Rumors of a 2027 Super Smash Bros release have Reddit flaming the journalism. A dev's take on the nightmare of following up the legacy code of Ultimate.
Alright, fellow keyboard warriors, grab your energy drinks. I was scrolling through Reddit looking for some drama and got hit with this completely unhinged headline: "New Super Smash Bros reportedly releasing as early as 2027." Hold up. Smash Ultimate dropped in 2018. 2027 is literally 9 years later. In what universe is a near-decade dev cycle considered "early"?
This whole circus started with a Dexerto article quoting some random internet dude claiming he just "knows." No datamined code, no leaked repos, not even a blurry screenshot. Just pure, unadulterated hopium.
Reddit user Headrocks (sitting on a fat 1250 upvotes) nuked the author from orbit, basically saying: "So this entire article is about one guy claiming he just 'knows'? No proof, no actual leaks, just take it on faith? This is hardly journalism." It’s the gaming equivalent of your uncle who totally works at Nintendo.
Fake leak aside, the real meat of the thread is the monumental technical and design debt left by Smash Bros Ultimate.
As user The-YeahNah-Guy pointed out, Ultimate backed the devs into a massive corner. Everyone is here. If they build a new engine from scratch, they have to scale down the roster. And if they dare sell those legacy characters back to us as DLC? You bet your ass there will be riots and massive review bombing.
The logical dev route? Port Ultimate to the Switch 2, slap on some new modes, and call it a day. But here's the kicker: licensing. Bringing back third-party reps like Cloud and Snake means navigating a legal minefield of expired contracts. It's an absolute nightmare for the legal team.
And what about Sakurai? Didn't the man say he was done? The community jokes that he’ll be directing the game from the grave in 20 years, somehow still looking younger than a 20-something dev running on 3 hours of sleep. Or, plot twist: he won't be involved at all, leaving the new team to drown in the codebase.
From a dev perspective, Ultimate is that massive, monolithic legacy codebase your company is terrified to touch. Refactoring it (rebuilding) means cutting features (characters), which pisses off the end-users. Maintaining it means dealing with insane dependencies (third-party IPs).
Also, if they do drop a new game, they better rewrite that spaghetti P2P netcode. Otherwise, we'll all be forced to run a game booster just to get a playable ping online.
TL;DR: Whether it’s 2027 or 2030, Nintendo is sitting on a ticking time bomb of player expectations. GG to the devs who have to follow up Ultimate. You're gonna need it.
Source: Reddit
