Luigi’s Mansion 3 devs quickly gave up on the idea of single-player DLC

Back in December, Nintendo announced that the excellent Luigi’s Mansion 3 would be getting DLC in April and July of this year. The confusing part of this announcement was that a game beloved for its single-player story experience would only be getting new multiplayer segments.

Now the developer, Next Level Games (NLG), has revealed that the idea of new single-player DLC was on the table at one point, but quickly dismissed. “In the very beginning, there was an urge from NLG to do a single-player expansion, but it faded quickly,” creative director Bryce Holliday told Kotaku Australia, adding that the team at NLG simply “love making multiplayer games.”

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In fact, the team “had a lot of multiplayer ideas that would be fun to develop and share with fans that were getting cut,” Holliday explained. “Making story mode games is a difficult and slower process, development-wise, than multiplayer modes, so we ended up pushing them to DLC.” 

When it was pointed out that single-played DLC needn’t be a huge undertaking and could just be additional floors for the haunted hotel, producer Kensuke Tanabe pointed out that this would disrupt the flow of the game. “By inserting an additional floor, there would be an inconsistency with the setting and chronological order, and we would end up restarting the story in an incomplete way, which the player should have already finished,” he said. “I didn’t want to do that.”

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That’s bound to disappoint fans eager for more single-player content, but there’s a positive side to this: “cut single-player ideas can be saved for something else in the future,” Holliday added. And given Next Level Games was responsible for both Luigi’s Mansion 2 and 3, we can’t rule out another adventure for Mario’s perpetually spooked sibling in the future.

You can read the full interview at Kotaku Australia.