Mario Kart World's gimmick is.... being an open world. They added intermission roads between the tracks that the players are expected to drive on between races. However, players have by and large rejected the intermission experience for taking up 2/3 of the laps in each race, and for being dull straight-line drives compared to the actual tracks.
It was discovered that when playing online, by selecting "Random," you could make the game select tracks that have no intermission connecting to the last track. This forces the game to let you drive all three laps as normal. En mass, the fans voted for the classic Mario Kart experience. Lobbies were filled with nothing but "Random" votes.
Nintendo's response? Patch the game so that Random is now heavily weighted to only pick tracks with linked intermissions.
TLDR: Nintendo doesn't like it when their playerbase rejects their gimmicks.
Solution: Replace the intermission system with regular matchmaking, and mix in the open world tracks in with the regular tracks so that all the tracks are selected at random, also preventing the infamous "everyone only plays one map type" issue.
How long have they had non-looping courses? It seems like that would take away the utility of several items and the chaos of hazards dropped in previous laps. What is the benefit? Cleaner rides for the frontrunners?
They've had non looping courses for awhile, but only a couple and they were centered around the theme. There's one that is a ski run that doesn't loop for instance. Now its between pretty much every race now, which is dumb as shit.
Maybe if someone made a proper Death Race 2000 game, where you relay race across the country with a navigator, and your exploration is rewarded by finding high-point value victims to run over.
Open world games in general are considerably less fun than people convince themselves they are. The vast majority of them you could turn into a mostly linear RPG (or whatever genre) and be no worse off for 90% of the players.
Did literally anyone explore Elden Ring's world after the first time? No, they rushed to the exact points they knew they had to get to to accomplish their task.
In Mario Kart’s case, the open world is it’s own thing you just screw around in, and only serves to have gapless races where there’s no loading track to track, just the next track. Works pretty well.
Quick Summary:
Mario Kart World's gimmick is.... being an open world. They added intermission roads between the tracks that the players are expected to drive on between races. However, players have by and large rejected the intermission experience for taking up 2/3 of the laps in each race, and for being dull straight-line drives compared to the actual tracks.
It was discovered that when playing online, by selecting "Random," you could make the game select tracks that have no intermission connecting to the last track. This forces the game to let you drive all three laps as normal. En mass, the fans voted for the classic Mario Kart experience. Lobbies were filled with nothing but "Random" votes.
Nintendo's response? Patch the game so that Random is now heavily weighted to only pick tracks with linked intermissions.
TLDR: Nintendo doesn't like it when their playerbase rejects their gimmicks.
Solution: Replace the intermission system with regular matchmaking, and mix in the open world tracks in with the regular tracks so that all the tracks are selected at random, also preventing the infamous "everyone only plays one map type" issue.
"FUN DETECTED!"
How long have they had non-looping courses? It seems like that would take away the utility of several items and the chaos of hazards dropped in previous laps. What is the benefit? Cleaner rides for the frontrunners?
They've had non looping courses for awhile, but only a couple and they were centered around the theme. There's one that is a ski run that doesn't loop for instance. Now its between pretty much every race now, which is dumb as shit.
Blizzard-tier nerfing
Maybe a hot take, but open world racers have never been fun. Pointless gimmicks at best that just add boring faffing about in between races.
Maybe if someone made a proper Death Race 2000 game, where you relay race across the country with a navigator, and your exploration is rewarded by finding high-point value victims to run over.
Carmageddon's sandbox levels were pretty cool, but I suppose those were more like battle arenas than typical racing, same with Redline.
I can't think of too many other open-world racers that weren't just always-online trudge-fests.
Open world games in general are considerably less fun than people convince themselves they are. The vast majority of them you could turn into a mostly linear RPG (or whatever genre) and be no worse off for 90% of the players.
Did literally anyone explore Elden Ring's world after the first time? No, they rushed to the exact points they knew they had to get to to accomplish their task.
In Mario Kart’s case, the open world is it’s own thing you just screw around in, and only serves to have gapless races where there’s no loading track to track, just the next track. Works pretty well.