If you’ve played any of Super Mario 3D World on the Switch with your
friends, you might have noticed that something feels a little off. It sure is
difficult to control this game, isn’t it? Wait, which character am I? All I’m
saying is, if you’ve played 3D World with friends, either online or in the same
physical space, and you haven’t thrown the controller at someone with rage or
changed your Facebook status to “It’s Complicated”, then you must be an
absolute saint.
The thing is, though, if the game’s multiplayer mode feels endlessly frustrating, it’s not just your imagination. It’s supposed to be that way.
Nintendo’s developers have publicly stated that they wanted this game to be, quote, a “complicated psychological battle”.
In an Iwata Asks interview from all the way back in 2013, then-President of Nintendo Satoru Iwata spoke with Mario 3D World director, Kenta Motokura about how the game actively pushes players to fight amongst themselves.
The interview went as follows:
Iwata: Cooperation and mutual interference mix within the same stage. That is the model for all kinds of multiplayer gameplay.
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Motokura: Super Mario 3D World's multiplayer mode has gameplay somewhat similar to that. When you clear a course, the player who came in first receives a crown. A player who reaches the goal on the next course while wearing the crown gets a bonus.
Iwata: So a battle breaks out over that crown. Motokura: That's right.
You can do a Ground Pound and nab it, or get in each other's way. But when the number of remaining players drops, all of a sudden you start cooperating! Apparently, the little button you can press to randomise every player’s character is part of this dastardly scheme.
Anyone can, at any point, mess things up so that nobody knows what’s going on. The interview continues:
Motokura: A secondary element is that it isn't easy to tell who is which character-which is useful when you pull dirty stunts on someone!(laughs) Iwata: (laughs) I bet that really brings out one's personality-the choice between cooperating with everyone or getting in their way.
Is anyone else getting the sense that the developers at Nintendo are a sadistic lot? Actively trying to make players hate each other by programming in gameplay features designed to start arguments?
Of course, they also claim that they intended the whole experience to be fun without being too competitive, but let’s be fair here, nobody was ever going to outright state, “we wanted to raise the divorce rate among out players”.
Said Motokura: “When we were testing multiplayer gameplay, I couldn't help but say, "Hayashida-san! This is like Mario Bros.!" And it literally is!”
This is particularly interesting observation, because the original Mario Bros’ multiplayer gameplay is…kind of…the worst.
The premise of Mario Bros is simple: there’s some turtles in your
plumbing, you don’t want them there. You have to sneak up on these hapless
creatures while they’re minding their own business, bop them on their bums, and
then kick them off the screen. And, because it’s a multiplayer game, you can
work together with a friend to clear levels faster.
Or… You can beat each other senseless. You can send turtles raining down on your partner. You can steal all their kills and claim some kind of superior victory as you become the undisputed biggest jerk of the arcade.
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No, the game doesn’t specifically tell you to play this way. Essentially it just… hands you a loaded weapon, and leaves you to do what comes naturally. This is the kind of gameplay that co-op cooking simulator Overcooked developer Phil Duncan describes as “first-to-fun” – the idea of having players ostensibly work together, but in practice, the game is put together in such a way that players will argue with each other and race to get all the good items.
Duncan has said that when developing Overcooked, the goal was to basically do the opposite of this.
He said: “We'd played a lot of co-operative games and a lot of them fell foul of what we've started calling 'first-to-fun' – that is when you and your teammates start to race against each other to be the first to kill the next enemy, or pick up items etc. We wanted to make a game where is didn't matter how good you were on your own, it was all about how you worked within a team.”
Overcooked succeeds on this front by making the controls as simple as possible, but by building levels that can’t be navigated by a single person on their own.Winning doesn’t come down to technical proficiency with a controller, but rather, a team’s ability to cooperate and share out tasks.
Compare this with, say, a Mario multiplayer, where the player who is having the most fun is typically the one who’s had the most practice. When New Super Mario Bros Wii brought back the concept of multiplayer Mario mayhem, the developers at Nintendo elected to allow a degree of friendly fire.
In multiplayer platformers like, say, Sonic the Hedgehog, two characters can exist in the same space at the same time: they won’t bump each other off of platforms. With Mario multiplayer games, if two people are trying to jump onto the same ledge at the same time, one of them is going to fall into lava.
It’s inevitable. The game is designed to inspire arguments. Developer Eiji Mukao once explained how he’d seen – if you can imagine such a thing – two people playing the game and actually cooperating! Sort of.
He said: “During New Year's break, I had the chance to see my brother and his wife in our hometown. He used to play video games, but now that he's married, he hasn't played them very much… “But he said he bought New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and he plays it together with his wife. It seems his wife isn't very good at video games. She said it's a little difficult… “When I asked them about it, they said that when they reach a difficult part, they clear it by him carrying her on his shoulders as he runs forward.”
You might recognise this as a common occurrence if you’ve ever tried to play some of these Nintendo platformers with a friend who’s not quite as experienced. Eventually, you get to a stage of frustration where it’s quicker and easier to simply pick up your friend and literally carry them to the finish.
Is this good game design?
It depends on how much you want your players to hate each other. But it’s not the only way that Nintendo knows of to do co-operative play. Most famously, last year, the world received Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or, as it’s commonly known in some circles, the one redeeming feature of 2020.
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In this title, there’s no competition, no in-fighting, no need for any kind of confrontation. You just wander around and relax together. And it’s wonderful.
This, apparently, is not the kind of experience Nintendo wants for Super Mario multiplayer games. Super Mario 3D World is all about pushing friends and family members to the brink of arguments, even though all they’re doing is playing a game where you dress up like a cat and collect coins.
Is this…fun? Yeeeessss….
As long as you either have the patience of a saint, or the competitive fire of a heartless monster. There is, though, one quick and easy way to avoid all the drama. To avoid the infighting and bickering and arguments over who gets to use the Tanooki suit.
If you’re really not looking for yet another reason to deal with your petty roomates during lockdown….You can just play Bowser’s Fury instead. I personally think it’s pretty telling that Nintendo’s 2021 add-on to 3D World gives you an AI companion in the form of Bowser Jr who will never get mad at you, no matter how many times you screw up!
