How popular would a Mario Party game designed around 8 players be?

[Paper Mario]

It would play exactly like 7, only that you don’t have to split a controller in half with someone else this time. All minigames would be in 8 player 4 teams ffa, 2 vs 6, 4 vs 4, 2 vs 2 (replacing duels) and whatever other categories you can think of.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

That could get a bit chaotic. It's tricky enough to keep track of your own character on a minigame screen, but now double the size of the field? That spells something of a mess.

Plus, the turns on the board would take twice as long. Have fun waiting through 7 other players for your time to move.

Moreover, I don't necessarily see what this opens up, design-wise. Like, we could see asymmetric three party minigames (1 vs. 6 vs. 1, or 3 vs. 2 vs. 3). Hm... maybe 2 Archers who are competing to hit 6 moving targets? Or two alien trios, each of whom want to be the one to break into a two-pilot UFO?

...Okay, so there's some potential there, perhaps. But for my part, it's hard enough to find 3 other friends to play the game with. So an 8-player game, for me, would be either an online affair with a bunch of randos, or a CPU fest. Could be good for people with wider social networks, I guess.

[lenticular]

I have to imagine that at some point over the history of the development of Mario Party, someone in the development team has come up with the idea of "what if we allow for more players?" Conceptually, it's not a particularly big creative leap to make. So the fact that they've never done it probably means that they decided it wouldn't work very well for whatever reason.

And I think that First Mate has hit on the two biggest reasons why it wouldn't work well so I'll largely just echo him, but I will add another couple of potential concerns: 8 players would mean you'd need 8 controllers, which a lot of people don't have. I sure don't. And also, there's the issues of how many people you can happily fit around a Switch. My living room certainly can't fit 8 people and have most of them be anything close to comfortable, and I imagine that's true for a lot of people as well.

[Paper Mario]

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

I have to imagine that at some point over the history of the development of Mario Party, someone in the development team has come up with the idea of "what if we allow for more players?" Conceptually, it's not a particularly big creative leap to make. So the fact that they've never done it probably means that they decided it wouldn't work very well for whatever reason.

And I think that First Mate has hit on the two biggest reasons why it wouldn't work well so I'll largely just echo him, but I will add another couple of potential concerns: 8 players would mean you'd need 8 controllers, which a lot of people don't have. I sure don't. And also, there's the issues of how many people you can happily fit around a Switch. My living room certainly can't fit 8 people and have most of them be anything close to comfortable, and I imagine that's true for a lot of people as well.

And yet they made other 8 player games, most notably Smash and Mario Strikers

[lenticular]

12 minutes ago, Paper Mario said:

And yet they made other 8 player games, most notably Smash and Mario Strikers

They're not really games that are designed around 8 players, though. (At least, Smash Bros isn't; I'm not super familiar with Mario Strikers, but I assume it isn't either.) Rather, they're games where more players can be accomodated without sacrificing how well the game plays with fewer players. Yes, you can play Smash Bros with 8 people, but you can also play it with 4 (or any other number up to 8 ) and you never feel as if the experience is watered down at all. With Mario Party many mini games are designed around having a specific number of people and don't really work properly (or at all) with fewer.

[Integrity]

10 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Plus, the turns on the board would take twice as long. Have fun waiting through 7 other players for your time to move.

this is really funny to me because op asked this same question on the discord yesterday and this was my first response too, that everything would take twice as long to resolve lmao

1 hour ago, Paper Mario said:

And yet they made other 8 player games, most notably Smash and Mario Strikers

one notes that 1) those are real time games and b) i'm not sure i've ever heard people talk about playing 8s in smash as anything other than a novelty

[Fabulously Olivier]

I've got a better idea. Make it Pokemon Party. With up to 8 players each carrying a badge that the others have to win off them. 

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Incidentally the 2v2 team based mode in Super Mario Party was very interesting and I wouldn't mind them returning to that concept. Teaming up with a partner and sharing stars. Traditional, local multiplayer can get exhausting when one person is always finding themselves in the lead and getting targeted by the other players. The others will forge temporary alliances, but nobody wants to help the dude in the lead. Pre-determined alliances create a more fair cooperative dynamic. It would also be easier to hand a little brother / child the win every once in a while. Normally I got to throw a few minigames and make other subtle moves that help them out, but there's only so much you can do as one player.

Edited September 23, 2023 by Zapp Branniglenn