Sakurai goes over Smash Bros. Ultimate's Small Battlefield, talks online play, rollback netcode considerations, and more

Masahiro Sakurai is back with another Famitsu feature. This time around, he goes over the addition of the Small Battlefield stage, along with the intricacies of online play. Check out the translation below, courtesy of PushDustIn and Sephazon.

- although Battlefield is often used in 1v1 competitive play, it was originally designed for 4 players
- this is why Battlefield is slightly tall and wide
- Small Battlefield removes the top middle platform and brings the left and right platforms closer together
- it would’ve been impossible to make 100 ‘Small Battlefield’ style stages
- the team wanted to add Small Battlefield as a single-stage option
- Sakurai decided to allow all the songs in the game to be playable on FD and Battlefield-related stages
- a lot of attention was put into making the input delay when fighting 1v1 as very low
- as a side-effect, when there is a delay in communication, the match may drop
- some small adjustments to matchmaking and other optimizations are still being tweaked
- specific details of these updates have not been revealed, as they are largely client-side, and there is a limit to improvements
- Mr. Harada, the producer of Tekken, said that “60% of home console gamers use WiFi”
- the number is likely higher for Switch, and internet connections across the world may not necessarily be as fast as Japan
- making adjustments and improvements to online play has its own risks
- Internet speed has seen its own improvements over recent years, and Sakurai says he will review and adapt accordingly
- there are requests to display when a player is using WiFi, but it’s not possible to refuse a player based on their connection
- regarding rollback netcode, Sakurai researched a similar feature during development and decided against it
- this decision was made due to the side-effects being substantial
- Sakurai is thankful for more than 20 million players buying Smash Bros. Ultimate
- Sakurai will do his best to make all possible improvements and adjustments to the game