Tekken creator Katsuhiro Harada  recently sat down for an interview with Kotaku. In it he says:

Harada is candid, perhaps unintentionally, about Tekken 6’s substandard netcode. “Fighting games aren’t really tailored to online play at the moment because of the lag,” he said. “But as technology evolves and the infrastructure gets better, and you have much less latency, perhaps that kind of participation — whether that be avatars watching or whatever — can be recreated.”

So the technology’s to blame? Well, Mr. Harada, why didn’t you say as much in your Game Pro interview back in April?

In terms of matchmaking, we are focusing on the compatibility of players’ connections and hope to improve online matching in this way. Of course, Tekken 6 will improve on the system from Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection in so many ways.

I’ve been willing to cut Namco some slack and wait for them to fix the online lagfest in Tekken 6..until I read Harada’s statement. He hinted at the fact that the problems with Tekken 6’s online mode is the hardware. Now, I haven’t played that many online fighters so far this gen but the ones I have experianced ( DOA4, Tekken 5:DR, and SC4 ) didn’t have the mess of a netcode that’s in Tekken 6. Tekken 5: DR had lag issues but they weren’t as bad as Tekken 6. As a matter of fact, Tekken 5: DR has a better online experience than Tekken 6. I’ve never suffered from input lag in T5:DR and if there was a laggy person in the room one could simply opt to kick the person out. You can’t do that in the most important part of Tekken 6,the Online Ranking matches.

I’m sorry Mr. Harada, but your lame cop out won’t fly with this Tekken fan. Own up and admit your lazy dev team focused to much time on Scenario Campaign and not enough on the Online aspect of Tekken 6.