Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

yeah i kinda recognized the two lions + sword there too, but didnt think it was a unique sorel family crest until now
I had always assumed it was unique to the Sorels since we see it in the official artwork of both Raphael and Amy as their background motif. I'm wondering, in the event it's not just a generic design to have on Wilhelm's breastplate, if maybe it's a hint in the lore for some kind of connection. In any event, whatever it is (or isn't) we'll probably all have to wait until SC7 to find out.
 
Okubo has done great job on SC6 and also T7, but it wasn't just that, but he became kind of the figure of SC. But i don't think we should be sad about this, but instead we should wish him good luck.

Also Okubo leaving doesn't mean no SC7, what decide on SC future are the sales and the SC6's were pretty good, there are a bunch of talented people inside Bamco you have no idea, Okubo was one guy no body ever heard about and played big role on T7 developpement "from harada's own words", and made SC6 a thing, without mentioning the other super talented people in the staff of Project Soul.

Hope the best for Okubo, and can't wait for SC7. (But yeah for SC6 Season 3 i don't think this will happen lol, not a big deal tbh as long as the franchise continue with new games)
 
well fuck... i wish Okubo the best and hope he can keep going strong wherever he goes.
As off now the counter of SoulCalibur 7 releasing has gone from "in the next 2 or 3 years" to "God only knows" something will come out from this IP just before their IP rights expire, that should be around August 2040 ... i get the feeling we will see a pachinko slotmachine coming just to preserve the IP rights ... FeelsBadMan
 
well fuck... i wish Okubo the best and hope he can keep going strong wherever he goes.
As off now the counter of SoulCalibur 7 releasing has gone from "in the next 2 or 3 years" to "God only knows" something will come out from this IP just before their IP rights expire, that should be around August 2040 ... i get the feeling we will see a pachinko slotmachine coming just to preserve the IP rights ... FeelsBadMan
SoulCalibur IP rights belong to Bamco as they always did and will never expire. This is not a Marvel type of deal with IP rights getting chooped to tiny pieces to be sold, rented and pawned to 100 different companies under 100 different contracts.
 
SoulCalibur IP rights belong to Bamco as they always did and will never expire. This is not a Marvel type of deal with IP rights getting chooped to tiny pieces to be sold, rented and pawned to 100 different companies under 100 different contracts.
That's even scarier, imagine they could just put SC on the shelve just to gather dust for years to come cus they dont have the NEED to do anything. like i said God only knows ... im sadder than before...
 
Okubo being the producer got us SC6 + a couple of season passes (3 guest characters) which exceeded my expectation.
2nd season pass had delayed release, but couldn't fault him for that.

I'm hoping they keep the same game director (yoshinori takahashi). Creatively the gameplay is leaps and bounds ahead of SC5.
 
Okubo did a great job as the producer so it sucks to see him go. But on the bright side, we still have Takahashi who is the director of the game. People forget that it's the director who handles most of the creative decisions made in games, the producer's job is mostly on the public relations (player feedback and game promotions) and business (game budget and dealing with investors) side of the game development which is why Okubo is seen as the face of the game. But as long as we still have the director, we should still be good.

I still believe we'll be getting SOULCALIBUR VII in the future since the sales are good and it was well received. I'm not sure about SOULCALIBUR VI getting a Season 3 though but TEKKEN 7 continued to get new season passes even after its producer (ironically Okubo) left the team.



Harada has won.
Soul Calibur has been silenced.
Now Project Soul can be pulled into Tekken 8.
😭
I don't get how Harada wins by "silencing" SoulCalibur. Harada was the guy who reassigned Okubo, alongside many other developers, from the TEKKEN 7 team into Project Soul to begin with. He was even on stage next to Okubo during the unveiling of the game. Just because Harada is the Tekken guy doesn't mean he has a heated rivalry against SoulCalibur, in fact he co-directed SOULCALIBUR IV.

In the case that Project Soul does get pulled into Tekken (since a good amount of developers working on SOULCALIBUR VI were from the Tekken team to begin with), I have no doubt that a lot of them will return to SoulCalibur alongside other Tekken developers when they're done with their work.
 
Okubo did a great job as the producer so it sucks to see him go. But on the bright side, we still have Takahashi who is the director of the game. People forget that it's the director who handles most of the creative decisions made in games, the producer's job is mostly on the public relations (player feedback and game promotions) and business (game budget and dealing with investors) side of the game development which is why Okubo is seen as the face of the game. But as long as we still have the director, we should still be good.
Yeah fighting for the budget to get SC6 started and fighting to get a 2nd season pass approved seems to be Okubo's biggest triumphs. I imagine he had the final say on who the 3rd party guest character selection is as well in his capacity as game producer.
While I imagine the producer is responsible for hitting deadlines, I think covid's impact gave him an out for the delayed S2 character releases.

I'm still in the camp that thinks that SC7 won't be announced until Tekken 8 is a thing.

Somewhat related thoughts:
SC6's creative team seems to have a lot more free reign compared to Tekken.

For example, if you look at the unique resources / charged properties of the returning veterans characters in the DLC bundles in SC, compared to the returning veterans in Tekken, its a vast difference. Perhaps Tekken 7 really values nostalgia, and too much change is actually a bad thing.
Tekken DLC characters seem like tweaked versions of their prior selves, while the overwhelming majority of SC characters seem like overhauls (ranging from slight to almost unrecognizable in the case of Hwang)
I'm sure there's tons of hitbox / frame data changes for character in Tekken 6/7.. but largely they're the same with different combo paths. The same can't be said for someone like Hilde in SC5 vs SC6, since the charge timing mechanic was replaced with a charge-direction mechanic, and she gained some aesthetic regalia powerup states.
 
Okubo did a great job as the producer so it sucks to see him go. But on the bright side, we still have Takahashi who is the director of the game. People forget that it's the director who handles most of the creative decisions made in games, the producer's job is mostly on the public relations (player feedback and game promotions) and business (game budget and dealing with investors) side of the game development which is why Okubo is seen as the face of the game. But as long as we still have the director, we should still be good.

I still believe we'll be getting SOULCALIBUR VII in the future since the sales are good and it was well received. I'm not sure about SOULCALIBUR VI getting a Season 3 though but TEKKEN 7 continued to get new season passes even after its producer (ironically Okubo) left the team.

From the tweets I saw from masuooyama he passionately wants to continue working on Calibur so I know if SC7 is in the bag he should be there which is great IMO. My only concern about everything is Okubo leaving Bamco at this stage of Calibur's revival. I can't get rid of this thought that he bet his job that season 2 would be a success but didn't reach expectations. It just seems weird that he transitioned from Calibur to Pac-man then to his new workplace, it's all rather abrupt.

As for season 3 that ship has sailed. I honestly think it was in the works but got cancelled. Fuck this pandemic man, it really screwed up the momentum SC6 had.
 
Wow...... forget season 3, Soul Calibur 7 might not even become a thing.
Nah, I doubt this will have more than slight effect on the timeline for future games in the franchise, let alone present an existential threat to it's survival. SCVII was always going to be coming along quite a bit longer than the rosey-eyed optimists here wanted to predict, but at the same time, this is an established property which, despite some missteps and poor stewardship in the last decade, has continuing brand appeal. SCVII will come along in due course--I feel fairly certain of that.
Harada has won.
Soul Calibur has been silenced.
This whole idea that Harada and Okubo are somehow foes fighting for the fate of Tekken and SC respectively is a silly fiction created by salty stans who add a whole new level of speculation (short on any realistic insight into the industry and long on fabricated melodrama) every time there is the slightest setback for one franchise or the other. In reality, these two men are colleagues, and further are employees fairly well down the hierarchy of the overall Namco decision making chain. As developers, they are two senior figures on their respective teams, but they both get their marching order from higher up: the idea that they are in position to have some sort of machiavellian struggle for team resources is silly; the certain reality is that they have to coordinate very closely on these products and there's never been the least hint in interviews or industry media to suggest that they have anything but a perfectly friendly working relationship.
Now Project Soul can be pulled into Tekken 8.
😭
Uhhh, that's how it's always worked? Unlike some other internal development teams at Namco, Project Soul is not a standing studio: it's an adhoc team that gets reconstituted from creative and technical staff that are borrowed from other teams (primarily the Tekken development staff) whenever Namco decides to greenlight a new title in the series. That's why Soul Calibur games are always released a few years after the previous Tekken game: the more robust Tekken team is used to build competencies with the newest hardware first, and then when that entry goes to a downbeat, so to speak, some of their skilled labor assets are transferred to PS who use that experience to create the SC game on a typically tighter budget and timeline. That pattern has gotten a little more complicated with the new continuing support model, as we've seen with the timeline for content overlapping more than ever now, but the idea of PS being temporarily defunct is by now means anything remotely new.
As off now the counter of SoulCalibur 7 releasing has gone from "in the next 2 or 3 years" to "God only knows"
Honestly, for a large number of internal constraints (not the least of which is that we don't even know where Tekken 8 is in its development right now) and industry trends, I never expected SCVII would come before 2024-25, at the earliest. My hope and expectation is that this won't have a huge impact on that timeline. This is a massive corporation with some of the most robust human resources capacities of any company in all of the gaming industry: they have succession options for their teams and there's no reason to believe that the support for SCVI wasn't already cancelled before Okubo made the decision to move on. They'll have plenty of time to sort out who will take the reigns for the next title, and as artard notes, there are even some obvious candidates to step into lead development roles, regardless of official titles, which seem to fluctuate even more wildly at Namco than they do in this industry in general--which is to say, quite a lot!
That's even scarier, imagine they could just put SC on the shelve just to gather dust for years to come cus they dont have the NEED to do anything. like i said God only knows ... im sadder than before...
But that is a more realistic concern, honestly. Namco does have a massive portfolio of IP. At any given time, they can only fund titles and content for a small portion of these franchises, while the entire game development/publishing for console/PC arm of Namco also competes against other ventures. If SC does languish for a long time before SCVII, Namco's other priorities will probably be a big part of that.
But on the bright side, we still have Takahashi who is the director of the game. People forget that it's the director who handles most of the creative decisions made in games, the producer's job is mostly on the public relations (player feedback and game promotions) and business (game budget and dealing with investors) side of the game development which is why Okubo is seen as the face of the game. But as long as we still have the director, we should still be good.
In this case, i think you are probably right, but it is worth noting that the director/producer division of labor is not quite as clearly delineated for games as it is in other types of entertainment media: it can often be hard to know for certain what the duties of senior devs are in particular games just based on job titles. Here though, I think we have seen plenty of evidence in interviews that the dichotomy for SCVI worked more or less as you described above.
I imagine he had the final say on who the 3rd party guest character selection is as well in his capacity as game producer.
Undoubtedly he would have input, but I think it's more accurate to say that he had first say on who the third party characters were going to be, not "final"; those kinds of decisions, when huge multinationals license content from one-another, have to be approved through a fairly complex legal and budgeting process. I think with Haohmaru, we got to see a little beneath the hood here, when we saw (assuming it wasn't planned marketing) Okubo begin to float the idea of some sort of crossover content with a senior SamSho developer (I forget who) on Twitter, and then saw it come to fruition. I'm going to guess that Haohmaru didn't break the bank on licensing costs, but Okubo certainly would not be in a position to drag his feet and settle for only exactly those characters he would want.
I'm still in the camp that thinks that SC7 won't be announced until Tekken 8 is a thing.
Oh, not a chance in the universe that SCVII comes before T8.
SC6's creative team seems to have a lot more free reign compared to Tekken.

For example, if you look at the unique resources / charged properties of the returning veterans characters in the DLC bundles in SC, compared to the returning veterans in Tekken, its a vast difference. Perhaps Tekken 7 really values nostalgia, and too much change is actually a bad thing.
Tekken DLC characters seem like tweaked versions of their prior selves, while the overwhelming majority of SC characters seem like overhauls (ranging from slight to almost unrecognizable in the case of Hwang)
I'm sure there's tons of hitbox / frame data changes for character in Tekken 6/7.. but largely they're the same with different combo paths. The same can't be said for someone like Hilde in SC5 vs SC6, since the charge timing mechanic was replaced with a charge-direction mechanic, and she gained some aesthetic regalia powerup states.
I think this is dead-on accurate. And frankly, I wish that they could take a page from each-other's book and both moderate a little towards the middle: Tekken should be a little bit more adventerous and let each title strike a little bit more of a unique tone rather than retreading basically the same ground from title to title, while Soulcalibur needs to learn that it doesn't need to reinvent the wheel on everything every single game, including (most especially in SCVI) radical reworks of the basic character mechanics of 3/4 of the roster...
As for season 3 that ship has sailed. I honestly think it was in the works but got cancelled. Fuck this pandemic man, it really screwed up the momentum SC6 had.
Yup, I think that's fairly likely. There aren't any firm indicators that it got into the actual production stage, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't have detailed plans on what the content was going to be. Really unfortunate. But now that multiple season passes have been established as a thing that the FGC consumer doesn't reactively oppose for dumb and self-defeating reasons, and publishers have shown that they can handle the format while giving reasonable value on the dollar, I'm really hopeful that SCVII will end up being the game that finally unifies virtually the entire franchise roster. SCVI wasn't that far off, afterall. But honestly, it also wasn't one of my favorite games in the series when it comes to gameplay, aesthetic design, or the overall choice of priorities in terms of which parts of the game were polished and robust and which were skimpy.



And lastly, hey everybody! How is everyone?
 
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now that multiple season passes have been established as a thing that the FGC consumer doesn't reactively oppose for dumb and self-defeating reasons,
I think most agree is a necessary evil to have balance patches over a long period of time. If you consider all the new moves all the vanilla characters got, Season 2 SC6 is a very different beast. I can't imagine playing Yoshi without all of his new tools, or even the suggestions I asked for that got implemented.

SCVI wasn't that far off, afterall. But honestly, it also wasn't one of my favorite games in the series when it comes to gameplay, aesthetic design, or the overall choice of priorities in terms of which parts of the game were polished and robust and which were skimpy.
I'm surprised you mentioned gameplay not one of your favourites because I think it's the best even with it's flaws. It's easy to pick out garbage like RE, but making the actions of basic moves universal across all characters as well as the movement speed being the fastest in the series are just a couple of things that make SC6 really special compared to the previous games. I know aesthetics are subjective, but this is another area where I think they got right. I've never liked the gloomy visuals of SC4 and SC5, and while I would have liked brand new character models, I do find the fusion between those models and the bright, upbeat feel of the earlier games to be very satisfactory. Sound design and music is stellar in this game (especially after SC5 music which I pretty much hate every single one) so for me this is another reason why it's up there with the other top tier sound tracks of the series.

And lastly, hey everybody! How is everyone?
Kinda bored of gaming ATM, but it is the summer (more to the point, the end of summer) which usually means a drought of games. Publishers always holding the release of new games for the Christmas sales.
 
I'm still in the camp that thinks that SC7 won't be announced until Tekken 8 is a thing.
Oh, not a chance in the universe that SCVII comes before T8.
Technically there's a chance of SOULCALIBUR VII being announced before TEKKEN 8 is announced... and that's only if they decided they want to work on TEKKEN TAG TOURNAMENT 3 or Tekken X Street Fighter instead (who am I kidding, I'm sure they'd rather the next Tekken project be TEKKEN 8).

But for the most part, it makes a lot of sense for them to work on the next Tekken project first before working on the next SoulCalibur project. From my own observation, the workflow they're going for appears to be:
1. Have a big team focus on the next Tekken project.
2. Once the base game for Tekken is completed, the Tekken team is downsized to work on DLC as others move on to other projects.
3. Project Soul gains some developers from the Tekken team to focus on the next SoulCalibur project.
4. Once the base game for SoulCalibur is completed, the SoulCalibur team is downsized to work on DLC as others move on to other projects or back to Tekken.
5. Repeat Step 1.

Starting from Tekken 4 and counting arcade releases as first launch, major Tekken and Soulcalibur games have always been released in between each other:
Tekken 4 (2001)
SoulCalibur II (2002)
Tekken 5 (2004)
Soulcalibur III (2005)
Tekken 6 (2007)
SoulCalibur IV (2008)
Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (2011)
SoulCalibur V (2012)
TEKKEN 7 (2015)
SOULCALIBUR VI (2018)

It's also interesting to note that if we don't count Tekken Tag Tournament 2 as an actual entry then it would have been ~8 years between Tekken 6 and TEKKEN 7 which is an even greater gap than the ~6 years between SoulCalibur V and SOULCALIBUR VI.

Honestly, I don't think the SoulCalibur IP is in a bad spot especially with SOULCALIBUR VI exceeding expectations.
 
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