Tekken developer BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment America has announced the Tekken World Tour 2022, marking a return to in-person Tekken events for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic started.
The announcement, made at FGC convention Combo Breaker 2022, also revealed that the tour has expanded to cover 16 regions globally.
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In the Tekken World Tour 2022, players will compete in regional leaderboards across ‘MASTERS’ and ‘DOJO’ events. The top players from each region will advance to the Regional Final and eventually the competition’s Grand Final. BANDAI NAMCO has stated that more details on the Regional Finals will be shared at a later date.
The initial MASTERS and DOJO events will take place from June through October, with the Grand Final scheduled to take place in early 2023.
The first MASTERS event will be held at Community Effort Orlando (CEO) in Florida from June 24th-26th, meanwhile, community-run DOJO competitions begin starting June 24th.
DOJO’s will be a mixture of online and offline events. Meanwhile, MASTERS are classed as ‘large-scale offline events’. As of this writing, there is one MASTER PRIME tournament — EVO 2022 in August.
The Tekken World Tour has not seen in-person events for nearly two years due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The last in-person event — the World Tour 2019 — concluded in December 2019 and featured a $185,000 (~£141,000) prize pool. The prize pool figure for the Tekken World Tour’s 2022 edition has yet to be revealed.
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The news of Tekken 7’s return to LAN — which BANDAI NAMCO called ‘much-anticipated’ — comes as the latest instalment of the franchise celebrates its fifth anniversary.
Esports Insider says: It’s nice to see Tekken finally see in-person events again, especially considering how important physical events are to the Fighting Game community. The Masters and Dojo system this year looks incredibly promising and CEO on June 24th seems like the best way to kick off the tournament.