Tekken 7 unveiled at EVO 2014

The hotbed of fighting game action that is the EVO convention has had a major break in news with the reveal of Namco Bandai’s seventh installment of the Tekken series.

So a few things from that trailer that may or may not play into Tekken 7 in a big way. For starters, the next Tekken will be running on Unreal Engine 4 tech, which is bound to look mighty impressive indeed.

“The power and flexibility means that we can focus our efforts on making TEKKEN 7 the best possible game without worrying about spending time creating a stand-alone graphic engine,” said Katsuhiro Harada, TEKKEN series Executive Producer/Game Director at BANDAI NAMCO. “With Unreal Engine 4, we could rapidly achieve visual quality expected on next-gen platform and go beyond it. Not only is Unreal Engine 4 powerful and easy to use, but it allows us to immediately bring TEKKEN 7 to any platform we desire.”

“The Tekken franchise is beloved and we couldn’t be more excited to be working with the talented team at BANDAI NAMCO,” said Taka Kawasaki, Studio Head at Epic Games Japan. “This marriage is perfect – the most powerful engine in gaming along with one of the most enduring brands in fighting games. We have no doubt that these forces coming together will yield fantastic results.”

Other than the engine announcement, which actually is a pretty big deal, there was one other part of that trailer that kind of stuck out. Just a little. It’s pretty clear that the text at the conclusion of the teaser says Tekken 7 is the “final battle”. Whether that means that T7 is slated to be the final game in the long running fighting series, or just that it’ll be the last time we see certain characters who’ve been around from the start, we don’t know. Let’s face it, this was a teaser, which means that there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot to  expound upon.

If you’re a fan of the game though, there was probably more than enough to get you excited about what’s to come. Between Mortal Kombat X and Tekken 7, it looks like the fighting game genre is alive and kicking here in the next generation. Stay tuned for our San Diego Comic Con coverage in a few weeks time for some fresh info on the panel presentation where it’ll be detailed a bit more.