#oneaday Day 16: Seeing the Light

I feel like I scored a personal victory last night: I helped someone who previously disliked Super Smash Bros. to enjoy Ultimate.

I'm really happy about this, as it means that on the increasingly rare occasions when I'm able to get my local friends together, Smash Ultimate is now a reasonable option for us to suggest without any sort of "guilt". All it took was giving the person in question a brief instructional session in the controls and how they work, and he was away, suddenly coming to understand the appeal of the game after probably about a decade of not really liking it.

I've been absolutely delighted with Smash Ultimate's multiplayer offering so far — both online and offline. I know some esports types are getting pissy about the online for some reason that I frankly can't be arsed to look into, but for my needs — and those of my immediate friends, those who I will most likely be playing with — it works extremely well.

The only thing I'd say was definitely missing was some means of directly inviting a friend into your game, but I suspect this is more a feature of Nintendo's implementation of online services than anything else; there's no messaging feature at all, and voice chat is very much on a case-by-case basis. And while the lack of things that people consider to be "essential" to online services has drawn some criticism, I understand why Nintendo has omitted them: it's so they can keep the service as "safe" as possible, maintaining that good old family-friendly image. Without a messaging service, you can't have 12 year olds calling you a fag for not being good at Splatoon; without an invite system you can't have someone spamming you with game invites when all you want to do is play World of Light mode; without public voice chat, you don't have to listen to strangers talking unless you specifically want to opt-in to conversation.

Anyway, I'm not here to debate the pros and cons of Nintendo's online service; it is what it is. What I do want to talk about is the two multiplayer experiences I've had over the course of the last few nights: one online, one in person.

For our online matches, those of us who owned Switches agreed a time beforehand, and I set up a Battle Arena. This is Smash's main "custom" online mode, allowing the host to set the parameters beforehand, including whether battles are 1-on-1, free-for-all or team-based as well as the actual ruleset used in the match. Oddly, it doesn't appear that you can change these rules once the room is open, but this is presumably to prevent any sort of "griefing" in public rooms by drawing people in with a popular mode, then changing the ruleset at the last minute. We were in a private room, so that wasn't an issue; it might be nice to see the ability to change rulesets without having to start a new room in a subsequent update, but it's something you can work around easily enough.

For voice chat, on one occasion I tried the Nintendo Switch Online app for mobile, which makes use of a "speakerphone" system that works very well. For the other, we simply all used Discord, which is well-established as being a good choice for real-time online interactions. Obviously this depends on your computer being near your Switch (or I guess you could use mobile for that too), but this wasn't an issue for any of us.

The online experience was good. The "queueing" system works quite well — though the fact you have to leave the queue to change characters meant that a couple of us missed the opportunity to spectate a 1-on-1 match on a couple of occasions — and the actual in-game performance seemed to be very good both when I was playing someone in the States and my more local friends. There was the odd hiccup, but certainly no kind of unplayable lag — certainly a far cry from the "slow-motion" gameplay I've experienced in the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle and SNK Heroines on a couple of occasions.

As for the in-person experience, it, as you might expect as Smash's specialism, works wonderfully. It's easy to add and remove players, and having more than four participants for a basic Smash match is no longer considered a special case. The player profile system allows players to easily set up their preferred control settings and for these to be saved for future sessions, and the wide selection of characters, while potentially intimidating to new players, is full of recognisable faces.

The five-player three-stock match we had was extremely enjoyable. I was expecting absolute chaos to unfold, but it actually ended up having a rather nice flow to it. It helped that we were playing on a massive stage — the Mother 3 one, as I recall — as this allowed us to effectively break off into smaller "sub fights" before all bundling in together when we felt like we wanted a good and proper rumble.

Perhaps best of all, we found that "the guy who always wins at Smash" didn't win every fight he played. Yes, he did significantly better when playing as the characters he was "best" with (Link and Ganondorf) but he felt less "undefeatable" than he had been in previous installments in the series. As such, the whole thing felt much more balanced and enjoyable for everyone, which is exactly what you want from a party game.

Now, I just need to convince everyone involved to play a bit more often and we'll be well away…