After August’s announcement, Tekken 7 Season four has officially revealed Kunimitsu as the latest addition to the King of Iron Fist Tournament cast together with a brand new Vermilion Gates stage today. The content and gameplay improvements will be available in Fall 2020 when Tekken 7 Season four drops. Yes, even though they released a “launch trailer”, Bandai Namco hasn’t spilled anything about any specific release date.

Kunimitsu last appeared in the 2011 Tekken Tag Tournament 2 but her last “canonical” appearance was in Tekken 2. Kunimitsu was a member of Yoshimitsu’s Manji ninja clan but was banished for stealing the clan’s funds for her benefit. Later, she entered the King of Iron Fist Tournament to steal Michelle Chang’s valuable pendant and Yoshimitsu’s legendary sword. Failing to do both, she was gone from the entirety of Tekken‘s storyline. Now, her daughter took on the Kunimitsu mantle and, for the first time, managed to outwit the Manji clan head and let us see the face behind the mask. You can watch the trailer below.

Along with Kunimitsu and the Vermilion Gates stage, there are new gameplay improvements Tekken 7 Season four will bring to the table:

  • New moves for all existing characters.
  • More streamlined user interface.
  • Tekken Prowess, a new way to calculate your skills through point-scoring. It’s taken from your highest owned rank, the total rank of all characters, play stats, and the number of matches you’ve played.
  • A new title for the highest level ranked players: “Tekken God Omega”.
  • The long-awaited online play enhancements: response improvement and Wi-Fi indicator.

As its name suggests, the Wi-Fi indicator will show you whether your opponents are using a wired or wireless connection. Meanwhile “response improvement” seems to be the implementation of “rollback netcode“. Simply put, with rollback netcode when the game encounters lag, it predicts your moves and then fixes any discrepancies in milliseconds the moment your connection stabilizes, instead of freezing and waiting for your and your opponent’s connection to stabilize.

The Director of Business Development at the EVO fighting game tournament Mark Julio said on Twitter that he was able to playtest and compare between season three and four netcodes. He noticed that there’s a huge difference between the two. Based in San Diego, he played against a Tekken esports player Hoa “Anakin” Luu in Atlanta and Tekken development team members in Japan, and the experience felt “just like offline”, even letting him do precise Ganryu combo strings in the middle of the test.

3 of 4 – I was able to do things like Ganryu d/f+2, microdash 1, u/f+1+2 combos during our test matches. Something that I don’t even attempt online currently.

I even had a match against Japan and it was very playable (shockingly) and enjoyable. Please note again, this is a WIP.

— Mark Julio (マークマン) (@MarkMan23) September 27, 2020