The limited amount of item customization seen in Mario Kart 7 will be expanded in the upcoming Wii U sequel, Mario Kart 8 , according to director Kosuke Yabuki.

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"There was some item customization in Mario Kart 7, in that you could choose to have a mushroom-only race or shell-only race. We're going to have that plus a little bit more, actually, in Mario Kart 8," Yabuki said during a roundtable interview at GDC last month."I think we're going to be able to answer that feeling of, 'I don't want to race with items.' Well, OK, then no items. Or, 'I only want to have bananas.' Well, OK. I think we're going to be able to provide a system to answer that desire this time around."Mario Kart 8 producer Hideki Konno reiterated what Yabuki said without sharing any specifics, stating, "We're going to have some rule customization for folks who want to be able to go in and set that up for themselves." But he also stressed that a lot of thought goes into what items are available to players by default."Game balance is a really important element of Mario Kart that we look very, very closely at and place a lot of value on," Konno explained. "I think that item balance, from the time we start working on development, a thousand times, maybe even tens of thousands of times, we adjust that balance while we're playing. At the end, we come up with what we hope or feel is a really good balance. It's our strong hope that folks would want to play with the items as we have balanced them."The Mario Kart team is aware that some people claim that winning in Mario Kart, thanks to items like the notorious Blue Shell that seeks out the player in first place, is all about luck. However, Konno claims there is more thought that goes in to things like the Blue Shell than people may realize."That feature is not random. It just doesn't happen," he said. "There is a lot of adjustment, and there is a lot of thought and effort put into that system and developing it in a way that actually promotes game balance. So I would hope people would understand that as well."One of the things we actually hope for is that if you're just playing on an off day, and you've lost a race or two. We hope that you step away going, 'Oh well, I just didn't feel it today. My luck wasn't with me. Whatever the cause, it just wasn't my day, but I'm going to come back and play again.' And that's sort of what we're aiming for. We want people to feel that way when they step away, that they want to come back."Mario Kart 8 will be released on May 30. For more on the game, check out IGN's latest preview coverage

Chris Pereira is a freelance writer who spends his spare time agonizing over the final seasons of The X-Files. Check out what he's saying on Twitter and follow him on IGN Jose Otero is an Associate Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat . You can follow him on Twitter