Will Smash ever reachs it's full potential?

[lucasla]

Ultimate is a great game, but is not perfect. It has really really good/awesome things in certain areas, but it also has a lot of flaws, and still has some missing features in my opinion that hurts the experience a lot, depending on what you want to extract from the game.

To properly analyse the game, it needs to be divided in three categories of gameplay, that are the ways you can play a game: singleplayer, local multiplayer, and online multiplayer. Then, I have the thinkings about Smash Ultimate:

1. What it does for local multiplayer is awesome.
2. What it does for singleplayer gameplay is just Ok.
3. What it does for online gameplay is not good at all.

And I dont think that because local multiplayer is awesome, that it is enough, impecable core gameplay, 100 metacritic score, nothing else is needed, everything else is a plus and I should stop complaining, and so on... Because not being able to properly enjoy the game in other ways, hurts the experience of the game too.

1. Local multiplayer is awesome.

As I said, the core gameplay is just great. And local gameplay in this game, provides basically everything you could want from the game. You can configure the matches in any possible way you and friends want, with items, no items, with final smash ball or final smash meter, all stages, all the characters, all the music, you can create tournaments, play smashdown, jesus... you can configure anything in this game for the experience for you playing with your friends be just awesome and on point with what you want from the game.
If you reunite friends to play, or have a brother, or a friend, or girl/boyfriend, any person to play constantly locally with you, you will be able to enjoy the game in it's full potential of delivery the fun that developers wanted when they were creating the game the game.

The problem is: not everyone has someone to play all the time.
Many people dont have family members that play Smash. Many people work all the day, have family, and have limited time to play, and most of the time, reunions with friends to play locally is not possible. This even because maybe your friends dont really like to play Smash, or they are not players at all, or the friends that you have that are players, cant go to your home constantly just to play. Even if you eventually can reunite friends in your home, they are not really good at the game, and you just cant use your friends to get better, cause you will have advantage against them for knowing the game much more than your friend that just play eventually when they visit you. Your friends may be very casual at the game, and need to learn the game always they come to your house, and you may want to improve your skills and you dont have people avaiable at your avaiable time to do it.

In resume, every day, you arrive at your house at night after work, and want to play, will your friends be there to enjoy the game with you? Most of the days no, so, you dont play or go play the game in the other modes, singleplayer, or online multiplayer.

2. Singleplayer

I will not talk here about the smaller modes, that I consider so small and quick that are not really relevant (they are "extras" at my view, minigames). I also presume most of the time people play these smaller modes like Multiman Smash, Home Run Contest, and others, a few times in their life and never more. I will just speak here about the main big modes: Spirits, and Classic.

Spirits mode, that consists in World of Light and the Spirit Board, and Classic mode, are very similar. They are very like the previous Events mode from previous games, but bigger and better. They are better, but they are also very similar. If you dont like Spirits, is very possible that you also dont like Classic, and if you dont like Classic, you probably will not really like Spirits too.
So, if you are not into small quick battles with different properties on the enemies and rules, you basically will not enjoy the completiness of all main singleplayer modes. Cause they are the same quick battles, jsut formated in different ways. In World of Light you fight quick battles while walking in a map and have some features like skills to improve. In Smash Board.. it's spirts battles in a board. And Classic... it's quick battles again, the difference is that there are no spirits, but if each individual battles were inside the spirits mode ,you wouldnt even notice. It's battles with different properties too, with the difference that they are in sequence and ends with a repetitive final boss.

This means that, if you dont really like spirts, or the idea of just fight quick battles with different properties, you have nowhere to run. There are a lot of menus in the game.. Spirits, WoL, Spirit Board, Classic.. but you click in any of them and you just have basically the same experience if fight event battles.

So.. your options are: quick event battles or play Smash mode alone with AI, that I consider boring after some time.
And the solution to that would be the online multiplayer, that oh boy...

3. Online Multiplayer

At least for me, my experience with this game is: It's playable most of the time in 1v1 matches (with enventual lag in some matches), and lag festival in any mode with 4 players.
This means that when I play online, I'm restricted to 1v1 matches, that is actually my preffered way to play the game, but is not the only way I like to play, and the amount of lag that I have in matches with 4 players makes the game unplayable for me. And it reduces the content of the game I have avaiable to play online in basically 70%. I can only enjoy 30% of the game online (that are the 1v1 matches), because something that is not my fault. Well, any other online game runs properly here, and I know this problems is not exclusive to me, I watch youtubers complaining, I see people here complaining of lag, and it doesnt happen in server based games. This is another discussion, the fact is, the game suffers from lag, depending on your location, proximity with other players, whatever, but this problem dont affect any other online game I play, just Smash (and previous Smash games too).

Appart from the lag, there is the bad GSP system, that is not good to adjust players at similar level to play with you. For you really to be able to advance your skills in the game.
There is the unorganized Arenas, that most of the time you fight the interface and wait times on lines.
And obviously, the preffered rules system and lack of a proper competitive ruleset like a For Glory mode (Tournaments kind of minimized this problem, but it rotates, so you have to play competitive when the game wants).

Seriously, what I wanna say is: this game is Ultimate on the core local experience. But the core experience requires people avaiable all the time you want to play, and this is just not realistic. This problem could be solved with a decent online system, with a proper ranked system, dedicated servers (like Brawlhalla! that free game has dedicated servers and run smoothly than Smash, that costs 85$ with the DLC and is a product of a big company!), and better organized modes, that are created by listening to the casual and competitive community of the game. Why the competitive mode keeps in rotation all the time and forces competitive players to need to waste time in lines and finding good matches in Arena mode, or needing to deal with strange rulesets at quickplay?

Why people that want to use these characters in a good big adventure mode, have only avaiable to play alone a bunch of event matches in all the big singleplayer modes of the game?
On Brawl, Sakurai showed they tried to develop a good adventure mode, like an adventure game, and with Ultimate, the game was kind of rushed, and a similar, improved mode from SSE, wasnt possible on that time, so they created these quick battles in all big modes of the game because it was faster, not because they arent able to deliver with a proper time of develpment, or because they dont want. It is possible to have some events mode in a next game, and a proper adventure mode that is not based on quick battles again.

Ultimate has a lot of space for improvements, I will list the ones I think it needs to be done are bellow:

2. Singleplayer

- A evolution of Subspace Emissary adventure mode.

3. Online Multiplayer

- A proper ranked system (for competitive scene)
- Dedicated servers
- Thematic Events for competitive and casual players

All this not happening in the next game, just means that again, I will have on my desk a very good game that will most of the time, will not be played. I would like to play the game much more than I play today, but I cant, specially because multiplayer is not good to play, is actually pretty stressing. and I'm already tired of quick event battles, and as a main mode, it was cool, but at the same time was kind of underwhelming.

 

[GhostM]

Can sort of agree with this. (Number one about offline LAN play being excellent, single player being okay, and awful online). I don’t really play single player smash for the story anymore, so it basically doesn’t affect my opinion about the game as a whole. The portion about the multiplayer is a crippling fact about Ultimate, and everyone knows how bad the lag is online. I feel like the reason why there’s no real dedicated servers is because Nintendo’s mindset has more emphasized to appeal to the casual gamers rather than the multiplayer experience. You can tell since older Nintendo consoles like the Wii were marketed towards families and casual gamers as a whole. Not saying that this is a bad mindset, since the Switch has sold over 40M+ units worldwide since last month. I would love to see changes to separate casual and competitive players like how they did in Smash 4, since casual players don’t want to be ranked, and competitive players want more of an accurate placement rank. Dedicated servers would help the online experience drastically, but for now arenas are the only real viable way to practice. I guess even if dedicated servers were implemented, lag would still be a thing, but minimal. At this point, I don’t think they’re going to change the multiplayer experience because that’s not their focus. It sort of shows that multiplayer isn’t their priority since the normal Switch does not have an option to have a wired connection, forcing you to opt money to play on that connection. Then again, they did patch the multiplayer to connect people with the same ruleset as you, but it isn’t 100% accurate. Who knows, maybe they’ll update it but I don’t see it happening any time soon.

 

[PF9]

Outside of SSE and Smash Tour, perhaps more modes from previous games should be added in future updates. While this would require Sakurai to change his mind about not adding any more new modes, it would make the game truly Ultimate.

And not just returning modes, some brand new ones could be created too. In terms of Story Mode Splatoon 2 had a new story added as DLC.

Perhaps an SSE-styled story mode would be great too, not necessarily a port of SSE.

 

[Sour Supreme]

I dunno. Local Multiplayer has always been the core attraction of what Smash is. The undertaking that was developing Ultimate meant that certain aspects of the game couldn't be as well fleshed out. Naturally, the focus of the game was to perfect Local Play to it's most refined state, and they've truly accomplished that. I was a huge fan of SSE, mostly for the insane cutscenes. But we get some compensation for that in the form of reveal trailers these days. Online Play for fighting games has never been ideal, thanks to the immense number of inputs that the game has to process. Ultimate is amazing, it has the most widely viable roster in the franchise's history, amazing stage choices, and plenty of extra content to enjoy. To me, the single player and ability to play online are just extra content. If Smash was a LAN only game, it would still be an excellent one. I don't think sanding down the refinement of Local Play in favor of better Online or Single Player experiences would be a worthwhile trade. And I love to see that, with my friends, Ultimate has reignited our desire to play video games while sitting on the same couch. That's where the most fun is, if you ask me. And I think Sakurai and the team did a fantastic job of perfecting this.

 

[lucasla]

I dunno. Local Multiplayer has always been the core attraction of what Smash is. The undertaking that was developing Ultimate meant that certain aspects of the game couldn't be as well fleshed out. Naturally, the focus of the game was to perfect Local Play to it's most refined state, and they've truly accomplished that. I was a huge fan of SSE, mostly for the insane cutscenes. But we get some compensation for that in the form of reveal trailers these days. Online Play for fighting games has never been ideal, thanks to the immense number of inputs that the game has to process. Ultimate is amazing, it has the most widely viable roster in the franchise's history, amazing stage choices, and plenty of extra content to enjoy. To me, the single player and ability to play online are just extra content. If Smash was a LAN only game, it would still be an excellent one. I don't think sanding down the refinement of Local Play in favor of better Online or Single Player experiences would be a worthwhile trade. And I love to see that, with my friends, Ultimate has reignited our desire to play video games while sitting on the same couch. That's where the most fun is, if you ask me. And I think Sakurai and the team did a fantastic job of perfecting this.

With local play in it's current state, if they just make the aspects of the game better, I would buy the game again pretty happy. I dont think the series is in a point that it needs to drop the quality of the core experience of local play. The problem is, because the focus of local play, I basically never play the game, because the game dont give to me better ways to play. As I said too, all other games in the world have no problem to play online, games today have 100 players in one match, games that require as much precision, and Smash barely can handle 2 players, with 4 it can be painful. Even Brawlhalla that is a free indie game runs better than Smash, anyone can download it on eShop or on PC and play to test it. It is more simple, but not too different from Smash, that even being in 3D, it still works like a 2D game, and they have a lot more resources than an indie company. I dont like Brawlhalla, but the online works perfectly, super free of lag, the way I always wanted Smash to work.

 

[volbound1700]

I think Smash Ultimate is very close at A+. I agree with most of your feedback. Here has been the down-side of Smash Ultimate in order:

1. Single Player - World of Light seems weak compared to SSE or Adventure Mold in Melee. It is a lot better than the Smash Wii U Single Player. One major issue with WOL is the lack of a major theme. They should have kept the characters for series together for more impact (kind of like the Street Fighter level which is memorable). People want to play through the theme of each series. An improved WOL would have had Mushroom Kingdom space with classic characters from that series, a Hyrule space, a Kirby space, Sonic the Hedgehog Space, etc. The spirits for the series are stuck in the region based off that series.

Another better option would have been SSE part II with live-action fight stages. Perhaps also have the stages and villains based off the themes of the series similar to Smash Melee's Adventure mode on steroids.

2. Smash Ultimate Announcements after August Direct - It was a letdown for the Smash Community that the Grinch Leak was fake. That was a base roster that the fan base would have gotten behind. It was also overly ambitious. However, Sakurai could have thrown one more highly wanted character in the Base Game such as Geno to finish out the base game.

3. The Smash Fighter Pact - Overall this pact has been a disappointment for everyone outside of Japan. It has been a very Japanese centric Fighter Pass with only Banjo-Kazooie being a major character to appeal to the West. Joker and Terry fail in comparison to so many big names that have been thrown out by the fan base such as Sora, DoomGuy, Geno (just in Smash fanbase), Crash Bandicoot, Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, Rayman, Tails, Ryu Hayabusa, etc. There are so many better picks than what we have received in this pact and some of these characters like Ryu Hayabusa appeal to both East and West.

Overall Smash Ultimate is "Ultimate" but it isn't perfect. I think the steam went out of it in the November direct as well when the Grinch Leak was proven false. (The November Direct was probably the weakest directs in Smash history, IMO). Sakurai captured some of the hype back at E3 this year with Banjo and Hero but it has been disappointing.