Mario + Rabbids dev on lack of online co-op, scrapped fumble mechanic

A number of media outlets recently went hands-on with the new Donkey Kong DLC for Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. YouTuber AbdallahSmash026 was among them, and was also able to chat with lead developer Xavier Manzanares.

One of the topics discussed is multiplayer. While you can play with a friend locally, online isn’t supported.

Manzanares explained why the team decided to focus on couch co-op:

“So basically, when we started to work on the game – and I guess it could be the same for other games as well – we have to think about the scope and what we want to do. From the very beginning, we wanted to do co-op because we felt the turn-based aspects multiplayer would be very cool because you could help me and I could help you. We didn’t know how people would react to the turn-based tactics. Would it be accessible enough? And co-op was one of the answers – this could be interesting.

So from the very beginning, and for us Switch was a platform where you could play wherever you want, and having the ability to play with this little screen for example on wherever you want, with the controllers locally, was good already… so we focused so much of our attention on that, that we didn’t design or focus on anything that is online because online brings new elements that you need to think of, new challenges. It’s not just putting it online, it’s about how do you communicate, what do you indicate, how fun it is to be afar. What is fun when you play co-op on the couch is to see the reaction of the other guy… so it’s different, and at the very beginning we decided to really focus our attention on local play.”

Also during the interview, Manzanares elaborated on the scrapped fumble mechanic. We heard about this briefly last year, but Manzanares now went into much more detail about what the team had planned.

He shared the following:

“Maybe the one I remember the most – because today I still wonder – we had in fights what we called fumble. You could fumble during the combat. Basically your weapon could turn against you – a percentage of chance. So for example you’re aiming at someone far, and your weapon is really strong, but because it was very strong, the possibility that it shoots you instead is high as well. We had a lot of elements around this, it was also for example you could add that to the super effects. So burn, push, bounce – the weapon just explodes, and then you get yourself bounced or pushed. And then it became even in strategy, some of our weapons at that time had a very low percentage of damage in terms of the damage output and critical, but high possibility of exploding. It’s cool because for example in PvP, you could use this as a way to get out of a situation… So it started to be really complex, but really cool, but at the same time, is it cool? … We put that out, but it took very months to decide to do this.”

You can watch the full interview with Manzanares below.