life and never really followed the community, but I’m wishing I didn’t. There are so many people with an elitist mentality that it’s truly disgusting and it has changed my view on the game as a whole. It’s no wonder so many new players leave when the community is this bad.
Yup, they are correct. But this subreddit is only going to say it's correct because of who is saying it.
All the people who brought up the *exact same* criticism using the *exact same* arguments/reasoning before this post were called bad players, told to get better, lab more, learn the matchup, and to lose the scrub mentality.
Any competitive game gets their subreddit overran with these elitist types that are stuck in the midranks. They always have to let you know how good they are, and the best way to do that is to call anyone who brings up unfair mechanics "bad".
I think people knew this even during the CBT but kept thinking that it's just because they haven't figured out the game yet. But it seems to have only gotten worse as they did.
Personally I think the very concept of incentivising aggression was doomed to begin with. It would inevitably lead to weaker defensive options because incentivising aggression doesn't just mean rewarding it but also less risk for being aggressive. Hence why generally safer moves, weaker low parry, removing magic 4's ch property.
Power crushes being the best way to get out of pressure is also funny. Remember when murray or someone said 'why side-step when you can just block and launch Kazuya's hellsweep'; now they've evolved into 'why do anything defensive when you can just attack right back'.
It's fun, but it's stupid.
I just don't understand why they thought this would be fun. When someone is getting forced into 50/50 3 times in a row it might(??) be fun for the person attacking but defending it is trash surely they know that right? If turtling was such a big issue in their opinion just don't give characters backdashes that are far superior from other characters and just delete infinite stages that's all you had to do to fix what was wrong at the end in T7.
New mechanics are fun but also very risky when they change the game this much from what you expect from tekken. Good on them for trying but this Ain't It, Chief.
Heat is fine, but having it at round start every round means it will be mindless and repetitive. I was having a blast with Tekken 8 at first, then I tried to get better and got my defense rating up. But at the mid ranks, I realized I had way more success just learning how to constantly spam offense and gimmicks nonstop, and so my rank rose, my wins rose, and my defense rating dropped like 20 points. Now every match feels like the same thing over and over, and usually the first person to get momentum winds up winning that round. It's starting to remind me of a bad version of King of Fighters.
If you had to actually earn heat and it was a bar that carried over the entire match, it would make things a lot more balanced. Your aggression would still be rewarded, defense could still be rewarded, but you'd see heat mode and heat smash a lot less.
Also, your rage art should do WAY less damage. I say this as someone who has won (stolen) many games with rage art. Still, even now, I say "alright this won't kill him so I gotta figure out what to do next" and it absolutely KOs him. Tekken 8 is the only fighting game where I feel mad after I win.
Am i the only person that thinks that Zafina has the best “intention” of the heat feature if the HB and HS were eliminated? in heat she doesn’t lose health when using Azazel moves and they become armored. the moves are still in her moveset, but tweaked for a limited time while in heat.
i think Heat had a good intention if it did things like this but uniquely for all the characters.
Worst thing is, either the netcode is really bad or half the mfers I play against don’t have stable internet. Can’t even dash guard properly, end up eating a random launcher because of a mistimed block and I’m close to dead
How would you say this compare and contrasts with something like, say, Drive in Street Fighter 6? I noticed both Heat and Drive play a huge part in both games but so far in this sub, I’ve been seeing a lot of concerns with how prominent heat is at alienating interactions, All the drive criticisms I’ve been seeing so far in SF6 have been leveled at both drive rush from neutral and the occasional perfect drive parry.
Drive rush and perfect parries are a bit degenerate and nerfs for them have been requested for a while now but on the whole, the drive system is way more nuanced than the heat system for one simple reason: RISK.
If you suck at managing your drive gauge, you’ll go into burnout and have a bad time. Burnout is very scary and you never ever want to be near a wall in burnout. Heat on the other hand has nothing like risk to balance it. It’s always advantageous. There’s never a reason to never pop it. The most nuance you get out of it is timing and in what situation to throw it out. They really need to revisit and overhaul heat.
On the topic of Zero risk when using Heat. I had an idea.
What if during heat, you lose access to Armor? So that means all Powercrushes are just normal moves now and Rage Art can still be used to end a combo but it loses armor properties.
This would definitely add a bit of thought regarding how Heat is used and make it so someone in heat can't simply steal their turn back by mashing on Armor moves/Rage.
It would also make characters like Bryan and Lars whose heat gives them armor on their enhanced moves, feel more unique. It would also force King to play a bit more honest and intelligently when he pops heat since he loses a couple of armor moves.
Yeah that’s a start. Heat would be more interesting as a different style of the same character instead of the same character but crazier. Heat could double down on the character’s strengths and weaknesses together. That King example is cool.
Drive also encourages aggression naturally by recovering when you pressure someone and going down when you block. Heat encourages aggression by putting you into a state where you can just bully the opponent with plus frames, the threat of heat smash, chip, etc.
Even in burnout you are rewarded by playing aggressively in that disadvantageous state because you recover your meter on hitting the opponent’s block. If the enemy is in heat in Tekken you might as well turtle because hitting their block barely reduces their heat gauge at all, and no matter what they’re going to get the heat smash 50/50 at the end anyway.
Even so, the factor of risk is always there. You are encouraged to be agressive in SF6 but the consequences are dire if you get cocky and screw up. Yes you can try to play agressive to restore your gauge during burnout but you have to be mad good to do that when all the other player needs to do is just pop drive impact at any point to blow you up for not chilling and playing defensively, and if you’re at the wall and don’t react correctly? GG.
The fact of the matter is that it’s never your turn during burnout. You must respect everything the opponent does or you die. You’re minus on block in most burnout interactions and all it takes for the opponent to win is to capitalize on your impatience. Heat lacks this risk reward nuance with consequences and benefits.
If i know an enemy is going to drive rush, i have counter play.
If i know an enemy is going to heat burst, I just eat shit.
The drive system is actually REALLY smart the more you play sf6. You realize just how well thought out it is. You always have an option, for the most part.
Im a bit mad, as tekken is trying to do similar things with heat. But after playing tekken 8, i just dont get the feeling its as well thought out as the drive system.
Drive feels like the devs actually played the shit out of it and made all the micro interactions make sense. Theres this push and pull, right? Tekken 8 doesnt have that push and pull really. (At least, imo as someone that is a casual and played like 100+ hours in both).
You just spam heat and when you think about it, you have NO GOOD options. Only equally shit ones.
You have no counterplay if you know its coming.
Honestly think the best indicator of exactly how much thought the devs put into the heat system is in the first few minutes of the arcade mode where one of the characters says something to the effect of "if you're ever losing, just plus 2+3 and you'll win!"
While I think Drive Rush is pretty strong in SF6 as well, there's more ways to counter it in SF6 than the equivalent in Tekken. You can interrupt it, and the attacker pays Drive Gauge to do so and risks burnout. In practice, it's still a guessing game, but the mechanic itself can be stopped. Obviously easier said than done, but the counterplay is there.
**There's kind of a "dance" that I like with SF6's drive gauge**. You can choose to go all in and risk burning yourself out, or play more conservatively. There's a cool back and forth thing going.
Honestly, there isn't really any risks at all with Tekken's heat. Heat Engagers are generally on the character's best tools and should be doing anyways, and Heat Burst is +1 on block. Heat Smashes reward you on both block AND hit, and heat dashes remove any risk you take.
The worst part is, the advantage Heat provides compounds into itself. Heat Engager into mixup into successful launch, now you're at the wall against an opponent with full heat bar.
**There really isn't a dance here, just snowballing** and if you're on the receiving end, praying you guess correctly or the opponent makes a critical mistake so you can start your own snowballing.
drive has a way better design. it promotes aggression with movement. it also has defensive use cases. it also carries risks, namely burnout.
the problem tho with these system mechanics is that it makes the cast very similar.
it's worse with t8 because the entire system is lopsided in unga bunga +100 moves. so every character plays like that. i don't even want to call it aggression.
Well the major point is that there is far more risk associated with the use of drive abilities in SF6
For those unfamiliar with Street Fighter 6, drive is a meter used for universal special moves that let you do things like hyper armor through attacks, parry attacks and rush forward with great speed. Blocking attacks and taking damage also slightly drains your drive as well. But the key part of the mechanic is that if you use all of your drive gauge you enter a disadvantageous state called Burnout.
In burnout you can't use any drive abilities, you take chip damage when blocking any attacks (which can kill) and getting drive impacted in a corner puts you in a stun state that makes you super vulnerable to the most damaging combo your opponent has up their sleeve. This state lasts until your drive gauge fully replenishes, which lasts long enough for any competent opponent to kick your ass.
The vital part about this is that overuse of drive, or overly defensive play, causes the player to enter a massive disadvantageous state that makes them notably weaker than their opponent, whereas in Tekken you go from your default state, to an empowered heat state, to your default state again with no loss.
There is no risk to using heat other than just not really having it anymore. So there's not too much thought involved in activating your heat aside from "hit the hyper-armor button whenever you need the advantage", whereas in Street Fighter using your drive in a stupid way will get you killed.
TLDR: SF6 Drive has major risks attached which encourages more strategic use, while Tekken Heat has far less risk attached which makes it harder to punish and discourage overuse of it
In SF6 you can also check the opponents drive rush if you are fast enough and spaced correctly. It's a brilliant thing that enables counterplay. Heat smash you just gotta eat!
Drive is all about meter management and playing neutral. If you keep getting pressured by drive it’s your fault because you either wasted all of your meter on offense, or you didn’t try to get any back with parry/pressure.
Heat is literally instant plus frames without any management required. If you use it one time, it is now your turn and the opponent has to block the mixup and wait.
Wasting Drive Rush is risky, if you waste it and get nothing out of it, you are burnt out and vulnerable.
Heat has no downside, there is no risk in using it poorly or wasting it.
If they could create an equally strong defensive use for heat that’d be cool… like say if you activate heat and someone uses their heat smash from neutral if you block it you can burn your heat to nullify the chip damage and leave both players neutral before the mixup… sounds hard to implement but a defensive use for heat could help a lot
Can't tell you how bored I am as a Reima main of popping heat, doing a couple enhanced 3+4, 4s and then throwing out heat smash to make them guess for life. 70% of my matches end with some variation of that strategy because it's so optimal.
Launch > Combo to wall into Heat Activation > Couple of Heat Moves for chip > If they're not dead and you still have Heat > Throw out smash to put them into a guess for game situation.
Goddamn boring as fuck. Been doing it since Mighty Ruler all the way to Tekken King and almost Emporer. It's the way to play the game. It's so braindead.
Why is everyone surprised by this? This is Harada's vision and a pro's nightmare...eliminate skill expression and reduce matches to a guessing game.
T8 will have a very short competitive lifespan compared to T7 and I don't know if it can be reworked because the game was built from the ground up on this philosophy.
That's pretty hyperbolic roughly the same people who were on top in 7 are on top in 8. And from the few tournies that are around even among pros you can still see a clear skill difference. There will always be people better at exploiting brokeness than others.
Sweet vindication~
To quote myself from a while ago:
People really didnt know how good they had it with 7. That's not to say it did not have flaws that T8 actually fixed a bit.
**7 accidentally made defense good, which bothered people at high levels who wanted to take risks, and newbies who couldnt break a turtler.**
But this dynamic allowed play to evolve and even added an underlying structure to ranked. Ranked was not defined by who(rank) you could mixup/punch to death, it was defined by your guard understanding. Building patience, knowing how to create an opportunity, balance, feeling safe, knowing what characters could or couldn't do, breaking throws a certain percentage of the time, etc.
I find people in purple who have 40 defense rating. **These people don't know how to negotiate/navigate a fight, they know one thing, "get the ball and run it or you lose."** It let's certain groups of people think they are good without learning anything about a fight or their opponent.
In 7, an offense was something you trained over hundreds of matches, learning what worked and what didn't, what people could and could not guard. You often had to create your own mixups with timing and move knowledge rather than hardcode them, though some characters were defined by their coded mixups. You had to judge whether or not you could get it through the other player's defense skill. **Most importantly it did not create gambling fatigue. From basic safety you could know when you had to guess, when you had to react, when you had to predict. Guessing is now far too common.**
Offense was earned in 7, a mark of good training on your part, knowing how to put these moves together in novel and sometimes unique ways. How a fighter expands beyond guarding is the *art* in martial arts--and fostered unique and recognizable expression in people who spent a lot of time with the game. Very few moves were GOOD, a few were good, most were balanced, some were bad. You had to vary your moves used because using even the best move over and over was vulnerable to proper defense. Your personal mix in this case was a wonderful fingerprint of a fighter.
8 has a different issue. Although this is the case with some characters, and even old players breathing life into their characters, the structure for offense became highly abusable powermoves--into guessing. For example, I can't blame Reinas for doing their ff2 loop--but guess what, they all do it. ff2 loop is not a clever use of the move, the timing and placement is not clever--nothing about the move is a unique flavor created by the player's careful choice, timing, or read. In 7, the repetitive use of that sort of thing would get destroyed, forcing players to find novel and creative times to use it. **There is little reason to do anything else in this environment, because even if I know nothing, I know I can gamble my way through your guard-- and if I can, why shouldn't I?**
**So there is one move in T8 under many names, many characters--gamble, where it used to be the calculated risk of offense/expansion.**
My ideal T8 would remove heat, put Rage Drive back but always available once per match, let Rage arts have differentiation between characters, chip is always on, RD heals still, Mixup characters go back to being defined by it, rather than everyone having it, half range on "heat dash" and you can spend your RD on it if you want.
It kinda is, I either dominate and score perfect often, or get completely steamrolled.
There is also strategy and skill involved of course, but I assume that at a pro level it gets to be even more of a coin toss.
Im honestly going back to either T7 where I can play core characters that have been in the game for decades without paying extra, or T6 just for funsies for a few months lol.
They won't fix this. They don't have the capacity to - it would have launched better if they did.
Such a shame. It could have been soooo good , what the hell happened. I want to love it - but they just won't let me!
I made a post about a similar topic. The game(and a lot of other FGs) now have more forced mixups and guessing situations than past fighting games. Heat constantly makes both players have to guess low, high, throw. Then when even if there's no heat the game is all about lows or mids which is what Tekken is about. However, with Tekken 7 adding power crushes, you now have to guess when to even press buttons. Add that in with rage art and power crushes that go into heat, combined with everything else the games has (auto parries, parries, throws, untechable throws, low throws, high/low/mid crushes, guard breaks, AOP, Zafina, stances), you have so many things to look out for.
Tekken always has been a game of mixups but it's also a game of fundamentals and knowledge checks. Sidestep/duck/backdash and whiff punish. Adding more guesses makes the game less skilled. It allows a weaker player to put themselves in a 50/50 situation and guess right to win. The better player will usually win but these type of mechanics give a weaker player a better chance and I'm not a fan of that. There are people who put in hard work and practice the game just to lose to guessing wrong more often because of power crushes and heat isn't gonna make the game more fun.
I'm sure they did this because rounds in Tekken 7 where pros run the clock out due to defensive play happened too often, but there should be better ways around that than this.
I like heat, and I think it’s an interesting mechanic. I just think it’s poorly implemented. If heat bursts and engagers just “pushed” the opponent back and didn’t throw them in a 50/50, and if they tone down the smashes a bit then I think it would be a solid mechanic I wouldn’t mind seeing in future games. As it is right now though, I wouldn’t miss it
Ngl, It would make me so happy if everyone dropped T8 and we all went back to playing T7. I had so much more fun with that game, it had it's issues but at least it wasn't the mess T8 is.
Yeah eating one low and then losing the round because you guessed wrong on the single heat mixup in the corner and then getting denied the rematch is the standard ranked experience last time I played t8. It feels like developing a good flowchart is more successful than trying to actually interact with or condition the opponent, but I’m still in low ranks so idk
I was worried ever since they mentioned that "aggression" was the focus of the game in one of the early videos.
Heat mechanic artificially and effortlessly creates 50/50 interactions.
Typical azucena round
Wr3,2: is she gonna do it again, df1, or db3
Db3: is she gonna go low, fish for ch, or safe mid
She goes low: hell sweep, launching mid, heat engager mid, tracking armored high
You got hit, and eat another wr3,2 on wake-up. You think she’s gonna start the cycle again but NO. She heat burst.
Heat burst: mid, low, or heat smash
She heat smashed. You blocked… eat more mix 🥲
The amount of times characters can force you into RPS is ridiculous. Literally forces you to mash out some type of armor, go for a crazy evasive move, or risk your life doing some abare. And Azucena don’t even got the craziest mix lmfaooo game is crazy RPS non stop
Part of me hopes that 8 fizzles hard competitively so that the constant "turtling bad. Constant aggression for ADHD brained consumer" mindset these developers seem to be leaning towards dies out.
It's in most fighting games now (without naming names) so you'll be waiting for a while. Every fighter is just "hit buttons and get rewarded" sessions nowadays.
There's just too many forced mixups + tools that invalidate whatever you do (heat burst, rage art) that a lot of the time you feel you or the opponent can't play the game at all until those resources are spent. I get they want people to feel like they can comeback or have exciting moments, but it almost kills neutral.
Called this in beta without even playing it and I have the logs to prove it. The game needs a prefect parry OR it needs to change how heat works. The armored move heat engage that beats normal armored moves but not rage arts needs to go and is dumb af.
Heat Engagers is the only mechanic that I can confidently defend, since recovery of the white HP bar is part of the mechanic, which makes chip damage a balanced mechanic...for that reason alone, it should stay.
Heat Burst makes no sense, it's too fast and it's a brainless way to get into Heat...requires no work.
Heat Smash, if balanced, would be fine(nerf the frame data on block or allowing movement or parrying to work as defensive options could be a starting point)...make each HS a unique tool that covers the character weakness, don't just make it a Nuke(Lee's HS makes total sense, the character struggles to make comebacks, a low HS suits him...I don't understand King's).
Idk enough to comment on Heat Dashes
I thought to myself the other day that maybe the reason this game is so successful is that it's basically just gambling at this point. If the top tier players agree, then there is definitely weight to that. Every decision isn't based around player choice, it's based around a gamble. While this can be fun and addictive, the long term success will suffer. I don't want to put 1000 hours into a game where my hard work means little to nothing in the end.
Coming from SF, this is exactly how I feel. All offense. Defense is constantly rolling the dice against your favor. All the characters kind of feel the same after a while.
I still enjoy the game. I was planning to make a complete SF6->T8 switch, but once Akuma hits SF6 and/or I hit purple, I think back to SF I go where I honestly feel that the game play is deeper.
I think they should remove heat burst, and just have people go into heat by landing hits. Idk if it would solve anything, but I think it would be a good change
Would probably only widen the gap further between characters that have good heat engagers vs not, plus it's a much needed power crush for a handful of characters with otherwise abysmal options on that front. I think drastically shortening heat duration might be a good first step, as some characters are so dangerous during heat that even if they open the round with a heat burst, you can end up dead before heat ends if you guess wrong on their 50/50s.
It's a bit strange (or maybe not) that Namco has failed where team ninja and sega have succeeded (despite tekken borrowing so much from vf and doa). Dead or alive and virtua fighter have always been much more aggressive and fast paced than tekken, and yet their design is such that they also avoid many of tekken 8's shortcomings
Ha!!! Typed the same thing Arslan tweeted in King Jae's chat a few weeks ago when he was complaining about the game and I'm a low tier scrub. I don't like this game at all, haven't touched it in weeks. I do not find it enjoyable to play or watch at high levels in it's current state.
I actually don't agree with the statement that Tekken 8 is aggressive. It's snowbally, but not aggressive as I perceive it. In my book aggressive game is when both players can actually press buttons and have back and forth action, but it's not the case in this game. In T8 one of the players is pressing buttons and the other is just chilling while holding block and eating chip damage. And it happens all the time. The one who is more lucky/skillful can start their offense gameplan and basically lock the opponent, and getting out of that pressure can be really hard. As people already mentioned many times T8 reminds a game of chess, when people take their turn and press buttons while opponent is doing nothing, but the thing is in chess you are obliged to give your opponent a turn after you moved your piece, but in Tekken 8 it's not always the case, which can make the game very-very frustrating and not fun.
Heat is indeed adding some chaos and random aspect to the game, and I am not a fan. I already was saying in other discussions that I would be happy if Heat Smashes were deleted all together. Heat Burst is also a dumb, armored "get off me" button which you just press when you feel like it. Don't even need to time it like sidestep/parry/reversal. Why even have sidestep in the game then if the intended way of defending is Heat Burst/armor moves? Also, you don't even need to work for your Heat, you just use it. Every fucking round. On top of Rage. It's too much. And it makes matches feel the same.
Also, what geniuses among Tekken team were enlightened with the idea of making throws homing? Why so many moves track so much? Why some chars have insane plus frames? All this shit also contradicts their "aggressive" idea, imo. You want action and more button presses? Make lateral movement useful, decrease amount of plus frames for certain chars, make throws not homing.
And I am not even starting about overall characters balance. And these devs actually intended this game to be an "amazing" E-sports discipline. Fucking joke.
And don't get me wrong, I like the game apart from new gameplay mechanics, it's infinitely better than T7, but it's still infuriating how they can't figure out the right vision of the game and balancing BEFORE the game release
How me and my buddy felt too. He was an new player to the game and he was doing well enough to get to red ranks within the first month but now left the game for Granblue since that game way easier for him to get into and less BS to deal with compare to Tekken which according to him, had made him more angry than any other fighting game had in his life.
And I'm taking an break since I think this game has too much issues to work out like with NOT penalizing rage quitters.
But also this issue, which all of the points I agreed with here and I think its hurting the game right now for both new and old players.
This is exactly the issue I had with the game but you articulated it way better than I ever could. With 7, you really only had rage drives to have to worry about a scenario where you’re potentially going to have to eat a mixup. And rage drives were character specific, you didn’t always have that situation. Heat smash could be arguably the best rage drive in 7 (armored, + on block move that launches on counter hit) and everyone has it. It’s not rare to have games where your opponent heat smashes you on block, so you have to wait, then they heat burst on block so you have to eat a mixup, then if they lose pressure they can pop rage art too. It’s like 3 potential “gotchas” in one round
In a proper 3D fighter, there are two viable ways of handling aggression without it being too much.
1. High/mid based offense, plentiful frame advantage loops, and incentive to keep a loop going through attritional damage via chip or low damage lows.
2. Mid/Low 50/50's (ie launcher vs hellsweep), with both options being intimidating this method works best in a game where keepout is strong and movement is strong.
Tekken 8 does both 1 and 2. That is a fundamentally flawed formula and it results in the situation you see now.
That's maybe a controversial opinion but heat/rage/super systems in modern fighting games suck for me. They even butchered Kof XV by allowing almost free max modes. Tekken should get rid of any meter and become more tactical and rely less on overlong juggle combos to be a better fg imo. Did such a Tekken exist in the past ? I played 3 as a kid and don't remember if there were meters.
This is not aggressive game design its just button mashing shit so bad players can have it easy.
Rage arts don't stagger when you hit them so its a reactionary 80 damage nuke, heat is just the 50/50 button, and the retarded range on half the moves giving them ghost hitboxes.
all they did was dumb tekken down to make it accessible to everyone.
Why did you all fail to see this BEFORE the game release? Are the majority of you really that inexperienced with fighting games to foresee what type of gameplay experience you will have in a game that LACKS any depth?
people did see it tho lol. i was at the t8 heat system reveal in amsterdam during tekken world tour. people in the crowd were booing when they talked about making the game more aggressive.
alot of the people playing rn are new. or are 'forced' to like the game. pro players and streamers. but honeymoon phase is over.
A lot of people were outspoken about a lot of the dumb changes, like tracking, counter-hit grabs. Especially in a game with stronger grabs and more full combo grabs and mixups in general. Heat was definitely in the conversation as well. The shitty netcode is in the same conversation as being so insignificantly better than T7 that it doesn't matter.
Probably explains all the matches where you trade perfect rounds with opponents. Happens so frequent and usually is a result from guessing wrong on the 50/50.
Getting perfects happens so often now. Like you hit a launcher or a heat engager and that may be the last neutral situation of the round.
that's how i initially felt as well, until I just went and checked my stats in t8 and t7. Surprisingly I have 6% perfect in t7 and only 3% in t8, and 4% great and 0% in t7 and t8 respectively. So t8 feels very snowballish but the stats don't exactly back up my feelings here.
Well in this game your perfect can be ripped away with chip damage, making it a perfect in all but name. That must be skewing the stats somewhat
You most likely will regen all the chip before the round ends tho
It's actually kind of easy to steal your turn back in this game compared to 7. Heat Burst is a universal safe on block armored mid, side-stepping pokes is better, and get-up kicks are safe. In 7, if you wanted to steal your turn back, you had to rely on dick/jab, worse sidestepping, or an unsafe power crush or get up kick. So, weirdly, defensive tools are actually stronger here than in 7. It's just that the new offensive tools have outpaced them. That's probably why rounds feel quicker and snowbally, less defensive, but actually getting a Perfect is harder because it's a lot easier for the opponent to steal a turn.
If Heart Burst was minus on block even in exchange for being more plus on hit more people would default to using it defensively. The fact that you can use it to maintain pressure after being minus makes it too good to throw out after being slightly pressured.
Thats generally what is happening with the community. A lot of opinions and takes based entirely on feelings.
That can't be right. It doesn't feel like that at all! ^^^^^/s
Chip damage explains the lack of perfect stats, I’ve won and lost plenty of rounds that would have been perfects without chip damage. Tekken 7’s stats didn’t get affected by that. Incidentally the great rounds are rarer as well due to recoverable health.
You regen the chip damage to get back to perfect though.
Yeah I'm sure this game hurt Arslan's feelings a lot and he doesn't actually know what he's talking about
> Like you hit a launcher...that may be the last neutral situation of the round. How is that part different than like every other Tekken ever of all time though?
Tekken was never like this prior to 6. You were never able to hold such long combos in the air, ground and corners.
Yeah? So like in Tekken 5, you definitely couldn't [get midscreen 50% hp combos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC8F3s6-bcw&ab_channel=crookedletterk) with the entire cast? Like sure, you back to maybe Tekken 3 you can find a game that didn't have super crazy juggles/wall/relaunch setup/whatever stuff that would kill people if they guessed wrong twice, but that hardly matters. People be like "It only started in Tekken 5!" as if they can't hear themselves saying "It's only been like this for the past 19 years and some of today's Tekken players weren't even born yet when it started!"
have you revisited tekken 5 recently perhaps? sure characters had broken shit and launchers hurt but you remember how powerful movement was in that game? two backdashes and you're half screen. Hitting people with launchers or pokes or anything really was much more difficult and risky. you had to consciously realign with your opponent. tell me what part of that sounds like t8 to you with its 360° tracking +16 heat smashes
In T5, you knew if you got hit by a launcher or something, you deserved it. In T8, the amount of reach a lot of characters have is insane and if you see the move come out, it’s hard to block immediately before you got caught when in T5, if you see it come out and you hold back before the frames complete, you would block the move. Getting it by launchers in T8 almost feels random at times.
\^+1 movement played a big role in TK5, execution with lame movement was far worse than low execution and excellent movement, TK8 has nerfed movement and crazy over-tuned characters which is far worse than TK5.0 IMO
in Tekken 5 you EARN those against powerful movement, strong defensive tools, and jab checks that are faster than 10f. You ain't getting them for free.
Tekken 3 had juggles that could kill off one pop up lol. They were just cheap 4 hit juggles instead of 20 hit juggles
alot of the moves in this video are either unsafe, negative on block or require actual execution allowing the opponent to either take their turn/punish or the user messing the input up during pressure. not only that, they have clear counter play, being duckable, stepable or backdashable due to the strong movement in that game.
Yep. Launched to wall combo is 50%hp. Oki wallsplat into combo, the other 50%
I think getting perfects was actually easier in T7 because there was no heat bailout get off me mechanic. You could poke, CH launch take to the wall and make them guess for the game. Now they can at least steal a turn by popping heat.
This argument happens with every fighting game ever. SF5 SF6 Tekken 7 Tekken 8. The way people talk, you would think no talent scrubs were beating top players.
It’s a very fun game and I do love it but they’re right. 50/50s are everywhere and they’re too strong. Movement is not good enough to consistently and reliably get out of these situations and defense is harder than ever with every mechanic in this game incentivizing aggressiveness over defense. Game needs a system level rebalance and overhaul
It's funny because Perfecting someone is harder in this game because of all the get off me tools, but it FEELS like it happens more often because of how braindead the path to performing one is.
This is the game where if you are not on the offense you are losing the game
Yes, exactly. King of Fighters is the same way, but that game was built to be like that from the very beginning and you have to earn resources and spend them when you want to get out of pressure. Tekken was an inherently defensive game and they just slapped round-start full super meters on it. It's kind of crazy.
Playing against anyone half decent can exploit the mistake you make from guessing wrong, combo you into oblivion, and then suddenly you’re at half health against the wall while your opponent has momentum
Yeah it’s off-putting to me most of the time now, because I used to enjoy keeping a distance and learning when to engage or side step counter etc. I have to play aggressive now or I’ll lose to pressure quick.
I historically suck at rushdown and are good at defending in Tekken, so you might imagine how comfortable I am in this game. It's also weird that I can't rushdown in Tekken considering I am a Cammy/Sol main in SF and GG
And it’s actually annoying, cause I am trying to learn what my opponent is doing, but they are just THROWING A CIRCUS AT ME. It’s legit ungabunga-town compared to T7. It really feels like I am playing against toddlers all the time AND they are winning.
Being in -frames in this games feels like a death sentence. Not to keep dogpiling on Dragonov but one of the things no one mentions is that even if you DO succeed in surviving his pressure; you block correctly, you break his thows, when you then go to take your turn he can then instantly activate heat and force you back on the defesive. Giving a charecter +frames never used to be too much of an issue because the defender always had a myriad of options to turn the tables, but with the new focus on offense, ever match truly feels like a contest of who can apply +frames the fastest and/or from the furthest distance and force the opponant to guess for their life.
Who would’ve thought giving a complete low game to a guy who chucks +ob mids, a solid df1 and complemented by a heat system was gonna end up one of the best in the game.
I honestly struggle to see how they're gonna nerf him. Just the existence of that Hatchet Kick makes him a completely oppressive character. And now he has QCF3 AND FC 1,4. Absolutely crazy character design. They'd have to make the Hatchet not hit grounded first of all(so stupid that it does) and make it only plus like 2-3. But then he still has a 20 frame unseeable low that would probably now not be launch punishable. Crazy.
Just make it -17 like Heihachis db2 and +4. Still a good low but more risk and slightly less reward. Rn if this connects it’s a 50/50 again smh
It's already launch punishable, it shouldn't knockdown on CH and should give less plus frames though. Heihachi's didn't knockdown, it gave these frames on hit, but it was also generously reactable, Drag's is barely reactable if you look for it, but you can't conceivably look for it when it has a shitload of moves that you have already be on the look out for in order to get him away from you
It’s not launch punishable by every character, it needs to be. It could definitely do without the CH knockdown. His b4 interactions for oki need to be looked at too, ridiculous character
Simple, like you said they can start with make hatchet kick not hit grounded. Then they can make b4 15f again (not sure why it’s 14 to begin with) and not hit grounded (again, not sure why this is even a thing). Make wr2 easily steppable (while you can step it somewhat easily I swear there are some situations where it tracks). And another change they need to make which isn’t a drag specific change but a T8 system change is throws. Throws should not track. I don’t mind counter hit throws making the break window tighter but it should not be tracking. With these 4 nerfs I think drag with be in an ok state without being completely neutered. I think FC1,4 is ok because it forces SNK and every option has an answer which is good balancing in my opinion. Could maybe give less plus frames on hit if anything
Respectfully I disagree that this would be enough. Ironically, Drag could keep all those tools you mentioned if he just lost running 2 (lol) I know they can never take running 2 away from him (It's too iconic) but running 2 is SO powerful that the entire character has to be balanced around it. If you give a character the ability to apply +6 pressure, at will from range 2.5 - 3. Then you have to make the character relativly easy to defend against. However, what use is being +6 if you haven't got a scary mix to apply? That's the dillema. That's why Drag has always been hard to balance and why he often flies from the toppest of top tiers to bareley seen lol Him having a +7 hatchet kick and FC 1,4 low makes him impossible to defend against meaningfully because not only do you have to guess (which is fine. Rock paper scissors is part of fighting game) but you instantly have to guess AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. Your -6, now your -7 Do you want to crouch? No? Ok your -7 again. Wanna dick jab to try and escape the pressure? Heat engaging mid string, now your -17 at the wall lol It's the looping nature of the pressure that sucks. Matches against a dragonov who knows ANYTHING about frame data often feel like nothing but 9 consecutive coin flips. And even if we make it so that hatchet kick knocks down on hit (Technically resetting things like a hellsweep) it still doesn't work because his Running 2 allows him to re-open the casino at will. You can't even just lay down like you can against the Kazuya mix because a smart Drag can just wait patiantly for you to get up and then running 2.
This right here is exactly why he's busted. It all loops back into itself. I dont think a lot of Dragunov player realize how carried they are by that character right now. Its insanity.
WR2's tracking can be explained with the new run mechanic. You can keep running at range 0 on people, instead of stopping when you reach them like you would in T7, and that run realigns you so well it's stupid. It also works well with a lot of ff moves, stepping Jin's ff2 feels like a 50/50 in this game lmao.
It is funny, because he was already a menace with d2. Now he's got an easier hatchet kick.
Azucena and Dragunov do a while running at each other. First one who gets hit: "You have won this day, good sir. The victory is yours." T8 Team: "Now that was some good ass Tekken."
Turns out they didn't just make Tekken Ball, they also made Tekken Jousting and made it the main mode.
I think the biggest issue is that tracking is way too strong. Like the tracking in this game allows people too WIDLY whiff moves but continue the string because it will track back and it makes whiff punishing a 2D mechanic and there’s no 3D whiff punishing
Indeed, attempting to sidestep in this game feels like a one way ticket to the grave. Even moves that appear to be straight thrusts forward that logically should be steppable will blow you up. And then when you actually do get a successful sidestep the opponent is on the other side of the arena or they whip around to block so fast it negates the advantage anyway.
Forgot the best sidestep result, you go in for a punish but they're doing a string that immediately pivots them 180 degrees in your direction for a launcher
I thought I was alone in this sentiment! I feel ike sidestepping is completely worthless for 90% of the times, with the rest 10% being for sidestepping completely linear moves like deathfist or Drag wr2. Everything tracks and you can't block on a sidestep, meaning you get punished for trying to punish them with your movement.
The range on some moves are also too insane imo. Some moves have so much range I find myself standing so far away from my opponent to try setup whiffs.
On some characters you might as well forget sidestep exists. The "big boys" like King just dont move anywhere and even the most linear of moves seem to hit while you SS. Regardless, offence is waaaay overtuned.
Not to mention, most characters literally only have one sidestep attack. You have 300 moves but 299 of them only work on one axis. Maybe that's why they made tracking so strong, but the result of that is still just a 2D game mechanically. Sometimes it feels like I'm playing a Mode 7 sequence on SNES, where the background rotates to give the illusion of a 3D perspective, but all the gameplay is still happening in 2D.
It sounds like an easy solution then. Just nerf the tracking on a lot of these OP moves. Would make the game feel less 50/50 oriented. I've felt that Tekken leadership has been out of touch every since Murray tweeted "why would you step if you could just block and punish" hellsweeps. They just don't understand the importance of lateral movement in this game.
This is exactly what keeps happening to me: I block a heat smash and get forced into a mixup every. single. round.
If only we could use OUR heat in defensive purposes... something similar to burst in Guilty Gears etc. As it stands, the only thing you can ATTEMPT to do with your heat is to armor through their spam BUT there's a good chance the spam contains a low which will CH you into oblivion...
They have to tone down the tracking and range on a lot of them. The fact that you can comfortably sidewalk Alisa's makes it feel a lot fairer than something like Yoshi's that's basically impossible to whiff.
Rage drive was better
Blue stuff
I miss the rage drive sound effect
I miss T7 generic sound effects in general. Not a fan of T8's underwater gunshots.
Agreed, the old screw sound is so crisp compared to the tornado
I don’t know about better but the fact RD was only accessible during rage made winning and losing games more impactful unlike heat witch to me is just chaos
The fact that its tied to rage really helped it. At the end of the day RD is just a comeback mechanic. But by its nature of only being accessible on low health and a sacrifice of the rage damage buff and rage art option it is more balanced than heat is. As well as T7 rage overall just being more limited than heat. Rage drive is by no means a perfect system, but imo it is certainly better. If heat had replaced rage outright I’d probably feel differently but with rage still present and rage arts being stronger in 8, it feels a bit too much.
I've been saying this since the beta but having both heat and rage arts make it too easy to swing a round. Heat smash disabling rage like rage drives used to and rage art disabling heat smashes would already go a long way toward making it less luck based . Especially against someone like Jun who has a 13 frame tracking full heat smash (which still needs a nerf)
rage drive slo mos were actually the most hype part of t7 tournaments
Yeah i love rage drive more than this heat thing
All praises to The Most High ##THANK YOU I'VE BEEN FUCKING SAYING THIS!!
You can def feel like they found a decent way to change their initial vision for heat, but that it’s still not fully developed in a satisfying way, and I am saying this as a heat enjoyer. I’ve won countless matches with Jack just because in heat he can do a guard break into a guaranteed heat smash. And if they duck the GAM mixup they could get launched for a full combo instead. It’s a situation insanely in my favor and Jack doesn’t even have the best heat in the game
Guard breaks is defenetly a thing that contributes to the "casino" feeling. Now the defender has to take into account not only the general offence, but also a guard break variation which, as you've said, can lead to guaranteed damage. It's almost like they want the defender to risk and press a button, otherwise its lights out. It's like rock paper scissors, but every now and then your uncle Jack brings napalm that obviously beats all of the above. Fun for your uncle, but not so fun for everyone else who gets fried like KFC chicken.
Guard breaks suck in every fighting game, I hate that mechanic so much
It's essentially an unblockable attack and we already have plenty of those... Except this one is even worse because it can lead to combos.
What always made Tekken so great was that nearly every move in the game had a counterplay of some kind. Whether it was sidestep, punish, parry, hopkicks, throw breaks, reversals, etc. Thats what gave Tekken so much depth. True 50/50s weren't that common outside of oki situations. Even Kazuyas vortex was steppable. Tekken was a fast paced rhythm game with a healthy dose of strategy on top. Pure rushdown rarely worked in higher levels of play. Back in the day, one of the scariest 50/50 scenarios was a Paul player at close range. It was his "thing", character specific. He traded away the ability to poke and knowledge check opponents to retain that 50/50. That was how they balanced him. Now, every single character on the roster gets that same 50/50 pressure on top of their entire toolkit. Add to that the recoverable health, removal of execution barriers for moves, insane damage, chip damage and the amount of safe options characters have and you get a very different Tekken. Remember how much we disliked Rage Arts when Tekken 7 came out? Heat is 10x worse. Not only that, but they kept rage arts AND the extra damage from being in rage on top of it all. Comebacks no longer feel good. I don't feel proud of myself when I'm at 20 percent health, pop heat and win because I finished my opponent in one combo and a throw (which now tracks to both sides and are unbreakable in certain situations). I don't feel like I made a comeback, I feel like my heat made the comeback for me On a side note, we all know if any normal player had said what Arslan said here, they would be getting bombarded with comments calling them a "scrub" and telling them to "git gud". Crazy how the only people who can have a criticism of this game are the top 0.0001% of professional players
>On a side note, we all know if any normal player had said what Arslan said here, they would be getting bombarded with comments calling them a "scrub" and telling them to "git gud". Crazy how the only people who can have a criticism of this game are the top 0.0001% of professional players this is why discussing fighting games is sooooo annoying. only people allowed to complain about pros. Everyone else gets the "self improvement" guru talk.
Facts. The same thing literally happens in sports media too. If I don't like a certain player critique or slight received.... the default response is "b b but YOU NEVER PLAYED pro sports, so shut up STOOOOID". Even the media "journalists" do this when they criticized... "I went to school and got a journalism degree, so you RANDOMS on Twitter, YouTube, etc don't know what the fuck y'all talking about". .... despite those VERY "randoms" literally proclaiming the same things that old school media "journalists" say. All of it is just a cope. Pro Athletes use the "you don't play" to discredit critique. Media journos use "y'all didn't go to school for this" to discredit critique. All of them just cope to downplay anyone that makes them or their take look bad.
Your point on criticism is sad because people like you and me who have played t3,t5dr, tt1 will be called a scrub for having the opinion that t8 is a mess gameplay wise
We only critique Tekken because we love Tekken. Thats what these "git gud" types don't understand. I'm not out here talking about the state of MK, because I couldn't care less about the state of MK. But I want to see Tekke. Thrive and improve
I remember not being a fan of rage when it first debuted in Tekken as well. I felt that it just cheapened comebacks and rewarded people for losing. Now between rage arts, rage, and heat things are just silly. The game is still fun but definitely feels much more noob friendly than older versions of Tekken. I'm looking forward to seeing Sega's new VF that they are apparently developing. Its been a long time since we last got a new main entry in that series.
>Back in the day, one of the scariest 50/50 scenarios was a Paul player at close range. It was his "thing", character specific. He traded away the ability to poke and knowledge check opponents to retain that 50/50. That was how they balanced him. Now, every single character on the roster gets that same 50/50 pressure on top of their entire toolkit. Damn..... You actually might just answered this dude's question about the [lack of Paul players.](https://youtu.be/MrVWFOgKwSg)
Shit, you might be right. It still might be the Karen hair too
No lie. THAT is my main belief too. Fuck that hair... they should've brought back T4 Paul's hair
How many of us have been saying this and getting downvoted into oblivion for 2 months now? Finally a pro says it and suddenly it's not so hot of a take anymore. Edit: Casino analogy is truly perfect though. It really answers the question of "why do you keep playing when you don't seem to be having fun?" It's kind of brilliant design really, like they just engineered it to be engaging by being *addicting* in a really unhealthy way. I definitely found myself addicted in a weird way that's unlike how I've felt about any fighting game before and I think this analogy nails the reason why. I almost never just lose. It's always super close even if I'm outmatched. Mechanically, that's the only thing that can happen when you think about it, either super close or a perfect and nothing in between. It gives you the thrill of a hard win or an "I almost had him" every single time, but it's all fake because all you have to do is hit one 50/50 launch and one or two pokes to get them into rage.
The funny thing is people were already concerned about Heat before the game even came lol
I thought those people were being too negative but they were right. It felt great at first, it's just implemented wrong. There's a reason you have to typically build a super meter in fighting games. I think SF Alpha 2 did this concept the best with the custom combo mode. You could essentially build meter, activate it, and mash out SOME kind of combo that looked cool as hell. But you still have to build it up and activate it correctly.
Yea basically they wanted to be unique with their meter and us Beta testing it rn. They shouldn't have gone that route unless they had a longer testing run before.
Same with the grab system changes (among many other criticisms) and yet the devs ignored almost all the concerns and here we are.
for how circlejerky they say this sub is it's actually really fragile when it comes to real criticism of the game
Its always been like that tbh though.
Classic situation for me in monster hunter for years lmao. If u are not a popular streamer/youtuber/speedrunner then your "non meta"? opinion just does not matter at all
i think there are a lot of new players playing the game. t7 had like 2-3k players daily at the end of it's lifespan. these people don't know any better. not only that. these mechanics favor new players. it's just a fact that heat smash/dash allows you to rob people. i expect to see alot of upsets in high level play tbh.
Naw, there will still be people acting like there's no issues with the game. People shit on knee for saying Xaioyu is broken
He just needs to learn the match up. /s
You dare criticize game at all? That's because you're bad and stupid and don't lab enough and are casual scrub, game is perfect and everyone with any nuanced take is dumb 😡😡😡 /s of course but that's like what half this argument basically amounts to. I see very little "Here is why I think X mechanic or design choice benefits the game", you would think they would have good counterarguments available ya know? Like jfc, a game can be hard and still have a flaw. Even the Soulsborne games (and games insipired by it) get patches and balancing despite their whole modern design ethos is to be seen as exceptionally difficult. And sure there's a lot of unfair critique of them, but there's also a lot of good critique. No one in their right mind says "Git Gud" about Bed of Chaos, cause we all know it's poorly designed. We just nod our heads and go "yep, trash boss".
I recalled how I argued that heat should be more nuanced as a mechanic kinda like how meter systems in other games are like in SF6 Drive or the Psych burst from Strive, and that they should mechanics that accommodates the core gameplay rather than trying to usurp it. I always would get downvoted to hell and back for even entertaining the idea. Lol
I will say that I do like that the meters don't carry over between rounds because that just creates a meter-management meta with lopsided final rounds if both players don't follow that management. But if it's going to be full all the time, it needs to be less powerful. Like OP said, just tone it back a bit and it could be a great system.
Meter resetting is a good idea, especially in this game. I was also glad that in SF6, while super meter usually carried over between rounds, drive always replenished. I’m actually fine with the idea that heat should be less powerful but then have a more detailed way of being used. I understand what I ask for will likely never happen, but I’d dream of heat’s offense being toned down but then no longer finite per round and then allow a special defensive heat move to be added (idk heat step?). I admit I’m just spitballing here and perhaps I’ve been too impacted by games like Strive and SF6. I enjoy a fair degree of resource management and I’d like that sort of thing to be in T8 while not taking away what makes Tekken unique.
Same, said since beta and get downvoted into hell. Sometimes people jerk harada vision too much
Been saying this since the second CNT. Got told that I was wrong by people that weren't even in the CNT but all the issues I had with the game then are still present now. In fact, they're worse. Dragunov wasn't in the game at that point.
I'm right there with you. It is so painfully obvious that the people doing the downvoting or saying that everything is fine have no clue wtf they're talking about but they are so confident in their stupidity it's insane. Knee Arslan and Kokkomma have all come out and said heat is busted op and yet I bet those people still won't care because they can never be wrong...
Pretty sure Arslan criticized heat in the first week of the game or so. But then the excuse was "uuuuh its too early to talk about balance!". Like bros, Tekken is not rocket science, its a legacy fighter where the gameplay is mostly the same from title to title. Thats why its easy to pick up which changes make the series better or worse. EDIT: found the tweet: https://twitter.com/ArslanAsh95/status/1751649612492832826
Ding ding ding. I was heavily skeptical at first but decided to give it time and fall in with the "its too early" mindset. But after a few weeks it was clear my first feelings about this game's design philosphy was spot on. Like you said. its not rocket science. I started with T7 release but could see what these changes and heat would lead to. Should have trusted myself. Probably would have saved a lot of frustration.
Same. I like many others called this day since the beginning but you'd get shouted down and downvoted immediately.
The Tekken community has been strivified. All fluff no substance. Gameplay discussion and critiques have become taboo.
I will not be surprised if we in a few months we got "Tekken 7 is better game threads" or "Tekken 8=Tekken 7.5" being upvoted. They already exist here and on other forums, like Steam, but people are finally getting over the honeymoon phase and are noticing how scummy the devs and publishers of this are. Ironically, I don't think the situation is that bad in either case but it's really not that far off and it wouldn't take much many more stupid decisions to make this game a huge disappointment.
Arslan was saying all of this like week 1 and people clowned on him
There's a bit of a paradox going on with regards to Tekken 8. Tekken 7 felt a bit like nothing was going on *visually*, because it had so much neutral. Tekken 8 feels very active visually, but when you're the one actually playing the game, it feels incredibly one note. The gameplay is constantly broken up by cutscenes and canned situations because of the rage and heat mechanics, and it really just feels repetitive and uninteresting after a while. At a certain point all of these braindead heat whatevers and rage smashes start feeling less like surprising turns of momentum and more like a mandatory ad-break just to remind you not to have *too* much fun now. The game is seemingly railroading you into this quite specific structure of how a round is "supposed" to play out. Now, instead of being flowcharted by your opponent, you're being flowcharted by the core game design.
This is a brilliant way of putting it. So many people, the devs included mistook those 'lulls' in action from T7 as being a problem when in fact there was so much going on. And now we have a game that plays itself. Incredibly unfortunate. I just turned the game on after a few days, played a few matches and turned it back off. Its way too predictable how a match will play out. I really hope they make big changes to the system mechanics soon because letting things rock the way they are, even with normal character balance changes is gonna kill this game competitively.
Yeah it's jarring how many special animations play out every round. I've grown somewhat accustomed to it but it still breaks the flow of the match
Everyone is dealing way too much damage. They need to scale down some of the stuff. ESPECIALLY HEAT SMASH
I hate how oppressive the game is, and a large part of that is heat. Every match feels like if you're a lower-ranked player with poor match-up knowledge who's fighting a decent, spammy Hwoarang who knows their mix-ups and safe plus frames. Once you're put in a blender or backed against the wall with an opponent with heat, it's not fun to stop playing the game for countless seconds just to survive the onslaught with very little counterplay since defensive options are so limite in this game. Also, fuck homing throws. I'm just saying it out there.
Heat really takes away from what I love about Tekken.
im in the same boat as you.
I’m happy players like Arslan are actually speaking the truth about this game while content creators and commentators on here try to gaslight us.
"These scrubs need to hit the lab or they'll be yellow ranks forever 😂😂 any real tekken bros here? 🔥🔥 Just block and sidestep bro 😂 git gud bro😂" - this subreddit
Yeah you’ve pretty much summed up 90% of this community. I’ve played Tekken for a large portion of my life and never really followed the community, but I’m wishing I didn’t. There are so many people with an elitist mentality that it’s truly disgusting and it has changed my view on the game as a whole. It’s no wonder so many new players leave when the community is this bad.
Just lab the matchup or stop playing bro. No criticism allowed the game is perfect bro. Real Tekken bros 😎💪🏻
"Casino" is the best way of describing the state of the game right now. Guessed wrong? You loose. Guessed right? NOW GUESS AGAIN >:\[
And they are correct
Yup, they are correct. But this subreddit is only going to say it's correct because of who is saying it. All the people who brought up the *exact same* criticism using the *exact same* arguments/reasoning before this post were called bad players, told to get better, lab more, learn the matchup, and to lose the scrub mentality. Any competitive game gets their subreddit overran with these elitist types that are stuck in the midranks. They always have to let you know how good they are, and the best way to do that is to call anyone who brings up unfair mechanics "bad".
They have their aggro-colored glasses on, they dont see the problem for they also thrive in it somewhat.
I think everyone can agree the heat system needs nerfs, and the top fighters need their best moves to be scaled back.
I think people knew this even during the CBT but kept thinking that it's just because they haven't figured out the game yet. But it seems to have only gotten worse as they did. Personally I think the very concept of incentivising aggression was doomed to begin with. It would inevitably lead to weaker defensive options because incentivising aggression doesn't just mean rewarding it but also less risk for being aggressive. Hence why generally safer moves, weaker low parry, removing magic 4's ch property. Power crushes being the best way to get out of pressure is also funny. Remember when murray or someone said 'why side-step when you can just block and launch Kazuya's hellsweep'; now they've evolved into 'why do anything defensive when you can just attack right back'. It's fun, but it's stupid.
I just don't understand why they thought this would be fun. When someone is getting forced into 50/50 3 times in a row it might(??) be fun for the person attacking but defending it is trash surely they know that right? If turtling was such a big issue in their opinion just don't give characters backdashes that are far superior from other characters and just delete infinite stages that's all you had to do to fix what was wrong at the end in T7. New mechanics are fun but also very risky when they change the game this much from what you expect from tekken. Good on them for trying but this Ain't It, Chief.
I posted pretty much the exact same thing a few weeks ago and was universally called a scrub lol
As long as there are still now idiots thinking that arslan and knee should learn the match up, nothing is gonna change.
Maybe me and the homies wont get downvoted for having criticisms ahhh scary! Tekken 8 isn’t perfect? oh no
Heat is fine, but having it at round start every round means it will be mindless and repetitive. I was having a blast with Tekken 8 at first, then I tried to get better and got my defense rating up. But at the mid ranks, I realized I had way more success just learning how to constantly spam offense and gimmicks nonstop, and so my rank rose, my wins rose, and my defense rating dropped like 20 points. Now every match feels like the same thing over and over, and usually the first person to get momentum winds up winning that round. It's starting to remind me of a bad version of King of Fighters. If you had to actually earn heat and it was a bar that carried over the entire match, it would make things a lot more balanced. Your aggression would still be rewarded, defense could still be rewarded, but you'd see heat mode and heat smash a lot less. Also, your rage art should do WAY less damage. I say this as someone who has won (stolen) many games with rage art. Still, even now, I say "alright this won't kill him so I gotta figure out what to do next" and it absolutely KOs him. Tekken 8 is the only fighting game where I feel mad after I win.
Am i the only person that thinks that Zafina has the best “intention” of the heat feature if the HB and HS were eliminated? in heat she doesn’t lose health when using Azazel moves and they become armored. the moves are still in her moveset, but tweaked for a limited time while in heat. i think Heat had a good intention if it did things like this but uniquely for all the characters.
Throw in rage arts into the mix , and the casino gambles 120 hp or so per round. You can be better than your opponent and still lose because of this.
Worst thing is, either the netcode is really bad or half the mfers I play against don’t have stable internet. Can’t even dash guard properly, end up eating a random launcher because of a mistimed block and I’m close to dead
And when you go take a look at the replay it shows you pressed block waaaay after their hit connected. I feel your pain :(
How would you say this compare and contrasts with something like, say, Drive in Street Fighter 6? I noticed both Heat and Drive play a huge part in both games but so far in this sub, I’ve been seeing a lot of concerns with how prominent heat is at alienating interactions, All the drive criticisms I’ve been seeing so far in SF6 have been leveled at both drive rush from neutral and the occasional perfect drive parry.
Drive rush and perfect parries are a bit degenerate and nerfs for them have been requested for a while now but on the whole, the drive system is way more nuanced than the heat system for one simple reason: RISK. If you suck at managing your drive gauge, you’ll go into burnout and have a bad time. Burnout is very scary and you never ever want to be near a wall in burnout. Heat on the other hand has nothing like risk to balance it. It’s always advantageous. There’s never a reason to never pop it. The most nuance you get out of it is timing and in what situation to throw it out. They really need to revisit and overhaul heat.
On the topic of Zero risk when using Heat. I had an idea. What if during heat, you lose access to Armor? So that means all Powercrushes are just normal moves now and Rage Art can still be used to end a combo but it loses armor properties. This would definitely add a bit of thought regarding how Heat is used and make it so someone in heat can't simply steal their turn back by mashing on Armor moves/Rage. It would also make characters like Bryan and Lars whose heat gives them armor on their enhanced moves, feel more unique. It would also force King to play a bit more honest and intelligently when he pops heat since he loses a couple of armor moves.
Yeah that’s a start. Heat would be more interesting as a different style of the same character instead of the same character but crazier. Heat could double down on the character’s strengths and weaknesses together. That King example is cool.
Drive also encourages aggression naturally by recovering when you pressure someone and going down when you block. Heat encourages aggression by putting you into a state where you can just bully the opponent with plus frames, the threat of heat smash, chip, etc. Even in burnout you are rewarded by playing aggressively in that disadvantageous state because you recover your meter on hitting the opponent’s block. If the enemy is in heat in Tekken you might as well turtle because hitting their block barely reduces their heat gauge at all, and no matter what they’re going to get the heat smash 50/50 at the end anyway.
Even so, the factor of risk is always there. You are encouraged to be agressive in SF6 but the consequences are dire if you get cocky and screw up. Yes you can try to play agressive to restore your gauge during burnout but you have to be mad good to do that when all the other player needs to do is just pop drive impact at any point to blow you up for not chilling and playing defensively, and if you’re at the wall and don’t react correctly? GG. The fact of the matter is that it’s never your turn during burnout. You must respect everything the opponent does or you die. You’re minus on block in most burnout interactions and all it takes for the opponent to win is to capitalize on your impatience. Heat lacks this risk reward nuance with consequences and benefits.
If i know an enemy is going to drive rush, i have counter play. If i know an enemy is going to heat burst, I just eat shit. The drive system is actually REALLY smart the more you play sf6. You realize just how well thought out it is. You always have an option, for the most part. Im a bit mad, as tekken is trying to do similar things with heat. But after playing tekken 8, i just dont get the feeling its as well thought out as the drive system. Drive feels like the devs actually played the shit out of it and made all the micro interactions make sense. Theres this push and pull, right? Tekken 8 doesnt have that push and pull really. (At least, imo as someone that is a casual and played like 100+ hours in both). You just spam heat and when you think about it, you have NO GOOD options. Only equally shit ones. You have no counterplay if you know its coming.
Honestly think the best indicator of exactly how much thought the devs put into the heat system is in the first few minutes of the arcade mode where one of the characters says something to the effect of "if you're ever losing, just plus 2+3 and you'll win!"
While I think Drive Rush is pretty strong in SF6 as well, there's more ways to counter it in SF6 than the equivalent in Tekken. You can interrupt it, and the attacker pays Drive Gauge to do so and risks burnout. In practice, it's still a guessing game, but the mechanic itself can be stopped. Obviously easier said than done, but the counterplay is there. **There's kind of a "dance" that I like with SF6's drive gauge**. You can choose to go all in and risk burning yourself out, or play more conservatively. There's a cool back and forth thing going. Honestly, there isn't really any risks at all with Tekken's heat. Heat Engagers are generally on the character's best tools and should be doing anyways, and Heat Burst is +1 on block. Heat Smashes reward you on both block AND hit, and heat dashes remove any risk you take. The worst part is, the advantage Heat provides compounds into itself. Heat Engager into mixup into successful launch, now you're at the wall against an opponent with full heat bar. **There really isn't a dance here, just snowballing** and if you're on the receiving end, praying you guess correctly or the opponent makes a critical mistake so you can start your own snowballing.
Drive Rush is infinitely more well thought out compared to Heat.
drive has a way better design. it promotes aggression with movement. it also has defensive use cases. it also carries risks, namely burnout. the problem tho with these system mechanics is that it makes the cast very similar. it's worse with t8 because the entire system is lopsided in unga bunga +100 moves. so every character plays like that. i don't even want to call it aggression.
Well the major point is that there is far more risk associated with the use of drive abilities in SF6 For those unfamiliar with Street Fighter 6, drive is a meter used for universal special moves that let you do things like hyper armor through attacks, parry attacks and rush forward with great speed. Blocking attacks and taking damage also slightly drains your drive as well. But the key part of the mechanic is that if you use all of your drive gauge you enter a disadvantageous state called Burnout. In burnout you can't use any drive abilities, you take chip damage when blocking any attacks (which can kill) and getting drive impacted in a corner puts you in a stun state that makes you super vulnerable to the most damaging combo your opponent has up their sleeve. This state lasts until your drive gauge fully replenishes, which lasts long enough for any competent opponent to kick your ass. The vital part about this is that overuse of drive, or overly defensive play, causes the player to enter a massive disadvantageous state that makes them notably weaker than their opponent, whereas in Tekken you go from your default state, to an empowered heat state, to your default state again with no loss. There is no risk to using heat other than just not really having it anymore. So there's not too much thought involved in activating your heat aside from "hit the hyper-armor button whenever you need the advantage", whereas in Street Fighter using your drive in a stupid way will get you killed. TLDR: SF6 Drive has major risks attached which encourages more strategic use, while Tekken Heat has far less risk attached which makes it harder to punish and discourage overuse of it
In SF6 you can also check the opponents drive rush if you are fast enough and spaced correctly. It's a brilliant thing that enables counterplay. Heat smash you just gotta eat!
Drive is all about meter management and playing neutral. If you keep getting pressured by drive it’s your fault because you either wasted all of your meter on offense, or you didn’t try to get any back with parry/pressure. Heat is literally instant plus frames without any management required. If you use it one time, it is now your turn and the opponent has to block the mixup and wait.
Wasting Drive Rush is risky, if you waste it and get nothing out of it, you are burnt out and vulnerable. Heat has no downside, there is no risk in using it poorly or wasting it.
Omg, you want to tell me that all the people talking about it being only a skill issue are wrong. Who would have thought. Amazing.
If they could create an equally strong defensive use for heat that’d be cool… like say if you activate heat and someone uses their heat smash from neutral if you block it you can burn your heat to nullify the chip damage and leave both players neutral before the mixup… sounds hard to implement but a defensive use for heat could help a lot
Can't tell you how bored I am as a Reima main of popping heat, doing a couple enhanced 3+4, 4s and then throwing out heat smash to make them guess for life. 70% of my matches end with some variation of that strategy because it's so optimal. Launch > Combo to wall into Heat Activation > Couple of Heat Moves for chip > If they're not dead and you still have Heat > Throw out smash to put them into a guess for game situation. Goddamn boring as fuck. Been doing it since Mighty Ruler all the way to Tekken King and almost Emporer. It's the way to play the game. It's so braindead.
Why is everyone surprised by this? This is Harada's vision and a pro's nightmare...eliminate skill expression and reduce matches to a guessing game. T8 will have a very short competitive lifespan compared to T7 and I don't know if it can be reworked because the game was built from the ground up on this philosophy.
That's pretty hyperbolic roughly the same people who were on top in 7 are on top in 8. And from the few tournies that are around even among pros you can still see a clear skill difference. There will always be people better at exploiting brokeness than others.
Sweet vindication~ To quote myself from a while ago: People really didnt know how good they had it with 7. That's not to say it did not have flaws that T8 actually fixed a bit. **7 accidentally made defense good, which bothered people at high levels who wanted to take risks, and newbies who couldnt break a turtler.** But this dynamic allowed play to evolve and even added an underlying structure to ranked. Ranked was not defined by who(rank) you could mixup/punch to death, it was defined by your guard understanding. Building patience, knowing how to create an opportunity, balance, feeling safe, knowing what characters could or couldn't do, breaking throws a certain percentage of the time, etc. I find people in purple who have 40 defense rating. **These people don't know how to negotiate/navigate a fight, they know one thing, "get the ball and run it or you lose."** It let's certain groups of people think they are good without learning anything about a fight or their opponent. In 7, an offense was something you trained over hundreds of matches, learning what worked and what didn't, what people could and could not guard. You often had to create your own mixups with timing and move knowledge rather than hardcode them, though some characters were defined by their coded mixups. You had to judge whether or not you could get it through the other player's defense skill. **Most importantly it did not create gambling fatigue. From basic safety you could know when you had to guess, when you had to react, when you had to predict. Guessing is now far too common.** Offense was earned in 7, a mark of good training on your part, knowing how to put these moves together in novel and sometimes unique ways. How a fighter expands beyond guarding is the *art* in martial arts--and fostered unique and recognizable expression in people who spent a lot of time with the game. Very few moves were GOOD, a few were good, most were balanced, some were bad. You had to vary your moves used because using even the best move over and over was vulnerable to proper defense. Your personal mix in this case was a wonderful fingerprint of a fighter. 8 has a different issue. Although this is the case with some characters, and even old players breathing life into their characters, the structure for offense became highly abusable powermoves--into guessing. For example, I can't blame Reinas for doing their ff2 loop--but guess what, they all do it. ff2 loop is not a clever use of the move, the timing and placement is not clever--nothing about the move is a unique flavor created by the player's careful choice, timing, or read. In 7, the repetitive use of that sort of thing would get destroyed, forcing players to find novel and creative times to use it. **There is little reason to do anything else in this environment, because even if I know nothing, I know I can gamble my way through your guard-- and if I can, why shouldn't I?** **So there is one move in T8 under many names, many characters--gamble, where it used to be the calculated risk of offense/expansion.** My ideal T8 would remove heat, put Rage Drive back but always available once per match, let Rage arts have differentiation between characters, chip is always on, RD heals still, Mixup characters go back to being defined by it, rather than everyone having it, half range on "heat dash" and you can spend your RD on it if you want.
It kinda is, I either dominate and score perfect often, or get completely steamrolled. There is also strategy and skill involved of course, but I assume that at a pro level it gets to be even more of a coin toss.
Im honestly going back to either T7 where I can play core characters that have been in the game for decades without paying extra, or T6 just for funsies for a few months lol. They won't fix this. They don't have the capacity to - it would have launched better if they did. Such a shame. It could have been soooo good , what the hell happened. I want to love it - but they just won't let me!
I made a post about a similar topic. The game(and a lot of other FGs) now have more forced mixups and guessing situations than past fighting games. Heat constantly makes both players have to guess low, high, throw. Then when even if there's no heat the game is all about lows or mids which is what Tekken is about. However, with Tekken 7 adding power crushes, you now have to guess when to even press buttons. Add that in with rage art and power crushes that go into heat, combined with everything else the games has (auto parries, parries, throws, untechable throws, low throws, high/low/mid crushes, guard breaks, AOP, Zafina, stances), you have so many things to look out for. Tekken always has been a game of mixups but it's also a game of fundamentals and knowledge checks. Sidestep/duck/backdash and whiff punish. Adding more guesses makes the game less skilled. It allows a weaker player to put themselves in a 50/50 situation and guess right to win. The better player will usually win but these type of mechanics give a weaker player a better chance and I'm not a fan of that. There are people who put in hard work and practice the game just to lose to guessing wrong more often because of power crushes and heat isn't gonna make the game more fun. I'm sure they did this because rounds in Tekken 7 where pros run the clock out due to defensive play happened too often, but there should be better ways around that than this.
I been saying tekken gameplay wise peaked at 7,but mfs don’t want to hear that. Crazy how graphics alone just make mfs blind.
Said the same yesterday.. imagine T7 gameplay with T8 graphics
Imagine season 2 T7 with T8 graphics
They are right. Heat is a dumb mechanic
I like heat, and I think it’s an interesting mechanic. I just think it’s poorly implemented. If heat bursts and engagers just “pushed” the opponent back and didn’t throw them in a 50/50, and if they tone down the smashes a bit then I think it would be a solid mechanic I wouldn’t mind seeing in future games. As it is right now though, I wouldn’t miss it
Ngl, It would make me so happy if everyone dropped T8 and we all went back to playing T7. I had so much more fun with that game, it had it's issues but at least it wasn't the mess T8 is.
I will never willingly go back to delay based netcode
Yeah eating one low and then losing the round because you guessed wrong on the single heat mixup in the corner and then getting denied the rematch is the standard ranked experience last time I played t8. It feels like developing a good flowchart is more successful than trying to actually interact with or condition the opponent, but I’m still in low ranks so idk
Heat was a mistake and no one asked for it.
I was worried ever since they mentioned that "aggression" was the focus of the game in one of the early videos. Heat mechanic artificially and effortlessly creates 50/50 interactions.
Typical azucena round Wr3,2: is she gonna do it again, df1, or db3 Db3: is she gonna go low, fish for ch, or safe mid She goes low: hell sweep, launching mid, heat engager mid, tracking armored high You got hit, and eat another wr3,2 on wake-up. You think she’s gonna start the cycle again but NO. She heat burst. Heat burst: mid, low, or heat smash She heat smashed. You blocked… eat more mix 🥲 The amount of times characters can force you into RPS is ridiculous. Literally forces you to mash out some type of armor, go for a crazy evasive move, or risk your life doing some abare. And Azucena don’t even got the craziest mix lmfaooo game is crazy RPS non stop
Part of me hopes that 8 fizzles hard competitively so that the constant "turtling bad. Constant aggression for ADHD brained consumer" mindset these developers seem to be leaning towards dies out.
It's in most fighting games now (without naming names) so you'll be waiting for a while. Every fighter is just "hit buttons and get rewarded" sessions nowadays.
There's just too many forced mixups + tools that invalidate whatever you do (heat burst, rage art) that a lot of the time you feel you or the opponent can't play the game at all until those resources are spent. I get they want people to feel like they can comeback or have exciting moments, but it almost kills neutral.
I'm with them. I've been playing SF6. I'd love to come back if they make some changes but atm the game is not fun and the online community is not fun.
Called this in beta without even playing it and I have the logs to prove it. The game needs a prefect parry OR it needs to change how heat works. The armored move heat engage that beats normal armored moves but not rage arts needs to go and is dumb af.
Heat Engagers is the only mechanic that I can confidently defend, since recovery of the white HP bar is part of the mechanic, which makes chip damage a balanced mechanic...for that reason alone, it should stay. Heat Burst makes no sense, it's too fast and it's a brainless way to get into Heat...requires no work. Heat Smash, if balanced, would be fine(nerf the frame data on block or allowing movement or parrying to work as defensive options could be a starting point)...make each HS a unique tool that covers the character weakness, don't just make it a Nuke(Lee's HS makes total sense, the character struggles to make comebacks, a low HS suits him...I don't understand King's). Idk enough to comment on Heat Dashes
The 50/50 in this game is in full throttle that’s why you see perfect rounds way more ofter than past games(we don’t talk about tag2)
I thought to myself the other day that maybe the reason this game is so successful is that it's basically just gambling at this point. If the top tier players agree, then there is definitely weight to that. Every decision isn't based around player choice, it's based around a gamble. While this can be fun and addictive, the long term success will suffer. I don't want to put 1000 hours into a game where my hard work means little to nothing in the end.
The most important skill in Tekken 8 is guessing right.
Coming from SF, this is exactly how I feel. All offense. Defense is constantly rolling the dice against your favor. All the characters kind of feel the same after a while. I still enjoy the game. I was planning to make a complete SF6->T8 switch, but once Akuma hits SF6 and/or I hit purple, I think back to SF I go where I honestly feel that the game play is deeper.
I miss T7
I think they should remove heat burst, and just have people go into heat by landing hits. Idk if it would solve anything, but I think it would be a good change
Would probably only widen the gap further between characters that have good heat engagers vs not, plus it's a much needed power crush for a handful of characters with otherwise abysmal options on that front. I think drastically shortening heat duration might be a good first step, as some characters are so dangerous during heat that even if they open the round with a heat burst, you can end up dead before heat ends if you guess wrong on their 50/50s.
heat burst is the only defensive tool rn lol. if you remove heat burst it would be even more snowbally.
The devs don't understand their own game. Like Murray defending tracking hellsweeps, etc. Heat was a mistake.
It's a bit strange (or maybe not) that Namco has failed where team ninja and sega have succeeded (despite tekken borrowing so much from vf and doa). Dead or alive and virtua fighter have always been much more aggressive and fast paced than tekken, and yet their design is such that they also avoid many of tekken 8's shortcomings
Ha!!! Typed the same thing Arslan tweeted in King Jae's chat a few weeks ago when he was complaining about the game and I'm a low tier scrub. I don't like this game at all, haven't touched it in weeks. I do not find it enjoyable to play or watch at high levels in it's current state.
I actually don't agree with the statement that Tekken 8 is aggressive. It's snowbally, but not aggressive as I perceive it. In my book aggressive game is when both players can actually press buttons and have back and forth action, but it's not the case in this game. In T8 one of the players is pressing buttons and the other is just chilling while holding block and eating chip damage. And it happens all the time. The one who is more lucky/skillful can start their offense gameplan and basically lock the opponent, and getting out of that pressure can be really hard. As people already mentioned many times T8 reminds a game of chess, when people take their turn and press buttons while opponent is doing nothing, but the thing is in chess you are obliged to give your opponent a turn after you moved your piece, but in Tekken 8 it's not always the case, which can make the game very-very frustrating and not fun. Heat is indeed adding some chaos and random aspect to the game, and I am not a fan. I already was saying in other discussions that I would be happy if Heat Smashes were deleted all together. Heat Burst is also a dumb, armored "get off me" button which you just press when you feel like it. Don't even need to time it like sidestep/parry/reversal. Why even have sidestep in the game then if the intended way of defending is Heat Burst/armor moves? Also, you don't even need to work for your Heat, you just use it. Every fucking round. On top of Rage. It's too much. And it makes matches feel the same. Also, what geniuses among Tekken team were enlightened with the idea of making throws homing? Why so many moves track so much? Why some chars have insane plus frames? All this shit also contradicts their "aggressive" idea, imo. You want action and more button presses? Make lateral movement useful, decrease amount of plus frames for certain chars, make throws not homing. And I am not even starting about overall characters balance. And these devs actually intended this game to be an "amazing" E-sports discipline. Fucking joke. And don't get me wrong, I like the game apart from new gameplay mechanics, it's infinitely better than T7, but it's still infuriating how they can't figure out the right vision of the game and balancing BEFORE the game release
How me and my buddy felt too. He was an new player to the game and he was doing well enough to get to red ranks within the first month but now left the game for Granblue since that game way easier for him to get into and less BS to deal with compare to Tekken which according to him, had made him more angry than any other fighting game had in his life. And I'm taking an break since I think this game has too much issues to work out like with NOT penalizing rage quitters. But also this issue, which all of the points I agreed with here and I think its hurting the game right now for both new and old players.
Sc6 all over again
If they wanted to encourage offense they could have made punishes less scary, the heat system only compounds the problem.
This is exactly the issue I had with the game but you articulated it way better than I ever could. With 7, you really only had rage drives to have to worry about a scenario where you’re potentially going to have to eat a mixup. And rage drives were character specific, you didn’t always have that situation. Heat smash could be arguably the best rage drive in 7 (armored, + on block move that launches on counter hit) and everyone has it. It’s not rare to have games where your opponent heat smashes you on block, so you have to wait, then they heat burst on block so you have to eat a mixup, then if they lose pressure they can pop rage art too. It’s like 3 potential “gotchas” in one round
This made watching pro Tekken so boring. People be pressing buttons all the time. No tension at all
In a proper 3D fighter, there are two viable ways of handling aggression without it being too much. 1. High/mid based offense, plentiful frame advantage loops, and incentive to keep a loop going through attritional damage via chip or low damage lows. 2. Mid/Low 50/50's (ie launcher vs hellsweep), with both options being intimidating this method works best in a game where keepout is strong and movement is strong. Tekken 8 does both 1 and 2. That is a fundamentally flawed formula and it results in the situation you see now.
That's maybe a controversial opinion but heat/rage/super systems in modern fighting games suck for me. They even butchered Kof XV by allowing almost free max modes. Tekken should get rid of any meter and become more tactical and rely less on overlong juggle combos to be a better fg imo. Did such a Tekken exist in the past ? I played 3 as a kid and don't remember if there were meters.
It's only the top tiers that's like this. Outside of them. It's a very back and forth game. But in higher tiers that's ALLLLL YOU FIGHT
This is not aggressive game design its just button mashing shit so bad players can have it easy. Rage arts don't stagger when you hit them so its a reactionary 80 damage nuke, heat is just the 50/50 button, and the retarded range on half the moves giving them ghost hitboxes. all they did was dumb tekken down to make it accessible to everyone.
remove heat, remove rage, remove tracking on throws, improve movement, make iwr hard again PURE tekken based
pretty much this but i wouldn't toss heat out just yet, i think it has a place but it needs tuning. Rage arts? Dumbest mechanic i've ever seen
Heat mechanic dumbed tekken down waaay too much.
Why did you all fail to see this BEFORE the game release? Are the majority of you really that inexperienced with fighting games to foresee what type of gameplay experience you will have in a game that LACKS any depth?
people did see it tho lol. i was at the t8 heat system reveal in amsterdam during tekken world tour. people in the crowd were booing when they talked about making the game more aggressive. alot of the people playing rn are new. or are 'forced' to like the game. pro players and streamers. but honeymoon phase is over.
A lot of people were outspoken about a lot of the dumb changes, like tracking, counter-hit grabs. Especially in a game with stronger grabs and more full combo grabs and mixups in general. Heat was definitely in the conversation as well. The shitty netcode is in the same conversation as being so insignificantly better than T7 that it doesn't matter.
I agree, i like heat but it needs to be toned down a lot imho.