His view of the situation is frustrating to me, as someone who is on the tournament side of the dichotomy.
This in particular:
As a result of these considerations, overall Brawl is rather tame game; this had its advantages, but it also took away some of the excitement.
While theres a lot of enthusiasm for tournaments on the one hand, there are also users who just give up on these sorts of games because they cant handle the complexity and speed. While other fighting games continue to work on honing this tournament aspect, I think that we need to move in a direction where there is more of a focus on inexperienced gamers.
How can he say things like this one after another? "We tried it last time and it kinda worked but mostly the game suffered. So this time, we're going to keep focusing on the inexperienced!"
I get that he made Smash Bros. to appeal to people that found fighting games difficult. I really do. I'm one of those people; I'd never be able to hold my own in traditional fighting games, they're far too difficult.
But there's no where else to go for more games like Melee. I don't care that Capcom and Arc Sys or whoever are making plenty of games for tournaments, because those aren't the games I like to play. I want more Smash, but it seems like the developer is trying to prevent the new Smash Bros. games from being exciting.
It's conjecture... but in large part, I'd guess the people that give up on these games don't do so because the game is too fast paced. They do it because of input barriers, and especially because they get discouraged by playing people that are vastly better than them. The former can be fixed by removing silly stuff like L-cancelling and wavedashing, and the latter can't be fixed without turning your game into pure RNG.
I recognize that he has different goals and plans for the series, and that there are more novices buying and playing the game than people like me. I guess I'm just venting, and the above can be disregarded. It just bothers me that a series I love is led by a guy who regrets his best game, and does so for the same reasons I loved it.
If tournament popularity was the most important consideration, then I think we would create a Smash Bros. game that included a multitude of fast moves with complicated controls.
This line also really gets on my nerves. Fast moves, yeah. But he acts as if complicated controls (for the sake of being complicated) are some prerequisite for a competitive game. No one wants the controls to be complicated!
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