Namco have announced the release date for the console ports of Tekken 6: the game will release in North America on 27 October 2009, with releases in Europe, Japan and the rest of Asia "shortly thereafter". That's much later than I had expected, I was hoping that the previous estimate of "Fall 2009" would be early September, but as it stands, we will probably only get the game in November.
That's a pretty slow conversion considering the arcade game was released in Japan in November 2007 (admittedly, the console version is not based on the original arcade release, but rather the Bloodline Rebellion update). What has taken them so long? For one, they've needed to port the code to the Xbox 360 now that the game is multiplatform (the arcade hardware it runs on is very similar to the PS3, so very little work would have been needed for the PS3 version). They've had to add online play, but I'm assuming that the Tekken team would just have purloined most of the Soul Calibur team's netcode. Namco had previously talked about wanting to add new modes to increase the game's longevity, maybe this was what was taking all the time?
Well, at E3 this year, the new mode was revealed to be Scenario Campaign mode, a rudimentary beat-em-up in the style of Final Fight. This really isn't anything new, as there has been a mode like this in every game since Tekken 3, with Tekken Force mode in T3, Tekken Force Assault mode in T4 and Devil Within mode in T5. These modes have always been at best a novelty, briefly entertaining, but nothing you'd return to over the core fighting, and videos of this mode in action lead me to believe that it will be no different. The only redeeming feature of this new mode is that it can apparently be played co-op, and games like this are usually far more entertaining with a friend. We'll have to wait until November to find out, though.
For the one person reading this who might be interested in Tekken 6 news, Tekken series director Katsuhiro Harada has stated that you won't need to unlock characters on the console ports, all 40 characters will be available from the moment you start the game.
ReplyDeleteThis is great news for people who just wanted to play the game against other players without having to grind through the single player multiple times to unlock everyone. That said, I will probably end up spending a good deal of time on the single player anyway, as it's getting harder and harder to organise live opposition in these games.