I had always assumed it was unique to the Sorels since we see it in the official artwork of both Raphael and Amy as their background motif. I'm wondering, in the event it's not just a generic design to have on Wilhelm's breastplate, if maybe it's a hint in the lore for some kind of connection. In any event, whatever it is (or isn't) we'll probably all have to wait until SC7 to find out.
It’s unfortunate that he left but I still wish him the best. Doesn’t look like we’re going to be receiving any more support for SC6 from here on out.
well fuck... i wish Okubo the best and hope he can keep going strong wherever he goes.
SoulCalibur IP rights belong to Bamco as they always did and will never expire. This is not a Marvel type of deal with IP rights getting chooped to tiny pieces to be sold, rented and pawned to 100 different companies under 100 different contracts.
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...
I don't get how Harada wins by "silencing" SoulCalibur. Harada was the guy who reassigned Okubo, alongside many other developers, from the TEKKEN 7 team into Project Soul to begin with. He was even on stage next to Okubo during the unveiling of the game. Just because Harada is the Tekken guy doesn't mean he has a heated rivalry against SoulCalibur, in fact he co-directed SOULCALIBUR IV.Harada has won.
Soul Calibur has been silenced.
Now Project Soul can be pulled into Tekken 8.
Yeah fighting for the budget to get SC6 started and fighting to get a 2nd season pass approved seems to be Okubo's biggest triumphs. I imagine he had the final say on who the 3rd party guest character selection is as well in his capacity as game producer.
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.
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.
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.Now Project Soul can be pulled into Tekken 8.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Oh, not a chance in the universe that SCVII comes before T8.
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...
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.
