During Evo 2024, Bandai Namco shared a new trailer highlighting the first season of content and updates it has planned for Tekken 8, capping things off with a DLC character reveal for Lidia Sobieski.
As a refresher, Lidia is the prime minister of Poland and a practitioner of karate who was introduced as a DLC fighter in Tekken 7. Her Tekken 8 reveal doesn’t show any of her gameplay, sadly, though I can’t imagine she’ll play that much differently to how she did in Tekken 7. She’s slated to arrive in the summer, but anyone who buys the Character Year 1 Pass will get early access to her, just like what happened with Eddy Gordo’s inclusion.
A new character isn’t all Bandai Namco has promised for 2024. For starters, Tekken 8 will start receiving battle adjustments later this spring to keep the game balanced. Then, in the summer, Lidia will be accompanied by a new Seaside Resort stage (which looks awfully similar to the Island Paradise stage that was bundled with Lidia’s inclusion in Tekken 7) as well as a photo mode, both of which are free updates. No mention of a Waffle House stage though.
The thing I’m most looking forward to is the new story chapter in the fall. Exact details are slim, but the brief glimpses we see of it show it’ll prominently feature Eddy, who obviously missed out on Tekken 8‘s story mode by virtue of being DLC. Judging by what little there is, it seems Eddy will be ditching his previous role as a member of the Mishima Zaibatsu’s Tekken Force so he can team up with Jin to help bring down Kazuya and save the world.
So, it’s not continuing the main story but showing new sides of it, which I’m more than happy with, especially since it’s a free update, meaning you don’t even need to purchase Eddy to access it. Hopefully, this isn’t the only story update; I’d love to see what Lidia was doing during all this considering Kazuya was threatening to destroy the nations that failed to win his fighting tournament. Surely, Lidia would’ve entered herself to protect her homeland.
Bandai Namco has mentioned it’ll add two new gameplay modes—Ghost vs. Ghost and Online Practice—as well, but it hasn’t provided release windows for them yet. There are also two more DLC characters still to come in the fall and winter, but their identities remain a mystery. Could one of them be a guest character, like Akuma and Geese Howard were for Tekken 7? Executive producer Katsuhiro Harada hasn’t ruled out Tekken 8 receiving guest characters, only saying, if it were to happen, they’d be DLC and not part of the base roster.
