First, with Brawl's online mode, you can only see the names of people you've already added to your Wii Friends list, making online tourneys of any kind a big hassle. It's also just messed up. He said nothing about a chat function for the online, so even if you happen to find somebody you'd like to play again, once the match is over that's it. You may never play that person again for the rest of your life.
Second, with this Stage Builder thing. Once again, its online capability is only worthwhile when it comes to your Wii Friends (and Smash Friends, whatever those are. He's never mentioned those before), wherein it's just like the online creative communities of such games like Halo 3, with map builders of their own. However, the success of those communities should be a glaring beacon to any game designer wishing to make a similar system that a map building feature with online sharing capabilities MUST be done in the same way. EVERYBODY, not just your Wii Friends, should have potential access to your maps.
We should be able to go to some special Wii Channel, through Brawl or downloaded from the Wii Shop Channel and then through the Wii itself, or through the Internet Channel, or whatever, and be able to submit our stages there, as well as be able to see the stages other people have submitted, and download them. It's not like this would create any network problems; online play might have some lag issues cross-continent, but a map sharing channel is vastly less complex and less of a strain than a high-speed fighting game. And, if Nintendo were to do this through a website, that would not only take away a great deal of strain from their Wi-Fi network (because the system wouldn't be manifested on the network by Brawl connecting to an app somewhere at Nintendo.com, and because people could choose to download stages from their PCs into a SD card, thus decreasing the Wi-Fi traffic) but also increase the accessibility.
Instead of a system like that, we get this "random flavour-of-the-day stage" feature? That's ridiculous! What if 99 people submit stages you wouldn't like, and 1 person submits a stage you would like? So you have a 1/100 chance of getting that stage. Let's say you don't, and the next day 100 more people submit stages you wouldn't like. It's a lame example but you can see where I'm coming from. Once again, we should be able to see ALL the submitted stages and choose the ones we want to download; Nintendo can still do the stage-of-the-day thing even with a system like this.
Of course, these two features are certainly better than nothing, they're great features and it's great that Brawl has online capabilities, but IMO Sakurai really needs to take a look at the games that, right now, have huge, bustling online communities filled with shared content and see what it is that makes them work so well.
Second, with this Stage Builder thing. Once again, its online capability is only worthwhile when it comes to your Wii Friends (and Smash Friends, whatever those are. He's never mentioned those before), wherein it's just like the online creative communities of such games like Halo 3, with map builders of their own. However, the success of those communities should be a glaring beacon to any game designer wishing to make a similar system that a map building feature with online sharing capabilities MUST be done in the same way. EVERYBODY, not just your Wii Friends, should have potential access to your maps.
We should be able to go to some special Wii Channel, through Brawl or downloaded from the Wii Shop Channel and then through the Wii itself, or through the Internet Channel, or whatever, and be able to submit our stages there, as well as be able to see the stages other people have submitted, and download them. It's not like this would create any network problems; online play might have some lag issues cross-continent, but a map sharing channel is vastly less complex and less of a strain than a high-speed fighting game. And, if Nintendo were to do this through a website, that would not only take away a great deal of strain from their Wi-Fi network (because the system wouldn't be manifested on the network by Brawl connecting to an app somewhere at Nintendo.com, and because people could choose to download stages from their PCs into a SD card, thus decreasing the Wi-Fi traffic) but also increase the accessibility.
Instead of a system like that, we get this "random flavour-of-the-day stage" feature? That's ridiculous! What if 99 people submit stages you wouldn't like, and 1 person submits a stage you would like? So you have a 1/100 chance of getting that stage. Let's say you don't, and the next day 100 more people submit stages you wouldn't like. It's a lame example but you can see where I'm coming from. Once again, we should be able to see ALL the submitted stages and choose the ones we want to download; Nintendo can still do the stage-of-the-day thing even with a system like this.
Of course, these two features are certainly better than nothing, they're great features and it's great that Brawl has online capabilities, but IMO Sakurai really needs to take a look at the games that, right now, have huge, bustling online communities filled with shared content and see what it is that makes them work so well.
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