EGMi Cover Story for Soul Calibur V
- Thread starter Malice
- Start date
KingAce
HERMITISM
No where does Daishi say he's going to intentionally unbalance SC5. You're all miss quoting him.
"....And Street Fighter IV was really well done-certain moves would cause a lot of damage, and the balancing was quite interesting to someone who's interested specifically in fighting games. That balance seemed to change when they introduced Super Street Fighter IV, though; the game was, of course, more balanced as a whole, but it lost some of its uniqueness, I guess? Personally, I thought it was more interesting before."
There's also a concept in Japanese called wabi-sabi, which means "a perfect balance between too much and too little." So, it's not like you can just make everything over the top and it'll be OK; some elements have to be kind of bland on purpose. [That even goes] for character; Some can be strong, and some we want to be kind of weak, on purpose. That's a perfect balance from the Japanese mentality."
I can clearly see where Daishi is coming from and it's not something as simple as an unbalanced game is ideally better than a balanced one.
From SF4 to SSF4, I personally felt because of the larger roster, and better balance the game lost something. Daishi calls it a lack of uniqueness. And that's something that I would say exists in T6 as well, despite the game being balanced. The characters don't standout at all. The roster is larger but to maintain that balance the characters come off very similar. Even though the animation or fighting disciplines are different the moves perform the same tasks with the same power.
The trick for designing a competitive game is, the smaller the selection the easier to balance while maintaining the uniqueness or distinction of each character. The larger selection, makes it harder to balance without basically cloning everything.
In SC some characters are good punishers, some characters have incredible ringouts, some are faster, and some do massive amounts of damage. And also unlike other fighters the weapon disciplines personify the characters. I feel the balance Daishi is talking about lies within these distinctions. Not overall competitive balance, as in 7:3 match-ups and such.
"....And Street Fighter IV was really well done-certain moves would cause a lot of damage, and the balancing was quite interesting to someone who's interested specifically in fighting games. That balance seemed to change when they introduced Super Street Fighter IV, though; the game was, of course, more balanced as a whole, but it lost some of its uniqueness, I guess? Personally, I thought it was more interesting before."
There's also a concept in Japanese called wabi-sabi, which means "a perfect balance between too much and too little." So, it's not like you can just make everything over the top and it'll be OK; some elements have to be kind of bland on purpose. [That even goes] for character; Some can be strong, and some we want to be kind of weak, on purpose. That's a perfect balance from the Japanese mentality."
I can clearly see where Daishi is coming from and it's not something as simple as an unbalanced game is ideally better than a balanced one.
From SF4 to SSF4, I personally felt because of the larger roster, and better balance the game lost something. Daishi calls it a lack of uniqueness. And that's something that I would say exists in T6 as well, despite the game being balanced. The characters don't standout at all. The roster is larger but to maintain that balance the characters come off very similar. Even though the animation or fighting disciplines are different the moves perform the same tasks with the same power.
The trick for designing a competitive game is, the smaller the selection the easier to balance while maintaining the uniqueness or distinction of each character. The larger selection, makes it harder to balance without basically cloning everything.
In SC some characters are good punishers, some characters have incredible ringouts, some are faster, and some do massive amounts of damage. And also unlike other fighters the weapon disciplines personify the characters. I feel the balance Daishi is talking about lies within these distinctions. Not overall competitive balance, as in 7:3 match-ups and such.
WuHT
Premium Moderator
I'm going to be optimistic and think that it IS possible to maintain overall balance while not sacrificing character-specific uniqueness.
Considering the SC engine, you could have your jack-of-all-trades characters with the solid core basics:
1) can step kill
2) good poke damage
3) safe fast launcher
4) decent low
(your basic character, which imo is the most boring but also tends to be the strongest in the soul series)
while some others, would lack some of the above, but could compensate by specializing in:
1) ring outs and/or wall combos
2) long-range keep-away
3) oki
5) CH fishing
6) ability to exploit the effect of the new soul gauge
7) ability to generate new soul gauge/damage enemy soul gauge
8) stance shenanigans
9) strong aGI/evasion
10) increased grab range
11) ..etc
(which imo is usually traits we see on the lower-tier character that makes them stand out)
We don't have the same "problem" with the tekken homogeneous strat AND execution of commands, which inherently makes it tougher to balance initially (hence why hearing about even a slight interest from the dev team about a patch is very exciting) because soul calibur seems to have a lot more variables and therefore will require some hindsight to correctly balance.
What I don't like is how some characters are more defined by weaknesses than their strengths (because the weakness is too glaring, exploitable, and damaging).
Overall, I just hope that the decision process is not "lets make this character weak overall but with ONE strength". It'll be more positive if they took a character with a strong gimmick, then made 1 or 2 core properties slightly weaker to compensate.
Raphael for example, is highly vulnerable to step, but he can't get respect as a character with incredible speed/reach combination (because imo this strength is overshadowed by his weakness).
Maxi has pretty poor frames on his basic moves, but even his loops are not strong enough to compensate and suffers from a similiar fate.
The thing is, if the "gimmick" characters are actually overpowered, that is worse for the game than having them be underpowered. For instance, having a character that can you ring you out from anywhere being the top character, really cheeses people extra hard.
Gimmicks imo are always harder to predict( at the development stage) how strong they would eventually be, release date SC5 may not be acceptably balanced, but just pray for patches to rectify that.
Considering the SC engine, you could have your jack-of-all-trades characters with the solid core basics:
1) can step kill
2) good poke damage
3) safe fast launcher
4) decent low
(your basic character, which imo is the most boring but also tends to be the strongest in the soul series)
while some others, would lack some of the above, but could compensate by specializing in:
1) ring outs and/or wall combos
2) long-range keep-away
3) oki
5) CH fishing
6) ability to exploit the effect of the new soul gauge
7) ability to generate new soul gauge/damage enemy soul gauge
8) stance shenanigans
9) strong aGI/evasion
10) increased grab range
11) ..etc
(which imo is usually traits we see on the lower-tier character that makes them stand out)
We don't have the same "problem" with the tekken homogeneous strat AND execution of commands, which inherently makes it tougher to balance initially (hence why hearing about even a slight interest from the dev team about a patch is very exciting) because soul calibur seems to have a lot more variables and therefore will require some hindsight to correctly balance.
What I don't like is how some characters are more defined by weaknesses than their strengths (because the weakness is too glaring, exploitable, and damaging).
Overall, I just hope that the decision process is not "lets make this character weak overall but with ONE strength". It'll be more positive if they took a character with a strong gimmick, then made 1 or 2 core properties slightly weaker to compensate.
Raphael for example, is highly vulnerable to step, but he can't get respect as a character with incredible speed/reach combination (because imo this strength is overshadowed by his weakness).
Maxi has pretty poor frames on his basic moves, but even his loops are not strong enough to compensate and suffers from a similiar fate.
The thing is, if the "gimmick" characters are actually overpowered, that is worse for the game than having them be underpowered. For instance, having a character that can you ring you out from anywhere being the top character, really cheeses people extra hard.
Gimmicks imo are always harder to predict( at the development stage) how strong they would eventually be, release date SC5 may not be acceptably balanced, but just pray for patches to rectify that.
EbonyBlack
[06] Combatant
Quoted for truth.