Soul Calibur III's producer talks details

TOKYO--In an interview posted on the official Japanese Soul Calibur III site, the game's producer, Hiroaki Yotoriyama, revealed that the game will be released in America and Europe before Japan. The game is slated to hit retailers in Japan this fall. No release date has been confirmed for the US.

Yotoriyama reconfirmed that Soul Calibur III will be exclusively released on the PlayStation 2 unlike the previous installment. He also revealed that the game will not feature any guest characters since it's his policy "not to do the same thing twice," even though his development team received numerous guest-character offers. Soul Calibur II was published on three different home consoles, and it featured a different guest character on each platform. The GameCube edition included Link from the Legend of Zelda series, the PlayStation 2 edition had Heihachi from Tekken, and the Xbox edition had Spawn from Todd McFarlane's comic book of the same name.

Yotoriyama also revealed that Soul Calibur III will not feature online play, because it limits the gaming audience. "At the current time, the online infrastructure is extremely different between countries, and there's people that can't enjoy network gaming," commented Yotoriyama. "We've decided to concentrate on improving the [game's offline content] and its characters so that people all over the world will be able to have fun."

For more information on Soul Calibur III, read GameSpot's first look at the game.