Yesterday Tekken 7 Director and Producer Katsuhiro Harada asked the fans for feedback on an Arab-looking assassin-like character concept that might be used for the game, and the community definitely scrambled to comment and discuss.

Harada-san responded extensively on Twitter, expressing his surprise for the amount of feedback received and talking about the experience, which definitely isn't very common for a game developer.

I'm surprised at the number of feedback and reactions (on the Facebook, Twitter, Internet media) about Arab character.

Whew..The open discussion is not easy way.

But It is glad Because We can get many people's opinion & We can advance game development safely.

We got many positive feedback from Arab Tekken fan community.

But we have to be careful with that. We need to read their opinion for several more days.

He also mentioned that the character has short hair because while visiting Dubai and Saudi Arabia he was told that long hair is not suitable for an Arab fighter. The typical Arab long coat is also missing because the bottom would be too demanding hardware resources-wise.

Harada-san then answered about the similarities with Altair from Assassin's Creed:

Um ok. But that is not hood and modern design right. Anyway I'll change something.

It's actually quite refreshing to see a prominent developer like Harada-san actually asking members of a culture for feedback on a character belonging to it. Unfortunately it's also quite rare, and often we get to see characters that are supposed to come from a specific part of the world depicted with misguided stereotypes.

Hopefully this kind of experiment will bear fruit and the example will be followed by others.