Mario Kart 8 GDC 2014 Roundtable Interview Round-Up

“I think we’re going to be able to answer that feeling of, ‘I don’t want to race with items.’ Well, OK, then no items.”

☆ NintendObs Weekly – Monday, March 31, 2014 – Sunday, April 6, 2014.

We’re working with HD for the first time, and we really wanted to take advantage of that. The last console version was Mario Kart Wii, which was released in 2008, so it was about six years ago. And during those six years, we were able to incorporate a lot of technology in our development process, but especially on the graphics side. So we put a lot of effort into making this a good looking game–it’s a very pretty game.

This time with the power of the Wii U we really made an effort to keep that graphic quality high regardless of how many ways we were splitting the TV into.

 

— Hideki Konno,
Mario Kart 8 Producer
Source: GameSpot.

 

[We were able to harness the power of the Wii U to get a huge polygon count, and we were able to make courses that involved a lot of undulating, moving surfaces. We’ve also done a lot of work with the character animations. If you look at Mario and the Koopalings and all the characters, you’re seeing a level and range of animation that you’ve never seen before.]

We’ve also been able to show movement on the [karts and bikes] that we haven’t seen before. We’re seeing bounding, we’re seeing different parts of the kart move, we’re seeing dirt on the tires, we’re seeing skidmarks left on the course–again I think we’ve done a good job of utilizing that graphical power.

Using the power of the Wii U, we were able to create a Mario Kart title that feels right, and the controls feel like they’re perfect for this game.

 

— Kosuke Yabuki,
Mario Kart 8 Director
Source: [GameSpot], GameSpot.

Rainbow Road of course is a classic course. This time we actually grabbed Rainbow Road N64 version in addition to the current iteration of Rainbow Road. So we hope you look forward to racing on both of those courses.

One thing I do want to mention is Rainbow Road, that final course. We really want you to look forward to what we’ve done to it this time because it’s something else. It’s really spectacular.

 

— Kosuke Yabuki,
Mario Kart 8 Director
Source: GameSpot.

 

We really wanted this game to be a representation of all the games that came before it. We wanted to summarize and bring together all the elements of the series into this title.

The race courses themselves is one of the most important–if not the most important elements–in the series, so with Mario Kart 8 we really wanted to divide up the things we could do and make sure we’re really using them effectively. So we have underwater sessions, we have flying sessions, we have anti-grav sessions, and we use all of these in a way to create really interesting and fun to drive on courses.

 

— Hideki Konno
Mario Kart 8 Producer
Source: GameSpot.

When you look traditionally at Mario Kart, colliding with other characters was not something you wanted to do. The risks outweighed any benefits you might get from doing that. However, the boost that you get when colliding with a character in an anti-grav section of a course alters that whole paradigm. So you may see some new strategies come out of this that even we aren’t aware of. For example, you may see some folks that may be a little down in the pack actually run into each other on purpose to give them a little extra speed so they can close the gap with whoever is in first.

One thing that’s always happened with previous Mario Karts is that if you’re using a light character and you bump into a heavy character you were at a disadvantage. However, with the anti-grav section, even the lighter characters will be able to strategise using the anti-grav sections to stay level, or even gain the advantage in collisions, even if you are a lighter character.

 

— Hideki Konno,
Mario Kart 8 Producer
Source: GameSpot.

 

Some of the things you’ll see in courses is anti-gravity being given to players as an option. You’re driving on a course and now the course branches off, and you can either continue driving on the ground or go on anti-grav route and go up on the wall. With the addition of the anti-grav feature, we’ve been able to create course designs that fundamentally alter the strategy and give players more options when racing.

 

— Kosuke Yabuki,
Mario Kart 8 Director
Source: GameSpot.

There was some item customization in Mario Kart 7, in that you could choose to have a mushroom-only race or shell-only race. We’re going to have that plus a little bit more, actually, in Mario Kart 8.

I think we’re going to be able to answer that feeling of, ‘I don’t want to race with items.’ Well, OK, then no items. Or, ‘I only want to have bananas.’ Well, OK. I think we’re going to be able to provide a system to answer that desire this time around.

 

— Kosuke Yabuki,
Mario Kart 8 Director
Source: IGN.

 

We’re going to have some rule customization for folks who want to be able to go in and set that up for themselves.

Game balance is a really important element of Mario Kart that we look very, very closely at and place a lot of value on. I think that item balance, from the time we start working on development, a thousand times, maybe even tens of thousands of times, we adjust that balance while we’re playing. At the end, we come up with what we hope or feel is a really good balance. It’s our strong hope that folks would want to play with the items as we have balanced them.

[We do hear, and a lot of people out there say it, that Mario Kart is all about luck. That if you’re at the front then you’ll get hit with a blue shell, so it’s all about luck.] That feature is not random. It just doesn’t happen. There is a lot of adjustment, and there is a lot of thought and effort put into that system and developing it in a way that actually promotes game balance. So I would hope people would understand that as well.

One of the things we actually hope for is that if you’re just playing on an off day, and you’ve lost a race or two. We hope that you step away going, ‘Oh well, I just didn’t feel it today. My luck wasn’t with me. Whatever the cause, it just wasn’t my day, but I’m going to come back and play again.’ And that’s sort of what we’re aiming for. We want people to feel that way when they step away, that they want to come back.

 

— Hideki Konno,
Mario Kart 8 Producer
Source: IGN, [GameSpot].

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