You can only play with friends on one Nintendo Switch or with local wireless play.
Super Mario Maker 2, as it stands, will not allow friends to play online together and will only allow online play with random players as “with global leaderboards, the matchmaking for competitive play would be compromised if you could play with friends.”
Speaking to Nintendo World Report, a Nintendo Treehouse representative confirmed the news at the Super Mario Maker 2 press event last week and confirmed that the only way to play with friends in either co-op or versus mode is through one system or local wireless play.
GameXplain followed up with Nintendo about this report and Nintendo responded with confirmation that what the Treehouse representative said was true.
“This is true. As the game is now, you can not create friends lobbies online,” Nintendo said. “You can only play online with randoms. You can still get friends together and play with Local Play, and you’re free to play with four players on one Nintendo Switch system. You can also still challenge your friends to your creations and take on their designs through Course IDs and having them follow your Maker profile.”
GameXplain also asked if you could “mix-and-match local and online play” if you have two players online and want the full four players with two randoms filling in. Nintendo responded by saying that was also not possible.
Besides this unfortunate news, Super Mario Maker 2 is shaping up to be a worthy sequel as, in our latest hands-on, we said that “There’s an absolute ton of things to do here and [we] genuinely can’t wait to keep playing it.”
For more on this upcoming Switch title, we’ve compiled a list of everything new in Super Mario Maker 2, as well as some other Mario styles we would love to see added to the game.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN who really hopes Nintendo reconsiders this and adds the ability to play with friends as he would really love to play Super Mario Maker 2 with his brother Jordan who lives in another state. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst.