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Sakurai: players “gave up on Melee because it’s too technical", won't focus too much on competitive
- Thread starter Atheerios
- Start date
Since it won't effect casuals to the degree that most people claim, 100% many people can say this objectively. LOL
Do you know what objectively means?
It would be nice if he could just make it more like Melee though and we can avoid having this conversation every time a new Smash game comes out. Thankfully every iteration seems to be moving closer and closer to Melee.
Every iteration is moving further from Melee, as there is a bigger focus on items, smash balls, assist trophies, etc.
More people play Smash casually than competitively.
Damn, Link does look good. I love the power of those bombs. The faster flyaway speed makes the game way more dynamic.
Smash games were all about content, including Melee. A game could still be like Melee with a bigger focus on items, Smash Balls, assist trophies etc.
Casual players love Smash.
They reduced aerial lag and included directional air dodging, you can even waveland now. The current waveland might be too bad to bother executing at high level, but compared to Brawl, they are definitely moving closer and closer to Melee. It's pretty cool to see. Even if Ultimate still feels alot like Smash 4. it's definitely getting closer to Melee than Brawl ever was. Excluding PM of course.
I wonder if you had a survey asking if melee was too hard what the results would actually look like. Even if melee was "too technical" ?!, that's not even what was truly lost. its more the speed and weightiness that vanished and never came back. Those things affected the single player aspects heavily too, and it should be understandable for anyone who started with 64 and saw how the series rapidly evolved then just as rapidly devolved in speed and options like no other videogame series I can even think of.
They do seem to have slowly been coming back the other direction since 4 though with 4 removing tripping and having massively improved online modes, even if its completely detached to think competitive players really wanted FD versions of everything.
They do seem to have slowly been coming back the other direction since 4 though with 4 removing tripping and having massively improved online modes, even if its completely detached to think competitive players really wanted FD versions of everything.
The more videos of this game I watch, the more I like seeing the gameplay. It's way more fun to watch than 4, and that's great.
You know, anecdotally I'm not sure this is true. For one in college the people I used to play Smash Brothers 64 and Melee with never bothered with Brawl and further. It was only me :( Melee was the puntuation mark in a lot of casual players I know that have never picked it back up.
Secondly, I work in a place where kids play Smash Brothers for Wii U tm all the time and it is predominantly Omega matches, all items turned off except Smash ball and that game is running all day. These kids probably don't know Melee but they are emulating the competitive scene, even to the point they'll do one on ones with the better players while everybody watches.
I'd have expected a room full of teens and younger that don't know each other to be more casually but it's not quite.
Secondly, I work in a place where kids play Smash Brothers for Wii U tm all the time and it is predominantly Omega matches, all items turned off except Smash ball and that game is running all day. These kids probably don't know Melee but they are emulating the competitive scene, even to the point they'll do one on ones with the better players while everybody watches.
I'd have expected a room full of teens and younger that don't know each other to be more casually but it's not quite.
User Warned - Inflammatory Comment
Ugh, this man will never forgo an opportunity to shit on Melee, will he?
Hell, the guy even uses the same asinine talking points from 2005.
First of all, not a single, solitary major media outlet that criticized SSBM for being "too technical" at the time of release. Zero. Nada. Completely, and entirely, NON-EXISTENT.
That's not to say that there weren't individual people from the hoi polloi who might have complained about Melee, obviously. But there was never widespread disappointment with SSBM. There was no large scale backlash. The game was universally praised when it came out. Need I remind everyone that this game that was so overtly "complicated" and utterly burdensome, managed to somehow sell two million MORE copies than its relatively far simpler predecessor? And on a userbase that had ten million fewer people. Any resentment that occurred was completely and entirely retroactive, and it was led by one man (I'll let you guess who).
Second of all, his logic is completely non-sensical. People couldn't enjoy Melee because their friends would be too skilled? Can't that argument be applied to literally every single competitive game in existence? If you can't enjoy a game because your friends are too good, well don't blame the game. Blame your shitty friends! Get new ones! Sakurai acts like people are forced to learn wavedashing, L-cancelling and all that other shit the moment they pick up a GC controller, as if no one has any agency whatsoever. Are you somehow mandated to enter tournaments the moment you place the game disc in the console? Do the Nintendo Ninjas show up at your house and hold your family hostage unless you sign up to Evo?
And finally, he once again creates this moronic false dichotomy where you can have either a competitive, highly technical an precision based fighting game, or a fun game. But you can't have both.
BULL.
SHIT.
I'm not even some snooty, elite tourney player. I don't like playing with items off on final destination all the time. Hell, I've been playing the game since 2001 and I have yet to properly wavedash. Yet, I think SSBM is still by far and away the most enjoyable and fun Smash Bros. title.
But Sakurai is so blinded by the animosity he developed the moment he found out people were playing SSBM in a way that he didn't approve of, that he wanted to throw the baby out the with the bathwater. Because in the end, that's all he is. A big, fat baby.
Sakurai said:
Sakurai said:
Hell, the guy even uses the same asinine talking points from 2005.
First of all, not a single, solitary major media outlet that criticized SSBM for being "too technical" at the time of release. Zero. Nada. Completely, and entirely, NON-EXISTENT.
That's not to say that there weren't individual people from the hoi polloi who might have complained about Melee, obviously. But there was never widespread disappointment with SSBM. There was no large scale backlash. The game was universally praised when it came out. Need I remind everyone that this game that was so overtly "complicated" and utterly burdensome, managed to somehow sell two million MORE copies than its relatively far simpler predecessor? And on a userbase that had ten million fewer people. Any resentment that occurred was completely and entirely retroactive, and it was led by one man (I'll let you guess who).
Second of all, his logic is completely non-sensical. People couldn't enjoy Melee because their friends would be too skilled? Can't that argument be applied to literally every single competitive game in existence? If you can't enjoy a game because your friends are too good, well don't blame the game. Blame your shitty friends! Get new ones! Sakurai acts like people are forced to learn wavedashing, L-cancelling and all that other shit the moment they pick up a GC controller, as if no one has any agency whatsoever. Are you somehow mandated to enter tournaments the moment you place the game disc in the console? Do the Nintendo Ninjas show up at your house and hold your family hostage unless you sign up to Evo?
And finally, he once again creates this moronic false dichotomy where you can have either a competitive, highly technical an precision based fighting game, or a fun game. But you can't have both.
BULL.
SHIT.
I'm not even some snooty, elite tourney player. I don't like playing with items off on final destination all the time. Hell, I've been playing the game since 2001 and I have yet to properly wavedash. Yet, I think SSBM is still by far and away the most enjoyable and fun Smash Bros. title.
But Sakurai is so blinded by the animosity he developed the moment he found out people were playing SSBM in a way that he didn't approve of, that he wanted to throw the baby out the with the bathwater. Because in the end, that's all he is. A big, fat baby.
It's so weird to resort to name calling and insisting Sakurai hates Melee when even after Brawl he's said that he personally considers it "the sharpest game" in the series.
But nah making things less technically complex at an execution level and making transitioning into competitive mindsets easier for an intermediate audience means he fucking hates his games and is throwing a temper tantrum.
But nah making things less technically complex at an execution level and making transitioning into competitive mindsets easier for an intermediate audience means he fucking hates his games and is throwing a temper tantrum.
So true.
About waveland, people keep saying its too slow but its only a few frames slower than Melee TBH. The only real issue with waveland now is that you can't platform cancel it.
Regardless if you can use it offensively like Melee's, the great thing is that it's just another option that the entire cast has to play with.
It would be amazing if the entire cast could platform cancel with the waveland, but still, things like that are exactly what smash has been needing for a while.
I'm assuming this is directed at me, but you do realize it's possible to compliment something while also feeling disappointment for it, right?
Yes, Sakurai said what you said. But he also said (amusingly enough, from the same interview where that quote is from) that he's also never going to attempt such a game again.
Another way of putting it:
"Boy, I sure do think highly of this game that I will never, ever willingly replicate for the rest of my life."
Being able to fall off edges would mean so much. I dont know much about coding games but surely thats a binary decision? edge cancels and wavelands off edges are some of the most fun things you can do
Yeah, most of the criticism's toward Sakurai's mindset is over things like the "mountain" comment, where he implicitly said he wants the skill ceiling to be low, and various comments like you see in this thread about how Melee was allegedly unsuccessful among casuals.
I assume he's left that awful Brawl-era skill ceiling mindset behind at this point, but he still seems feel Melee was "held back" by its depth. Which is a kind of ridiculous notion, what kind of game gets a 1/3 attach rate, is the best selling game on the platform by a good margin, but apparently should have sold better but the game was too hard.
And I've heard mixed things about Smash 5's wavelands. Like they exist, but they aren't practical because they are very laggy and you can't do slide offs.
Sure, he's never going to replicate a game that was super rushed and full of awful decisions. But let's overlook that because look at the competitive scene!
Note, I'm just assuming what you meant from what you posted, just like you're assuming what Sakurai meant.
I don't agree with his attitude, but it is certainly a weird feeling knowing that this one game is the one and only of its kind, and will probably only ever be. Indie games like RoA have done well, but Nintendo has so many great characters and developers its almost unfair.
We have a guy modding a training mode for Melee with hundreds of patrons on patreon because the interest in community driven melee content is so strong, its kind of crazy. Is there any other game with anything similar to this happening?
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Hmm. I wonder why he doesn't want to cater to people thinking like this. A conundrum even the greatest minds couldn't solve, this.
He's the fucking creator and head developer of Smash Bros ffs. He knows WHAT he want it to be.
Just how entitled can a person/community be?
Name calling is uncalled for, I agree.
But really, I don't get Sakurai's thought process. His comments and even some actions like 4's For Glory mode seem to show he has a similar attitude as those that keep saying trash like "fox only, final destination" or "melee players won't be happy without a perfect melee clone".
But at the same time the path 4 and Ultimate have been slowly going in seem to be taking the competitive side to heart.
It still feels he has a misguided view on what made people love Melee if he thinks a game needs to have execution as technical as it to be on its level. Unfortunately, his comments tend to feed the mindset that leads to a flood of comments brushing off anything a fan of Melee might want to discuss as them simply being entitled.
Honestly, I hope the best for Ultimate. I may think there's still room for improvement, but even if it turns out to not be my kind of game, I still hope its competitive scene thrives.
But it would also be nice if the game could capture a bit of the feel that made me love the series, you know?
Than you just weren't paying attention. Both games had a huge casual scene.
You know, posts like these just make the Melee community look foolish and entitled. I'm sorry that Sakurai can't bow down and worship and kiss your feet, but he's not required to.
His thought process is this. He doesn't want the game to be determined by a skill gap that offputs other players from playing. That's it. He's perfectly fine with competitive stuff. It's only the crazed ideas of certain Melee fans who thinks they are still the underdog of the world that has this insane attitude of "everyone hates my perfect game!!!!!"
A skill gap is unavoidable, that's the nature of any multiplayer game. Even a tech skill gap, no Smash game is free from that.
I can't imagine the changes we've seen in 4 and Ultimate could have happened without accepting that a skill gap between players will always be a factor, which is why his comments are odd.
Among other things you literally called him, and I quote:
That kind of goes a bit beyond "feeling disappointment". The rest of your post is the epitome of entitlement, ungratefulness and lack of self-awareness.
The delicious irony of a Melee fan calling a game dev this is just
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What Sakurai properly doesn't want is a skill gap with a barrier in between. In Melee you needed to learn Wave Dashing to play most of the characters on a higher level. A barrier, which wasn't planed as part of the game, and something which doesn't fit his philosophy or his vision of the game.
What Oblivion said was pretty stupid.
Please don't go to the same level by implying Melee fans are just being babies, let's try to keep this discussion reasonable.
There's a barrier to every Smash game, Melee's is just a little more obvious.
And it's fine to not want the execution barrier to be as extreme as Melee's, no one worth listening to is asking for that. The fact that he seems to think it's the execution barrier that makes Melee so good is unfortunate.
It's absolutely a deliberate change. The game actually stops you from falling off while in the waveland state.
It's similar to the way shieldpush no longer pushes you off a platform or the stage....which is pretty much the only change left that I really wish they'd bring back.
People are very vocal about a comeback of Wave Dashing. All the mods and spin-offs are including it in there games. So of course Sakurai and many other people believe that.
I find the ideas behind Wave Dashing to be intresting and it would be great to include them, without having an execution barrier. Smash is all about NOT having such barrieres (Specials on buttons) … so it just doesn't fit the game.
I really just think it comes down to high level Melee not fitting his vision of how the game should be played. And the game can still be very competitive without pushing the skill ceiling to those stratospheric heights.
It's easier to just work with what you know on cases like mods or suggestions for most people.
Ultimate did the right thing on this part though, letting us cancel dashes into anything gives us exactly what we've wanted, better movement options that effectively let us do what wavedashing did.
I've been saying that's fine.
That's the problem with just assuming Melee fans will only be happy with a Melee clone, it becomes easy to overlook what people actually love about it.
Of course. Melee's core speed and fluidity, even at lower levels of play, really contribute to its identity. It's great that Ultimate is pushing much more in that direction.
playing smash with a fighting stick sucks... It's not designed for that kind of input.
And I'm willing to bet the tendinitis comes from solid weeks of doing the same crazy intense wacky button and stick combos over and over... (I have a feeling he's also referring to his own dying hands)
What Sakurai says about Melee is generally true.
It's the reason he says the things he says that makes it a problem.
Smash does not need another "Melee", in the sense of technical difficulty.
But to have a spiritual successor to Melee, you don't NEED a ridiculous amount of technical difficulty. You just need the mechanics to favor competitive play.
Smash Ultimate looks as though it's doing that. Smash 4 did not.
Nobody is asking for wavedashing or L-cancelling or any of that other shit.
You don't need wavedashing to have good mobility, you don't need L-cancelling to have a decent skill gap (it's honestly a pretty whack mechanic anyway, it's only neat because of the possibilities it opens up, but you could just auto-apply it and achieve the same result).
My issue with Sakurai is that he SEEMS to believe that you cannot do this without alienating casual players...but the nature of Smash Bros itself pretty much ensures that this is never going to happen.
Case in point....never recall any casual players complaining about how difficult Melee was.
It's the reason he says the things he says that makes it a problem.
Smash does not need another "Melee", in the sense of technical difficulty.
But to have a spiritual successor to Melee, you don't NEED a ridiculous amount of technical difficulty. You just need the mechanics to favor competitive play.
Smash Ultimate looks as though it's doing that. Smash 4 did not.
Nobody is asking for wavedashing or L-cancelling or any of that other shit.
You don't need wavedashing to have good mobility, you don't need L-cancelling to have a decent skill gap (it's honestly a pretty whack mechanic anyway, it's only neat because of the possibilities it opens up, but you could just auto-apply it and achieve the same result).
My issue with Sakurai is that he SEEMS to believe that you cannot do this without alienating casual players...but the nature of Smash Bros itself pretty much ensures that this is never going to happen.
Case in point....never recall any casual players complaining about how difficult Melee was.
Yeah, I think people will be surprised at just how many people enjoy basic Smash without the fluff. Even my 4 year old nephews prefer no items lol.
Smash has controlled better and can control better than 4; that's all people want. But here comes Sakurai with some small comment people use as fuel in the age-old was of Melee fans vs The World to stir the pot again :b
You misunderstand. It's not about "entitlement". Yes, I have my preferences, but if Sakurai wants to go in a different direction, he's certainly allowed to do that. My bigger complaint is about his BS, retroactive rationale for doing what he's doing.
Also, how on earth can I get a warning for attacking a game developer? Sakurai doesn't even post here!
Yup. None of my casual friends have complained about ICONS.
Icons looks great, wish I'd gotten in the beta. Definitely picking it up... Today? I thought it was later this month!
No OT? That's funny.
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I believe early access is Friday, yeah.
The betas were the highlights of my week until I moved and didn't have my PC.
Can't wait to get back to my Waifu Xana when I get my PC and desk from the movers.
I played it enough over the last year that I felt they should take my money for it.
It should be out in about half an hour, at least according to steam.
Enjoy, y'all. It's barebones as hell presentation wise but it's fun as hell to play and it just feels GOOD.
Personal attacks on developers aren't allowed on ResetEra. If you have any issue with that, it would be wise to take it to the moderation team in private.
Because not resorting to name calling is basic human decency?
I was criticizing his temperament and maturity. Hardly anything egregious. On the other hand, several people in this thread outright called me "stupid".
edit: and anyway, I'd not rather make this about me. It would be nice if people addressed the meat of my arguments regarding Sakurai.
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I said what you said was stupid, not you.
Name calling adds nothing to this discussion other than distracting from the main point and giving more fuel to those that just want to hate on Melee fans, as seen with the one drive by post responding to you with essentially "oh yeah, well melee fans are the real babies, look at my gif", which I also called out.
I don't know you personally and am not judging you, but the name calling was poor judgment.
Yeah I stumbled upon this match yesterday and man does Link look hype! I gotta try him out.
