Smashed off the internet

Like so many other canceled events of 2020, the Evolution Championship Series, otherwise known as Evo, has been forced to make new arrangements in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rather than thousands of people flocking to Las Vegas to compete in today's top fighting games, the tournament will instead be held entirely online, allowing players to participate from the comfort and safety of their own home.

However, while most of the current relevant fighting games will be represented one way or another during Evo Online, there is a notable exclusion.

There is no Smash Bros.

The Smash Bros. franchise has a long and complicated history with Evo. Mechanically, Smash Bros. is drastically different than your traditional fighting game and Nintendo has traditionally made little effort to design it around competitive play. Its stigma as a "party game" has made its inclusion into the fighting game scene a bit of a controversy for the purists.

However, the numbers don't lie. "Super Smash Bros. Melee," in spite of being more than a decade old at the time, was officially introduced into the Evo line-up in 2013 and remained one of the event's most popular tournaments for through 2018. It was only due to the logistical headache of trying to set up functioning GameCubes and CRT televisions that Melee was finally dropped from the main line-up in 2019.

In its place, "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" for the Nintendo Switch brought in more than 3500 players for the 2019 event, dwarfing every other game in the roster.

"Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" is arguably the most popular fighting game in the world right now. Its presence draws in thousands of players and viewers to Evo that may otherwise not pay the event any attention. So why won't it be featured for Evo Online?

While there hasn't been an official explaination, the answer is fairly obvious. It's the "online" part.

I've said it before, and I'm saying it again. Nintendo, for all their innovations in other areas, has been roughly a decade behind the times when it comes to its online features since online play became a standard part of gaming. One would have hoped that Nintendo's paid online service would have meant they'd be putting more resources into improving their online experience, but alas, "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's" online play is just as much of a laggy mess as its previous free iteration.

No matter how fast your own internet is, there is no way to avoid getting matched up against a player that feels like they are running off a dial-up connection... from the moon. This is a deal-breaker for a game where a fraction of a second can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

In a world where 10,000 people could descend on Las Vegas to play shoulder-to-shoulder against each other, "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's" shoddy netcode wasn't much of an issue. Unfortunately, we aren't living in that world right now.

The organizers of Evo had to make some hard choices when transitioning their 2020 line-up to an online contest.

Four games with reliable online play were selected for the event's open tournaments, allowing anybody to enter. The remainder of the games will be restricted to exhibition tournaments, indicating that the Evo organizers were at least confident that the invited participants will be able to face each other online without much disruption.

This is not to say that these other games will run flawlessly. They won't. There will doubtlessly be the occasional pause in the action or a teleporting character no matter how good the connection between players is. But only with "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" is the likelihood of a game changing latency spike so high that Evo decided it was better not to run it at all.

This is embarrassing for Nintendo, but possibly not quite as embarrassing as watching one of their most high profile titles trip over itself during the biggest fighting game event of the year.

Still, let's put this in perspective.

"Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" is a $60 game developed by an industry juggernaut and it requires a paid subscription to play online.

"Them's Fightin' Herds" is a $15 indie game that started out as a "My Little Pony" fan-game.

One of these games has reliable enough netcode that the biggest fighting game event in the world is confident enough to run it for an open online tournament. The other game is "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate."

With luck, this may be the kick in the pants Nintendo needs to finally give its online play the attention it deserves. I wouldn't count on it though.

Maybe in 2030.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and would rather play against players in Smash Bros., rather than their internet connections.