Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

New Loli > Alpha Patroklos > Old Mama Setsuka
DayZC4wWkAElhXD.jpg
 
DanteSC3 said:
I wake up and somehow we’ve gotten the subject over to Voldo’s crotch? I miss the days of Amy’s feet. Not that that’s a preferred topic of discussion or anything, just wow. Might I suggest something more palatable, like Rock’s thighs? -settles in for maximum comfort and protection-

I know we all feel a bit differently about the games in the series, and each one does have their ups and downs. While I am grateful we even got SoulCalibur VI, it definitely has felt the crunch harder even in some ways more so than SoulCalibur V did, just in different ways. I think what we’re all really hoping for is that SoulCalibur VII gets the time and budget needed to make it the best game in the series to date, a title that hasn’t even been contested since SoulCalibur III. I’m not saying SoulCalibur III was the best, but it had the ambition and seeming goal that it was trying to be, and none of the others after it have even started to be on the same level.
Click to expand...

SC3 was too good for its time, even if SC2 was still a more fun game to play by miles away. Tho the save data corruption really killed this game to me and my ambition to complete it 100%, those days where patches weren't even a thing yet, right.

It was also very surprising to me back then for a Namco game to have such a hardcore ugly bug, speaking about it. I don't think i've ever met an ugly bug at that level before or after in any Namco game.
 
SSfox said:
SC3 was too good for its time, even if SC2 was still a more fun game to play by miles away. Tho the save data corruption really killed this game to me and my ambition to complete it 100%, those days where patches weren't even a thing yet, right.

It was also very surprising to me back then for a Namco game to have such a hardcore ugly bug, speaking about it. I don't think i've ever met an ugly bug at that level before or after in any Namco game.
Click to expand...
I’m not privy on the details as to why the bug actually occurs, but I’m pretty certain that “try moving or deleting save data on your memory card that was there before the data on the game that you’re testing that has nothing to do with the game that you’re testing” isn’t a part of the debugging and testing process. It’s such a nonsense set of triggers that I don’t really blame them for missing it, though it’s still pretty impressive that somehow, it’s the only PS2 game that managed to have this bug.

Even without that bug, though, the general balance issues and few glitchy mechanics are also big problems, things that could have been patched out too, if patches were a thing. It’s kind of bizarre to look back at a time where they couldn’t just implement patches to fix console games, though that did, for the most part, encourage developers to get it right the first time.
 
It does make the most sense, for solidarity, that each stage would just get day/night cycles instead of needlessly cluttering up the selection screen with copies of the same stage. And give the option to either cycle or pick your preferred time of day.
 
I would rather them just make quick and easy day/night or weather/wall/obstacle variants of stages rather than implementing complex daytime changes.

Simply because we have so few stages that minor changes of existing stages would be appreciated.

I weep for the days when stage variants came with the damn game day one! Remember all those coliseum, Egypt Maze and labyrinth variants in SC2?
 
SSfox said:
I said it many times, the roster choice was literally the biggest back hole of SCV, outside of that the game has done a lot of great things
Click to expand...
I'm a defender of SCV myself--actually, that's kind of a the wrong way to put it, because while I think probably a significant majority believes SCV is the weakest game in the series (relative to when it was released), I think probably an equal number of people recognize that this does not by any means make it a bad game: if you establish a very high standard, not every game is going to hit it.

Which is not a means of apologizing for what the devs / publisher did with V. Tonally and in terms of some core mechanics, the devs tried to push too many changes to the fundamental formula, particularly for one game--often with the sense that the new PS team had lost sight of the unique qualities of this series and tried to borrow too much from the outside, decisions that were compounded by the fact that they were apparently handed a small budget and a short development time, meaning that once these decisions were undertaken, they were committed and that overall content in areas where the game traditionally excelled would be paired down. Then Namco compounded matters further by not giving the team extra time to at least flesh out some extra content.

But all of that granted, it has to be said that this rhetoric that "the series nearly died" as a result of SCV is exaggeration bordering on nonsense. Of course a huge plunge in sales from one game to the next is never a good thing for a series, but Soulcalibur was still a brand name with value. And Project Soul had, for a long time, always been an ad-hoc team put together when Namco was prepared to invest in the franchise again. It's not like when a major title tanks for an independent developer with limited IP. What's more, they shored up their costs there with the actual worst fighter in the series--Soulcalibur: Lost Swords, which just used mostly recycled assets from SCV and attempted to provide a bare bones experience that bilked people out of their money for time saver conveniences like we were playing on our frickin' mobile phones... But I digress.

Point is, the company continued making products under the property, and continued promoting the franchise and teasing further titles. At no point was the actual future of the series in serious threat of going off the map forever, with Namco owning the rights. We can speculate that it reasonably played a role in the long wait for the next game, but it is worth noting that in the nearly 25 years the franchise has been around, every mainline game since the first has taken a bit more time than the one before it, six times in a row. Which of course maps to a larger trend in the industry. On top of that, the company has another 3D fighter, with which Soulcalibur somewhat competes in the market, and that franchise was killing it during the same years Soulcalibur was dormant. All things considered, I am sure SCV by no means helped--we can't visit an alternate timeline with a better SCV, so we'll never know if it added months or years to the delay--but a long wait was inevitable, in any event, I think it is fair to say. Incidentally, people sincerely believing in 2022 as a release date for SCVII are setting themselves up for disappointment.
SSfox said:
great gameplay
Click to expand...
Eh, this one is a mixed bag for me. The speed was appreciated--although I think the complaints about SCIV in this regard are a little exaggerated as well. Most of the movesets were tight, but balance was not great and support patching in this regard did not last as long as it needed to. The numerous and fairly radical changes to the impact system were not to the benefit of the experience, in my opinion, at least not when taken together. The Street Fighter-fication of the inputs in certain instances, including the CEs and BEs especially, was just out of place: those kind of convoluted spins are just not where SC gets its difficulty or the test that separates the good from the great. But on the whole, as a nuts and bolts fighter, this game actually delivers pretty well, which is why people were still playing it competitively right up until SCVI was announced. Few were thrilled with the roster situation, but that didn't stop it from being a viable fighter experience.
SSfox said:
incredible graphics for its time
Click to expand...
Again, I have to go "yes and no" on this one. It was significantly further into the generation than SCIV, so the devs were certainly able to eek a little more performance out of the platforms, but the art deign and subtle tweeks to the visual formula made it feel like a step backwards to me. It's certainly one area where I think we can say it fell behind SCIV, which had hit a pretty nice style of visual fidelity that balanced realism in the models and textures against the more solid colour "painted out" look of the the previous two games. SCIV looked like SCI if it had been made on modern hardware, in other words. For SCV, the team decided on something that was neither of those things exactly, but certainly closer to the SCII and SCIII look: it again de-emphasized realism for a more "artistic" look, but this time around it was more heavily anime influenced than ever--or to be more accurate, it had a frankly Street Fighter-influenced aesthetic. Blacks were blacker, particularly at edges, and the colouring was more saturated than ever, but not as well lit and with less detailed an realistic texturing.

The sound design was also a weird departure for me: everything sounded so flat and failed to give any sense of impact as feedback for what was happening on the screen.
SSfox said:
the character design were overall super good (even tho some of the 3D model were poorly translated compare to their artwork)
Click to expand...
Minus a leather-trousered douche here or there, sure. ;)
SSfox said:
the first time a 3D fighting game has a legit netcode.
Click to expand...
Nah, there were definitely others before that. Actually, I don't think we can say with any certainty that SCIV's netcode was bad. It came so early in the transition to online play for fighters, it wouldn't be weird to determine empirically that it was coded poorly, but I still played the occasional game on there up until a couple of years ago, and it was not awful. Better than the average SCVI game I play today by a mile, in fact. I think the real problem was the fact that many of the people you would play against in ranked were people on shit connections, at a time when the internet backbone for even some countries at the head of the telecommunications revolution was not great. But yeah, SCV was better in this regard, much better. Though both games (and VI) employ a ranking system that makes the connection issues you do run into much more annoying when they happen, needlessly.
DanteSC3 said:
And I know the kid clones of their parents get a lot of hate, but I truly believe that if they had full stories and background information then they'd have been less hated. Not not hated, just far less hated.
Click to expand...
I think you are stamping your own priorities onto the situation in a way that probably does not reflect a factor that is likely to have significantly improved those characters in the eyes of the average hardcore player. And I think, in fact, that we have evidence to the contrary: no character got more detail and context in that game than Patroklos. And who is arguably the most maligned/mocked character in that game (and possibly the franchise as a whole)? Patty-cakes.

It's true that collectively the choice to advance the clock like that and replace so much of the legacy cast was poorly received in general, but to the significant extent that certain newbies were received better than others, it was due to a complicated interplay between whether they were "replacement" characters (not a great start, but I think we can all agree some were welcomed more than others--Natsu was a more reasonable replacement than Xiba, by a mile, for example), how well done their design was, and a bevy of other factors. But I don't think most of us would have given a fig if Xiba had been given more background. I wanted to see less of his stupid knock-off Jackie Chan shtick in the moves, not more lore explaining why he was such an obnoxious little knit.
AMillionHP said:
Its not that SC5 was so great, its the next game after 4 which is why a lot of us have good memories of it. The bar for improvement wasnt set very high. No, i didnt care much for a lot of the replacements they put in that game but then i was never a huge fan of a lot of the missing/replaced characters anyway.
Click to expand...
I have to disagree: I think there are very few broad categories of SCV where you could point to it and say that it was objectively better than SCIV. In terms of its visual design, fundamental gameplay mechanics, and especially overall size of the content, IV outstripes V.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back