[Official] Project M discussion: RIP

[Mochtroid127]

When I first heard those announcer calls, I thought they sounded a bit off.
Now that I know where they come from, I'm surprised they didn't end up even worse.

And while a bit of distinction wouldn't hurt, without the proper recording equipment and know-how, they might might as well invest their time and money on things they have the means to make more distinctive.

For instance, I didn't think someone could make Falco more generic and insipid than the SSBB devs, but it looks like I was dead wrong. I don't care if you have a maniac tournament Falco player holding a knife to your throat, but I want you to fire whoever did all those lazy copy-paste Melee movesets and replace them with the guys who came up with actually creative ideas to de-clone Toon Link, Wolf and Lucario.
Honestly, I had fun playing with those, experimenting with their new stuff and the rest of the cast that recieved changes. But then I come to the top tier guys and all I can read is "return to their former glory", "restoration", "replica", "remade to match Melee".

You're giving both tournament AND non-tournament players reasons to play most of your characters over their Brawl/Melee equivalents. Why stop applying that constructive logic whenever you get closer to the Melee top tiers. Are Fox/Falco players notably more intolerant to change than Samus/Ganondorf players?

tl;dr: Is there any point for me, "casual" player, to play any of the copy-paste characters that I've already played for more than 7 years?

Personally, I think they're different enough already, although, I don't completely disagree. I used to main Falco in Melee (also not because he's top tier, simply because I tried him once and liked the feel of his movement and such) and still consider him to be one of my best characters in both Melee and P:M, but now I main Ganon and I have to say, I don't like P:M Ganon as much because he IS different. I like him, but more to just play for fun. Even though I don't usually play competitively, I would never use him competitively for P:M. Even just with the flame choke left from Brawl, I feel maybe half as good with him, Link, Mario, and Falcon in P:M as I do in Melee, but I feel WAY better with Samus, Marth, and Sheik in P:M, not to mention 90% of my Brawl mains were new characters like Snake, Wolf, and Wario. One of my friends mains Falco in Melee as well and he says that he likes P:M Falco, but not as much as the Melee version, so he mains Captain Falcon instead. I don't know. I guess it varies from person to person based on how well you know every little technical thing about your character. Also, it is called Project MELEE for a reason. If someone wants a more Brawl play styled character, why not just play Brawl? You could say the same for Melee, which is why I do play Melee more, although I feel like Project M is a nice balance between the two. Sure Melee is unbalanced (Has anyone other than Fox or Falco beaten Fox or Falco lately?), but it's not exactly likely that you'll see Brawl Ganon or Ike or even Wolf beating Diddy or Meta Knight either. At least those characters can match up with Sheik, Marth, Falco, and Fox with the near unlimited balancing and editing that Project M can have. Why not make every character as good as they can be as long as they aren't unbeatable, but with moveset editing, it can be done. I mean, look at Bowser! Not god tier or anything, but he's definitely improved even without actually changing anything other than the attributes of his already existing moves.

[iwantgames]

  samus is short, what happened?

[Velen]

When I first heard those announcer calls, I thought they sounded a bit off.
Now that I know where they come from, I'm surprised they didn't end up even worse.

And while a bit of distinction wouldn't hurt, without the proper recording equipment and know-how, they might might as well invest their time and money on things they have the means to make more distinctive.

For instance, I didn't think someone could make Falco more generic and insipid than the SSBB devs, but it looks like I was dead wrong. I don't care if you have a maniac tournament Falco player holding a knife to your throat, but I want you to fire whoever did all those lazy copy-paste Melee movesets and replace them with the guys who came up with actually creative ideas to de-clone Toon Link, Wolf and Lucario.
Honestly, I had fun playing with those, experimenting with their new stuff and the rest of the cast that recieved changes. But then I come to the top tier guys and all I can read is "return to their former glory", "restoration", "replica", "remade to match Melee".

You're giving both tournament AND non-tournament players reasons to play most of your characters over their Brawl/Melee equivalents. Why stop applying that constructive logic whenever you get closer to the Melee top tiers. Are Fox/Falco players notably more intolerant to change than Samus/Ganondorf players?

tl;dr: Is there any point for me, "casual" player, to play any of the copy-paste characters that I've already played for more than 7 years?

Oh boy, here we go...

[OmegaMalkior]

samus is short, what happened?

Short? You mean, her running animation is more inclined making her appear to be more short, right? Since I've never noticed any height difference between her on both Melee and Brawl o.O.

[iwantgames]

nope, just short period.

I used other m model and it looked short in p:m so I did a comparison, and it turned out she was shorter. in brawl samus is taller than ike, in p:m she is shorter than ike. brawl model is bulky so it isn't noticeable, nor does it look weird in p:m. use an import over her and it's looks weird because it will be shorter than all or most of the other characters.

[HaloedHero]

Are Fox/Falco players notably more intolerant to change than Samus/Ganondorf players?

tl;dr: Is there any point for me, "casual" player, to play any of the copy-paste characters that I've already played for more than 7 years?

It's not so much about how intolerant they are to change. It's more that the better a character did in Melee, the less change they underwent, generally. Remember, this game was made for competitive smash players, but the game it's based on is Melee, so we brought back what worked in competitive Melee and went from there.

(Although, I do think it's fair to assume that the worse a character is, the more its players would appreciate change.)

Is there any point for a casual player to play the Melee tops in Project M? If you look at the character in a vacuum, no, not really. However, the Melee tops finally have an entire viable cast of characters they now have to fend off and learn how to fight, which may not be as exciting as having new moves, but you can't really say that you might as well just play Melee. It's the same character, but it's a very new game.

Still, I don't expect you'll be excited by that, and I don't blame you, but why should we take that away from people who will be, especially since they're the kind of players who started this game, and that's always been the audience we've aimed at. In short: if you want an entirely new character, we've provided that. If players want to revisit the top Melee characters in a new game, we've provided that, too.

That way, there's something for everyone, which is what we thought Sakurai forgot about Brawl. He deliberately took away things that competitive players want. Instead, we're choosing to cater to both audiences, but that will certainly mean that not every decision pleases each camp.

[Steam/SSBB Guy]

I hope this is the right place to tell this, but I found out Pichu is possibly gonna be in the next version of Project M I viewed the common5 file for it I found an icon titled, "InfStc.351" when I viewed it and it contained a Pichu Icon it can't be just a placeholder cause it looks like a custom made Icon

[Ricky (Br3)]

Just letting the vBrawl users know, the Dr. Mario pac/pcs doesn't work on vBrawl without some editing, as it carries its own cape and messes up the down-B.

[ZX_BraveSol_ZX]

Ok, WHY the hell is everybody busting an arm and leg to get Pichu back? Pichu is probably the worst character in the existence of smash bros. just use pikachu for petes sake!

[Kaye Cruiser]

I hope this is the right place to tell this, but I found out Pichu is possibly gonna be in the next version of Project M I viewed the common5 file for it I found an icon titled, "InfStc.351" when I viewed it and it contained a Pichu Icon it can't be just a placeholder cause it looks like a custom made Icon

That was done as a troll move, buddy. Smashboards already talked that up. XD

Sorry that you got your hopes up. ¦D

[SonicBrawler]

Ok, WHY the hell is everybody busting an arm and leg to get Pichu back? Pichu is probably the worst character in the existence of smash bros. just use pikachu for petes sake!

anyway, I was better with Pichu than Pikach in Melee. And yes, they may be the same, but they are not exactly the same. they are different, but the same. I found pichu was just a character that was more fun to play as.

[Gamma Ridley]

Pichu wasn't particularly great, but he's one of my favorite characters to troll with when I play Smash with some guys on campus. They mostly pick the "normal" characters when we play Melee (Falco, Fox, Sheik, etc) so I like to use low tiers to mess with them. Good times.

[Segtendo]

Eww. Pichu.

Just letting the vBrawl users know, the Dr. Mario pac/pcs doesn't work on vBrawl without some editing, as it carries its own cape and messes up the down-B.

That's why you export the model and textures from the P:M costume into a clean Mario PAC

[Steam/SSBB Guy]

Truth is I never played as Pichu considering Brawl was my first smash bros game and I haven't unlocked Pichu in my copy of Melee I bought I am wondering though how the group managed to give Dr. Mario his pills, yet keep Mario's Fireballs.

[Miacis]

It's not so much about how intolerant they are to change. It's more that the better a character did in Melee, the less change they underwent, generally. Remember, this game was made for competitive smash players, but the game it's based on is Melee, so we brought back what worked in competitive Melee and went from there.

I really feel that there's a gross misunderstanding here on that whole "what worked in Melee", which kinda surprises me considering you guys have been working on nothing but that for years now. What worked in Melee were its mechanics, the effective and coherent movesets, stuff like that. The things that you've already understood and applied to other fighters. That's what made Falco good, not the fact he's a boring copy-paste of Fox.

You can't just say "well, that worked, so no use fixing what isn't broken", that's just not how game design works. Game design is not finding the optimal setup and then sticking with it, that's Math. It's about finding different optimals every time, which is something that's been done rather successfully on Toon Link, or even Samus. There was no need to add the Ice Beam, for instance. But you did it anyway instead of just, y'know, tweaking a few numbers to balance Samus out and call it a day.

Not to mention, you really can't say Melee Falco "worked" either. He was a generic Fox clone. That's not "working" in my book.

Is there any point for a casual player to play the Melee tops in Project M? If you look at the character in a vacuum, no, not really. However, the Melee tops finally have an entire viable cast of characters they now have to fend off and learn how to fight, which may not be as exciting as having new moves, but you can't really say that you might as well just play Melee. It's the same character, but it's a very new game.

I've seen that brought forward on the website too, and I still can't help but feel this is incredibly flawed. Putting the same characters in a different situation isn't changing the characters in any way, just as adding new DLC levels doesn't suddenly make a new game, especially if those levels don't bring foward new mechanics.
In a nutshell, it's still the same Fox and Falco and Captain Falcon I'm playing. And in the frequent occurence where you'd have a match with two of the Melee top tiers, lo and behold, it's not a "very new game" anymore at all.

That way, there's something for everyone, which is what we thought Sakurai forgot about Brawl. He deliberately took away things that competitive players want. Instead, we're choosing to cater to both audiences, but that will certainly mean that not every decision pleases each camp.

But there's not something for everyone, that's the main problem. You've tuned all the regular characters to be tournament-friendly AND casual-friendly, but completely left out the second part for Melee top tiers. Pragmatically speaking, you're alienating a major part of your audience (target or not, I don't really care) from a decent portion of your cast. That's the exact opposite of "for everyone".

On those characters, you're deliberately taking away things that casual players wanted (variety, personnality), and catering those players to the rest of the cast. In a way, that isn't all that much better than Sakurai did when he catered tournament-players towards playing only Metaknight, Ice Climbers, Olimar, Diddy and such.