Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

DanteSC3 said:
It was "Raphael fans might wind up having some stress sweat," as disgusting a phrase as that was. I still am not sure what was meant by that.
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I still assume he was speculating that Raphael might not make it into SC6. If that was the case, I would say that would’ve been a crime to exclude Raphael, especially given how much of a mainstray he’s been and that he was the only SC2 newcomer to return to SC5.
 
Rusted Blade said:
Yeah, my thoughts run roughly in the same direction: Amy may very well have been an honest mistake born out of sloppy coding/prep for a near-future update, but with each subsequent release doing the same exact thing, it's become increasingly difficult to imagine this isn't intentional. There's actually a fair bit of additional contextual evidence to suggest this is their approach to viral marketing, which I won't belabour yet again because I fear I am beginning to sound like a broken (and verbose) record on the subject, but really it suffices just to point out that there is no possible way they are unaware that people are noticing the reference names and character IDs. I mean it already strained credulity to assume they wouldn't be aware of what as programmers themselves with even the initial data leaks, but at this point there have been numerous industry articles discussing these "unintentional" reveals and countless times where the devs have been directly tweeted at about them. They certainly know, so at a minimum, they are unconcerned about this information getting out.

But I'm pretty sure that at least from Cassie on (if not going back to even Amy), this was just clever viral marketing. It directly engages the fanbase who then spread the news directly via the fan communities and beyond. No matter how plain and obvious it seemed to me, people were pretty slow to buy into this when I started arguing this is what was going on about...a year and a half back, I guess? But I feel that at this point the writing is really on the wall. The thing is, even though I've argued this was a marketing strategy during that period, I've simultaneously doubted it was a -smart- marketing strategy. They are experimenting here, and probably because it is cheap alternative to the kind of direct marketing they would do for a cashcow like Tekken. But I doubt their market research on the matter is refined enough to tell them (particularly at this point) whether this approach has really helped sales/preserved momentum for the title. It's probably just a 'better than nothing' approach. But I have a hard time believing its truly more beneficial than just announcing the characters at the beginning of (or part way into) development for a given season pass; I just have to think that would generate the most aggregate interest and discussion for at least the average hardcore player.
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One of the reasons why I'm hesitant to believe the leaks were intentional is due to how different and seemingly random they've been. Here's a list of the leaks I can remember:
  • Knowledge of the game leaked a few weeks before being announced at Game Awards via Vergeben (I won't mention any of the other Vergeben stuff as they've been mostly ambiguous).
  • Geralt leaked via a tester posting some very tiny details about him and SC6 (this went under everyone's radar since it was posted on a random forum and didn't seem very believable at the time).
  • Taki trailer leaked one day before being announced online.
  • Yoshimitsu trailer leaked one day before being announced online.
  • Voldo leaked (via Israeli arm of Xbox) a few days before the formal announcement (was supposed to be announced during a comic con show).
  • The entire roster leaked by a guy working on the game's localization (though it took a long while before people actually believed the list).
  • Namco sent the wrong build to an e-sports event in Melbourne which happened to have the entire roster (except Inferno) unlocked, and thus footage of Cervantes and Raphael showed up.
  • Cervantes and Raphael leaked once again before their formal announcement via promotional trading cards Namco sent out to the press.
  • Amy and Cassandra leaked via 2B patch due to configuration files referencing them. The next patch would include the 6 weird codenames added to the same configuration files.
  • Screenshots of Character Creation Set A leaked via Namco Taiwan's Facebook 5 days before being announced with Amy at Evo Japan.
  • "Assassin" and "Alpha Patroklos" leaked due to very obscure references to them in the game's executable.

I should note that in addition to the character leaks via game files, they have periodically been adding some files now and then they're not supposed to. For instance, several patches before Cass was added would have the occasional file for Cass. Haohmaru actually had a file for him added back with the Hilde patch. I think those are all accidental due to it being hard to ensure no unused file is leftover in a patch (I should note that it's extremely rare for any game to not have unused leftover assets in their builds).

I don't really see how any of these leaks are to Namco's benefit. Their marketing plan for SC6 before its release was pretty straightforward: announce 1-2 characters every month. I think Cervantes and Raphael leaking so early was especially damning as that meant they had nothing to announce before release (and release was nearly 2 months away at this point) except for Inferno. And no one was gonna get excited about Inferno.

And then you have some character trailers which leaked mere days before they were supposed to be announced, and if those are intentional then what's the point? Especially since most of those trailer leaks were in such bad quality.

So yeah, my theory is that Namco is simply very sloppy. I can also confirm this when it comes to press assets. I have access to a European Namco press site for my Youtube channel and what's the last SC6 asset they posted there? ... The trailer for Amy. On the other hand, I have access to two Capcom press sites and both of those are updated super quickly whenever they announce something. Back when Namco actually did update that press site with SC6 press assets it was very random how slow or quickly they did it.

DanteSC3 said:
It was "Raphael fans might wind up having some stress sweat," as disgusting a phrase as that was. I still am not sure what was meant by that.
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Raphael was the last character to be announced (if we ignore the 3-4 times he leaked...) so maybe it was supposed to be a reference to that?
 
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FluffyQuack said:
One of the reasons why I'm hesitant to believe the leaks were intentional is due to how different and seemingly random they've been. Here's a list of the leaks I can remember:
  • Knowledge of the game leaked a few weeks before being announced at Game Awards via Vergeben (I won't mention any of the other Vergeben stuff as they've been mostly ambiguous).
  • Geralt leaked via a tester posting some very tiny details about him and SC6 (this went under everyone's radar since it was posted on a random forum and didn't seem very believable at the time).
  • Taki trailer leaked one day before being announced online.
  • Yoshimitsu trailer leaked one day before being announced online.
  • Voldo leaked (via Israeli arm of Xbox) a few days before the formal announcement (was supposed to be announced during a comic con show).
  • The entire roster leaked by a guy working on the game's localization (though it took a long while before people actually believed the list).
  • Namco sent the wrong build to an e-sports event in Melbourne which happened to have the entire roster (except Inferno) unlocked, and thus footage of Cervantes and Raphael showed up.
  • Cervantes and Raphael leaked once again before their formal announcement via promotional trading cards Namco sent out to the press.
  • Amy and Cassandra leaked via 2B patch due to configuration files referencing them. The next patch would include the 6 weird codenames added to the same configuration files.
  • Screenshots of Character Creation Set A leaked via Namco Taiwan's Facebook 5 days before being announced with Amy at Evo Japan.
  • "Assassin" and "Alpha Patroklos" leaked due to very obscure references to them in the game's executable.

I should note that in addition to the character leaks via game files, they have periodically been adding some files now and then they're not supposed to. For instance, several patches before Cass was added would have the occasional file for Cass. Haohmaru actually had a file for him added back with the Hilde patch. I think those are all accidental due to it being hard to ensure no unused file is leftover in a patch (I should note that it's extremely rare for any game to not have unused leftover assets in their builds).

I don't really see how any of these leaks are to Namco's benefit. Their marketing plan for SC6 before its release was pretty straightforward: announce 1-2 characters every month. I think Cervantes and Raphael leaking so early was especially damning as that meant they had nothing to announce before release (and release was nearly 2 months away at this point) except for Inferno. And no one was gonna get excited about Inferno.

And then you have some character trailers which leaked mere days before they were supposed to be announced, and if those are intentional then what's the point? Especially since most of those trailer leaks were in such bad quality.

So yeah, my theory is that Namco is simply very sloppy. I can also confirm this when it comes to press assets. I have access to a European Namco press site for my Youtube channel and what's the last SC6 asset they posted there? ... The trailer for Amy. On the other hand, I have access to two Capcom press sites and both of those are updated super quickly whenever they announce something. Back when Namco actually did update that press site with SC6 press assets, it was very random how slow or quickly they did it.


Raphael was the last character to be announced (if we ignore the 3-4 times he leaked...) so maybe it was supposed to be a reference to that?
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Ah, but I think there's been some confusion here: I'm definitely not saying every leak with regard to this game is part of some greater marketing framework (as you say, that would defy credulity for a company that gives such short shrift to this game when it comes to promotion). In fact, of the events covered n your eleven bullet-points above, it is only those detailed in the ninth that I find suspect: those which we in this ommunity have developed the shorthand of "the data leaks" to reference. These just all follow a pattern that is pretty hard to swallow as an ongoing mistake, given a) the repetitive fashion in which these 'mistakes' have occured, b) despite Namco getting feedback on said supposed errors via industry press and tweets directly to head developers about them, and c) with these names going into the code ages before there is any need for them (does anyone really believe any work had really gone into the assets for most (if any) of the codenamed six at the time those names went in?)

I held some small reservations when the mistake was repeated for Cassie, but when it came to the follow 'leak' there's just not much realistic believability to the notion that all six of those characters were in a stage of completion that necessitated entering their names into the code -in any capacity- at a point in time when Cassie hadn't even been released yet. Some of them are highly unlikely to have even entered into serious development even by today, based on what we know about the development timeline for the DLC of this game so far. That means there is no realistic explanation for those names being in there other than that Namco saw the way fans fell all over themselves when they discovered the value reference for Amy and have been engineering that same situation repeatedly since. And let's remember, this has happened four times now: Amy, Cassie, the codenamed six, and now specific ID values left in for Setsuka and Hwang in advance of their release. This is a pattern that makes more sense as an engineered scenario than sloppiness even if we didn't have the additional contextual evidence.

But as for the other ten categories of leak you cover, I personally don't see any reason to suspect that any of them are other than what they appear: the usual kind of genuine leaking that occasionally occurs due to relationships with development or platform partners if a high level of care is not taken to prevent them. But (aside from the last item, which i have to admit this is the first I am hearing of) they are all qualitatively different in nature from the so-called "data leaks", which involve information left in an officially released build for anyone to find.
 
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Rusted Blade said:
I couldn't agree more. Not to point fingers at anyone in particular (which would just feed back into the negative energy further), but sometimes there is way too much gravedancing here
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Seems Rusted is calling out grave dancing... So I have to confess, he’s talking about me!

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and I don’t regret any of it!
 
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Dissidia said:
Seems Rusted is calling out grave dancing... So I have to confess, he’s talking about me!

View attachment 75276

and I don’t regret any of it!
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No, not at all--I'm not pointing fingers at anyone in particular. There's certainly no shortage of people willing to talk trash about He Who Should Not Be Named--nor, it must be said, a shortage of legitimate reasons why they like to mock him, even in his absence. I just personally find that at a point it gets as tedious as the person who inspired that level of animosity and feel like it's probably time to move on. And bear in mind I say that as one of the people who (excepting Dante anyway) had to deal with his full volume as much as anybody.
 
I mean, y’all are free to openly mock me if/when Amy’s traveling companion isn’t Z.W.E.I., rather the one who will become him in the future. Extra chuckles if it it’s Grøh (not Wilhelm, it doesn’t make sense). I can take it. I just feel really strongly about my prediction there, but I’m sure you noticed.
 
Spanky said:
Agreed. It looks like a prototype for the lesbian barbarian imo.😂

In contrast, I did like the boob snakes on the bottom left; it's very "Ivy" to me, to mix sexuality with the snake motif.
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It's less the existence of snakes on her chest and more the size of them. I feel they'd have looked better as more subtle accents to some kind of bodice than the entirety of a boobplate thing.
 
mokamoka827 said:
It's less the existence of snakes on her chest and more the size of them. I feel they'd have looked better as more subtle accents to some kind of bodice than the entirety of a boobplate thing.
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That's a good point; I agree that would have been a better way to incorporate them.
 
To be honest, I would have forgiven Vergeben if he had apologized for giving false information or if he had just come clean about his fanfiction/speculation.

Similarly with Nyte. I don't remember if he actually apologized or not, but I'm fairly sure it was a weak or insincere apology. There was actually a period of time when I missed seeing Nyte post here (before his crazy shenanigans about the female newcomer and Rock) but then he became nasty over such an utterly insignificant thing (daring to challenge him on the newcomer idea/barbarian) and went absolutely ballistic.

It is why the Nyte has been made fun of for such a long time, his antics are extreme and his reactions are explosive. It is everything you could ask for in a forum based meltdown.

I don't think he's sorry, but I am glad that his misinformation campaign is over. But if he continues to have entertaining freakouts here or elsewhere I will get out my chair and enjoy my popcorn!

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if you have information that others don't you should be responsible with said information... leakers should be clear over what they know and what is speculation.

For example, one of the two 4chan leakers clarified and removed Lizardman and Hwang from the leaked roster list because they went and verified that they weren't there.

From what I've seen of vergeben on gamefaqs/reddit and other forums he seems to really relish to attention he gets...so this is all just an ego boost for him. Of course his reputation for soulcalibur leaks have been absolutely assblasted into the sun, but he seems to have some credibility with the smelly smash players....
 
that Ivy SC2 1p concept art has a sizeable elbow buckler, which would look pretty silly in-game. I'm glad they're releasing these concept art (albeit from photos) because otherwise we would only have low-res scans (and some I've never seen before!).

Makes me wonder if they're going to contemplate releasing legacy costume parts as part of the upcoming CAS DLC.
 
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