Michael Murray on Tekken 7's switch to Unreal Engine 4

The Tekken World Tour finals are taking place today in San Francisco, but yesterday we got the chance to catch up with veteran designer Michael Murray to talk about the competition. During our chat we also veered into a discussion about Tekken 7 as a whole, and we asked Murray how the switch to Unreal Engine 4 was for everyone.

"It was very tough," he said. "I remember early on when our programmers were messing around with some of the default stages and kind of plugging our characters in, I believe Kazuya was the first one, and we were all surprised how quickly it was to get up and running, but that was just the barebones. We had to import our own fighting game... I guess you could say the base engine is just for the graphics and the rendering, physics, while the actual character movement, animations, and all that is handled by our scripting. So we had to pair those two and that took a lot of time, and actually when we got into development it was the first time that our team had ever done Unreal Engine, so a lot of the assets weren't prepared in the best way or manner that you would typically do for Unreal Engine."

"So there was a learning curve there, and I think you can see that if you look at Tekken 7, the first one for the arcades, then the Fated Retribution, you see the ramp in the detail of the stages and the character level of detail, those kinds of things. It got a lot better when the team got a good handle of the engine."

Are you impressed with how Tekken 7 looks and plays?