Tekken Tag Tournament 2 opens World Tekken Federation, an online community portal

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is connecting its huge roster of fighters with a free, multi-purpose community portal, and I got to test it out on the road. Namco opted to demonstrate the service, called World Tekken Federation, in a tricked-out bus in San Francisco.

After a few matches online with a PS3 hooked up to a Mifi adapter – which supported stable net code, the backbone of which was taken from SoulCalibur V – I saw my profile in-game. Everything was in order: I had a rank, a win and loss percentage, a list of my favorite fighters and my ranking in the grand scheme of things.
Namco VP of Marketing Carlson Choi gave me the skinny on the new portal. It's been built entirely in HTML 5, so it works fine on iOS, mobile devices, and in traditional web browsers. It's also noticeably responsive – seconds after a match was finished in the game, my data was available online.

Namco Bandai looked to a lot of the other heavy hitters in the supplementary information space, like Bungie's efforts with the Halo series, and Activision's Call of Duty Elite. Since Choi himself spent years at Activision overseeing the interactive marketing division, it makes sense to see those principals are at play here in World Tekken Federation.

The usual stuff like wins, losses and leaderboard info is readily available, but it's the more specific play data that excited me. World Tekken Federation stats can tell you many times you perform throws in a match – apparently I never do – or, as another example, how much of your total damage dealt comes from juggle combos. It's useful data one can use to become a better, more diverse fighter. I throw more often now!

On the community side, players can form teams and build up their level (and take on other teams), but much of it is cosmetic. You can set a slogan and create a custom icon, and unlock more of both as you progress in-game.

It's an odd decision not to enable replay videos online, and for now they're only visible in the game. Choi told me this decision was because the two compliment each other, and Namco Bandai didn't want to put all the info eggs into one specific basket, forcing players to either boot up their console or go to a website whenever they wanted to check on their progress or play history. "We'll be making improvements as we go along," Choi added.

In its Tekken Tag Tournament 2 launch state, World Tekken Federation is an impressive supplementary product for both the hardcore and new players – perhaps even more so for the latter, who can access data to accompany their learning. And, of course, being free to all Tekken Tag Tournament 2 players doesn't hurt either.