Today Nintendo held one of its Direct presentations, this one dedicated to everything Super Mario Maker 2. The company dropped a fair number of details during the 15-minute presentation about what you can expect from the creator suite sequel.

Here are the most important bits: 

Tools & Themes

  • Like the first game, you build your stage stage the ground up with level palettes, foes, and items from the various Mario games.
  • You can modify foes to make them bigger and hide them in blocks.
  • New tools include slopes, the Angry Sun enemy, snake blocks, on/off switch for blocks, seesaws that tilt under the player’s weight, swinging claws Mario can use to swing through the air, water/lava levels, and custom scrolling for sidescrolling levels, Dry Bone shells, Bullet Bills, and new sound effects.
  • New course themes include desert, snow, forest, sky, and day/night, the latter featuring new renditions of classic Mario themes. All themes have modifiers that affect the stage at night, like the ground on the snow theme causing Mario to slip around while the desert theme has a sandstorm that blows Mario back.
  • You can set clear conditions for each level, such as the player obtaining a certain object or amount of coins.
  • While Super Mario Maker 2 includes classic game styles, it also has a new style based on Mario 3D World so you can create 3D stages with unique objects, actions, and characters (like Cat Mario).

Multiplayer & Course World

  • You’ll need a Nintendo Switch Online membership to upload, share, and play others’ courses via Course World. You can browse them by theme, difficulty, recency,  genre, and most popular.
  • In Course World, you can do an endurance run of randomly selected stages global rankings and bragging rights in Endless Challenge mode.
  • Network multiplayer options let you play stages competitively or cooperatively with other players. In both modes, your mission is to get through the course. The Versus mode includes a ranking system.
  • You and a friend can make levels together with another player using the co-op function.
  • There is a local multiplayer option for up to four people.

For more on Super Mario Maker, be sure to check out our review of the original here.