Been a long time since I've posted on smashboards to say the least... I basically dropped smash 4 entirely when my side of the customs debate lost.
This is a pretty exciting and pretty interesting reveal all around. I guess it's probably still too early to get the real detail from people at the event, but this game looks like a tuned up/more polished 4 which from my perspective is pretty good. I also really think they've tried to make this game as much as possible a thing you could play competitively "out of the box" with minimal community imposed rules. Consider...
-Customs seem obviously gone (the retooling of Palutena and Mii Fighters is clearly to accommodate this). This I guess was the best solution they had to deal with the reality that a lot of the game's quality content was pretty difficult to integrate logistically.
-Stage select happens before character select and loser's counterpick is now automatic.
-A stage hazards off toggle apparently exists.
-Sudden Death is substantially revamped into an infinitely less stupid tiebreaker.
-Moves do different damage in 1v1s which I suspect is their attempt to allow tighter balance of 1v1 in particular without impacting group play.
Like you could run an entirely viable tournament just randoming game 1 among a huge number of reasonably acceptable stages, defining a set length and stock/time settings, and otherwise going "just do what the game says to do". Being able to have a competitive ruleset that's so simple and clean does a lot to make competitive play more accessible (the more the ruleset resembles game design the less happy everyone is and the fewer people want to join the community). This game could really be a huge opportunity for the competitive community, and I look forward to that.
The particulars of the gameplay seem mostly pretty thoughtful. I think the decay on dodges is actually going to be a major scrub killer; it's mostly weaker players who roll a lot anyway which just got a ton worse, and being able to effectively use dodge moves in general that have variable commitment and invincibility is going to be way, way harder than it used to be to keep yourself out of trouble (kinda like how the harsh staleness of moves in Brawl actually mostly strongly favored more advanced players who fully managed it except even more fundamental here because if affects your frame data). Power shielding coming after you block something instead of before seems like it probably makes it harder to execute but also more practical in more situations to utilize as well. On the other side, they apparently made most aerials have less landing lag and provided a quick input for easy SH aerials which is going to make attacking in a non-suicidal way a lot easier. It's almost like they looked at smash 4 and liked the total accessibility level but thought it was relatively too hard to do offense and too easy to do defense for newer players so they wanted to flip it so offense would be more available to lower level players while you'd have to push yourself harder to have that solid defense. While that doesn't necessarily change how the game plays at a high level when people have mastered all the decay factors and the harder execution stuff and the spacing/movement of the new airdodges, it will almost certainly make competitive style play a lot more appealing at the entry level (entry level competitive 4 is basically just rolling over and over).
I'm not super hot and bothered by the particulars of characters since those details will probably change a lot before release and honestly which characters are in the game or are good/bad isn't really important to the game as a whole anyway (unless you have a broken character I suppose), but I do see some intrigue. My day -177 from only watching video impressions are probably as worthless as they sound, but man, Ridley looks awesome which is a rare first impression for a big in any fighter, and while I think it was probably extremely inaccurate to say Pokemon Trainer players will be able to just pick a main and stick with it, the potential of that character looks extreme in this form. What little we saw of Zelda showed they at least tried to improve her horrible animations on everything that made her useless in every previous smash game which is more encouragement that maybe they have a careful eye on how these games have played out before, but then again, they don't seem to have done Samus a similar favor so I guess we can only ask for so much. It looks like they directly prevent Ice Climbers stupidity by having Nana "celebrate" when Popo does a throw so that's wonderful news for the health of the game (make no mistake, Ice Climbers did more to kill Brawl than Meta Knight). I can swear I saw some kind of meter on Pichu too which makes me wonder if Pichu now has a gimmick and is no longer just designed to be a worse Pikachu. I can't really guess where any of this sort of stuff goes, but what we've seen suggests it will be extremely fun to explore when the game drops!