Reflection on Smash and Competition

[Deleted member 245254]

I don't know about you, but if I were to raise a child right now from a very young age, I wouldn't give them unrestricted access to the internet at home until they reached a certain age. I grew up with Smash 64 and Melee without much access to the internet, entering the Brawl scene only around the time I came of age, and even then Brawl was the shiny at the peak. I knew of the Melee competitive scene and on some level wished I could join it, but things such as transportation and age prevented me from doing so. Even still, I did not notice the changes from Melee to Brawl (aside from the lack of ability to L-Cancel or Wavedash). I did not notice the game was flawed until I learned that Pikachu had a 0-80% chaingrab on Fox that was inescapable. Even knowing that I kept playing, not realizing how slow the game truly was until I started getting into Brawl+ and Project M.

I want you to consider players who are not entirely familiar with Smash, or who are just starting to get into the scene. As far as many of these players are concerned, Smash 4 is their only option. Why would you buy a Wii to play Brawl or Melee when you can buy a Wii U or 3DS and get in on the game with the latest shiniest release? I can assure you if I was a kid growing up and I didn't start with Melee or Brawl, I wouldn't consider buying the older Smash games unless there was a serious draw to it. Why would I?

That said, there really isn't much in the way of options for these players. The only reason someone would wish to get into the scene for an older Smash game is if they were previously acquainted with the franchise on a competitive level (or if they wanted to play through the Subspace Emissary or play Project M). Even for players who play casually, this is a bit of a no-brainer. The casual scene is moving to Smash 4. There really isn't much of a choice. Soon casual players will start saying Brawl is dated, just as they said Melee was dated back in the day.

Meanwhile, players who pride themselves on the mastery of the game will notice the true differences in gameplay between the titles in the Smash Bros franchise. There are plenty of people that accepted Melee as a sister game to Smash 64, not as its replacement. The players that learn the way the game's mechanics work to the point of mastery are the players most shell-shocked when those mechanics are completely changed in the next edition of the game. These are the people that have hopes and expectations for the next releases, in hopes that the flow of the game they have mastered can be revitalized. These people are rarely satisfied, and will often stick with their own games.

When these players start playing the new games, however, or when the casual players starting in the new game take the steps to become these kind of players, that's when the competitive community for the new game starts to shine. The deeper the game, the brighter the shine. It remains to be seen how bright Smash 4 will shine, but expect it to be relevant for longer than Brawl was. Regardless of how brightly it shines for the competitive audience, though, it'll appeal to the casual audience just fine. Just as Brawl appealed to them just fine before it. Just as Project M appeals to them just fine. Just as Melee appealed to them just fine before, except to those with preconceived notions about the game today.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I feel this logic is still plenty applicable.

Just because Brawl faltered where Melee didn't does not mean Melee was any less of what it was, a difficult and complex fighting game to play.

Obviously it wasn't difficult to strut around the stage smashing the c-stick using absolutely no techniques or strategy but are we talking about folks who actually play Smash or people who we aren't even worried about retaining in the community?

Smash 4 imo is the epitome of Smash, the closest to Sakurai's original vision of the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way, it's amazing.

Melee players do have an option, play Melee.

 

[Blue Warrior]

The rest of this argument doesn't interest me, so I'll just focus on the first post.

I really like the way you've articulated your point, but I feel like maybe you're slightly missing the point of what makes SSB so great to begin with. You're right, the way the player fights is an art and an expression of the player himself, and to this end, no other titles accomplish this so well than Melee and P:M. However, the notion of player expression also works at a global scale. Everyone's messed around with custom items, match settings, Custom Melees and the crazy Brawl modes at one point -- or maybe they haven't! -- and the level of enjoyment these settings can give to vastly different audiences is what makes SSB such a good series. It is not just the fight that is the form of expression -- it's the way the players choose to play the game.

Brawl was not bad because it was casual-oriented, it was bad because of design choices intended to limit player expression. Making giant pit stages with soccerballs on high is great, whatever, but that doesn't mean the designers need to water down competitive playability for the sake of centralizing toward a specific type of gameplay. The same could be said if Sakurai went the opposite direction; how much outcry do you think there would be if the next Smash game eliminated items?


SSB4 could never offer the same kind of gameplay as Melee, but it could be equally great for a different reason: gameplay diversity. SSB4 acknowledges the need for both competitive play and casual play; there's a surprisingly well-balanced roster that consists of characters with incredibly different strengths and playstyles; the level of customization present in characters not only has the potential to create strategic depth for competitive, but it can increase the lifetime of the game for players who just want fresh play experiences.

I agree that competition is an art and I think it can be, as you said, a jam session for people who rock the guitar and drums. But what I'm really hoping for is that this will be the type of garage band where music afficionados and kids on kazoos can play to the same beat. Hell, some of those kazoo players might just grow up playing more complex instruments because of it.

...Analogies aside, the crux of my point is that competitive and casual expression are both important, because freedom of expression itself is the key to what Smash really is.

 

[Tremendo Dude]

Just because Brawl faltered where Melee didn't does not mean Melee was any less of what it was, a difficult and complex fighting game to play.

Obviously it wasn't difficult to strut around the stage smashing the c-stick using absolutely no techniques or strategy but are we talking about folks who actually play Smash or people who we aren't even worried about retaining in the community?

Smash 4 imo is the epitome of Smash, the closest to Sakurai's original vision of the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way, it's amazing.

Melee players do have an option, play Melee.

I suppose we're talking about anyone playing the the game, whether it's people who play smash or people who chance upon the series. Not everyone who doesn't dive deep into the water will be ignorant of depth. That said, if I grew up with Brawl instead of Melee, I would probably have played it for ages and had fun figuring out the "advanced techniques" at a casual pace. I wouldn't have wanted to go back to the past except to screw around with older game modes or to play with friends that preferred the game.

That said, yes, Melee is a much more demanding game skill-wise. I honestly wish that certain elements things were different, lowering the skill floor while leaving the skill ceiling relatively high, but I love it regardless cause the bad outweighs the good. I never cared back then, though. I was inexperienced to the point that I didn't really see much different between Melee and Brawl, save for the characters themselves. I imagine that I wasn't the only one.

Players looking for a more demanding experience do have the option to play Melee or Project M as well as/instead of Smash 4, of course. I'm not arguing that point. I'm speaking more to give a bit of perspective to the hopes of technical players for mechanics in new smash releases versus the resulting outcry of casual players. The only point I'm making is that while times have changed, for the majority of smash players times haven't changed that much.

Smash 4 is looking rather promising with its skill floor being set as low as it is. It remains to be seen how high the skill ceiling will be, but it's already looking very good.

 

[Redd500]

I just thought of something. Does a high skill ceiling slowly raise the skill floor as more and more people get better and better at the game? I mean, for competitive games, the main reason a skill floor is high is because there are tons of people who are so much better than you, right? So maybe Sakurai thought this and decided to both make Brawl have a lower skill ceiling and be radically different from Melee so that the skill floor would stay mostly constant and wouldn't start off higher than normal due to way more skills carrying over. I still don't think lowering the skill ceiling was the way to do this because we have a great handicap system in place that people should use should they want to play a match against a friend who is ridiculously better than them. Speaking of which, people should really use the handicap system more often.

 

[Tremendo Dude]

Not necessarily. One the main issued I see about Melee's skill floor is the existance of L-cancelling and the precise timing required for simple actions such as a short hop. L-canceling gives you a huge advantage over player who don't L-cancel, creating an artificial skill cliff. L-cancelling is also not mentioned ingame or in the manual at all, only by an old website for Smash 64 accessible through archives and by word of mouth through players. It doesn't add much in the way of options or expression to the game, as a player who knows about L-canceling has no excuse for not always L-canceling. Higher skill ceilings exist naturally for other reasons, though Melee's is artificially boosted by its demand for precise inputs such as these. Many people dig that. I personally don't.

Brawl's answer was to attempt to sabotauge the skill curve by throwing everything for a loop. This was their attempt to prevent players from getting too good at the game and allow newer players to have more of a chance to compete with experienced players They failed to a degree, and created a broken game while they were at it. Smash 4 removed those elements of sabotauge and fixed many of the problems in Brawl while having potential to fix any new gamebreaking issues that arise. Learning the inputs is easy, while mastering options and the environment and acting accordingly remains tough, as it should be.

 

[raymundoTheGod]

Anything can be competitive. Rolling dice to see who can get the highest number can be competitive. But competitive EVO Smash was an accident. Smash Bros. was never meant to be in a major fighting game tournament. Melee was a complete accident, yet it changed the idea of competitive once it was exposed. Every Smash game will be it's own game, and have its own scene and players, and Melee will never happen again. Some people don't like Brawl because in a nutshell, it wasn't as deep as Melee, and again, that will never happen again. But every Smash game will be and is competitive. Because people will continue to play to be better than one another. A competitive game doesn't have to have standards, or as many inputs and combos as Starcraft or MVC. If one favors Melee because of it's depth, then they favor it. It doesn't mean Brawl or Smash 4 isn't competitive.