Wow...... forget season 3, Soul Calibur 7 might not even become a thing.
Nah, I doubt this will have more than slight effect on the timeline for future games in the franchise, let alone present an existential threat to it's survival. SCVII was
always going to be coming along quite a bit longer than the rosey-eyed optimists here wanted to predict, but at the same time, this is an established property which, despite some missteps and poor stewardship in the last decade, has continuing brand appeal. SCVII will come along in due course--I feel fairly certain of that.
Harada has won.
Soul Calibur has been silenced.
This whole idea that Harada and Okubo are somehow foes fighting for the fate of Tekken and SC respectively is a silly fiction created by salty stans who add a whole new level of speculation (short on any realistic insight into the industry and long on fabricated melodrama) every time there is the slightest setback for one franchise or the other. In reality, these two men are colleagues, and further are employees fairly well down the hierarchy of the overall Namco decision making chain. As developers, they are two senior figures on their respective teams, but they both get their marching order from higher up: the idea that they are in position to have some sort of machiavellian struggle for team resources is silly; the certain reality is that they have to coordinate very closely on these products and there's never been the least hint in interviews or industry media to suggest that they have anything but a perfectly friendly working relationship.
Now Project Soul can be pulled into Tekken 8.
Uhhh, that's how it's always worked? Unlike some other internal development teams at Namco, Project Soul is not a standing studio: it's an adhoc team that gets reconstituted from creative and technical staff that are borrowed from other teams (primarily the Tekken development staff) whenever Namco decides to greenlight a new title in the series. That's why Soul Calibur games are always released a few years after the previous Tekken game: the more robust Tekken team is used to build competencies with the newest hardware first, and then when that entry goes to a downbeat, so to speak, some of their skilled labor assets are transferred to PS who use that experience to create the SC game on a typically tighter budget and timeline. That pattern has gotten a little more complicated with the new continuing support model, as we've seen with the timeline for content overlapping more than ever now, but the idea of PS being temporarily defunct is by now means anything remotely new.
As off now the counter of SoulCalibur 7 releasing has gone from "in the next 2 or 3 years" to "God only knows"
Honestly, for a large number of internal constraints (not the least of which is that we don't even know where Tekken 8 is in its development right now) and industry trends, I never expected SCVII would come before 2024-25, at the earliest. My hope and expectation is that this won't have a huge impact on that timeline. This is a massive corporation with some of the most robust human resources capacities of any company in all of the gaming industry: they have succession options for their teams and there's no reason to believe that the support for SCVI wasn't already cancelled before Okubo made the decision to move on. They'll have plenty of time to sort out who will take the reigns for the next title, and as artard notes, there are even some obvious candidates to step into lead development roles, regardless of official titles, which seem to fluctuate even more wildly at Namco than they do in this industry in general--which is to say, quite a lot!
That's even scarier, imagine they could just put SC on the shelve just to gather dust for years to come cus they dont have the NEED to do anything. like i said God only knows ... im sadder than before...
But that is a more realistic concern, honestly. Namco does have a massive portfolio of IP. At any given time, they can only fund titles and content for a small portion of these franchises, while the entire game development/publishing for console/PC arm of Namco also competes against other ventures. If SC does languish for a long time before SCVII, Namco's other priorities will probably be a big part of that.
But on the bright side, we still have Takahashi who is the director of the game. People forget that it's the director who handles most of the creative decisions made in games, the producer's job is mostly on the public relations (player feedback and game promotions) and business (game budget and dealing with investors) side of the game development which is why Okubo is seen as the face of the game. But as long as we still have the director, we should still be good.
In this case, i think you are probably right, but it is worth noting that the director/producer division of labor is not quite as clearly delineated for games as it is in other types of entertainment media: it can often be hard to know for certain what the duties of senior devs are in particular games just based on job titles. Here though, I think we have seen plenty of evidence in interviews that the dichotomy for SCVI worked more or less as you described above.
I imagine he had the final say on who the 3rd party guest character selection is as well in his capacity as game producer.
Undoubtedly he would have input, but I think it's more accurate to say that he had first say on who the third party characters were going to be, not "final"; those kinds of decisions, when huge multinationals license content from one-another, have to be approved through a fairly complex legal and budgeting process. I think with Haohmaru, we got to see a little beneath the hood here, when we saw (assuming it wasn't planned marketing) Okubo begin to float the idea of some sort of crossover content with a senior SamSho developer (I forget who) on Twitter, and then saw it come to fruition. I'm going to guess that Haohmaru didn't break the bank on licensing costs, but Okubo certainly would not be in a position to drag his feet and settle for only exactly those characters he would want.
I'm still in the camp that thinks that SC7 won't be announced until Tekken 8 is a thing.
Oh, not a chance in the universe that SCVII comes before T8.
SC6's creative team seems to have a lot more free reign compared to Tekken.
For example, if you look at the unique resources / charged properties of the returning veterans characters in the DLC bundles in SC, compared to the returning veterans in Tekken, its a vast difference. Perhaps Tekken 7 really values nostalgia, and too much change is actually a bad thing.
Tekken DLC characters seem like tweaked versions of their prior selves, while the overwhelming majority of SC characters seem like overhauls (ranging from slight to almost unrecognizable in the case of Hwang)
I'm sure there's tons of hitbox / frame data changes for character in Tekken 6/7.. but largely they're the same with different combo paths. The same can't be said for someone like Hilde in SC5 vs SC6, since the charge timing mechanic was replaced with a charge-direction mechanic, and she gained some aesthetic regalia powerup states.
I think this is dead-on accurate. And frankly, I wish that they could take a page from each-other's book and both moderate a little towards the middle: Tekken should be a little bit more adventerous and let each title strike a little bit more of a unique tone rather than retreading basically the same ground from title to title, while Soulcalibur needs to learn that it doesn't need to reinvent the wheel on everything every single game, including (most especially in SCVI) radical reworks of the basic character mechanics of 3/4 of the roster...
As for season 3 that ship has sailed. I honestly think it was in the works but got cancelled. Fuck this pandemic man, it really screwed up the momentum SC6 had.
Yup, I think that's fairly likely. There aren't any firm indicators that it got into the actual production stage, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't have detailed plans on what the content was going to be. Really unfortunate. But now that multiple season passes have been established as a thing that the FGC consumer doesn't reactively oppose for dumb and self-defeating reasons, and publishers have shown that they can handle the format while giving reasonable value on the dollar, I'm really hopeful that SCVII will end up being the game that finally unifies virtually the entire franchise roster. SCVI wasn't that far off, afterall. But honestly, it also wasn't one of my favorite games in the series when it comes to gameplay, aesthetic design, or the overall choice of priorities in terms of which parts of the game were polished and robust and which were skimpy.
And lastly, hey everybody! How is everyone?
