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Apparently, SSBB had no other developers who worked on previous SSB titles

O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
So I was browsing Mobygames in search of something, and came upon something interesting. Some of you may already have known this, but I finally got it confirmed: There was pretty much no one else working on Brawl that worked on previous SSB titles.

SSB64:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/super-smash-bros

Melee:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/gamecube/super-smash-bros-melee/credits

Brawl:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/wii/super-smash-bros-brawl/credits


Pretty much everyone who worked on SSB64 worked on SSBM. Whereas, Sakurai was the only SSB veteran to work on SSBB, 99.9% of the development staff was brand new. The only other person was Shogo Sakai (who composed the music for all the other games) and one dude from Hal who was credited as a supervisor.

I know some of you will say "Well, no shit, Sherlock! SSB and SSBM were both developed by Hal, and SSBB was created by a brand new developer."

Yes, I'm already aware of that, but I could have sworn I read somewhere (probably here) that many of the lead designers at Hal helped out with Brawl then went back after it was finished. Seems that wasn't the case at all.

So this makes me ask 3 questions:

1. I know Sakurai said that he left Hal to start his own company, but was there ever any reports of him having any bad blood with the staff (minus Iwata, obviously)?
2. Could the lack of input from other SSB veterans helped shape SSBB into what it is today?
3. Has there ever been any major game series that got a proper main line sequel that was missing pretty much everyone in the design team?
 
Brofield said:
I'm actually glad this wasn't first post. Still, disappointed the negativity starts so early.
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Why? It's not exactly cycnical since the negativity is somewhat justified. Brawl was not a great multiplayer game. Everyone in my playgroup prefers Melee and no one really touches brawl anymore
 
That explains a lot of the coding fallacies... and probably even the multiple delays (excluding the one about Sonic).
 
Yeah, I like Brawl more than Melee, but I think it's clear that the code was inferior in several ways.

I always thought it was wrong how people talked about Brawl's development team like it were a step up from Melee's, but I had never bothered to search for names.
 
NeonZ said:
Yeah, I like Brawl more than Melee, but I think it's clear that the code was inferior in several ways.

I always thought it was wrong how people talked about Brawl's development team like it were a step up from Melee's, but I had never bothered to search for names.
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Er... how can you really come to a conclusion like this? Are we actually looking at the code of the games now?
 
It's pretty well known that Brawl had a team made from scrap.


As in, Sakurai wanted to make a new team but failed horribly at it and Nintendo had to have TONS of companies do stuff for the game because of Sakurai's inability to make a team.

He has a record showing he can't get by on his own which is why Namco is making SSB4. No having to outsource everything to a net-work of companies this time, just good old Namco devs making a smash title.

(Also, Brawl turned out weak because of Sakurai's vision/ direction or because of the Wii's direction towards casual gaming or some combo of that. )
 
Berordn said:
Er... how can you really come to a conclusion like this? Are we actually looking at the code of the games now?
Click to expand...

Longer loading times, the way it loads transformations also was worse and more inconsistent than melee's, some move proprieties went against Sakurai's own design changes for the game (attempts to remove combos)... There's also the obviously bad online, but that doesn't have a direct comparison with Melee.


As in, Sakurai wanted to make a new team but failed horribly at it and Nintendo had to have TONS of companies do stuff for the game because of Sakurai's inability to make a team.
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Hm... no. The core team was GameArts, but they also outsourced parts of the game to various other companies, like SSE, which was described by Sakurai in an interview as a parallel development from the main game (and you can see it with the way it doesn't share assets with the multiplayer, aside from the Halberd which was one of the first things they had done for the game) and have mostly people from other companies listed in the credits.
 
RawkHawk2010 said:
At least Smash's main theme sounds HALly again.
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This is not a good thing IMO.

Uematsu was a vast upgrade.

meltingparappa said:
What bizarre alternate universe do I live in where Brawl outright sucks?

Maybe it's disappointing to super competitive player who must know that they represent maybe 4% of the people who play the game, but sucks?

Really?
Click to expand...

More like 0.4%.

That game sold 11 million units. There aren't 400k competitive Brawl players.
 
NeonZ said:
Longer loading times, the way it handles transformations also was worse and more inconsistent than melee's, some move proprieties going against Sakurai's own design changes for the game (attempts to remove combos)... There's also the obviously bad online, but that doesn't have a direct comparison with Melee.
Click to expand...

Loading times are related to the way it handles transformations, and that's all due to memory limitations on the Wii, not because of some arbitrary coding difference. The characters have far more detailed textures and models and stages are much more involved in Brawl than they were in Melee, so characters had to be loaded on-demand rather than existing in memory because of it. Had the game not been such a graphical leap over Melee it wouldn't have been an issue.

You can argue that it's bad code, but without the source to look at it's a pretty merit-less argument when there's explanations for it.
 
check out this maverick viewpoint: that information is telling when considering how ssbb compares unfavorably to ssbm
 
They all have the same lead guy behind them. Even the grunts changed between SMB1 and SMB3, with only two guys (Miyamoto and Tezuka) being consistent between them.

Even Melee had heavy outsourcing. Don't expect a lot of the people below the senior positions to stay with companies these days.

3. Has there ever been any major game series that got a proper main line sequel that was missing pretty much everyone in the design team?
Click to expand...

Quite a few
 
Sheroking said:
This is not a good thing IMO.

Uematsu was a vast upgrade.



More like 0.4%.

That game sold 11 million units. There aren't 400k competitive Brawl players.
Click to expand...

You don't need to be competitive to realize there is some dumbass design in there like tripping.

Like how a room of people decided that was even an acceptable thing blows my mind.
 
meltingparappa said:
What bizarre alternate universe do I live in where Brawl outright sucks?

Maybe it's disappointing to super competitive player who must know that they represent maybe 4% of the people who play the game, but sucks?

Really?
Click to expand...

Brawl does suck and wasn't fun at all. A horrible step back for the series.
 
Brawl was a good game. Melee and 64 were light years better but to say brawl sucks is just uninformed. Brawl was still much better than the competition and made some good decisions like music selection and finally allowing third party characters. Core mechanics were weak though. :(
 
Regarding sloppy coding--there are quite a few bizarre oversights in Brawl's coding that aren't there in previous Smashes.

For instance, there are a lot of characters in Brawl (many of whom are in Melee) who, when they grab the ledge with their Up-B, the next time you land on the ground from a jump you will land with the lag as if you landed from said Up-B.

Ganondorf's forward aerial attack's landing animation seems borked (you land with the full fist in the ground lag at pretty much any time you land during it, even after he's retracted his fist).

There's a lot of little things like this.
 
Authoritative Shark said:
They all have the same lead guy behind them. Even the grunts changed between SMB1 and SMB3, with only two guys (Miyamoto and Tezuka) being consistent between them.
Click to expand...

Don't think that's really the same thing. The original SMB barely had any people working on it, and when they went to SMB3, the core members remained but the team grew substantially (relatively speaking).

Even Melee had heavy outsourcing.
Click to expand...

From where?
 
Berordn said:
Loading times are related to the way it handles transformations, and that's all due to memory limitations on the Wii, not because of some arbitrary coding difference. The characters have far more detailed textures and models and stages are much more involved in Brawl than they were in Melee, so characters had to be loaded on-demand rather than existing in memory because of it. Had the game not been such a graphical leap over Melee it wouldn't have been an issue.
Click to expand...

We can still load Melee stages in Brawl, mostly unchanged, or with only 2 players, and the loading time doesn't magically matches Melee's when you start those less intensive matches. And that's also considering how Brawl sacrifices some variable elements to even get that performance (like less on screen Pokemon possible than in Melee).

Several of Nintendo's core titles managed graphical upgrades over their GC versions without the kind of performance problems that Brawl had. Remember, the Wii did have extra ram. Also, Brawl had obvious loading screens - that's very different from how Nintendo's internal teams handle a problem like that.
 
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