What stage of development it the game at?

[Guybrush20X6]

In the scheme of software development cycles the game is in the Beta phase but who do you think it stands.

I think they're still adding characters and trying to get them to work and animate. Notably is you look at the 3DS version footage in the closer look trailer Bowser lacks facial and finger animations.

 

[Deleted member]

Probably in it's beta stage. I think that they brought over the data of the character's in Brawl or at least using them as a reference and are reworking the characters as we speak. As Sakurai said on Peach's Pic of the Day that her "moves might be refreshed", meaning that she probably already has different moves now or she has the same moves in this stage that they will rework into newer moves later on. It's not as if Sakurai and the team didn't do that before since Brawl's first trailer showed Kirby using his hammer attack in the air being similar to Melee's instead of being different in Brawl.

However, I can safely say that SSB4 is most likely in a longer development period when it was shown off at E3 this year than when Brawl was shown off at E3 in 2006. We saw gameplay of all of the characters confirmed in SSB4 while Brawl showed us gameplay of 6 of the confirmed characters.

 

[Ascended]

I think SSB4 is pretty far along in development. No where near ready to be released, but we are getting a lot more information/screenshots/videos compared to Brawl, which just had the E3 launch trailer and then nothing til November, then nothing again til the dojo started updating.

 

[Guybrush20X6]

I don't think there'll be any big delays like adding Sonic to Brawl as this time they clearly got third party characters sorted out first. There may be one more they're keeping under wraps until near release for hype purposes but we'll see.

I think the game is in the "visually presentable" stage in that they can make footage and screenies but a lot of stuff is still to be done and there's probably a crap-ton of glitches. Plus Skaurai said they're still balancing.