So, in Melee we just ban a few stages. In Brawl, we ban grabbing the ledge too much. MK is invulnerable on the ledge. No character is invulnerable on the edge in Melee. Some have constant invincibility (like Marth or Sheik), but it isn’t a winning tactic if you know how to counter it.
As I said people don’t care about “fun” when they have the chance to win a few thousand bucks. They will exploit the hell out of the game to win. Ledge camping in Melee would have caught on much quicker if it was actually a winning tactic.
In addition to playing Smash, I play Zangief in Super Turbo, son- you don’t get to lecture me on how ‘unfun’ projectile spamming is. Falco laser spam can be annoying when you’re playing someone not particularly fleet of foot like Dedede, but it doesn’t have shit on trying to muscle in on Dhalsim fresh from getting clear across the screen post-knockdown with a character that has no tools that advance him safely and nothing in the universal options like Brawl has (air sidestepping, powershielding) to get him forward. It’s a lot of patience, a lot of correct reads, and taking advantage of correct reads by punishing limbs and possibly even knocking Dhalsim down long enough to get in and start playing the damn game. But you know what- that’s part of playing Zangief, and that’s part of playing against Dhalsim regardless of character (to a degree, anyways) and I don’t know about you, but I find it drat rewarding when I managed to finally get through and start to put 'sim through his paces, even knowing odds are he’s eventually going to slip out somehow and I’m gonna have to chase him down all over again. Then again, the other character I really play in ST is Guile, and I’d say a good 60-70% of my Guile is Sonic Boom pressure, zoning, or setup- I can find my fun on both sides of the spam, and just because you don’t enjoy having your options limited by someone camping the hell out of you with projectiles doesn’t mean other people don’t have fun being the guy who sets it up. It’s as valid a gameplay style as rushrushrushdown, shorter-ranged poke based pressure zoning, or repeated grappler option reset pressure. You don’t get to tell other people that how they choose to play and compete in the game is doing it wrong unless it’s proving to completely break down the competitive scene (and it isn’t- otherwise we’d be seeing Falco winning a hell of a lot more then he has been) and the fact that is, by and large, what Smash community has done until fairly recently is why I quit competitive Melee back in 2007 and only really dabble in competitive Brawl as an outsider. I repeat- if you don’t like how the game can be played, find a new goddamn game or at least drop the hell out of the competitive scene and keep it to your homies. Nobody’s going to give a shit about your salty tears about how cheap and boring you think laser spam is when it comes time to play for cash, especially if it’s a playstyle they personally enjoy.
On heavy gravity- No. I’m not afraid of one minor cost. I’m just stating something you likely didn’t think of when suggesting heavy gravity, since it’s obvious you have a very narrow definition on what you want Brawl to be and you’re not thinking of what else it affects when you make suggestions- it murders off the stage play, and you don’t care because in the Brawl you want, off the stage play doesn’t exist. It also kills the effectiveness of slow aerials because now they’re too slow to come out in a short hop, but that doesn’t matter because slow aerials used mostly for zoning or baiting incoming pressure have no place in the Brawl you’re picturing in your mind. It also makes projectile spam on a low horizontal plane (like Pikachu’s Thundershocks or, get this, Falco’s laser) that much harder to deal with since floatier jumps make them easy to go over or pass through them with a short hop air dodge. But since you’re already willing to completely punish characters for daring to have a projectile as one of their moves by giving everyone perma-reflect, over half the cast losing at least one viable tool be damned, that’s obviously not a concern of yours either. How about uping the number of chain-grabs that last for a severe duration since the way most characters escape them (recovering high enough to not get grabbed again) isn’t going to happen until later? That rewards aggression, I suppose, but upping the number of characters who can inflict/suffer from 0-death isn’t what you’re looking for, I suspect. How about drastically increasing the potency of kill moves that send the opponent away more then up? How about crippling Diddy Kong’s recovery since his requires charging while still suffering from the effects of gravity? Maybe it’s being made up by the fact that heavy gravity makes it that much easier for Diddy to Banana-lock people since people have so much less air mobility to escape Diddy and his peels.
The problem is that you don’t have a clue. You don’t know how what you’re suggesting will affect the game other then that, on the surface, it seems to support your preferred playstyle by increasing the number of combos (true) and reward aggression (also true). You also are saying that certain projectiles are making the game unplayable (false) and unfun (opinion), and that because of this all characters who rely on projectiles need to be punished for their playstyle (false). You believe that other facets of the game should be free to suffer for the benefit your preferred playstyle (opinion) and that the game can gain more depth (false- removing viable playstyles is the opposite of depth) and become more fair (false for the same drat reason) by implementing your changes.
In your game, you can’t turn off projectile spamming, and in your game, it’s fun because you can heavily punish a projectile spammer in your game. In barlw, you can’t heavily punish a projectile spammer. So you think running away the whole match and pressing B is always fun for the guy who’s doing it? For 8 minutes?
Not really. camping is generally considered boring by many players, a more aggressive playstyle is generally considered less boring.
You misunderstood the point. The point is to make the game more fun. Falco was used as an example of what makes barlw boring.
As I told you before, I’m not at all part of the competitive barlw scene. I would be if barlw had fun rules.
Nobody has to give a shit about my non-existant salty tears. When it comes to playing for money, don’t you think playing for money and fun is better than playing only for money?
Off stage gameplay can still exist. You’ll just have to play a floatier character.
I don’t think there are much of any moves that are too slow to come out in a short hop with heavy gravity. What moves are you thinking of? Zoning and baiting still have their place in the game. They just have to be not projectiles unless they’re explosive projectiles and hit with only their splash damage. King Dedede’s Waddle Dees still work by the way.
Your horizontal plane theory is correct. However, you’re incorrect about completely punishing characters with projectiles. They still have their about 18 other moves which are still useful. You’re right, it isn’t much of a concern because the main goal of my ideas are to improve gameplay. Character balance can be looked at later. What if my ideas accidentally balance out a lot of the cast?
There are a few new chain grabs, but they only last until about 20-30%. And the current ones only get about a 20-30% boost. It’s not much of a problem. The potency of kill moves that send opponents is not drastically increased. It is increased, but to varying degrees. Floaty characters and characters with up-B’s that are unaffected by gravity lose very little in their recoveries. Whereas faster fallers tend to be less capable of recovery, but it’s not to the degree of drastic. Diddy Kong’s recovery still works if you give it a 0 to slight charge. It’s just a bit short now. You seem to be addressing the point of character balance when the point I’m trying to make is making barlw more fun.
You might be mistaken. I know what I’m talking about. I play with these ideas more than you do, as far as I know.
When the game is being reduced to players on opposite sides of the stage only throwing projectiles at each other, something is pretty flawed. Characters who have projectiles also have about 18 other moves they can use. You could say it’s about punishing projectile based gameplay, but look at what its removal frees up.
People prefer to have a more offensive based playstyle than a defensive. It’s most of everyone’s opinion. It can add more depth because now the game is about using more varying options instead of camping with one. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned fair in any of my arguments yet.
Brawl’s gonna die anyway. It won’t survive the next fighting game wave which happens in 2011. Unless something changes for the better, Brawl’s gone. I don’t know how long Brawl’s gonna last in MLG. I like the series, but this game was a letdown. Doing this idea is probably gonna be pointless anyway.
Threads like these don’t give the Brawl scene a good look
Considering that we’ll have Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Mortal Kombat 9 (with it being 2.5D this time), and likely Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown, I think you might be right.
To be honest, I don’t think we’ll see any changes that will save the game, not even banning Meta Knight. My prediction, going off of pretty much nothing, is that we’ll have a lot of people going to Melee or going to other fighting games (and the Smash community REALLY needs it).
Melee players will slowly convert to barlw as time passes because there, actual players exist. Meanwhile good barlw players quit of of Smash entirely and convert to SF4. The second one is already happening to those who care about fun over $. The first. Hell, I want to convert to barlw.
Don’t most Melee players hate Brawl? It doesn’t make sense to me to play a game you don’t like. Also, I doubt all the abandoning Brawl players “converted” to SF4. Sure, I see some people on XBL, but I doubt it’s a large trend.
And why do you want to convert to “barlw”? Hell, you might as well convert to SSFIV or BBCS which is probably closer to SSB than the former.
I want to give up on Melee. It’s dying and I’m just mad. barlw is still popular and I was exagerrating that a lot of barlw players want to quit barlw and convert to SF IV. Melee is a good game, but points the point of playing a multiplayer game if there isn’t multiple players? barlw has that more than Melee and as time passes, life will hit Melee players and they won’t be so easily able to play at tournaments so easily. There aren’t many new players to fill in where old players left. A game that’s 9 years old is difficult for new players to find compared to a game that’s still on store shelves. And according to n00b logic, newer=better, better graphics = better game. N00bs start off as n00bs, but as they learn, they can be good players too. Well, there are some people who will remain bad gamers forever no matter how good they are at games because they never learn about respect and all. I think it’s genetic and they’re the weaker ones on the competitive gaming Darwinism. You like that? I just coined a new term on a venting post.
Because Smash is that game that dares to be different.
I just call it as the way things are. Some people are just naturally better than others at different things. It’s not gaming Darwinism. Well, okay, you might be able to call it that, but it’s nothing special.
Different != Better
Different and better are completely unrelated.
Seriously though, Nintendo needs to get their act together with the next game. They’re going to have a heck of a time going up against the following:
[LIST=1]
[]Super Street Fighter IV
[]Street Fighter III 3rd Strike
[]Marvel vs. Capcom 3
[]Marvel vs. Capcom 2
[]Tatsunoko vs. Capcom
[]BlazBlue Continuum Shift
[]King of Fighters XIII
[]Mortal Kombat 9
[]Tekken 6
[]Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown
[*]Darkstalkers 4 (Rumored)
[/LIST]
They’re going to have to do more than just be different just to survive.
I was off on a tangent with my rant. Ignore everything about that now.
Nintendo isn’t aiming to out-anything the competition does unless it’s sales. To me, every item on that list is the exact same item, they’re all traditional fighters. Melee does something with fighting games that no one else dares to do. But then again, only Nintendo would be capable of it anyways. Half of what makes Smash Brothers so great is that it’s Nintendo’s favorite characters beating the snot out of each other in a cartoony way. You can’t just replace Mario, Link, and Samus with Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li. You can play out your favorite fan fantasies.
I have faith in Nintendo because maybe Nintendo does have faith in me. Look at Super Smash Brothers for the DS or 3DS.
Exactly! It doesn’t exist. I really don’t know if this is true or not, but maybe Nintendo does realize that Smash Brothers is their #1 multi-player game. The way Smash Brothers is played can’t be reduced to a hand held system. The fun of Smash Brothers is playing the game with your friends in a party.
Maybe they also know that since Smash is so deep and and competitive, they realize that with a high level player’s actions per minute, the system would get destroyed. And maybe the 3DS’s slide pad isn’t so perfect like an analog stick.
Now that Nintendo has a super big amount of money-
Have you seen what they’ve done with their money!? They invented the 3D TV! In their 3DS Nintendogs presentation, the 3DS has a front and back camera on it which can help the player interact with the game. The camera in Nintendogs can recognize a human face, even when the face tilts. It can recognize the owner’s face and a different person’s face and when the dog sees different faces, it will behave differently. I’d bet they put a lot of money into researching how to do that kind of stuff and guess where that money came from?
The games they made for casual gamers.
But I think Nintendo’s now learning from their mistakes. Ever since Zelda Twilight Princess, they’ve dropped the difficulty level too low. According to a friend of mine, he thinks New Super Mario Brothers Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2 brought back difficulty to the level it should be, even if it’s a bit limited to the end of the game and the later side quests. I haven’t played them to see for myself if he’s right, but I can trust him.
Super Smash Brothers barlw was a mistake, and perhaps it’s one of their last foreseeable big mistakes. I know Iwata (I think it was him?) said he wanted the next Smash to be lead by Sakurai and Sakurai said barlw would be the last game he makes, there will inevitably be a sequel. Smash Brothers = good profit, even though it’s not as big profit as the 22 million copy sold Mario Kart wii. Smash 4 will happen on whatever the console after wii is called is released.
Sakurai is a selfish fool who tried to force his ideals onto Smash fans. But there may be good news because Sakurai set up his own development team, Sora LTD, sometime around the development of barlw. Even though HAL is mostly credited for making barlw, they actually didn’t do so much work on the game as Sora LTD made. Also, barlw tried to use a third party engine, Havok, for their game and there were many or several coding errors. There is a chance Nintendo knows about their mistakes and if they continue to value their most loyal Smash fans, the fans that organize big events for people who play the game to get together and share their love to the world, I think Nintendo will put Smash4 in the hands of the people who made one of the best and most unique fighting games ever, HAL.
Then I suggest you do your research. These games, despite sharing similar conventions all play differently. Are you going to tell me that Guilty Gear plays like Tekken? King of Fighters like BlazBlue?
lol they didn’t invent 3DTV. But yes, I do believe that the casual gamer games have been fueling quite a bit of Nintendo’s larger projects.
I believe him. I have ten stars left in SMG2 and they are making me say terrible things.
I don’t know if I want it back in the hands on HAL again. Remember that Melee was a total accident not unlike a certain Capcom fighter.
Smash itself isn’t even close to being a traditonal fighter.
Except that Nintendo still doesn’t get that the only reason why Smash survived for over a decade was because of Melee’s tournament scene. It wasn’t because of casual gaming with people wanting to come over and play Smash for a while, it was because of players actually playing a game for over ten years then getting spat at by a developer who openly despised the scene that kept Smash alive for well over ten years. Its exactly like Marvel 2. The only real reason why the game even got a third sequel was because of a community who supported the game over ten years, no matter how broken or busted it got. It was NEVER because of casual players at all.
If that were true, Melee would have destroyed the gamecube easily due to all the precision needed. The 3DS is reported to be as powerful as an HD console anyways, which means Melee could be ported quite fine.
Despite this, despite ALL OF THIS, Capcom is probably the only major video game company who will actually listen to the input from players and do something about, rather than let it stagnate and rot like an old carcass.
Ninty still hasn’t learned. The only REAL difficult game on the Wii right now that is mainstream Nintendo is probably Sin and Punishment: Star Sucessor and that is only because the original was harder than most games as well. SMG2 only got slightly harder (and way better) due to Miyamoto being the main developer for the game.
Except that Sakurai never cared about the competitive Smash scene at all. Japan, in the US, Europe, anywhere. He wanted it extinguished. Even IF Smash still made profit during the gamecube era it was still only because of the competitive Smash scene. To ignore that would to commit developer suicide and unrelenting hatred from probably the only competitive community that actually cares about a Nintendo game that much.
IF Smash 4 is made, it won’t be for another 5 years, which means Smash will either be one of two things: Everyone will go back to Melee or the community will be so few in number that only a new Smash game could get the community back up and running.
Exactly the point. It dares to be a different kind of fighting game.
Smash has the most casual gamers, percentage wise and total numbers wise, of all the fighting games out there. They fueled Nintendo’s Smash profits initially. THen the tournament scene furthur promoted their game, but it still isn’t to the extent the causal gamers have. There are so few tournament players out there compared to the number of non tournament players. There is a small portion of people who don’t go to tournaments but still play Smash with tournament rules and follow the tournament scene.
I’m talking about the 3DS controller, aka the whole system. If you’re trying to do some technical stuff like multishining, a player might break some of the buttons, or if he tried to moonwalk, the slide pad would wear out fast on the 3DS.
Well, I can thing of Bungie and their apalogy to their MLG and Halo 1 fans, aka Halo Reach. Nintendo may not be listening to us fans so much, but they might accidentally be helping us out again.
I don’t buy games anymore, so I don’t know.
Smash64: 4.9 million sold
Melee: over 7 million sold
barlw: 9.5 million sold
Mario Kart wii: 22 million sold
I think Nintendo sees a trend. Causal gamers far outnumber hardcore and competitive gamers. We’re at the lowest spot on their list of target audience priorities. But guess what? They’re freely using their pocket change to make a little something that pleases us too now. It’s little, but it’s a start on the right path. And you should know that Melee is often considered THE reason to own a GameCube. Its highest copy:GameCube ratio was 3:4. That means at one point in GameCube’s life, 75% of GameCube owners had Super Smash Brothers Melee.
I can wait 5 years. I waited 7 for barlw, so with the 2 years so far + the expected 5, I’m used to being patient. Most players who quit out of barlw are going to SF IV, because there actual players exist. I have yet to be at a Melee tournament with 77 players that wasn’t Genesis and this weekend, there are 77 expected entrants at some MD/VA barlw tournament. MD/VA is only an above average region for Smash. At the Melee tournaments I’ve been to, there has been as few as 7 players and at most as 20. That’s not a big number like 77.
I love how Fluga talks about how the few thousand or so people who make up Smash’s competitive scene is what is making Smash worth making for Nintendo and not the remaining four-five million fans who bought the game for Nintendo fan-service or four-player couch play. That’s what sets it apart from most fighting games- Street Fighter was, until SF4, a series of arcade games that made money from the hardcore fans that kept coming back repeatedly, clogging the machines and getting arcade owners to request another cabinet/board or six from Capcom. Mortal Kombat, KoF, Soul Calibur, Tekken- all come from the same roots, even as many of them transitioned to being home-oriented titles. When the people who’ve been playing as part of these communities get recognization from Capcom as the people who convinced Capcom to bring back Street Fighter after over ten years in retirement as a series, it’s because they WERE the guys Capcom got paid by. These were the guys who got people interested in the game and expanded their player base and gave these new faces someone to look up to. Contrast this to how the casual fans treat the competitive Smash community- like a leper colony that’s more fit to be purged by fire then embraced for their efforts. The casual fans hate the competitive Smash community, and large part of that is because of how important the competitive Smash community makes themselves out to be- trying to compare themselves to the guys who carried Marvel and Street Fighters for a ten-year dry spell until Capcom was finally convinced to pick it up again- when in reality the Smash train would have kept on chugging without them, and every drat casual fan knows it. Because Smash is ultimately a fanservice game for Nintendo fans first and a competitive brawler for fighting game fans somewhat after that.
Unlike all the arcade fighters, Smash started life as a home console game, where they need to make their money by touching as large an audience as possible because the money difference Nintendo made between Joe Sofa and his three friends who break it out every other Sunday for an hour and Mick Hardcore who played the game every day until he got Fox Waveshine down to perfection was $0. Sakurai had the mindset to develop it as a game that was targeted at Joe Sofa knowing this, with an emphasis on fun and flash first and competitive balance second. It worked and sold like gangbusters by and large to Nintendo’s huge pool of loyal fans looking for something new to break out between games of Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye, so they made another one. And when the Wii hit, Brawl got made because a new one for a new console would make a shit-ton of money and the hardware upgrade would stop people from looking at it as Super Smash Brothers 2 Super Turbo DX Ultra and the Wii suddenly had an install base that would have Smash make MAD MONEY if it had anywhere near the attach rate Melee had. He pandered to the guys who wanted him to expand on the 1P features and bring in crazier items and stages for more couch play shenanigans and characters whom it was more important it played to their roots as game characters first because they were the ones that made up a majority of both Smash 64 and Melee’s fanbases.
I didn’t play Smash 64 looking for a deep, competitive fighter, but I won’t complain that we ended up getting one. Ditto Melee and Brawl. Getting such a focus on it’s mechanics and competitive viability has helped the game keep it’s legs as both a casual and competitive game, but the emphasis is on the former group far more then the latter, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs find an archive of Brawl’s Dojo blog during the months leading to it’s release and read it over nice and slow, paying attention to what the updates focus on more. Anyone who thinks Nintendo needs to focus on the competitive community for Super Smash Bros. Next to have a chance of being as big as it’s predecessors really doesn’t have a grasp of how huge Smash is as a video game with all gaming audiences and how small a part of that group those who play it as a serious fighting game are.
I thought casual Smashers hate competitive Smashers because of the whole no items, Fox only, Final Destination stereotype? I have met casual Smashers that are absolute jerks and try to force items on when they play, otherwise they throw out insults at anyone who wants them off. (Would that make them casual or just item scrubs? I think it might actually be the latter?)
Also, fun fact. If you look at all the dojo updates, you won’t find 1 update that has anything to do with tripping.
Sakurai didn’t pander to those who wanted 1P features. He wanted that from the very beginning, but Miyamoto told him to focus on the multiplayer. Sakurai made a big mistake in deviating from this as it’s obvious that the Subpar Emissary took a good chunk of development time.
We really don’t know what Sakurai’s intentions were necessarily when he created the first SSB other than he wanted to make a fighting game that was an alternative to the others in the market at the time. You also have to remember that SSB was designed originally as a Japan-only, low budget title. You couldn’t have a whole lot of time for balancing and glitch finding anyway.
Heck, we can’t truly determine what his intentions were with Brawl. Supposedly, based on data the hackers found, Brawl was to be much better balanced then it is now. This included getting rid of a lot of MK’s transcendent priority on his moves, Snake’s disjointed hitboxes are from when his model was bigger and they didn’t scale it down; grab release issues were to be taken care of, among other things.
It’s also possible that Sakurai may have been aiming for another Melee. By this, I mean that he wanted to make another SSB game that appealed to both sides of the spectrum. Except this time, he wanted it to not be an accident.
It’s quite possible that, like Melee, Brawl was hit hard with time restraints which can be indicated with Mewtwo and Roy being near completion, but were cut. In summary, Brawl is the way it is because of time constraints, and overemphasis on the single player mode.
It’s the latter as they insist on playing only with those settings.
And you will find one update that has something to do with tripping: Smash Bros. DOJO!!
It’s only in the Mario picture, but other than that, I don’t think there is an update that explicitly refers to it.
You made me want to hate Sakurai less. A friend of mine made a post on Smashboards on why the skill gap in barlw is narrower than it is in Melee. I’ll have to dig through a lot to find it, but here’s the story from what I rememer:
Sakurai’s son went to a gaming convention where a barlw demo was being hands-on previewed and his kid got to play a lot with the other players at the gaming booth. But he got destroyed a lot so he asked Sakurai to make the game so that he wouldn’t get destroyed so much. So then Sakurai listened to him and narrowed the skill gap in barlw. I don’t know how much of the story is true, but he claims it’s true.
Also, I heard that the barlw demo at E3 had real Melee l-canceling.
Alright, this is totally derailing the topic a little here, but this has been a fun read. I just have to ask…
…EP, why on earth do you spell it “barlw?” At first I thought it was a typo, then I thought it was a hilarious coincidence… now I’m thinking La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo.
It’s sort of an inside joke. Shortly after the release of barlw, there was this one guy on the forums who hated barlw, so when ever he had to type “Brawl”, he would mash the keys in random order. barlw was the one that was picked up the easiest by people who copied him.