I woke up at 4am with a game design in my head

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Well, not so much a full game design, more of a way to make a beloved, flexible, party-based action RPG if I am ever in a position to use the original Soul Calibur source code, which I will not be.

So basically: everyone loves Soul Calibur – it’s accessible, it’s deep, it feels good – and we agree that sequels to pure action games that make them more than that, ala Star Control 2, are a genius underused idea.

So figure you make a semi-linear Infinity Engine style RPG, with, we’ll say, a Phantasy Star-ish 80s anime aesthetic because that’s also great and underused, and a Shadow Hearts-y setting. And better writers or whatever. And you recruit different characters over the course of the game as normal, roughly one for every fighting style that already exists in Soul Calibur. And you have encounter mobs in the dungeon maps.

But when you encounter them with your active party of four you get shunted off to a lovingly polished Matsuno-esque isometric formation screen featuring both you and the enemy team, and you only have 10 seconds or so to match your characters to each of the enemies they’ll have to fight, like you’re calling a play in football. And maybe some of them have special traits that let them call an audible at the last second, and they all have double tech bonuses for being paired up together, of which more in a second.

So, now they all so Soul Calibur battles in order of descending initiative, with the added factor of different gear and buffs and whatnot, and the game systems do a bunch of neat work to ensure that the battles themselves are always 1v1 so as not to overburden the original engine or core game loop, but also keeping things logically consistent and interesting.

For example, if you ever have two characters matched to one enemy (or vice versa – this should be entirely symmetrical to support online versus) the second character acts as support, and you get a spell toggle and a spellcast mapped to shoulder buttons Guardian Heroes style. Maybe some characters don’t have support abilities and some only do (ie you have mages in your party who aren’t originally derived from Soul Calibur characters) and this affects formation choice. Maybe some of them only add damage to canned throw animations and only make getting thrown more risky.

The battle would proceed over relatively short rounds by fighting game standards and if any rounds time out or characters survive they go back to the formation screen for the next one, and as the matchups get more lopsided as parties shrink, additional characters beyond your matchup “plus one” can do buff/debuff effects from the formation screen (which is a good excuse to incorporate movename callouts, which I love). Or maybe you want lopsided matchups from the start, so you have to do all four or however many fights in a round with the same character with the same non-replenishing pool of health but you get all the other characters for buffs or spellcasting.

Anyway this would obviously be great. The cat puked around this point in my thought process though.

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I’ve always thought that the Archon style of battle chess was widely underused. It’s one of the best examples of X meets Y, and we’ve yet to see anyone really update it.

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i had this idea too. you gotta have a way to skip battles to avoid tedium tho i feel

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imo it’s at least as much a fighting game as an RPG at that point, and fighting games are 100% battles, so having a game that becomes only 50% battles shouldn’t actually be a problem

the party-of-four-ish active characters also imposes the same “you have to be really good with more than one character but maybe not all of them to play competitively” requirement as with most popular fighting games

in this fantasy after getting the soul calibur source code we google a tier list from gamefaqs in 2000 and use it to balance the characters

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bushido blade is also easier to clone (or, rather, to justify implementing from scratch and improving on), but maybe not as accessible / doesn’t leave as much space for players to intently minmax damage numbers, which I don’t particularly mind as a design goal and would likely make it more popular

there could be a “bushido mode” toggle

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anyway the best part of this game is that it would require an eight figure budget to do well so I never have to even think about getting to do it

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I’d play it

risks: fights take too long, so players forget about spatial goals while engaging in fights (example: tactics RPGs don’t have environment exploration for this reason); RPGs are extremely stressful without grunt/boss pacing (Breath of Fire effect (not that I’m trashing that game)); fighting games are usually balanced to close win/loss ratio, RPGs are usually player wins 95%+, so how do we handle player failure; how do we integrate player skill in the action game to traditional RPG power progression? selectable difficulties?

comparable: Soul Calibur 2 quest mode, Mortal Kombat something or other quest modes. How does the RPG not feel like a sidestory to getting better at the fighting engine, but instead an equal partner?

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Well for one thing let’s get a nice dungeon crawl aspect to it where if you lose characters mid dungeon you can’t revive them but you can parachute in others you’re maybe not good with, up to your full party of 4

I think if the RPG is actually developed as an equal partner, it will feel like one; obviously Soul Calibur 2’ quest mode was not. I also think endurance matches (where your opponent can heavily outdamage you) would actually be great if the fighting is good enough though I may be wrong there.

But also just: short dungeons. Only a few mobs a piece, and only suspend saving within them. More fun town / dialogue stuff.

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I know it’s very kitchen sink-y but I think it could actually work and weirdly that’s more exciting for me to think about lately. Partially it’s an excuse – it’s not fun without getting to write the entire ensemble cast, which makes negative budgeting sense.

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Steal the New Order typography for the formation screen

The mission design could be kind of Mass Effect 2-ish?

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And the fight night champion story mode has lots of “unfair” battles and it’s great, so I do think that can work

Plus DBFZ has some explicit “double techs” and those are great too, so I don’t think having non-implicit synergies is necessarily a problem

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I also love the idea from a technical point of view, that you could take the entire Soul Calibur fighting engine, recompile it, rewrite the shaders, and just implement the entire thing as, like, a subprocess loop with minimal modifications that the rest of the game engine wraps

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Yeah this is a lot like Chronicles of the Sword in SC3 but better, and I put SC3 in my personal top 5 games on the basis of that game mode

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oh cool, I never played that one because I was so bummed they were making a followup to SC2 on the worst platform

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You had me at Shadow Hearts-y. Then you lost me again at football. Even if it’s not for me it’s a great idea though, as far as ideas go!

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Other stabs at this ideaspace: Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, uh, other mid-90s platformers that thought using fighting game combat engines would be a good idea

Short dungeons: Darkest Dungeon carefully prunes its encounter count in dungeons to maintain its high-lethality combat and is probably a good model

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One question:

How many outfits will Voldo have?

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Have you looked at Indivisible? It’s not this (at all) but seems reminiscent somehow

It looks more like Zelda II x Tales of etc

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I always wanted those Robot Taisen games to be actiony, so I’m up for this Felixware