I cannot process the volume of information I just saw.
I took up streaming Mario Maker this year (and indeed, I put my entire streaming setup together specifically for Mario Maker). I am not
nearly out of stuff to learn and do just in the existing 2.0 patch, and I'm sitting on multiple unpublished levels that I haven't finished off with the existing toolset.
I am
overwhelmed. Excited, but overwhelmed.
Look, you folks who dropped out of SMM1 by early 2016 have no idea how incredible it became by 2019 once the long-term community settled in. And you folks who drifted off SMM2 after a month, only to come back for Link, then drop out again—you have no idea how good it is this week,
today. After hundreds of hours I'm learning new things about this game every week, faster than I'm able to translate those ideas into completed levels of my own.
Now I'm confident this game will keep me going for as long as I have a functional Switch and the network stays up—or failing that, Mario Maker 4. Because we just practically received Mario Maker 3.
And I'm just talking about the course elements here.
Love the interactivity to the parts, especially all the additions to the perpetually underrated 3DW style. I'm not prolific enough to fill a world map, but some people have already made multi-world Mario games of their own and literally only need to make the map and plug their levels in. I always thought playlist management was the thing this game needed most (string a few challenges together, and assign a certain number of starting lives to make lives meaningful and carefully budgeted again) and I'll have to take a closer look at how well implemented this is. I'd hoped for worlds/playlists to cover collaborative projects from different users, and it looks as though we're not getting that, though I need to watch this again carefully.
Most of all I'm shocked by the turnaround time on this patch. I almost feel like this is too much, too soon—we're only 10 months in and toolkit content is already halting, and there's something profoundly sad about that—but there is
so much to do with all the new elements that, as a player as well as a maker, I fully expect to be hit with new ideas for
years.
*
By the way, for those of you planning to make some new levels this weekend: once the update drops I plan to stream some playtesting sessions
on my channel that will be entirely dedicated to showing off the new parts. Stay tuned—SMM2 Era folks can attest that I tend to give this community an inside lane. (Although I'd also like to spend some time fooling around in the editor again, and lately I haven't had that at all.)
www.mariowiki.com
