 So Mario Plus Rabbids Kingdom Battle is the game we just announced, we're super happy we were announcing the game yesterday at the conference and since then we start to show a bit of the gameplay so we're super happy to show today more of the basics and combat basics exploration and so that's what we're going to do and in terms of the game itself so what happened is the rabbits have just been teleporting to the kingdom. A twisted version of the mushroom kingdom. Yeah and it changed completely the kingdom in itself by twisting it so you'll have a lot of surprises and elements in the environment but basically Mario doesn't know anything about the rabbits when the game starts so we're still at the beginning of the game here but basically that's when things start to go a bit crazy with twisted elements. We even have this plant here that's a bit special. So yes we tried to recreate a very immersive world by using the misproportion so you feel that you are small and in a huge environment which is enveloping you and everything around you is animated like for example this plant it's incredible because it's animated by hand and it's following the music of Grand Kirikop which is the composer of the game so it's one of the things that I love about this game. It's part of things that Mr. Miyamoto, Nintendo and us as well, Ubisoft wanted to see as well in terms of details, things that we wanted to play with so yeah let's go and a big part of the game as well as the combat itself. And when the players see those enemy flags in front of them they know that they are about to play in a fight. Before we go in actually there are a couple interesting characters that's following Mario. Let's talk about them a little bit. Yeah so aside the big goomba that has been almost played with because of the rabbits and stuff for the characters and the heroes themselves so we have Mario of course he's a true hero he's a fighter-like character in combat as well so he's really strong almost everywhere but he also have a rabbit peach she's a hot tempered quite fun of Mario but hot tempered rabbit and a very strong personality as well and rabbit Luigi the third one he's a wizard-like type of character he's really clumsy naive but at the same time he's quite dangerous in combat and as the game progresses as well so yeah it's a it's a nice cast and this cast is the beginning cast so as you'll progress into the game you'll unlock new heroes so you don't unlock the heroes at the beginning you unlock them throughout the adventure. Now can we say what other characters there will be in the game as well? Sure absolutely so the player will control eight heroes we could we'd be able to choose between eight heroes at the end so that would be the player's roster and we really wanted to play around this contrast between Mario character and the rabbits one like in order to create the humor so if there is something that the rabbits learn from Mario throughout the game is how to become heroes and Mario loves how to crack the joke so we go for the fight yeah let's do it let's do it yeah definitely all right so you switch from exploration mode to battle mode this way so basically when you see those two flags you switch to battle mode and you don't control anymore directly your characters you control Bipo a little cursor you see in front and this little guy in fact is telling you you can tell him where to go and the characters will follow so that's a big difference between the two and for us it was a good match you know between exploration and combat in terms of the feeling we have so let's go. So as soon as you start the combat a fly cam is showing you the battleground but you can always use the tactical which is a tool that will let the player observe the surrounding to decide what to do the best move take and as you can see in the top right part of the stream the mission objective it's a rich area so it's not really important to defeat the enemy there but to really decide the best way possible way to arrive directly at the objective so the player will have two choices directly in front of the enemy that seems a little bit risky or moving a little bit on the right to use the cover and being protected by the attack of the rabbits so what you see right now is Xavier which is controlling the heroes in this case we each heroes can perform three different type of action as we are quite early in the game right now we have only movement and attack later on there will be techniques which is way more let's say an indirect way to deal with an enemy and it's more magical but the blue line is defining where the characters can move and in this case Xavier could for example go behind the cover in order to be alpha protected or just go in front of them so as soon as you press the character moves and like David said we can attack but it will show first the movement phase itself you can do whatever you want you can move first attack then it's up to you to decide in fact you you can advance towards another corner such for example as a rabbit region is doing or even better you can move the cursor behind one of your teammate in order to activate what we call the teen jump the teen jump is expanding your area of movement allowing you to go much further than your normal area of movement right and this is also allowing you to feel the gaps such as the small river that you can see in front of you after that you you can choose but there is no sequence like exactly so basically here we just finished the movement phase and now we can see in this fight that the enemies are positioned in a way to zerg you they called ziggies those guys are don't have a lot of life points but they're really they dash you all the time so it's good that i'm on the other side with mario thanks to the team jump so when you're ready you press a you attack and what you may have seen just over the the enemy is the percentage hit percentage so 100 percent means 100 percent chance to hit if they are behind a half cover full cover it changes so we'll see that just later on so i'll continue with the uh the attack here and even defeat the enemy in the process he's zapped out and in terms of story basically they're not dying uh they're going back to the hub as white rabbits so we're actually saving the rabbits here that's great then you feel good about the yeah absolutely that's the whole point because they i don't want to spoil too much about the story but they have been controlled by a force and by defeating them you are removing this force from them and they are part of the gameplay look look of the the players because they will go back to the pitch castle and the more you free them the more they will build the structure that will help the player throughout their adventure so we saw there mario was attacked but he's behind a full cover so the enemy had zero percent chance of hitting him but the cover did take damage i noticed so exactly so we um it's actually something really important in the combat itself um they are actually a side one that we have later in the game no cover that is really infinite like they have this amount of damage and if they uh get destroyed you don't have any cover anymore to defend yourself so for example here if i go and attack this enemy i know i'm not gonna hit it zero percent chance but i just to show you the the damage on the cover itself this is a wood cover so in two hits it's going to be destroyed and the one you see here next to rabid luigi is a brick uh cover so this one is a bit more tough so three hits so basically that's really important in the game itself to use this the enemies will do it you will do it so and this is cool because uh you can also use interactive element in the battleground such as the rabid's pipe the rabid's pipe really helps you to go in other places where you couldn't reach just with your aerial movement so when you use that tactic and spot those pipes and you know use that to plan out your strategy so that's why the observation part it's important and we gave this tool to the player in order to really study if they want to the battleground definitely it does count for you you do have to explore a bit to really figure out that turn based strategy and find out what the best advantages you have especially in this new level of environment that you're encountering exactly here you know it's uh even we showed some gameplay yesterday uh at the conference it was uh justified after this one is before like david was saying we don't even have the techniques but one thing here that is really important for us in terms of design and philosophy was you see the water uh this is creating a gap so it teaches you to use team jump a lot but the enemies do not use team jump those guys are dashers you don't have glow trodder go towards the second archetype we have they do team jumps but here we really want to show the player like hey you can protect yourself uh they will dash you eventually because they will take the pipe by the end of the map trying to rush you but it depends because according to where to you are in the fight we never know what the enemies can do but they should do that in this map because again we want to teach you this is the way you can play as well you can reach um you know bigger zones and reach new areas but also you can go over gaps like water and this is quite cool and later in the game you'll even have a height so if you go up there you have an advantage in terms of damage so it starts to build up you know we start to put the ingredients together and this map is 30 minutes into the game so it's really a good map to start to get those things and yeah the players are still learning here so it's really up to them where to move they want to go directly against the enemy and risking to be dashed but they maybe could arrive at the objective sooner or they want to take maybe a more safer route like the one we are taking right now because we are moving helping each other uh using the protection of the course right and you had mentioned earlier the objective for this battle is really to get to this final checkpoint yeah there are different different battles where you actually have to defeat all the enemies so here it's a tricky map of course we're playing we know pretty much the map but for the player it's going to be a first tricky map because they could take this as oh we like to defeat all the enemies but the issue is that we have a lot of respawn and the more you wait the more more enemies will spawn and it's going to be very complicated so here it's a reach objective you need to reach when your character needs to be in the zone and this is something key for the players to do and then we have multiple enemy objectives we have defeat defeat all defeat this type of enemy uh reach escort and those type of objectives throughout the game uh to really challenge the player again to do the right decision when it matters so rabbit luigi is really close now he's not close enough because we met it to arrive at the mission objective and definitely there's something that you that we've never seen before really with mario and he's pairing up with the smash up but also you know we have uh you know mario for the first time you're really using a weapon a projectile weapon and uh yeah yeah you know mario has never been afraid to take whatever power ups are you know available to him so it's cool to see these new types of weapons that he can play with he's adapting to the surroundings right yes plus they are very very lighter than funny because the weapons in our game are not just there uh in order to damage the enemies but they are also a tool to create fun because uh you can plug additional behavior such as you can glue an enemy on the ground there is a particular particular enemy that is very powerful in using the techniques you can freeze his face so he cannot speak anymore therefore he cannot use the use the techniques there is someone very good at shooting you can hink his face so he cannot see you and he cannot shoot at you you can burn enemies so they are running with their bottom on fire and there is also propagation so if an enemy on fire is touching another enemy will propagate there are some crazy behavior that could happen uh within the battlefield and that's what we call the domino effector so you can chain multiple effects and the output could be very very crazy also when you finish a fight you can go back of course to the zone in free movement in exploration mode all the the coins you have on your battlefield is because when you destroy covers you gather coins as well so even if you hit an enemy behind a cover and the cover is destroyed it's rewarding as well for the players so you can go back and buy better weapons thanks to coins uh but if we have a few minutes we just wanted to show something as well here just a quick fact you know we we went that way for the fight itself but in fact the most effective way let's say advanced way would have been to go that way even if it's dangerous the first round you get you know dash and stuff second round you really dashed the enemy well so a good strategy would be to put mario on the right side he's a good damage output in terms of his weapon uh right which is not really good with his weapon but he's good with dashing so you can put it in front line and then you go really quickly to the zone here so yeah we just reveal something for people when they will play they know how to play the map now but yeah it's up to the player to decide they can go front or go left right whatever they have uh in mind they can go for it depends on the player's playstyle itself because a good tactical game should give the player the choice to choose their strategy so not only in terms of how you want to customize your character which kind of weapon you want them to be equipped with but also the plan that you want to take into the battlefield so we didn't want for the battles to have only one possible solution but multiple so um let's go to the peach castle to show the hub itself yeah take a look we didn't present it yet although it's a big part of the game of course um so it's of course it's a peach castle it was not destroyed by the arrival of the rabbits so thank god this is good but the issue or let's say the challenge for a peach uh as a princess as well is that the castle will evolve as the game progresses so as you progress you'll see more stuff built by the rabbits a bit randomly or not randomly like this one balance you to change your team change your weapons change your skills in the skill tree um access to new worlds so this one is the first one uh ancient gardens and you also have many puzzles around that you have to solve um and as you finish a world you get new contextual actions and exploration as well so you can progress and see other places that you couldn't go before um so this is key as well for the player to you know go back to the hub and see what they could do now that have new abilities so yeah this hub will evolve throughout the game and um we won't be able to show today you know the other worlds but uh as soon as you finish a world you can access a new one uh with this new ability and uh the canon takes you and then shoot you in the world itself and um and we just saw an example here of um a little puzzle that we we have with the right coins that we have in the game as well so we have yellow coins red coins blue coins as well in the bug zones museum where you get all the collectibles from the game you can gather in the game this one is still broken when you're at that moment in the game but it's the washing time machine that's what they use to come in the world itself of Mario and it will be useful in the future you can go back and revisit and get better scores in all the fights that you've done and also um other elements that uh here are you know teasing that uh the the player will discover new worlds here xr xr so that's really an important part of the game as well this hub and how it will evolve with the game itself and I do remember that the hub was one of the first things that we decided to do we did in the game like a really a point of contact for the player to to really help me throughout the whole game and uh I remember when uh we uh were told that uh we were about to work with Nintendo in a game that was featuring both Mario and the rabbits and we immediately understood that it was a lifetime opportunity we worked really night and day in order to find something new nicks for the rabbits but as well for Mario so as we are huge tactical fun we say okay we should use them to propose something fresh something new in the turn based uh combat games and but at the same time we wanted to stay true to the Mario universe and therefore we decided to mix those two different phases but in a seamless seamless way like the combat and the adventure and uh at the end when we felt that we had a solid idea we decided to meet with Nintendo and I remember that we had only three weeks and a half it was crazy to remember uh to to really prepare something and when I finally met Mr. Miyamoto I felt like he's the creator of my favorite game it's the inspiration of my career as a game designer and I felt like if I was divided like in two so the passionate Nintendo player and the Ubisoft creative director the urgency to ask for an autograph and the responsibility to present the game the most professional way sure but at the end the effort paid off because he said he told me that he was impressed and uh keep asking how come that we had Mario and Luigi in our prototype but the truth is that uh even if we spent uh we had only three weeks and a half to work on the prototype we recreated Mario and Luigi from scratch the model animation the rig in order to try to translate their essence in our prototype and I guess I think that this is was the moment where we truly convinced Nintendo about our commitment and passion so from that moment on we kept meeting with them in Kyoto it was an incredible journey and Mario plus Rabbids Kingdom battle become really a work of love a labor of love that's such an amazing story yeah I think you guys have a lot to be proud of and and I know that uh Mr. Miyamoto you know he's hard to impress and and you guys have worked really hard and and super proud of what you guys have come up with like I can't wait to play the full game and it's just beautiful looking at all the graphics and the technical style but also the exploration of the game it's it's a new style that we never really encountered before so we didn't sleep a lot these past month and years but um we're super happy to be here and uh and talk about the game it it feels great like uh you know we were almost like in the cave you know walking and working in this game and I think for the team the whole team dev team all the studios to be here today to talk about the game show the game finally it's just uh yeah super exciting yesterday press conference was uh yeah it went very well and all the emotions we had on uh it was great and I think uh now showing the game like that it's uh just incredible thank you awesome thank you so much guys for coming um so this was Mario plus rabbits uh kingdom battle