Nintendo and Namco Bandai are hard at work on Super Smash Bros Wii U, and we’re beginning to get the first details about the game. According Nintendo game designer Masahiro Sakurai, creator of the series, Super Smash Bros Wii U probably won’t be featuring more playable characters than previous games in the series. He says that having a lot of playable characters means a lot of balancing has to be done and that fine tuning the gameplay and characters becomes difficult.
“There is a charm to games that have huge casts of playable characters, but they tend to have issues with game balance and it becomes difficult to fine tune each character and have them all feel distinctive” Sakurai told Nintendo Power magazine, talking about fighting games in general. He added, “we have probably already reached the limit of what’s feasible. A change of direction may be what’s needed”. This could very well mean that Super Smash Bros Wii U probably won’t feature a cast that’s larger than what we’ve seen in the series so far. We’ll have to wait and see what the “change of direction” entails.
The last game in the series, Super Smash Bros Brawl, featured 35 playable characters, including some from third party franchises like Solid Snake from Metal Gear, and Sonic The Hedgehog. Super Smash Bros Wii U is co-developed with Namco Bandai and is expected to be released sometime in 2014.