Red Bull Pindrop - Tekken 8 Quick Recap
by William Hernandez
Just a week before launch now, people are getting restless for Tekken 8. The Red Bull Pindrop event has ameliorated the fanbase ever so slightly by being a very solid source of visual information - much more than anyone could have anticipated. No secrets or hiding of gameplay elements. Pure information and entertainment. We're going to breakdown 3 major highlights of the show here. 3 things that we think can really elevate this game to new heights in terms of player and viewer experience.
Frame Data Crunching
You mean to say that displaying frame data shouldn't cost anything extra to the player? Could have definitely fooled us after that stunt pulled off in Tekken 7. But seriously, frame data display is very much an appreciated feature and it is very easy to digest in this game. You can see the length of your combo, the damage, the hit properties, the attack startup frames, the frame advantage, what status it leaves your opponent in, etc. It basically has everything that you could need other than a handy dandy frame meter to map everything out easily for you. Well, we can't say for sure that it's not available, but...we probably would have seen it in some capacity otherwise. Beginners might struggle to interpret the data to its fullest potential at first, but part of improving comes with finding out what doesn't work anyway. When you have an actual frame of reference as for what's good and what's totally unsafe, you'll get a lot more out of training from both an offensive and defensive perspective. Labbing out combos will always help, though, no matter what level you're at and the tools available should make all the possible chains much easier to find. Character guides might come out real quick.
Redo The Fight With Replays
Learning through failures is a legitimate thing in life. In fighting games - or any competitive game for that matter - VODs will always be your best friend. Going through replays is a good way of finding your bad habits as well as your opponent's. It also might be helpful in telling you what mistakes you're making against a specific character. Maybe your never block their one move or are getting punished too frequently for your attacks leading to a really long string of pain. Normally, you'd go into training and make the CPU try out the same move on you again and again and hope that translates into something. But now, you can actually re-play within your replays. You can pick (presumably) any part within a fight to insert yourself into and redo whatever it is you did to see what better choices you could have made. This has obvious uses in helping your defense as you can freely experiment with sidestepping, guarding, and countering while you don't have any pressure on you. There's also offensive utility in it as well, though, and this will be most apparent to people learning a character. Whenever you dropped a combo or didn't punish a whiff properly, you can just jump right back in and see how you could have executed better. This feature should really help in promoting actual growth and might genuinely become a staple of fighting games in the near future.
The Main Spectacle
Tekken 8 matches are a joy to watch. Everything just looks so well put together. The amount of aggressivity isn't overbearing in the slightest; individual rounds last a healthy enough amount of time and players can still show their hardened discipline and creativity in battle. From the perspective of a viewer, it's all perfectly fine. We're still in the phase where we're learning the potential of characters so that's definitely also adding to the intrigue, but, by itself, Tekken 8 is just a good watch. I can't really add much more to the conversation without showing specific footage so just make sure to check it out for yourself!
No one was expecting such a big info dump, but we got one. Over 5 hours of Tekken 8 were streamed and yet there's still so much more to learn about the game and the individual characters. We've not even covered the depth of customization here. There's so many ways to personalize yourself and your characters. There's so many tools to become a better player that there's plenty of inspiration even for casual players. We didn't even get any story updates, but that's also something to look forward to. Tekken 8 is just going to be a fun time no matter what specifically you're looking to get out of it. But anyway, that's the gist of Red Bull Pindrop's coverage of the game. The wait just gets harder...
