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.
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.