Olivia Richman is a seasoned esports journalist who has worked with Inven Global, Esports Illustrated, Esports.gg, and more. As an editor and writer at Esports Insider, she loves telling unique esports stories, especially within the FGC. When not working and gaming, Olivia loves collecting Kirby plush, eating sushi, and driving her cars at the track.
There’s a Nintendo Direct tomorrow (September 9th) and there’s a rumor that we will get the first confirmation that Super Smash Bros. 6 is on the way. This isn’t really a big surprise or secret: Kirby’s father, Masahiro Sakurai, has been saying he wants to work on another Smash for years now. He just needed to finish Kirby Air Riders first.
Super Smash Bros. 6 is more a matter of when .
The Ultimate scene is getting a bit stale as players wait for a new title. While older games like Smash 64 and Melee have a dedicated scene formed over decades, the Ultimate scene is often full of a wide range of players and characters. It’s not as set in stone. It’s ready to be shaken up. Refreshed.
However, Smash 6 needs a few things to keep the Smash esports scene growing. Although knowing Sakurai and the rest of the team at Nintendo, we can just keep on daydreaming.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is said to have better rollback netcode than the previous console, but it’s still quite far behind for those who are looking to compete in online tourneys or have competitive practice matches.
Said one player on Reddit : “The online scene is quite alive, never ever have trouble finding a match since the game came out to this day. It’s just frustrating due to the not-so-great netcode. So if both players don’t have an optimal connection, it’ll have input lag or stuttering. With two wired connections, it’s pretty good.”
Added another: “Putting such a bad netcode in your MAIN fighting game, quite possibly your best-selling game of all time for that console, shows the greed and the carelessness we can expect from Nintendo. Just devastating.”
Despite the horrendous lag making online play totally different from LAN matches, Nintendo has no interest in doing much about it. In fact, Nintendo is actively working on keeping it this way. A recent update specifically targeted Delay Mod , a mod meant to fix Nintendo’s rollback netcode. Apparently blasphemous.
If Nintendo doesn’t fix the rollback netcode for Super Smash Bros. 6, it will continue to reduce the number of competitive players who don’t want to deal with online lag in matches. One of the reasons that other fighting games have continued to grow is good online play, something severely lacking in Smash. That lack of connectivity among players and having fewer practice options is most definitely a struggle for the esports side of things.
The competitive stage pool for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a bit snoozeville. Previous games, like Melee, had a lot more interactive and dynamic stages. Pokemon Stadium 2 has that one transformation with a potential glitch, but the rest of it creates a lot of opportunities for varying strategies and gameplay styles.
While stage hazards are definitely unappealing to competitive players, it seems that Ultimate overcorrected its stages, making them almost too safe. They’re all very similar to one another, lacking in transformations and shapes in exchange for Battlefield in a variety of sizes.
“The stages in Ultimate…