Soulcalibur: Lost Swords

~ the goodbye ~

My own competitive gaming ran from about 2002 to 2005 in Turkish internet cafes, Counter-Strike against people sitting two chairs away with the same screen glare on their faces. The other player was the entire appeal. Lost Swords was a Soulcalibur with no other player in it anywhere.

It arrived on 6 February 2014 in Japan and on 22 and 23 April in North America and Europe, a free PS3 download on the PlayStation Network from Bandai Namco Studios. Soulcalibur by then was a nineteen-year-old weapons fighter with a serious reputation, and the 1999 Dreamcast version is still the one people bring up when they want to argue that a home conversion can beat the arcade cabinet it came from.

What you got instead was a mission grinder in the costumes. You fought the computer, and you kept fighting the computer until a meter ran out and told you to come back later or pay to carry on. Microtransactions handled the rest. There was no versus mode of any kind, online or on the couch.

The producer, Masaaki Hoshino, said the reason out loud: the pay-to-win structure was why multiplayer had to be left out. That is the whole grave in a single sentence from the person who built it. A fighting game exists so that two people can find out which of them is better, and this one had been designed in a way that made the answer purchasable, so the question was removed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Free games get downloaded. It cleared 1.4 million downloads by 8 May 2014 and passed two million by September 2015, which was reported at the time as a success and which mostly measures how many people will click install on a Soulcalibur that costs nothing. The critics went the other way. Metacritic settled at 38 from nine reviews, with a user score of 1.9 from eighty-six. Eurogamer gave it 3 out of 10 and called it a cash grab, and GamesTM went to 5.

The complaints were not only about money. Loading times were long enough to be listed as a review objection, and ring-outs had been taken out. Knocking an opponent off the edge of the stage is one of the things that distinguishes Soulcalibur from every other fighter, and removing it is a decision about what game this is rather than a tuning choice.

~ the decline ~

A free-to-play fighting game is a contradiction, and this one at least had the honesty to resolve it in public. Balance is the product in a fighter. If one player can buy a better sword, the result of a match stops carrying information, and the thing people came for is gone. Bandai Namco's answer was not to solve the balance problem. It was to delete the match.

Nothing was stored on the console in any usable way. Characters and progress lived on a server, so what a player had after eighteen months of grinding was a row in somebody's database. When the announcement came on 1 September 2015 there was no explanation attached, and there was also nothing anyone could do to keep a copy. The end date was the end.

~ the long tail ~

Service stopped on 30 November 2015, and on the same day Bandai Namco teased that something else Soulcalibur was coming. What eventually came was Soulcalibur VI in 2018, sold at full price with the versus mode back where it belongs. The experiment had lasted long enough to be counted and quietly not repeated.

The wider lesson did land, just not here. Free fighting games came back later with the fights intact and the money moved onto characters and cosmetic items, which is the arrangement that works because it leaves the match alone. Lost Swords is the version that tried it the other way around, and it is worth remembering for that reason rather than for anything it played like.

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