Mario Kart World

There's something uncanny about Mario Kart World. Trying to follow up the pinnacle of an established franchise was never going to be easy, but Nintendo have an incredible track record of iterating and modernising their series. From the paradigm-shifting transition to 3D in their flagship Mario and Zelda releases, to the more recent shift to an open world in games like Breath of the Wild, if there's any publisher out there you'd back to get the next Mario Kart right it'd be Nintendo.

So why does Mario Kart World, the flagship day 1 release of the new Nintendo Switch 2, feel like playing a tech demo? How is a game with a core formula so iconic failing on nearly every count?

In trying to shake the game up, and pivot to a new direction for the series, Nintendo have made bigger changes than ever to Mario Kart. From a sprawling open world, to new modes, to doubling the player count, this game was shaping up to be incredible. However, once the initial excitement of the announcement wore off, and we were left with just the trailer to look over, the cracks were already starting to show. In your one chance to get a good first impression for the new console, why does the system seller look so... empty? Why is the road so wide, and why is it so straight?

Upon release, my worst fears were confirmed. Mario Kart World is an abject failure in game design, and should be a blueprint for what not to do when introducing sweeping changes to something so established.

The Open World

It's impossible to engage with Mario Kart World without addressing the main new feature - the open world. Everything in the game is contextualised through the lens of how you exist within this space. From obvious features like free-roaming, to the intermission tracks, and most problematically (which we will get onto) the VS Races.

We must first look at the motivation for building an open world, and all the potential benefits that come with it, before we look at the reality of how its implementation percolates the whole game.

Open World? Open Road

The concept of immersion in a story and a world and an experience is often listed as one of the most important factors when judging the quality of a piece of media. This is especially true amongst gamers and generally nerdy people (see: sci-fi or fantasy fans). While there is value in how lost you can get in a world, I think immersivity is placed on a pedestal that it does not deserve. Without underlying support from good writing, cinematography, gameplay, etc. an immersive experience can feel amateurish and cheap - like the whole budget has been spent on meaningless props, and not writing a character who has depth.

A consequence of this desire for immersion in video games is a focus on increasing player agency. Games are traditionally sold on a fantasy, and by giving players more control in how they exercise this fantasy, you can increase this so-called immersion. As the power of technology has improved, game developers are no longer limited to a 2-dimensional plane with a single button to jump, and have been able to explore new ways of allowing player expression.

The Holy Grail of an immersive experience is being able to go anywhere and do anything - the open world. The player is given total freedom to explore and to express themselves. In the last decade or so, we've seen expansive open worlds become more prevalent in the general gaming landscape, in my opinion to the detriment of the average popular video game. Skyrim felt like a turning point for this, at least for my generation, opening up the possibilities to explore random boring pieces of the map and still receiving huge critical and cultural success. Since then, your Ubisofts, your Rockstars, your Tom, Dick and Harrys have been focusing on making larger and larger worlds, packed with more and more alleged content, all in the pursuit of this immersion.

The attachment of an open world to a video game is to commit thematically to engaging with all the consequences that come with limitless exploration. This to me, is the core decider on whether an open world is a successful addition to an experience. If you have a narratively driven game, an open world often works directly against everything the game is trying to get the player to do. This frequently plays out as a "go and do this really urgent thing" scenario, but then the gameplay loop is encouraging the player to explore, take their time, engage in side-quests, and immerse themselves.

So how do we reconcile the consequences of an open world for a game like the new Mario Kart? There does appear to be a really strong natural fit between a racing game and a high-agency experience. Something baked into our psyche by the Americans is how the car represents freedom and personal responsibility. In our own lives the car allows us to get around in ways our hunter-gatherer ancestors never could have dreamed of, and is the embodiment of a status symbol. A road trip is one of the staple experiences in most people's lives. Nearly everyone will have been driven across the country by their parents to visit family, friends, or for a little holiday. There's memories of getting lost, arguing over the map, stresses of where to park, but ultimately arriving at your destination with a sense of freedom that is hard to find in other places.

These are natural feelings to evoke with a vehicular open world, and I think it presents a strong argument for success. So why then does MKW fail so spectacularly in eliciting any of these emotions? It comes down to the second most important thing about an open world video game - how much is there to actually do? If a game has a thematic consistency with allowing player agency, it then needs to ensure there are actually ways of expressing that agency.

There is nothing in the Mario Kart World free roam to encourage exploration. There is nothing to make the player feel lost, or to make the player feel excited to discover something. There is nothing off in the distance to draw your eye and set a spontaneous destination. In fact, there's not really anything there at all. Other than a smattering of little challenges across the landscape, there is nothing to excite the player into engaging with the open world at all. The majority of the geography is vast open spaces, wide American-style roads, and one-way elevation changes (think cliffs). The player frequently finds themselves driving aimlessly around, with no goal in sight. The game needed to meet a critical mass of activities, and it missed the mark by a mile.

Even traditional video game language is subverted. Towers of smoke indicating activity reveal lifeless Toads sat around a fire with nothing to provide other than a little bump off their massive heads. The collectibles that do exist are not documented anywhere on your map, giving you no idea how much you've explored an area. It is hard to overstate how these combine to make the open world feel even more empty and strip the space of any charm or life. It ruins immersion.

I've broken down and I need a mechanic

I go back and forth on the relative importance of mechanics and theming in video games, but in reality they're so closely tied together I probably need to find a better way of spending my time. Games are unique in that, as we've discussed, they allow for agency that other forms of media don't. That is unless you are a choose-your-own-adventure enjoyer, in which case power to you.

The underlying gameplay loop is where Mario Kart World lets the player fantasy down. There is not enough in the open world to justify spending any time there. The challenges and collectibles that are present feel underwhelming, with the player often employing basic driving mechanics in order to succeed. On occasion, you find a challenging P-Switch (the world's primary content), but this happens infrequently enough that it's hard to feel anything other than patronised when driving around.

The core feature of the world is the fact the tracks exist within the space, and can be reached by trundling around at slower-than-desired speeds in order to reach them. But when you do arrive at one of them, there's not really anything there to greet you. You're just at the track. Sure there are some extra collectibles, but these are mostly obnoxious to find. The game doesn't understand that you're in a car, and don't have strong movement options to manoeuvre move about. The player finds themselves reversing clumsily back and forth, performing messy 3-point turns that would cause them to fail their drivers' test, in order to reach a little nook with a shiny block. It's not fun to do this, in fact its frustrating.

Some collectibles require a skill expression in order to gather. This can be anything from timing a simple jump to nailing a bunch of wallrides up a building to a rooftop. It is these few seconds of gameplay where you can almost convince yourself that the open world was a good idea. But then you miss the collectible. And your car takes its momentum forwards, off the roof, down the castle, over the cliff, into the sea. Even in these spaces, where the player is exploring the new movement mechanics of MKW, the game feels clunky. Mercifully, Nintendo added a rewind feature, so you can zip yourself back up to where you were in no time, but if you missed your line up, you'll still have to spend time fiddling with your exact line before you finally hit the accelerate button.

Something that has clearly taken so long to build, and yet is so problematic to the whole game can only have come about from pure delusion or a lack of time and resources. With the weakness of the Switch 2's launch titles, if MKW did not make it out in time then the console was definitely in trouble from day 1. I think this deadline has resulted in huge corners being cut in relation to the design of the open world. It was ripe for some defined single player content, unlockable characters, and surprise races, but what we are left with is a bland, soulless core.

Intermissions

To double down on the effort spent crafting this geography, Mario Kart World mixes up the core racing gameplay as well. Traditionally, the main single player mode would consist of the player driving 3 laps around 4 courses called a Grand Prix. Your finish on one race would score you points and the racer with the most points at the end of 4 races was crowned the winner. There's nothing complicated here, but the simplicity just works. The player gets to enjoy 4 well crafted circuits, with multiple laps to hone their lines and their skills before the crucial final lap where the stakes are so high.

This formula works because Mario Kart has no need for immersion. The player does not care if one track looks similar to the next. The player does not care about how these spaces exist. The player just wants a refined gameplay loop, because it's an Italian plumber driving in a cloud against a baby version of himself. To expect immersion from a game like Mario Kart is absurd.

The switch to prioritising racing through the open world then is particularly questionable. Nintendo are replacing the classic track formula with an experience of driving through the bland open world that exists between the tracks. The only justification for this is that Nintendo spent so much time building the open world that they felt they had to force players to engage with it, even outside of the dedicated free-roam mode.

Instead of racing 3 laps around a single track, you race 1 lap of the track after driving to it from the previous track in the Grand Prix. This means the majority of time spent playing MKW is not spent drifting around tight bends, nailing wallrides, and battling your way up the order through a combination of luck and skill, but is in fact holding the accelerate button as you drive in a straight line getting peppered by items.

Some of the most iconic tracks in Mario Kart 8 are 1-lap tracks (think Big Blue or Rainbow Road), and Nintendo seems to have taken that to heart when thinking how they could evolve the series. But those tracks are the exception in MK8, and crucially - they have corners. Nintendo have totally missed the mark in what makes those tracks fun, and in doing so reduce most of the gameplay in MKW to mindless and uninspired.

Beyond the majority of the time now just being boring, this change has wider implications to other mechanics which compound the issues. As the player is racing through the open world, driving along routes the Romans would be proud of, there is a lack of skill expression for the players. There is no difficulty in holding A in a straight line, so the pack stays very close together. This makes the intermission tracks mostly inconsequential, as when you do arrive for your single lap of a real track, all the racers are close together to the point where a single item can send you from last to first, or vice versa.

The strategy of bagging (being intentionally slow to pick up good items) was a huge problem in MK8, and is an anti-fun playstyle that encourages disengagement from the gameplay loop. How Nintendo have then ended up with a game where bagging is even more powerful is unbelievable. The optimal strategy, especially online, is to hang back, pick up the best items, and hold them until you reach the actual track, by which time you're only a few seconds behind first place. The fact the race is almost always so close feels fun as a novelty and is noticeable even in the first few races the player takes part in, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is antithetical to how the game should to be operating. This is compounded by the inclusion of coins which boost a player's max speed. By hanging back, you get to hoover up all the coins that are being dropped, ready to unleash your full speed while those ahead of you are dropping theirs to item spam.

I am unsure which decision came first, but having double the number of racers when compared to MK8 (24 up from 12) is inherently tied to the intermissions. 24 racers mandates a wider track to physically fit everyone onto the road, which results less interesting routes with fun tight corners. Additionally, without 24 racers, there wouldn't be as much item spam to keep your screen flashing, removing any illusion of perceived fun.

The impact of the open world on the courses themselves should be limited, given a track is just a track. However, it does feel like the decreased development time on them has taken its toll. There are fewer actual tracks than ever, and there are only really a few stand-outs. Other than the new Rainbow Road and the Great ? Block Ruins (awful name), nothing can hold a candle to a track like DK Summit from MK8, in creativity or in flow of driving it.

The lack of 3 laps around most of the courses hurts as well, with no opportunity to adequately hone your skills while the race is going on. Any mess-up from the player is instantly punishing, and it feels really bad to drop from the front to the back because you attempted to engage with some of the new mechanics.

My final thought on VS Race is why would they put the most boring tracks as the races you do first. Those are the only 3 lap races you end up doing, so what possessed them to put the bland tracks that almost feel like intermission areas as the ones that prioritise the lap structure. Baffling.

Online Troubles

Despite the game's presence as the only flagship title for a brand new Nintendo console, the online feels like it's struggling to keep up. Either something is fundamentally broken, which I suspect, or there is a serious player count issue. In many hours of online gameplay, I have never been in a 24-player lobby, and most of the time it's not even close. A 12 person lobby is not uncommon, and there are occasions when it's dipped to 6 people. Things are clearly not working as intended here, although I have found myself enjoying the ~12 person lobbies, since the item spam is much reduced.

I'm sure you will also be aware, but Nintendo patched the ability to force a 3-lap track by voting for Random when the options present themselves. After each VS Race, players vote on 4 options: 3 tracks or random. Most of the time the 3 tracks are an intermission plus a 1 lap race, but on release, the Random would guarantee a full classic race on a circuit. For obvious reasons, this became incredibly popular, especially at higher ranks. Nintendo, seeing people were enjoying their game in a way that did not recognise the effort put into making the open world, changed how Random worked to also include the intermission options, therefore practically guaranteeing you get those instead. It is a classic example of Nintendo being off the pulse from what their customers want. They do have a long history of awkward decision making on this front however, so I personally find it unsurprising.

One consequence of the online being built around the intermissions is how tied the races are to the geography of the world. You mostly vote for tracks that are located close to the race you just finished to enable the intermission, but this results in the lobby getting stuck in a corner of the map. Even if the players don't choose a specific map, it can be offered 3 or 4 times in a row because it's still close to the track that was chosen. Even after hours of online, there are tracks I simply haven't raced on because I hardly ever find the lobby to be in that area.

Could have been a Knock-Out Tour

It turns out that Nintendo made a mode designed specifically to actually highlight the strengths of an open world. Knock-Out Tour is an elimination race, where the bottom 4 racers each checkpoint are out. All the races take place along the intermissions, with a single lap marking the finish for the 6th and final check-point. By having frequent check-points, it mitigates a lot of the more frustrating aspects of MKW, such as the viability of bagging.

As there is such an insistence of pushing the open world as a core gameplay element, KO Tour should have been front and centre of all the focus. However, as is, the mode is plagued by various issues that stop it from filling the role as the focal point of the game.

No matter how you dress them up, and no matter the jeopardy you add to them, there is no getting away from the intermissions broadly being boring straight lines. There is still no strong skill expression for the majority of the race, and the game will never be fun until it can find a way of at least approximating some amount of it while driving.

There are also only 8 different cups, and that's reflected in the online as well. KO Tour online is primed to allow for fully dynamic races, randomly jumping between the different intermissions as you progress, but being fixed to only 8 configurations sees players experiencing the exact same straight lines repeatedly. The final lap of each of the cups being consistent adds so much importance to knowing those specific tracks over any other. The mode would be far better chaining together lots of single laps with a check-point at the end. Players would still get to race on some interesting sections, while also having that pressure of elimination looming over.

New Mechanics

We can finally talk about the new driving mechanics introduced in the game. After the open world, these are the most talked about additions to the game, and on the surface they look like incredible additions. New and difficult ways of mastering navigating the tracks should only be a good thing, and in many ways that's true, but it does come at the cost of what I think is the single best part of a Mario Kart game - drifting.

Drifting is the what makes MK so good. The responsiveness, the balance, and weaving your kart around tight bends is why the game has such a high skill ceiling despite having simple mechanics. In MK8, even the more basic tracks become highlights, allowing players to link drifts and boosts to set faster and faster times. With the new mechanics, drifting takes a bit of a step back. Not only is it not necessary on most of the intermissions, but it's outshone by the speed and ease of rail grinding.

Rail grinding itself starts out feeling great. It's rapid, and you can repeatedly trick off the rail to get multiple speed boosts back to back. It also feels limiting. By removing any directional input, it effectively becomes a QTE of when to jump off. Sometimes this can be a difficult QTE when you're trying to land on another rail for a short-cut, but even that doesn't hit the same way a perfectly timed drift does. Rail grinding is the primary mechanic to gain speed during the intermissions, with many straight lines having small rails to encourage doing something that isn't holding A. It is better than nothing, but it feels like scraping the barrel.

Wall riding in contrast is genuinely fun. Nailing the angle to jump onto a wall and then trick off feels like an allegory for the skill expression of drifting. It enables some interesting short-cuts, and is not plagued by the player being directly in front of the drivers behind making you an easy item target. The issue with wall riding is it's too niche. It's almost a null mechanic in intermissions, and many tracks don't have good spots to utilise it, relegating it to fringe uses.

Finally, as a replacement for the anti-grav, underwater and glider sections from MK8, MKW has boats and planes. These have controls that are far more stiff than their predecessors, and are barely a focus of most levels. They feel like a notable downgrade, and it raises the question for the motivation, especially for the glider change. There are no longer any underwater sections, likely because there is vast amounts of water in the open world. Letting the player explore is pointless when they can give you a large flat surface of water to pootle along on, but there are places where having less control over your airborne vehicle feels unnecessary.

Conclusion

There is fun to be had in Mario Kart World. At the end of the day, it's a series that will never not be a blast when played with a group of mates crowded around a TV. But it's a game that is far less than the sum of its parts, and those parts are not particularly impressive in isolation either. A top-to-bottom failure to understand the interaction between systems included in the game results in a largely bloated and directionless experience.

All MKW's failures compound with the fact we get at most a single Mario Kart game per console generation. It's harder to accept the issues the game has released with when it's taken at least 8 years to get to this point. I truly hope what can get fixed does, but I think the game is rotten to the core from a design perspective.