Quote
Originally posted by: Adrock
I always figured all the harping about Brawl being slowed down was based on hearsay. I watched the trailers again and they game doesn't appear any slower than Melee. Granted, they were just trailers and most likely not representative of final gameplay.
Does anyone have a link?
And seriously, what does "slowed down" even mean? It's an awfully cryptic statement. What does it refer to exactly? I think we'll have our answer at GDC.
Allow me to elaborate on this as I've done some extensive research on the subject (also, I owe an explanation on it anyway).
The reason why the new SSB is likely to be significantly slower than Melee, according to the SSB community, is due to the "freeze frame" effect having a far longer duration than it did in SSBM.
What do I mean by that? When one player strikes another player with any attack which will cause said player to be knocked back or even just grimace without traveling far, the "freeze frame" refers to the amount of time the character who has been struck spends recoiling, sort of "frozen" for a moment as the hit is registered.
In SSBM, there are little to no freeze frames. However, such was not the case with SSB64 which gave an ample amount of time after being struck. The end result, with longer freeze frame, is that the overall fight will move slower as each hit takes longer to finish for both the attacker and the victim. This gives all players involved, those with insane reflexes and those without, more time to react to the events transpiring in the game.
As I said, this wasn't the case in SSBM, and as a result, the four fastest characters in the game, Fox, Marth, Falco and Shiek, hold the top tier due to their speed as it gives them an incredible edge. This is contrasted in SSB64 where Ness and Kirby were regarded as top tier, even ahead of faster characters like Fox and Falcon.
IMHO, freeze frames are the difference between SSB being a game which is "easy to learn but a challenge to master" and "non-reflex oriented gamers don't have a goddamn prayer against someone who has that reflex". I'm 100% in favor of more freeze framing: it gives all players more time to react, and in the end, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. SSB shouldn't be the type of game where it requires lightning quick reflexes to be the best because, in SSB64, players without such reflexes could routinely win games by simply being better at predicting their opponent's moves in advance and moving to counter them.
As such, the game had an immense amount of depth as it was, the kind which earned me and my friends 700 hours of play time logged on the cart, but the point is, there's no need for reflex to be the dominant skill involved in SSB: it's a good enough game that it can get by JUST fine without it and by not allowing reflex to dominate the game, it makes the experience vastly more accessible to a plethora of other less-hardcore players who would otherwise not be able to compete.
I always saw SSB as a big send-up to traditional fighting games, replete with cheesy fighter intro and everything. Rather than taking the approach of making controlling your character as hard as possible via memorized moves and combos with ridiculous input patterns, HAL made the game as easy and intuitive to play as they possibly could. SSB was EVERYTHING games like Street Fighter and other hardcore-oriented fighting games were NOT, and that included the gameplay being more paced and strategic in lieu of the emphasis being on speed (I believe it's Street Fighter's faster characters which ALSO occupy the top tiers of the roster, coincidentally).
But that's just my opinion on the subject. I understand that some people prefer reflex over strategy and reading your opponent in a fighting game, but I personally say keep reflex-dependent gameplay in Wario Ware and out of my SSBB.
Topic: Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Read 347187 times)
