Hi Friends. This is M3D. I used to run Smash and do commentary for MLG. I make my living
designing games now, but I still play Melee and I'm still an ardent fan and member of this community.
I had the unbelievable privilege of being in the audience for yesterday's Smash Invitational. It was an incredibly uplifting and validating experience for me. People that I love and respect as friends and as members of this great community got to get on stage and help share our passion for this series with the world. They also shared it with key Nintendo executives and with Mr. Sakurai himself. The man who holds our future in his hands. If he felt even a fraction of what "One Unit" really means to us from seeing our people in action yesterday then I believe Nintendo will continue to provide us with support that we've been lacking for the first fifteen years we spent building this community. That's a huge deal.
So I was pretty disappointed this morning to see the bile on this subreddit and other social media outlets about the new game. Apparently this demo isn't exactly what people wanted or expected. Instead of basking in the afterglow of the big event, too many members of this community very publicly accused Nintendo of failing us. And frankly that's just not true. But most of you don't have experience developing games, nor do you really understand what it means to show off a product demo six months or more before a product launches. So I thought I'd give you all a little perspective.
Let me approach this from a few different angles:
- From a Game Systems perspective, all the complaints about missing DI or changes to edgehogging could simply be the result of those game systems not being 100% complete. Sometimes a game system needs to be changed in development or its delayed so that more critical systems can be completed. What we may be seeing right now could be the result of those systems not being done. They might even exist right now on an engineers machine someplace, but those changes didn't have time to be merged up before this demo needed to go out to Best Buy and the team for E3.
- Bugs. Bugs, Bugs, Bugs. You know what is a really challenging and frustrating experience for any game developer? When you're game is not done, but you have to create a build that is stable enough to demo for outsiders. If you show the build in its current state, your audience will likely only notice the bugs and not the good elements in the game. Lucario has been confirmed, but he wasn't in the demo this weekend. Right? He probably isn't in a stable enough state to share externally at the moment. So what does a developer do to resolve this? They create a special build that has all the troublesome elements turned off so that only thebest parts are put on display. For all we know, the DI system is pretty buggy right now and it was just disabled to make sure the experience was solid at E3.
- Likewise, Game Tuning is an ongoing process and one that is difficult to get right in early builds. Many of your favorite games (Melee included, I'm sure) has tuning changes right up until the last moment. Yes, Mr. Sakurai stated that he wanted Smash 4 to be somewhere between Melee and Brawl in terms of pacing, but he's still months away from turning in that work. He may have started close to Brawl's tuning numbers and then is dialing up the speed over time to make sure the game feels right. Iteration on game tuning takes time and hopefully watching some of the best players in the world this week will help Mr. Sakurai make some good decisions as he tunes the game going forward.
Remember that Mr. Sakurai reminded everyone before the show that this was a game in-progress and please forgive him for any problems that might arise. Many of you forgot that request way too quickly. Tweeting "LOL BRAWL 2.0 MELEE FOREVER" doesn't encourage Nintendo to engage with us further. It suggests to them that we can't be trusted to consider the broader picture and give them actionable feedback.
Nintendo did an amazing thing for this community by bringing our people out to promote the new titles. Sure, its in their interest to utilize our community as a promotion tool, but it won't continue to be if we can't communicate our requests and concerns intelligently and respectfully. Nintendo
is listening, friends. They are asking questions. They are interacting with our people. They care that we will still be this excited when the
next, next smash game comes around. But if we can't demonstrate that our community can be good partners and provide constructive criticism, then we're going to keep doing this alone.
I think Nintendo and Smashers are better off together. Let's keep this relationship healthy. Let's communicate our desires without negativity. I believe Nintendo really wants to listen and Mr. Sakurai really wants us to be happy. What you are seeing this week is a game in-progress that still has a lot of engineering, tuning, and polish to be done before its ready. So don't panic.
