question though about stage legality... wasn't there going to be more added to make more stages playable? and without chain grabs, doesn't that make more stages viable?
I guess you'd have to worry about people getting comboed off the side easily, but can't you expand the side blast zones?
Bridge of Eldin - I guess it's too big? and that barrel of splosion is bad, though I guess it could get nerfed.
Shadow Moses Island - Other than the walls, this is more balanced now I guess. Is there a code to keep the walls from coming back or keep them off altogether?
Skyworld - Is it possible to keep the floors from breaking? I mean, it does sort of remove the essence of that TERRIBLE stage, but you'd think if it weren't for the floors...
Green Hill Zone - This would be a cool stage if the side blast zones were farther out. The only edits I would see would be to nerf the save point or remove it entirely and keep the floors from falling too quickly.
WarioWare Inc. - I remember discussing this awhile back. The stage could be counter pick if it didn't give you invincibility or size. Health gift was fine. Also, the challenges should be nerferd in knock back. other than that... if it were possible to do...
Summit - Meh, give the edges grab points, keep that fish out of the way, and don't lower gravity on the slide, you'd have a good stage, cept for the circle campping...
I am going to give a good and very detailed answer to this, but then I don't want to talk about it more. Let's talk about things actually in the release after this.
Expanding side blast-zones on walk offs isn't productive. It just makes the walk-off farther out. They aren't unfair as they are; just "learn to play". A lot of people use chain throws as kinda an excuse not to learn how to properly play on stages with walk offs; that is just not going to fly in this game. Nerfing stage hazards... We really tried, but no one else seems to care so we got zero help from anyone else and weren't able to find what we needed. That is something that is maybe in the next release.
We also refuse to strip the soul out of stages. It's better a stage be a quality design and banned than a soulless husk of a stage that is legal. That will be a recurring theme here.
Bridge of Eldin: The hazard isn't a problem at all. The size and flatness make it iffy. I won't say flat out that it has to be banned, but it does have problems. Olimar in particular is really, really good here; run-away Olimar is very hard for most of the cast on Bridge of Eldin. We decided not to push the buck on this (and a few other) borderline stages. We wanted a set of legal stages we could stand behind with confidence, and while I don't think this stage is 100% ban-worthy, I can't stand behind it with confidence like I can with Onett or Mario Circuit or other stages I catch trouble for.
Shadow Moses Island: The walls do need less health for this stage to be viable; characters like Sonic and Meta Knight just can't get kills here at all. We weren't able to implement that so this stage saw little to no playtesting since it's obvious how things pan out. Getting rid of them altogether is an non-option on the "strips the soul out of the stage" criteria.
Skyworld: This stage isn't as bad as you would think, but it does favor gimping too much and in general isn't something I can stand behind with confidence. It could be fine with just strategic health tweaks of the ground (more health on anything with a ledge, less health on the top two platforms that create the "cave of life" effect). We can't do that now so it remains as it is.
Green Hill Zone: This is the closest stage to legal we left in the "extra stages" group. It's mostly just a worse version of Mario Circuit; the checkpoint really is kinda ridiculous, and the general structure is campier. I don't think it's that bad, but I don't have confidence. I would want to make the checkpoint a little less dumb before giving this stage another whirl. The blast zones don't need to move; people don't need to live forever here.
WarioWare: We just can't implement anything that doesn't ruin the stage. The situation is cut and dry here.
Summit: There's nothing wrong with non-grabbable ledges. There's nothing wrong with it being all ice. There's nothing wrong with the low gravity. The fish isn't nearly as bad as it seems even. The loop, however, is a big deal we can't do much about. Making that huge chunk of ice passthrough like some projects have done is just too awkward. I really find this stage fun, but I don't see much we can do for it.
Realistically, if we get stage hazard editing, the four stages that spells good news for are Port Town Aero Dive, Green Hill Zone, Spear Pillar [Cresselia], and Flat Zone 2. If we could edit breakable terrain health piece by piece, we'd look a lot into Skyworld and Shadow Moses Island. The ability to edit events would open up WarioWare and Rumble Falls. Once things have progressed and I think we can have to worry less about defending the 27 we have now, I'd like to give Bridge of Eldin and Big Blue another shot. The remaining banned stages (Temple, New Pork City, Hanenbow, Mario Bros., 75m, Summit, Mushroomy Kingdom 1-2, Spear Pillar [Palkia]) are the "very difficult" ones that would require massive reworking to be legal stages without just ruining what makes them unique. Of course, editing in general of some of this stuff mentioned would also be used to somewhat improve our 27 legal stages!
Most "original" stages suck, including SSE stages. None of them move or transform. None of them have damaging hazards or interactive elements of any kind. Maybe someday they will be worth considering, but for now, they are just not up to the standards of the stages we have now, and I'm not making the game worse by including a bunch of generic flat + plat stages.
All slowed down stages are slowed down via the code. I worked very hard on slowing down MK 1-1 via a .pac edit, and I didn't succeed and when I asked for help from numerous sources no one knew what to do and/or no one cared. It was very frustrating, but the fact that people get super hyped about stuff that is not useful for major projects (I could give examples, but I'm not going to insult people's work just because it's not useful to me) and don't care much about this stuff (or at least don't voice it!) is what causes this situation.
So, the in short, please do enjoy the 27 stages we strongly stand behind, and feel free to experiment with the others! Let's not worry too much about what didn't get into this release; for now, let's talk about what did.