Smash 4 designed to draw in new players?

[Zork]

I think so. I think that was their main design philosophy considering how they made established things a lot easier. I'll give two examples in this topic.

1. Recovering. Not only are recoveries in general easier than ever before but they've removed ledge hogging. Before now to recover safely, one would have to have good DI, save their jumps, understands their options and how to delay them and really mix it up. Now one can basically snap the ledge with a relatively invincible move for free, no matter how poor they are at these things. Perfectly timed ledge stealing into bairs/dairs might become and effective counter but that remains to be seen.

2. Survival DI has been replaced by vectoring. One no longer has to know the opponent's kill move trajectory and which way to DI accordingly. Simply holding towards the stage is always the best option. In general one can survive longer than ever before thanks to larger blast-zones.

These changes no doubt make Smash easier to get into for newcomers both casually and especially competitively. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on what you value more. A more accessible game that will draw in the masses or a more demanding game with a higher skill cap?

 

[peterisyum]

I'm kind of hoping this smash is just the beginning of Nintendo moving back towards competitive smash. The game is clearly already more suited to a competitive scene than brawl was, and perhaps if Nintendo can reel some new players in with the easier vectoring inputs and such it will allow for the game to become even more competitive in its next iteration down the line. That said I do think that the easier recoveries do detract from the highly skillful and demanding off stage play.

 

[Alus]

The recoveries are fine I think. It now actually takes several good reads to gimp, the offstage player still takes damage while trying to get back so its not like there is no point in edgeguarding. More encouraging to a beginner player than losing a stock for being offstage at 50%. Pretty much automatically even sometimes. The great recoveries might encourage new players to edgeguard too in some cases.

Vectoring however is garbage. Its braindead, Its going to be done every time, you cant **** it up. Whatever that advantage is, everyone has it, to the same measure of success. It defeats the purpose of itself. Its like mashing in marvel.

 

[Nevarro]

It's certainly drawn me into smash. Brawl was good, but I never had many people to play with on the Wii. I'm playing on the 3DS as almost a stepping stone for when the Wii U version comes out, and I have plenty of people online to play against (Lag doesn't bother me, I'm to new for it to cause me problems) I like the For Fun and For Glory game modes as well, the training mode has been good to find who I prefer to use and to try some of the stuff I've learned about. I do hope it turns out to be good competitively as well, I'd like to practice and get good at it.

 

[Lemon Girl]

I think it was the right thing to do, considering other fighting games are pretty hard to get into (Tekken is a big example), this game will just increase the competitive scene, and if it results to not be enough of a challenge for some people, they could always try Melee. I even became overall better at some characters in Melee by playing this, for some wierd reason o_ó