Nintendo revealed its Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Minecraft DLC and while it had many reacting along the lines of ‘Minecraft Steve? More like Minecraft Peeve‘, others were excited to see the newest roster addition. What else was interesting about the reveal was how much work went into making this move happen in a way that made sense.
When bringing the wildly successful world of Minecraft into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the team had to make a lot of in-game adjustments to make it work. In order to make Steve, Alex, Enderman, and the Zombie feel true-to-the-game, Nintendo needed to implement various Minecraft-related features like crafting and mining. This meant that the stages needed to be reworked, something creator Masahiro Sakurai mentioned during the earlier reveal.
Sakurai-san mentioned during the event that the team had no idea that bringing Minecraft into Smash would ever become a reality, despite it being in ideation quite a bit in the past. Now that it’s official, he revealed that every single stage in the game had to be reworked in order for the Minecraft crew to play the way they were meant to. That’s over 100 stages that needed to be changed!
The plan for the fighter is easy to create. The graphics should also be straightforward. The motion is relatively simple, and the sound is comparable to other fighters. There are plenty of things to consider, but we don’t need to implement any voices.
What is difficult, however, is the programming work required to bring the character to life. It’s a massive challenge. Plus, we have to rework all our existing stages so that blocks can be placed in them. What about biomes? We also need to consider things like those. And most importantly, how do we adjust the game balance to accommodate the new fighter? Who knows what will happen?
Making everything work well together in the game including the fighter’s physical attacks and their short reach, will be extremely hard.
Anytime a new fighter is added to the roster, there are balance tweaks made to the game to make sure that the meta stays true to vision. With a character like Steve, there is a lot more that goes into his move sets, moves that are heavily interacted with the environment and the added blocks.
Sakurai-san didn’t mention, however, if those changes will impact how other fighters interact with the environment, but it is interesting to see the depth of this addition.
We don’t have a release date at this time for the Minecraft Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC, but we do know that a full reveal of its changes is on the way for October 3.
Thoughts on Steve and the gang joining Super Smash Bros. Ultimate? Who is the next fighter you’d like to see added? Shout out those Smash dreams in the comment section below.
Source: Game Informer
