Masahiro Sakurai Talks About Super Smash Bros Ultimate’s Netcode

Masahiro Sakurai from Sora Ltd talked about the netcode for Super Smash Bros Ultimate on his own column in the latest issue of Famitsu. When the game received Update 8.1.0 last month in August 2020, Sakurai also posted a tweet hinting that there may have been a minor improvement on the response for 1v1 online matches. [Thanks, Ryokutya2089.]

Here are some highlights from Masahiro Sakurai’s new column where he explained more about Super Smash Bros Ultimate netcode:

• “1v1 is a very big element among the online modes; we made the input delay in the connection to have more aggressive values. Things like transmission interval and buffering are crammed in.”
• “Tangible details on the connection improvement were not announced, because no matter how much we improve it, the factors from users’ environments are bigger.”
• “Mr. [Katsuhiro] Harada from Tekken said that around 60% of all home consoles use Wi-Fi. But in Switch’s case, it would be more than 60%.”
• “There have been requests to show whether the opponent uses Wi-Fi or not, but it’s not like they can be rejected, so we cannot do it.”
• “It’s not like Wi-Fi is bad, but please kindly use a wired connection in order to have a stable match.”
• “There are also requests for a rollback method, and we did inspect it during development, but we passed up on it. The side effects were too big.”

Super Smash Bros Ultimate is immediately available worldwide on the Nintendo Switch. Masahiro Sakurai also mentioned in the column that it has shipped more than 20 million copies.