Free Step Dodge

you can kinda already do that with certain moves, Nyo's hiten no mai 5ppp, Kasumi's running h+k, most of Ryu's shenanigans out of his Onion stance; just buff sidewalk to make it an universal answer to poor tracking instead of a situational one, cause they've tried the whole command sidestep with built in follow up twice now and it's been not great in both games

so kinda like Soul Calibur? I've be down with that.

Yeah, I guess kinda like soul calibur lol

Honestly, I'd take any functional sidestep over DOA5 & DOA6's "sidestep system". Making sidewalking avoid linear moves would be a good idea. That's basically how "sidestepping" is done in SoulCalibur (basically sidewalking then whiff punishing). Didn't DOA3 have "Freestepdodge" free walking?

I believe DOA3 was the first game to have unrestricted freewalking (whether or not it could be used to dodge attacks I honestly don't remember), cause in vanilla DOA2, at least on the dreamcast version, you had to hold the free button to enter a freewalk state, if not you'd just move along a 2D axis where 4 and 6 move you back and forth, 7,8,9 make you jump and 1,2,3 make you crouch