No More Smash Bros Balance Patches

Masahiro Sakurai has announced that there will be no more Smash Bros balance patches for Wii U and 3DS. The most recent patch is ver. 1.0.4 and will be the final update for major gameplay/balance tweaks. Sakurai also stated that all future patches and updates will be to fix online multiplayer performance. The only reason the team would go back to fix character balancing is if any major problems with a character comes up. Characters in Smash Bros on both Wii U and Nintendo 3DS can be customized with various items that boost certain stats. However this feature is disabled when playing online against anyone who is not on your friends list. Because of this Sakurai and the Smash Bros team don’t have to endlessly work on Smash Bros balance patches due to the customization options.

Patch ver 1.0.4 was released in November and had a multitude of gameplay changes. King Dedede was powered down a bit across many moves. Ganandorf’s landing lag was reduced,  Greninja was nerfed, Ike was made more susceptible to hits and knockback, and Link’s base knockback was reduced. The full patch notes are quite long and the patch itself is required if you desire to play Super Smash Bros online.

Sakurai also recently talked about how he doesn’t think he will be working on another Smash Bros title due to the necessary time and effort to improve upon each title. The amount of content in Smash Bros has grown larger and larger with each entry and has become something of a giant operation to create. The amount of stress from fans who desire the game to be better and better also weighs in upon Sakurai. Whoever wound up taking his place would have a lot of expectations, which Sakurai doesn’t think they’d be able to deliver on.