Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

[Rusted Blade]

Well, I'm sure PS had more restrictions on them making SC6. I would say that I was very generous in giving the right to 34 characters, the conditions are not so bad: include two guests, exclude only 3 characters from SC2 (if you want) and preferably bring most of the characters that were in SC6.

I mean, it's your proposed game, you can set whatever conditions you like to the exercise: I'm just saying that by having nine separate criteria, two of which require including all of the roster of one game and almost all of another, you aren't going to get much variance whatsoever, because there's really very little room for difference between how constructed roster. And the less flexibility in that regard, the less purpose I can see in the exercise.

SC3 had 43 playable characters if you count the bonus, but being very realistic, I think it's very difficult for SC7 to have 34 characters, 40 would be almost impossible. SC6 had 28, being 8 DLC, I would say if we're lucky the next game will be 32.

In no way is 40 characters out of the question. SCVI easily could have had 40 with slightly different development priorities: less of the tedious, underwhelming single-player content, for example. Add in factors like the possibility of a slightly expanded budget for SCVII (by no means guaranteed, but also easily within the realm of possibility) and/or a more extended post-release DLC content schedule, and 40 is not really that much of a stretch.

Mind you do I expect it? Well, with ever increasing development costs and the fighting genre still not looking like it's going to lose its trend towards niche interest anytime soon, as well as Namco's pretty solid turn towards the casual audience in the recent games (i.e. those that want single player and story content above mechanical augmentations like extra characters/movesets), I suppose probably not. I would say the odds are in the roster staying within the 30-40 range for the next game.

But "impossible" is a massive exagerration. It easily could be that the next director would prioritize content differently, that the front-end budget might be increased (Namco is an absolutely massive developer afterall, and these decisions come down more to market research and internal metrics for success than feasibility afterall), or that more characters would be greenlit through DLC. And let's remember the approach to this franchise from the lead developers of the last three mainline games, as well as the budgets and timelines they have been given to work with, has been pretty damn variable.

One can only hope, of course, but I live with the dream of a Project Soul lead who will realize that what made the classic games great was a technically deep roster of well-balanced options, along with solid art and gaemplay design....not 40 hour long visual novels that are painful to watch beyond even the first five minutes.

 

[LisaK]

I mean, it's your proposed game, you can set whatever conditions you like to the exercise: I'm just saying that by having nine separate criteria, two of which require including all of the roster of one game and almost all of another, you aren't going to get much variance whatsoever, because there's really very little room for difference between how constructed roster. And the less flexibility in that regard, the less purpose I can see in the exercise.

hmnn this was more to see who you would sacrifice as DLC than the versatility of the roster itself.

Z.W.E.I.

Spoiler

pray I'm never a member of PS, because you won't like my changes to his design.

 

[Rusted Blade]

I liked reading your response and this detail stood out to me. I don't see fighting games as niche at all. Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Street Fighter, and yes Soulcalibur are multi-million selling franchises. When a franchise gets 1 million+ sales, it's got a significant amount of appeal. Only reason I'm responding to this point is because I keep seeing it brought up in different places. I don't think the sales numbers back that up.

Well, I don't want to oversell the point either, because "niche" is all relative. But it's worth noting that 1 million in sales is next to nothing for a decently budgeted, big developer title. It's just barely into "made it worth the effort" territory for a publisher of Namco's size. Only by comparison to the other smaller fighting genre titles does a number like this stand out. And the main point to be emphasized here is that, unlike almost every other major genre, those numbers are actually less (both proportionally and in real numbers) as time goes by: for most franchises in the genre, recent titles sell worse than did their predecessors. This franchise is no exception: Namco announced that SCVI had hit the one million unit point a few years after its release: Soul Calibur IV hit 2.4 milion 8 months, and even SCV (arguably the most poorly received game in the series) hit 1.5 million in its first year.

Unfortunately, it's the same almost across the board for the genre: even franchises that are still able to be consistently and comfortably profitable (Mortal Kombat for example) are still pulling fewer numbers. I think literally the only series that continues to buck the trend and do truly blockbuster numbers with each release consistently to this day is Street Fighter--though Smash Bros. and Tekken titles also consistently sell into the several millions of units per game. But for the genre as a whole, the trend is still one towards marginalization: even if it does remain an active sphere of development and isn't in danger of going away as a genre entirely, it is still increasingly harder for companies to turn a profit, with fewer sales to go around, and ever-increasing development costs. While the overall number of gamers has increased manifold over the last two decades, the proportion of industry market share for fighters has shrunk at a faster rate, and within the genre there are more developers fighting for those sales.

And the situation grows even a little more complicated when you are talking about a massive publisher like Namco that owns a huge portfolio of IP, and a large number of internal development studios. In a situation like that (as compared against a smaller company which focuses on just a few titles) now a franchise doesn't just have to be merely profitable: it has to be one of the more profitable options from among any number of other franchises waiting for their next sequel to be greenlit in a given year. It's highly competitive, and that's really the point I was meaning to emphasize: I don't mean to suggest the series is on the chopping box. In fact, I think the plus side of being a legacy Namco property is that it will never go away forever: sooner or later it will get dusted off again. But I doubt SCV and SCVI are the last games in the series where the seams will show in the final product because the budget wasn't quite what we would like it to be.

Forgive my yammering on here, but I find the current industry of the genre very interesting, from a development, logistics, and demand-economics standpoint.

Soulcalibur 6 had the balance, decent visual style (though older games are still superior in this regard), and fun gameplay (though with too many interruptions during fights e.g. Reversal Edge) but the single-player content was lackluster for sure. I think the stories were decent but the presentation was awful. Maybe the devs should've focused more on the netcode and online. It would've had higher replay value if they went that route.

I agree with every word here. Though I will say that "decent visuals" still falls short of the legacy of this series and what I hope to see from it. Visually everything in SCVI is technically at a level where you can't really see yourself complaining, but it all just feels slightly flat, unambitious, and lacking the level of artistry that past titles had. Compared to what SCIII and SCIV did artistically, with the tools of their times, for example, it all feels a little paint-by-numbers and pasteurized to me. It's like seeing a cover band for some legendary: they might get all the right notes, but you're getting a fraction of the magic. It's especially noticeable in the stage designs: the characters look alright, and mostly play pretty well (with the usual caveats that there are way too many gimicks for characters and, as you say, the tempo is harmed by some of the mechanics. But those stages....so uninspired and bland.

Either way, Soulcalibur's future does look bright no matter how many times it might stumble. It's one of the few fighting games where it doesn't feel like a chore trying to learn a character's moveset. Universal controls is something the genre needs more of. Mortal Kombat 11 just felt awful every time I switched characters. It just felt like you had to relearn the game over again. The combos just didn't seem intuitive either, just a bunch of random inputs that were easy to do but made me wonder "Why is it setup like this?"

Soucalibur never felt that way to me, A to beat sidestepping, B to beat crouching, K to do a fast interrupt, etc. The controls make sense and are easy to pick up. Hopefully the series gets back to its Soulcalibur 2 and 4 popularity days.

Yeah, I think you're right: the basic formula of SC's combat system is pretty accessible, in a "takes a day to learn, a lifetime to master" kind of way. Well, accessible compared to many other fighters, anyway. It's still a very complicated and demanding set of systems, but there's an internal logic too it, and discrete mechanics that you can focus on at each stage of your development as a player, the things you refer to as universals. Like you, I'm less a fan of the idiosyncratic combos systems. It's why I gravitate more towards Soulcalibur, Dead or Alive, and Virtua Fighter: all three of these titles are more intuitive than 2D fighters in general, imo, and I sometimes feel Soulcalibur shares more in common with the other major, non-Namco 3D fighters than it does with Tekken.

hmnn this was more to see who you would sacrifice as DLC than the versatility of the roster itself.

Ahhh, yeah, well for myself I just put the characters that were more to the peripheries of popularity and/or story prominence in the DLC, as that seems to be Namco's approach so far. I honestly think there's something to be said for holding back big names for DLC, as that could drive sales. But to their credit, Namco seems to be trying, in SCVI at least, to make sure that a maximum number of players get their mains back in the base product.

Z.W.E.I.

Spoiler

pray I'm never a member of PS, because you won't like my changes to his design.
View attachment 95178

Well, the guy already looks like the wannabe musician that a young woman picks her first college STD up from, so it would be a tall order to make him look more underwhelming to my eye!

 

[Crash X]

I think SC6’s system has been pretty easy to pick up as a whole (more so in comparison to the other games imo). With each characters standard commands and functionality being shared across the board. 3A being a hori mid, 3B being your standard launcher, 4B being a mid/short ranged poking tool, etc… It does make the game and it’s cast much more accessible in that regard and is a welcome change. Some characters get more usability out of each but that’s a whole other story for another time…

 

[Rusted Blade]

I'm a bit unaware. Are there any characters that are problematic due to this? This got my attention.

I don't think Crash was saying that there are some characters who benefit less from universalist controls (though I can think of situations where that might also be true), but rather that certain characters have more or less powerful or utilitarian variations of a certain type of move, based on metrics like frames, damage, hitboxes, and conditions-on-hit for their particular versions of a type of move, as well as how well those moves synergize with other tools in their moveset.

This is probably due to the quality of the games rather than the genre itself tbh.

Well these things are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Do I think there are good, practical reasons why SCV and SCVI should sell worse than SCIV? Yes, personally, I think IV is head and shoulders above it's two follow-ups. But the typical consumer didn't necesarrily have the benefit of knowing that, because the critical reviews and early buzz for both V and VI were actually pretty good, and it's only with the benefit of hindsight that their flaws became widely discussed. And I'm talking mostly about V in that respect because VI is (somewhat to my confusion, I'll admit) still regarded as one of the better games in the series by the hardcore crowd, though now that scene has died down so completely, I think people are starting to recognize some of the flaws a little more reliably. Personally, I don't think it was a bad game by any measure, but it left me underwhelmed. And on the flip side of the coin, IV (possibly my favorite game in the series) actually was quite controversial in this community.

Beyond that, there's just not any question that the genre is in decline generally: it's just a well-established fact that it's popularity peaked somewhere between 15-20 years ago, when judged in relative terms to the overall industry. Analysts have talked the possible reasons into the ground, developers reluctantly face up to it in interviews, publishers are slow to greenlight. And the numbers just don't lie: if you look at the top ten longrunning franchises in the genre, I don't think there's a single one other than Street Fighter that has sustained upward growth over the last three titles. In terms of once-major genres now struggling, probably only the average RTS is having a rougher time right now than the typical fighting game.

It would be a massive exaggeration to say the genre is dead (games are still being made, and developers are still innovating, afterall), but we're a long ways away from the halcyon days of the arcade tournament fervor. I mean, it's a very indirect metric, needless to say, but just look at how dead things are here and in other genre forums. Even for between games, this is pretty much rock bottom for activity/interest.

 

[Rusted Blade]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the reason why fighting games have been trying to be easier to play this past decade? Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Tekken, etc. They either introduce simpler controls or make specific characters with easy inputs (I believe Tekken 7 falls in this 2nd category). You seem better informed on the industry than me so maybe you can confirm if this is true. I barely play fighting games.

Yeah, or at least that's the general take. You'd have to ask each individual development team how much this factored into their decisions, of course, but looking at it from the other side, complexity/barrier of entry has long been blamed for one of the reasons why the genre's top titles often struggle to attract new players. The issue is compounded somewhat by the fact that mechanics tend to persist much more consistently in these games than others, giving legacy players additional facility and making it (to some degree) more difficult for newbies with each new entry, while the mechanics tend to build in layers of complexity on top of one another.

There's a lot of reasons for why this happens: you don't want to reinvent the wheel on mechanics/movesets, on a set budget, when costs for development are ever-increasing; building upon the foundation left by the previous complete product can genuinely lead to increasingly dynamic play for the well-versed hardcore crowd (who actually do like the continuity and might feel alienated by too much change); and developers do tend to come from a background where they sympathize with the wants of the hardcore and competitive scenes. I mean, honestly, if you're crafting a particular kind of game, it's reasonable that, as someone who might prioritize your craft over profit motive, you might be inclined to say "Well, I want new players, but not at the cost of not giving the most nuanced experience possible, for the most skilled and experienced players, who can do the most with what i give them."

The problem is, if you follow these reasonable impulses to the conclusion, game after game, it does create a substantial barrier of entry. I don't think all of the decline of the genre can be attributed to this, but it's a major factor, especially as the scene evolved from couch play with friends more inclined to take it easy on you and help you build up your skillset, or the equally social in-person arcade and tournament scene, to an online setup where a new player can (even with the benefit of algorithms attempting to sort players by skill) get crushed game after game in a grueling and isolating gauntlet of player and ranked matches. If you weren't grandfathered in early enough, these games can be dispiriting for someone trying to learn the basics, and all the training features in the world do only so much for that--and in some cases, they can just make the process look that much more daunting.

So yes, the trend towards more accessible play and straightforward controls is largely a result of this concern (or more precisely, the declining sales forcing the hands of the devs). The ultimate goal is to thread the needle and hit a balance between complexity that satisfies the core fandom who come back title after title--but who are aging out of having all the discretionary time in the world (some of them anyway!) and who in any event represent only a tiny fraction of the overall market--and accessibility and appeal for the new player, to grab as many sales from casuals (and semi-casuals new potential hardcores), in what industry analysts and marketers sometimes call the "blue ocean strategy" (i.e. maximum sales on the immediate product by trying to appeal to as broad a variety of consumers as possible).

It's not an easy balance to strike, but I think things like the altenrate control schemes you referenced in SFVI are example of doing it smart: trying to open doors while not throwing a winning formula out the window. Ironically Capcom is in a position where they are already doing better than most devs/publishers in this space, and yet they have shown some willingness to innovate all the same, which I think is very smart: I don't think they got to the top of the pile in this genre by accident, though I tend not to be a big player of their games myself, at least not since Marvel vs. Capcom 2...just a little whole back. :)

 

[Rusted Blade]

While I agree, it does seem like they're leaning to the casual side over the traditional one. When I look at gameplay from the 2000s and then the 2010s, it does look like it's going in the easier direction. The inputs are requiring less buttons, tutorials improved, comeback mechanics, story content, etc.

Yeah, and to be honest, adapting UI and expanding onboarding of the new player base are areas where I don't mind favoring the casual player. I've been pretty vocal about how much I think Project Soul skewed SCVI towards the casual audience in other respects, such as paying an outside studio to produce droves of low-quality single player story content, while some of the basic features of the game that were traditionally well done by this series (stages, initial roster size, playing mode options) were quite underdeveloped. That was clearly a blue ocean choice, something Okubo and his development team probably pitched to get the game greenlit in the first place, if I had to guess.

And that's less a complaint about the devs and more a gripe about where things are with the industry right now: the gaming consumer base is unlike most others: they can and do throw their weight around in a very immediate way, being very tech saavy in general and early adopters of social media. And because of the unmitigated shitshow of bullshit monetization efforts by publishers about ten years ago, said consumers pushed back big time and got used to having their voices heard. All good, for the most part, but it's had some negative impacts too. In particular, this habit for making noise sometimes gets deployed against creative choices, rather than bs monetization schemes. And the biggest example of where this has become a problem, in my opinion, is that it's been hard for companies in competitive genres to adapt by offering more tailored experiences. This is changing a little, but for a while there, you couldn't not serve the casual audience's preferences without featuring a backlash.

Titfanfall, for example, was a brilliant title that offered a multiplayer only experience, with light story interwoven exclusively into the background chatter of it's arena levels. Awesome idea, excellently executed, and yet, somehow there had to be a controversy over this. Over-entitled gamers, with nothing better to do with their time, plastered the internet with whinging about how unreasonable it was for a budget title to focus on just gameplay to try to capture a hardcore only audience of serious shooter fans. Nevermind that that genre was born from such shooters, and until Modern Warfare, no one expected more than the lightest of story elements in a shooter. No, this was an affront to gamers, an attempt to steal something that was expected in a big game of this sort now. Leading to a paint-by-numbers sequel with a story campaign and overall package so lackluster, it was almost immediately forgotten.

Just silly, imo. And I think SCVI came out just a little too early in this respect, because now people are slowly starting to accept that games are going to come out in a wider variety of forms and with different sales models, and that these are not always just exploitative and "stealing" something from the player, and you have to do a value-to-price assessment independently for each product. I honestly hope that means that SCVII is not so weighed down by chasing overdeveloped, but ultimately very, very weak story content. Although this franchise has always had a rich lore, it should be appreciated for the tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top setting that it is, and that story delivered in relatively small doses, not hundred-hour-long, tin-earred visual novels that divert substantial chunks of budget away from elements that are critical to a fighter, and were definitely noticeable for being underbaked in SCVI. God the majority of the stages in particular, especially the launch stages, are so slapped together and uninspired, it really sharply impacted my moment-to-moment engagement with this entry.

Anyway, that unasked for diatribe was all inspired by contextualizing my immediate response to what you were saying: the way you should be serving the casual audience in a fighter is not by chasing broader industry trends to always make sure there is single player content. I mean it makes some sense, market wise. Some of those players will pay for a full priced game, play through its story and then not bother using your online features much, which means plenty of net profit from those buyers. But it can hurt the legacy of the product at the same time.

By comparison, lowering the barrier of entry by making the multiplayer more accessible to new players? That's just a win-win, and has the ability to convert players into lifelong fans of the franchise. I really hope the next game moves its appeal to casuals away from auxiliary elements (like super long, but low-quality story modes) and back more towards vital gameplay and art design elements, like continuing to make the gameplay as accessible as it can be, without sacrificing the depth of gameplay legacy players have come to expect. Given it's size, Namco is in a position to take chances like that, but it's also more likely to follow a corporate culture of trying to follow the conventional wisdom, so...who knows...

Also, I think legacy players valuing older titles and traditional gameplay can be tainted with nostalgia bias.

Yup, and when it comes to UI in particular, there are other biases that longtime players of a franchise (and I by no means am trying to exclude myself here) have, including a desire to maintain an advantage we feel that we've earned. Plus the fallacy of sunk-cost has an impact here "Well, I already learned it this way, so might as well just keep it that way, as much as possible." Even if the new inputs might actually make us more fluid and accomplished players once we got over the hump of relearning things. I will say though, that I actually think (and based on your comments above, I think you'd probably agree) that Soulcalibur titles have actually adapted a little better than some others in this respect.

Or maybe it's more accurate to say, it had an advantage all along, because it's lower level of dependence on combos and its rock-paper-scissors dynamics have let subsequent titles to not too married to massive strings of inputs (although some characters in particular still have those, no doubt!), and thus there is more flexibility as the characters evolve. It's too bad things are a little quiet here right now, because there are some people with really deep knowledge of the input scheme for this series here, and I wonder what some of them would think about that perspective.

 

[Rusted Blade]

I'm sorry but I don't think people have just realized this. Fighting games have traditionally had barebones content for decades and yet they still sold well. People just want whatever looks fun, they don't care too much the details as much as how a game feels to play. Look at the MMO subscription modeling. People have always accepted different sales models and types of games, it's not something they've slowly accepted.

Yeah, but outside of the subscription model for particular types of games, gamers have been really, really resistant to things like extended post-release DLC schedules or games that focus exclusively on certain hardcore experiences. I already discussed Titanfall as an example of the latter (though of course there's no shortage of titles I might have mentioned), but as to the former, you don't need to go any farther back than looking at posts on this forum following the release of SCVI, with people whinging about the mere existence of season passes, even though there is zero chance that those characters and content would have been included in the base product, given the budget and number of other priorities, and would have been absent from the game altogether if not sold as DLC.

My view is that as long you got your value for the base product, there's no harm in tacking on post release content, so long as the characters are balanced well with the rest of the product, and adjustments are made by patching as necesary. But as I said before, between the legitimately bs monetization practices employed by many companies in the last decade (understandably putting consumers on guard), and the kind of entitled power rush that gaming nerds have gotten from throwing their weight around about any little thing in more recent years, a lot of people don't really stop to do the mental calculus about how much value they are getting for their buck and just oppose anything on impulse. Trust me, this community in particular was thick with it at SCVI's release, and I've seen the situation play out similarly with other titles.

Of course, on the other hand, you have people hand money over to companies hand-over-fist in the casual market, enabling and encouraging all kinds of dodgy monetization tactics, so we're really trapped between two varieties of person without proper perspective in this regard. But I do think things are changing for the better: people are getting more open minded and recognizing the benefit of letting comapnies experiment with development and delivery models, so long as the consumer pays attention and keeps them honest.

A win-win would be to get a budget for good online and decent single-player content. Street Fighter 6 is the best example of this. If the devs need to pick one over the other, they should prioritize the online because that's going to have higher replay value. But single-player content should be on the mind of fighting game devs at some point in the series.

Yeah, I don't want to oversell the point: there's room for story content in most mainstream, triple-A fighting titles. It just should never be undermining the core gameplay experience. And I am worried that the trend is towards too much prominence in some of my favorite multiplayer experiences, including in titles where the budget is already clearly not quite sufficient to deliver on everything serious players would want. Again, SCVI is a pretty good example of this, imo.

I'm interested too but based on what I've seen on other fighting game communities, there's usually just criticism of making the controls easier. They talk about how it ruins depth or whatever but ignore how it stops feeling like a chore to play. Tbh, I find most of any genre's hardcore players to be narrow-minded and stuck in the past. If devs only listened to them, innovation would be at a snail's pace. Games like Street Fighter 6 would be way less impressive and barebones games like Tekken 7 would be the norm. Not a fan of that timeline.

Yeah, I agree: aside from the nostalgia goggles aspect, there's also a lot of "I paid my dues with this system, why should it change now?" type of reasoning that leads to surly reactions to the experience evolving a bit. And to be fair, where a new approach to a control scheme does in some way limit depth, that's a legitimate thing to be concerned about. But that's usually not the case: usually the complaints don't result from a decrease in tactical depth, but just a change in approach in how you utilize your tactical options.

On the other hand, sometimes there's just changes that don't make the game easier or harder, but which are just lateral moves that shake up the formula. with those its harder to say how often resistance is based on reasonable complaint or knee-jerk reaction to changes and experimentation. For example, I kinda loathe the gimmicks added for most of the characters in VI, which with regard to many of the characters, felt poorly considered and implemented. And reversal edge is probably about the dumbest thing you could have added into a game like Soulcalibur, given what it does to the flow of a match. On the other hand, the implementation for meter, critical edges, and soul charge are all great: probably the best version of all those mechanics. And honestly, that makes sense: anyone who doesn't perceive the changes in a new entry of a fighter series to be a mixed bag is probably thinking to reflexively.

 

[Tenchi8]

Since we're bored and this website is dead, how about we do a dynamic*?

Spoiler

YOU are the next producer/director for SC7, so please list the characters you would include in this game.
RULES:

• Your base roster must contain a total of 24 characters from the franchise + guest character. (Out of 25, that's the number of characters that were in SC 2)
• The game must have a maximum of 3 guests and a minimum of 2 guest and no guest character from a previous game can return.
• You can integrate to your roster any bonus character from SC 3 or 4, except Angol Fear. Nothing against the character, but she is canon of the Sgt universe. Frog/Sergeant Keroro, so she could be classified as a guest character, being the hardest to return compared to Ashlotte, Kamikirimusi, Scheherazade or Shura.
• Just like SC 6 you can have exactly two season passes, allowing 8~9 extra characters, totaling 33~34 playable characters in SC7, the same number of playable characters in SC4.
• Regardless of how many extra characters you have in your 4~4 / 5~4 / 4~5 season pass. The first pass must contain a guest character. You don't need to include a guest in the second (and last) season, unless you want 3 guest characters in your game, just like you had in SC 2 and 6.
• As I mentioned earlier you will be entitled to have 8 or 9 extra characters to release as DLC. If you choose to have 9, one of them will have to be a free DLC or a Pre-Order character like Eliza from T7/Shao Kang in MK11.
• The order of your character roster has to be the way your announcement trailers were released, following the SC 6 model.
• Soul Calibur 6 aimed to narrate the events of SC 1, BUT it omitted 3 characters from that game: Aeon, Rock and Edge Master, so in summary you can only exclude 3 sc2 characters from YOUR SC 7, that is, most of the characters that been to SC 2 MUST return.
• With the exception of Geralt, 2B and Haohmaru, all characters in SC 6 must return. As for Inferno, he is not mandatory, however you will have to add a final boss in his place and specify him as a possible Unplayable Boss just like Night Terror was in SC3.
• Optional: If you want to explain your choice just open a spoiler tag with the character's name and explain your reasons why it was included in the base or as a dlc.

Aw, man I wish I had more free time to participate in this. But I guess, me personally, I enjoy the element of surprise.
The producers and writers of this franchise are generally good at the directions in which to take the characters and lore. I guess if anything, it would be a lot of fun if there was a mode where our CAS would develope a strong bond with one of the canon characters, depending on the choices and actions we make in the quest game, and we end up joining a faction or pair up with a character accordingly, and maybe even a non-canon love interest just for fun. Like there would be the canon story mode to follow and there would also be a parody mode along to choose from or something. Or some other extra feature to explore, or perhaps exploring the area of every fighting stage and other interesting aspects. :)

 

[LisaK]

Aw, man I wish I had more free time to participate in this. But I guess, me personally, I enjoy the element of surprise.

I tried to do mine 4x it's hard to choose which character to come, there are so many. I wanted to add 3 new sc characters to my original roster but with that I always forget some veteran. The game became torture for me.
hmmn As for the cast okay, but what excites me the most during the game announcements would be seeing the costumes, I'm always excited to see it, I hope that in 7 the alternate costumes come back.

 

[Spanky]

Meaningless little idea popped into my head and I felt like sharing:
I have this big brain theory that SC7 is a matter not of "if," but of "when," and we'll finally start hearing about it after SF6 and T8 have had their day. I personally think we'll start getting news on SC7 once the hype for those other fighters dies down but while there's still hype for fighting games generally, so SC can ride that wave.

 

[Rusted Blade]

Meaningless little idea popped into my head and I felt like sharing:
I have this big brain theory that SC7 is a matter not of "if," but of "when," and we'll finally start hearing about it after SF6 and T8 have had their day. I personally think we'll start getting news on SC7 once the hype for those other fighters dies down but while there's still hype for fighting games generally, so SC can ride that wave.

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much how it's worked for the last 25 years. Historically Project Soul (which remember, is not a standing internal studio at Namco but rather an ad-hoc team that gets thrown together under that banner whenever it is time for a new Soulcal game) shares much of it's development staff with Tekken. It's simply not feasible to make a Soulcalibur game game until after the release of the immediately preceding Tekken (and these days at least some ways into the post-release content development). There are other reasons as well (there's no value in their having two of their most similar games go head-to-head too close in time, marketing cycles, other competing products in their IP meaning they are never going to put more than a certain amount of funding into their fighters over a given span of time, ect.), but if nothing else, the staffing issue is a bottleneck that means these games will always come out on a certain timetable/cycle.

And yeah, there's basically zero question that it's coming back eventually. We're not talking about some little indie studio here: we're talking about one of the very largest publishers in the world and this is IP which hasn't always flourished, but has been a established name since the first title: sooner or later there will always be another bite at the apple. But it gets a little longer between titles each time, and that's a trend that will probably continue into future hardware generations, because of the nature of development. I remember I had to rain on sooooooo many parades here back when VI released and people were continously throwing out pie-in-the-sky predictions that SCVII would be released 2020-2023. I'd say we're looking at 2026 at this juncture, possibly later.

 

[Spanky]

My sentiments exactly, Rusty. I think we're in for a bit of a wait, but I'm confident it's gonna happen. The soul still burns, it just needs to be on simmer and not full heat right now, if you know what I mean.

 

[SSfox]

Meaningless little idea popped into my head and I felt like sharing:
I have this big brain theory that SC7 is a matter not of "if," but of "when," and we'll finally start hearing about it after SF6 and T8 have had their day. I personally think we'll start getting news on SC7 once the hype for those other fighters dies down but while there's still hype for fighting games generally, so SC can ride that wave.

Agree, Harada already said SC6 sold well, there's no reason there won't be SC7, but it is obvious it won't be until Tekken 8 releases, it's just a matter of time, question is which one will come first, SC7 or DBZF2, i mean they can also market both at same time but who knows.

I've been playing SC6 lately more than any other FG, i'm trying to get to a good decent rank before Tekken 8 comes out.

 

[LisaK]

SC6 was released in October 2018 with support until the end of 2020 with the release of the last two DLC (Hwang & CaS F). After that, the official @ of the game asked the fans to wait and support the game and after 1 year of silence we had the news that the producer of the game left the company. PS when their work in SC ends they have their members relocated to another BAMCO game, I'm sorry to say but this time they are not working in SC, they are probably with the TEKKEN team working in T8. Otherwise, we would already have information from about a possible new sequel.
and even if they released another low budget rushed SC in 2024 the game would be completely overshadowed by the possible season passes of SF6, MK1 and T8. Better to wait for 2025~2026, the only big competition would be with a possible Injustice 3, DOA 7 or maybe a new Killer Instinct. Out of these 3 the only announcement that might cause an uproar in the FGC would be the announcement of a Bloody Roar reboot/remake/sequel.

 

[SSfox]

I don't know if this is sarcastic but all of this just seems obvious. If a franchise has successful sales, it's not a matter of if but when. There's been 6 games and they come out not long after Tekken does, so none of this should be news.


No way it's 2026, I predict 2024. 6 came out in 2018 so it's been 5 years already, I doubt they'll need 8+ years.


Honestly I wish you luck in playing SC6 online. I tried to do that but the netcode is so bad it isn't worth it at all. I don't know how you could put up with the online being as bad as it is.

Tekken 7 has way better online but I hated how you get launched in the air, lose 50% of your health to a combo, and there's nothing you can do but watch it play out. At least in Soulcalibur, you can move in the air to get out of the way. Can't do that in Tekken 7. Man they really need to make the online a big priority in the next Soulcalibur. Game is more enjoyable and feels much fairer compared to Tekken 7. We just need more 3D fighters with an active player base than Tekken.

It's not too great but I've seen worse. What annoy me most is how it can take time to find match, then the other leave after just 1 game.

A new VF is likely in the works, and i think it will come before SC7

Speaking of. Here's a nice come back I did yesterday on T7

https://twitter.com/x/status/1664031534171529221

 

[SSfox]

Hopefully the online is good. Want to try Virtua Fighter at some point but if the online isn't good, I'm not gonna bother.

VF5US Online now that's some god aweful netcode, feels like the era of SC4 and T6.

 

[LisaK]

Do they have a small crew that stays behind to work on the sequel? I guess the release date depends on if they started development after release or after the final dlc.

idk, but there's this interview during SC5..

I'm sure Okubo mentioned that the team isn't that big, like I remember when he wanted to post a fanart for the success of SC6, just like Harada does with T7, but he didn't want to overload the team, anyways.. in case I find, I'll leave the link here.
In fact there is another example, during the same week that PS announced Setsuka, the director of SC6, was in his @ saying that 'they' were working on Pokken and even asked fans if they recognized some moves of SC characters.

 

[Rusted Blade]

No way it's 2026, I predict 2024. 6 came out in 2018 so it's been 5 years already, I doubt they'll need 8+ years.

Sorry my friend, but 2024 is a pipe dream. We don't even know the current timeline for Tekken 8's release, but it's unlikely to be 2023 based on what is known. Then you have significant post-release support for Tekeen 8 (Tekken always gets a fair bit), and then 12-24 months (probably around 18 months, and one hopes for it to be on the longer side, really) of development time for Soulcalibur. And that's assuming they decide to greenlight it precisely on the heels of Tekken 8, which is faaaaaar from a given. 2026 is actually generous: it could easily be later. Late 2025 is not outside the extremes of possibility, but I'd be surprised to see it then. 2024? Not even the remotest chance.

Do they have a small crew that stays behind to work on the sequel? I guess the release date depends on if they started development after release or after the final dlc.

See my posts a little farther up about this. It depends on the title. Typically no. Namco has a a number of formal internal studios, some of which work on consistent IP, so they might be tinkering now and again with plans for Title A while they are actively developing Titles B and C. But in the case of Project Soul, it is an adhoc team that gets thrown together whenever it is time to make a new Soulcalibur game, and a significant chunk of the team (unsurprisingly) has historically been brought over from the previous Tekken title. Planning between head developers might get a bit of a headstart a little earlier than that, but it's simply not possible for developmental production of a Soulcalibur game to get truly under way until some time after the previous Tekken title drops.


EDIT: Mind you, I'd love to be wrong about this. If Tekken 8 dropped fourth quarter of 2023 or first quarter 2024, and then Soulcalibur VII third or fourth quarter 2025, I'd be estatic (assuming there weren't signs it was rushed), and I'd be happy to eat crow if it meant having the game that much sooner. But I just don't see it happening. Sep-Nov 2026 would be my bet.

@LisaK lol, Bloody Roar. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a minute.

 

[LisaK]

It's been a while since I've seen everyone comment on the fighting g@me bubble about how iconic the return of Bloody Roar would be, well, I only played the first one when I was a kid, but I still remember how amazing it was for me to see the characters turning into animals, that caught my attention a lot. This game I can say I would buy for sure, the others I could wait.

talking about of old games, was Fighting EX Layer (2018) a hit or a flop? I literally don't see anyone talking about this game. It would be so nice if fighting games were trending again.