The only grass I've touched this past year is the big shortcut between Wario Shipyard and Cheep Cheep Falls that saves 3 seconds even without a mushroom.

finally... long cat

One thing nobody seems to points out is the fact that due to all the tracks being within an open world, there are no tracks like Waluigi Pinball, Ribbon Road or Squeaky clean sprint, which added a lot of variety and creative trackbuilding. Since there is no logical way to enter a bathroom or a childrens room and becoming smaller, all these track concepts had to be ruled out.

I'm a game dev, and Mario Kart World is fascinating to me because I can see a lot of cut corners beneath the usual sheen of polish. The costume/character unlock system is 100% a placeholder that they intended to replace with something better, as is the way every costume is treated like its own character in the menu. Likewise, most of the routes (and free-roam content in general) is decidedly first-draft.

If I had to guess, they had lofty ambitions for this game, but had to cut a lot of it to meet the console launch deadline. They polished what they had up to expected Nintendo quality, but probably have been working ever since to finish adding in everything they couldn't get to. When this game inevitably gets an update, it'll probably be related to those lacklustre elements that feel so empty and unfinished.

MKW was the one of the first games I ever played for a little while and said, "Man, I am NOT having fun"

I will never understand why nintendo went OUT OF THEIR WAY to create an update that DIRECTLY went against what people liked, the 'random' feature selecting regular track only and specifically making it so that statistically choosing a regular track would be harder. It genuinely feels like they listen to fan feedback and choose to do the opposite to piss the most people as possible.

The biggest issue with 200 routes isn’t that so many are bad.

It’s that most players will never have the opportunity to learn to make routes fun like you have.

Because you never get to practice any cool strategies. If you learn one, you might not see it for months. Even if all the routes were great, having 200 single lap tracks makes it impossible to learn the fun strategies (and remember/distinguish them).

"If its not fun, why bother?" It kills me to see that line get forgotten more and more by the very company that coined the term.

The tracks simply lack that feeling of being intimate, carefully crafted and memorable. Like you said, some of them are particularly bad, just being empty wide roads with nothing going on. On the other hand, the good ones are good in a messy, sandboxy-y sort of way - and this just isn't what Mario Kart means to most people. There is a good idea underneath but the execution is very lacking. A bit unusual for Nintendo first party studios.

As I watch this, I realize I was probably right to quit on this game after the first couple of weeks, which I spent, constantly asking, "what does this game want me to do?" The answer I kept arriving at was "have more track knowledge than I, personally, care to invest time into getting." It continues to appear like the correct answer.

I feel like nobody is mentioning how much they gutted the replay function…

No viewing after races, no customization like no mini map and no viewing bots, and not able to view any replays online.

1:39:12 YES! EXACTLY! 200cc is not "let's speed up the gameplay by 50%" it's "let's go 50% faster and work out how in the world we're meant to play like this"

It felt like it came out yesterday can’t believe it’s been 1 year 💙

1:43:35 "mario kart 8 introduced driving upside down"
the humble MKDS rainbow road:

Honestly there was 3 main points that made me drop this game maybe only a month after I got it.

1. Like a lot of other comments are saying, the game felt like it was trying to much and not succeeding at a whole lot. The open world is beautiful and impressive sure, and it does feel nice to just drive around and admire the scenery. However, when there's nothing to do or no incentive to actually explore the world aside from, well, looking at the pretty graphics I don't have much desire to play open world. It really still baffles me how Nintendo made this honestly super cool open world and put nothing to do in it, Mario Kart World isn't a walking sim, it's a kart racer, but if I don't wanna kart race around the open world, why even have it? Why aren't there more missions, mission to unlock characters, random little side quests, or heck make it so if I wanna unlock more tracks I have to find them on the open world! That'd add so much to the game!

2. The skill ceiling is too high. Sure all the tricks and parkour are cool looking, but even as someone who would say I am good at Mario Kart, all the new moves and tricks just seemed like too much to try and learn. At least in Mario Kart 8 as long as you knew how to drift you could get pretty good at the game, and it was rather beginner friendly in that way, but then in World you have to know how to wall ride, and trick of objects and how to manage mushrooms and boosts and for anyone expect the competitive players it's just too much to ask a player to learn. I still remember before the game came out I was chatting to my brother-in-law who went to school for game deving and he said he wasn't sure how to feel about the new mechanics in the game, and was worried how'd it'd affect the overall gameplay. At first I was optimistic, but after I played it and realized just how hard it was to even pull off, I agreed with him. Not to say that a game having a high skill ceiling is bad, or a game having a competitive scene is bad, hardly, but just coming from the perspective of a casual player who make up a vast majority of players, it's not fun. If you don't have the skill or time to consistently practice the new tech, then casual players feel like they're being left in the dust and it doesn't really match Nintendo's whole "Pick up and play" mentality.  


3. The routes. I mean you did a great job explaining why they suck in your vid, but as a more casual player who just wasn't interested in putting in the effort to learn the crazy tricks and optimizations they're just boring. When 3/4's of the "Courses" in the game are just mostly straight tracks with not much of note to the point where it can be hard to tell the difference between them, it's just not fun to play. I would much rather play the actually really well designed, fun, and interesting course in Mario Kart 8 over the routes, cause tbh even though there are some bad tracks in MK8, at least they're actual tracks and not a highway driving sim. Then on top of that there was just the way Nintendo responded to the fan backlash, instead of listening to them, doubling down on the routes and forcing players to play them. It just felt like a giant middle finger to player choice and freedom and didn't make me wanna keep playing. Sure Nintendo just kinda tends to do their own thing most times, and even for a Japanese game company they're still an outlier, but the random change for online just felt particularly insulting considering all of the other discourse surrounding the game at the time.

There was some other smaller things too, like not being able to do local multiplayer freeroam without a weird workaround. That was really disappointing for me and my partner at launch when we wanted to play together. Or the original character unlock method, or not having trackers for collectibles at first, but those were and still are my main 3 grievances.  

It's impossible to deny the fact the Mario Kart World had some big shoes to fill considering it following MK8 and it being the first truly new Mario Kart in 8 years, and it being a launch title for the Switch 2, it was never going to be able to satisfy everyone, but Nintendo just really dropped the ball this one. When the game isn't fun to play most of the time for the vast majority of casual players, it makes sense they'd just shelve the game. It doesn't surprise me most players just headed back to 8, or just shelved the game like me and moved onto better more interesting games. Not to mention the other issues like the games and the Switch 2's pricing also being huge points of contention making players hate the game even more. I don't think there's anything wrong with you defending the game from a competitive standpoint, and tbh if you enjoy it more power to ya, but I'm with mostly everyone else on this one that the game just isn't fun casually, and like Reggie said "If it's not fun, why bother." I'm certainly not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Shortcat:The documentary

Shortcat just casually drops a movie

Not really surprising that ''sentiment'' around connected tracks has changed, all the people who vehemently dislike them have stopped playing the game.
Especially after that update that killed the Random Pick exploit which I imagine was the final straw for a lot of people who come to Mario Kart to just play actual tracks.

I'm one of the many who permanently quit this game. Looking at the gameplay tells me that I did not make a mistake. This looks more like forcing bad physics to work in your favor than an actual game. The base gameplay is slow and boring but the fast gameplay is just slamming your face into as many obstacles as possible and flinging yourself around the map. If that's what the people still playing enjoy, more power to them, but it looks like an absolute unenjoyable mess to me. I really don't know what it would take for me to pick this game back up outside of a family game night -- in which case I'm probably reaching for Jackbox or Mario Party instead.

The fact people went back to 8 deluxe like 2 months after release says everything you need to know about World. Nintendo also released it and left it to die, at this point I wont be surprised if more people are playing mario kart wii than world