Its a little disheartening to see random articles that describe how difficult for Nintendo to make a game as good as Ultimate. Or they pose the question, where do we go from here? As if the game is absolutely perfect.
- Personally I do feel like Smash could improve their solo player experience. Id like to see a full on 3D Adventure/RPG style overworld and story to flesh out single player. Many of the animations like ladder climbing, swimming, and etc are there and should have more meaningful uses. A single player experience would be a great way to realize that in a 3D environment. I wasnt a fan of the whole subspace thing, Id rather see a more serious story even if they have to introduce a new or customizable protagonist. The current fighting system will serve as the go to layer for battle mechanics for the first player mode.
- They should really lean in to the echo character class as well, still so many missed opportunities there. Flesh out the characters that deserve it, but I wouldnt mind seeing more popular/iconic "echoes" being added.
- A Mario Party like mode would work quite well since there are so many characters in here. Minigames and Duels when you land on the same spot could add a whole other element of multiplayer fun. Once again there are so many lesser used animations these characters have, and its unfortunate they dont serve more purpose.
- Online obviously needs to be better. So many areas to improve here, and I would need whole thread to cover all those. Overall quality, Ranking system, modes, etc.. Some this may have to be fixed on the Nintendo/Hardware side of things unfortunately.
- More characters, not less. More Items, not less. I cant stress this enough. Unless the controls/mechanics planned to be fleshed out more per character, I see no reason to leave out characters unless it is due to obvious rights. Less content in this area is a bit of a cop out in my opinion. I've always held on to the hope that Sora would have been included in the roster and that his "confusing" rights issues would not get in the way. What people should take away from his inclusion is that any character is possible at this point so long as their origins are from a video game. In addition to that most companies are on board with how smash handles their IPs.
- New mechanics. Tag team battle mechanics should be implemented. So many characters on this roster have synergy amongst each-other. Whether that be characters from a single IP or even across IPs. Mario and Yoshi combined attacks make sense. However even Sonic and Mario combined attacks make sense. These should be explored.
- Custom character. Personally not a huge fan of the mii aesthetic, so I do see potential here in both visuals and implementation.
- Collectibles and Cross game interactions being improved. Stickers were ok, personally loved the trophies a lot more. Overall I'd say they need to make a way to make these collectibles more appealing. Maybe you collect trophies and stickers, posters that could be used to decorate a room. Id also like to see this game interact with other games more as far as special content goes.
Really these are just a few things I wanted to get off my chest as far as where I hope the next smash game could go.
1. I agree that singleplayer is one area where a new Smash could easily improve over Ult. I did like SSE, however, and would love to someday see a more refined and modernized version of it, though I would be concerned about the amount of resources going into such a project.
2. Personally would rather see less Echoes, actually. I think we're at a roster size point now where we could increase immersion by relying less and less on clones with each installment. The roster pad is not a necessity the way it was in earlier games with <40 characters. Just put the vast majority of the effort into the characters who really earned their unique slots, IMO.
3. They did try the board game thing already with Smash Tour. But it would be fair to argue that a much, much better executed board game sort of mode could be more successful, though I wonder if they would have any doubts about trying it again.
4. Online, yeah, another (at least ostensibly) easy area for improvement.
5. I'm not concerned about the character count, personally. They're not gonna try to sell us anything smaller than the last ground-up game they made, which was the 50+ characters in base Smash 4. The roster can be plenty big even with several cuts, and potential DLC can only improve the count. A smaller raw number of characters could even constitute a better roster, IMO, depending on who they are and how they are executed. You can always compensate for a slightly smaller size by revamping outdated aspects of vets and focusing on a healthy number of newcomers rather than mandating that every single clone and circumstantial addition from the past gets carried over.
With items, again I'm not concerned about the raw number of them, but it's certainly fertile ground there for interesting ideas that could help to shake up the party-friendly gameplay.
6. New mechanics are easily possible, yeah. I wouldn't put it past them to take some risks with the gameplay in order to up the ante in a new game. I don't know about Tag Team mechanics in particular; it would be a lot to do it for every pair of characters, and doing it for only select pairs might seem weird.
7. The custom options may be subject to what the next console does: will Miis be continued or replaced with another player avatar system? Will the next hardware even utilize a player avatar system that could be used as the basis for custom Smash fighters? Or would Smash consider divorcing its custom options from those built into the hardware? Expansion of customization options was tried out fairly heavily in 4; some of it stuck, and some of it didn't. Not sure how far they're willing to go with it. Of course Smash will always focus on leveraging the highly diverse and distinctive abilities and appearances of brand-name characters rather than devolving into a more generic build-a-fighter game, but I agree that there are some relatively aggressive customization options that could be explored either in terms of custom characters or in terms of the stage builder and singeplayer level design.
8. I loved trophies also and getting full renders of so many classic Nintendo characters was amazing. However, they may be gone for good as the desire for a larger raw number of easier-to-make collectibles has seemingly taken over. Their approach so far, in both SSE and WoL, is to make the collectibles interesting by corresponding them to powerups in the singleplayer mode. Don't know if they'd rather try to simply execute that formula better or try something completely different; I'd lean towards the latter. I do like the idea of more decoration and display options for the collectibles.
You also have to consider that the companies that own these characters are very protective of their brand. So writing a story mode using their characters is kind of risky, because if what you write upsets the IP holders, it lowers the chance of those characters returning in subsequent games. It's probably not worth it from Nintendo's perspective.
Forget about subsequent games; any aspects of the story mode would have to be approved by all of the respective rights holders before anything is final, and would probably be subject to several quality/satisfaction checks all the way through development. So yeah a story mode could impact certain characters not only returning in subsequent games but also getting in to begin with.
edit: sorry for double post
