I honestly don't think Mewtwo was being developed until E3 2014 before the game released. While there Sakurai got told to his face Mewtwo's popularity, which he seemed to be underestimating up until that point. Remember, in October 2014 Mewtwo was little more than a basic model. There's no way he was meant for the base game.
That makes more sense. I wasn't aware that Sakurai was told how popular Mewtwo was at E3, so I didn't know the circumstances of the development. Otherwise, Mewtwo would have been finished for release, since he would've been planned and worked on from the beginning.
That's the thing a lot of these rumors are kind of missing the point of. All these talks about characters getting cut, added late into development, etc. That kind of thing happened in Melee and Brawl, but not in Smash 4. All characters "cut" from that game weren't worked on, but only considered. Otherwise, all the characters in Smash 4 were planned from the beginning, except for Mewtwo.
The reason the roster is planned early on is so that there isn't chaos in development due to cutting characters and adding more. And Sakurai has said that the development for Ultimate has been going very smoothly, so I doubt there's been a lot of that going on behind the scenes.
Please read my post properly
1) I never said a character would be Day 1 DLC
2) I never said a character would be locked behind the Online
3) I never said a finished character would be held back to become DLC
What I said id that a DLC character being FREE to those with the online subscription is very likely, much like Mewtwo was free to those with both versions(but still available to be bought on its own)
Ah, okay. Your post wasn't entirely clear. What you mean is more like the Online subscription acting as a season pass for Smash content.
That could happen, though I don't consider it to be likely, since there's no precedent for it, and so far all of Nintendo's DLC are either paid or free content updates. And again there's the issue of third parties being involved. Also, would you lose access to the characters if your subscription expired? It's much simpler to just have them as individual purchases.