Getting good at fighting games is hard, especially if you don’t have a local tournament scene you can reliably compete in or online friends around your skill level to grind with. That is partly why Tekken 8’s new Ghost CPU has developers excited about how far players push the feature.
Bandai Namco’s team has proudly hyped up T8’s Ghost CPUs, which will use AI to train themselves in real time using each player’s moment-to-moment gameplay. That data will instantly be used to improve the Ghost’s ability to simulate a specific player’s habits down to the combos they drop consistently—essentially allowing you to fight a carbon copy of yourself.
During a preview session hosted by Bandai Namco, I was able to train up a Ghost with multiple characters and test just how this AI would learn from someone with only above-average experience with Tekken. Within minutes, I could see it whiffing heavy openers and failing to convert air juggles just like me for real, but this allowed me to build on those mistakes as I countered them, seeing where I could improve—all naturally without the need for a combo trial or feedback from another player.
On top of being a perfect way to see your flaws by playing against yourself in a way that wasn’t possible before, it also opens the door to new training potential, as you can challenge Ghosts for other players to train against them and learn from the best without needing hands-on coaching. Sure, getting your butt handed to you by ArslanAsh’s Ghost might not be a great teaching experience for everyone, but others will be able to walk away with insight into how he approaches different situations and what moves he uses as follow-ups out of specific combos.
If you pair that with T8’s enhanced replay capabilities, a feature that will let players rewind their past matches and jump in for short bursts to see how different scenarios can play out, Tekken 8 will offer you every tool possible in modern fighting games to hone your skills. All of this and more has the devs pumped to see the “possibilities” for Ghosts and where the community will take them at launch.
“People seem to be having a lot of fun in different ways with [Ghosts,]” T8 director Kohei Ikeda told Dot Esports. “Maybe in the future, we can see expansions of different ways to use that because that’s something that, at the moment at least, is quite unique to Tekken. There’s more room to perhaps give people different ways to raise their Ghosts kid of like a Tamagotchi in a way.”
Ikeda and the rest of the dev team are eagerly awaiting Tekken 8’s Jan. 26, 2024 release to see how they can further enhance the experience in the future, specifically for newer features like the updated Ghosts and Special Style control scheme.
