Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

The same method does not work for accessing other story-only stages (the game ends up loading a default stage instead), which makes me think Project Soul either intended to make this available in other modes, or it's something they'll be adding to other modes in a future patch.

Is the faraway meadow name for the stage part of your mod or is that what the game already named the stage in the coding or whatever?

Lmao, at the end of chapter 10 they left in the script instructions.

Pic?
 
Turns out it was pretty easy to make a mod making it possible to access the new stage in Hilde's Soul Chronicle in every mode:

The same method does not work for accessing other story-only stages (the game ends up loading a default stage instead), which makes me think Project Soul either intended to make this available in other modes, or it's something they'll be adding to other modes in a future patch.
You can use your mod manager's trainer to force the music to be something else if you really want to have another stage music than Under a Pledge play. But that it works in other modes, I'd almost say it's a safe bet that it could be one of the remaining four stages, to be released at a later date once they've finished ironing out the details. Like the animals are completely untextured. Trying it myself, I started a fight and some of the elk? caribou? not sure ran by, and they're just solid grey, even close up, so it's not a distance rendering thing. The stage just really is incomplete. Though I really do like the effect they've used for the infinite a lot better than what was in SoulCalibur V. If you looked at the background in that, it was circular and spinning and could easily make someone dizzy if they focused on it long enough. This way is a lot more clean and smoothly animated.

Also in regards to your other video where you showed off playing with the AI in Hilde's story, I'm not sure who mentioned Wilhelm appearing in SoulCalibur IV, but that's not true. Not even as a random Tower of Lost Souls character (like they reused a handful of names from SoulCalibur III's Chronicle of the Sword for example, but the characters aren't using similar looks or styles) or anything like that. They must have just misremembered it. That being said, though, Hilde's other knights than Gerhilde that were mentioned in her Soul Chronicle but not seen, Ortlinde and Rossweisse, they were non-playable but did appear as enemies in some characters' story modes in SoulCalibur IV, though they were serving Astaroth, along with a third, Helmwige. Other knights seen alongside Hilde in SoulCalibur IV other than Gerhilde were Waltraute, Schwertleite, Grimgerde, and Siegrune.

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Yeah I honestly hope the roses die by the next game. I love Amy and she has the moves I love, but it gets to a point where going for roses just isn't really fun. Its an interesting play but I hate idea of not really having complete access to a character and needing to constantly fulfill conditions each match just to get started. Becomes more annoying than fun eventually. Its not a great way to differentiate her either I think.
Obviously they wouldn't take them away in this game but if they were going to do that I gladly would have been open to whatever changes etc that must come.
I've met a few people who don't play Amy (anymore) and whenever I spoke to them their reason was the roses up to now.
Regardless I'm sticking with her until I can ride off the Hwang/Viola/ZWEI/Rock train.


Its a new layer and an interesting one to be fair. I honestly guess it varies by person. I like it from a style perspective almost completely, but I would have liked it more if like some of the rapier intros etc from SC3 were remade and with her holding a rose or something rather than it being subjected to literally being gameplay.
If anything, it probably would have been better to slightly tone down the moves from SC4 instead of locking them behind the rose mechanic. I know some Amy players would find that statement rather controversial but it’s just how I feel (especially after how she was from SC4).
I can't play as Hilde vs Voldo. I just cant deal with a close up of Voldo's crotch whenever I throw out a CE.
Try being Voldo (or any male character) on the receiving end of the CE. Then you’d know what true suffering is to have your codpiece pierced and have your baby makers ripped off. I probably don’t wanna go there for the female characters though...
 
Is the faraway meadow name for the stage part of your mod or is that what the game already named the stage in the coding or whatever?
That's the official name of the stage. The development team has definitely done some work to make this stage selectable. Though some stuff is super unfinished. It always plays Under a Pledge and it doesn't have unique artwork on the stage select screen.

You can use your mod manager's trainer to force the music to be something else if you really want to have another stage music than Under a Pledge play. But that it works in other modes, I'd almost say it's a safe bet that it could be one of the remaining four stages, to be released at a later date once they've finished ironing out the details. Like the animals are completely untextured. Trying it myself, I started a fight and some of the elk? caribou? not sure ran by, and they're just solid grey, even close up, so it's not a distance rendering thing. The stage just really is incomplete. Though I really do like the effect they've used for the infinite a lot better than what was in SoulCalibur V. If you looked at the background in that, it was circular and spinning and could easily make someone dizzy if they focused on it long enough. This way is a lot more clean and smoothly animated.

Also in regards to your other video where you showed off playing with the AI in Hilde's story, I'm not sure who mentioned Wilhelm appearing in SoulCalibur IV, but that's not true. Not even as a random Tower of Lost Souls character (like they reused a handful of names from SoulCalibur III's Chronicle of the Sword for example, but the characters aren't using similar looks or styles) or anything like that. They must have just misremembered it. That being said, though, Hilde's other knights than Gerhilde that were mentioned in her Soul Chronicle but not seen, Ortlinde and Rossweisse, they were non-playable but did appear as enemies in some characters' story modes in SoulCalibur IV, though they were serving Astaroth, along with a third, Helmwige. Other knights seen alongside Hilde in SoulCalibur IV other than Gerhilde were Waltraute, Schwertleite, Grimgerde, and Siegrune.


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I eventually concluded Wilhelm is not part of SC4, as I could not find anything about him online either. But at least it was fun to see SC4 again and play through Hilde's "story" there.

By the way, the files for the Faraway Meadow stage include files for deer, bears, foxes, eagles and ducks. I've only ever seen foxes and deer, so it definitely looks like it's unfinished.

And yeah, the way they do infinite stages in SC6 looks smoother and makes more physical sense, but I think it would also make it harder for them to make it look good. The trick they used in SC5 and Tekken games means they can add in a lot of detail close to the players as your distance to those objects never changes. But in SC6 it looks like you're actually moving through a large space (I'm curious if they simply made a GIGANTIC stage with an actual invisible wall somewhere, or if they made it seamlessly loop).
 
Try being Voldo (or any male character) on the receiving end of the CE. Then you’d know what true suffering is to have your codpiece pierced and have your baby makers ripped off. I probably don’t wanna go there for the female characters though...
On that topic, if you were forced to, which CE would you want to be hit by? I think I'll take Yoshi.
 
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That's the official name of the stage. The development team has definitely done some work to make this stage selectable. Though some stuff is super unfinished. It always plays Under a Pledge and it doesn't have unique artwork on the stage select screen.


I eventually concluded Wilhelm is not part of SC4, as I could not find anything about him online either. But at least it was fun to see SC4 again and play through Hilde's "story" there.

By the way, the files for the Faraway Meadow stage include files for deer, bears, foxes, eagles and ducks. I've only ever seen foxes and deer, so it definitely looks like it's unfinished.

And yeah, the way they do infinite stages in SC6 looks smoother and makes more physical sense, but I think it would also make it harder for them to make it look good. The trick they used in SC5 and Tekken games means they can add in a lot of detail close to the players as your distance to those objects never changes. But in SC6 it looks like you're actually moving through a large space (I'm curious if they simply made a GIGANTIC stage with an actual invisible wall somewhere, or if they made it seamlessly loop).

shit....looks like you might have discovered one of the 4 slots in the stage select!
 
I love Amy and she has the moves I love, but it gets to a point where going for roses just isn't really fun. Its an interesting play but I hate idea of not really having complete access to a character and needing to constantly fulfill conditions each match just to get started. Becomes more annoying than fun eventually. Its not a great way to differentiate her either I think.

In short it's no fun grinding to open your full moveset. I've mentioned many times in other places that grinding like this in a fighting game is cancer and should never appear in a Calibur game again. If Project Soul want to keep the roses they can just be a small damaging projectile that's also a indication of switching stances. Her white rose can be the calm and collective stance while her red rose can be the dance stance that she had in SC4.
 
Even then the Roses feel very pretty tacked on. It’s like it’s just a lame excuse to differentiate her more from Raphael. Hell, Amy users themselves fucking hate the roses too.

Oh I thought it was a horrible idea, “character layer” or not. I especially hate fighting Xianghua, as she’s basically Amy but can do her important stuff from the BEGINNING of the fight. Don’t get me started on fighting Ivy.
 
So how is it Online Rank, are you finding players easily?

It’s very iffy. I personally think they should have reset everything if the amount of points gained and lost was going to increase this dramatically. I’d been grinding my Amy’s D1 bar up all month, just to unluckily run into another D1 on S2 release day and lose three times, suddenly kissing demotion. 😑
 
It's time for... animal science!

I was playing with a few friends on the meadow stage, and people were of different opinions if the animals were textured or not. It's something @DanteSC3 pointed out as well.

Looking at that, it's pretty clear they are untextured. The weird thing is, though, they do have textures in the game files. Diffuse textures, normal textures, and the whole bunch.

Textures are used for the wolves in the wolf stage: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme...ur_VI_Screenshot_2019.11.28_-_02.38.12.74.png

I also noticed there is an absurd amount of animations for each animal (eating, sleeping, running, walking, dying, etc). And the naming of the files is unlike a lot of other assets (I mainly noticed there was a distinct lack of Engrish). That made me curious if these were assets bought from the Unreal store, and after a quick google search I think I found the exact assets they bought: https://forums.unrealengine.com/unr...tofactor-inc-s-animals-packs-work-in-progress (the previews look a bit different as the previews use much fancier rendering for fur, but these meshes look the same)

And that's it for animal science. Very exciting, yes. I mainly find it funny I was actually able to find the store asset they got.
 
In short it's no fun grinding to open your full moveset. I've mentioned many times in other places that grinding like this in a fighting game is cancer and should never appear in a Calibur game again. If Project Soul want to keep the roses they can just be a small damaging projectile that's also a indication of switching stances. Her white rose can be the calm and collective stance while her red rose can be the dance stance that she had in SC4.
In other words; Mortal Kombat 11, keep your grinding bullshit out of our Calibur.
 
On that topic, if you were forced to, which CE would you want to be hit by? I think I'll take Yoshi.
Nightmare. Because of that damn horse he has lol, even if it’s situational as all hell.

Oh I thought it was a horrible idea, “character layer” or not. I especially hate fighting Xianghua, as she’s basically Amy but can do her important stuff from the BEGINNING of the fight. Don’t get me started on fighting Ivy.
Sometimes her roses just don’t flat out connect reliably.
 
You can use your mod manager's trainer to force the music to be something else if you really want to have another stage music than Under a Pledge play. But that it works in other modes, I'd almost say it's a safe bet that it could be one of the remaining four stages, to be released at a later date once they've finished ironing out the details. Like the animals are completely untextured. Trying it myself, I started a fight and some of the elk? caribou? not sure ran by, and they're just solid grey, even close up, so it's not a distance rendering thing. The stage just really is incomplete. Though I really do like the effect they've used for the infinite a lot better than what was in SoulCalibur V. If you looked at the background in that, it was circular and spinning and could easily make someone dizzy if they focused on it long enough. This way is a lot more clean and smoothly animated.

Also in regards to your other video where you showed off playing with the AI in Hilde's story, I'm not sure who mentioned Wilhelm appearing in SoulCalibur IV, but that's not true. Not even as a random Tower of Lost Souls character (like they reused a handful of names from SoulCalibur III's Chronicle of the Sword for example, but the characters aren't using similar looks or styles) or anything like that. They must have just misremembered it. That being said, though, Hilde's other knights than Gerhilde that were mentioned in her Soul Chronicle but not seen, Ortlinde and Rossweisse, they were non-playable but did appear as enemies in some characters' story modes in SoulCalibur IV, though they were serving Astaroth, along with a third, Helmwige. Other knights seen alongside Hilde in SoulCalibur IV other than Gerhilde were Waltraute, Schwertleite, Grimgerde, and Siegrune.


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That doesn't show up in French ^^
 
But in SC6 it looks like you're actually moving through a large space (I'm curious if they simply made a GIGANTIC stage with an actual invisible wall somewhere, or if they made it seamlessly loop).
I was wondering the same thing; its pretty technically solid work if the latter...and I'm not sure if that's the first phrase I associate with this game, much as I like it. Of course it could be a combination: a larg-ish area (which would further explain the lack of assets that would draw a lot of active memory for rendering) but eventually a margin that repositions the combatants, effects and any other models or particles relative to the topography and backgrounds (or in a perhaps more accurate technical sense, resets the stage elements relative to active objects), in exactly the same way as is always done with endless stages but on a larger scale, helping to make the visual effect a little more seamless in several respects.
 
That doesn't show up in French ^^
I guess the French subtitlers have a better editor than English.


I was wondering the same thing; its pretty technically solid work if the latter...and I'm not sure if that's the first phrase I associate with this game, much as I like it. Of course it could be a combination: a larg-ish area (which would further explain the lack of assets that would draw a lot of active memory for rendering) but eventually a margin that repositions the combatants, effects and any other models or particles relative to the topography and backgrounds (or in a perhaps more accurate technical sense, resets the stage elements relative to active objects), in exactly the same way as is always done with endless stages but on a larger scale, helping to make the visual effect a little more seamless in several respects.
I know it’s a little different a scenario, but considering the amount of seamless teleporting that goes on during Critical Edge attacks, my personal bet is that they are sneakily using some sort of teleportation method to recalibrate the stage periodically. Particularly when all the animals have fled, so they don’t just disappear randomly when it happens. But @FluffyQuack’s animal science may indicate we have more updates coming with regards to those animals, maybe even possible to see the rest of the animals in that Unreal pack. I’m personally glad to see background animations again, which helped stages from SoulCalibur IV/V feel more alive.
 
I guess the French subtitlers have a better editor than English.
I just find it to be a source of great amusement that their direction processes have such detailed guidance on the exact type of "Rgaharaarrghhh!" the actor is meant to be emoting. It shows such a bizarre combination of effort to get the details right combined with a complete lack of awareness that if your story has fifty thousand occasions when some person or another has to gargle out some variation of "Ragllebragabrahgrrrrr!"...you have a bad script.

I know it’s a little different a scenario, but considering the amount of seamless teleporting that goes on during Critical Edge attacks, my personal bet is that they are sneakily using some sort of teleportation method to recalibrate the stage periodically. Particularly when all the animals have fled, so they don’t just disappear randomly when it happens. But @FluffyQuack’s animal science may indicate we have more updates coming with regards to those animals, maybe even possible to see the rest of the animals in that Unreal pack. I’m personally glad to see background animations again, which helped stages from SoulCalibur IV/V feel more alive.
Well that's in essence pretty much what always happens with an infinite stage--although again, it's probably better to say that the background elements are being re-oriented relative to the models, as they are the element that are kept relatively more consistently in center frame, though you can really describe it in either fashion and to some extent you're technically correct. However, I wouldn't actually say the CE animations are particularly seamless: they are full of holes if you are looking for them--the design just cleverly uses quick cuts, rapidly changing angles and distracting effects to keep the observer's visual cognition focused elsewhere. It's basically a form of inattention blindness which game developers (like filmmakers) have become increasingly familiar with exploiting over the years.

I would venture to guess that base game/Season 1 was not expected to do so well, and thus the people doing the coding and data management weren't too serious about hiding stuff.
A stupid and delusional notion, as it seems they greatly underestimated the passion and fervor of the soulcalibur fanbase! They clearly weren't expecting fans to back the game the way they have.
Thus season 2 being a proper effort and taking care of leaks shows they are taking this seriously now!
Sorry homes, but that doesn't add up one bit. The only reason those names would be in there for practical purposes is if they had been at some level of readiness to be included in some build of the game at some point in development. That was frankly a pretty difficult thing to credit as realistic even at the time, but after the last year of continued development and how long it has taken them to release the additional characters, I think we can say with pretty much absolute certainty now that there is essentially zero chance that six extra characters (after Amy and Cassandra!!) were nearing anyhting remotely looking like complete enough in December of last year that it made any kind of sense to have a coder take the time to make those entries. It just doesn't add up.

I've seen a hundred different theories trying to bootstrap an explanation for why those names were added and what they mean about what's coming next, but only one actually even begins to match the evidence available: they were thrown in long before they had an practical purpose, because the devs knew that eager-beavers like our Sectus were plumbing the code and had found Amy and Cassie's references (and they HAD to have known about that: discussion was all over the buzz surrounding the game at the time, with numerous articles and much chatter on Twitter feeds relating to the game, some of the comments directed right at the devs), and they saw a great opportunity to stir up debate among the fanbase and thereby generate engagement with the brand and create viral marketing via that debate. In fact, the more you look at the situation, the more obvious it is that not only did they do exactly this, but they did it in a pretty clumsy and obvious way that leaves very little doubt as to the legitimacy of those values as something that were just accidentally left in there.

Now is it possible that those names were added by some dev (high or low in the hierarchy) just for kicks, as opposed to it being a a concerted effort to generate attention? Yeah, I suppose. A conscious decision by some senior dev for promotional purposes seems more likely than a rogue programmer, but the important point is that it certainly was not out of any practical coding application. I was surprised at the time by how few people saw through the charade on this one, but even more so that it still has not become more broadly recognized even at this point. Anyway, I don't think its going to be the last time Namco dips its toes in this kind of catfish promotion: from my own casual observation of Namco over recent years, I've come to appreciate that some people in their marketing arm are very big on viral marketing and I think the Project Soul devs in particular are more than happy to play along with that playbook, cheeky boys and girls that they are. Our much-loved cherub Okubo I think is actually particularly amused by dangling little hints couched in ambiguous language or imagery, which doesn't always bear out to be quite the thing the fans' minds first leap to. I think the "smirks are on the faces" of Project Soul staff more so than the fans!
 
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