I look hesitantly optimistic about this. Calibur has a large enough casual base to justify a release if done correctly. But I think we all know the odds of that happening are. The series has endured a legacy of terrible mismanagement.
-Soul Calibur 3 getting released to console before testing in arcades leaving us with a broken game and putting the weight of balance on the community
Wait, you mean that issue that caused the game to randomly force you to delete it from your Memory Card?
-Soul Calibur 4 giving us a broken S tier character and ignoring the problem, causing further strain on the community
To be fair, Yoda was a guest character, and there is no one else they could have added to the game that was classic on his level.
-Soul Calibur 5 internal development in-fighting: dev team groups arguing over which mechanics were too simple; game rushed out the door a year early in lieu of moving their development team to help with Smash Bros; terrible online matchmaking and lobby options; buggy net code that caused matches to crash regularly (which of course was fixed in Tekken but not Calibur); Hosting a tournament and not paying/ignoring the winner for months until it got blown up on social media. I'm missing some other big ones too.
I haven't heard about this problem with a tournament. But the Online mode was the least of SCV's issues.
But you know what was most apparent from the drama of 5 is that the "Team Soul" cares far more about their Tekken IP than anything else, and the people who DID care were overruled and rushed off the project. Our community leader that NB employed for the release of 5 did the best he could but you could tell his heart was not in Calibur, it is in Tekken.
Many of the features that could have seen the light of day, such as Tag style matching simply didn't happen most likely to eliminate the competition between it and the Tekken Tag game that was released around the same time, which didn't do well. What a shit reason not to include a mechanic. Decisions made out of fear.
Considering the game was rushed, I think it was a very good idea to not implement a Tag Team feature in SCV. The gameplay was the only thing that ended up being fine, and rushing an important feature would end up making the game a total mess. If it wasn't rushed, however, it wouldn't be a bad thing.
You could tell that the timeline for 5 went from caring love to being rushed out the door. You know what hurt 5 the most? The hack-patch that came swiftly in the night that harshly penalized 8-wayrun movement. I'm not debating whether or not the patch was the right thing in the end, but what was obvious is that it wasn't not communicated to the community well, and you know what happened? People started leaving in droves. The game was turned on its head practically overnight. Even the strategy guide that was assembled over painstaking hours by the some of the community was voided the moment that the game was patched and repatched.
Time and time again, mismanagement from higher up has crippled the community and turned it against itself. And finally they did the worst, and pissed off their casual community with a half finished game with no content. Here we all come together with a love for soul calibur franchise, and in the end we stop playing it. It's sad.
There is no love for Calibur at the moment. Only disappointment in what could have been an amazing series that could have made NB loads of cash. I remain hopeful, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, they really fucked up on the content part.
Things like story and single player come second in a fighting game. SCV was just that, a fighting game. There was a colossal natural disaster, and they prioritized what was important in order to get the game out since Namco are greedy fucks and pushed it out the door. For a game that the devs had no choice but to rush, SCV is quite exceptional in my opinion.
Wrong, horribly wrong, I must say. Or do you really think that Story Mode was not something hyped for in a game like Mortal Kombat X, for example? Street Fighter managed to survive without that for a while, but even Capcom noticed they cannot survive without a Story focus (despite the fact that SFV is also an unfinished mess, it doesn't even have an Arcade Mode). This thing of "fighting game doesn't need a story" isn't true, big fighting games are already moving to work on their stories because that is good, that sells. Also, the devs DID have a choice, I wouldn't have minded and neither would have the community if the game was delayed for a much better result. A game without content is bad and gameplay doesn't save anyone because gameplay is not a feature.
