Sakurai discusses why Smash Bros. Brawl online is no longer thrilling
Here’s how one guy, who wrote in to Brawl producer Masahiro Sakurai, put it:
Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai recently tried playing Brawl online. He was a bit disappointed with the players he encountered. In addition to being disappointed that items were turned off, Sakurai noticed that “nobody ever went on the attack; it was like everyone was taking the approach of waiting for the other guy to take the offensive.”
“The other day, I had my first run at Smash Bros. Brawl online play. What I found was that nobody ever went on the attack; it was like everyone was taking the approach of waiting for the other guy to take the offensive. There were no items, either. I wanted to shout at them ‘This isn’t how you do Smash Bros.’! As the producer, what do you think of fights like this?”
Sakurai, in a Famitsu column, wrote that would like to see “some freer approaches with their gameplay” and just have fun – something he’d like to address with the next Smash Bros.
“The idea of Brawl’s ‘carefree brawling’ motto was to get rid of as many restraints as possible and allow people to choose whatever play approach they liked. I’d like people to take some freer approaches with their gameplay, but the sort of battle style you describe in your letter is not interesting or fun. That’s why I’ll probably be thinking of a way to deal with that in the next game. We’ve learned a lot about net play since Brawl was released, after all, so a lot more is possible.”
Sakurai wrapped up with the following:
“Of course, I suppose the fact that we’ve still got no-fee online battles available in a game that was released five years ago is another cause of the problem. It would have been nice if we could have revised the game rules as appropriate, but with the system we had, that wasn’t possible.”
