14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the trend towards niche fighting games in the industry, the development team at Nintendo working on the new Super Smash Bros. wants to make sure that the experience has a broad appeal and delivering plenty of fun moments.
Masahiro Sakurai, one of the creators of the franchise, tells Kotaku that, “Basically, Smash Bros. is designed to be sort of targeted at the centre, intermediate players, and if you think of sort of a skill graph or something where if you’re targeting just the peak of that performance level, you’re targeting a very small group of people.”
Traditionally the most successful fighting game series, like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, tended to focus on very precise movement and use of special powers that drove away many players who were only interested in a more casual experience.
Sakurai adds, “We wanna avoid a situation where it becomes a game sort of like other competitive fighting games, where it’s only appreciated by a very small, passionate group of sort of maniac players. We definitely don’t want that sort of situation. It’s supposed to be a fun game for a wide variety of people.”
Sakurai believes that very capable players will be able to test their skills against one another but the vast majority of gamers will still have a chance to defeat them via good movement and positioning.
The developer says that Super Smash Bros. will also benefit from its focus on vertical level design, which makes the entire experience more competitive.
At the same time better collision detection for the Wii U and 3DS game will make all other mechanics easier to master.
The game is expected to launch in 2014.
The two versions of Super Smash Bros. will not have cross-platform play, but gamers will be able to export and import custom-made characters.