As the title that got the biggest attention during its Nintendo Direct, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is clearly going to be one of the marquee titles coming to Switch owners later this year, and Nintendo provided a few more details on the upcoming fighting game that brings together (almost) all of its franchises and characters in one place.
Over at Game Informer, Nintendo of America’s Bill Trinen and localization manager Nate Bihldorff provided some more insight into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which got an extensive showcase at E3 2018 and will be arriving later this year.
In an interview with Game Informer, one of the biggest clarifications that Trinen provided was in stating that Nintendo and the game’s director, Masahiro Sakurai, consider this “a new game” in the series and not just a “definitive edition” or “port” of the series’ previous iterations.
A large part of that, as Trinen explained, comes from the ways that Ultimate will bring “core change to the core mechanics,” such as speed, movement, animation, and more, and players as a result will have to “re-learn every character” compared to previous iterations in the series.
In addition to those details regarding the game’s development, Bihldroff detailed that what has been shown at E3 2018 is “the tip of the iceberg” with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and that there will be “a ton to announce down the line” regarding additional features and more coming from the game.
Nintendo has also confirmed that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is being developed in a collaboration between Nintendo, Sora Ltd, and Bandai Namco Entertainment, the same development team as the last entries in the series: Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will release for Nintendo Switch on December 7th, 2018. For more on the game, you can check out the extensive reveal that we got from the Nintendo Direct to check out the announce characters and much more, including GameCube controller support.