About Tekken I had Harada in interview two weeks ago. We talked for one hour about the future of Tekken. To make it short here's what he said to me :
- They had complaints that TTT2 had too many characters so they'll stop at T6 number.
- Tekken Revo worked great in USA, for younger players, and it also had people (casuals) coming back to the series after leaving it for years. It means the F2P model, even if he didn't talked about making money with it, can help people play your game, find a new public, by lowering the entry charge.
- I told him that in my opinion, Tekken was a game from the nineties for people that grew in this period. Because the game is full of colors, electro, nonsense, light hearted things. You can have the old master Baek, then the stylish nineties hwoarang then a bear so I asked him if he realized that maybe, it was too much for people born after 2000. I feel that younger players want cool but "serious" things and that being funny and absurd was maybe is ok but for one character but not for the entire game. He told me he agreed on that and that he has to work on this while still staying true to Tekken, and that it's hard.
- We talked about tutorials and how everyone says fighting games are too complicated and people wants to get in without making any efforts, and they want tutorials. So I basically said what I said here :
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=840119
Harada told me he agreed somehow, but that if learning was a too hard, people would stop playing the game, even of the tutorial is great. He said he wanted some tutorial with a cool coach maybe, something funny that helps you feel good.
- We tried to talk about teaching the meaning of mechanics, and not just the theory, but it was hard because of the translation (and because I had two car accidents on the way, so I was exhausted). What I said to him and since he practiced Judo (I practiced french kickboxing so we could talk about this) and knows what it's about to learn how to fight, maybe it would be better to just mimick reality to show people how dangerous a fight is, even in a videogame. As it's "just a game" people does not take care about their life, their decisions, and then complaint they lost. He agreed and then we joked about a tutorial when you fight a tree and broke your leg on it, and electrocuting people when they loose. :'D
- We asked him to make a french character and had a bug discussion about what french players thought about their representation. He cas curious about Abel in SF4.
If I remember other things I'll write it here. Harada is very nice in interview.