SoulCalibur VI dev team talk game balance and future updates

Update: The official English translation of the topics discussed on this stream are now up on the Bandai Namco EU website.

When it comes to transparency and being receptive to fan feedback, the team behind SoulCalibur VI have been pretty on the ball to all the comments they read on social media and in the player surveys. The entire balancing act between creating a Fighting game with a vision in mind and catering to the player communities is a difficult undertaking in itself which is what they were here to discuss on stream. Appearing live on the Dengeki YouTube channel this past evening was SoulCalibur VI's Producer Motohiro Okubo, the Director Masteru and the Battle Director Oosaka as they sit down and outline their current balancing philosophy and answer questions from the community. The stream was entirely done in Japanese but here are some quick notes from the presentation.

SOULCALIBUR 6 Dev Team Talk Broadcast ≫ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT6oDehpJj4

▌Stream Archive
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▌SOULCALIBUR VI - Community Follow-Up
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Introduction

Since the last feedback by the project team, there have been a total of nearly 7,000 inquiries by both Japanese and English in the user request inquiry form.

Many requests are accompanied with supporting comments such as "This game is great!" and "Keep up your good work!", which we (the Project Soul) are very grateful for.

However, there were also many complaints that there was no official announcement or replies to requests. As we have been busy for further development, our feedback has been delayed. We apologize for inconvenience this may have caused you.

Adjustment policy by character

1. Why did you nerf _____? / Why didn’t you nerf_____? (Inquiries made by many users)

We have been continuing to receive many similar feedback since the release.

In the last Community Questions Follow-Up, we answered, "We still think that the perception of various characters’ strength has not been established yet. The perception also depends on each community or the individual battle environment". This time, we would like to give a more detailed answer.

We have counted the inquiries sent to us since the last feedback by the Project Soul to find out which characters got a large number of the above inquiry.

The top 5 characters with largest number of the above inquiry up to Ver. 1.30 are as follows

1^st: Siegfried

2^nd: Ivy

3^rd: 2B

4^th: Nightmare

5^th: Seong Mi-na

The top 5 characters with largest number of the above inquiry after Ver. 1.30 are as follows.

1^st: 2B

2^nd: Ivy

3^rd: Nightmare

4^th: Amy

5^th: Siegfried

For each of the above characters to whom inquiries were made after Ver. 1.30, we consider them as follows.

2B:

• She is a globally popular character and at the time of the release most of the players used 2B in ranked matches. We believe that we received so many requests about her because many players have either played and/or fought against her.
• At present, we are concentrating her main skills on "Aggression Shift" to make it easier to understand the key points in maneuvering. However, it may be better to decentralize her main skills from "Aggression Shift" a bit more.
• We apologize that in Ver.1.40, she could not follow-up to "Aerial Leap" when "Augmented First Strike~Aerial Leap" whiffed. We corrected this problem with the patch Ver.1.42. released on 19th June, 2019.

Ivy:

• She is generally highly-rated in any communities, due to her performance in the long-range combat and the level of average combo damage.
• However, although she has a number of very strong attack moves, they are difficult to use precisely, and she is a difficult character to bring out full potential.
• She may be able to cause larger damages more easily due to the revision of various conditions for the lethal hit against the failures to hit in Ver. 1.40. Therefore, we may partially review the level of damages her attacks cause to balance out with other characters.

Nightmare:

• He is highly popular character because of his appearance, back story, and the ability to swing the big sword with ease. He is regarded in completely different way depending on the region, and there are a large number of requests for both buffing and nerfing.
• As he is a character subject to extreme reactions, we would like to make adjustments in the future while taking care not to lose the personality of Nightmare as much as possible.

Amy:

• She is a character whose regard has drastically changed by the time. There were many requests for buffing at the time of release, and then various feedback was given after how she would become strong when the Red/White Rose Perception is max-out had been recognized by the players.
• We believe that the hurdle to play her at full potential may be high at present, and there is a possibility of making adjustments in terms of playability.
• As she has the smallest physique of all characters, there was a lot of feedback saying, "certain combos are not successful to Amy". The game is designed in a way that certain combos varies according to the size of character physique. Nevertheless, we will make adjustments to where the players find less convincing while taking the level of priority and ease of adjustments into account.

Siegfried:

• He is very popular and, as well as Nightmare, we have been continuing to receive many requests about him.
• Type of requests given to Siegfried has changed since the Ver.1.30 update. There were many requests for buffing him up to Ver. 1.30, but his popularity has increased after Ver. 1. 30 and there are now many requests for nerfing.
• We would like to make adjustments as required while observing the progress in the current form including the updates up to Ver. 1.40.

We have also been receiving many inquiries that Azwel is too strong.

Azwel:

• We also consider that Azwel is a very strong character. However, "every character has its own strength" is also what we are working hard for.
• As ratings of characters may be subject to constant change by researches and strategies, we will continue considering for adjustments while observing the situation.
• This does not only apply to Azwel, but we will make modifications where irregular inputs give unexpected strength to the characters.
• We sometimes receive the requests saying "please make the weapon modes of Azwel visible on the screen". However, what we wanted to achieve with this character was to offer the players the joy of fighting with the character whose weapons are invisible. Therefore, we believe that it is better to keep as it currently is.

Feedback regarding the Reversal Edge

2. Since the parry performance is too successful, I want it to be more severe. The pace is too slow during the Reversal Edge Clash situation. The return for the player who was successful in the Reversal Edge Clash is too high = it has a huge impact on winning and losing (and the luck factor is high). So please reduce the return of the Reversal Edge Clash (damage & the amount of gauge increase).

SOULCALIBUR VI was developed in a way that a player can play it with a good pace overall.
Nevertheless, we acknowledge that the rhythm of the game will become slower when the Reversal Edge is activated in rapid succession. We are currently looking for possible improvements to accommodate the players’ requests.

3. In rare cases, the color of the health gauge would not change despite the guard gauge is full. Please fix it.

This problem will be fixed at the same time when out next update, the 6^th download content, is released. We apologize to you all for the inconvenience. we also released the Ver. 1.42 update patch on 19th June, 2019. Please wait for a while as we will address the confirmed problems in the 6^th download content.

4. Isn’t the character adjustment too biased towards the battle planner's favorite characters?

Certain characters are only buffed, and I feel that some characters are clearly favored over others. I also feel that some characters are badly treated. I want all characters to be treated with equal love.

As the basic development policy, we have never favored any specific characters. For example, in the adjustment process we follow the work flow below to eliminate personal subjectivity and make sure that each character is treated equally.

• Data collection

We are constantly collecting information such as data obtained by the actual playing, the results of surveys on the users’ playing details, and feedback sent through the request form.

• Drafting plans

Our battle adjustment team drafts specific change plans based on the gathered information.

• Listing the change plans

We list the change plans for all characters and the entire adjustment teams prioritize which character change should be changed first, then proceed to the adjustment while making sure that the changes are not biased in any way.

• Test playing

The entire teams assess the updates by trying out in battles and keep making improvements.

• Checking the overall balance and creating the update text

Finally, we create the update text for our customers and add an explanation on our intention for adjustment to be transparent as possible, while checking the overall balance again.

All the characters have been adjusted through the above process.

We believe that everyone of us are the kindred souls in trying to make SOULCALIBUR VI more interesting. Please feel free to send your feedback through the request form at any time if you have any.

Additional requests

5. You seem to be making adjustments mainly on the battle part. Please put more effort into other areas, such as the online functions and the character creation.

Since the last feedback, we have made a number of changes, such as the making game compatible with Ansel, adding more character colors, correcting the initial cursor position, amending character creation parts, and revising the matching system. As the battle part and other parts are done by different teams within the Project Soul, we are not in any way concentrating too much of our resource on the battle part. We will continue to do our best to make the parts other than the battle part more convenient and add more functions.

6. SOULCALIBUR VI still needs more stages.

We have been receiving many requests regarding this, and although this takes time to realize, we are currently examining the possibility of adding more stages. Furthermore, with regard to requests such as “I want a stage shape for close-range characters”, we will consider broaden its playing possibilities further such as modifying the existing stages to make them adaptable as separate stages.

7. Please enhance the aspects of communication tools further, such as adding the text chat function and enabling to set room names.

We have received many requests for the functions that enable users to enter text freely, such as entering a creation name, setting of a room name in the casual match, and text chat. We will give this a serious consideration.

8. The CPU in the versus mode is too weak even in the hardest mode, so I want it to be stronger.

I want to have the difficulty mode equivalent to the legendary difficulty in the arcade mode for all characters.

Thank you for enjoying the game. Although it is quite difficult to do so, we believe that it would be ideal to have the characters with extreme difficulty as a challenge from us in the future. We will give this a serious consideration.

Online battles

9. Please stop making matches with the players with too much rank difference.

We have improved the matching system in both Ver. 1.20 and Ver. 1.30.

We have changed the searching system to find opponents whose ranks are closest to the player as possible first, then expanding the range of the search from there. Therefore, a player is now more likely to battle with the opponent close to the player’s rank. However, if the searching system is unable to find an opponent that matches player’s rank, the system may eventually match the player with an opponent whose rank is far apart from the player.

Currently, we make a priority of making sure that a matching is made. However, in the future, we may consider changing the matching system to avoids matching with an opponent with too much rank difference, and we will continue to make revisions as well as adjusting the settings of the matching system based on your feedback.

10. Input delay varies per platform when playing online. Could this be fixed?

Although we have been receiving many requests since the release, we have not yet found a solution for this problem. We would like to continue investigating this matter.

11. Everyone wants a cross-play.

SOULCALIBUR VI is currently not made compatible for cross-play, and we are not yet able to make it compatible at once. We would like to make this happen, but even if we could, we believe that it will take quite some time.

Character creation

12. Please make the creation items unisex.

We have been receiving many requests revolving around the regular characters’ items. As many of the regular characters’ items are designed to suit the character's gender and body shape, it is difficult to equip characters with items by opposite gender. However, some items may be suitable for opposite gender, so we will consider addressing this matter.

13. Please enable the fitting of items that are noticeably dislodged from the character body, such as shoulder items and some head items.

As it is difficult to realize the request as it is, we are considering updates such as changing some items as extra items.

However, for items with ribbons, etc., which sway together with the movements of the characters, they cannot be modified as extra items due to the data structure. In these cases, we are currently considering to address in another way.

Finally

Thank you very much for many requests to SOULCALIBUR VI.

As you become more familiar with the product, we have recently been receiving increasing number of feedback and requests more specific and particular. We take this as an indication that our overall direction for adjustments is more or less accepted by the players.

The Project Soul members have also read through the specific requests that were difficult to answer this time, and we will use them as future reference. We are always looking forward to receive your requests.

[English request form]

Source ≫ https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/soulcalibur/news/soulcalibur-vi-community-questions-follow

▌Notes from the Stream
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Notice: The topics that were discussed on stream will be translated and added onto the official SC6 website soon. This section will be replaced when the official English translation goes up.

• When it comes to making balance changes, the dev team likes to 'monitor the situation' for a little bit instead of hastily get changes out there, they note that most of the balance complaints they've received are from overseas (outside Japan) players commenting after tournament wins.
• Reversal Edge may be getting further tweaks but overall, they're happy with the current function of the mechanic.
• No intention on giving Nightmare a 12 frame startup move because it's not part of the character's design.
• Azwel is considered fine and 'sufficiently strong enough' from the dev team. (I wouldn't expect many if not any changes towards that character in the future.)
• Updates to the online features and character creation are coming, they've already done work in improving those areas as they have different people working hard on different parts of the game.
• For improving the Network Online Lag, there's not much they can do here. (Speaking in terms of just making the 'netcode' better or designing the game around being played in laggy conditions. Most online lag related issues are client side with how the players have their console and internet connection set-up.)
• On adding Crossplay to SoulCalibur VI, it is not possible for them to implement it. It takes a lot of money to get that working and a lot of time from both Microsoft and PlayStation.
• On letting players use either Male or Female customizations on any character creations, it's still up for consideration. The dev team noted the difficulty of implementing this broadly due to the differences of the base models and having to adjust the positions of a lot of parts.
• Adding more stages to the game costs a lot of money but they're doing their best in making that happen.

Top 5 Characters that received the most amount of comments from the player surveys:

Before Version 1.30: 1st Siegfried, 2nd Ivy, 3rd 2B, 4th Nightmare, 5th Seong Mi-na.

After Version 1.30: 1st 2B, 2nd Ivy, 3rd Nightmare, 4th Amy, 5th Seigfried.

SoulCalibur VI Character Balance Flow:

Step 1: Assemble data. (relating to whichever character or move that might need adjusting)

Step 2: Draft it.

Step 3: Create a list of all the ways you could make changes to it.

Step 4: Test Play the changes.

Step 5: Confirm all the balance changes made and start making the patch notes.

SOULCALIBUR ASIA LEAGUE

Website for full details: https://beastapac.com/scasialeague/

SOULCALIBUR VI Original Soundtrack

From SweepRecord: https://sweeprecord.com/srin-1161/

SoulCalibur VI Character Creation Contest

Details in English: https://sc6.soularchive.jp/special/characreation_en.php

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ナイトメア君へ pic.twitter.com/dWy86oaAwT

— SHK (@SHKYEN) June 26, 2019

誰かこの人しかって pic.twitter.com/umeMNCTSOE

— SHK (@SHKYEN) June 26, 2019