SoulCalibur V hype train has arrived at General land

Ariesboy88 wrote:
Just give us a female replacement who is fab.

Delayne wrote:

Ariesboy88 wrote:
Just give us a female replacement who is fab.

Just give us Setsuka

CFW wrote:Algol and Edgemaster.

Delayne wrote:

CFW wrote:Algol and Edgemaster.

*yawns irl*

Baldulf said: ↑
Let's get this straight, emblematic characters like Taki get the shaft because they don't fit the image of the game anymore but we have to suffer Algol again?

Great, just great.

Oh I was waiting for this one!

This one is image. One of the primary criticisms of the SC series is "too much fanservice", which is a nice way of saying it has a ton of overt sexuality in a negative way. I mean, articles have been written on breast size changes from game to game. Daishi has even commented about this as a negative issue. So, limiting this took many forms. When figuring out how to limit it, one must ask a basic question from a designer perspective. That question is:

Is it less detrimental to replace the character, or to change their image?

Characters like Ivy were perhaps deemed too iconic, or simple to fix. People also don't scoff at her sexuality as much because frankly when you are giving off a dominatrix air, it's expected. She may be wearing slightly more clothing, but she is no less sexual as a character.

Characters like Sophie and Taki were deemed not iconic enough, or that changing their image was too in contrast to do. The sexuality present in these characters was frankly just out-of-character, and over the top. You could shrink Taki's boobs and remove her camel-toe, or you could just make an entirely new character, which falls more in line with moving away from the old.

Regarding Algol, the game engine is extremely unfriendly to runaway and turtling styles of play. If they put Algol in directly from SC4; he would get destroyed utterly, easily at that. Obviously he needs to be modified for the new engine, new systems and what have you. I figure this alone will make him bear only a passing resemblance to his SC4 self.

What Algol actually needs is an image overhaul. Feathers? Floating? Claws? Sword Arms? Bubbles as the projectile that come out of a gun-arm? Yeah there are better ways to represent all of these things from an aesthetic perspective that are much less ugly.

I don't even know what everyone was so shocked about either. Part of Project Souls emphasis, design wise, is to rectify the mistakes of SC4. Algol and Hilde are cited as those major mistakes. If you've been following what they've been saying and not had a head-in-the-clouds view of the development, it's very obvious he would be back in some form.

That being said, it should also be clear as to the kind of things they want to exclude, too. Perhaps maybe I just have that view because I already know, but it seems obvious to me. It seems that many people's speculation isn't touching on design sensibility. I have tried to say over and over in here that false lines of logic are being used in the speculative process, such as story or designer favoritism. The only lines of logic that are at all relevant are the design teams motives (not their personal preferences) and the ability to make the title seem like a departure from previous installments in many different ways.

If you look back at their choices, they all make sense within that frame of reference. If you don't understand, feel free to ask. As we get closer to launch, I am more free to explain certain things.

Also, Edgemaster is awesome. Don't hate!

Just a question- where does the line of logic that "They have a unique style, therefore they have to come back" come from?

I mean yes, on the surface it seems plausible, but if you dig deeper you hit a ton of snags. Snags like the engine is completely different, and maybe the designers realized some styles couldn't be modified into it without changing them so dramatically that they figured why not just scrap them or put new characters with new styles in their place?

Or what about the fact that these decisions are not inherent to "style" at all, they are inherent to roster integrity. The forces that go into choosing a roster are marketability and sense within the game system (sense within the game system has nothing to do with story, either). Uniqueness has no inherent bearing on any of these things.

My 2c.

It makes sense to have many original unique movesets/styles in a fighting game. Wouldn't that set it apart from other fighting games? I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just wondering.

At the point where most fans of the game think that Rock and Astaroth are "clones", and that Lizardman is still a sisters clone, or that Maxi is just a different Li-Long.. I don't think the marketing department can parse what the average fan thinks of as unique at all (as it pertains to style), so why try to deduce that?

High concept ideas like actual style difference are lost in translation to the average consumer and player, and people are just going to make illogical assumptions about them anyways. I'm sure the marketing people probably know that, which is why their weight for roster seems to lean more on how a character looks or how they display their peacock feathers (I am not going to use the word personality, as that would be an insult to depth). It just doesn't make sense to have roster inclusion use a metric that is so impossible to pin down what the public perception of it is- but it is easy to know that the average consumer targets certain character traits, so they shoot for those and leave the play stuff under the hood when it comes to roster selection.