Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

Except katars, tonfas, or any short ranged weapon in Calibur aren’t even in the same league as Azwel’s gauntlets. Hell, I wouldn’t even classify the gauntlets as short ranged weapons given what can come out of them.
Its simple really. Characters already have gauntlets as clothing items and there will be confusion as to whether gauntlets are solely cosmetic or for actual combat. Secondly, you will still have a massive range disadvantage against even katar/tonfa, since you could always CAS your character to the smallest size and now the game's gotta do extra balancing due to this extreme.

In Azwel's case
• I don't like his moveset and I think he's out of place. He'll join the class of characters like Necrid / Algol / Azwel that seem to infect the series but there's always enough interest to bring them in for canonical/story reasons. Azwel is a step in the right direction, because at least you always see the gloves and he's not just protruding spikes out of his body for no reason.
• Azwel is not actually striking you with metal gauntlets, they're just magical conduits that emit energy weapons (makes me want to vomit thinking how out of place this is). Characters like Ivy and Zas do the "battle wizard" or "warrior that can also summon magic" way better because at the of the day you're still identifying them with their whip sword and death scythe first.

Considering CAS isnt used in competitive play, I dont see why the balance matters here. Especially when its already broken for balance with the normal weapons. Clipping issues already exist, character size issues already exist, enlarging items to cover certain parts already exists. What problem would a brawler style actually add here? And the arm part issue? Make anything that covers the hands incompatible with the style. Or have the weapon overwrite the hand part of the gauntlets, like how some clothing parts shorten/get tucked in when paired with certain leg items.

Not sure why Azwel keeps getting brought up. He's clearly not a hand to hand fighter. His style clearly doesnt fit the topic. His actual weapons are conjured weapons, not his fists. Actually, I've never tried customizing Azwel, but aren't his gauntlets just arm parts? When you change his "weapons" you just change the color of his conjurations.

For everyone bring up issues with range and citing the Tekken guests, they were TEKKEN GUESTS. They had pre-established fighting styles that were brought over to SoulCalibur with some tweaks (and I personally found them both to be fun). They weren't movesets that were built from the ground up for SoulCalibur, for use against characters with varying ranges and in a system with a very free range of movement. A new character with this kind of style would be made with these things in mind. Moves that get them in their opponent's face quickly, quick dashes, moves with GI and/or evasive properties, they have plenty of ways to make it work.

And hey, do you absolutely need something in their hands instead of around them? Give them a pair of something like brass knuckles or a short claw weapon like a bagh nakh.

I just plain dont see how a single character using this kind of fighting style, whether they have gloves, gauntlets, or some form of fist supplementary weapon, would break the spirit of the game just because they were different. Billy Kane sure doesnt ruin Fatal Fury or KoF by using a staff. Now if they started throwing in several of them in a single game? That might be a little weird. But one? Come on. Especially so if it's on a new guest who probably wont come back anyway.
 
I just plain dont see how a single character using this kind of fighting style, whether they have gloves, gauntlets, or some form of fist supplementary weapon, would break the spirit of the game just because they were different. Billy Kane sure doesnt ruin Fatal Fury or KoF by using a staff. Now if they started throwing in several of them in a single game? That might be a little weird. But one? Come on. Especially so if it's on a new guest who probably wont come back anyway.
Personally im' not even a fan of vega having claws in SF but its been in the game so long.

here is where it is different:
• Billy Kane has an additional weapon. He's still free to use his feet, elbows, fists, knees.. etc. So this is a character with additional perks that no one else gets.
• In soul calibur, a weaponless fighter will be a character that is missing something, and is strictly a negative. He doesn't have a weapon, and in order to be somewhat competitive this character will probably have some absurd imbalanced aspect somewhere else. A fist weapon (Katar) already exists in literally every version of the game. It'll take a lot of creative muscle to design a fist weapon smaller than a Katar that is also immediately recognizable (since the whole point of fist weapons like brass knuckles is to have a concealed weapon, and not for the pure effectiveness) and cool at the same time.
• Supplemental side-arm fist weapon is ok however. But you'll have to design it intelligently rather than shoehorn it in.
• Lastly, for punches, you could go with nightmare. His punch with his monster arm probably hits harder than a mule kick.
 
Every attempt to make a weaponless style has been awkward and out-of-place (Heihachi, Devil Jin) because the game just doesn't lend itself for it.
I'm sorry, but that's pretty much begging the question, don't you see? You're just re-asserting the premise you want to support, as support for that premise: it's a circular argument that doesn't really build your case. There are -plenty- of players who adored the Tekken guests and continue to do so to this day: any time I go back to play some SCII or SCV with my couch play buddies, those two get plenty of play, even with the aggravating fact that Devil Jin ends up rendered with an inconsistent model/proportions.

So, in what specific way does Soulcalibur "not lend itself" to a non-armed fighter? Given the variety of the existing and historical rosters, with their various concepts and mechanics, and the complete lack of respect for physics, logistics, or basic reality in every single second of Soulcalibur that has ever been played by anyone anywhere, I really don't see any principled reason why an unarmed fighter is so much as on whit more sensible than the quadruple-jointed gimp, the fighting lizard with mystical wings, the robinhood wooden-cyborg demon bandit, or the twenty thousand recent characters who summon ghost weapons from mid-air... Honestly, the objections here really feel like nothing more than a taste thing that people are trying to backstop with vaguely-defined "it's not in the character of the series" rhetoric...which, I'm sorry just doesn't track as an argument when you are talking about a property that is the king of irreverent, goofy, anything-goes thematics in its medium.

Likewise, the arguments regarding mechanics are just as ambiguously approached: yes of course there will be a challenge in balancing to account for limited range, but given how much the design of the games in this franchise already heavily leverages inattention blindness and other quirks of human visual cognition to get away with allowing characters (who if you looked frame-by-frame are clearly constantly clipping through their weapons and eachother) to get from point A to point B in a movement faster than they should have been able to or in a way that would look badly if you slowed it down but works fine at speed (every character has a dozen of these at least), I really don't see the problem at all.

And even to the extent that you might need to compensate these characters for their short range with novel mechanics and strengths in other areas, that's not exactly a problem but rather an opportunity to add texture to the overall game, provided it is handled in a skillfull way that takes into account the holistic balance of the game--and given their success with recent adaptations, I have absolutely zero problem assuming PS are up to that task. It has been, in fact, one of their great strengths across the years as developers and continues to be one in this entry to date. And when you consider that likely guest brawlers already have visual designs in movement that allow them to close the gap fast, you can see the problem of range is not really much an issue at all. And again, they've done it twice before..

And frankly, given the notorious budget constraints, the absolute last thing we need is the devs wasting their time developing and balancing a fighting style that only a minuscule subset of the player base will use . . . Fans are sick of waiting for their mains to come back.
This has been talked about at great length here in the past: guest characters substantially increase the number of legacy characters that ultimately get added to the game by making season passes much more financially viable for the developer: in other words, they do the opposite of "taking spots" from mains that people want to see come back. Since a brawler is quite likely to be a guest, problem solved.

...so that little Johnny can make his Dragon Ball characters.
Ok, and here you're just engaging in a psuedo-strawman argument with a twist of patronizing nerd shaming (as if that should ever be a thing when it comes to people who support this, of all franchises). First off, one person above said that brawlers are good for CaS: that doesn't mean that it is the only reason why the characters have utility: they are also good for gameplay variety and depth regarding the game's overall mechanics, and there are plenty of people who will never open the creation editor who will nevertheless still be keen on those gameplay options or just eager to see a specific potential guest in this area, or who would otherwise embrace such a character for any number of other reasons.

Second, whether it is your cup of tea or not, the CaS elements unquestionably helps support this series and keep it afloat in an increasingly crowded and (until a recent uptake) a simultaneously declining genre; it's an important aspect to other consumers of this product and not seeing that doesn't make you a more elite fan, it just means you are missing some of the mental calculus that the development team and publishing arm at Namco will continue to factor in, whether it is to your taste or not. And for those who do like the artistic aspect of CaS, yes it would very much be nice to have a dedicated unarmed combatant.
 
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I'm sorry, but that's pretty much begging the question, don't you see? You're just re-asserting the premise you want to support, as support for that premise: it's a circular argument that doesn't really build your case. There are -plenty- of players who adored the Tekken guests and continue to do so to this day: any time I go back to play some SCII or SCV with my couch play buddies, those two get plenty of play, even with the aggravating fact that Devil Jin ends up rendered with an inconsistent model/proportions.

So, in what specific way does Soulcalibur "not lend itself" to a non-armed fighter? Given the variety of the existing and historical rosters, with their various concepts and mechanics, and the complete lack of respect for physics, logistics, or basic reality in every single second of Soulcalibur that has ever been played by anyone anywhere, I really don't see any principled reason why an unarmed fighter is so much as on whit more sensible than the quadruple-jointed gimp, the fighting lizard with mystical wings, the robinhood wooden-cyborg demon bandit, or the twenty thousand recent characters who summon ghost weapons from mid-air... Honestly, the objections here really feels like nothing more than a taste thing that people are trying to backstop with vaguely-defined "it's not in the character of the series"...which, I'm sorry just doesn't track as an argument when you are talking about the property that is the king of irreverent, goofy, anything-goes thematics in this medium.

Likewise, the arguments regarding mechanics are just as ambiguously approached: yes of course there will be a challenge in balancing to account for limited range, but given how much the design of the games in this franchise already heavily leverage inattention blindness and other quirks of human visual cognition to get away with allowing characters (who if you looked frame-by-frame are clearly constantly clipping through their weapons and eachother) to get from point A to point B in a movement faster than they should have been able to or in a way that would look badly if you slowed it down but works fine at speed (every character has a dozen of these at least), I really don't see the problem at all.

And even to the extent that you might need to compensate these characters for their short range with novel mechanics and strengths in other areas, that's not exactly a problem but rather an opportunity to add texture to the overall game, provided it is handled in a skillfull way that takes into account the holistic balance of the game--and given their success with recent adaptations, I have absolutely zero problem assuming PS are up to that task. It has been, in fact, one of their great strengths across the years as developers and continues to be one in this entry to date. And when you consider that likely guest brawlers already have visual designs in movement that allow them to close the gap fast, you can see the problem of range is not really much an issue at all. And again, they've done it twice before..


This has been talked about at great length here in the past: guest characters substantially increase the number of legacy characters that ultimately get added to the game by making season passes much more financially viable for the developer: in other words, they do the opposite of "taking spots" from mains that people want to see come back. Since a brawler is quite likely to be a guest, problem solved.


Ok, and here you're just engaging in a psuedo-strawman argument with a twist of patronizing nerd shaming (as if that should ever be a thing when it comes to people who support this, of all franchises). First, one person above said that brawlers are good for CaS: that doesn't mean that it is the only reason why the characters have utility: they are also good for gameplay variety and depth for the mechanics, and there are plenty of people who will never open the editor who will still be keen on those gameplay options or just to see a specific potential guest in this area, or for any number of other reasons.

Second, whether it is your cup of tea or not, the CaS elements unquestionably helps support this series and keep it afloat in an increasingly crowded and (until a recent uptake) a simultaneously declining genre; it's an important aspect to other consumers of this product and your not seeing that doesn't make you a more elite fan, it just means you are missing some of the mental calculus that the development team and publishing arm at Namco will continue to factor in, whether it is to your taste or not. And for those who do like the artistic aspect of CaS, yes it would very much be nice to have a dedicated unarmed combatant.
Just needed to co-sign this whole fucking post.

With all this non sequitur complaint about range, you'd hardly expect as many fans to be excited for -- demanding even -- Setsuka's return. I personally can't abide using her because her mechanics and playstyle don't fit my sensibilities or reflexes at all. In my hands, she's a way worse balancing option than a character with a rushdown style built around closing distance and comboing.

Nonetheless, I'm excited for Setsuka's return and Namco will be getting my money for it because a) I know other players are going to be really happy about it, and b) I appreciate the boon to the game's overall variety.

Hell, I wasn't even a fan of using Heihachi for that matter, but my brother was, and he was good with him. Cut the Tekken mechanics out, and I can definitely see there being potential for a brawler to be fun in this game.
 
With all this non sequitur complaint about range, you'd hardly expect as many fans to be excited for -- demanding even -- Setsuka's return. I personally can't abide using her because her mechanics and playstyle don't fit my sensibilities or reflexes at all. In my hands, she's a way worse balancing option than a character with a rushdown style built around closing distance and comboing.

Nonetheless, I'm excited for Setsuka's return and Namco will be getting my money for it because a) I know other players are going to be really happy about it, and b) I appreciate the boon to the game's overall variety.
I have exactly the same degree of affinity for and ability with her very niche style, and the same disposition on that being perfectly ok; her style always felt clunky to me, but obviously it clicks with certain people, because she's never been regarded as anywhere near a low tier character that I can recall. Regardless,not every DLC has to be for me. I typically still like the variety in play and mix-ups in the scene that a new character brings, even if I don't plan to log a huge amount of time with them on my end.

As to the broader question of whether the game can accomodate rushdown characters with extremely limited range with their simpler moves, but with a bag of tricks to get in under the opponents offense or defense, there's only, let's see aside from Setsuka: Talim, classic era Amy, Taki, Maxi, and a fair number of other characters with varying degrees of that combination of traits.

Hell, I wasn't even a fan of using Heihachi for that matter, but my brother was, and he was good with him. Cut the Tekken mechanics out, and I can definitely see there being potential for a brawler to be fun in this game.
The fact that you can't even 2G with him in the SCII:HDO version of the game and yet people went crazy playing him during the narrow window when that game was viable for online play speaks to just how fun he can be. If, with that particular limitation being coupled with the very mediocre range, he is still enjoyable and kinda-sorta, vaguely viable in that game, then they did something right.

Though personally, I really do think that Tifa is the character that makes sense for them if a brawler were to be added: if there is a season 3, and it follows the pattern of the first two by having the guest character second, the timing could be almost perfect for being contemporaneous with the release of the second entry in the FFVII Remake--that's significant cross-promotional value/appeal for both parties there. Which is not to say that someone like Kazuya would not be welcome as well, as far as I am concerned.
 
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Fist weapons are fine and the concerns about range are moot when zoning tools can be achieved with the extension of the body and how much of a leap forward you take with attacks. Using Heihachi's or Devil Jin's moveset as an example is also largely irrelevant because they had their Tekken moves planted in Soul Calibur which will always come with their own problems when you do crossovers. What a close range fighter should be built around is closing the neutral to use damaging up close attacks. This is nothing special in SC6, Yoshimitsu and Taki have exactly the same issue that they have to close the gap. There's also the option to have moves with GI properties that can make this close range fighter deadly at mid range, where certain moves pull in the opponent and making say, Mina's and Ivy's zoning tools risky to spam.
 
List of ways in which a short range character could close the distance and play around SC VI mechanics is immense. Brawler character would be a perfect addition considering how diverse the cast is at the moment.
Also on a side note - personally I would consider it a nice homage to that one Soul Blade mechanic
 
personally I would consider it a nice homage to that one Soul Blade mechanic
I was waiting for this to come up :) I agree it'd be an awesome throwback!

After giving it some thought, I do think a brawler/gloved character could work. Like anything, as long as the gameplay is thoughtfully designed so it's integrated reasonably into SC's mechanics, it can work. I feel like the trick is to make sure it doesn't just come off as Tekken being dumped into SC or something to that effect. (I like to believe that could actually be accomplished...)
 
I was waiting for this to come up :) I agree it'd be an awesome throwback!

After giving it some thought, I do think a brawler/gloved character could work. Like anything, as long as the gameplay is thoughtfully designed so it's integrated reasonably into SC's mechanics, it can work. I feel like the trick is to make sure it doesn't just come off as Tekken being dumped into SC or something to that effect. (I like to believe that could actually be accomplished...)
Come to think of it - a well thought-out gameplay should be mandatory for any kind of character but I know what you mean. I'm pretty sure it would work out just fine and could be really fun. Also they wouldn't be burdened by Tekken moveset if the character would be from a different franchise (preferably Tifa but it ain't that simple)
 
I think a brawler style could work, honestly. Mainly because PS could come up with a wholly original moveset rather than being somewhat restricted to Heihachi and Devil Jin's Tekken moveset. I think it'd be fun to see Grieve Edge come back with the addition of some kinda brass knuckles or something. As far as the whole range issue, they could implement certain moves to close distance like Talim has.
 
Sometimes I wish Project Soul would hold a contest like this, maybe for CaS sets or something, but then I look at their track record for guest-designed costumes and, well... I'm not very confident that the winning designs would be any good. It would probably end with a bunch of ecchi designs for the female characters, and one boring design for males that was picked just because they needed a male costume.
 
Setsuka or Hwang trailer today?

omg
kimono = setsuka wears a kimono. setsuka reveal coming in 1 hour and 28 minutes confirmed.

I've said this already but while i didn't play Summer Lesson but i really love the overall tech used on it, specially on the characters models, it remind me of early techs used by Namco in their first games on PS1. An Example: It's like Summer Lesson ingame = First RR games CGI


On the topic of SC6 future: I actually wouldn't mind no season 3 if it means an SC7 at early as possible in next gen, a SC7 with big budget, early next gen, and that hopefully will be getting support for the entire gen, of course those are things way too far from now.
 
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omg
kimono = setsuka wears a kimono. setsuka reveal coming in 1 hour and 28 minutes confirmed.

I knew Setsuka won't be announced today especially with MK11 Aftermath releasing last Tuesday & SFV: Season V announced yesterday.
MK11: Aftermath - More Story & Kombat Pack 2.
SFV: Season V - 5 characters & 3 new stages.
I don't remember Namco announcing & releasing DLC characters unless it's 3 - 4 months after the last one was released.
 
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