Well, you'll never see a Capcom or Sega character (megaman, sonic) in the game, as they're franchise characters and Nintendo would not pay the licensing fees for a game they know would make a lot of money.
The surprise could be online kart competition or rallies or whatever, but it's probably something related to gameplay, and it's probably not groundbreaking but rather simply a surprise that they don't want to give away until the game comes out (so it is actually a surprise, instead of having a ton of 3rd parties jump on it now in order to get clones out soon after launch to steal some of the hype).
And with the tons of characters issue, with a lot of characters inevitably comes a lack of variation. The great thing about Mario Kart is that since it's still just a kart racing game, the characters cover a good range of abilities so you can pick the one you feel fits your abilities the best. It wasn't about picking the cool guy (well, except for Wario in Kart 64), but picking the person you drove best with. If you have 4 fat guys, well, I guess they all handle poorly, have slow acceleration, but high top speed. Well, perhaps they have minimal differences between the 4 of them, but who cares? In the original Kart, there were 4 types of racers and 2 variations on those types. Usually one was better. For instance, Bowser sort of sucked compared to Donkey Kong Jr, unless you were going for a challenge or a new time trial record. Toad sucked compared to Koopa unless you couldn't steer, and even then he was crap.
They likely will expand the available racers, but probably no more than 16, and they'll probably let people play as the same characters but with different colors (especially if they're going to push the multiplayer more -- it would suck if you can get 16 people on a game but everyone has to play as someone else, regardless of their abilities).
Then again, the revolutionary/surprising thing could be a mapmaker. There hasn't been one in a racing game since excitebike, true?
Topic: --Mario Kart-- (Read 16840 times)
