Nicola
Titan
Offline
MKDS will never die!
6910 sex records
Italy
Gender: 
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ITEM FREQUENCE AND PLACEMENT
During my races, however, I noticed something very weird: items seem to appear in basically every position. I’ve noticed, for example, the following situations in 12-players races: a Crazy 8 in 2nd; a triple shroom in 3rd; a green shell in the last positions; a golden shroom in 4th.
It might be that this only happens offline, and that online the item balance will be different, but such situations have often immensely helped whoever found such items in high spots - and immensely hurt, instead, whoever found a green shell in the last spots instead of getting much more powerful items. If this is the item balance online too, it will surely greatly affect races in ways I don’t think I can predict.
KARTS, BIKES, QUADS
I’ve thoroughly talked about statistics, but I haven’t talked about what people probably care the most about yet: which is faster, karts or bikes?
Any verdict after only 4 hours is very approximative, but my impression was that the difference isn’t that big speed-wise. Karts generally feel easier to handle than bikes, which, as we already know, can have inward or outward drifting; in either case, their drifts tended to feel different than the most used bikes there were in MKW, so much that I felt like they were an entirely new vehicle category rather than a returning feature from MKW. Bikes with outward drifting gave me the impression that they are difficult to control on many corners, even though they worked well on long and soft corners; inward drifting bikes, instead, seem to take much sharper turns compared to karts, and this might be one of the main differences that will determine whether karts, or bikes, will be more used on certain tracks.
As always, one of the most important factors is the own feeling the player has with every type of vehicle, but what I previously said also applies: with certain combinations, many parts of many tracks became literally impossible to do decently.
Other than karts and bikes, however, we also have a mysterious new vehicle: the quad. I only tried the standard one, with tires that I unfortunately don’t remember (they might have been Monster or Roller tires). I have to say that they gave me a very good impression: I felt like I had even more control than with karts, and I was able to perform well on tracks I was trying for the first time. I think they’ll be an easier to handle version of karts, probably at the cost of other statistics like speed.
CHARACTERS
As we already know, characters are divided into numerous categories of statistics, depending on their weight; they greatly affect the characteristics of the vehicle we’re going to use in races, and they should consequently be treated as parts of our combination themselves. Bowser can’t have the handling and acceleration of Baby Peach; at the same time, Yoshi simply cannot push as hard as Metal Mario does. It will be important to take this into consideration too, and think about what kind of vehicle we want, before selecting our character… or we can simply use the characters we like the most instead, and adapt to their characteristics!
COMBINATIONS THAT WILL BE USED THE MOST ONLINE
Because of what I’ve said so far, I find it impossible to try and predict which combinations will be most used online, also because I haven’t been able to try every part. The fact is, combinations give very different feelings from each other, and it almost feels like playing different games: statistics truly influence what we can and can’t do a lot, and they make us do certain parts of tracks differently depending on what we’re using. I think that, before the MK8 metagame goes into a clear direction, it will be difficult to find out a selection of combinations that will be truly superior to the other ones. We thought speed would have prevailed, but I strongly suspect that, at least initially, it won’t be possible.
AN OBSERVATION ON COMBINATIONS
I would, however, like to specify something very important. I’ve thoroughly thought and discussed with other people about what I’ve written so far; but it might also be possible that, once everybody has access to it, the game will still be exclusively based on speed, or that the selection of characters will still be limited to a determined category. Rather, most likely we will eventually have a clear direction to follow which will determine which combinations and characters to use to use; but personally I think it’s difficult that it’ll be clear what to use from the start, and I believe there will be a lot of experimentation.
Maybe some doubts, like the one about speed, would be resolved by comparing the results of various combinations on Time Trials, but sadly I haven’t had enough time to do extensive research on it… I think, however, that it will be important to do so when the game is out to better understand how important the various statistic are.
GAME MODES
TIME TRIALS. REPLAYS
We spent some time trying to discover everything the Trial Mode has to offer in MK8, and we’ve found out many good things.
First at all, I would immediately like to say something that will make TT players happy: replays finaly have the same point of view of the races again, rather than having the first person view we saw in MK7. But other than this, we will also have some useful tools to study replays more thoroughly.
Do you remember what you can do with the replays of the races on MKTV? You have a slow-mo option, you can make the replay go faster or backwards, or rewind it from the start… all these options will also be available for Time Trials replays. They will most likely be very useful to study strategies and techniques, and will also probably make videos more interesting to watch.
Anyway, we tried to do some races on Time Trials, on Mario Kart Stadium and Mount Wario. On MKS we found ourselves rather comfortable, unsurprisingly, with a full speed set (Morton - Mach 8 - Slicks - Various gliders); on Mount Wario, though, we found out that with sets like Bowser - Mach 8 - Monsters/Rollers - Bowser Plane most turns were still quite tough to take.
Thinking about it, we probably tried to TT on the most particular track in the game, since pretty much all of it is offroad and quite differetn from the other ones… this might also explain why we haven’t managed to get much here
Apart from that, I noticed that with the first set I mentioned (Monsters) it was, for example, pretty much impossible to take the first section turns very sharply, and I always ended up going wide or hitting the walls, losing time in either situation. I would like to try it again with sets that can take those turns sharper, and see if I can manage to get better splits even if they have less speed. As every TT player knows, in fact, taking sharp turns is important at least as much as the raw speed of the vehicle being used…
RANKINGS
What I’ve tried to understand is: how do rankings work in MK8? The only option I found regarding them was on the menu you see after choosing the track to TT on: there is in fact an option called “See ghosts”, which, when chosen, makes the “Downloading ghost data from Miiverse…” line appear. After that, a list of ghosts appears, and some of them have a Miiverse comment next to them.
I hav quoted what the game says for one reason: it seems, in fact, that the ghosts database is connected to Nintendo’s social network! In fact, every time we set a new record, we were asked if we wanted to send it to Miiverse. If we chose Yes, we were also prompted to write a post that would then appear next to the time on the ghosts list.
I don’t know if, by choosing No, you are allowed not to send ghosts to Miiverse and consequently hoard, but one of my friends said that ghosts are uploaded even if you don’t accept to send them to Miiverse, and this option’s only purpose is to publish a comment to show next to the time.
Anyway, I’ve also found out that you can save up to 16 downloaded ghosts on your Wii U (you can download them from the ghosts rankings), and up to 4 for the same track.
I’ve found out something to be confusing: we got 10 ghosts when downloading rankings from Miiverse; occasionally, though, we’ve received 20, too. This made it unclear whether these will be WW Top 10 rankings, or times will instead be downloaded on different criteria. If I remember correctly, however, the first 10 ghosts we received were always the same for any track.
TOURNAMENTS
I tried to explore the rules relative to tournaments, but we already knew most of this information: when creating a tournament, you can choose whether to play on 50cc, 100cc, 150cc or Mirror; you can choose whether to have CPUs, and their difficulty setting, and so on. I’ve also noticed something interesting, though: you can choose to automatically have players switch to different rooms within the same tournament every four races.
I’ve also unfortunately read in the game options that tournaments can be private, but their password will in fact be their code, similar to MK7. This means that tournaments will truly be private only if people keep their code a secret; otherwise, friend rooms might be the only viable option to host private races.
FRIEND ROOMS
In friend rooms, you have to choose your set before creating or entering one. We couldn’t start it because nobody could join us, but we still had the “Start!” option available. It didn’t make the room start, but it still showed us a list of settings for the room once selected. They were more or less the same ones found in tournaments, such as 50cc/100cc/150cc/Mirror and CPU settings. We could also choose how many races to play.
FRAMERATE IN OFFLINE MULTIPLAYER
Bad. Not much else to say… 30 FPS, and frames are sometimes skipped altogether. It will be quite problematic.
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