The Donkey Kong Bananza thread: Out now exclusively on Switch 2

[zorg1000]

Tober said:

The SB Odyssey team made DK Jungle Beat back in the day. They are now come full circle.

I do expect it will take a while before we would get a new Mario 3D game now. Halfway Switch2 life I would expect now, or perhaps Nintendo will give another team a go.

Or they could be working on DK & Mario concurrently, Nintendo is pretty notorious for messing around with a bunch of different concepts before development truly begins so it’s possible they had so many ideas and they didn’t necessarily mesh together and decided to make separate games featuring these concepts.

It seems that they want to have a single, giant open-world for the next 3D Mario and Bowser’s Fury was a testing ground for that concept and they also wanted to experiment with destructible environments and maybe while experimenting with it they decided that it would be a better fit for DK and are going with a different mechanic for the next 3D Mario.

I could see the timeline looking something like

2017-Mario Odyssey releases in October

2018-Bowser’s Fury begins development

2020-part of the team splits off and DK Bananza begins development

2021-Bowser’s Fury releases in February and the next 3D Mario begins development shortly after

2025-DK Bananza releases in July

2026-3D Mario releases in the 2nd half of the year