January 31st can not come soon enough

[Shard]

I know that I am more or less the only one interested, but just to update, I got a chance to play Calibur V at NEC in philly (North East Championship, one of the two premier east coast annual FG tournament/conventions, along with Final Round in Atlanta).

The lead designer, Daishi (and his translator) came and brought five copies of Soul Calibur V (as well as some really beautiful/large monitor setups to play them on).

The game is looking very, very solid right now. We didn't play the most recent build (that's still design team only at the moment) but it was still very smooth and polished. All of the new mechanics aside, they've been putting an emphasis on trying to make sure that every character has viable tools and it really showed. Only a couple of characters seemed to be a little too good, and only one character seemed bad, and upon interviewing Daishi it came out that even that had already been fixed/tweaked in their in studio build.

It's less than two months until retail release and I am officially hype

[Swash]

Balance is the thing I'm always skeptical of.  It'll be interesting to see how they've gone with it in the release.

[Shard]

Well, almost all fighting games end up having top tier characters that, while not unbeatable, are just better than others.

Calibur 4 was actually a pretty balanced game if you don't count Hilde and Algol (but especially Hilde. God that bitch was broke). One of the biggest problems the SC4 community had was that we took *way* too long to ban Hilde. We let the debate go on for over a year before we finally banned her, and by that time she had made enough of an impression where players from other fighting game communities began to think that SC 4 was an unbalanced train wreck. We should have banned her within two months of discovering Hilde doom-combo.

Other than Hilde, though, the game was as balanced as most competitive fighting games get. Sure, there were some trash characters and top characters, but there were 6 or 7 top tier characters, which is more than most fighting games, which are usually dominated by just 2 to 4 characters.


For those interested and/or unaware (I've noticed most of the casual Soul Calibur 4 players I've met were never even aware that Hilde was good, let alone broken) of why Hilde was so damn stupid, allow me to demonstrate with this 10 second video


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xQRSN9WMik

Also, I should mention that that combo would have still rung out even if she'd started the combo 10 or more feet further back from where she started it in this video, and this is one of the lengthy, rectangular arenas.

[Swash]

...wow, yeah, ground-juggling is a mechanic that I've always hated.  Combine that with spear range and...well, yeah...broken.

Maybe they need to put juggle-breakers into these things?  Give the victim some control over which direction they're sent flying, perhaps.  If they're caught in a straight line juggle, they'd move laterally, if they're caught in a sweep juggle (which in a balanced game would be short-range) they could move downrange and hope like crazy their opponent doesn't have a quick ground juggle waiting behind their sweep...

[Shard]

It's not really a ground juggle, in the sense that the opponent is never considered grounded. When they hit the ground, they're in a brief slide-state, which is its own state. If a character were just laying on the ground, it either wouldn't hit them or wouldn't put them into full combo like it did in that video.

Also, many moves that launch do exactly what you say, it's called air control. Some moves don't allow air control and lead to guarenteed combos, but moves that do allow you to control the direction you travel in when launched into the air, making it so that things will only combo if you air control in the wrong direction.

I'd have to disagree on combo-breakers, though. They work fine and good in some games (Hell, Mortal Kombat 9 would be downright stupid without combo breakers) but Calibur does pretty fine without them, as Calibur really doesn't have combos that go above 40-45%, and even those are usually both: A. rare  B. only do that much damage on counter-hit

[The Hanged Man]

And then they get scraped, hard. God, I got beat down so bad at my first tournament. It made me www.frownface.sad . Most leave and don't come back after that. Took me a long time to get to the point where I could compete on the level of tournament players who had been doing it since before SC 4 even came out. Satisfying though

Actually I've been playing Soul Calibur games since  I was 8 years old (at least).

[Shard]

Doesn't necessarily mean what you think it might. It's sort of like saying, "Well hey, I've been playing football with my friends for ten years, I'm sure I'd do fine in the NFL".

Just saying, it's a rarity.

[The Hanged Man]

Now I don't think I'll do fine in the NFL (or the soul calibur equivalent) I just wanted to point out that I've had more experience than I let on before.
Although knowing those guy's skill set I could have beat them when I was 8 years old.

I think I would get my overconfidence handed to me in a tournament though.

[Shard]

Yeah it's rougher than most people would expect. I've been playing competitively for three years now and I still can't honestly say I'm one of the 15 best in America. One of the 25 or 30 best, sure, but there's a whole tier of player above me that still make me look like a chump.

Almost all of the characters have been announced at this point. Get hype

[The Hanged Man]

I just hope SC:V has more features than IV, I got bored in a weekend with it.

[Shard]

What do you mean by features? Do you mean things like create a character and single player content?

Or were you talking about more in-match mechanics? Because I know it has a lot of the latter, though I can't speak for the former yet

[The Hanged Man]

Well Soul Calibur IV for me had a very short life span.

By the end of the weekend I bought it I ran out of things to do, I finnished all the story modes within something like 4 hours and only had the tower of lost souls mode left to do.

I missed how Soul Calibur III had the alternative path story modes with alternative endings, I couldn't help feeling that Soul Calibur IV had prettier graphics and more combos and such but the lifespan took a hit for it.
I'm kind of hoping that Soul Calibur V will be more like Soul Calibur III in that regard.
I still can't wait till V though.

[Shard]

Well, it looks like I have some disappointing news for you.

Supposedly, there's just as little single player content that there was in SC IV, give or take.

However, the create a character system has been greatly improved.

Like most fighting games, this is going to be something that is best purchased to play with people.

Only a week and a half left! Get hype

[Swash]

OHMAIGAWD!

Good enough?

[The Hanged Man]

I'll work on cracking a smile to show my excitement, it requires all my concentration...