Budget Player Cadet_
Smash Hero
<Foreword: a good part of this references heavily (i.e. blatantly rips off) a genius post by Slashy. Partial credit goes to him. Oh, and if you're on a site like GameFaqs, or IGN, or whatever... repost this. >
IF ANYONE KNOWS A WAY TO COMMUNICATE THIS TO NINTENDO OR PROJECT SORA, LET ME KNOW. LET'S GET THIS OUT THERE!
Dear Sakurai, and dear Project Sora
As a slight foreword, I'd like to state that I mean no offense to any of you; I respect your work greatly and have personally sunk more hours of my life into various Smash Bros titles than I am willing to comfortably admit to myself. This does not mean I'm going to pull my punches, however.
It has been more than three years since Super Smash Bros Brawl first hit the shelves, and among those I've communicated with... Well, it's been met with mixed reviews. You tried very hard to make Brawl a non-competitive game, and in the process you shafted... well, us.
We are the competitive crowd that you seem to not really care about. We're the people who played Smash 64 until our fingers and joysticks were worn ragged. We're the people who bought melee, and played until we found out all of its secrets and spent more time on it, again, than we are proud to admit. We are the people who bought brawl, and spent days upon days figuring out how it worked. Yes, even brawl, the game you openly and proudly claim was "dumbed-down" to work for the casual crowd, was complex enough (is complex enough) to keep us occupied for a long time. I personally still play and enjoy brawl, and I still have a long way to the top.
But I have to talk to you about those mixed reviews. A lot of my friends simply did not like Brawl the way they liked melee. So what's changed so much?
Poor hit rewards.
Most fighting games have very strong combo systems, to the point where a player can figure out a "Bread and Butter" combo and use that most of the time. Smash is different, but in a very good way: both players have serious influence over how a combo goes. And in Melee, this was a big deal. With correct play on one side, you could have a single hit from a character like Fox or Falco lead into 40-50%, or a single hit lead into absolutely nothing because the other player escaped it correctly. In Brawl...
I play Jigglypuff from time to time in Brawl. And there is one thing that frustrates me more than anything else: at 0%, at the start of the match, almost every attack I use can and will be punished... on hit. That is, I hit my opponent and he gets a guaranteed free hit on me. In brawl, there are very few true combos. Many characters, especially those who are weaker, such as Jigglypuff or Samus, have very, very few options on hit. All they can really do is play incredibly defensively, or rely on items, which are a difficult thing to rely on due to their random nature. If there is any single complaint about Brawl that comes up almost every time, this is it.
Intentional Removal of Complex Elements/Addition of Random Elements.
What do I mean by this... Nobody likes tripping. Nobody. The hardcore gamers hate it because it introduces an element of randomness into the game that can and often does decide who wins matches (a recent Japanese tournament was ended after one of the characters tripped into a kill move in the final match). The casuals hate it for... well, exactly the same reason: it gives wins to players who didn't deserve it, and cheapens the wins for those that would've anyways. It leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth, regardless of your level; if you were abusing it, your friends can complain that you didn't really win, you only won because of tripping; if you were on the receiving end, you just lost the match.
What the casuals won't complain as much about is how you removed Crouch Cancelling (despite the code being in the game and ready to use), Double Stick DI (again, it was already coded but you just didn't use it), non-tumble DI, grab release influence, and the like. And this underlines a more serious issue with Brawl's design.
All in all, it all boils down to one thing: you tried to turn Super Smash Bros into something that was not a fighting game, or you tried to turn it into a fighting game with no competition.
This is a really bad idea, no matter what philosophy your business may have regarding game design. If people want to play a party game, they do not buy Super Smash Bros. They buy Mario Party or Raving Rabbids or Wii Sports-the wii (and nintendo overall) has tons of simple plug-and-play party games. Super Smash Bros, as unconventional as it is, is a fighting game. And taking the competition out of a fighting game is like taking the sugar out of a coke. The whole point you would play a fighting game is to compete. You play against your opponent in a fighting game to show that you are better, or to become better. If you remove the competitive aspect from a fighting game, you are removing the entire point of the game. Fighting games do not have driving storylines. They do not have particularly interesting characters (especially ones where most of the characters, canonically, do not ever speak); at least, not interesting enough to keep you playing. They do not have skinner box mechanics to condition you to keep grinding like RPGs. They don't offer much of a goal beyond "beat your opponents into the dust". Competition is not some small side point of fighting games, it is the whole point of playing. And while overly heady gameplay can alienate some fans (Guilty Gear, for example, is a genius game that really suffered from being too complex and difficult), removing gameplay depth and especially competition leaves a game which only one crowd will readily appreciate: the ultra-casuals.
Yes, this is what many of us see from Brawl: a game which was intended solely for the ultra-casuals. The players who will pick up the controller, play for an hour, tops, and then put the game back down and go back to... whatever else. People who will innately see no replay value in the game, and see it solely for a ridiculous party game. I hope I don't have to explain why aiming your gameplay at them is a bad idea; this crowd would not care what game they are playing. They wouldn't notice the difference between Brawl, Soul Calibur, and Tetris. Aiming for them means simply poor game design.
Furthermore, it shafts the people who are not only likely to buy your game, but are also likely to buy the console it's on, despite the fact that they only really care about this one game. It shafts the very people who care about your game.
But after this huge tangent, I still haven't gotten around to "Why you can learn from Brawl-". I think it's time I brought this up.
Brawl Minus is one of the more recent of a line of full modifications to Brawl; akin to the fan-made modifications of games on the Steam platform. The smash modding community has been very, very active in this regards, and a lot of people play and enjoy modified versions of the game.
Brawl Minus is the casual mod floating around. We're the guys that the tournament players will not take seriously for tournament play, but still enjoy and respect. Brawl Minus focused on things that would take people's mind off of the competition (and the seriousness of it) rather than basing the whole game around avoiding it. It's perfectly possible to allow a game to be competitive, have a skilled player win, and not get so worked up over it. I truly believe that Brawl Minus follows very strongly in the spirit of what you wanted for Brawl... But it has one crucial difference.
Brawl Minus' unpredictability is in the control of the players, and it always is in the favour of the players, meaning when a new player does witness something unexpected they aren't frustrated by it, while techniques such as prat falling (tripping) are the bad kind of random factors that frustrate players because the game decided to take away their victory in a way that many would consider undeserved.
Also Brawl Minus has both balanced characters and balanced mechanics, the game is much more enjoyable when you need to rely on your variety of defensive techniques rather than use them as a crutch. In Brawl Minus, players who do well are likely to feel a greater sense of satisfaction when they manage to succeed. Every time they avoid an attack they can feel satisfied knowing that they've dodged something dangerous, and every time a player succeeds in attacking their opponent they feel a sense of pride and a sense of encouragement to continue attacking for a combo. This leads to greater satisfaction.
In Brawl's case it does everything it can to try and punish players, which in turn leads to players becoming frustrated and wanting to leave the game. This is most prominent with the poor character balance, tripping, and the lack of hitstun. Every time a player is punished in a video game, he or she must have an understanding of why he or she has been punished. In Brawl there is no such reasoning, tripping can happen at any moment, you can get hurt by trying to attack, and you can get utterly dominated even when you're using all of your character options effectively.
This is why every competitive player always seems to be fighting the game, it's analogous to trying to swim against a current, and in someways even literally. The game's defensive nature, loads of random factors, and the lack of hitstun is basically the game telling you to stop trying to take matters into your own hands. However, this applies equally to the casuals, because the truth is, almost everyone is playing a game like this competitively at one level or another.
So what was that one big change? Brawl was casual in a way that was actively against the competitive grain; Brawl Minus was casual in a way that leaves the competition intact and fun on every level of play. Yes, it's possible. In fact, Melee did it wonderfully, and without pulling its punches or becoming slow or "wacky".
You spoke in your previous interviews about Melee being "just too hard". Even when I picked up Melee for the first time, I did not see it that way. I found melee to be perfectly playable. I mean, I can understand that one might get that impression if you face an amateur up against a pro, but you will have that in every game, from Melee to Brawl to Chess to Rayman Raving Rabbids. The casual crowd will either find a different game, or find others on their own level. I mean, hell, Smash in and of itself is not an easy game. Whereas in a game like Street Fighter or Guilty Gear you can pick up a controller and mash buttons and have some hope of success, in Smash mashing buttons will most likely lead to you killing yourself. The smash formula lends itself very poorly to this casual crowd you seem intent on catering to. And yet, it is beloved by many such casual players.
The truth is, casual players are not some diametrically opposed group when compared to competitive players. You cannot be a competitive player without first being an amateur for a while, and we both desire the same things in gameplay: depth and good design. By shafting the competitive crowd, you are at the same time shafting the casuals. As said, nobody likes tripping. We're all out to compete in a fighting game like this, and removing mechanics like tumble DI that make competition more deep, or adding ones like tripping that cheapen it, don't help anyone. And in fact, for all of my touting of Brawl- that I did earlier, I honestly think that most of us would appreciate a more serious game; a game that both takes itself and its mechanics more seriously. What we want most of all is the continuation of the mechanics that made smash so great in the first place-things like Directional Influence in all of its forms, the free-form combo system, the beautiful character design. If there's anything that I (and the rest of the community) can offer you, it's these items. And please don't ignore us as amateurs; several of us are accomplished freelance game designers or studying game design. At the very least, we can claim that we know the Smash series inside and out. You may be a great designer, but I believe we still have something to offer.
Don't dumb it down too much.
I know, you worry about hypothetical casuals getting frustrated very quickly when playing against players who are way better. But dumbing the gameplay down is not how you should fix this! As said, competition is the entire point in games like this. Instead, offer better tutorials. Show off some of the less obvious mechanics along with the bare-bones basics. David Sirlin did a series of vids of this sort for Brawl, and there was nothing there the average player would not understand. Why not try to explain DI to newer players, instead of leaving it up to the community to explain to them how to escape combos? You get what I'm getting at. As long as the game explains itself (which, by the way, is something most fighting games are notoriously bad at; I have been playing Guilty Gear for ages and I still don't get it), it can be as complex and deep as it needs to be without getting too difficult for the beginners. Melee pulled it off, despite being incredibly fast and challenging (I am one of these so-called "competitives" and I still am awful at the mechanics in melee that you need to master as the first step. Doesn't stop me from loving the gameplay, though), and Smash 4 can too. Remember: if a casual player wouldn't notice it, then it probably will not effect them.
Reward us for landing hits!
In general, there is very little which is less rewarding than landing a hit and getting punished for it. I brought this up earlier, but it really does need to be emphasized. In Brawl, it is often quite hard to hit your opponent and not get punished for doing so. This is possibly the single worst thing a game can do! In fact, some moves (for example, Jigglypuff's Sing) do literally nothing on hit (you can always get out of it before Jigglypuff can do anything to you!). This is a major issue, and not to be overlooked. When you start punishing players for playing the game the way it was intended, they become conditioned to dislike it. Please, please do not make this mistake! It is crucially important. Be it via buffed hitstun (like in the original Super Smash Bros) or faster gameplay (like in Super Smash Bros Melee) or even a cancel system (like other 2D fighters), just ensure that you aren't regularly punished for hitting with a move.
Don't randomize it too much.
Oh god I cannot overemphasize this. Lemme say it again: nobody likes tripping. NOBODY. LIKES. TRIPPING. Not the competitives, not the casuals, not even the player who just won because his opponent tripped into a smash attack. Some forms of randomness are OK, especially those that are ingrained into the series, but even then, it could be better if it was only semi-random (like how Norfair's lava works on a complex series of timers in Brawl); you can turn items off anyways, so that's okay. But you can't turn tripping off. It's always there. And it shouldn't be. Please, please do not try to add mechanics like this. Inescapable randomness is simply not a good idea. Especially in such cases.
Bring on Beta Testers.
Another modification of Brawl, the aptly-titled "Balanced Brawl", made Brawl an incredibly well-balanced game with only a few changes. To quote them:
An alternative to this...
Serialized Releases.
We get one Smash game every 5-10 years. We then proceed to play that Smash game. For a long, long time. This is a model which is unique among popular fighting games. If you look at other series, you see Tekken having a new release every year or two, none of which changes the core gameplay beyond adding new characters/refining old ones. You see Blazblue bring out a series of games within the last two years, each refining the old formula. You see Street Fighter 4 come out with a Super and an Arcade Edition upgrade. All of these sequels, which had mostly smaller balance changes or a few added characters would be easily doable for the smash bros series, and would allow for major improvement of the game's balance at each go, and another fat paycheck in the pockets of Team Sora and all others involved. Maybe something to think about.
Then again, this isn't my idea either... So whatever, I dunno. If something like that was profitable, you guys probably would've already jumped on it.
All in all, most people I know are hoping that the mistakes made in Brawl do not repeat themselves in Smash 4. I sincerely hope you take the lessons that the community has to offer you.
Sincerely,
-<real name here>, Alias Budget Player Cadet
IF ANYONE KNOWS A WAY TO COMMUNICATE THIS TO NINTENDO OR PROJECT SORA, LET ME KNOW. LET'S GET THIS OUT THERE!
Dear Sakurai, and dear Project Sora
As a slight foreword, I'd like to state that I mean no offense to any of you; I respect your work greatly and have personally sunk more hours of my life into various Smash Bros titles than I am willing to comfortably admit to myself. This does not mean I'm going to pull my punches, however.
It has been more than three years since Super Smash Bros Brawl first hit the shelves, and among those I've communicated with... Well, it's been met with mixed reviews. You tried very hard to make Brawl a non-competitive game, and in the process you shafted... well, us.
We are the competitive crowd that you seem to not really care about. We're the people who played Smash 64 until our fingers and joysticks were worn ragged. We're the people who bought melee, and played until we found out all of its secrets and spent more time on it, again, than we are proud to admit. We are the people who bought brawl, and spent days upon days figuring out how it worked. Yes, even brawl, the game you openly and proudly claim was "dumbed-down" to work for the casual crowd, was complex enough (is complex enough) to keep us occupied for a long time. I personally still play and enjoy brawl, and I still have a long way to the top.
But I have to talk to you about those mixed reviews. A lot of my friends simply did not like Brawl the way they liked melee. So what's changed so much?
Poor hit rewards.
Most fighting games have very strong combo systems, to the point where a player can figure out a "Bread and Butter" combo and use that most of the time. Smash is different, but in a very good way: both players have serious influence over how a combo goes. And in Melee, this was a big deal. With correct play on one side, you could have a single hit from a character like Fox or Falco lead into 40-50%, or a single hit lead into absolutely nothing because the other player escaped it correctly. In Brawl...
I play Jigglypuff from time to time in Brawl. And there is one thing that frustrates me more than anything else: at 0%, at the start of the match, almost every attack I use can and will be punished... on hit. That is, I hit my opponent and he gets a guaranteed free hit on me. In brawl, there are very few true combos. Many characters, especially those who are weaker, such as Jigglypuff or Samus, have very, very few options on hit. All they can really do is play incredibly defensively, or rely on items, which are a difficult thing to rely on due to their random nature. If there is any single complaint about Brawl that comes up almost every time, this is it.
Intentional Removal of Complex Elements/Addition of Random Elements.
What do I mean by this... Nobody likes tripping. Nobody. The hardcore gamers hate it because it introduces an element of randomness into the game that can and often does decide who wins matches (a recent Japanese tournament was ended after one of the characters tripped into a kill move in the final match). The casuals hate it for... well, exactly the same reason: it gives wins to players who didn't deserve it, and cheapens the wins for those that would've anyways. It leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth, regardless of your level; if you were abusing it, your friends can complain that you didn't really win, you only won because of tripping; if you were on the receiving end, you just lost the match.
What the casuals won't complain as much about is how you removed Crouch Cancelling (despite the code being in the game and ready to use), Double Stick DI (again, it was already coded but you just didn't use it), non-tumble DI, grab release influence, and the like. And this underlines a more serious issue with Brawl's design.
All in all, it all boils down to one thing: you tried to turn Super Smash Bros into something that was not a fighting game, or you tried to turn it into a fighting game with no competition.
This is a really bad idea, no matter what philosophy your business may have regarding game design. If people want to play a party game, they do not buy Super Smash Bros. They buy Mario Party or Raving Rabbids or Wii Sports-the wii (and nintendo overall) has tons of simple plug-and-play party games. Super Smash Bros, as unconventional as it is, is a fighting game. And taking the competition out of a fighting game is like taking the sugar out of a coke. The whole point you would play a fighting game is to compete. You play against your opponent in a fighting game to show that you are better, or to become better. If you remove the competitive aspect from a fighting game, you are removing the entire point of the game. Fighting games do not have driving storylines. They do not have particularly interesting characters (especially ones where most of the characters, canonically, do not ever speak); at least, not interesting enough to keep you playing. They do not have skinner box mechanics to condition you to keep grinding like RPGs. They don't offer much of a goal beyond "beat your opponents into the dust". Competition is not some small side point of fighting games, it is the whole point of playing. And while overly heady gameplay can alienate some fans (Guilty Gear, for example, is a genius game that really suffered from being too complex and difficult), removing gameplay depth and especially competition leaves a game which only one crowd will readily appreciate: the ultra-casuals.
Yes, this is what many of us see from Brawl: a game which was intended solely for the ultra-casuals. The players who will pick up the controller, play for an hour, tops, and then put the game back down and go back to... whatever else. People who will innately see no replay value in the game, and see it solely for a ridiculous party game. I hope I don't have to explain why aiming your gameplay at them is a bad idea; this crowd would not care what game they are playing. They wouldn't notice the difference between Brawl, Soul Calibur, and Tetris. Aiming for them means simply poor game design.
Furthermore, it shafts the people who are not only likely to buy your game, but are also likely to buy the console it's on, despite the fact that they only really care about this one game. It shafts the very people who care about your game.
But after this huge tangent, I still haven't gotten around to "Why you can learn from Brawl-". I think it's time I brought this up.
Brawl Minus is one of the more recent of a line of full modifications to Brawl; akin to the fan-made modifications of games on the Steam platform. The smash modding community has been very, very active in this regards, and a lot of people play and enjoy modified versions of the game.
Brawl Minus is the casual mod floating around. We're the guys that the tournament players will not take seriously for tournament play, but still enjoy and respect. Brawl Minus focused on things that would take people's mind off of the competition (and the seriousness of it) rather than basing the whole game around avoiding it. It's perfectly possible to allow a game to be competitive, have a skilled player win, and not get so worked up over it. I truly believe that Brawl Minus follows very strongly in the spirit of what you wanted for Brawl... But it has one crucial difference.
Brawl Minus' unpredictability is in the control of the players, and it always is in the favour of the players, meaning when a new player does witness something unexpected they aren't frustrated by it, while techniques such as prat falling (tripping) are the bad kind of random factors that frustrate players because the game decided to take away their victory in a way that many would consider undeserved.
Also Brawl Minus has both balanced characters and balanced mechanics, the game is much more enjoyable when you need to rely on your variety of defensive techniques rather than use them as a crutch. In Brawl Minus, players who do well are likely to feel a greater sense of satisfaction when they manage to succeed. Every time they avoid an attack they can feel satisfied knowing that they've dodged something dangerous, and every time a player succeeds in attacking their opponent they feel a sense of pride and a sense of encouragement to continue attacking for a combo. This leads to greater satisfaction.
In Brawl's case it does everything it can to try and punish players, which in turn leads to players becoming frustrated and wanting to leave the game. This is most prominent with the poor character balance, tripping, and the lack of hitstun. Every time a player is punished in a video game, he or she must have an understanding of why he or she has been punished. In Brawl there is no such reasoning, tripping can happen at any moment, you can get hurt by trying to attack, and you can get utterly dominated even when you're using all of your character options effectively.
This is why every competitive player always seems to be fighting the game, it's analogous to trying to swim against a current, and in someways even literally. The game's defensive nature, loads of random factors, and the lack of hitstun is basically the game telling you to stop trying to take matters into your own hands. However, this applies equally to the casuals, because the truth is, almost everyone is playing a game like this competitively at one level or another.
So what was that one big change? Brawl was casual in a way that was actively against the competitive grain; Brawl Minus was casual in a way that leaves the competition intact and fun on every level of play. Yes, it's possible. In fact, Melee did it wonderfully, and without pulling its punches or becoming slow or "wacky".
You spoke in your previous interviews about Melee being "just too hard". Even when I picked up Melee for the first time, I did not see it that way. I found melee to be perfectly playable. I mean, I can understand that one might get that impression if you face an amateur up against a pro, but you will have that in every game, from Melee to Brawl to Chess to Rayman Raving Rabbids. The casual crowd will either find a different game, or find others on their own level. I mean, hell, Smash in and of itself is not an easy game. Whereas in a game like Street Fighter or Guilty Gear you can pick up a controller and mash buttons and have some hope of success, in Smash mashing buttons will most likely lead to you killing yourself. The smash formula lends itself very poorly to this casual crowd you seem intent on catering to. And yet, it is beloved by many such casual players.
The truth is, casual players are not some diametrically opposed group when compared to competitive players. You cannot be a competitive player without first being an amateur for a while, and we both desire the same things in gameplay: depth and good design. By shafting the competitive crowd, you are at the same time shafting the casuals. As said, nobody likes tripping. We're all out to compete in a fighting game like this, and removing mechanics like tumble DI that make competition more deep, or adding ones like tripping that cheapen it, don't help anyone. And in fact, for all of my touting of Brawl- that I did earlier, I honestly think that most of us would appreciate a more serious game; a game that both takes itself and its mechanics more seriously. What we want most of all is the continuation of the mechanics that made smash so great in the first place-things like Directional Influence in all of its forms, the free-form combo system, the beautiful character design. If there's anything that I (and the rest of the community) can offer you, it's these items. And please don't ignore us as amateurs; several of us are accomplished freelance game designers or studying game design. At the very least, we can claim that we know the Smash series inside and out. You may be a great designer, but I believe we still have something to offer.
Don't dumb it down too much.
I know, you worry about hypothetical casuals getting frustrated very quickly when playing against players who are way better. But dumbing the gameplay down is not how you should fix this! As said, competition is the entire point in games like this. Instead, offer better tutorials. Show off some of the less obvious mechanics along with the bare-bones basics. David Sirlin did a series of vids of this sort for Brawl, and there was nothing there the average player would not understand. Why not try to explain DI to newer players, instead of leaving it up to the community to explain to them how to escape combos? You get what I'm getting at. As long as the game explains itself (which, by the way, is something most fighting games are notoriously bad at; I have been playing Guilty Gear for ages and I still don't get it), it can be as complex and deep as it needs to be without getting too difficult for the beginners. Melee pulled it off, despite being incredibly fast and challenging (I am one of these so-called "competitives" and I still am awful at the mechanics in melee that you need to master as the first step. Doesn't stop me from loving the gameplay, though), and Smash 4 can too. Remember: if a casual player wouldn't notice it, then it probably will not effect them.
Reward us for landing hits!
In general, there is very little which is less rewarding than landing a hit and getting punished for it. I brought this up earlier, but it really does need to be emphasized. In Brawl, it is often quite hard to hit your opponent and not get punished for doing so. This is possibly the single worst thing a game can do! In fact, some moves (for example, Jigglypuff's Sing) do literally nothing on hit (you can always get out of it before Jigglypuff can do anything to you!). This is a major issue, and not to be overlooked. When you start punishing players for playing the game the way it was intended, they become conditioned to dislike it. Please, please do not make this mistake! It is crucially important. Be it via buffed hitstun (like in the original Super Smash Bros) or faster gameplay (like in Super Smash Bros Melee) or even a cancel system (like other 2D fighters), just ensure that you aren't regularly punished for hitting with a move.
Don't randomize it too much.
Oh god I cannot overemphasize this. Lemme say it again: nobody likes tripping. NOBODY. LIKES. TRIPPING. Not the competitives, not the casuals, not even the player who just won because his opponent tripped into a smash attack. Some forms of randomness are OK, especially those that are ingrained into the series, but even then, it could be better if it was only semi-random (like how Norfair's lava works on a complex series of timers in Brawl); you can turn items off anyways, so that's okay. But you can't turn tripping off. It's always there. And it shouldn't be. Please, please do not try to add mechanics like this. Inescapable randomness is simply not a good idea. Especially in such cases.
Bring on Beta Testers.
Another modification of Brawl, the aptly-titled "Balanced Brawl", made Brawl an incredibly well-balanced game with only a few changes. To quote them:
They didn't really need that much to make the game way more balanced. These are the kind of changes that a dedicated team like Team Sora could code over the course of a few days, if not far less. And it makes the game better at every level of play. But you need the feedback to get this. So what do you need to do? Closed beta testing. I have a fairly sizable list of people who I would strongly recommend for such an action. Any of these people would be a major boon in the phase shortly before release of your game, to stop things like Brawl Ganondorf (he is incredibly slow and weak, to the point that winning against a competent opponent with him is next to impossible... At least without items, and as said, you cannot really rely on items, especially when the opponent is faster than you).
An alternative to this...
Serialized Releases.
We get one Smash game every 5-10 years. We then proceed to play that Smash game. For a long, long time. This is a model which is unique among popular fighting games. If you look at other series, you see Tekken having a new release every year or two, none of which changes the core gameplay beyond adding new characters/refining old ones. You see Blazblue bring out a series of games within the last two years, each refining the old formula. You see Street Fighter 4 come out with a Super and an Arcade Edition upgrade. All of these sequels, which had mostly smaller balance changes or a few added characters would be easily doable for the smash bros series, and would allow for major improvement of the game's balance at each go, and another fat paycheck in the pockets of Team Sora and all others involved. Maybe something to think about.
Then again, this isn't my idea either... So whatever, I dunno. If something like that was profitable, you guys probably would've already jumped on it. All in all, most people I know are hoping that the mistakes made in Brawl do not repeat themselves in Smash 4. I sincerely hope you take the lessons that the community has to offer you.
Sincerely,
-<real name here>, Alias Budget Player Cadet
