According to director Masahiro Sakurai, the Kirby Air Riders teamed considered bringing back the original City Trial map from the GameCube title.
That nugget of information was shared in a new developer post today. In it, Sakurai explained that despite that consideration, the team “just couldn’t pull it off” and bringing the map back would have required “tremendous cost and effort.”
Sakurai wrote in the post:
“So during the design planning phase for City Trial, we actually considered bringing back the old map as one of our options.
But, we just couldn’t pull it off… Things don’t work like they did in the past. It would take tremendous cost and effort.
It took everything we could just to create the base for Skyah, and it wasn’t simply a matter of porting it over.
Unlike the previous game, we can have up to 16 players this time, and the balance for both machine power-ups and acquisition frequency differs from back then. We had to figure it all out as we were creating the machines: how big the gameplay field should be, how often attacks should land for offense-defense balance, the ratio of surface level, underground, and building areas, and how to achieve high jumps. Previously, I was the only one setting the machine parameters, so I only needed to satisfy myself. This time, however, a lot of people were deeply involved in making balance adjustments.
As an example, if the average speed of a machine is increased even just a little, the width and height appropriate for the field then changes.
The composition is so delicate that even slight changes can significantly alter the balance and feel. Coming up with a coherent design and layout within a gameplay field with that sort of limitation was incredibly challenging.
Moreover, it was impossible to have variations of the fields.
We had to condense all of the various elements of Skyah into the one setting, which makes it a fun map to play even when changing up battle strategies.”
Sakurai also recently revealed that he wrote the lyrics for Kirby Air Riders’ main theme song. And in other news, the game just got a new update this week – read the patch notes here.
