“Super Smash Bros” is easily one of the most popular competitive franchises in the history of gaming, and there are lots of factors adding up to this quality of the series. Above all, they have an active community who are always eager to experiment with new tactics and characters, and keep making suggestions to the developers about how the game could be improved. Subsequently, those suggestions are taken into account when they are viable, and as a result we often see improvements to the game that may not have been so obvious to the developers originally.
However, developing a game like this is never easy for many reasons, and competitive gaming tends to be a delicate thing for the most part. Recently, there was an interesting argument brought forward by Masahiro Sakurai, director of “Super Smash Bros”, who explained the way the development of a game like this works, and why fans are sometimes disappointed over the wrong things when the development doesn’t necessarily go in their desired direction.
The problem, according to Sakurai, is that the developers have a long-term plan for the game which isn’t immediately obvious through their short-term patches, and sometimes fans could get the wrong impression about where the game is going if they only judge it momentarily. It’s difficult to see the bigger picture, especially for someone who doesn’t actively follow the development of the title, and it’s entirely possible that some fans could even think that the game is going to move in a specific direction that’s very different from the reality of things.
Sakurai compared the development of a game like this to building a house, as people tend to look at single components that they dislike or see a problem with, and focus on them in their complaints. At the same time, they disregard the bigger picture and don’t notice that the house actually needs certain details to work the way they do in order to function as a whole, and this is why players often need to be patient when it comes to patches and balance changes.
He also talked about a more recent particular problem with the game’s community, the announcement of Cloud Strife coming to the roster of characters. Some players have an issue with that and claim that he has no place in “Super Smash Bros”, and while it might seem like the developers have been generally unresponsive to those problems in the community, Sakurai seems to be well aware of the general notions and has been keeping an eye on those discussions, although he described the issues he’s seen so far as “trivial”. In general, he seems a bit skeptical of the claims that people have been making about the addition of Cloud to the title, and hasn’t been that supportive of the community in their issues, claiming that people should just be patient and see what’s coming next, and he seems to have a very serious idea about how the game will look like.
It’s understandable where he’s coming from if we look at the development of other titles in the past, such as Valve’s “Team Fortress” or “Counter-Strike”. Both games received some questionable updates during their lifetime which were met with skepticism from fans, but it eventually became evident that the studio had an actual plan with these things and they weren’t just random moves. However, it would have been difficult to communicate that from the beginning.