Announced by Nintendo Versus, in addition to the online connection stability, version 1.2.0 also contains “matchmaking improvements to further prioritize Preferred Rules in Quickplay.”
Blizzard Entertainment announced Thursday their decision to pull back further development on the multiplayer game, Heroes of the Storm.
In a blog post, Blizzard President, J. Allen Brack and Chief Development Officer, Ray Gresko commented on all the new projects they have in the works and why these changes are being made.
“We’re also at a point where we need to take some of our talented developers and bring their skills to other projects. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams, and we’re excited to see the passion, knowledge, and experience that they’ll bring to those projects.”
The idea of what the Super Smash Bros. games are, and what they can be, has been different things during the series’ 20-year history. What began as an accessible multiplayer game also became a highly competitive one-on-one game. But it’s also been noted for having a comprehensive single-player adventure, as well as becoming a sort of virtual museum catalog, exhibiting knowledge and audiovisual artifacts from the histories of its increasingly diverse crossover cast. Ultimate embraces all these aspects, and each has been notably refined, added to, and improved for the better. Everyone, and basically everything, from previous games is here–all existing characters, nearly all existing stages, along with the flexibility to play and enjoy those things in different ways. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a comprehensive, considered, and charming package that builds on an already strong and enduring fighting system.
If you’ve ever spent time with a Smash game, then you likely have a good idea of how Ultimate works. Competing players deal damage to their opponents in order to more easily knock them off the stage. The controls remain relatively approachable for a competitive combat game; three different buttons in tandem with basic directional movements are all you need to access a character’s variety of attacks and special abilities. There are a large variety of items and power-ups to mix things up (if you want to) and interesting, dynamic stages to fight on (also if you want to). You can find complexities past this, of course–once you quickly experience the breadth of a character’s skillset, it allows you to begin thinking about the nuances of a fight (again, if you want to). Thinking about optimal positioning, figuring out what attacks can easily combo off of another, working out what the best move for each situation is, and playing mind games with your human opponents can quickly become considerations, and the allure of Smash as a fighting game is how easy it is to reach that stage.
Complexity also comes with the wide variety of techniques afforded by Ultimate’s staggeringly large roster of over 70 characters. Smash’s continuing accessibility is a fortunate trait in this regard, because once you understand the basic idea of how to control a character, many of the barriers to trying out a completely new one are gone. Every fighter who has appeared in the previous four Smash games is here, along with some brand-new ones, and the presence of so many diverse and unorthodox styles to both wield and compete against is just as attractive as the presence of the characters themselves. In fact, it’s still astounding that a game featuring characters from Mario Bros, Sonic The Hedgehog, Pac-Man, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, and Street Fighter all interacting with each other actually exists.
On a more technical level, Ultimate makes a number of under-the-hood alterations that, at this early stage, seem like positive changes that make Smash feel noticeably faster and more exciting to both watch and play. Characters take more damage in one-on-one fights; continuous dodging is punished with increased vulnerability; fighters can perform any ground-based attack, including smash moves, immediately out of a running state; and short-hop aerial attacks (previously a moderately demanding technique) can be easily performed by pressing two buttons simultaneously. Refinements like these might go unnoticed by most, but they help define Ultimate’s core gameplay as a tangible evolution of the series’ core mechanics.
A number of Ultimate’s more superficial changes also help Smash’s general quality-of-life experience, too. Some make it a more readable game–additions to the UI communicate previously hidden elements like meter charges and Villager’s captured items, a simple radar helps keep track of characters off-screen, and a slow motion, zoom-in visual effect when critical hits connect make these moments more exciting to watch. Other changes help streamline the core multiplayer experience and add compelling options. Match rules can now be pre-defined with a swath of modifiers and saved for quick selection later. Stage selection occurs before character selection, so you can make more informed decisions on which fighter to use.
On top of a built-in tournament bracket mode, Ultimate also features a number of additional Smash styles. Super Sudden Death returns, as does Custom Smash, which allows you to create matches with wacky modifiers. Squad Strike is a personal favorite, which allows you to play 3v3 or 5v5 tag-team battles (think King of Fighters), and Smashdown is a great, engaging mode that makes the most of the game’s large roster by disqualifying characters that have already been used as a series of matches continues, challenging your ability to do well with characters who you might not be familiar with.
The most significant addition to Ultimate, however, lies in its single-player content. Ultimate once again features a Classic Mode where each individual fighter has their own unique ladder of opponents to defeat, but the bigger deal is World of Light, Ultimate’s surprisingly substantial RPG-style campaign. It’s a convoluted setup–beginning as Kirby, you go on a long journey throughout a huge world map to rescue Smash’s other fighters (who have incidentally been cloned in large numbers) from the big bad’s control. Along the way, you’ll do battles with Spirits, characters hailing from other video games that, while not directly engaging in combat, have taken control of clones, altered them in their images, and unleashed them on you.
Though there is some light puzzling, the world is naturally filled with hundreds upon hundreds of fights–there are over 1200 Spirit characters, and the vast majority have their own unique battle stages that use the game’s match variables to represent their essence. The Goomba Spirit, for example, will put you up against an army of tiny Donkey Kongs. Meanwhile, the Excitebike Spirit might throw three Warios at you who only use their Side+B motorbike attacks.
It may seem like a tenuous idea at first, but these fights are incredibly entertaining. It’s hard not to appreciate the creativity of using Smash’s assets to represent a thousand different characters. Zero Suit Samus might stand in for a battle with The Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater by donning a silver-palette costume and fighting you in a flower-filled Final Destination, but she also stands in for the spirit of Alexandra Roivas from Eternal Darkness by using a black-palette costume and fighting you in the haunted Luigi’s Mansion stage, with a modifier that makes the screen occasionally flip upside down (Eternal Darkness was a GameCube horror game whose signature feature were “Sanity Effects”, which skewed the game in spooky ways to represent the character’s loosening grip on reality). If I knew the character, I often found myself thinking about how clever their Spirit battle was.
Defeating a Spirit will add it to your collection, and Spirits also act as World of Light’s RPG system. There are two types of Spirit: Primary and Support. Primary Spirits have their own power number and can be leveled up through various means to help make your actual fighter stronger. Primary Spirits also have one of four associated classes, which determine combat effectiveness in a rock-scissors-paper-style system. These are both major considerations to take into account before a battle, and making sure you’re not going into a fight at a massive disadvantage adds a nice dimension to the amusing unpredictability of this mode. What you also need to take into account are the modifiers that might be enabled on each stage, which is where Support Spirits come in. They can be attached to Primary Spirits in a limited quantity and can mitigate the effect of things like poisonous floors, pitch-black stages, or reversed controls, or they can simply buff certain attacks.
There are a few Spirit fights that can be frustrating, however. Stages that are a 1v4 pile-on are downright annoying, despite how well-equipped you might be, as are stages where you compete against powerful assist trophies. On the flip side, once you find yourself towards the end of the campaign, there are certain loadouts that can trivialize most stages, earning you victory in less than a second. Regardless, there’s a compulsive quality to collecting Spirits, and not just because they might make you stronger. It’s exciting to see which obscure character you run into next, feel validated for recognizing them, and see how the game interprets them in a Spirit battle. There’s also just a superficial joy to collecting, say, the complete Elite Beat Agents cast (Osu! Takatae! Ouendan characters are here too), even though these trophies lack the frills of previous Smash games.
Some hubs in the World of Light map are also themed around certain games and bundle related Spirits together to great effect–Dracula’s Castle from Castlevania, which changes the map into a 2D side-scroller, and the globe from Street Fighter II, complete with the iconic airplane noises, are personal standouts. Despite the dramatic overtones of World of Spirit’s setup, the homages you find within it feel like a nice commemoration of the games and characters without feeling like a pandering nostalgia play. One of the most rewarding homages of all, however, lies in Ultimate’s huge library of video game music. Over 800 tracks, which include originals as well as fantastic new arrangements, can all be set as stage soundtracks as well enjoyed through the game’s music player.
There is one significant struggle that Ultimate comes up against, however, which lies in the nature of the console itself. Playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in the Switch’s handheld mode is simply not a great experience. In situations where there are more than two characters on screen, the view of the action often becomes too wide, making the fighters too small to see properly, and it can be difficult to tell what you or your opponent is doing. The game’s penchant for flashy special effects and busy, colorful stages doesn’t help things at all, and unless you’re playing a one-on-one match, you’ll likely suffer some blameless losses. This is a situational disadvantage and may not affect all players, but it puts a damper on the idea of Smash on the go.
The need to unlock characters also has the potential to be an initial annoyance, especially if your goal is to jump straight into multiplayer and start learning one of the six brand-new characters. In my time with the game, I split my attention between playing World of Light (where rescuing characters unlocks them everywhere) and multiplayer matches, where the constant drip-feed of “New Challenger” unlock opportunities (which you can easily retry if you fail) came regularly. I naturally earned the entire roster in roughly 10 hours of playtime, but your mileage may vary.
Your mileage may also vary in Ultimate’s online mode, where the experience of competing against others was inconsistent during the 200+ matches we played. Ultimate matches you with players from your region, but continues to use peer-to-peer style connectivity, which means the quality of the experience relies primarily on the strength of each player’s internet connection. A bad connection from any player can result in a noticeable input delay, stuttering, and even freezing as the game tries to deal with latency issues. Things have the greatest potential to go bad during four-player matches, where there’s a greater chance of finding a weak link.
There’s some blame to be put on the console itself–the Switch only has the capabilities for wifi networking. You can invest in an optional USB LAN adapter to make sure your own connection is stable, but because of the peer-to-peer nature, I found that the experience was just as inconsistent. You can get lucky–I would regularly enjoy sessions filled with smooth matches–but regardless, laggy matches aren’t exactly a rare occurrence. It’s also worth noting that you’re required to have a paid subscription to Nintendo’s Switch Online service to be able to play online at all, so the sub-optimal performance of the mode is disappointing.
Network performance aside, Ultimate’s online mode does have an interesting way to cater to the large variety of ways to play Smash Bros. You can create public or private arenas for friends and strangers, which serve as personal rooms to dictate specific rulesets, but the primary mode is Quick Play, where you’re matched against people of a similar skill level to you. Quick Play features an option where you can set your preferred ruleset–things like the number of players, item availability, win conditions–and it will try to match you up with someone with similar preferences. However, Ultimate also prioritizes getting you into a match in under a minute, which is great, but sometimes means that you might find yourself playing a completely different style of match.
In my experience, I found that there were enough people who wanted to play with my ruleset (one-on-one, three stock, six minutes, no items, Omega stages only) and I would find myself in these kinds of matches, or at least a very close approximation, the majority of the time. Getting thrown into the occasional four-player free-for-all felt like a nice, refreshing change of pace to me, but depending on how flexible you are as a player, this can be a turn-off. But like so much of Ultimate, its multitude of options and styles of play doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them will suit every player.
An inconsistent online mode and situational downers don’t stop Super Smash Bros. Ultimate from shining as a flexible multiplayer game that can be as freewheeling or as firm as you want it to be. Its entertaining single-player content helps keep the game rich with interesting things to do, as well as bolstering its spirit of loving homage to the games that have graced Nintendo consoles. Ultimate’s diverse content is compelling, its strong mechanics are refined, and the encompassing collection is simply superb.
WWWWWWWWEEEEEELLLLLLLLLCOME! We’re taking a look back at The Game Awards and all the major announcements that came out of it. But let’s be honest, we’re mostly talking about Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Now we’ve all gotten quite a bit of hands on time with the monster of a game, and we are LOVING it! We talk about the good, the bad (what little there is of it), and of course all those freakin’ characters! This week’s cast: Zachary Ryan, Peer Schneider, Brian Altano, and Casey DeFreitas
Blizzard’s MOBA Heroes of the Storm is undergoing some big changes. The developer announced today that it is moving some developers on the game to other projects, while the game’s major competitive tournaments are coming to an end.
In a blog post, Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack and Ray Gresko said the developer is making the “tough choice” to move developers from Heroes of the Storm to other projects.
“We need to take some of our talented developers and bring their skills to other projects,” Blizzard said. “As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shift some developers from Heroes of the Storm to other teams, and we’re excited to see the passion, knowledge, and experience that they’ll bring to those projects.”
Brack and Gresko added that this is nothing new for Blizzard. As part of its ongoing evaluation of its own development processes, it regularly makes “hard decisions” like this that can pay dividends down the road.
“We now have more live games and unannounced projects than at any point in the company’s history,” they said, adding that games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch “would not exist” were in not for Blizzard’s decision to scale back other projects.
Even though Blizzard is scaling back development on Heroes of the Storm, the game will still be “actively” supported with more heroes, special events, and “other” new content. However, Blizzard acknowledged that updates might be slower than in the past. The overall goal is for the game to be available over the “long-term” but Blizzard didn’t put any specific dates on how long it plans to support the game.
Another part of the announcement was around Heroes of the Storm competitive tournaments. Blizzard is shutting down the Heroes Global Championship and Heroes of the Dorm tournament series; they won’t be back in 2019.
“This was another very difficult decision for us to make,” Brack and Gresko said. “The love that the community has for these programs is deeply felt by everyone who works on them, but we ultimately feel this is the right decision versus moving forward in a way that would not meet the standards that players and fans have come to expect.”
It is unclear if there were any layoffs at Blizzard related to these changes with Heroes of the Storm. We spoke with a Blizzard representative, but they said Blizzard does not discuss personnel-related matters. You can read a quick Q&A with Blizzard below.
An in-depth report from Kotaku claims Blizzard management is trying to cut costs and ship more games. Some said they believe that Blizzard’s culture is changing. Blizzard founder and CEO Mike Morhaime left the company in October.
Heroes of thee Storm was released in 2015. The free-to-play multiplayer game features characters from across Blizzard’s suite of series. A 2.0 edition of the game came out in 2017, containing a number of changes. GameSpot’s Heroes of the Storm review scored the game a 9/10, with writer Tyler Hicks saying the game is a “must-play” for MOBA players and Blizzard enthusiasts.
GameSpot: What led to this decision?
Blizzard: With more live games and unannounced projects than ever before, we’re at a point where we need to focus more of our resources in areas that could benefit greatly from the additional support. As a result, we made the difficult decision to transition some of the extremely talented developers from Heroes to other teams at Blizzard. We’ve had to make decisions like this in the past, and it’s never easy, but it’s one of the factors that’s enabled us to continue developing games that our players love.
GameSpot: How many people are working on Heroes?
Blizzard: We generally don’t disclose specifics about team size. However, the Heroes team will continue to have a smaller but dedicated development team that will continue supporting the game with new content.
GameSpot: When you say you’ll actively support the game with new content, how will that compare to before this change?
Blizzard: Heroes players can continue to look forward to new content in the future, including new heroes and themed events, but at a different cadence. We’ll be sharing more specifics in the future, so keep an eye out for updates from the Heroes team.
GameSpot: Were there any layoffs related to this shift?
Blizzard: While we don’t publicly discuss personnel-related matters, this change was made at a time when we have more live games and unannounced projects than ever before, and we felt we needed to focus more of our resources in areas that could benefit greatly from the additional support.
With The CW’s announcement that 2019’s Arrowverse crossover will be Crisis on Infinite Earths, it got us theorizing on just what that could mean for this DC TV universe. It also got us questioning how a specific character in this year’s crossover is significant to next year’s Crisis.
Stranger Things didn’t have a huge amount of build-up when it first appeared on Netflix in 2016, but it quickly became a must-see phenomenon. The ’80s-set sci-fi/horror drama wore its influences proudly on its sleeve, but the calibre of writing, acting, and directing meant that it was much more than just a nostalgic reminder of why the work of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg remains so popular. It was funny, scary, thrilling, and heartfelt, and its success ensured that creators Ross and Matt Duffer returned for more seasons.
Season 2 in 2017 was every bit as good as the first, and managed to find new ways to scare and thrill while still delivering everything fans loved about Season 1. By this point, several of the cast had become stars in their own right–Finn Wolfhard was one of the main stars of the horror smash It, Millie Bobby Brown appears in the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and David Harbour went from supporting actor to a leading man–we’ll see him next year as Hellboy in the much-anticipated reboot.
Stranger Things Season 3 is set for release in 2019. Netflix never announces release dates very far in advance, so we don’t yet know when it will arrive. The previous two seasons were released in the fall, while the first teaser for this new season hints at a summer debut. While specific plot details are, unsurprisingly, unknown, we do know quite a bit about the direction this next season will take the show in. So here’s everything we know so far about Stranger Things Season 3 …
Over the summer, the DC Universe experienced a dramatic influx of, well, evil Batmen–which are exactly what they sound like–care of the massive Dark Nights: Metal crossover event helmed by writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo. Spiraling out of the extremely comic book-y Dark Multiverse–a brand new parallel to the regular and antimatter DC multiverses already in play–the evil Batmen were alternate reality representations of Bruce Wayne’s worst nightmares, fused with different members of the Justice League. They had over-the-top codenames like the Red Death, an evil Bruce who siphoned the Speed Force from Barry Allen, or The Dawnbreaker, the Batman and Green Lantern combo with a half-torn face and an endless supply of battery-charging willpower, but were mostly support characters for the ringleader of entourage: The Batman Who Laughs, a fusion of Batman and The Joker.
Don’t worry if that all sounds like a lot to take in–the events of Metal were as full bore on the superhero absurdity as any crossover event could be–but the concept itself is actually fairly simple. The Dark Multiverse represents a limitless amount of nightmare scenarios, and The Batman Who Laughs represents one of the very worst, a reality in which Bruce killed The Joker and then became The Joker, thanks to a toxic chemical that exists deep within Joker’s heart. Basically, whoever does Joker in is “infected” and transformed into the next Joker and so on and so on. Even Batman. All of which is to say The Batman Who Laughs is simultaneously The Joker and Batman, making him, arguably, the most dangerous thing to ever exist in the DC Universe–because, well, these are the things that happen in superhero comics.
Now, after his introduction in Metal, The Batman Who Laughs has been given his very own breakout solo series–and he’s not alone. Another evil, alternate Batman has been introduced to the mix–one that didn’t make it into Metal but is no less horrifying. The Grim Knight, a Batman who uses guns, sort of like a Punisher hybrid, has entered the fray here in The Batman Who Laughs #1 and things are just getting even more chaotic now that they’ve both got Bruce–real Bruce, our Bruce–in their sights.
The question then becomes: is there a risk of going too dark with broken Batmen, when you’re introducing hybrids like this into the mix? Not according to Snyder and artist Jock, who explained plainly in an interview with GameSpot that they’re not concerned about going too far.
“I’m of the mindset that there shouldn’t be anything you’re afraid to do, as long as the story supports it emotionally,” Snyder said. “We’re never trying to do anything just because it’s salacious or sensational. Here, when you see violence, it’s not meant to be like ‘oh yay!’ It’s meant to really terrorize Bruce. It’s meant to have a real impact.”
“Exactly,” Jock added. “There’s a sort of internal barometer we use for these things. We don’t want to be introducing things or doing things for the wrong reasons.”
The reasons, in the case of The Batman Who Laughs #1, are to show all the ways in which a character like Batman can be thoroughly and irreparably broken when his moral codes and ethical compass are stripped away. Snyder assured there’s nothing celebratory about The Grim Knight and his arsenal of deadly weapons or The Batman Who Laughs and his rictus grin–these are cautionary tales.
“I had the idea for the toxin in Joker’s heart back when I was working on Batman, but it was kind of a back pocket thing at that point,” Snyder said. “It didn’t really come up again until Metal. This whole story is really centered around the idea of happiness and laughter–there’s a moment in issue two where Bruce monologues about how some cultures have the belief that happiness lives in the heart, and then he talks about his memory of his parents being killed and how that memory lives in his heart, how he can remember his father’s hand coming over his ribs, protecting his heart. So when The Batman Who Laughs confronts Bruce, he explains that he remembers that night too–but he understands the memory differently. He tells Bruce that that’s what he’s always been to Gotham, just a weak old man’s hand trying to protect a heart from a bullet. That mentality is what makes him so scary to me–he doesn’t have any of Bruce’s weak spots, he’s so deeply nihilistic, he truly believes there’s nothing that matters except winning.”
Meanwhile, the heat-packing Grim Knight breaks Batman from a different angle. Rather than nihilism, he takes his brutality with a relentless efficiency. “He’s like the Punisher, but he’s not broke,” Snyder laughed. “He’s got all of Bruce Wayne’s resources so he can just remotely tamper with your car’s GPS and you’d be dead in an accident without ever knowing who did it. We wanted to show how absolutely terrifying that would be.”
The Batman Who Laughs #1 is on sale now, continuing for six issues from DC Comics.
