Super Mario Maker 2 Online Won’t Let You Play With Friends

Some things in this industry will never change. Activision will release a new Call of Duty ever year, Hideo Kojima will never stop being a serial-teaser, and Nintendo will, one way or the other, manage to screw up something to do with online in most of their major releases. Super Mario Maker 2, revolving around the idea of online play, should ideally get online right, but one aspect of it will be making a baffling omission.

During the recent information blowout for the upcoming title, Nintendo confirmed that it would support competitive and co-op online play as well. But now, as Nintendo World Report is confirming, you won’t be able to play online modes – competitive or co-op – with your friends. Matchmaking will be your only option. Nintendo says that this is being done to preserve the integrity of global leaderboards, which could be be compromised if you were to play with friends.

You’ll still be able to play with your friends through local wireless, or locally on a single Switch, but if you want to play online, you can forget about playing with those in your friends list- you only match with randoms. It’s not game-breaking by any means, but it sure is baffling. But then again, one need only take a look at the 3DS version of Super Mario Maker to see that Nintendo can do incredibly baffling things at times. Let’s hope future updates change this up.

Super Mario Maker 2 launches for the Switch on June 28. It’ll take up less than 3 GB on your system.