I don't think it's hard to come up with scenarios where vaulting would be an easy solution where precisely controlling your movement would lead to better results, lowering the skill floor while keeping the ceiling high.
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GameXplain: 5 Things 2D Mario Can Learn from Super Mario Run
- Thread starter nynt9
- Start date
I don't think it's hard to come up with scenarios where vaulting would be an easy solution where precisely controlling your movement would lead to better results, lowering the skill floor while keeping the ceiling high.
Yeah and I don't like it there either.
Doesn't really matter. Again, it simply dumbs the game down to a point where things that actually require way more skill requires way less skill. That's just style over substance. You can already gracefully leap through a level in the new Mario games if you have the skill to pull it off.
Neoleo2143
Member
The question is that is there even any need to "lower the Skill floor". It seems unnecessary given that NSMBWii sold a stupidly high amount.
Yeah, it actually adds more unnessecary complication more than anything. Keep it simple.
I meant the lowering of the skill floor as a side effect. Having more movement options would lead to more options for traversing a level and thus more interesting platforming, and it would ALSO allow for some less skill intensive options as well. My wife for example can't really beat anything beyond a few easier levels in most Mario games. Clever design can lead people who play with low skill alternatives to slowly check out more complex moves without alienating them with a skill barrier early on in the game.
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
Why add anything ever then? By that standard, the addition of wall jumping, ground pounding, and the in-air spin move already added unnecessary complication
Yeah, this argument of "Mario already has the perfect move set" just ignored he fact that every entry changes the mechanics, adds more moves and things to interact with. Even Mario maker added a bunch of new interactions. So being a purist doesn't really make sense unless one stopped playing the game at an arbitrary point (but even then, if 3 was the cutoff point, were the mechanics added before that game not unnecessary additions by this logic? Was SMB1 the only good game in the series?)
Because these additions lead to things you actually couldn't do before? Auto-vaulting only adds automation and lowering the skill-ceiling for advanced players. Otherwise you can already move through most Mario levels without stopping once because the level design is actually that good. It looks cool, I guess?
You can add a lot of unnessecary stuff to your game. Doesn't mean everything makes sense.
ElectricBlanketFire
Member
I don't want Mario games to cater to people who can't beat more than a few easier levels as the first few Worlds in most of them are already easy enough. My 3-year-old can beat the first few levels in Mario 3D World.
So by that logic were the recent 3D world/land games unplayable to you because of the optional mushroom that makes you invincible, or was it totally optional and harmless to your way of playing?
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
nm
SMW have some of those aspects.
Seems weird to decry Mario daring to not be a "pure platformer"- whatever that means- when the amount of gimmicks they throw into these games nowadays subverts or changes Mario's basic control set anyway. It also seems weird to equate a greater amount of mobility with a decreasing of the skill ceiling. Ignoring whether or not Mario's identity is even predicated on being as hard as possible, the new Rayman games still got hard as fuck regardless of his ability to actually grab ledges for a quick second. Proper game balance and difficulty does not always directly correlate on the simplest, most barebones move set possible.
I agree. Good post. I support having multiple ways of handling problems in games that cater to different play styles, and having more options (some simpler) don't really take away from a game, unless the game's main point is difficulty, which isn't the case for Mario games.
Team Filler
Member
1- I'm not entirely against the idea of ledge grabbing coming over from 3D Mario, but I do think as a mechanic it can break the "flow" of classic 2d Mario gameplay. I am 100% against the auto-vaulting mechanic leaving SMR, it should stay in that series lest you want to lessen that reward-feedback a player gets from the act of making Mario jump.
2- Nintendo's been doing this almost the entire lifetime of the series, I'm all for it continuing.
3- I feel like the lives function works well enough as it is. The bubble function isn't really all that different, and isn't likely to make for less frustration from a player who's stuck. Might be more frustrating, actually, depending on the person.
4- Coins already have a great purpose as a level design tool, and are only meaningless to those who never paid attention. Continues to surprise me with how many people miss things like this.
5- They've already done stuff like this before, I don't see why not again.
2- Nintendo's been doing this almost the entire lifetime of the series, I'm all for it continuing.
3- I feel like the lives function works well enough as it is. The bubble function isn't really all that different, and isn't likely to make for less frustration from a player who's stuck. Might be more frustrating, actually, depending on the person.
4- Coins already have a great purpose as a level design tool, and are only meaningless to those who never paid attention. Continues to surprise me with how many people miss things like this.
5- They've already done stuff like this before, I don't see why not again.
ElectricBlanketFire
Member
If you're an invincible, auto-vaulting Mushroom Kingdom god, what are you playing?
Re: 4: I think most people realize that, but that signposting can be done with non interactive elements as well, and if coins have no meaning beyond signposting, aren't they kind of a bad signpost? If something is collectible, it should have some value, so giving them some purpose would also incentivize players to pay more attention to their signposting as well.
True- coins are good at leading a player and for intrinsically rewarding them sometimes because it "feels nice" to collect them. But when you've got a huge bank of coins, what do you do with them?.....
Hello? This is Hailun!
Member
#1 is needed because the game otherwise has embarrassingly bmbad controls.
#2 was literally the gimmick of SMB USA on the NES.
#2 was literally the gimmick of SMB USA on the NES.
You never have a huge bank of them. You get 100, get a 1Up, and they roll back over to 0.
You missed my point. You say you don't want Mario games to be too easy, but they already contain an invincibility mechanic, so they're already too easy, so your argument against vaulting doesn't hold water, especially vaulting wouldn't necessarily be a net difficulty reduction - it could open up new design ideas especially considering you can high jump off a vault.
Point is, that's not the case in SMR and you don't have lives in SMR either which goes along with the other suggestions and the one about kingdom building.
Team Filler
Member
But when you start adding more import to the coins and make them a more valued commodity to the player, you run the risk of said player feeling forced to redo levels to amass more coins to get the thing they really want (whatever the coins end up being used for). Star Coins already fulfill this purpose better, I think, since there are always only three of them and they are always able to be fully retrieved fully the first time through the level as long as the player is inclined to explore enough.
Above all else you don't want the player to feel like something they're doing is "unfun", and I feel like anything that has a taste of coin grinding could pose that problem.
Above all else you don't want the player to feel like something they're doing is "unfun", and I feel like anything that has a taste of coin grinding could pose that problem.
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
Were Star Bits grinding in Galaxy? It's the same thing
I'm dumb; I'm currently on a Color Splash kick where I'm trying desperately to get rid of coins.
Regardless, this leads into the question of why even have 1Ups anymore? What is the point in arbitrarily limiting the amount of chances a player can attempt a stretch of a level before booting them back to the beginning? With games getting larger and thus being completely impractical to force players to start over from the beginning upon elimination of lives and continues, which in turn has popularized the use autosaving, why have this holdover, especially since any decent player is going to rack up a shitload of lives through the course of a normal playthrough anyway? SMB and Rayman's idea of unlimited tries/checkpoints makes more sense and is easily less frustrating. Don't punish me with having to plod back through parts of a level I've already beaten just because I couldn't get it on x try.
Also this. That was one of the fun things about the Sonic Rivals games-- vaulting over stuff properly and getting a nice speed boost out of it.
ShironRedshift
Member
Agreed with most of these. But for #3, I don't really care about the lives themselves--those don't really matter that much. The better approach would be just letting the player do a hard save after every level, instead of every Castle level, similar to how the 3D series lets you save after every stage/star. The 3D series has from 64 let the player save after every star and not lose any progress if they game over. The 2D series has been much more stubborn about this and just stuck to castles for whatever reason.
For players like me, who kinda suck but want to get better at the series, this sucks. Because like, in NSMBU, I can get to like Frosted Glacier or whatever. But then I lose a few lives getting to the castle just due to stupid mistakes/human error and only have like 2 for the castle itself. The castle level is naturally a step up in difficulty from the others, so I lose my lives as I'm trying to learn it and get a handle on things. But then I'm sent back to the beginning of the world, which I don't actually have any problem with and it just wastes my time having to get back and doesn't help me to actually learn or become better at the things I'm actually having difficulty with because those levels aren't the ones I'm dying on and don't necessarily even have the elements responsible for killing me and just entirely breaks up my flow. So, by the time I get back to the castle, my sense of where exactly the problematic part is is off, I'm just more frustrated from having my time wasted, and there's just no benefit to me. And I just have to get back there and manage to beat it on like 5 lives which doesn't really work that well when you're bad at something and trying to get better since that ain't that many tries.
It's also why I liked NSLU much better than NSMBU. NSLU introduced the character of Nabbit who's invincible to most things that aren't pits/lavas/crush damage and is unable to use power-ups, instead turning any collected power-ups into 1-Ups at the end of the level. Relying on him let me beat it easily, unlike NSMBU. However, since that involves relying on an invincible character, it's naturally very unsatisfying. I still enjoyed going through the game and appreciated the level design and stuff, but it's very unsatisfying knowing that why I was successful was contingent on using an invincible character. I want to get better at playing the game and relying on an invincible character isn't conductive to that and while it does let me beat the game it doesn't help me to become a better player at all, which is what I really want to do and there's just no good option with the way things currently are.
So while having stuff like Nabbit is one option, I'd definitely prefer the 2D series to just adopt that element to the 3D series, and just let players have a hard-save after every level they clear. That will actually allow players like me to get better at the stuff that's actually causing us problems and manage to home in on that stuff instead of having to retread levels that don't have anything to do with anything when we game over and just waste our time.
And of course it's not just players like me that will benefit in that case. Since players will actually be able to hone their skills on stuff that's difficult for them, step-by-step, instead of being thrown back, and Nintendo doesn't have to worry about stuff like that, that will allow them to create more difficult levels for everyone as they'll have to worry less about people getting stuck and having to make sure they're able to do a handful of levels and can focus on making each individual level more difficult.
But, yeah. It's just so weird to me that they got it right their first try in the 3D series but they still keep this structure in the 2D series and aren't willing to let go of it. I don't really get what the point of it is other than punishing people like me who already suck at the series and deter us from actually getting better by making it annoying to get back to the things that give us problems, and an easy thing to fix, so it's definitely the thing about 2D Mario games tha annoys me the most at this point.
For players like me, who kinda suck but want to get better at the series, this sucks. Because like, in NSMBU, I can get to like Frosted Glacier or whatever. But then I lose a few lives getting to the castle just due to stupid mistakes/human error and only have like 2 for the castle itself. The castle level is naturally a step up in difficulty from the others, so I lose my lives as I'm trying to learn it and get a handle on things. But then I'm sent back to the beginning of the world, which I don't actually have any problem with and it just wastes my time having to get back and doesn't help me to actually learn or become better at the things I'm actually having difficulty with because those levels aren't the ones I'm dying on and don't necessarily even have the elements responsible for killing me and just entirely breaks up my flow. So, by the time I get back to the castle, my sense of where exactly the problematic part is is off, I'm just more frustrated from having my time wasted, and there's just no benefit to me. And I just have to get back there and manage to beat it on like 5 lives which doesn't really work that well when you're bad at something and trying to get better since that ain't that many tries.
It's also why I liked NSLU much better than NSMBU. NSLU introduced the character of Nabbit who's invincible to most things that aren't pits/lavas/crush damage and is unable to use power-ups, instead turning any collected power-ups into 1-Ups at the end of the level. Relying on him let me beat it easily, unlike NSMBU. However, since that involves relying on an invincible character, it's naturally very unsatisfying. I still enjoyed going through the game and appreciated the level design and stuff, but it's very unsatisfying knowing that why I was successful was contingent on using an invincible character. I want to get better at playing the game and relying on an invincible character isn't conductive to that and while it does let me beat the game it doesn't help me to become a better player at all, which is what I really want to do and there's just no good option with the way things currently are.
So while having stuff like Nabbit is one option, I'd definitely prefer the 2D series to just adopt that element to the 3D series, and just let players have a hard-save after every level they clear. That will actually allow players like me to get better at the stuff that's actually causing us problems and manage to home in on that stuff instead of having to retread levels that don't have anything to do with anything when we game over and just waste our time.
And of course it's not just players like me that will benefit in that case. Since players will actually be able to hone their skills on stuff that's difficult for them, step-by-step, instead of being thrown back, and Nintendo doesn't have to worry about stuff like that, that will allow them to create more difficult levels for everyone as they'll have to worry less about people getting stuck and having to make sure they're able to do a handful of levels and can focus on making each individual level more difficult.
But, yeah. It's just so weird to me that they got it right their first try in the 3D series but they still keep this structure in the 2D series and aren't willing to let go of it. I don't really get what the point of it is other than punishing people like me who already suck at the series and deter us from actually getting better by making it annoying to get back to the things that give us problems, and an easy thing to fix, so it's definitely the thing about 2D Mario games tha annoys me the most at this point.
Crimson_Echidna
Banned
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
Good post and is pretty much exactly what they said in the video too. Lives and game overs only punish those who aren't good, making them repeat things they've already beaten
I agree that lives are an arbitrary holdover from the games of the past. Taking them out of the recent Mario games would change basically nothing about them. In that case you could maybe get a free power-up when reaching 100 coins.
AuthenticM
Member
I agree!
ShironRedshift
Member
Indeed. Also, coming at this from a different direction: it's become quite a staple in Super Mario Bros. games to have an infinite 1-Up trick, usually not that far into the game. I don't know if it was actually intentional or not in the first game (I'm almost confident they've answered that question in interviews, but I can't remember the answer), but regardless ever since it's been in practically every game in some form or another. And it usually appears in a very similar manner, involving a relatively simple to set up jump on a Koopa Troopa and a staircase of some sort. And Nintendo shows no real signs of ditching that part of the series history.
That being the case, it's very easy to also argue this from the other way around: that it seems like since Nintendo is going to put in an easy way to max out the lives into each of these games anyway, if a player wants to take the two or three minutes it takes to max out the life counter, what's the point of having them at all when Nintendo themselves doesn't seem to take the concept that seriously and undermines the entire concept by keeping those tricks in? If lives are going to be so plentiful and meaningless anyway, what's the point of having them at all? That is, they already have it set up in such a way that it's not hard to get as many lives as you want, it only involves wasting a few minutes on a simple trick every time you need more and being able to endure hearing the 1-Up sound effect over and over again that long, so why not just remove the grind for lives and give players unlimited tries from the start to begin with?
RareFantasy64
Member
I like/love all of it except auto-vaulting. Edge grabbing is fine, but Mario is Jump Man. Platforming is what he is about. Auto-jumping over smaller things feels pointless outside of Super Mario Run
Hello? This is Hailun!
Member
Because they're things already done in other MARIO games?
I don't find those really new, especially
It's definitively already the case for both New Super Mario Bros, Galaxy and 3D World (anyone who has played the last two levels know how different they're played depending on the character)
What? It was already the case on Mario 2 on NES? (for both versions, I think... USA, obviously, but isn't Luigi handling also different in Lost Levels?)
It's definitively already the case for both New Super Mario Bros, Galaxy and 3D World (anyone who has played the last two levels know how different they're played depending on the character)
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
Wut. I think you're confusing your SMBs--Super Meat Boy is about that, Mario definitely isn't, especially in the NSMB games where you have wall-jumps and mid-air spins that make it significantly easier to cross gaps and not die. Not to mention the power-ups where you can literally fly
Is it that hard to watch the video first guys? He mentions SMB2 and then explains we haven't seen that again in a 2D Mario since until Run
1morerobot
Member
Pretty much disagree with all of this.
badcrumble
Member
Best thing about SMR is the three variations of each level for different coin colors, tbh.
As for using coins for something: I say just use them for character unlocks and for, like, switch palaces (but playing through the full game once should generally provide enough coins to unlock everything in the game) so you can broaden your toolset for tackling the remaining challenges.
I kinda disagree with the fundamental assumption that 2D Mario seriously needs fixing.
As for using coins for something: I say just use them for character unlocks and for, like, switch palaces (but playing through the full game once should generally provide enough coins to unlock everything in the game) so you can broaden your toolset for tackling the remaining challenges.
I kinda disagree with the fundamental assumption that 2D Mario seriously needs fixing.
Linkstrikesback
Member
And the grinding for them was one of the worst parts in the game, if you accidentally didn't get enough to unlock the bonus stages that need them.
Nd that's where you're wrong. There are some incredible videos of the Nintendo team playing nsmb perfectly included in the skill videos in the games.
https://youtu.be/alZpmLmhCWc
Skip to 4:40 for one example. Just because it doesn't kill you for failing to do the perfect run doesn't mean it isn't the ultimate goal in the level designs.
Team Filler
Member
No, they aren't the same thing. Nice try though.
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
How aren't they? You had to collect them to unlock parts of the game
Team Filler
Member
And they were a randomly respawning item that you or another player could pick up regardless of mario's location by pointing your wiimote cursor at them. Coins in 2D marios are something to subtly hint at the player things such as to "jump here" or "something is down here if you can reach it". Think about things like coin trails being used in blind jumps and the like.
And to your statement earlier about SMR bringing back different characters in a 2D mario: they were already back before then in NSMB U.
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
Star bits weren't really any more a "randomly respawning item" than coins are. And of course coins (as well as Star Bits) are used as directional aids--there's no reason they can't serve a 2nd purpose much like they used to, with them actually being worth collecting because 1ups used to be hard to come by
You missed the part about having different attributes. And you also couldn't choose characters in single-player
Team Filler
Member
Yes, star bits randomly "respawned" with a few occasionally hitting the planetoids, akin to meteorites crashing into earth. Star bits also served other purposes like being used to stun enemies, and like was said above, yes grinding star bits to unlock things was annoying for some players.
I didn't miss it, the video and you are both either wrong, or you played a different version of NSMB U where Luigi and Nabbit had attributes identical to Mario.
Just because you can play the game in a pixel perfect manner doesn't mean the game was designed to expect that type of play. Super Meat Boy actually requires that level of skill whereas Mario games don't. That you can speedrun a Mario game doesn't mean you need to be a speedrunner to play it. In fact, in a thread where we're discussing adding more play styles to Mario games, this is a perfect demonstration of how that's a good idea.