The Pre-Gameplay Changes are the modifications that the Personalisation AI makes without any feedback from players. This kind of behaviour arises when the game has never been played before or the player hasn't generated enough feedback to work with.
These changes never affect the parts where Mario is playable and they are instead focused on improving the game's title screen, menus (except the pausing menu), Mario's interactive face, the starting cinematic, Peach's letter, Lakitu's text boxes (only the ones that show up before being able to move Mario for the first time) and The Castle Grounds.
List of Changes[]
Menu changes[]
The most common changes in the menus are usually decorative visuals to make them seem more appealing. For example:
- Sparkles when choosing an option and animations on the buttons like shaking and spinning.
- The background going through changes like being sunk in water and lava or being covered by the toxic gas from Hazy Maze Cave.
Interestingly, some reports talk about the cursor the player uses to navigate the menu gravitating towards save files and/or moving faster than usual, which is probably an incentive for the player to start the game.
Title screen / Mario's face changes[]
The title is shown to appear in more original ways such as:
- The letters and numbers jumping around and falling into place.
- The words floating around the castle grounds.
- A light flashing the words individually until they gather an are all seen together.
As for Mario's face, more ways to interact with it have been discovered (punching, slapping, being able to remove his hat and making him talk by moving his mouth. Some rumors say that if the player makes a funny face, Mario's face will imitate it though this is not confirmed.
The blue screens of the background can occasionally show the credits' sequences from the different stages. If the copy has been played before and abandoned, sequences of personalized levels can appear in the screens.
First cinematic / Lakitu's dialogues changes[]
In most cases, Lakitu is given more text boxes than normal. In these extra (normally few) sentences, Lakitu will commonly explain Mario how to move despite being a sign that has the same function right in front of Mario. This could be because the players which had played before never stopped to read it and rather asked someone else or learnt for themselves. Lakitu will also be able to mention some quirks about the moveset like being able to bounce on lava using the sweep kick and may even talk about personalized moves if they were to be present in the copy.
The cinematic and Peach's letter don't usually present high-level modifications as the AI prefers to just tweak these elements. An example of this is either Lakitu or his camera becoming the point of view of the cinematic or simply changing "truly" for "sincerely" in Peach's letter.
Castle Grounds changes[]
These changes vary between the ones which want the player to stay there, move around and experiment and the ones that try to push the player into the castle:
- The first ones try to make the place feel good, adding details such as:
- Blades of grass that react to Mario stomping them.
- Changing the skybox's clouds turning them into familiar shapes like Mushrooms and stars.
- Adding breeze, water and chirping noises.
There is also a chance that the Castle Courtyard is fused with the Castle Grounds presumably rewarding exploration and curiosity.
The second type of changes are meant to catch the players attention and making them feel like they are losing time if they just wander. Some of these changes are:
- Suddenly playing a sound effect of Peach, Toads and/or Yoshi screaming, Bowser's laughter, submarine noises or a wall being destroyed.
- Peach's letter floating near Mario or making Mario hold it until he enters the castle.
- A Toad or Lakitu straight up running into Mario and telling him to save the princess.
Rarely, one of these modifications can make the stained glass transparent and Peach visible inside it where she is normally waving her hands and punching the glass.
Exceptions[]
In some cases, the AI will simply not respond to not being played and it won't do anything until the player comes back. This may be caused by the AI getting used to the player leaving and coming back at irregular intervals and not identifying it as a problem anymore. This behaviour is naturally a lot more present in abandoned copies than in copies which haven't been played.
In a more unusual case, the AI may start clinging to the demos which are shown if you wait enough on the start screen. This way, the AI can make changes for certain stages and Mario without the need for players. Since these demos repeat themselves over and over and they don't ever change the AI ends up in one of two ways:
- The AI does this on purpose knowing it is not a player in order to practice and be prepared for a real player.
- The AI confuses itself as it doesn't understand why Mario is always doing the same thing since it's not able to sense anyone controlling him and therefore it can't make accurate changes. Every AI that has entered this state has ended up corrupting the game, going into a state of AI Degradation, or becoming worse at personalising.
Speculation[]
It is debated whether if the Personalisation AI is able to have feelings or not but the ones that have worsened its personalisation process because of the demos looping are demonstrated to transmit more negative emotions and stress. When finally coming back to play, some players reported eliminated save files. Chances are that the AI thinks the player has probably forgotten about most of the game and considers a better option to start from the beginning to remind the player about everything. Players who had left right as they saw their files erased and then came back again report that the AI had quickly restored the files, sometimes with stars given to the wrong save file or mistakenly given from incorrect stages. It is possible that the AI was created to perceive the time spent played as a good thing and the time waiting for the next session as a bad thing, this would explain treating the demos as players since it would always stop the punishment from the game not being played. However, a discovery made about a function which the AI has that determines the players' temper and tells them to stop playing if they feel bad could contradict this.
