Yeah. The endless challenge mode on normal difficulty is very nearly an ideal experience for me, but it’s far too often ruined by just really bad levels. I mean, far be it from me to advocate gatekeeping. But though the shitty scrawl of tossed off levels was charming for the first couple weeks, at a certain point I wanted something more fun to play and the only way I found outside of following people I know here and elsewhere was occaisonally checking what y’all liked, too.
Being able to play through someone’s whole world has me excited. Time to start ginning up ideas about my own dream SMB3 game.
Thinking of this article lately, about how Halo 2 replaced player-controlled custom lobbies with “just click one button to play”:
I feel like Mario Maker overlearned the now-conventional-wisdom and it held back the game’s potential. It would have been a good fit for stepping back to some degree of player-driven curation and community management. Like little forums of particular design styles with their own internal voting and listing systems.
I think I’ve ever only booed at most twice. And it was for something really egregious, though I can’t remember what (it was more than just annoying or boring design).
My ideal would be a sort of social media-style feed that shows courses that are currently hot globally, things made by people you follow, and things liked by people you follow. Also to be able to search with a fucking keyword (wait, you can’t, right?)).
The world stuff might get me back into this. I remember groups posted collaborative campaigns, but I couldn’t be bothered to search for each level individually.
I’m unclear if all the levels have to be the same creator or if you can play through worlds co-op.
It’s very, very hard to buck this curve shape, generally games that aren’t fully live only succeed in bending it. Even live games with packaged releases (World of Warcraft, Destiny and its weird sequel model) follow this curve. You’re usually trying to get a slower falloff and higher peak so you plateau at a higher baseline.
We don’t have Mario Maker user data, but ending support is the best sign we have of the numbers – with a dedicated few thousand you can still have a lively community creating enough content to sustain itself, just not enough to merit a dev team that costs $1m+ a month working on it.
There are a lot features from Dreams that MM could (and likely won’t) implement, like collaborative creations, clear creator attribution lines, promotion of playlists/curation.
The biggest differences between MM1 and MM2 for me were novelty and expectations. I had low expectations for MM1 (I didn’t believe Nintendo would actually deliver something with that much creative freedom), but it both delivered that AND had a high novelty factor. MM2’s prerelease stuff all looked good, but on release a lot of pieces were marred with weird limitations:
only certain elements available in certain styles
can no longer edit or view other people’s levels in the editor
multiplayer implementation was poor with no friend support at launch
no external bookmark site like mm1
course conditions remove your ability to place checkpoints
certain “advanced” kaizo tricks or level making tricks from MM1 no longer worked
Every feature in MM1 felt like a bonus; its weird Mario Paint interactions meant that it felt like you were “discovering” new uses and features of items all the time. My discoveries in Mario Maker 2 largely worked in the opposite direction: I’d frequently discover things that I thought I should be able to do, but couldn’t, due to some technicality.
As an overall package and in terms of breadth of content, Mario Maker 2 is definitely the better game. The backwards steps it takes are pretty minor, and the features you get in return are “worth” it in terms of strict value. I think the main problem is one perception and novelty, but it’s also not something I can quite shake, even being aware of it.
It is significantly worse, yes! The Wii U gamepad is light and curved/shaped in a way that is easy to hold in one hand with a stylus in the other. The Switch is NOT! And that doesn’t even get into the problems with big capacitive styluses for multitouch screens (like the switch has) vs. the small and light and precise single touch stylus on the Wii U. You could be precise with the Wii U stylus, but it just isn’t on the Switch, even with a clear disk attachment.
There’s also the factor of folks on Wii U basically having to obsess over everything we got when we got it. I think all the stuff everyone else here has said is also true, but I definitely think the desert island effect was a factor too.
