Famitsu: Sakurai Discusses Smash Ultimate’s Small Battlefield Stage, Online Play, And More

Famitsu has published another installment of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate creator Masahiro Sakurai’s weekly column for the magazine.

In this latest entry, Sakurai discusses the newly added Small Battlefield stage as well as some of the challenges the developers face when handling online play for the game.

You can check out some translated highlights below, courtesy of  PushDustIn and Sephazon.

Small Battlefield

• Although Battlefield is often used in 1v1 competitive play, it was originally designed for 4 players
• This is why Battlefield is slightly tall and wide
• Small Battlefield removes the top middle platform and brings the left and right platforms closer together
• It would’ve been impossible to make 100 ‘Small Battlefield’ style stages
• The team wanted to add Small Battlefield as a single-stage option
• Sakurai decided to allow all the songs in the game to be playable on FD and Battlefield-related stages

Online Play

• A lot of attention was put into making the input delay when fighting 1v1 as very low
• As a side-effect, when there is a delay in communication, the match may drop
• Some small adjustments to matchmaking and other optimizations are still being tweaked
• Specific details of these updates have not been revealed, as they are largely client-side, and there is a limit to improvements
• Mr. Harada, the producer of Tekken, said that “60% of home console gamers use WiFi”
• The number is likely higher for Switch, and internet connections across the world may not necessarily be as fast as Japan
• Making adjustments and improvements to online play has its own risks
• Internet speed has seen its own improvements over recent years, and Sakurai says he will review and adapt accordingly
• There are requests to display when a player is using WiFi, but it’s not possible to refuse a player based on their connection
• Regarding rollback netcode, Sakurai researched a similar feature during development and decided against it
• This decision was made due to the side-effects being substantial
• Sakurai is thankful for more than 20 million players buying Smash Bros. Ultimate
• Sakurai will do his best to make all possible improvements and adjustments to the game

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.