After 3 years of quite intensive work on Mario + Rabbids that kept me pretty far from this blog – I admit it – I wanted for once not to talk about the work of others but my own experience. Especially from this moment on, as a designer, you have to be able to turn a single player game into a multiplayer PvP game. SO here is a Small chronicle of an absolutely fascinating work of precision.

I will not discuss the final quality of the game here – I will let you be the judge of that. Instead I will just explain the decisions the team made to solve a number of design problems when it became necessary to create the PvP mode. This experience has allowed me to better understand a number of elements that I would like to share with the greatest number of interested people. In addition, I must advise you to read the articles by David Sirlin or Keith Burgun who theorize all this, probably much better than me.

You should know that Mario + Rabbids’ first design was not meant to be a « Player vs. Player » game but rather a solo experience guided by a story, turn-based tactical fights and some exploration and puzzle resolutions. Of course, since the beginning of the project, the team has not stopped dreaming of a PvP mode but priority was always to achieve the best solo experience as imagined at the start.

Switching from solo to competitive multiplayer may seem obvious for a game like M + R: KB but in reality the story was different. When we were able to embark on the adventure of this development, the design hurdles soon smothered our initial enthusiasm! Before speaking concretely about our concerns, I must outline to you the qualities that a modern multiplayer game must absolutely possess.

Replayability

The first big divergence from a solo adventure is at the level of replayability. Despite all the replayability you can imagine, a solo adventure is meant to be finished. I have no doubt about the tremendous motivation that some players may have to do and redo their favorite game, or the overflowing imagination of game creators who rely more and more on the emergence created by increasingly complex systems to constantly renew an adventure, but the DNA of a solo adventure is to be finished after a certain number of hours of play. The opposite is true for a multiplayer PvP game which must be replayable endlessly and which should, at least theoretically, have the ambition to be played by you all your life. For that, you have to make sure that even after thousands of games, the game will continue to create new scenarios like the professional football games that still generate so many passions week after week.

The Good Dose of Predictability

In my opinion, this is the hardest thing to get right in a PvP game. Players must be able to anticipate the actions of their opponent but without being able to guess them completely. If players cannot anticipate what their opponent will do, they will soon feel like they are playing a game based on luck or chaos, and that their decisions are not important enough in the final outcome. If, on the contrary, the players are able to perfectly anticipate the future movements of their opponent, they will optimize their turns so much that the two players will end up creating only one scenario and repeating it game after game. For techies, that’s what happens when you play the Checkers game against a super advanced artificial intelligence. The machine knows all possible scenarios and always make the best possible move in response to your turn. The issue is to find a fair and fragile balance. Give players enough to make informed decisions but at the same time make sure there are enough elements of surprise that players cannot be completely sure they have taken the right decision.

Catch-up

For a game to be interesting, the two players must believe as long as possible that they still have a chance to win. This does not mean that the game should give an advantage to the player who is losing. Rather, it should make sure that the one who is winning is not going to use his advantage to increase his lead and create a snowball effect. Tennis rules are really well designed for this purpose. Even if you’re winning the game 6/0 ; 6/0 ; 5/0 ; 40/0, the next point will be as hard to win as the last one, or even the first one.

In the most extreme of situations, we can imagine giving a little help to the loser to promote a start of recovery … But no more. When you imagine such processes, it is very important that they are an integral part of the game system and not an extra layer that the players might consider superficial.

Pace

A multiplayer turn-based game must be relevant to both players, regardless of the duration of the game, during your turn as well as your opponent’s turn. This is quite obvious with a single player game (clearly, the player should be concerned by all the actions that occur the game) but it is a little less so with a turn-based PvP game. For those who play board games, I’m pretty sure you’ve all experienced this moment of loneliness when your opponent takes too much time to play his turn. The more patient ones can begin to wander and have their mind focus on other things, and for those in a hurry, this is a reason to stop playing.

Worries about Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

If I chose to address these four topics above (Replayability, Predictability, Catch-Up and Pace), it is also because I consider that our turn structure in the solo mode worked less well in these four areas in a PvP mode. The turn structure of the single player game is designed to let the player perform all his actions before leaving the turn to the enemy faction. In PvP mode, a player controls three characters who each have a potential of three actions (Movement, Attack, Technique), for a total of nine potential actions per turn.

Pace : This structure gave rise to too long turns on the part of each player and therefore games with a poor pace.

Predictability and Replayability: Quite paradoxically, by letting the players play their turn in full, the game made it much easier to anticipate the next moves of the opponent. It may sound weird but it was all the easier to know which was the best first round. After a few games, we could even quickly understand how to respond ideally to this best first round. Then in the end, for the two players learned by heart which were the best moves to make for a given map. In contrast, the Super Effects, intended to introduce a little chaos and variety game after game, was a huge source of frustration. The chances of triggering a Super Effect were so « In Your Face » that you felt like you were unlucky but did not really have the chance to deal with it.

Catch-Up: As soon as a player lost a character, the number of actions of his entire turn was reduced by 33%, further increasing the chances of the opponent winning the final victory and thus reducing the chances of a comeback.

The Turn Structure in Three Actions

Based on these facts, the first modification we made was to change the structure of a player’s turn. Instead of letting each player play all his actions during a turn, we decided to limit the turn to three actions only. However he could freely choose his three actions out of nine possible. He could very well decide to move his three characters or to move a character, attack with another one and finally to realize the technique of the third one or to play only one character to make a movement, an attack then a technique.

Pace: It’s pretty clear that playing three actions instead of nine would speed up game turns and keep players interested when wasn’t their turn. Also, this has greatly reduced the duration of a game.

Predictability and Replayability: Surprisingly enough, limiting a player’s turn made it much more difficult to read the choices she would make in the next turn. I still do not know if this is the right amount of predictability, but for sure, we have gained a lot of replayability. Similarly, Super Effects became much less exploitable and the frustration it could generate was greatly reduced.

Catch-Up: It became possible to stage a come back with the two players keeping the same number of actions throughout the game. The first player to lose a character was no longer systematically condemned as before.

New problems to solve

The benefits of this structure in three actions per turn are thus numerous. But for all that, they were also disadvantages. One of the strong concepts of M + R: KB has always been to create synergies between movements, attacks and techniques. Letting a player play all his actions during his turn greatly increased the chances of creating synergies. It appeared relatively quickly that this new structure in three actions would, conversely, reduce the synergies tremendously. And these were synergies we placed at the heart of the gameplay and that gave all the flavor to our game.

Items Boxes

However, we had never considered making a PvP mode with the Nintendo characters, without using the bonus boxes found in Mario Kart. It was obvious and we saw the opportunity to solve our problem regarding the synergies of action. Quickly, these bonuses became free action to obtain additional actions. Admittedly, they have again extended the duration of a game but they struck us as a good compromise. As the techniques became hard to use effectively, we added some bonuses that could take over. For example, Mario’s M-Power was often used only for Mario, Luigi’s Itchy Feet was often used only for Luigi, and so on. By adding bonuses like « DamageX2 » or « Boost Movement » all characters were much more likely to enjoy their effects.

From that moment, the game really began to take shape and become exciting. The games between the members of the team took the shape of fierce competition, with each player wanting to avoid the humiliation of the defeat.

Yet the challenge was far from over. While we were delighted with the new form that the PvP mode was taking, it was now necessary to transmit to the players these new rules, make sure they were understandable by everyone, and ensure we hadn’t added too many layers of complexity which could have confused our players. This required massive work on the interface, work that questioned a lot our fundamentals created for the solo mode. The idea of ​​tickets to signify actions completely changed our approach and allowed us to find convincing solutions. Unfortunately, I cannot give you as much detail on this step because I didn’t follow it in its entirety.

I would not claim that M + R: KB has morphed with complete success from a single player game to a PvP game, there are still some flaws. However, if I have to take stock of this transformation, it remains extremely positive. We started from a material that did not work naturally in PvP mode, and we managed to shape it to create a third game mode totally different (the second one is The Coop Mode) in just a few months. If you have the opportunity to test this mode of Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, do not hesitate to give me your opinion. I sincerely hope you will enjoy it!