Brawl Update Patches

I have given this topic a ton of thought. However unlikely to be implemented by Nintendo, I believe the concept is feasible.

For the sake of background, I will use Blizzard as an example. Blizzard maintains their sacred triad of franchises: Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. In all those games, players discover imbalances in the core engine. Upon revealing those issues, Blizzard releases a patch required for online play. The patch makes certain characters stronger and others weaker to make the game more competitive. In the case of Diablo, the patches tweak individual spells and skills to prevent instances of the "one-trick pony" (one who abuses a single skill in dealing with all opponents because that skill does the job). In Starcraft, units have their damage and speed modified based on group dynamics. For instance, since marines usually travel in groups, it is only necessary to modify their weapon damage by a small amount. The large numbers amplify the effect of such a change.

The feasibility of Brawl update patches depends upon the structure of the combat engine. In an ideal situation, every move's speed, damage, hit-box radius, etc. would have a number assigned to them as opposed to being hard-coded into the game. Under these circumstances, patches from Nintendo would be only a few kilobytes. This would make the whole system quite comfortable in the Wii's limited storage space. 512 MB is not much, but a patch of this size would occupy less than a thousandth of the space.

Update patches would solve a whole bunch of problems. In Melee, Nintendo saw the delayed PAL release as an opportunity to clean up their "mistakes". Several of the high tier characters were weakened in hopes of balancing the game. Today, almost six years after Melee's release, I am sure both Nintendo and the smash community have thoughts on which characters need to be modified, but it is far too late for that. Brawl offers a unique opportunity with WiiConnect24. Today's DOJO update suggests that the game creators could more closely monitor the way players handle their characters. By collecting statistics on wins and losses sorted by character, Nintendo has the ability to better watch out for broken tactics. The tier list would slowly rotate as bottom tier characters improved. Every character would have his or her chance in the spotlight of competition because no one would be neglected.

Sadly, update patches would also introduce a whole bunch of problems. First and foremost, Nintendo and the competitive community would disagree on what moves or characters need improvements or handicaps. For instance, the PAL version of Melee destroyed the semi-spike ability of Link's spin attack, but even the NTSC Link poses no serious threat in a tournament environment. This change likely resulted from new players spamming the move and winning against other casual players. Second, releasing patches too often would prevent the game from evolving as Melee did. That also asks the question, how often is "too often"? Every six months? Once every two years? One way to answer that is to ask, when did Melee stagnate? When did Melee start needing patches? Those questions are equally difficult to answer. Third, patch johns would run rampant all over the world. Anyone playing on another person's Wii would excuse their losses by explaining how a patch's update threw them off.

Both sides present serious issues. Not patching the game leads to issues Melee experienced. Fortunately, Brawl is receiving much more attention and care than Melee did. I am fairly optimistic in hoping that Brawl features more than four characters winning tournaments everywhere.