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Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle dev on the game's lack of online multiplayer, and a cut gameplay mechanic
Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle dev Xavier Manzanares recently sat down for a string of interviews to discuss all sorts of things about the game. In the video above, two particularly interesting tidbits are discussed. We learn why the game doesn't feature online multiplayer, and hear about a cut error mechanic.
Lack of online multiplayer
One of the questions asked was the lack of online multiplayer. Manzanares said the development team decided to focus their attention on local multiplayer, as online multiplayer brought new challenges.
So basically, when we started working on this game (and I guess you can say the same thing about other games), we had to think about the scale and what we wanted to do. From the beginning, we wanted to have cooperative because we felt that a multiplayer based on the turn-based system because I could help you and you could help me. We did not know how people would react to turn-based tactics. Would it be accessible enough? And the cooperative was one of the answers.
From the beginning, for us Switch was a platform with which you could play wherever you wanted and being able to play with this little screen wherever you wanted, with the controls locally, was good enough … So we focused so much attention on it that we did not even get to design or focus on anything online because the online brings new elements in which you must come to think, new challenges. It is not only doing it online, it is also how to communicate it, what you indicate, how fun it is. It’s fun to see the other person’s reaction when you’re playing locally … it’s different and that’s why, at the beginning of it all, we decided to focus our attention on the local multiplayer.
Cut error mechanic
Perhaps the one I remember best (Because I still think about it today) is the error mechanism . You could miss combat. Practically, your weapon would turn against you according to a percentage. Let’s say that you are pointing at someone from a great distance and your weapon is very powerful, but because it is very powerful, the possibility of hurting you is also very great. We had many elements around this mechanics, such as the fact that secondary states could be added. So with states like push or bounce, the weapon explodes and you fly away. And then it became a strategy. Some of our weapons were not very powerful, but they had great potential to explode. It was cool, because in PVP, you could use them as a way to escape bad situations … So it became very complex, but was it cool? … We took it away, but it took months to decide.