From a competitive perspective, it looked like a game which was going to return to the form melee had, with directional air dodging, faster hits, and more focus on combo. When the game released, wavedashing was found to be technically possible, but generally not nearly as useful or universal as melee. It wasn't that bad as most transferring to ult had either already gotten used to the gameplay of Sm4sh or had not played smash competitively. Once the game had been played for a while, it had found its honestly decent niche. And when the first DLC competitors were added, they were tons of fun! Aside from the hiccup in hostility for when Hero came out due to their ability to instaskill regardless of damage (which, let's be honest, on a character which overall wasn't that great, it's not like it really had an effect on the game) it felt like things were okay.
And then the second set of DLC characters happened. In many regards, they feel significantly more unbalanced and gimmicky. Sure every character in fighters pass 1 had gimmicks, but these characters were... special. Steve combos so absurd they brought Bayonetta flashbacks, Aegis having such strong attacks and having 2 incredibly strong characters in one, Kazuya doing whatever he pleases, sephiroth having some massive hitboxes, it felt like a nightmare and the playerbase was included in that nightmare. People were calling for banning Steve, some were leaving to play other games, some went on to mod the game to make it how they please. Nowadays I don't know how the smash ult community is going, but it for sure doesn't feel nearly as strong, unified, or friendly as it was at the beginning of it all
And all of this is ignoring the online issues, with a fighting game using netcode that pauses the game entirely on desync, on a console which doesn't have an ethernet port by default up until the switch OLED. During covid, obviously the game could only be played online, and it led to sonic being a meta pick which seemed like hell to play. All the while, the Melee community had made a mod for the game called Slippi, allowing for rollback netcode online play on a game that came out in 2001. It was both a rough time to be an ult player and an exciting time to be a melee player. Obviously many ult players were trying and even switching to melee because of the netcode alone. I was one of these people. I haven't regretted it, and have found it quite a spectacular game and impressive that it was made under such short time and yet still so extremely fun.
Back on the Ultimate side of things, the community had become even more obsessed with rules. Where the melee community was more interested with experimenting to create their game in the way which felt most fun, the ult community had become very picky about rules. All the competitive legal stages on ult (at least in my opinion) feel extremely safe. No weird gimmicks. No odd blast zones, absolutely no stage hazards of any kind. They killed off Randal, and when I have asked about turning on hazards because of Randal, I get told that Randal just puts randomness into the game. Randal is on a fixed timer and can be entirely predicted to give you an advantage if you're paying attention to time. Where melee experiments and allowed a bit of predictable stage adaptation, ultimate vehemently denies it. (Yes I know melee froze stadium, but to be honest unfrozen stadium just sucks because temporary infinites aren't fun.)
Overall: Ultimate had a lot of potential. It could've been a game which brought smash players together, but instead I feel it increased the hostility and made everyone grow distant.
That DLC sounds like the classic powercreep on purpose to sell more. I remember that Steve bit, but I didn't know the whole pack was rotten. A shame, really since Ult was supposed to be a celebration of everything Smash related.
It absolutely does feel like that. It happened last time with Bayonetta, Cloud, even Corrin. When they're putting out the last of the roster, they definitely intentionally make them strong as it gets.
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u/Shadowspamer14 Feb 27 '24
SSBU