Super Mario Odyssey is groundbreaking. As the third in a line of genre-defining platformers, Odyssey manages to make itself stand out from its predecessors in a number of ways: a stellar line-up of expansive worlds, a delightful cast of quirky creatures, a profound depth to its platforming gameplay, and I could go on. With so much to love, it came as quite a surprise when Nintendo dropped another gem as a DLC, the competitive mini-game Luigi's Balloon World. Almost all other genres have found compelling ways to capitalize on competition, but until now platformers haven’t had much success. Odyssey makes a bold move by being one of the first big-budget 3D platformers to try, and actually pulls it off.
The Thrill of the Fight
Many games early on dedicated themselves to either being a multiplayer or single player experience. Designs shifted when games began including both. At first these were pretty basic, like competitive games where you could choose to play against a computer or against another player. However it wasn't long until these competitive games began having distinct single player modes based on completion. So games like Street Fighter, for example, had a discrete single player mode in which you only had to defeat 10 fighters to reach the end. Despite that change I'd argue that competition was still the main driver of most of these games. No matter how sophisticated the single player modes of fighting games became, the competitive community was the bedrock that allowed the titles to reach the heights that they did.
From a development perspective, it became a lot more economical to devote time to the competitive elements of a game rather than the completion elements, because the latter really only offers a discrete amount of playability. Once you beat the number of opponents set out for you, you were done. When you're playing for competitive purposes, you technically have an unlimited amount of opponents, which leads to infinite playability. Of course in practice that isn't so clean cut since developers can add plenty of reasons to replay a completion-based game, and competitive games can only be played until they become boring. This crossed over to shooters as well. Even though the modern shooter originated with single player games like Doom and Wolfenstein, competitive multiplayer now dominates the genre. No matter how much you enjoy the Halo single-player story, the reason the franchise is still around today is its achievements as a multiplayer experience.
A Ledge Too Far
Platforming games have a unique dilemma in introducing competition. These games typically present the player an area to navigate and a goal a reach. So ultimately it's centered around completion. That's not to say there haven't been games with competition, but those aspects aren’t the focus. Like other genres, the competition in platformers is based on your skill at the core concept of a game. Whether it's how good you are at fighting, shooting, platforming, puzzle solving, or moving a ball around a field, the idea is you want to compare your skills head to head. The difference is in the execution. In fighters, shooters, and sports games players can easily serve as replacements for the AI that other players would otherwise be engaging. That doesn't translate to platformers; you aren't engaging an AI, you're navigating a level. So the question is: how do you make that sort of gameplay competitive?
The original answer was a scoring system. This was how most arcade games operated, especially the original platformers. At the time they weren't really completion based; there wasn't a goal in mind to reach, it was simply survival. The original Donkey Kong, Mario's official debut, was a pivotal example of this. Now technically you could "complete" the game, with the game's infamous kill-screen bug at level 22. Even without that the game can't go beyond level 99, as the levels can't increment further. But from a design perspective, the game wasn't about that. The programmers weren't expecting players to get that far; they were expecting them to die. The real motivation behind the game was just seeing how far you could go and how many points you could get, and then being able to add your name to the high score list. This idea of comparing your skills based on some quantity of points was really where platformers started, and stayed for quite a long time. Even Super Mario Bros, the first completion-based game in the franchise, had a points counter, a tradition that kept up throughout the series for quite a long time.
Beyond that solution, most platforming games that have competitive elements don't actually center the competition around the platforming and instead focus on combat. Take Donkey Kong 64 for example, a contemporary of Odyssey's progenitor Super Mario 64, and a personal favorite of mine. The gameplay was highly inventive with a focus on a combination of unique platforming, combat, and picking up a million bananas. It has two multiplayer modes you can unlock, a strange shooter deathmatch akin to GoldenEye, and a sumo-like, ring-out game like Smash Bros. Nothing to do with platforming. As a kid it was unique, but no one would play it with me (for good reason). A more modern example would be Shovel Knight, an indie 2D action-platformer. A multiplayer DLC was made available called Shovel Knight Showdown, where players could compete by fighting each other and collecting gems. No, this doesn't come out of nowhere as half of the game is action based rather than platforming. It's not what we're looking for, but it brings up a good point. It's rare to find a game these days which is pure-platforming. Even Mario has some elements of combat, and that's not an issue. It presents an easier solution to the competition dilemma, and if that makes more sense as a developer then it's fine to go that route. I'm looking for competitive platforming though, so let’s move on.
Now there have been a few games that have tried something more unique. Mirror's Edge was a critically acclaimed 3D platformer that evolved the genre in many ways. It's sequel/reboot, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, attempted to change it in another, adding a multiplayer feature to the game. Players could effectively race each other by leaving checkpoints and paths within the world, a homespun racetrack. The game didn't find much success, but the idea itself was well received. In fact, those same ideas would find themselves appearing in Odyssey, coming out only a year later. More on that in a bit.
The real competition in the platforming community came from speed running. Since the key of speed running is to complete a game or level as fast as possible, platforming, completion-based games are the perfect pairing. Mario itself has been beloved in the community as a benchmark for platformer speed running. As of publishing this article, Super Mario 64 has the highest number of speed runs on speedrun.com, followed by Odyssey itself. So it's obvious there's an audience for competitive platforming, especially in the Mario community. The question is how to deliver a game that is able to capitalize on that.
Finding the Right Tools
A major issue with that audience is that it isn’t large enough to devote an entire game to competitive platforming, at least for Nintendo's standards. Speed-running is a niche community, and Nintendo is a company dedicated to creating games for a wide, family-friendly crowd. So it's a necessity for them to design a game that is able to satisfy multiple segments of their consumer base. Nintendo somewhat accidentally stumbled into an incredible answer to that with the Super Mario Maker series.
The origin of these games, as stated by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, was actually founded on internal tools the Mario team developed for creating other Mario games. As making new Mario side-scrolling platformers became easier, and the tools more accessible, the team felt there was an opportunity to hand these tools over to their audience. Instead of developing levels themselves, they could let the audience develop levels for each other. Millions of players can create way more levels than any single development team can. Also without the limitations of trying to make each level approachable, they could go as wild as they'd like. It was cheap, it was scalable, and most importantly, there was an audience for it.
Creation has been a motivator for a lot of games, and for the biggest game of the last decade, Minecraft. That being the new highest selling game of all time, Nintendo could feel assured that there was a large audience fueled by the desire to create. Super Mario Maker was able to easily tap into that and provide a seemingly limitless garden of innovation. The people who cultivated the garden were the creators. The people who fed off of it were the competitors. The symbiosis between these two motivators, these two audiences, allowed platforming competition to find its way into a big-budget, mainstream game. The success of the Mario Maker series and the introduction of this create/compete relationship was instrumental in allowing for Balloon World, but there was another hurdle.
Mario Maker's success was contingent on the ease of use of the level creation toolset. The 2D Super Mario games were already created with such a toolset in-house, so it wasn't unreasonable to clean that up and present it to their consumers. But 3D Mario games are not made that way. As any game developer will tell you, adding that extra dimension presents a whole new layer of complexity to development. Mario 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, all of these games had unique creation toolsets, and none were simple enough for the average player to create levels with a drag-and-drop editor. So 3D platforming competition needed another breakthrough. This didn’t necessitate crafting a new system from scratch. Rather the secret lay hidden within the truth in how Mario Maker’s system functions. For creation and competition to work together, players don't need to create "levels", they need to create "challenges". A platformer’s challenge is made up of an area and a goal. So if they couldn't have players create the area, they could have players create the goal.
Luigi’s Burst of Genius
In order to implement a functional competitive element into Super Mario Odyssey, Nintendo designed a system where players could create challenges that other players could attempt. So the challenge-creation system was key. Their solution was to meet creators halfway: Players provide the goal, and the game provides the level. So in Balloon World the main game provides distinct worlds to serve as platforming jungle gyms. Those who love providing a challenge can search for places within that arena to place a balloon, a goal. Those who love taking on challenges can hunt down those balloons. It's a lovely game of H-O-R-S-E, akin to the Mario Maker games.
It's also very similar to Mirror's Edge Catalyst. The core, completion-based game provides an arena for the competition to happen. But wait a minute, if Mirror's Edge already kinda did this, why is Balloon World so much more successful? The easy answer is just to say that Catalyst's main game wasn't well received, so the side content like multiplayer options weren't poised to receive much attention. From a design perspective though, I found two very interesting differences that make Odyssey vastly superior.
First, Mirror's Edge fails to deliver a satisfying platforming arena. Game Maker's Toolkit did a great video on why the open world didn't work, which you can check out here. But basically Catalyst's City of Glass is a bleak, sprawling map, filled with relatively linear tracks of platforming. It's a weird halfway point between the linear levels provided in the main missions, and a true platforming open world. Odyssey in comparison has 13 unique worlds densely packed with platforming possibilities. These in turn provide plenty of variety in challenges, which make the multiplayer a lot more scalable and interesting. Additionally, in Catalyst's core game the open world doesn't really serve that much of a purpose aside from being a hub to reach the main missions and a space for some unsatisfying side quests. Players aren't trained to understand the City of Glass, so don't have enough skill to satisfyingly play the multiplayer. Odyssey on the other hand makes sure that players are familiar with its maps. You're only allowed access to Balloon World after you've completed the main story and have played around in all the relevant areas. So once Balloon World comes along players have already climbed up a bit of the learning curve, making the multiplayer mode all the more approachable.
The other issue is how the competition is incentivized. In Mirror's Edge, the multiplayer doesn't really do much to connect to the game, aside from taking place in the main game's world. DICE, the game's developer, has said that they hoped it could be used to highlight Easter Eggs or help players learn the map better. But as I've mentioned, since the main game doesn't really necessitate those things, it's not really helpful. Mario Odyssey does the same, but it is a lot more useful since platforming in those worlds actually will help you in the main game. But on top of that there's a system of rewarding players for placing and popping Balloons by giving them coins. Those coins are sort of helpful in the main game, but are more so helpful in buying cool outfits for Mario to wear. It's pretty simple, but it does push players to participate in the multiplayer successfully. This system also helps create tiers within Balloon World, so lower skilled players aren’t frightened off by difficult Balloons. The harder a balloon is to pop, the higher the reward and the higher the risk (you have to pay coin to challenge balloons). So less skilled balloon hiders aren't discouraged too much since high skilled players are incentivized to go after higher reward balloons. On the other hand less skilled balloon poppers have some easier balloons to run after that they can afford to spend time and coins on. Catalyst's system isn't nearly so sophisticated, and not designed in a way that encourages players to take part regardless of skill. Therefore it couldn’t sustain nearly the volume of players that Balloon World can.
A World of Possibilities
Competition in platforming isn't likely to blow up post Odyssey’s take on it. As well implemented as it is, I can't envision that sort of gameplay becoming as prolific as competitive shooters, fighters, or sports games; it’s just not e-sports material. However, it does demonstrate that there’s lots of opportunities for innovation within more traditional platformers to experiment with competitive elements. Nintendo proves that by thinking outside the box a little bit, those features can yield some great results. Odyssey, on its own, was a very good game, but the Balloon World expansion was able to help it out in a number of key ways. As it becomes available after players complete the main story, Balloon World provides a second wind of fresh air and encourages players to stick with the game. Its coin system ties it into the post-game content, and keeps players invested in the game overall for much longer than the core game itself could. Additionally, the competitive and creative elements of the system are able to tap into new audiences who may not be as interested in the completionist aspects of the main game's content. At this moment, it sets the new standard for how good competitive platforming can be, and exemplifies how it can help out any game franchise.
Ultimately, in creating a solution for competitive platforming game developers should look at Nintendo's priorities. For them it was important that the system they implemented was economical, captured a wide enough audience, and was scalable to last a long time. These benchmarks are important for all game designers, perhaps to varying degrees. A more indie developer can make a game that's more niche. A larger studio could sink more money into solving this problem. Nintendo's creation-competition system was clever, but I don't think it's necessary for everyone. There are a couple of lessons can be learned from Odyssey regardless of a developer's priorities. First, consider how the competitive element fits into the game. If the competition is secondary, as it is in Odyssey and Catalyst, then prioritize the core game's design needs. Second, make sure competitive play matches the core game. The gameplay and the arena should be familiar, players shouldn't feel like they have to relearn everything. And lastly, incentivize participation. Playing competitively could just make players better at the core game, or it could deliver tangible rewards. There's a lot of room for creativity here, and I look forward to seeing what the industry can build. Perhaps Nintendo will continue to evolve Mario games to sit alongside Mario Maker and Odyssey. Mirror’s Edge had lots of potential; maybe DICE will take another crack at that. And the indie scene is booming with creativity, no doubt they’ll have some unique ideas. I'm sure that plenty of developers will continue picking at the issue, and eventually another one will hit gold.
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