I’ve been busy with a lot of things lately, but made time to try out Soulcalibur VI‘s multiplayer beta because it was the first opportunity most of us would get to play around with the general game mechanics. As as added bonus, Playstation Plus wasn’t required to play multiplayer (Soulcalibur VI‘s store page claims it’ll be a requirement in the full release) and Tira was one of the available fighters. Basically, the multiplayer beta was a glimpse inside the kind of experience those who purchase DLC and get conned into paying for Playstation Plus can expect. Note my usage of the past tense; I’m not entirely sure when this beta will actually stop being available, but I’m certainly not going to waste my time with it again. Needless to say, my experience was hardly a ringing endorsement, ultimately serving to reinforce my decision never to pay for console multiplayer. This left a terrible first impression.

The single-player elements have obviously been cut out of the beta, and for good reason, but the first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no way of learning how to actually play outside of throwing yourself directly at opponents who have a much better grasp on the characters than you do. Surely practice mode didn’t need to be cut? This underlying sense that you’ll magically know how everything works extends throughout the entire beta, too, as you’re tasked with selecting one of two color schemes for your chosen character without being able to see what those color schemes actually are. The only way to learn your chosen character’s moves (which was absolutely necessary for me; the only Soulcalibur character I’ve ever been comfortable using is Seong Mi-na, who inexplicably isn’t included in the beta) or figure out what your chosen color scheme looks like is to go up against an opponent.

That’s a problem in and of itself—after finally finding someone after something like two minutes and promptly getting beaten down by someone much more comfortable with their character’s moves, I opted to search again instead of trying for a rematch and then spent 10 minutes watching the little timepiece icon spin as it failed to find anyone. I was playing at around 8 PM Mountain time on the day the beta came out, too, which is to say after work pretty much everywhere in North America.

Now, fighting games are admittedly one of my weaker genres (though I’m quite good at the original Soulcalibur and Soulcalibur II, and got slightly okay-ish at Soulcalibur V), so don’t mistake this whole thing as me calling out any of the people I played or anything. It’s not their fault that the developers failed to put in any kind of mode that you can practice in to learn moves, nor is it their fault that I found three people to play against in the span of 45 minutes, learning nothing about the general mechanics in the process (outside of the fact that the Critical Edge input is the same as in Soulcalibur V). This entire multiplayer beta appears to have been aimed squarely at those who have printed out movesets and slept with them under their pillow, though, forgetting that some of us actually have to learn how to use most of the characters before being thrown into the deep end, and by forgetting that, this beta has been an incredibly embittering first experience with Soulcalibur VI.

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