Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Future Updates

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will get six additional Challenger Packs during the course of 2020 and 2021. While this alone is already quite extraordinary, since Nintendo usually doesn't support their games as long with DLC, there are still things left to be desired, which won't be achieved by the second Fighters Pass alone.

But every new DLC comes with an update for the game and every update is a chance of some additional contents or improvements to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Let's go through what still should be added and fixed in the future!

Echo Fighters

Echo Fighters are essentially just glorified skins, but nonetheless they are a nice and cheap way of adding characters, which wouldn't otherwise become playable. Some of the existing Echo Fighters like Dark Samus could have been unique fighters, of course, but it's better than not being playable at all.

And there is still some potential with characters like Impa from Skyward Sword or Jeanne from Bayonetta. Those could be sold for a small price or even be free as part of the upcoming updates.

Stages

If Super Smash Bros. Ultimate lacks anything, then it's new stages. There only have been nine so far, where six of them were used to introduce new franchises. Only very few Nintendo games from the last five years actually have gotten stages in the game...

Of course the focus clearly was on bringing old stages back, but even here the game still has some glaring omissions. And the second Fighters Pass probably won't fix any of that, however, they could add stages for free or even sell them as separate DLC, both of which has been done for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS & Wii U.

Stage Builder

The Stage Builder has been an amazing gift in version 3.0.0, but the selection of backgrounds and materials didn't turn out to be as good. Custom stages in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U looked much prettier than what we got here so far, so it would be nice to get at least the textures and backgrounds from that game back.

There is also an issue with the collision of platform edges, which probably should be fixed at some point.

Stage and Fighter Select Screens

If Sakurai's team has any time and resources left to work on other things, improving the stage and fighter select screens should be their first priority. There is so much wrong here, it's actually maddening how none of this has been fixed so far, since you go through these screens with every single match...

They should:

• Give us the option to sort stages and fighters by franchise, like in previous Smash games.
• Let us copy rulesets in addition to editing them.
  
• Let us quickly edit time and stock limits on the stage select screen.
• Let us turn stage hazards on and off on the stage select screen.
• Let us turn stage morphing on and off on the stage select screen.
• Remember the last choice of fighter and alt for each player.

The rule sets were a good idea, but having absolutely all options defined by them was not. They should in these cases only set the default, but you shouldn't have to create variants of each rule set just so that you can switch between normal stages and stages without hazards and so on.

Controls

Overall the options and configurations for your controls never have been better for Smash, but there are still some possible improvements here. First of all, it should be possible to turn of Smash Attack for the left stick, in case you prefer to do tilt attacks with it and Smash Attacks with the right stick.

It would also be good to have a dedicated short hop button, instead of pushing two jump buttons at once. Or better fix the problem at its root and don't make the short hop timing so extremely delicate.