In an era where developers are seemingly struggling to balance all their different weapons, characters, and abilities, Super Smash Bros Ultimate's director has revealed that all 86 fighters have a near-identical win rate.
Director Masahiro Sakurai has been sharing game design gold over on YouTube for two years now, and his latest video delves into the tricky waters of balancing a game, or in other words trying to make all in-game tools as viable as each other. And with a massive flex, the legendary director revealed his team cracked the code across the game's mega-roster.
"Data gathered from all over the world" shows that the brawler's most effective character wins matches 51.43% of the time, while the lowest win rate sits at 47.18%. The other 85 fighters land somewhere in between, meaning the unbelievably big roster is pretty much evenly matched.
Sakurai released the information because he thought the internet tended to be "an echo chamber of sorts" where repeated discourse about one character being over or underpowered would "gain momentum and make people think it's truer than it is."
Live service juggernauts struggle with evening the odds all the time, sometimes releasing balance patches to balance out the previous balance patches. Helldivers 2 has suffered from this recently, as has Overwatch 2, but Sakurai has some sage advice for developers.
"If you balance purely based on fighter strength, their abilities quickly start to level out," Sakurai explains. "Shortcomings are balanced while advantages are reduced, leaving you with something average. That doesn't make for a fun game, though - and that’s a problem. Hence, I advise our team to keep fighters unique by amplifying shortcomings to offset advantages."
"Now, if you move forward treating uniqueness as ideal, you'll naturally end up with mixed reception," he continues. "If you get rid of individuality, there'll be no point in having a wide array of fighters. A major reason why people enjoy fighter reveals is that each character's unique traits are firmly established. There won't be much charm in something with no strengths or weaknesses, after all. Average and mediocre are the same thing."
The Super Smash Bros steward announced that "work has finally come to an end" after the reveal of Kingdom Hearts' Sora - which also ended some decades-long amiibo obsessions. While he previously had retirement plans, Sakurai also can't imagine someone else directing an inevitable sequel to the series.
Find out what else Nintendo is up to our upcoming Switch games list.
