Okay, I've noticed the thread moving on and
Opossum
already covered some parts, but I don't feel I should just not respond to certain parts of this. This first part I deem the more important one, so I'll put a break in after it and people can choose whether to read and/or respond to the rest. I just didn't have the energy to finish this post when I was working on it earlier.
It is a waste of time to just talk about the same thing every five to ten pages tops. Most people can agree with me here that it is boring to hear the same three people whine over cuts when we have next to no idea on what the next smash looks like. We do not even have a new system on the horizon to look at Smash on. Even then, the sheer rate of cuts discussion is just pointless. There are so many more interesting things the thread can talk about instead of a very vocal minority whining about Sheik, Pichu, or Corrin. Its always the same few people whining over cuts. Its a boring circular discussion that happens over and over again due to the hyper fixation of a few individuals. Smash is gaming's greatest crossover. There is a vast ocean of possibilities that can be discussed instead of talking about cuts every five to ten pages at most. Clearly you are part of the very vocal very small minority that asks for cuts, this thread can be so much more than the same three users talking about cuts. I know that you are very adamant about the topic of cuts, in no small part due to how frequently you participate or outright instigate in its discussion. But I am pretty sure even you can agree that there is so much more that can be touched upon in Smash's discussion than just cut talk.
But it is that last paragraph that I have a big issue with. Your response to someone saying that this thread has a few users talk too much about cuts to be to suggest someone not participate in discussion. This level of gatekeeping is just disgusting. At no point in my call out of cut talk did I discuss outright suggesting people should not participate in discussion. At worst, I said that a short term moratorium on cut talk would be a good thing for the thread. But here you are saying I should not participate in this thread because not only do you value said circular discussion, but also turn it on me. You have even agkowledged in the past that your views on the topic are divisive at best, but now it is my fault for saying that this thread could be better off if we dont discuss cuts every other few pages. I find this level of gatekeeping honestly very toxic, even if it is coming from a place of good intentions.
It's totally fine for you or others to dislike the topic, and nobody is preventing you or anyone else from fostering discussion of other items. My opinion is that it is not a waste of time to talk repeatedly about cuts because the issues arising out of the aftermath of EiH warrant extended discussion. Some of it is bound to be circular in a big thread like this, but I feel like new points are still being made and other points warrant occasional reiteration when relevant.
I am not discouraging you from participation; I said so explicitly and I hope you had no reason to believe that wasn't sincere. I can see now some ways in which what I said could have been misinterpreted or perturbing to you, so I'm sorry for that.
I did have a problem with repeated efforts to invalidate a topic that does indeed generate discussion and, frankly, is exciting for me personally to be able to discuss so openly after years of the Ult cycle, in which cuts were not on the table at all. I also had a problem with some of your reasonings that could probably apply to almost any popular and/or recurring topic relevant to this thread, which led to my comment suggesting you evaluate
for yourself how much you want to read/post here. I also offered an alternative place to talk newcomers (the general franchise discussion threads), which you can choose to take or to leave. But the fact is that the likelihood of cuts is one of the few things that we
do have a concrete statement on for the next Smash.
I also do not appreciate you characterizing some of the cuts discussion as "whining" when I have observed very little if any of that in here, but hopefully we can just move on from that. Sometimes there is back-and-forth talk between a few users, which again happens in a thread like this, but there has always been a good number of people willing to discuss cuts in general. I don't think it is accurate to say the entire discussion is just a few people, nor do I personally opine that the repeated discussion has been unhealthy (though your opinion there may be different). In any case there isn't a hard limit afaik on how often you can discuss a relevant topic in a public forum. While I motivate it frequently, that is because I genuinely like discussing it and basically every time I bring it up, other users respond with thoughtful comments on the matter.
When it comes to "turning things on you," I did think it was a little odd for you to say cuts talk was unhealthy because it is too highly speculative, and then turn around to suggest other topics of discussion which are just as speculative. That I did aim to point out, but that should not be mistaken for a personal attack or a discouragement of participation, which I tried to be clear it was not.
Lastly, I'd like to express that I have no desire of having a beef with you. I derive no pleasure from making you angry or upset. I respond to you often and at length because you say things that I highly disagree with and am motivated to contest, but at no point should it become personal or malicious.
--
--
As for the rest:
This is a 2018 take and should have died when Seph came out. The rights for FF content is byzantine and we know that Sephiroth negotiations were in place for a long time. Did Square hold back some content like Spirits? Potentially sure. But the myth that Cloud was this hurdle to keep in only really spawned in 2018 when FF7 had the lack of content it had in the base game. Negotiations take time, and we know that before the game even came out Hero and Sephiroth were in negotiation talks. Cloud absolutely was not the hurdle to get into Ultimate. If anything, getting him into 4 on shorter notice was the hurdle that had to be overcome.
If Cloud
wasn't negotiated for Ultimate at the same time he was negotiated for 4, then it would again be short notice to get into Ult's base (although it could conceivably be easier having already completed the negotiations for 4). To my knowledge there hasn't been a statement on that either way.
I also acknowledge the possibility that the lack of music and auxiliary FF content is not an indicator of having difficulty negotiating for Cloud.
And any third party is quite an effort to bring in, with some people speculating that Cloud could have been even more difficult than usual (but yeah, it's not outright confirmed).
For starters, you are equating the work that needs to be done for a newcomer with that of a vet when that is almost never the case.
No, I'm not. I've acknowledged several times that a cut character does not necessarily mean a one-for-one exchange with a potential other character. I also said that it's hard to pin down exactly what the gains would be from cutting characters, but I'll say again that all characters take a ton of work, in which case the time/resources saved from not including someone would be impactful.
With a veteran, all the conceptual design has been done. There are animations to use as an example from their previous installment. They do not have to workshop them nearly to the same extent as they do for a newcomer. If you want an example of how the process works, look at how Sakurai and his team have designed newcomers in the past. They do research on the characters to attempt to come up with a creative and fitting moveset. They get motion dolls to display how he thinks an animation will go and figures of the characters to illustrate how that works. While there are shortcuts that are taken, such as using an existing character as a base instead of building them hard from the ground up, it still is a long process to make the accurate model, animate it, balance it, and so on. The process of making a new character furthermore gets more complex as time goes on because the development team has increasingly tried to make more complex characters. Plenty of characters both in Smash 4 and Ultimate's base game and their respective DLC seasons had a gimmick. Some of these gimmicks were more visual, such as Wii Fit's Yoga poses or Corrin's transformations. Others are gameplay focused like K Rool's armor, Hero's MP, Little Mac's KO Punch, Steve's Mining, or Cloud's Limit.
Now, a lot of this argument is diminished by what I said above, but I also think you are overstating how much easier it is to create a vet in a ground-up game. We don't really have hard statements afaik on the difference in work between creating vets and newcomers, but perhaps the most effective evidence I can give here is the content of Ultimate itself: the public statements are very clear that bringing all the vets back was a ton of work.
When Ult was first announced, I was on the other side of this, being optimistic about the number of newcomers and saying that the vets must not have taken that much time due to reusing assets and concepts from 4. But after seeing the final game I began to feel like that was not actually accurate.
Speaking in hypotheticals and fear mongering that it can be an issue in the future is not really that much of a solid argument.
There are some hypotheticals, but I've also tried to emphasize how Ult was a special circumstance produced in part by the quirks of the Wii-U-to-Switch transition and is unlikely to happen again.
My goal is not "fear mongering." If anything I'm trying to tell people that they
shouldn't be afraid of certain cuts because some of them could be for the best.
You cant really pin a number on how many characters we would have gotten if EiH did not happen, but I think that it is a unique situation that does not really have too much bearing on the next Smash
If characters were low priority in the past, then there is a good argument that they're liable to be low priority again. Trying to assess which characters would normally be low priority but weren't due to EiH is applicable, since EiH is the thing likely/possible to not be in place anymore.
And yet you ignore patterns almost exclusively when you discuss cuts. Cuts in Smash have been the exception, not the norm. Brawl's cuts to Smash 4 can easily be explained by either the vets being lower priority, techinical issues due to the 3DS version, or Konami in the early 2010s being an absolute dumpster fire that almost pulled out of the gaming industry as a whole. Melee to Brawls cuts were done for time constraints at least for Mewtwo, Roy, and Doctor Mario. Yet we have people that still argue that characters should be cut to free up development time. The pattern for cuts is that there are very few cuts and the devs do put a strong emphasis on keeping vets in.
I have acknowledged those patterns (and expressed displeasure with them), not ignored them. As the roster gets bigger, its sustainability gets more questionable and we get more discussion of more frequent cuts. I agree that the devs put a strong emphasis on keeping vets in. I just don't like how strong that emphasis has been, and I also see likely circumstances where the emphasis could weaken (not as much as I'd probably like, but weakened to an extent).
