It has been a good year for SAMURAI SHODOWN. The 2019 release revitalized the series when it came to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One last year, and it was among the first titles to appear on the Stadia service. Its second season of DLC characters are coming in 2020, and the Nintendo Switch version is about to appear outside of Japan. To help go over what's making this reboot special, Siliconera caught up with Game Director Nobuyuki Kuroki. Kuroki has been with SNK since 1993 and worked on its fighting games, starting with Art of Fighting 2 all the way up to SAMURAI SHODOWN.
There was an eleven year gap between SAMURAI SHODOWN SEN and SAMURAI SHODOWN.
How did the break and development and insight from other fighting games released during that time help shape and change this reboot?
Nobuyuki Kuroki: Honestly speaking, I cannot say that there is a title that helped shape or change SAMURAI SHODOWN all that much.
This is because SAMURAI SHODOWN has its own unique worldview and gameplay which is totally different from other titles. Instead of being influenced by other titles, we felt that creating the game fans have waited so long to play a lot more essential.
SAMURAI SHODOWN was SNK's first game using Unreal Engine 4.
What did you learn from the experience and how will those lessons influence your future fighting games?
Kuroki: For KOF14 and SNK Heroines, rather than do what we want, it was more of a case where we could only do what we can due to limited options.
By using Unreal Engine 4 with SAMURAI SHODOWN, the range of expression has been expanded.
For sure a coin has two sides, and we faced both positive and negative aspects. But it was great for us to have the chance to do what we wanted.
If we continue using Unreal Engine in our future games, we will make good use of the experience learnt from this time and make every effort to design our games.
More at Siliconera : https://www.siliconera.com/samurai-...e-game-its-ports-and-creating-new-characters/
