by Doc – Owner, Founder… Is Honestly At a Loss for Words
Holy crap, is really all I can say. Smash Ultimate has been ported to the PC.
Emulating it has been alright as a substitute for playing if you have a beefy enough PC, but having a fully decompiled and ported version means we might not be that far from being able to mod, mass-train and mass-host tournaments on lower end PCs without much setup from the user. I can imagine a scenario where the tournament host someday only has to collect amiibo bin files from the tournament entrants, place them into a folder, click a few buttons in a launcher, and let the tournament finish itself. Custom tournament operations like that have been implemented through modding (and is famously the backbone of the Amiibots Twitch stream, the 24/7 amiibo tournament) already and through some custom-made emulator add-ons but mods are expensive and hard, and the emulator add-ons are not publicly distributed and may never be public. Smash Ultimate already has a gazillion mods, but PCs capable of emulation or moddable Nintendo Switches cost money, and usually a lot of it (hell I’m a lawyer and the PC I’m writing this on can’t emulate a 3DS, let alone a Switch). A PC port is really just democratizing the ability to play and mod Smash Ultimate easily, and maybe strip out unneeded operations so it can be fast-forwarded excessively or played on low-end hardware.
Think of what this could do! Imagine what would happen to the amiibo meta if, instead of running a tournament as a 32-man Double Elim, you ran it as a 32-man, best of 501 round robin, fast forwarded 1000x? Think of how much more granularly we’d be able to describe the nuances of the meta when we have so much more data to process it with! A trainer could test their amiibo against a gauntlet of dozens of the best amiibo in the meta (with the trainer’s permission, as is the custom of the community) and make granular iterations on it until it’s optimized for the best odds of victory. What’s the difference in winrate between a 40 AOC Ness and a 41 AOC Ness, all else held equal? We can find out.
And if other decompilations are any indicator, there’s a lot to be gained from AI assistance in this, as it democratizes the ability to create new content. We could have community patches, AI tweaks, new, unlocked or balanced spirits, it would be endless potential amiibo tournaments so long as there’s a core set of rules everyone agrees on in the community. We could finally liberate the “unavailable” amiibo options out there, letting Pyra and Mythra play separately, or revert some of the AI patches that Nintendo put in over the years. There’s a ton of potential out there!
Not to digress into my own personal project, but that kind of mega-tournament is exactly the kind of functionality I’ve always wanted in amiibo training, and I implemented it into my amiibo-esque game BadAssteroids. BadAssteroids is a space arcade game-type fighting game focusing on parameter-based auto fighting much like amiibo that I’m working on, and it would be wild to see this in Smash Ultimate proper as a warm-up to what I’m doing in BadAssteroids.
