One of the biggest complaints in the video game community is that certain developers are so driven to get their video game titles out that they’re willing to rush through development. That’s a problem, as it can leave games feeling incomplete, or they can be so rushed that it leaves a ton of bugs and glitches in the title. Nintendo has always been a company that has prioritized a game’s quality over everything else more times than not. That was apparently the case with Super Mario Bros Wonder, as the team wasn’t rushed during the early stages of development.
The revelation came via an interview with Wired, where producer Takashi Tezuka stated how, at the start of the game’s process, there wasn’t a true “release date” attached to the team, so that they didn’t feel the need to rush:
“I wanted to prevent people from saying, ‘We won’t make that deadline, so that’s why we didn’t do it – we can’t do it.'”
When you see how much content is in Super Mario Bros Wonder, and all the new and fresh ideas that make it stand out, you definitely get the feeling that the team took their time and worked out numerous new ideas to see how they would play in this “new setting.” For example, there’s the badge system, which has never been in this version of the franchise. It was in one of the RPG spinoffs but never in the platformers.
The badge system allows you to put a badge on your character and give them special abilities. It can be something like attracting coins, having extra jump power when you do a wall jump, using your hat to glide down the map easier, and more. It’ll be a way to help players view the levels like never before. Plus, since you can only attach one badge at a time, it adds even more strategy to the mix, as you never know what badge might be the most valuable to use until you dive in.
Tezuka noted that the team almost had it where you could do multiple badges simultaneously, but it wouldn’t feel like a “Mario game.” What he did want was for people to try and replay the levels multiple times:
“If someone plays through a course, finishes it, moves on, and never comes back, that makes me a little sad. I really want players to play courses again and again.”
Given the uniqueness of the levels we’ve seen so far, that might happen when the game launches on October 20th.
