Kayane's Interview with Soul Calibur 6 Producer Motohiro Okubo from EVO Japan

The EVO Japan interview Kayane conducted with the Soul Calibur 6 producer Motohiro Okubo has now gone live over on Kayane's website. It makes for a pretty lengthy and interesting look as to where Soul Calibur 6 is at in this time in terms of development. There's also plenty of Kayane gushing over the new Soul Calibur game so she got to ask a lot about characters in the roster, ideas for guest characters, gameplay modes and a lot more. I'll be adding some snippets from the interview below but you can read the entire piece over on Kayane's website:

Kayane EVO Japan Interview with Motohiro Okubo ≫ http://kayane.fr/2018/02/19/interview-with-motohiro-okubo-producer-on-soul-calibur-vi-and-tekken-7/

▌Snippets
￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣ ￣

On Story Mode

Kayane : So, I have a few questions about the solo mode. The Soul Calibur series have been really focused on story and every character has a beautiful story. We saw them growing up and achieve their goals. Do you plan on having to develop a story mode similar to Soul Calibur I, or II or… Which Soul Calibur are you basing your story mode on ?

Motohiro Okubo : We wanted to go back to the era between Soul Calibur I et II with this new game… Well, it will not be specifically between, but it’ll be around that era.Wewant to go back to the concept of the clash between the Soul Edge and the Soul Calibur. And we can’t exactly say what will be in the game in terms of offline or solo content as we don’t know yet. It’s still in development, but what’s sure it’s that the game will take place during that time frame.

Character Roster

K : There’s only 20 characters at launch. I was wondering how it’d go with the balance in power between good and evil.

M.O : We cannot yet say it’d be 20 characters. We’re still working on that. Discussing it and trying to find new ideas. So no, it’s probably not going to be 20 characters.

Soul Calibur 6 Development

K : Soul Calibur VI will be available on PC as well. And you know that there is a frame difference in Soul Calibur and Tekken. The game is faster on PC. Is this something you’d like to correct for Soul Calibur, since in Street Fighter, there’s input lag on PS4 ? I know Tekken got corrected with patches. Will Soul Calibur benefit from the experience on Tekken to have better input lag ?

M.O. : We taught the Soul Calibur team everything we learned during Tekken’s development so that they may not repeat the same mistakes.

We use in both games the same engine : Unreal Engine 4. And during Tekken 7’s development, we tried reducing its imput lag to the barest minimum. Then again, we did encounter a few problems on the Unreal side of things that needed to be corrected.

Epic Games understood this problem coming from their engine and, after the game launched, they helped us a lot to find a solution and make a patch. Once it was finished, we had to implement it into the game and that took a lot of time, hence the fact it came out late last year.

Thanks to this patch, we managed to nearly fully eradicate this problem on the PS4 version of Tekken 7, to the point it’s now one of the fastest fighting games out there. As for Soul Calibur VI, it’s still in develoment. And since the patch for Tekken 7 already came out, we can use it as a framework to create an even better patch that can be incorporated into Soul Calibur VI.

End of Round Mechanics

K : I have one last question about what you said yesterday. When the characters are low in health, do you think about putting in a Rage Mode, with the possibility to do more damage with some moves ?

M.O. : I think it wouldn’t be a good idea to make the game more complex then it already is right now. Some moves will make more damages when low health, we are still balancing to define which moves for each character.

And as far as Reversal is concerned, we made it so that players may have a way to come back in a way that’s easy to understand. Then again, visually wise, maybe the life bar will sparkle… Or something. We’re thinking about making some modifications or visual tweaks. In any case, I don’t want the game to go overboard with complicated systems.

K : So the fact that the moves will make more damages when it’s low health, it’s not something you’d press a button to activate.

M.O. : No. I don’t want it to be like that.
Personnally, I think that, if you’re very low on health, you need to have a combo that can make more damage than usual.

You can read more of the Kayane interview with Motohiro Okubo over on Kayane's website:

http://kayane.fr/2018/02/19/interview-with-motohiro-okubo-producer-on-soul-calibur-vi-and-tekken-7/