Smash Ultimate Balance Patch
Elisabet Schwartzkopf
Common sense dictates that video games should be balanced. Of course they should be! Why wouldn't they? Well, it turns out there are actually some pretty cool things that can happen when a game isn't balanced.
When it comes to Smash Brothers it's really two games in one. The first is a wild and crazy party game. Four characters squeeze into a tiny arena filled with wacky environmental hazards and random item drops. It's what most people know and love.
The second game exists just under the surface. It's a hardcore competive 1v1 2.5d fighting game from the same bloodline as Street Fighter. Players disable all items and play only on simple, hazard-free maps. This post exclusively refers to 1v1 competitive play.
For Smash Brothers there is an invite-only message board that holds discussions and holds member votes to create a list. Then, after enough time has passed, they do it again. There have been 11 tier lists released over the past 12 years for Super Smash Brothers Melee (GameCube).
What makes SSBM an interesting case study is that it's a console game which has never been patched. There have been no balance changes or fixes. However, even though the game hasn't changed since launching in 2001, the player perception of balance has. Significantly.
Jigglypuff. My favorite. The pink pokemon had a dismal ranking of #17 after the first year. Her rise began after a few years and peaked at a shocking #3 in year 8. It's an inspirational tale that brings a tear to my eye.
Mew Two. My second favorite tale. An absolute basement dweller for almost, well, forever. Considered the absolute worst character in the game on two separate occassions. After 6 years of misery his ranking grew as high as #17.
These discoveries didn't just take a little time. It wasn't days or weeks or even months. It took years to be discovered. In the internet age, gamers flip their shit if a given character is considered overpowered or underpowered after a single week. Meanwhile, in Smash Brothers it took half a decade for game changing depth to be found in Ice Climbers.
I think a large part of what enables this depth to be found in Smash Brothers is that the game isn't balanced. It's not a small roster of perfectly tuned characters. It's a big game with lots of characters that creates a huge and unexplored problem space. It's up to the players to explore the nooks and crannies and see what treasures they can find. I find that incredibly exciting and compelling.
It's kind of funny. I've been wanting to write this post for over a year. And while writing, League of Legends (LoL) had a discovery. It turns out Zilean has been amazing all along no one realized it! He went from completely unused competitively to being picked or banned in a whopping 96% of tournament matches. In the World Finals he was banned every single match. That's absolutely bonkers!
Riot changes LoL all the time. Characters are regularly buffed. The nerfhammer is swung with reckless abandon. Ability sets are completely redesigned. The meta is meticulously influenced between seasons. I just can't help but wonder how the game would evolve if it was left alone like Smash. What would it look like after five or ten years? What amazing team comps would be found? What metas would develop? We'll never know, and that makes me a little sad.
If you've made it this far then you've read what I really wanted you to read. I'm satisfied. Thank you! If you've found this post interesting so far then keep reading. I've got a few more juicy bits you may enjoy.
I suspect this may be the reason Mew Two had a late rise. As the worst character in the game he was actually quite popular with top players. What could be more soul crushing than to be beaten by Mew Two?
Right you are. There are tiers and they are interesting and I have failed to actually show them. The reason is quite simple. I've yet to find a way to turn into a pretty, easy to read chart. Tiers are complicated. There's lots of them. They change in number. They change in size. They even change in name. Putting it all together well has proven quite difficult. If I can ever figure out how to do it well I'll make a new post to show it off.
Super Smash Brothers is super fun. I think part of it's magic comes from not trying to be balanced. I won't argue that having an unbalanced game is a good idea, but it does have some interesting side effects that are cool to follow.
Sakurai has also stated that he must balance Smash across a wide variety of playstyles and modes. He considers not only 1v1, but all kinds of match ups with a variety of playstyles and a variable amount of players:
After Melee, Sakurai would leave HAL, but later agreed to create Brawl (After Iwata had already revealed that Smash was coming to the Wii). For Brawl, he decided to take the casual audience more seriously, which severely altered the way Sakurai approached balancing.
As mentioned before, Brawl was balanced using data from a playtesting team that was comprised of four people. Because of the Wii hardware limitations, patches and DLC were not possible for the third entry into the series. Speaking with IGN, Sakurai stated:
Smash for Wii U/3DS also represents a big change to the way Sakurai has approached balancing. The first is that Sakurai enlisted the help of Bandai-Namco, partly due to the their experience making the Tekken games.
Recently, there was a tournament featuring the top Japanese and American players. In 1v1s, the natural tendency is to use low risk moves to gradually deal damage to the opponent. Smash attacks rarely came out, and the matches were prone to becoming long, drawn out affairs. When considering the variety of ways Smash can be played I think this is a shame, but the winner was certainly decided by skill.
Sakurai introduced a leaderboard system, but in reverse order. With the Global Smash Power, the higher the number, the better the player was ranked. This was done on purpose to combat that problems that Sakurai saw with a normal ranking system.
Sakurai balances Smash across a wide variety of playstyles, for many different kinds of players. When balancing the game he has to consider the many ways Smash can be enjoyed. His thoughts may be best summarized by the following tidbits from the April 2016 edition of Nintendo Dream:
The research was compiled by Soma and PushDustIn for Source Gaming. Special thanks to all of the translators on Source Gaming for helping us make this information available to you guys, and to the article staff for their suggestions! Check out the staff list here.
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Also, Sakurai seeing ladders in action at tournaments totally put the nail in the coffin for Meta Knight. His comments on using mostly safe moves and the trend of patches shows that he really wants competitive players to get KOs with smash attacks on a hard read, which would suck because most smashes are impractical and whiffing one is bound to get you heavily punished or KOed yourself. I hope we never end up with a Smash where we have to get KOs via smash reads, since that would bog down the pace big time.
The balance board is a peripheral controller that is compatible with a select Wii and Wii U, most notably with Wii Fit series of games. When a player stands on the balance board, it calculates weight and tracks weight shifting, which translates into actions in-game. Wii Fit among other sports games use this to detect a player's weight and support minigames made to help with exercise. In the Wii Fit series, the Wii Balance Board also functions as a character, complete with voice and personality. As a character, he helps encourage players to do their best.
Although designed for use with Wii Fit, the Balance Board saw use in a variety of third party titles in a variety of genres, most of which were aimed at the same casual market as Wii Fit, and/or were connected to some kind of licensed IP, some based around fitness such as The Biggest Loser or Gold's Gym, and some without such theming, such as Garfield and I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!. Skateboarding and Snowboarding games used the balance board to imitate being on an actual board. Some titles not designed for the Balance Board, such as Tetris Party and Scrabble Interactive: 2009 Edition also provided Balance Board support as an alternate novelty control scheme. The balance board even saw use in horror games as a method of running away instead of mashing buttons. Nintendo only used the Balance Board sparingly for their own releases, with only the Wii Fit series, Wii Music, Punch-Out!!, Rock N' Roll Climber, and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games using the peripheral. The Balance Board could also be used on the Wii U, but only two games were made to support it, one of which being Wii Fit U.
The Wii Balance Board appears as part of Wii Fit Trainer's on-screen appearance. Wii Fit Trainer balances on the Wii Balance Board before stepping off, after which the Wii Balance Board floats into the air, waves goodbye to Wii Fit Trainer and then disappears in a puff of smoke.
The Wii Balance Board also appears as a background character on Wii Fit Studio. He will occasionally wave with his right "hand" as combatants come near him. He will bow and walk off-stage once the stage platforms leave. When the platforms return, he will walk back on-stage and again bow toward the screen before he resumes cheering on the combatants.
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