Being the only ones coming from across the ocean, Everyeye.it was in Tokyo last week for the Namco Bandai special event focused on the upcoming Soul Calibur V. While we were in the beautiful Japan we tested the Online Multiplayer of the next chapter of the famous fighting game, scheduled on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 for February.
The Mad Catz's Arcade Sticks, famous for their SFIV tournament edition, were standing along with HORI's version in all their beat 'em up glory in the event hall, where we spent one full hour side by side with Project Soul displaying for the first time to the public some new characters, like Dampierre (directly from Broken Destiny for the PSP) and Algol (the boss of the previous episode). The biggest surprise though was another character who fights bare handed using the combat style of Devil Jin: Tekken fans rejoice!
Colosseum Fights
The Online Mode is divided in three main modes: Player Match, Ranked Match Global Colosseo. In the first, players access to the usual lobbies to set up single matches or small tournaments, while Global Colosseo mode is a sort of expanded lobby with 50 slots. We obviously focused our matches on this new feature: each player is represented by a card (fully customizable with unlockable items) and by clicking on one of them you will display players' statistics and be able to challenge them. In the middle of the screen there are two big boards. One of them stands for the Random Matches: dragging your card in there will couple you up with another player who did the same, quickly starting a fight. The other one is used for Ranked Tournaments, but it will not be always active. It will be usable just two times per month for several days.
In Soul Calibur V there are two different stats: the player level and his Rank. Raising up to 99, the first one progresses by creating new characters through the advanced editor, playing the Story Mode at each difficulty level and of course by playing online and offline quick matches against other players. On the other hand, the Rank will -astonishingly- raise by playing Ranked Match, beating opponents ranked higher than yourself (ranks go from E5 to A1) or many opponents of your same Rank. It will also be possible to lose Ranks if you will be defeated too often.
Another important new feature are the Soul Links, with which constantly monitor up to three players' stats and activities in-game, as we already saw in Need For Speed Autolog. We could just use Soul Links to keep up the good old competition frenzy among our friends or we could monitor the top players in the world and study their replays or even soul-link to a player whose characters are looking awesome so that we could constantly update their outfits.
An impressive work has been done when it comes to replays. The eight most recent online matches are automatically saved, and you can keep your favorites by saving them in appropriate slots.
Netcode
Soul Calibur V has dedicated servers in each region for matching and lobby, and the improvements in the netcode are simply impressive. At Project Soul they are aware that the fourth installment was almost an online disaster so they used the experience collected by Namco with Ace Combat and Tekken to refine it.
The matches we fought were smooth and constantly fluid, confirming -for once- that those fancy slogans claiming no difference between offline and online were not shouted out loud in vain. Strafing, grabs and the revamped Guard Impacts were executed flawlessy and instantly on the screens, without a single delay in the timings. We need of course to test the online infrastructure from across the ocean, but for now we were satisfied by the results. In the end, we want to stress that Soul Calibur V was chosen as an official title for the upcoming Evolution 2012, surely a great achievement for Project Soul and also a big challenge of testing and balancing their title, which is -no doubt- looking just great.
So, don't miss the official launch events in San Francisco and in UK, both available in streaming.
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