EGMi Cover Story for Soul Calibur V

EGM now has their June 6th issue of their magazine available to view online which features Soul Calibur 5 on the cover and an interesting interview with producer Hisaharu Tago and director Daishi Odashima.

You can click here to view the issue. You can also buy the current issue at your local news stand. Special thanks to Mr.Nobody for providing the tip.

 

You can always ask Daishi if wabi-sabi was used in SC4 and give him two extreme examples (Rock and Hilde). That might give him some idea why some people might have concerns about this philosophy.

 

If you're really that concerned about the "wabi-sabi" comment, maybe you should send Daishi a tweet and ask if he can clarify. I don't think it'd be out of line.

 

No where does Daishi say he's going to intentionally unbalance SC5. You're all miss quoting him.
"....And Street Fighter IV was really well done-certain moves would cause a lot of damage, and the balancing was quite interesting to someone who's interested specifically in fighting games. That balance seemed to change when they introduced Super Street Fighter IV, though; the game was, of course, more balanced as a whole, but it lost some of its uniqueness, I guess? Personally, I thought it was more interesting before."

There's also a concept in Japanese called wabi-sabi, which means "a perfect balance between too much and too little." So, it's not like you can just make everything over the top and it'll be OK; some elements have to be kind of bland on purpose. [That even goes] for character; Some can be strong, and some we want to be kind of weak, on purpose. That's a perfect balance from the Japanese mentality."

I can clearly see where Daishi is coming from and it's not something as simple as an unbalanced game is ideally better than a balanced one.

From SF4 to SSF4, I personally felt because of the larger roster, and better balance the game lost something. Daishi calls it a lack of uniqueness. And that's something that I would say exists in T6 as well, despite the game being balanced. The characters don't standout at all. The roster is larger but to maintain that balance the characters come off very similar. Even though the animation or fighting disciplines are different the moves perform the same tasks with the same power.

The trick for designing a competitive game is, the smaller the selection the easier to balance while maintaining the uniqueness or distinction of each character. The larger selection, makes it harder to balance without basically cloning everything.

In SC some characters are good punishers, some characters have incredible ringouts, some are faster, and some do massive amounts of damage. And also unlike other fighters the weapon disciplines personify the characters. I feel the balance Daishi is talking about lies within these distinctions. Not overall competitive balance, as in 7:3 match-ups and such.

 

I'm going to be optimistic and think that it IS possible to maintain overall balance while not sacrificing character-specific uniqueness.
Considering the SC engine, you could have your jack-of-all-trades characters with the solid core basics:
1) can step kill
2) good poke damage
3) safe fast launcher
4) decent low
(your basic character, which imo is the most boring but also tends to be the strongest in the soul series)

while some others, would lack some of the above, but could compensate by specializing in:
1) ring outs and/or wall combos
2) long-range keep-away
3) oki
5) CH fishing
6) ability to exploit the effect of the new soul gauge
7) ability to generate new soul gauge/damage enemy soul gauge
8) stance shenanigans
9) strong aGI/evasion
10) increased grab range
11) ..etc
(which imo is usually traits we see on the lower-tier character that makes them stand out)

We don't have the same "problem" with the tekken homogeneous strat AND execution of commands, which inherently makes it tougher to balance initially (hence why hearing about even a slight interest from the dev team about a patch is very exciting) because soul calibur seems to have a lot more variables and therefore will require some hindsight to correctly balance.

What I don't like is how some characters are more defined by weaknesses than their strengths (because the weakness is too glaring, exploitable, and damaging).

Overall, I just hope that the decision process is not "lets make this character weak overall but with ONE strength". It'll be more positive if they took a character with a strong gimmick, then made 1 or 2 core properties slightly weaker to compensate.

Raphael for example, is highly vulnerable to step, but he can't get respect as a character with incredible speed/reach combination (because imo this strength is overshadowed by his weakness).
Maxi has pretty poor frames on his basic moves, but even his loops are not strong enough to compensate and suffers from a similiar fate.

The thing is, if the "gimmick" characters are actually overpowered, that is worse for the game than having them be underpowered. For instance, having a character that can you ring you out from anywhere being the top character, really cheeses people extra hard.

Gimmicks imo are always harder to predict( at the development stage) how strong they would eventually be, release date SC5 may not be acceptably balanced, but just pray for patches to rectify that.

 

As for challenge of using low tier? You can always get that challenge with a sandbag character, or by playing folks much better then you. I don't need to be further handicapped just because Namco decided my favorite character was going to be a gimp. (Can you tell I mained Mina yet?)

Quoted for truth.

 

I don't mind characters having weaknesses, such as Mina's in-close liability, or Raph's step weakness. You just gotta give them real strengths to compensate. Mina's problem was that it was her CF game was nerfed, and it was too easy for many chars to punish her pokes.

 

Nice, i just hope Zassss is in, and the online they make would be like VF5, and dragon ball ect.

 

I can clearly see where Daishi is coming from and it's not something as simple as an unbalanced game is ideally better than a balanced one.

From SF4 to SSF4, I personally felt because of the larger roster, and better balance the game lost something. Daishi calls it a lack of uniqueness. And that's something that I would say exists in T6 as well, despite the game being balanced. The characters don't standout at all. The roster is larger but to maintain that balance the characters come off very similar. Even though the animation or fighting disciplines are different the moves perform the same tasks with the same power.

The trick for designing a competitive game is, the smaller the selection the easier to balance while maintaining the uniqueness or distinction of each character. The larger selection, makes it harder to balance without basically cloning everything.

In SC some characters are good punishers, some characters have incredible ringouts, some are faster, and some do massive amounts of damage. And also unlike other fighters the weapon disciplines personify the characters. I feel the balance Daishi is talking about lies within these distinctions. Not overall competitive balance, as in 7:3 match-ups and such.

Aight... I can feel you on this. With a roster with 40+ characters it's hard to make everyone strong in their own right and have them stand out and shine with that. Greatest example is Marvel vs Capcom 2. Of course... that games is also a great example of why I think balance is important, and tier gods can make the game get tired. That game had three basic teams: Magneto/Sentinel/Storm. Cable/Sentinel/Megaman. Sentinel/Storm/Megaman. And still that games gives another example of how unbalance can make a game so successful it's played for 10 years.

But really, I hope fighters evolve further then Marvel vs Capcom 2. I'd much have a 15 characters roster; each with his or her own specialty tactics, then a 50 strong cast where only 10 characters are actually feasible and the rest fall at the waist side. Those other 40 will never be remembered anyway so what's the point? That's what Super Street Fighter 4 was IMO. The roster was more usable over all in SSFIV yet they still gave you more characters. I honestly thought they made Super to correct the mistakes they made in Vanilla until AE came out. Now I don't really know what to think.

I already resigned my self to the fact SCV is not gonna have the full returning cast. I'm sorry if you have to lose your character. I feel as though I'm losing two right now. But I'm happy if we get a roster of 15 new characters and 5 vets, all balanced as close as possible, all near equal in the number of strengths and weaknesses, if it means the game has a long competitive life span. Sure I'm not the only one that wants to see SCV at Evo every year like it's fisticuffs cousin.

 

If you can't balance a 40 character cast , don't have a 40 character cast.

I'd rather lose Mina and be forced to play say, Amy then have an unbalanced game.

Hell, I'd cosplay as Mina for a month straight in public if it meant it would guarantee SC could have the balance of VF, keep a low to minimal execution barrier, and have diverse characters fun to play.

 

If you can't balance a 40 character cast , don't have a 40 character cast.

This

+

have 20 usable characters is like have more characters than a 40 char cast with 5-6 uberfuckers

And people talking about SF4-SSF4

Try play online, SF4 was all Sagat Ryu Sagat Ryu Ryu Sagat Sagat
Try the same with SSF4 and you see VARIETY. There is Guile but you don't see him get spammed over and over

 

I didn't mean to say SSFIV wasn’t unique… I just said SFIV felt more edgy and sharp. I guess something was lost in translation. - Latest tweet from Daishi Odashima.

 

I don't think it was fear of overpowered characters. I think it's more a function of some design flaws within the Tekken system.

I can see "wabi-sabi" being a good thing as far as aesthetics, but not what it comes to character balance.

As for 5/5 matchups across the board- that should be the goal, though it's unobtainable. A realistic goal is for every character to be legitimately tournament viable, at the end of the balance patch cycle. High level tournament play shouldn't ever be decidable at the character select screen. Since SC is less homogenous then Tekken/VF, you're going to have some matchup imbalance, as long as it's reasonable that's fine also.

And VF, that game has excellent balance (though I heard FS borked it with Akira). Yet, the Japanese love VF. So "wabi-sabi" isn't needed to make a good, popular game. It might have casual appeal, but casuals don't understand balance so it isn't necessary.

 

:D YAAAAA!!! THE MUSIC!! They really pumped me up by putting SE's character select theme while watching these SC5 issued pages!! "Welcome, to the stage of history" XD YAAAAA!!!!

 

i think people are reading wayyyyy to much into that Wasabi thing lol. Im sure the game will be balanced.

 

i think people are reading wayyyyy to much into that Wasabi thing lol. Im sure the game will be balanced.

And you base this theory on ____________________________

(you can write your theory over the line)

 

^
I
I
I

That! LoL

I think he's not worried because some of us been spamming Twitter with balance request and questioning the Street Fighter Comment. Shit, least I did after that read.

 

And you base this theory on ____________________________

(you can write your theory over the line)

I base it on the fact Daishi's english isnt that good and lot gets lost in translation. I'm pretty at this point in the series he knows how important balance is to the game. And im sure he's reminded about 50 times a day by people who have never made video games. All im saying is people should stop worrying about this stuff till theres more videos and info on the game. Makes sense to me.

 

well according to soulcalibur 4 i really think we didn t misread the thing...

Some characters are plainly more powerful than other and there is no way they didn t knew that.....maybe their "balance" is having harder commands but i am not convinced at all...

 

Balance is a risk / reward factor...

Siegfried's 3B is an example... if you do this move you can obtain a nice combo on CH, and maybe an easy RO... on NH you have the chance to do a little damage but also the opponent will be on knockdown, letting you setting up for a mind game... if the move is block you can try to do SCH K to interrupt the opponent's punishment. But if you get punished is not going to be more than a some chip damage. So the reward is more than the risk itself... so 3B worth the risk.

But in real world is not about balance... it's about options!

SF3 3rd Strike its a example of unbalance; but its an old game that people keep playing and playing, even on every major tournament you can see a lot of people playing 3rd strike! Chun Li, Yun and Ken are real god tiers characters but people doesn't complaint and keep playing! Because the game is fun, and part of this fun is learn how to beat those god tier characters, cause there's options available in the game mechanics to do this. These "options" make the game more fun, helping players to keep playing and getting stronger and clever.

Daishi is trying in first place to do a fun game to play; he is currently searching and testing the basics features that make SoulBlade the game that started all this hype and bunch of players around the world... They make Hilde, and she were the most unbalance character ever in a SC game... now they have to knowledge to change all this mess. Now they are taking players opinions in consideration to make a good game.

Until the game is ready, we have to wish fun more than balance... to me balance is not about fairness, its about (Namco)give us the power to balance the game by ourselves.

 

3S is "fun" (I don't think it's fun personally) due to its mechanics, not its poor balance.

Poor balance never makes a game fun, a game is fun is spite of poor balance. The problem is folks who assume that fun games have to be broken- they're the biggest problem with the FGC right now.