The final major update for Mario Maker 2 added 10 new power-ups, 7 new bosses, a handful of miscellaneous course elements, and a world editor, allowing players to link their levels together into games and going some way to address the continuity issue I mentioned about around three months ago in the process (though the lack of ability to bring power-ups from level to level is still an issue on that front). This is a huge array of additions, but the Super Mario franchise has been going for the past 35 years, so there are still some meaningful elements that could be added in a third Mario Maker game. Here are a few elements I would most like to see added in the next instalment of the series. Specific enemies and power-ups at this point are mostly taken care of. More would always be nice, obviously, but between everything we now have access to, the impact of any specific addition is likely minimal. This doesn't mean I don't want some specific ones - Fuzzies are surprising in their omission - but now that we have Pokeys and Koopalings, all the absolute essentials feel taken care of on an enemy front, and the platforming opportunities presented by the ice flower and/or penguin suit make it the only major power-up omission. The things that will have the biggest impact at this point, for me, are things relating to the newly added world maker functionality. A toggle for carrying forward power-ups would be huge to let people make super worlds that feel more like coherent games, even if it came at the expense of having to make all levels use the same style. Another useful, minor, addition to that would be the ability to add levels that are only present in our super worlds because they don't really make sense as standalone levels. What feels like a bigger deal, however, that's currently missing is the ability to add some or all of the following - secret exits to courses (as per Super Mario World and beyond), courses that when completed modify all other courses in the super world (as per Super Mario World specifically), roaming enemies (as in SMB3 and most games beyond it), and the ability to acquire inventory items that can open up new routes through the world map (As in Super Mario 3). More minor things I'd like to see simply from an 'It would be nice to be able to replicate some specific stages in Mario Maker' perspective: Vertical scrolling sections with horizontal warp rather than any side-scrolling (As per Super Mario 3 7-1), pipes that keep you in the same subworld, simply taking you to the other side of it outside of the 3d World clear pipes (used several times in Mario 3), spikes that crash to the floor before rising again (I think most fortresses in SMB3 have a room with this sort of thing in them). Outside of just SMB3 related things - the ability to add water to any course theme and remove it from the Jungle theme, lift platforms that operate in a constant stream appearing at one end of the screen before scrolling off the screen at the other (think 1-2 in SMB1), and scale lifts - the platforms that are two connected lifts where when one drops the other rises, until the pair break).
- Stephen