Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope looks set to be a much more ambitious game than its predecessor, the excellent Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. In a recent interview with the the game’s producer, Xavier Manzanares, he explained that the team have learnt a huge amount since working on the first Mario + Rabbids game with regards to the Snowdrop game engine and the Nintendo Switch systems limitations and what the console can excel at. The latest trailer for Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope shows how much the visuals have improved since the original game launched in 2017. Here’s what Mr. Manzanares had to say:
“We have way more experience first of all in Snowdrop, which is the engine we worked on for the Mario + Rabbids games. Then we also have way more experience on the Switch platform. We know how to work on it even more than we ever did in the past, so basically this has a huge impact on what we managed to do in Sparks of Hope versus what we did in the past with Kingdom Battle.
So for instance, having multiple planets in space and each planet is quite big. We didn’t want to have performance issues, so basically we went on and the scope is way bigger because of that. We have more experience and maturity with the engine and the platform. That’s also explaining the style and artistic direction that we went for with Sparks of Hope, and maybe something that we would not have been able to do in the past in 2017 or before. We’re very proud of what the team managed to do, and between the engineers and the artists, when it comes down to the graphics, it shows the experience and maturity we have in production now.”