We all know that Super Smash Bros. for Wii U isn’t arriving on store shelves till the holiday season, but until now we never had a full explanation as to why. While speaking with Famitsu, series creator Masahiro Sakurai told fans the reason for the home console delay. The short of it, is that an intense amount of debugging must take place to release two Super Smash Bros. games in one year. Sakurai feels that adequate testing must be done on both the 3DS and Wii U versions of the game to make them acceptable for players.
In the man’s own words, “debugging alone becomes a huge project. One of the biggest reasons for the separate release dates for the 3DS and Wii U versions was so that we could shift the debugging periods.”After all, Super Smash Bros. is one of the few games with dedicated eSports championships to its name. If Sakurai hopes to create a product that lives up to those very stringent standards, lots of bug squashing must be done both internationally and domestically.
The fighting game visionary also spoke to the more prevalent existence of game delays in general. “There are many reasons why a game [gets] delayed, but eight or nine times out of ten, it’s usually because a bug couldn’t be fixed.” In that sense, when titles like Watch Dogs or Driveclub were unable to release on time, one suspects that many of those extra months were spent in the debug stages. If you can’t possibly wait for more Super Smash Bros., check out the 3DS versionĀ in the US and Europe on October 3rd.
Would you rather a game be bug free than released early? Tell me your thoughts below!