The director of Brawl Masahiro Sakurai has confirmed that there will be no voice chat for Super smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii due to all sorts of rules and regulations on the Wii platform that meant it wasn't a viable option. He went on to say if gamers are really desperate for chat, then maybe they could set up Skype and talk to their friends as they please by their game station.

IGN: Brawl seems like the perfect game to introduce a Wii headset for voice chat. Why have you avoided this?

Masahiro Sakurai: Well, when I first started making Smash Bros. Brawl, I thought it would be wonderful if online battles between friends had voice chat and potentially keyboard based chat as well. But there are all sorts of rules and regulations regarding communication on the Wii platform and so it was apparent to me that it just wouldn't come together, we weren't going to be able to do it, so we decided to cancel that feature. I'm very sorry about that. But if you're really desperate for it, you could set up Skype by your game station and go at it with a friend if you like.


IGN: Why can't players in random online matches communicate or even see each other's names? What's the philosophy behind that?

Masahiro Sakurai: When thinking about this game and when realizing that we were going to do Wi-Fi, we had to think a lot about the whole idea of communication over the Internet. When we were doing this, one of the things that we paid a lot of attention to is the fact that there are a lot of unpleasant experiences to be had out there, be that being insulted over the Internet or that sort of thing. You know, it's one thing if you're used to it and you're playing a first-person shooter online with 16 people and you know these guys and you're trading insults back and forth and yelling at each other, that's all well and good. But when you've got new players, and one thing I've aimed to do is to really bring new players into the fold, if this is their first online experience I want it to be a pleasant one. I want to dodge and avoid those kinds of situations that could make the whole experience online psychologically damaging or unpleasant, so that's one of the reasons we've decided not to include that feature.