Mario + Rabbids creative director Davide Soliani says the best compliment he’s ever received for Kingdom Battle was that it helped someone fall in love with more tactical games.
“We tried to get people to enjoy tactical games, even if they were afraid of it at first [trying them.] We made it more lively, almost therapeutic, and more attractive.”
And now, with sparks of hope on the horizon, he wants to open the doors even wider. Soliani wants Sparks of Hope to remain a gateway to the genre for new players, but also to challenge those who have grown up to be experts at getting tactics right.
The most obvious way the Sparks of Hope team accomplishes this is the difficulty levels. After the tutorial, Beep-0 roughly asks the player how hard they think their task will be, and invites them to select an easy, normal, or expert difficulty that can be modified back into the list at any time.
But there are other, smaller ways in which Sparks of Hope summons difficulty is somewhat more customizable. As we indicated in our preview, it’s easier to grind levels with all the enemies roaming around the map, side secrets and secrets, so if you’re struggling with a fighting story, there are ways to move forward. But you’re also more than free to charge through the story for a more challenging experience, and to come back to additional missions you’re interested in later.
Soliani says the difficulty systems were at least partly inspired by his love of indie platformer darling Celeste, which is notoriously difficult but also includes a number of options to turn on and off specific challenge elements, including the ability to make only the hero, Madeline, invincible.
“I think in the past I talked to people who had a child and they were playing the game together,” says Soliani. And sometimes it was hard for them to progress. And then I say, “Okay, but if someone wants to enjoy the game just for the sake of the narrative, why not?” For that day, by acting on the difficulty level, you can also be invulnerable and do the whole game and join the The narrative, the visuals, and the humor are unchallenged.”
But at the same time, he adds, a lot of people already in the Mario + Rabbids community have given feedback that the game should be more challenging. So Soliani and Ubisoft also committed them.
“I think you can really customize the experience of this kind of game around what kind of player you are. So we said we should really open up to our player and make sure they can enjoy the game as much as they want. mechanism “.
We still have to see exactly how wild this challenge can go, but we were able to explore some of Sparks of Hope’s broader tactical possibilities in the game preview. You can also watch more of our interview with Soliani, including why the Rabbids are talking now, and what Soliani (as a fan) wants Nintendo (as a fan) to add to Mario + Rabbids in the future.
Rebecca Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find it on Twitter Tweet embed.