With Super Mario Bros Wonder adding elements like badges to grant abilities, it might seem designed with a casual audience in mind. It turns out that’s accurate. Director Shiro Mouri, in the fourth part of an official Nintendo interview series about the game, mentioned a decided choice to pursue “a casual connection” when it came to the online elements and features like allowing players to ride Yoshi characters selected by other people.

Shiori first explained how the online elements in Super Mario Bros Wonder tie into the idea of building a casual connection, allowing more people to play.

From the initial concept, we wanted to develop a Mario game that's also fun to play online. However, while playing online with people from around the world can be fun, we believe there are also some challenges. For example, in competitive games, more-skilled players can have multiple wins and feel satisfied, while newcomers give up early because they keep losing. In co-op games, those who aren't skilled at games can drag the team down. Also, there's a very small percentage of players who behave inappropriately and cause trouble. I’ve always wanted to create fun online gameplay, free from those sorts of worries. That's how we landed on the key phrase “a casual connection.”

Basically, you can enjoy the game as if you're playing solo. You don’t have to be on standby while you’re matched up with other players; matching takes place automatically behind the scenes during single player, so there’s no waiting around. If someone in the world is playing the same course as you at the same time, you can connect and play online together. And so, we came up with ideas to form this casual connection with players worldwide. We call other online players "live player shadows," and if you greet them, they might greet you back, give you an extra item if they have one, or even help you when you make a mistake. But they can't attack or disturb you. We wanted to create gameplay where only things that benefit the player can happen, and that resulted in the current design.

Yes, we were very conscious of creating a variety of ways to enjoy multiplayer. Not only can you enjoy online multiplayer, but up to four players can play together in local co-op as in the previous titles, and as a new feature of local multiplayer, if someone is playing as Yoshi, you can even ride on their back.

In another one of these interviews, the team talked about how this installment wasn’t influenced by other recent Mario tie-ins. It was specifically said that the Super Mario Bros movie didn’t influence its development and concept.

Super Mario Bros Wonder comes to the Nintendo Switch on October 20, 2023. 

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