Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

iliass said:
Just played cassandra’s story and found out she knew all along about the fragment in sophie’s heart View attachment 67548
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Ahhh, but that's an interesting metaphysical question, isn't it? Is the Cassie we followed in the earlier games the same one who we are observing now, and she always knew about her sister's ultimate fate? Or is this a new Cassie from the one we observed before (who never had such knowledge) and thus who has in effect "replaced" the old one?
 
DanteSC3 said:
Until they specify otherwise, I'm going with the closed time loop model theory, personally. :sc5vio1:
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Ahhh, but you're missing an important ontological point here: even if the SCVII Cassie deviates from the original timeline hereafter, we still don't know for sure that SCII Cassie didn't possess the same knowledge and fail to act on it--or maybe she did act on it "off screen" or in an incredibly subtle and cautious manner, careful not to give anything away. As an empirical matter, what she does in further games does not concretely establish what she knew in previous games. Short of a "word of god" explanation from the writers or a remake of the older games, we can't really know--and with regard to both of those options, there's a philosophical argument to be made neither changes the in-universe continuity of the fictional events of those earlier games. All of which begs the further question of whether my original inquiry (which I asked itself as a curiosity) is actually a question without a meaningful distinction; if we can't know original Cassandra's mental state, is there an actual difference?

In any event, I'll say this: if your presumption is true, and Cassandra is unwittingly repeating the same efforts based on the same warning, then that makes what is an already pretty bleak story for the Alexandria's even more tragic.


DanteSC3 said:
Also you linked a SaveFrom link instead of a link to the video. :sc5zwe1:
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Are you sure about that? It's working fine for me, and the content for a plain youtube link looks normal one to me.
 
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Rusted Blade said:
Are you sure about that? It's working fine for me, and the content for a plain youtube link looks normal one to me.
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This was actually the extension in my browser at work misbehaving, hence I deleted it from my post above. My bad.

As for the rest of the Cassandra argument, I agree that we can’t really know, but it falls in line with the rest of the continuity “changes” in SoulCalibur VI that don’t break the original continuity, thus it could be construed that she did know, and failed at her task. Which is why I remain steadfast in my beliefs that there is no “new timeline” and the entire thing is a misnomer and misunderstanding of the situation we are in. That will be made more concrete by SoulCalibur VII, assuming we continue with this established narrative moving forward, which I would find it a mistake not to, as it does nothing but enrich our existing story, allowing folks who aren’t as obsessively invested such as myself to appreciate the story intricacies, such as they are, such as they’ve always been, but obscured by a lot of nonsense.
 
Rusted Blade said:
Well, more power to you if that actually sounds like an enjoyable/productive use of your time, but I don't think I'm out on a limb when I say the vast, vast, vast majority of even the hardcore players who enjoy exploring the nuts and bolts at that level of detail would still rather have the absolute figures provided. And its more than just the incredibly laborious process of rinse and repeat experimentation necessary to flush out those details: there's also the fact that a fan-based investigation often arrives at figures that are more than a little imprecise/inaccurate on average, and even when they are correctly recorded, they can end up being codified in a community corpus (such as that which we have here at 8WR for various games) only to have those figures become completely inaccurate as different metas are released, often without people noticing or bothering to correct the out-of-date information.

No, I'm sorry but that is just not a function the community should be providing--not when the company could supply those numbers with several times the accuracy and a hundred times the ease. And there's another level at which the "explanation" for why they don't provide that data reeks of bullshit: if they did provide that data, there would be absolutely nothing stopping those players from ignoring it and continuing to test the frames themselves, if that really was a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

But above all, its really the disingeniousness of that official statement that gets to me. I don't buy for a single damn second that Namco's decision not to compile and present this data to its fanbase is even remotely related to an honest belief that the average fan (or even the average hardcore fan) wants to spend their time doing this. There's just no way they actually believe that: it's just a convenient excuse for the fact that they don't want to budget the resources necessary to build that database--even if it would be infinitely easier for their in-house team who built the moves and has ready access to those figures, and would be a tiny expenditure for them, relative to other components of the game. Namco has for years been stripping bonus features from their fighters, Soulcalibur in particular; the last thing they want to do is add one, especially one which would be mostly appreciated only by the hardcore fan and will be ignored by the average consumer.

And honestly, that's a totally fair perspective: they really struggle to sell these games at a volume that justifies their budgets these days, given their increased development costs, and every little bit of man-hours that goes into something like this has to pulled out of some other area of development which might itself have been stripped back in recent games. The new continuing support/multiple season pass sales model should improve that catch-22 situation for them this coming generation, but for this game, already made on a budget, I can see why a frame data database (whether integrated into the in-game movelist or presented separately online) was never going to happen--and again, that's fair enough. But that doesn't stop it from being absolute horseshit nonsense when they try to explain it as "Oh fans want to figure that out themselves and would be upset if we provided it". It's just a very transparent attempt to spin their decision not to provide a feature that is probably going to increasingly be seen as a required element for truly competitive fighters, especially now that industry leaders like Capcom are making a habit of it.
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Probably a "compromise" of sorts if they don't want to keep compiling lists and such multiple times would be to include an in-game frame counter, like DOA5/6 has.
 
DanteSC3 said:
As for the rest of the Cassandra argument, I agree that we can’t really know, but it falls in line with the rest of the continuity “changes” in SoulCalibur VI that don’t break the original continuity, thus it could be construed that she did know, and failed at her task.
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Well it depends on what you mean by "it could be construed that"; if by that you mean neither possibility is ruled out by what we observe in the earlier games, then yes that is so. But it would be psychological mis-attribution/consequence of cognitive bias to suggest that just because of superficial similarity that things probably happened the same way the first time around. Not only is there no way to know for sure, but any similarity between the two timelines does not really (in any empirical sense) tip the liklihood towards one option or the other.

DanteSC3 said:
Which is why I remain steadfast in my beliefs that there is no “new timeline” and the entire thing is a misnomer and misunderstanding of the situation we are in. That will be made more concrete by SoulCalibur VII, assuming we continue with this established narrative moving forward, which I would find it a mistake not to, as it does nothing but enrich our existing story, allowing folks who aren’t as obsessively invested such as myself to appreciate the story intricacies, such as they are, such as they’ve always been, but obscured by a lot of nonsense.
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Well, this is actually an entirely different question--because again, what happens in the next game doesn't really tell us anything more about what happened in the previous games/cycle, one way or another--but if we are talking strictly about what happens in SCVII, then I will say that I think you are setting yourself up for disappointment if this is what you want to happen. It is extremely, extremely rare for fictional accounts of time travel in popular media to adopt a "you cannot change the past" narrative, and based on the pretty goofy/pulpy quality of the franchise's story to date, I don't think Project Soul has any Chris Markers waiting in the wings ready take the storytelling to a more complicated place.

Vastly, vastly more likely is that the PS team, by adding a time travel element to the story, is signaling their intention that this reboot will, in further entries, depart from the original telling (and has probably done so already, as of Cassandra's Soul Chronicle) in increasingly obvious ways. There are a number of reasons why this kind of forking timeline narrative is more common: the biggest reason is simply that it is the common trope that most people are familiar with and the easiest to parse, and most writers who engage the topic just ape some version of Back to the Future's plot.

And for those few writers who really do conceptualize the causality loop issues in a more realistic fashion (and again, there's nothing in the history of this series to suggest there's anyone with that nuanced an approach to such issues on its writing team) many will still choose to avoid a circular continuity because it doesn't match the story tropes mass audiences expect, and also because stories with deterministic/fatalistic plot points step on the toes of most people's hardcore devotion to the idea of their own free will. This is a little silly in that most physicists who allow for the possibility of time travel (and it's worth noting that neither classical nor contemporary physics rules it out, as a theoretical matter) believe that in theory it could only exist with closed-loop causality, but there you have it: people are always more ready to embrace their biases before rationalism.

So the question becomes less "what makes more sense?" and more "what are these particular writers likely to do in these particular circumstances?" And I think the writing is very much on the wall in this respect. I'm so convinced that you are setting yourself up for disappointment here that if we were betting on this, I'd give you 100:1 odds or better.

werewolfgold said:
Probably a "compromise" of sorts if they don't want to keep compiling lists and such multiple times would be to include an in-game frame counter, like DOA5/6 has.
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Honestly, that would be fine by me: a step in the right direction in any event.
 
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A nightmare DLC scenario is that they just go down the list of the popularity poll and pick
Yun-Seong
Setsuka
Viola

None of the above characters are bad, but it would be legitimately awful to get Viola so soon after Amy..
 
So, I was messing around with CaS, and this happened when I put tracksuit pants onto my character. It only happens on male original characters, but not females for some reason. Weird. Anyone else had this?
those_eyes_tho (2).jpg
 
Dissidia said:
@LisaK it's not helping your case that they used a guy who did the generic CAS narcissist voice to do Hwang!

I shall never accept Hwang being in unless hell freezes over!
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In Dante’s Inferno there’s Cocytus (one of the rivers from the Greek underworld that the author stole for whatever reason) which is represented as being a frozen lake in one of the circles of hell.

Does that count?
 
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