A thread to hopefully quell the madness. A look into Brawl and it's ATs

First I'm going to openly admit that I don't have Brawl and haven't played it yet. I wish I did (much like everyone here who hasn't played it); however, I'm not letting my time go to waste as I have been observing videos of smart competitive players and been keeping tabs on them. From watching I've learned A LOT of stuff, and it all seems to point to one thing. Intuitive play.

To truly understand everything I say in this post you will need to be up to date with what we currently know. If you want a refresher course go here: http://smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=140981

What do I mean by this? Well think about it. A lot of the stuff we did in melee was incredibly cryptic. We haphazardly stumbled upon it, and while it worked it did divide the community into haves and have nots. Now I'll be the first one to say that those who condemned the AT's in melee were being immature when it comes to playing a game competitively, but it doesn't change the fact that these core pieces to competitive play were not something that someone would just learn on their own.

With Brawl however, it seems that the removal of our old ATs were not to remove depth. I say that because we have already discovered a lot of little tricks and the game hasn't even been around for a week now. A lot of these things seem more intentional. For example, the jump back towards, where you can turn around and jump but keep your forward momentum. This is something that we would intuitively discover by just playing the game. It wasn't cryptic at all, it wasn't some weird function of the physics, it's something that people would realize through observation over time.

This goes to my next point, which is a large portion of why people are upset. This is the removal of L-canceling not being a big deal. For starters, raise your hand if you figured out L-canceling by yourself. I don't see any hands myself, I've yet to run into any person who figured that out on their own before hand. I'm sure they exist, as we found out L-canceling on the smashboards, but as it stands L-canceling just isn't intuitive at all. Nowhere at all is there any mention in melee that if you press R at the right time you will be rewarded like that. Keep in mind L-canceling was an intentional technique added into melee. If you want proof just go to an internet archive and pull up the old old version of smashbros.com where it's talking about SSB64. On that site they actually tell you how to Z-cancel.

So yeah, you are probably wondering now. Why take it out if they wanted the mechanic in the game? Well, for starters like I said it wasn't intuitive. The thing is, we are alright without l-canceling. Sakurai and his team weren't dumb like some people are thinking, they realized that getting rid of L-canceling required them to do something to make the game faster. What they did was simple. Most attacks don't have as much lag upon landing. This is a minor fix, but this isn't the major thing. The big thing, isn't this. People thought this was their fix for it. No. So what is the replacement for L-canceling? It's very simple. Everyone is floatier now. Most aerials are faster now. The new L-canceling is simple, you have to time your aerials so that you land after the animation is over. If you do this you do not suffer from any lag.

I've watched a lot of vids, and it seems like this was indeed their intent on working without L-canceling. It may be too early for me to say this, but I feel as if they spent a lot of time with the characters and they definitely had this in mind in the design of the characters themselves. Even Ganon, being the slowest character I've seen so far, has an aerial that he can spam without lag (his uair). Also, specifically Ganon, they realized that his lag would still impair him, so they gave him what appears to be one of the best moves in melee history, his new forward B. Now you aren't safe from him, as he can severely punish his opponents for shielding and it opens up his options quite a bit. He is still somewhat balanced because he isn't speedy though. That seems to be the magic behind it all.

I hope this will make some of the brawl pessimists change their mindset about Brawl. I think people are too caught up in trying to compare it to melee that they haven't tried looking at it in a different light. Honestly, this game is shaping up to be amazing. I have no doubts that this game will be more deep and more varied than melee.

Mookie for prez.

Well said Mookie.

I was pessimistic about Brawl myself for a good while, so I can understand where a lot of these guys are coming from, but yeah, we got to remove that Melee lens and start viewing this game differently. The same stuff won't work in Brawl as it did in Melee. Also, like I said, because of it's more intuitive gameplay, even the casual players will be able to pull off very impressive stuff. If anything I see this as an amazing thing that Sakurai has managed to do. Of course, there will still be a lot of non-intuitive tricks that will be discovered, but the most important things are covered now by basic gameplay mechanics.

This is very exciting, and I think it will manage to bring together competitive and casual players together in the long run.

Thank you for this. Now hopefully people can stop posting in the other threads that jumped the gun in saying advanced tactics are gone.

awesome post Mookie. It really makes me think differently about it.

Amazing post! Im impressed, I hope that opened some eyes on competitive SSBM players.

I've been losing my brawl spirit the past few days after hearing nonstop about Sakurai butchering the game and what not with the removal of advanced techs. You've given me hope and all of it makes sense too. This game is still going to be ****ing sweet.

Mookie for Moderator (again).

I hope this will get some poeple to get it through their thick skulls.

I'm glad to see people starting to look outside the box now.

Completely right! Thanks for that.

I completely agree with Mookie here. Well said.

In my group of smashers there are a handful of people that can play at a high competitive level. However, some of them just can't perform an L-cancel let alone waveshine etc.. The discrepancy in skill level for Melee forced us to split into two groups because of fairness. Some of them don't play games at all. They don't have their own console, and Melee was the only game they played.

Regardless of all this, a few of them have excellent recovery techniques and mix up their recovery game. If they could only pull off the same techs as the rest of us, they would have played at the same level.

For this, I am thankful for brawl. I'm certain that the competitive community (with practice) will adapt to the mechanics very quickly. We will still be on the hunt of new techs which will increase the depth of the game. But to go along with that, removing many of the complicated techniques will create a nice beginner-friendly atmosphere so that those starting out won't have as large of a gap from the competitive gamer. It'll be much easier for a casual player to learn how play at a high level.

And frankly for competitive gamers, this is an excellent thing to happen. More competitive players means a larger variety of opponents to play and it creates an overall bigger fanbase. As someone who likes to play at a high level, I'd love to see different players with different styles of play. This also means the tournaments will be larger hence larger prize amounts.

The future is bright, but we'll all see that once those of us stary playing the game.

Yay for the mook. Good game design by the Sakurai. : ) (there's a reason why so many japanese devs <3 the guy : P)

You can't stop the madness. You will never stop the madness.

(Mookie is too good).

Buzz said:

It is absolutely ridiculous to pass judgment this early even if you have the game. Give the game 3 years... THEN complain.

Click to expand...

That's one I wish more people would consider. Why the heck are people asking for/making tier lists now?

It has been fairly usual amongst developers working on fighting game sequels to replace previously exploitable and overpowered tricks with more balanced ones. The game developers know how to please people, including competetive players and often their work is all about balancing between hardcore and casual scene. Melee's competetive scene was so huge that Sakurai and his team can't abandon it. Of course new ATs will eventually show up, because every game is imperfectly programmed.

Nicely said MookieRah. Also, another thing that makes this better is that it is done by a MookieRahtor. No one now would dare to post another thing about ATs (Negatively of course) in fear of a moderator attack. Hopefully this will lead to no complaining. The new age is about to begin- The No-complaints age! MookieRah for president!

Quite an interesting post. Halfing the lag of aerial attacks somewhat does defeat the purpose of timing said attacks. Nice observations, Mookierah.

Well you made a convert out of me, now that's a sign of a good writer!

good post MookieRah...

Good stuff there. Hopefully lots of them whiners will read that.


Thanks.


Brawl rules.

Mookie... you are one of the smartest guys on these forums, keep up the good work

yeah, i've been optimistic about brawl from the beginning. and ive always said the same thing. "you cant look at brawl as melee 2, you have to look at brawl as brawl."...peace

-hiro

This needs to be said in other boards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H9sZ7NvHh0

sorry to bring all you guys back to earth...

I'm keeping my head up high tho.

That Ganon target test still makes me laugh at how hideously slow it makes him look XD

I think we need a new acronym for Advanced Techniques or Assist Trophies, which is what I thought this was about before I clicked on it.

See the problem with that is that shield grabbing is also very unintuitive...

I also would've preferred brawl to build on what melee had, not just try to emulate it >.> I was really hoping for each character to have a move as useful as the shine.

Great Topic Mookie.

Much of the advanced tech dissapointment with Brawl is simply that they are changed. Brawl will have advanced techs, but they'll be different. You can't blame any hardcore Melee player from being sad or defensive about techniques that have either been there since the series start (l-canceling) or were main staples in Melee (WDing, etc).

But being different does not make Brawl worse. Unless someone sits down and logs on some considerable hours onto Brawl, its not fair to call the game better or worse than Melee. Sure some people will not like Brawl, even if its good... its just the nature of everyone having opinions.


On another note, when I first saw the title I thought it was going to be a topic on assist trophies. LoL.

In the past, I've made comments concerning my own fears and skepticism as to the nature of the metagame in Brawl, but I think I've gone through the same transformation that Mookie has gone through. Watching the videos, and seeing Noir's thread have changed my mind, and I've seen how a metagame that may even be deeper than Melee could develop, with all sorts of new tricks present, and furthermore, they're accessible. These are things that we've noticed simply because they compliment the metagame, unlike Melee, where they defined it.

The backwards jump forward thing was actually in on of the commercials, IIRC. The one with Olimar and Wario.

Very good post, Mookie.

I agree that techniques in Brawl are much more intuitive. For now I'll refrain from calling them advanced techniques because, in Melee, AT was primarily used to refer to techniques that were not intuitive at all -- wavedashing, L-canceling, etc. Nevertheless, I think that there are techniques already present and visible in Brawl that have all the potential for depth and even for technical skill present, but making them more intuitive opens them up to a much wider audience.

I played Melee for years but only recently started incorporating the advanced techniques into my game, mostly because I never knew exactly how good (and how much fun) they could be. Sure, I teched from time to time and L-canceled the occasional move, and even had a rudimentary shffl going, but I never realized how they could extend throughout your entire gameplay and be part of almost every move you make. I never want to go back to playing like I did, and not because I play better. It's just more fun this way.

Hence, I am very glad that they took some of the fun and variety in advanced techniques and put it in basic and intuitive play. I would have had much more fun in the past few years if Melee had been like that, and I'm sure that a lot of people will have a great deal of fun because Brawl is. Thanks, Sakurai!

Buzz said:

???????????

Click to expand...

vid shows ganon fairing...
brawl = no l-canceling.
punish, punish, punish.

falcon is unfortunately a lil less laggier, which DOES not mean he can't combo, we just need to find out more of what the game has to offer, im with you mookie. I'm not giving up on brawl just yet. Like Phanna, I always look for anything that is new and useful for game play, we just need to explore more.

I'm actually more curious as to who in the sb.com community will be "II good" in brawl. most likey the more smarter players i guess.

MookieRah, I dunno if this was mentioned, but I think you might want to change your title a bit. ATs seems to be the standard abbreviation for Assist Trophies now, I completely overlooked this thinking it was an AT compilation and just looked now out of curiousity!

It seems like a lot of people are just now discovering a fact that I have known for quite a while now....

the game is going to be good, if not amazing

Post of the year! :D

Well said. I used wavedashing and L-canceling alike... but didn't have a clue about either until I read up on metagame. I'm kinda looking forward to testing the new waters.

One small thing, is that really your hair in the sig, or is it meant to be ironic? Because... really? You're obviously a very smart guy. Gotta fix the hair, man.

Yay! Good Topic man. It won't stop the flow of whiners though. No one can emphasize enough that people need to stop looking through the melee lens (nice metaphor!) and look at brawl. It will be like Smash64 in terms of competitive play. Look at some Isai videos of 64, and tell me that no Advanced Techs ruin a game's competitiveness. (There's Z-canceling, of course, but you know what I mean).

Even thought the gap is closed (which is what Sakurai wanted), those who are more skilled will still much. Shine above the rest. Smash is still about skill.