Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

Rusted Blade said:
Well, they have a responsability to deliver, but nowhere in the licensing agreement for the product you purchased (assuming that, like most of us here, you bought the season pass as soon as Hilde went live) were any of us guaranteed a specific launch date. And meanwhile Tekken keeps the lights on; I have always been and will always be a SoulCalibur player first and foremost, but I understand the factors which would motivate them to rush the Tekken content out the door. Do I find it frustrating? Hell yes. Do I think it's a little short-sighted, in that SoulCalibur is having a moment here where Namco could really bootstrap the franchise if they showed it some support roughly commiserate with Tekken? Yeah, I think that's probably true too. So for both selfish subjective reasons and practical business reasons, if I were in charge of Namco's production and release schedule, I'd definitely be taking a chance on pushing the timeline for SCVI-S2 more aggressively. But at the same time, I understand why a company would prioritize the sure thing in these circumstances.

Anyway, my point was not that you shouldn't feel frustrated or even a little taken for granted as a consumer who pays some of their money in advance--that's totally reasonable, of course. I'm just saying that I think the precise language involved could use some calibrating. "Shameful" is the type of language we ought to be using for (just to use an example off the top of my head) when a bunch of entitled $#!t-for-brains college douchebags show up for Spring Break mobs on public beaches during efforts to stem a pandemic. Again, just to use the first random real-life/real stakes example that pops into my head. My next DLC character being a few weeks later than I'd hoped for is an annoyance, at most. Honestly, I don't think I would even get into the state of mind where I'd be using the descriptor "unacceptable" until it had been five or six months. At that point, I grant you, the company is beginning to abuse the good faith of its consumers, since we do expect, when we make that season pass purchase, that the release schedule will roughly conform to what was done with the previous one.

But personally, I'm nowhere near being even rankled yet. I do, however, accept that some people may be more irriated than they otherwise would be in these circumstances because they are expecting Haohmaru to be the most throw-away gimicky guest yet in the history of the franchise. I have that same fear to some extent, which I will grant, makes it feel like the delay between Hilde and DLC character 3 is the real wait. I'm really hoping that Haohmaru is surprisingly dynamic and not as redundant on Mitsu as we are fearing, but...yeah, I get why he's adding an extra dollop of impatience to the equation for a lot of people.

Edit: On a side note, I've always wondered, is your name a kind of wordplay based on the san-gréal, combined with Japanese honorifics? Because that's really quite clever if so. Or is it also an Absolver reference? What would that be, a double and a half entendre?
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Any chance we see the Tekken crew get down to business on SC's stuff now and expedite this season?
 
Dissidia said:
I doubt that many people are actually buying those costume passes, if I played DOA6 I would only buy the characters individually
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Sadly, a lot of people obviously have bought the season passes, that's why Koei-Tecmo keeps releasing them (they're probably going to reveal Season Pass 5 next month). I concur to only purchase the characters and costumes that you PERSONALLY want. Do NOT touch the hair change bullshit. However, all things considered, I'd still take DOA6's DLC release schedule over SCVI's non-existent release schedule. I bought SCVI's SP2 on November 25th, 2019, and have received 1 character & 1 DLC pack.

At this point, Namco has lost a lot of momentum with Haohmaru (and SamSho isn't exactly a well-known mainstream franchise like majority of the previous SC guests including Geralt & 2B). I indeed would like Namco to focus on SCVI a little more after T7 SP3 concludes.
 
TresDias said:
Any chance we see the Tekken crew get down to business on SC's stuff now and expedite this season?
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That's a good question and I do think there's more than a little bit of possibility that some small amount of staff will be moved over, but I wouldn't expect it to have a huge impact on the overall timeline for the Season Two content. We do know for a fact that Project Soul is not a standing studio within Namco but rather a team that is re-constituted (often with a large differences in even major roles) every time development is about to ramp up for a new Soul Calibur title. This is a not unheard of technique for a company large enough to be able to constitute non-standing development teams at a scale necessary for a title of this size, but presumably when the team is constituted, the lion's share of staff coming on board are temporarily pulled from Tekken roles, since this is by far Bandai Namco Entertainment Group's most similar game utilizing similar development software and approaches to many parts of the content development. Although we also know that Namco outsourced significant portions of SCVI to a third party studio; however, it seems that this was mostly for development of the single player narrative and mission portions of the game, as one would expect, with the core mechanics of the game itself (character gameplay assets surely included) done by the core internal team.

So, looking at the drop dates for The Tekken 7 season passes, the main SCVI software product, and then the SCVI season passes, one can get a sense of the likely ebb and flow of manpower, with large amounts of staff relocating to SCVI from Tekken as development got underway, but with a decently sized skeleton staff being retained for Tekken development, and then a flip to opposite relative sizes after PS dropped the core SCVI product,and transitioned to a continuing support team in the mode of Tekken--presumably the Tekken teams would be allocated substantially more staff once SCVI joined Tekken in continuing support status, clearly, as the relative speed of product releases seem to confirms. Mind you, one could subsantially double-check these presumptions by cross-referencing the staff credits from the two games, but that would be an hours-long process that's never really appealed to me on a cost-benefit basis! From a previous conversation, I know @FluffyQuack has taken a long look at the SCVI credits with regard to similar questions regarding internal and external staffing, but I couldn't guess as to whether he takes a similar interest in Tekken.

Anyway, the real question here is: is this the end of the road for the Tekken continuing support? I think probably it is. Don't get me wrong, I think the multiple season pass moment has succeeded with Tekken beyond Namco's wildest expectations. After about a decade of whinging and whining from consumers about games not being delivered to them in exactly the same manner and at exactly the same cost as in their childhood (which to be fair, such over-the-top complaining was first preceded by some shady industry practices that made gamers everywhere suspicious), everyone's finally getting on the same page that for some products, a slow burn and more content at some extra cost does make sense, and the multiple season pass model for fighters is finally a marketable proposition. And I think every developer in this corner of the gaming market wants that to be a cemented thing. That's why I have a high degree of optimism for a third SCVI season pass. Still, sooner or later you need to get to work on the next entry, and with the new consoles just over the horizon now, and with Tekken being the fighter that Namco usually leads with for a new fighter on new hardware--and with the need to do a short cooldown before you throw staff back in and try to sell consumers on the same product title again--I think this is probably the story for Tekken 7.

So, if that presumption proves accurate, much of that Tekken staff will likely soon be freed up, and could be folded back into Project Soul for a while. I don't know that it's likely to have a huge impact on Season 2, but a streamlined Season 3 (if there is one), with better turn-arounds on the drops, could be a result. All of this subject of course to major outside forces right now that could effect whether anyone is even working in BNEG's offices in six months and an economic downturn that could last years.
 
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IMO we're more likely to see Tekken 7 get two more seasons than seeing SC6 get any sort of extra focus. (Unless it was confirmed that S3 is last one. I wouldn't know, I don't pay much attention to Tekken.)

Thankfully, I think momentum will pick back up with the last two S2 characters, assuming they don't take forever like Haohmaru.
 
Autumn said:
IMO we're more likely to see Tekken 7 get two more seasons than seeing SC6 get any sort of extra focus. (Unless it was confirmed that S3 is last one. I wouldn't know, I don't pay much attention to Tekken.)
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It all comes down to how well these products are performing, of course (something for which we have only indirect and vague figures), but I suspect this is the last season pass for 7. The thing is, in the case of almost any core software product, each subsequent DLC product of a given sort (say, a season pass) usually performs at least a little bit worse the previous similar product. There are some ups and downs for particularly acclaimed DLC for major products (say a GTA5 or a Witcher III) or for specific characters in a fighter, but over-all, the buy in drops consistently over time. Changing that paradigm and making games more appealing as episodic format is, of course, everything that much of the industry is all about right now. But I still don't know of a fighter that has pushed past the third season pass, where the season pass content is most substantially constituted by actual characters, stages, and other hearty content selections and not just "My $90 Virtual Doll Girl Cosplay Kit", like DOA, do you?

Again, if it's profitable enough, I wouldn't be outright gobsmacked to see a Seaon 4, but my best guess is that, given the upcoming generation of consoles, the core Tekken team is now going to be transitioned towards figuring out what creating software is going to be like on those platforms, a years long process. And that's before you factor in outside circumstances that could have the studio scaling back its office populations for months, depending on how things go.
 
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Force_of_Nature said:
Sadly, a lot of people obviously have bought the season passes, that's why Koei-Tecmo keeps releasing them (they're probably going to reveal Season Pass 5 next month). I concur to only purchase the characters and costumes that you PERSONALLY want. Do NOT touch the hair change bullshit. However, all things considered, I'd still take DOA6's DLC release schedule over SCVI's non-existent release schedule. I bought SCVI's SP2 on November 25th, 2019, and have received 1 character & 1 DLC pack.

At this point, Namco has lost a lot of momentum with Haohmaru (and SamSho isn't exactly a well-known mainstream franchise like majority of the previous SC guests including Geralt & 2B). I indeed would like Namco to focus on SCVI a little more after T7 SP3 concludes.
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Remember SamSho? Oh yeah. It's basically dead in europe and the population has dropped off in NA. The moment to capitalize on Haohmaru was in 2019............................not 8+ months after the announcement
 
This new monster hunter world outfit reminded me so much of ivy lol
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Dissidia said:
Remember SamSho? Oh yeah. It's basically dead in europe and the population has dropped off in NA. The moment to capitalize on Haohmaru was in 2019............................not 8+ months after the announcement
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Have people easily forgotten that fighting games don't live and die on the metrics of online populations? It sucks that titles like Samsho don't have a large player base but it's a fighting game, not an MMO. You would think this genre with it's 30-40 year history this would be obvious to see.
 
sytus said:
Have people easily forgotten that fighting games don't live and die on the metrics of online populations? It sucks that titles like Samsho don't have a large player base but it's a fighting game, not an MMO. You would think this genre with it's 30-40 year history this would be obvious to see.
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You have to admit that Samurai Shodown is not a "hot" game though. That moment has long passed. 2B and Geralt at least come from games that continue to be popular.

SoulCalibur isn't popular enough to ram through obscure characters like Haohmaru the way geese was in tekken.
 
Dissidia said:
You have to admit that Samurai Shodown is not a "hot" game though.
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Samsho is already a success, the developers have said that the game has made a profit just from the pre orders, it's got a season 2 and hopefully a season 3 to bring more favourites back. What matters the most is having community support and to not make a loss going forward. Fighting games don't have to sell like gangbusters, not every developer and publisher is about money over art, there are plenty that understand good will and longevity are just as important.

Dissidia said:
SoulCalibur isn't popular enough to ram through obscure characters like Haohmaru the way geese was in tekken.
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Haohmaru isn't obscure, He is the main protagonist of the first Samsho game from a fighting game series that was popular back in the day. SNK games have also been more successful outside of the English speaking world, specifically Japan. I really think your opinion is clouded by your own experiences regarding Haohmaru, the only thing I agree on regarding his inclusion to Calibur is that his design is timid compared to the main cast which has always been super strong compared to other fighting game characters.
 
AriesWarlock said:
She is more like Aoi from Virtua Fighter. And yes, the gi is fabulous!
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Yeah, Tamaki is based off of Aoi from the inspiration franchise of DOA, VF. Both Aoi and Tamaki look fantastic.

I also agree with @Dissidia that Namco has more or less missed the boat to capitalise on SamSho & Haohmaru's prominence. SamSho has dropped off a lot compared to EVO time/2019 in general. GranBlue Fantasy Versus is the hot "footsies" game this year. All other SC guests have had more social prominence than Haohmaru. 2B, Geralt, Ezio, Kratos, Star Wars characters, etc.
 
So, I was wondering. Considering that they’ve given us the option to change the music that plays for the stages you fight on, what if they added in the option to change the character selection music? (I doubt something like that is going to happen in SC6, but it’s just a thought).
 
Crash X said:
So, I was wondering. Considering that they’ve given us the option to change the music that plays for the stages you fight on, what if they added in the option to change the character selection music? (I doubt something like that is going to happen in SC6, but it’s just a thought).
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I would like that a lot.
 
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