
As you may well have seen already at this point, a livestream hosted by Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai is set to air tomorrow. The stream will feature an in-depth look at upcoming DLC fighter, Terry Bogard.
Strangely enough, a surprising number of people have reacted to the news by saying that they hope to get - or even outright assume we will get - more news on unrevealed fighters, too. We're sorry to burst your incredibly eager bubble, but that will not be the case. Nintendo has actually made a point of explicitly stating this fact, likely hoping to avoid any disappointment.
During this livestream, there are no announcements regarding any unrevealed fighters.
We actually covered this in our last post on the topic, but some fans seem to be more interested in the idea of new reveals than the promised Terry breakdown so it seems pretty important to get the message across. How many times have we seen fans be upset or disappointed because something that was never promised wasn't shown in a Nintendo Direct?
Before Terry's big day tomorrow, feel free to check out our Just Who The Heck Is Terry Bogard? feature. In it, we go over the history of the character and highlight some of his key game appearances - perfect for anyone who wants to learn more about him before his Smash debut.
We'll make sure to cover any big stories from the livestream tomorrow, so make sure to check back with us for more.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 49
Just being able to watch Sakurai play with 2 controllers is enough
This was already stated in the previous article.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/11/masahiro_sakurai_hosting_smash_bros_ultimate_terry_bogard_livestream_on_6th_november
But nonclickbait channel gamexplain promised us geno?! wtf, don't tell me they were lying!
I don't know why they don't reveal them all. I'm interested in 3 out of 4 of the announced, but still need to know either the 5th is some character I want, because that will determine if I need the fighters pass. With the scarce information what they get is people like me holding off.
@Rika_Yoshitake No. They promised us Captain Falcon.
OK.
But what are they going to show for 45 minutes? A new mode? Smash Run comes back?
But how can they spend 45 minutes just showing off one character? They previously confirmed that there won’t be any more modes being added, so unless there’s also a truckload of Mii outfits or new Spirits, I don’t see how Terry alone can fill 45 minutes. Does Sakurai want to show off every single animation frame? Is he planning on spending 30 minutes thanking us for making this the best selling fighting game? I need answers!
Does anyone think that not revealing anything new has to do with not taking away too much attention from the biggest release of this year from Nintendo, which comes in one more week?
I'm talking of course of Perils of Baking which releases on November 14th XD
@gaga64 Sakurai loves to spend time in details. But I guess there will be more things to be revealed like new Mii characters outfits and themes.
Character (gameplay & history, maybe Sakurai goes into detail about the influences on Smash), stage, Mii costumes, the 6.0 update whatever this includes, and I'm pretty sure the new DLC will be explained in some way. No reveals, but price, structure, if/how it's different from the first set, possible bonus content for buying the pass...
@Moroboshi876
Yup same here, they didnt play this right.
Reveal all 5 up front ao people can deside to buy the pass or not. I still havent bought any of the DLC becouse of that.
Terry alone convinced Me to buy it but i will wait till he is released.
@Moroboshi876 Probably trying to ride the hype and suspense of it. 'Ooh, who's the last character?' and then Nintendo be like 'It's not even half of the DLC we've prepared'. Something along those lines.
So I’m guessing the 45 minutes is broken into:
5 min intro/backstory and exposition
10 min moveset explanation
10 min new free content and Mii costumes (also an amiibo plug)
20 min Sakurai playing Minecraft with his new best friend Toby Fox (spoilers: they build a house)
@Reigestugatensho You're right, in fact they said there were going to release more characters, and they didn't even finish announcing the first 5!
But depending on the 5th character they could have my money today. No info, no money yet.
@RupeeClock Oh, the irony.
There's no way in the world you're gonna get me to believe such a straightforward guy like Sakurai is gonna talk about one fighter, their stage, music, and Mii costumes for 45 minutes. It takes him a couple minutes to explain everything else once he's done discussing about the fighter which is like 15 minutes. Almost all of the DLC content videos are either less than 20 minutes or a little over it.
At the same time i'm not convincing myself that it could be something as special as new characters, but I just don't see 45 minutes on one character with Sakurai. My best bet is that he'll reveal a new mode and maybe some tweaks to smash ultimate as a whole.
Waiting for the next Direct to hear E1M1
Saves me the trouble of watching it for nothing, since I'm not interested in Terry. Good on them for clarifying that.
@Moroboshi876 Personally I prefer it this way! The mystery is way more fun!
TBF, when Sakurai announced the fighters pass, he did say only people who trust his team to deliver quality content should buy it outright.
I brought the first pass on day one and will do the same for the inevitable second pass when it comes out.
Okay, but then what's Sakurai going to be doing for 40 minutes? Banjo and Hero only got 20.
if there really are no new modes or characters to be revealed here, i can only think that this presentation is going to be even more unedited than usual. who knows
@YagaMaki Well, I'm not interested in Joker, and if the 5th fighter isn't my cup of tea either, the fighter's pass would have been a waste of money.
well, at least I know I don't need to watch then. I don't care about Hat Ken, so that was the only thing I'd want to see
@Moroboshi876 marketing. It’s all to generate hype. They could’ve announced all 5 before the game even came out (I’m sure they were decided by then), and the characters were likely all finished months ago so they could’ve released them then. It’s always about marketing though, and for every player like you who won’t buy until they know exactly what they’re getting, there’s several that will buy purely because of the possibilities. Many if not most people are not good at planning and seek immediate gratification, so to them, they’ll just buy it blind... but plenty of those people would not have bought it at all (or only bought a character separately) if they saw the entire list and didn’t like what they saw.
Yeah, they currently don’t have your sale, but they have sales they wouldn’t have had by drawing out the process and generating hype with each individual reveal.
@Moroboshi876 That last part would probably be fun to watch.
And who said they weren't showing a new character every other time they released a new character they showed a new one. Plus how would anyone know what there showing if they havn't showed it yet and didn't want to spoil anything.
@ShadJV actually when they announce the characters they weren't ready like in the terry announcement they said he is still in development so he was finished so they couldn't of all been done months ago.
@Audiogore0733 oh they said that so it MUST be true. Characters don’t take 3 months to add, otherwise this game would’ve taken two decades to make. They most definitely HAVE been ready early, heck it’s been proven that some of the character showcases were recorded months prior to being uploaded. Of course they wouldn’t tell us the characters have been ready for awhile, can you imagine the backlash? People would be pissed.
@Audiogore0733 as for who said they aren’t showing a new character... Nintendo? Nintendo literally stated that on their official Twitter shortly after announcing the video. Did you read the article?
Terry has the spotlight all to himself. I’m fine with that.
@Rika_Yoshitake he. Gamexplain are pretty clickbait if you ask me.
Really bad idea, Terry wasn't the most hyped character, and he cant get 45 min about him when Banjo got only 24 or something like that, the fanbase gonna be angry, the direct will have a new mode or something, for sure
@Moroboshi876 it's a bad dlc model that I dont get why ppl r ok with it. I know it's for hype but its dumb
@MarioVoreFan I still think it's possible for an announcement. Samurais lied be4 about the banjo leak. Normaly I'm not a person to believe leaks but no way in heck are they just going over terry.
@smashboy2000 I would also imagine Sakurai himself would go over Terry’s origins for those Uninitiated
Even without new modes, I can only hope we get some nice nifty upgrades:
-My music: Being an to use your playlist in the game, any place you want. Being able to mix and match music (Mario songs in Yoshi's Island, more songs in boxing ring, etc).
-Tournaments: Being able to set "doubles" tournaments at the very least, with the obvious possibility of going all around with bigger team or handicap tournaments, being able to set specific stages and music for each bracket (regular stages for the first rounds, final destination in the final, etc).
-Squad strike: Play with more than two players simultaneously.
And more little details that could make for an ever better product like more VR stages and features (hey, I like it), being able to completely arrange your character selection screen, more features for the stage builder, etc.
45 minutes wouldn't be enough for Terry and all that.
@Moroboshi876 You have a good idea of the content with these 4 characters...
@PickledKong64 I think you’re underselling how clickbait they are lol
@tobsesta99 I don't know if I'll like the 5th character. If I don't, that's 3 out of 5 that I want, and that means buying them individually is cheaper than a pass with 2 fighters I don't want.
@Moroboshi876 Why not just have them all?
@tobsesta99 ehh. They just arent a genuine channel imo. You shouldn't post about leaks because there just leaks
It will be hilarious if they do reveal a new character and a bunch of people start crying.
@PickledKong64 They don't always. They actually got heat for not covering the Grinch Leak when they knew it was fake. I think a lot of their is more recurring gags like with the Falcon silhouette. Their fans actually complained when they left it out of a thumbnail. I personally always found channels like Switch Force more brazen.
Having Nintendo Direct just for on e DLC character is a little overkill. How about a regular direct to announce 2020 Switch games.
@ShadJV Hey there, I've worked in AAA game development. It DOES take a while to make a new character. You have to model it, rig and animate it, design a moveset, make sure it's all working as it should be, balance it versus the rest of the fighters, do iterative adjustments to it as you develop the moveset, you have to make sure hitboxes are what they should be, you have to make sure that the character has no wonky interactions with any of the items, stages, modes, or other characters before release, making videos for it for promotional material...the list goes on.
A LOT of work goes into a single character. These were 100% not done when the game came out. With how release schedules work, they were working on the game up until the game the day launched and only just started working on the DLC fighters a couple weeks before it launched at BEST. Sakurai said they wouldn't start until the game was out, but I have a hard time believing they didn't do any preliminary work on it at all. Given how much work goes into each character, their release schedule has been snappy and impressive as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently King of Fighters has a tag team mechanic. So Terry might have a swap in fighter like Pokemon Trainer. (Actually come to think of it, we got Zelda and Sheik as separate characters, yet Pokemon Trainer is only one character...)
I'm betting that Terry swaps out into another character so they have to actually go over two move sets. They've said they're almost done for modes, but they could do something else like a new mode or something.
@cantras I never meant to imply they weren’t done upon release, just that they likely finished the fifth one several months ago. I too have game design experience and am well aware that, aside from a few certain developers, DLC is generally completed after launch, or at least sometime after the final product is “finished” (as it must go through the lengthy processes of ratings, publishing, distribution, etc). Most Day 1 DLC is worked on during that interval. Yes, modeling, texturing, animating, even balancing all take time. But there’s no way that takes them 3 months for a character, plus they likely are overlapping the time for them. Now I don’t mean to imply that they’re lazy or doing some sketchy practices by padding out the time between releases, but the meat of the work was done awhile ago, now they’re just doing fine tuning while they wait for the “okay” from Nintendo. They could’ve easily pushed the five characters out by summer had they been asked to, but the point of a season pass is to keep long term interest in a game. Ultimately, we can’t know for sure exactly how long they’ve spent on each character (I’ll give you that), but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume they didn’t spend 3 months per character. And evidence points to that, since Sakurai’s Banjo-Kazooie video was recorded shortly after his Hero video, meaning the bulk of BK was definitely done months prior to its release.
If you think I’m trying to say designing a character for a fighting game is quick and easy, I’m not. It’s a lot of work. But Sakurai does have a large, experienced team. They definitely didn’t need a year to design 5 characters from scratch.
@ShadJV Oh, I forgot to mention the remixes that need to be composed that accompany the characters and their stages. Also, they're working on Mii costumes and testing for discovered bugs and adjusting for balance based on information they're getting from Elite Smash. Characters take a good amount of time to make and balance, especially with a roster this large, but even beyond that, it's not all they're doing. Sakurai himself said his team was capped at 100 for initial development. I imagine it was reduced further for DLC. He also said their team took up to a year for some of the STAGES to be developed.
I feel like you don't have much actual experience in game development if you really think you know better here or you have never worked at a large studio on a large project. You don't really understand development pipelines or how much time it takes to make quality products and experiences in a big game from the sounds of it. We work on a bulk of things at my studio to be released in waves like they do for Smash. Even if something is "done", we keep working on it and checking it until the rest of the content is done. The difference is we often have to push stuff out with known bugs because we have hard deadlines from our publisher. Sakurai seems to have some leniency on that front, and is allowed more time for meticulous work. Either that or they're just good at hiding their deadlines. Or they have "softer deadlines." I have no idea how much space they give him and his team..
Even if you were correct and these characters were done a lot sooner than they let on (which I don't believe they were), it is really stupid to release small chunks of content as soon as that particular piece is done.
It just makes sense to do it in large batches for reasons like replays (they break every patch because they recreate matches based on button inputs to reduce file size and more frequent, small adjustments would be a nightmare.) It's doubtful Nintendo is artificially making them hold back content. It's, at worst, for stability reasons. At best, because they actually needed the time.
@ShadJV by the way they took about a month and a few days for banjo to Terry.
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