Door Key Pig
Smash Lord
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2010
- Messages
- 1,227
Something I haven't seen brought up much was when 3.0.0 came out with Joker and the sharing capabilities of Ultimate like Stage Builder, in Sakurai's Famitsu column he talked about the three aspects of Smash Ultimate they planned to do: Fighting, Sharing and Co-operation. As it says in this translation from NintendoEverything (which if it is inaccurate, please tell me so because that may change everything. I think PushDustin had a different recap of things, so maybe we should ask him or another translator):
"For me personally, I don’t want the battles to become ones where the winner and loser are forced in separate categories, and where only the winner can enjoy that fight. Of course, this is a game based on competition, but I don’t want that victory and defeat mentality to hamper anyone’s enjoyment of the game. While keeping in mind the type of game we have, the question was always: What do we need to do to make things more fun? This was one of the first points we hit upon. For this title, the truth is that I would have liked development to fall into three phases: Competition, Sharing and Cooperation. That last part, ‘cooperation’, unfortunately ended up being shelved part-way through. We had lots of ideas and even began working on some of them, but getting to the point where we could have four human players and four CPUs competing online was difficult enough in itself, and we just couldn’t do it. We managed to make it so that four players could battle online with Spirits, but that was our limit. I have regrets, but it’s also important to put those failures behind you. "
Thanks to hacking, we know that there might have been three unused online modes (as well as an unused Smash mode), and I totally think they could have been of this (assuming the "Convention" thing wasn't one of these slots?). Though of course like that unused Smash mode, it's all just speculation as to what they could have been like. Maybe not something as extravagant and development-intensive as something similar to Smash Run, with 4 CPU fighters taking the place of the enemies they didn't have the resources to make for the Adventure Mode or something. Maybe not something involving resources they were already short of for Spirits to be a thing in this game. Four CPUs and four players does match maximum multiplayer Mob Smash and Spirits (?) well, so it could have straight up just been Online options for those and maybe other modes that can be done in Co-Op locally? (Classic Mode, Home-Run Contest, Special Smash stuff like Super Sudden Death, Smashdown or Squad Strike even.) Or again, it was just fresh ideas we can't possibly guess right.
It's worth noting this isn't the first time a Smash game had planned online modes that were cut. Brawl apparently was going to have a thing called Slipspace (also online options for all the 1P modes, though maybe those weren't all actually planned to be playable online; Events, Training, Targets, All-Star and Boss Battles, which apparently had a lot of work done on it). The text reads:
"<X>-minute beat 'em up! Set your time and leap into the battle slipspace!"
(<X> = toggleable from 1 to 60 minutes. Mode is also limited to "With Anyone", with no coding pertaining to a "With Friends" variant.)
We don't know what this would have entailed, but it seems that it may have been intended to function as a continuous match, in which players could drop in and out of to be replaced by other players. This might have not even been what was an Online mode idea for Ultimate, but it sounds like it would have been pretty cool to play.
All in all, the criticism of Ultimate's lesser amount of things to do in-game compared to previous entries couldn't have possibly been helped by the removal of this Online content (a field to which Ultimate is already infamously struggling with right now...) and it may or may not have been removed due to limitations of the Switch console, or something else like just plain technical coding ways in doing such things. And if they were unable to do four players and four CPUs playing in a certain way online (it could have just been a regular 8-Player match that happened to have four human players against four CPU players. Again, resembling the local Co-op we did get in stuff like Spirits, Mob Smash and Home-Run Contest, which could be the greater idea here if that wasn't obviously present in the game already), maybe that is why we don't have online 8-Player Smash (or even simpler online versions of local modes, they seem to say using Spirits in Arenas was a high accomplishment and their limit, after all. Unless they meant they got Co-op Spirit Battles working online but just decided to scrap it anyway), not just because we have enough Online problems as it is with half that amount of players fighting together online. Doesn't an arena connection worsen the higher amount of max players within it, going up to 8 or so? It's ultimately a shame, but there might not be any way around it for doing certain things online in Ultimate for all we know.
"For me personally, I don’t want the battles to become ones where the winner and loser are forced in separate categories, and where only the winner can enjoy that fight. Of course, this is a game based on competition, but I don’t want that victory and defeat mentality to hamper anyone’s enjoyment of the game. While keeping in mind the type of game we have, the question was always: What do we need to do to make things more fun? This was one of the first points we hit upon. For this title, the truth is that I would have liked development to fall into three phases: Competition, Sharing and Cooperation. That last part, ‘cooperation’, unfortunately ended up being shelved part-way through. We had lots of ideas and even began working on some of them, but getting to the point where we could have four human players and four CPUs competing online was difficult enough in itself, and we just couldn’t do it. We managed to make it so that four players could battle online with Spirits, but that was our limit. I have regrets, but it’s also important to put those failures behind you. "
Thanks to hacking, we know that there might have been three unused online modes (as well as an unused Smash mode), and I totally think they could have been of this (assuming the "Convention" thing wasn't one of these slots?). Though of course like that unused Smash mode, it's all just speculation as to what they could have been like. Maybe not something as extravagant and development-intensive as something similar to Smash Run, with 4 CPU fighters taking the place of the enemies they didn't have the resources to make for the Adventure Mode or something. Maybe not something involving resources they were already short of for Spirits to be a thing in this game. Four CPUs and four players does match maximum multiplayer Mob Smash and Spirits (?) well, so it could have straight up just been Online options for those and maybe other modes that can be done in Co-Op locally? (Classic Mode, Home-Run Contest, Special Smash stuff like Super Sudden Death, Smashdown or Squad Strike even.) Or again, it was just fresh ideas we can't possibly guess right.
It's worth noting this isn't the first time a Smash game had planned online modes that were cut. Brawl apparently was going to have a thing called Slipspace (also online options for all the 1P modes, though maybe those weren't all actually planned to be playable online; Events, Training, Targets, All-Star and Boss Battles, which apparently had a lot of work done on it). The text reads:
"<X>-minute beat 'em up! Set your time and leap into the battle slipspace!"
(<X> = toggleable from 1 to 60 minutes. Mode is also limited to "With Anyone", with no coding pertaining to a "With Friends" variant.)
We don't know what this would have entailed, but it seems that it may have been intended to function as a continuous match, in which players could drop in and out of to be replaced by other players. This might have not even been what was an Online mode idea for Ultimate, but it sounds like it would have been pretty cool to play.
All in all, the criticism of Ultimate's lesser amount of things to do in-game compared to previous entries couldn't have possibly been helped by the removal of this Online content (a field to which Ultimate is already infamously struggling with right now...) and it may or may not have been removed due to limitations of the Switch console, or something else like just plain technical coding ways in doing such things. And if they were unable to do four players and four CPUs playing in a certain way online (it could have just been a regular 8-Player match that happened to have four human players against four CPU players. Again, resembling the local Co-op we did get in stuff like Spirits, Mob Smash and Home-Run Contest, which could be the greater idea here if that wasn't obviously present in the game already), maybe that is why we don't have online 8-Player Smash (or even simpler online versions of local modes, they seem to say using Spirits in Arenas was a high accomplishment and their limit, after all. Unless they meant they got Co-op Spirit Battles working online but just decided to scrap it anyway), not just because we have enough Online problems as it is with half that amount of players fighting together online. Doesn't an arena connection worsen the higher amount of max players within it, going up to 8 or so? It's ultimately a shame, but there might not be any way around it for doing certain things online in Ultimate for all we know.