To be honest, it really isn’t the models that really take time. The people working on Smash are experienced professionals, so making a high quality model wouldn’t take that long, nor is rigging the model or animating it, those usually take around from a couple of days to about a week and a half. Smash Ultimate already has pre existing assets they can use as reference, so it makes the returning veterans even easier to bring back and recreate.
What does take long, and this is coming from NEON’s interview with the Treehouse employee, is the balancing. This is my biggest fear when we had a huge veteran roster, you have so many variables to consider, character interaction, bugs, etc. balancing a 60+ roster is difficult and takes a lot of time from the devs to make sure the game doesn’t have a Brawl Metaknight character, or someone as weak as Brawl Ganondorf.
And because of the fact that they need to make the game as balanced as possible, they didn’t want to add as many newcomers this time around because the more they add, the more they need to balance the game. This game has around at least 2.5 years of development, possibly having more or the same as any Smash game, with no setbacks, they can easily have enough time to add more characters if they wanted to, however they’re not because they wanted to make sure that there is no oversights with this game, and to make this the best experience with all the veterans as possible. However, I do think that expecting just 2-5 unique newcomers is an understatement of the 100 man team of experienced professionals potential. I mean yeah, we can lowball to avoid being disappointed, but really I’m sure they can manage more than that.
