Bandai Namco Entertainment has announced details on Tekken 8 Season 3, confirming outright the first three of four characters to appear as DLC over the course of the year: Kunimitsu, Bob, and Roger Jr. Furthermore, the long-awaited balance update has been pencilled in for March 16, promising to take things back to basics.
The unannounced character is scheduled to arrive in Winter 2026 and will launch alongside a new stage, while February 9 will see the arrival of the Season 3 Pass, which will include all of the content drops planned for they ear. This also ties in with Tekken 8’s second anniversary campaign, and follows this will be the Refined Balance Patch on March 16 alongside a rest of your character’s rank.
The official Tekken 8 website goes into more detail on what to expect:
1. Adjustments that respect each character’s concept, strengths, and weaknesses, while preventing excessive performance gaps between characters
2. Re-evaluating the relationship between character-specific power-up mechanics and the Heat system
3. Prioritizing improvements that align with TEKKEN 8‘s core gameplay and the Season 3 balance theme of “Refine,” based on feedback received to date
Matchmaking based on a player’s “highest-ranked character” will be discontinued and replaced with matchmaking based on the rank of the “currently selected character.” To reduce mismatches in player skill, the timing and target ranks for raising sub-character ranks in accordance with main character progression will be adjusted. Additional tuning will prioritize reducing matchmaking wait times.
The Tekken World Tour 2025 concluded yesterday in Malmo, Sweden, where South Korea’s LowHigh took his Bryan Fury to claim the winning spot. It wasn’t an easy triumph, as he had been put in the Losers bracket prior to the finals, but managed to not only reset the bracket against Manjga, who was on the winning side, but then win an additional three matches to take the crown.
Katsuhiro Harada, who departed the Tekken franchise in December last year after three decades, was a special guest at the finals.
[Source – Tekken 8]