Not sure how you can really say this, though, with how well SoulCalibur VI has been / is doing.
Hopefully I'm just being overly pessimistic, but considering SC6 only got barely made and how Namco has treated the SC team over the years, I'm just not sure if Namco is willing to fund a big SC sequel.
Rubbish, Voldo still looks like a pimp. He knows he has the goods or why would he wear such an outfit?
Of course, he still has the goods. I’m just saying that the 3D art in SC2-3 was able to show it off the best compared to the 2D art and the in game models.
I'd say that neither the super rosey, nor the super skeptical view quite captures the reality of the situation that the franchise rests in at present time. On the one hand, FluffyQuack is quite correct: there is cause to be guarded here based on the internal dynamics of Namco and how they have treated the title over the last decade and a half. If nothing else, there's no real reason to believe the company will shift its practice of making Project Soul an ad-hoc team that is constituted whenever they decide to venture out on another SoulCal title, as opposed to a standing internal studio or team--and so long as that remains the case, the core game will always have a constrained development window limited by the amount of time in which they can divert staff and resources to develop the core game.
I used to be pretty skeptical about this--it's something that has never been done with the franchise before (a re-release of a title in back-to-back console generations) and for good reasons. But I think there's an outside chance it might actually make sense to port the game in two years, after the two or three season passes have finished, in a "complete" edition for the next gen. The problem is, the way content licensing works in practice these days, usually you can download and play the same game you bought on the previous generation's console on the next one, provided they are successor platforms: reversing that trend is not feasible for the platform or the publisher: consumers would rebel at that. This means if you make a complete edition (which is essentially a bundle of the previous core game and its various DLCs) you are really trying to market it to entirely new players for the most part.
In a company of the scale and sort of Namco, no developer (not even a lead developer) will be heavily involved in making the decision about whether to release that information, let alone being the person who is most responsible for making that decision. That's a call for a CFO and their staff, in consultation with numerous departments, and depends on a lot of financial, sales, marketing, public relations, investor, and even legal/regulatory factors that go well beyond any one game and an attempt to grant it plaudits.
Again, I have doubts that the game has performed at this level, and even if it had, in order to realistically judge the game's financial success, you would still have to adjust those figures to account for the inflation of production costs, per the factors discussed above. However, I will say that I think Namco probably does view this game as a success, but it probably has less to do with huge sales figures and more to do with other factors: not just the way it has helped move the needle on continuing support as discussed above, but in other measures as well, such as the overwhelming amount of support that was shown to the game in that twitter poll when Namco asked which of their current fighters most impressed their consumer base. Soulcalibur VI has insane word of mouth right now, particularly among 3D fighter devotees, and when it comes to media companies and their ongoing/longterm IPs, the old adage is often turned on its head: two birds in the bush are worth more than one in the hand.
Well, but that's not what I said. I said your idea of getting a game that is as expansive as this game is (after all DLC has dropped) as the base game for SCVII (before any DLC for VII is added) is simply out of touch with economic, business, and production reality. I'm not saying the experience will be 'pared down' but just the opposite: that it will be maintained or even somewhat scaled up--but that this comes with a cost and within certain practical restraints, as outlined at length above.
Well, if I had to guess, I would suspect that each subsequent game in the ongoing support model era will be (for this franchise anyway) a substantial overlap with the previous game's cast (with some mix-up as to who gets into the base game and who gets released as subsequent DLC) but with a handful dropping out here and there, characters from SCIV, SC:BD, and SCV being re-introduced and a dusting of entirely new characters and variant guests. Basically, what they have always done for more than twenty years. Only now the rosters will be slightly larger at the ultimate finish line, but will require multiple buy-ins and some patience if you want everything. It's not really that complicated or much in question, from where I am standing--not in the rough outline, anyway: the particulars regarding who is likely to get in to which entry and in what order, we will be arguing about for years. But the relative prevalence of storytelling in the overall product, whether high or low, doesn't really change that analysis much, if at all.
Well, you know I have to disagree with this.
The next entry is going to be on a new generation of hardware, and thus as new entries go, SCVII will, if anything, require significantly more development assets, not less. Having some systems in place vis-a-vis the mechanics is a drop of water in the bucket compared to the overall costs of a venture of that sort. Nor does any of that reverse the overall trend that the production of such media always involves increased cost, generation on generation. Inflation: it's a bitch, but it's economic reality. Particularly when you can't pass that extra cost on to the customer. To say nothing of the fact that they would, of course, like to be making more profit, if possible.
