Highlights
- Super Smash Bros. 6 needs to push the franchise to greater heights and improve on all aspects to stay ahead of its competitors.
- The built-in tournament mode in Ultimate, including Event Tourneys, is a fun feature but some design choices have turned away potential competitive players.
- To improve the tournament mode, more variations and competitive-focused events should be added, while fixing system-level issues like the delay-based netcode to ensure fairness and reliability.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was a milestone entry for the storied franchise. The game featured the return of every character from the series, the addition of plenty of newcomers, and a ton of single-player and multi-player content. Creating the biggest and most comprehensive Smash Bros. game to date was a fitting send-off for the series creator, Masahiro Sakurai, who has taken a step back from the industry. Despite SuperSmash Bros. Ultimate's status as the definitive compilation of the series so far, the next game in the series needs to push the franchise to greater heights in all respects.
One feature that Ultimate brought back from previous games was a built-in Smash tournament mode. This mode lets players enter brackets of 64 players online and compete to see who is the best. A part of this mode was the Event Tourneys, which had set parameters to celebrate certain things. Some Event Tourney themes were certain weight classes, game characters from specific decades, series-specific characters, and more. Event Tourneys are a fun feature, and with approximately 50 different events, there was clearly a lot of room for exploration. Despite this, the mode is far from perfect, and some of the design choices around it actively turned away the potential audience.
Smash 6 Can Improve Tournaments in Many Ways
While Super Smash Bros. enjoys a larger casual audience than almost any other fighting game series, many consistent and long-term players are more likely to be competitive or play with a more rigid rule set. The idea of a tournament is also inherently competitive and more intimidating than casual modes. In spite of this, many of the Event Tourneys revolve around items which are notably absent from competitive Super Smash Bros. Adding more competitively focused event tournaments to the roster could help pull in more dedicated players. Tournaments built around character limitations could have different variants for competitive and casual, similar to the standard online mode.
On top of variations to appeal to more types of players, a new entry would have to bring back relevant Event Tourneys and add news ones on a more consistent basis. Built-in online tournaments were a rarity when Ultimate launched, but Street Fighter 6 and other new fighting games have tournament systems now. The huge amount of characters, crossovers, and items in Smash Bros. games mean that weird Event Tourneys are not only possible, but one of the best ways to make the game stand out. Having a new event weekly, even if it was a simple variation, would keep the mode fresh and engaging.
System Level Fixes Will Help Event Tourneys Thrive
On top of specific additions to the mode, fixing some of the issues faced by the game in general would also help to make the mode better. Online in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is built on a delay-based netcode. This means that lag is a frequent occurrence, as are dropped connections. While this is problematic for all online modes, it compromises the tournament mode more than others due to the amount of players. Players could be eliminated because of networking issues. Mortal Kombat 1 and almost all other modern fighting games use rollback netcode which is much more reliable. Implementing a modern netcode solution would increase the integrity of all online modes, including the tournament mode and Event Tourneys.
Recent fighting games have pushed the genre forward into the modern era. Sluggish netcode, inaccessible systems and bare bones feature sets are a thing of the past. While Super Smash Bros. stands out as one of the few major platform fighters, it too needs to keep growing and pushing boundaries. Event Tourneys are one of the unique features that utilizes all the elements that makes Super Smash Bros. Ultimate unique from its competitors. Improving on system level issues and making new Event Tourneys more frequent and robust will help to push the mode to new heights and help the sixth entry in the series stand apart.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is available now on Nintendo Switch.
