I finally played a little Smash and it is a fun game. Really fun, lots of stuff to do. But it is clearly not supposed to be competitive… it is supposed to be fun. That is what Nintendo is still doing better than anybody else, making games that are just fun. All these balance patches probably aren’t even made with the competitive scene in mind, it’s just to stop the online matches from getting too stupid cheap.
If you want to play competitive Smash, play Melee and deal with it’s problems… every fighting game sucks in some aspect, most of them suck in almost all aspects outside the core game (busted online, no matchmaking, terrible story, awful single player AI). If Melee’s only problem is a lack of character variety, oh well. Could be worse.
Tychus himself is still really good… his odin was nerfed so you can’t get tychus down to 10%, and he just pops Odin to face tank and virtually have 2 health bars. It’s a much necessary nerf because odin was incredibly OP in team fights
but it’s not sakurai’s choice, it’s the fan’s choice what they do and don’t want to play
I’m not even really sure what “not made for a competitive scene” means… does that mean he wants his game played for 3 weeks and then put on the shelf? does he think so little of his own fanbase that they won’t try to get better at the game he made if they play it for longer than 3 weeks?
if you make a game with rules for a winner and a loser, and you have two players play against each other directly, your game is competitive… I’m sorry, that’s just how it works.
and again, lots of people seem to want to separate “fun” and “competitive” (including sakurai), as if these concepts can’t coexist. but no competitive game in history hasn’t been fun to a subgroup of players… if it wasn’t fun, nobody would play it. melee was so much fun back in the day to casual audiences, and that fun is the only reason people built the game up to what it is now. nobody starts as a competitive player, they start as a casual player, see that the game is super fun and awesome, and then decide to play more because they like it (a side effect of this is that they’ll get better)
anyway, i’ve said my piece on this numerous times so i won’t do too much of a rant this time. my gaming opinions seem to be in the minority a lot these days.
just cuz it wasnt intended to be doesnt mean it isnt. i think alot of ppl too easily dismiss smash just cuz “sakurai said its not a fighting game so it isnt.” its not that simple. melee is undoubtedly one of the most skillful fighters, despite not really intending to be. unfortunately for sakurai he doesnt define what makes something competitive or not. he can only make try to make it so that competitors are less rewarded than casual players.
I kinda see where he’s coming from from an online stand point. Melee was made before online was a thing. How many of us thought we were awesome at Smash? The Internet shows you how bad you really are.
I know so many people who won’t even play something as simple as COD just because they go online and get roflstomped. This goes double for fighting games. I mean, this may be a bad example since Advanced Warfare was still the highest selling game this year, so I’unno. But I’m not so sure melee would have been so succesful if it had online and the comptetive community were as far beyond casual players as they are back then.
Dude Smash 64 wasn’t even remotely good as a competitive game, but people still play that just for fun and that game is sixteen years old. 4 players around one TV where you beat up your friends as they play VG characters you all grew up with - an inherently awesome concept. For a lot of people, getting better at Smash just means getting to items quicker or hitting people into stage hazards, two of the first things to go when the scene decides to get “competitive” with it.
You are also comparing a 3 month old metagame to one that is 168 months old. Not really a fair comparison.
SF4 was slow as shit too. Remember how people used to cry for guard bars to stop the turtling? It also came up in the internet era where metagames move faster, but it still took a good two years before vortexes started taking off and another three before the devs figured they had to make a general system change to do something about it. Let’s maybe give Smash U another year and a half or two before getting too bitter about it
A better example for my point may be, just go on any article on a major media site about a fighting game, and then count the amount of comments of people saying “I’m gonna skip this fighting game because when I go online I just get stomped in them”
i’ve been really optimistic about this game and like i said with the japanese players pushing this game further i think theres hope as long ur not comparing it to melee. its just that when you play the most severely nerfed character and every time you DO find something that can help advance his metagame and you practice it and try to implement it in your game they just come in and nerf / remove it, its very frustrating. this happened to me with multi-hit spikes, hydro pump gimps, f-air setups, basically everything i practiced with greninja on 3ds they took it out or nerfed. it makes it hard to see the metagame developing because it cant with constant crippling balance patches that just take out things that werent intentional.
like right now, ppl are starting to realize pikachu is really good and has some edgeguarding techniques with thunder and quick attack that can be really effective. but i actually dont want word to get out that he can do these things because of possible patches.
greninja is fainted i must resort to my other poke but i dont want to battle sakurai.
(btw high level 64 has the longest combos and is pretty much always 0-death because of enormous hitstun on everything.)
well, here’s the thing though… no matter how “casual” you try to make your game, someone is going to take smash 4 online and get stomped by a good player. your design simply doesn’t matter, good players exist and will beat bad players always.
so… you could try to make the game have a medium skill ceiling so that the game looks awesome when it’s played well, thus convincing more people who would otherwise quit to try to learn, or you could make it really boring and slow, so that people don’t want to play it. you’re not going to stop SOME people from getting discouraged and quitting from an online beatdown, so you might as well try to make the game as cool as you can.
now, if his design goal was to make sure melee players had no advantage because they had a 10 year head start, well, okay then, now we can talk about design goals that accomplish that without ruining smash. the problem is, sakurai just made brawl again, so now all the brawl players are going online and stomping noobs (and melee players are good enough to do the same in a different game anyway). no progress has been made, except the game is now worse off.
re: first part: absolutely, and I have no problems with people who play like that (hell, i’ll play like that if you want me to). that’s why when you design a game well, those people can still have fun because they’ll be oblivious to all the stuff the pro players are doing and it won’t matter at all (it happened for years with melee). competitive players will still destroy casual players even if they turn on all the wacky stages and items, though, right? so the fact that casual and hardcore players exist really has nothing at all to do with game design… they exist and always will, and they’ll approach your game however you design it.
basically, my point is that the game can be well designed enough to easily cater to any and all players, regardless of how they want to play (items on/off, everyone at 300% damage with bombs on, a hardcore 1 on 1 fighting game, etc). if you try to intentionally cripple the competitive players because you want the casuals to stand a chance, all you’ll end up doing is ruining the game for everyone, because competitive players will STILL beat casual players no matter what you do, unless you design a game so incredibly bland and devoid of skill that nobody has any reason to play it (smash 4 isn’t that bad, but it seems they’re trying to trend that way).
re: second part: well, I’d be willing to give the benefit of the doubt here, but since the game is 80% brawl, we can apply the lessons we learned from brawl to it, so we have an 80% idea of how it’s going to look. we’re so much better at understanding the systems of smash now that we don’t need to wait 2 years to figure stuff out, especially if a lot of it is very similar to a game we already just played for 7 years.
its more similar to brawl but its definitely not brawl, so theres still alot to explore. the game could be good if people try to take it to the next level but they have to atleast give it a chance before they condemn it to failure. there will always be melee anyways and that game has finally gotten the spotlight it deserves so theres that to satisfy the hardcore players.
being easily accessible and fun casually while being deep, complex and rewarding competitively is a delicate balance and smash bros is the only game that ALMOST gets it right.
there’s a lot of smash 4 specific tech to find, sure, but I think the community can safely predict a curve that smash 4 will take (barring some huge glitch discovery). how it gets there might deviate a bit, but I don’t think people will be wildly off in their predictions. the game is designed to be straight forward more than other games in the series, so there is less chance we will find something that will turn everything upside-down
i have a lot of beefs with melee too… i think we can use it as a great base but do better in the modern era (project M is closer to the game i want to play), but if PM is gone then melee is what we have to accept
and that’s what a lot of modern game design is all about, it seems… just accepting that things suck and trying to make the best of it.
anyway, i didn’t wake up this morning and plan to shit all over the calgary thread, i’ll be quiet for now
daphne x johnny gets no fanart because daphne rejected johnny. but velma x johnny gets tons of fanart even though johnny rejected velma. i smell misandry
