Next Super Smash Bros. being co-developed by Namco Bandai

[liquid wind]

if you missed the link Jack Keiser heads up the 'free item alliance' or whatever he calls it that insists tournaments are better with items and even puts on one or two every year or so

I'm familiar with it, he's been on about this basically since the game came out. one or two a year is nothing, there were 9 NA tournies this weekend. items play is sheer novelty, there aren't a significant number of people who want it

Who's 'us'? I'm not going to pretend that Smash Bros is anything but a party game (let alone a competitive game or an esport), because again, the developer shows absolutely zero interest in fostering a scene. Any game headed by Nintendo is simply not going to have baseline features required for competitive gaming like matchmaking, spectating, sponsorships or even balance patches.

smash does have a pretty active competitive community but you're right in that it's in spite of nintendo, it could be much more if they were even remotely supportive of it. that's why I'm hoping namco gets a lot of freedom with it and sakurai doesn't pull an other m on us where the third party has no input, if this is brawl 2.0 I won't bother getting it

[BardicKnowledge]

Meh, it's decent. Balanced Brawl fixed everything that was a serious issue with Brawl and did it before P:M was even a concept. You can fix Brawl's issues without making it indistinct from its predecessor. I always saw P:M as less of a balancing / competitive issue and more of a "we can't move on / want to bring back the Melee players" issue.

Balanced Brawl is a good example; I have it and P:M both and enjoy both of them a great deal.

Um, items are already open to competitive play, and have been since 2008.

I'm just hoping that Sakurai has the good sense to listen to the Tekken team, instead of just use them for manpower.

Didn't mean to undercut your work (which has been great), but it ultimately represents a minority of competitive Smash, not the majority (again, not an attack on what you've done). Something like Nintendo stepping in with fixed item spawns might help make items more mainstream, which I'd love to see in future Smash games.

[Thalzon]

I dunno. I'd like to see even more customization options, including affecting things like gravity, force behind attacks, turning stage gimmicks on or off, etc. It lets the players decide what they like while making all the play options available to everyone, while undercutting the apparent "need" for modding. Forcing items would break the fanbase worse than tripping and Meta-Knight did.

[Scufo]

Most people see Smash as a party game, and with default settings that's pretty much what it is. But, anyone who was serious about Melee will tell you that there's actually a super deep and highly technical competitive game underneath the silly randomness.

Brawl showed that Sakurai and Nintendo have no interest in supporting a competitive scene, and are in fact hostile to its existence, with crap like tripping added specifically to make the game more random and less dependent on skill. And of course, balance testing was virtually non-existent (hi Metaknight).

For me Brawl was a disappointment, so I won't be buying this next game. I'm sure it'll still make for a good drinking game though...

[JackKieser]

I'm too tired from work to multiquote correct people, so I'm just going to bullet-point this out:

* "Item Standard Play", as a project, was never intended to be the official standard for all play. That would be stupid... at least for Brawl. Even by late 2008, when ISP came out with it's first full ruleset, it was too late for items in Brawl thanks to the scrubtastic community left over after the Melee exodus and EVO. By the metric of popularity, it's a miserable failure. Luckily, that was never the point: the bet that started it all was that items were, by definition, unviable for competitive play, and whether it is widespread or not, ISP disproves that sentiment handily. There is a nontrivial chance that an ISP-like system could be a day-1 standard when SSB4 comes out, assuming the community leadership steps up and learns from the mistakes of the Brawl launch (assuming the Tekken team doesn't change the mechanics too much, of course), but that doesn't mean that ANYONE, including anyone a part of ISP, has, is, or will push for widespread ISP use now.

* No one, and I want to stress this, not a single person who has ever been a part of ISP, including me, has EVER claimed that ISP is better than anything else. Every ruleset, items or no, has its strengths and weaknesses, and comparing them all to each other is an epistemic nightmare. The only claim we, as a project, have ever made is that ISP is legitimately competitive and competitively valid on its own, on its own merit. That claim has withstood scrutiny by top TOs, players, Smash researchers, and even the community writ large; regardless of personal opinion, almost no one who seriously reads the ISP thread ever has a bad thing to say about it.

* Scrubs and people with a passing knowledge of competitive Brawl or competitive Brawl history think all sorts of stupid, uneducated stuff about ISP. At the end of the day, it's a great project full of amazingly talented people and players, and not a day goes by where I'm not 150% proud of the work they did to make it a reality. It has served its community well, and that's the end of the discussion, full stop. I know it's a lot, but anyone who wants to badmouth ISP has a lot of reading to do first (82 full forum pages of reading, to be precise). That means you, Derrit.

[Scufo]

looks like someone's jimmies are rustled.

[JackKieser]

Nah, I've just never been the kind of person to let people spout inaccuracies on the Internet. ISP holds its own when it comes to serious scrutiny; people like Derrit are just trolls and, aside from the inaccuracies, all of the flamebaiting can be easily ignored. Besides, anyone who has anything to say worth listening to on the subject is on another website, anyway.

Although, that's a serious case of misreading if you interpreted that post as emotional or something. :/

[BardicKnowledge]

Yeah, ISP is awesome. As part of the organizing team for a few Melee tournaments up here in MN, I am also yet to hear anyone say the project was not completely worthwhile and a serious help to the community -- even those players who don't want to play with items were educated about what goes into forming a cohesive ruleset that holds up at the highest level of play.

Jack is right in that there is a legit chance for some play with items to be the standard format for the next Smash game -- here's hoping the next Smash game warrants competitive treatment with Namco's involvement.

P.S. Am I the only person here (besides Jack, who organized it) that read and followed the entire ISP thread on smashboards throughout its development? I might have even contributed a few posts here and there, though it's been so long that I forget.

[JackKieser]

Bardic, you posted? Is your SWF username the same as it is here?

[yangfeili]

One thing I've wanted since Melee:

Stock-stamina matches. You set the number of lives, and you set how much HP each life has. You can reduce an opponent's lives either by knocking him off the stage or depleting his HP. (Timed stamina matches with unlimited lives would also be good.)

I think my friends and I would only play this mode if it existed. We've always liked stamina mode, but its "one life" nature means that it's always over way too quickly even with the HP maxed out.

[DusK]

One thing I've wanted since Melee:

Stock-stamina matches. You set the number of lives, and you set how much HP each life has. You can reduce an opponent's lives either by knocking him off the stage or depleting his HP. (Timed stamina matches with unlimited lives would also be good.)

I think my friends and I would only play this mode if it existed. We've always liked stamina mode, but its "one life" nature means that it's always over way too quickly even with the HP maxed out.

This would be pretty awesome.

[liquid wind]

I dunno. I'd like to see even more customization options, including affecting things like gravity, force behind attacks, turning stage gimmicks on or off, etc. It lets the players decide what they like while making all the play options available to everyone, while undercutting the apparent "need" for modding. Forcing items would break the fanbase worse than tripping and Meta-Knight did.

It won't happen but I'd also love to see some built in aesthetic modification like brawl texture hacks

[The Derrit]

Bardic, you posted? Is your SWF username the same as it is here?

also as a note i have read the majority of that thread i used to spend a lot of time on smashboards.

the idea is well founded but i don't like it. and whether or not you like it the initial founding of it was a veil for all sorts of ignorance regarding competitive smash brothers, and mass amounts of scrubdom within the community. it may have matured into something interesting since then but at the inception of brawl it demolished whatever chances brawl had of being accepted by the larger fighting community.

though admittedly brawl then did that on its own later down the line by being really unbalanced/tripping/etc.

[liquid wind]

Not to contribute to this being derailed into an items debate but brawl/smash was never going to be "accepted by the larger fighting game community" even if it were more balanced and there was no tripping. They've always viewed it as an us against them thing, brawl having the flaws that it did just validated that pre-existing divide and fractured the smash community itself when most melee players quit brawl within it's first year

[The Derrit]

Not to contribute to this being derailed into an items debate but brawl/smash was never going to be "accepted by the larger fighting game community" even if it were more balanced and there was no tripping. They've always viewed it as an us against them thing, brawl having the flaws that it did just validated that pre-existing divide and fractured the smash community itself when most melee players quit brawl within it's first year

i mean why would i play brawl when i can go back to one of the fastest most entertaining fighting games ever made

i liked it because i loved ivysaur's kit (and pokemon trainer's by extension) but because everyone became so limited there was literally no way to make a usable play style against intelligent metaknights

did really well against snake though

[BardicKnowledge]

Not worth looking me up, Jack -- I've got only 6 posts on Smashboards total, and one from 2008 in the ISP thread.

I'd be more active but I feel that the majority of the community there is like trying to chat with a random DotA player It's a great resource for high-level information though, I've lurked a lot.

[The Derrit]

Not worth looking me up, Jack -- I've got only 6 posts on Smashboards total, and one from 2008 in the ISP thread.

I'd be more active but I feel that the majority of the community there is like trying to chat with a random DotA player It's a great resource for high-level information though, I've lurked a lot.

that's the way it is in any community of people who don't have to back up their opinions with objective information. aka the internet.

there is definitely a lot of good info on the site though from the people who actually do know what they're talking about. trying to contribute to theory threads is not worth anyone's time though.

[ocre]

What I want in the next smash game: custom soundtrack mp3 support. I've been wanting to hear

while playing on the Pokemon Stadium stage for a long while now. You would play Time mode and set it to 1-minute matches for added fun.

[DusK]

What I want in the next smash game: custom soundtrack mp3 support.

If they put this in, oh man, I'd have a field day.

[Thalzon]

So we're basically admitting, overall, that we want an engine that we can plunk fan-made resources into.

[liquid wind]

So we're basically admitting, overall, that we want an engine that we can plunk fan-made resources into.

It's what a lot of us already do with brawl

[Global-Trance]

Yeah. Brawl is one of the most extensively "hacked" Wii games so far. People have been able to import custom textures, custom music for stages, add entirely new stages from other Wii games and stay 99% intact (Monster Hunter Tri and one of the Castlevania titles if I remember correctly were a couple examples), and of course, completely change the game's mechanics. Pretty much if you can dream it, it's probably been "hacked" by now.

[JackKieser]

The only thing they haven't been able to do is add new character slots to the CSS. Additional stage slots? Not a problem. Additional character slots?

The game explodes.

All I know is that it has to do with .rel files. I think.

[RealFolkBlues]

Well this is some unexpected news. I'm not really sure how to take it, frankly. Smash is pretty close to my heart, and even though I liked Melee better than Brawl, it's hard to imagine an outside developer would really help matters. We shall see.

That having been said, since Namco is involved, maybe we can get some of the ridiculous Soul series announcer gems.

"MARIO was seriously wounded, but his soul still burns!"