Tekken 8 Devs Say the Game Was Built in Unreal Engine 5 from Scratch

Earlier this week, Bandai Namco Entertainment unveiled a new installment in the Tekken series, Tekken 8. During the latest State of Play, the company showed off the first trailer of the game and shared that the footage in it was actually taken directly from a certain part in the current work-in-progress Tekken 8’s story mode and captured from the game running on PS5. 

And now, the company revealed more details on the upcoming title. In an interview with IGN, Bandai Namco Entertainment general manager Katsuhiro Harada spoke about the development process and the advantages the developers noticed when shifting to Unreal Engine 5.

Harada shared that Tekken 8 was built from scratch in Unreal Engine 5. He said that the developers started creating Tekken 8 using the previous version of the game engine, Unreal Engine 4, however, according to Harada, when the team decided to shift to UE5, "all the models and everything from Tekken 7 [was] totally discarded" and everything had to be rebuilt in UE5 from the ground up.

According to Harada, the team came to the decision to shift to the new engine as most of the developers have been working on the series for more than ten years. This gave them not only a lot of experience but also an excellent knowledge of the characters and the game in general, which allowed them to recreate recognizable heroes and not disappoint the fans. At the same time, he emphasized that, despite the accumulated experience, the team often faces difficulties, in particular, with the balance of fighters.

Harada also revealed that shifting to UE5 was not easy noting that it is a continuous process to port everything to the new version of the engine, so the developers have been experimenting and constantly figuring out how to approach different areas. They also have been working closely with Epic Games to figure out how to optimize some of the processes.

Speaking of the UE5 advantages, the director stated that the new engine will take the graphics in Tekken 8 to the next level. As an example, he pointed at the raindrops that run down Jin and Kazuya's faces in the debut trailer. According to the game director, in the previous parts, the developers had to create a special parameter for such effects and adjust it. In Tekken 8, raindrops interact with character models and have the effect of rolling down the characters' models.

UE5 will also bring many other benefits to developers. For instance, the creators of Tekken 8 will be able to make the clothes of the characters get dirty during the battle exactly in the places on which they fall.

Harada admitted that his team wants the game to be visually impressive. According to him, the most successful parts of Tekken looked great for their time, so the developers consider the graphics a very important aspect.

You can learn more by reading the full interview with Katsuhiro Harada here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.