Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope is the highly-anticipated sequel to the original title in Kingdom Battle. A game that well and truly blew everyone’s minds when it came out because it mixed elements of both the Mario and Rabbids worlds, threw in some XCOM style tactics and RPG elements, gave everyone a gun, and it somehow worked! It had incredible sales, and now that the sequel is coming out next month, fans are eager to find out more about the game and what it will have to offer players from all sides of development. Thankfully, the creative director did an interview to talk about just that.
Davide Soliani wasn’t just the creative director for the game, he was a Nintendo fanboy himself! So doing this game is pretty much a dream come true for him, and thus he and the rest of the dev team are putting everything they have into this to ensure that nothing goes wrong. When the first game came out, he was honestly certain that people would hate it, even telling the team that this “would be their last game”. Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore.
But the nerves are still there, saying that there is “300% pressure” now because they’re making a sequel to a hit game. Yet, they’re not letting that affect them and are doing things that they personally feel need to be done. Including redoing some of the combat in the game and adding in new features to make it truly fresh:
“It doesn’t have to be ‘oh it’s been successful, so let’s build on what we did.’ We always want to create a new experience.”
He went on to label all the things they’ve changed:
“We changed exploration, we changed the combat system, we added a big mechanics in the sparks, we added RPGs elements… we changed so many things that it was quite the effort for everyone.”
Effort indeed. The original title came out in 2017, and it’s been over five years now waiting for the sequel. But the hope for the team is that Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope will be everything that fans have been waiting on, and even more.
Just for some context, the sequel has FOUR TIME the amount of Ubisoft people working on it than the original title. That’s a lot of new people, and showing that Ubisoft has a lot of confidence in what this team is doing and has done.
One final thing he noted was the music of the game, the title will apparently have such epic themes in the game that Soliani noted if they don’t get an award for the music they get, he’ll change his job.
Let’s hope they win the awards then when the game comes out on October 20th!
Source: GameIndustry.Biz
