As Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds seeks to overtake it, Mario Kart World gets a massive patch that tackles some of the game's biggest complaints: "WHY WAS THIS NOT ON LAUNCH"

Mario Kart World screenshot featuring Toad — (Image credit: Nintendo)

As players are starting to flock to Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Nintendo has released a major patch for Mario Kart World that seemingly fixes a lot of complaints.

Even though Mario Kart World was pretty beloved at launch, its issues definitely overpowered the conversation about the game, whether it be the overabundance of intermission tracks, the hidden stats, and how annoying all the Kamek unlocks were to get. However, benefiting from this was Sega, which reignited the studios' old rivalry with an ad referencing the console war days, and fans are certainly having a better reaction to Sonic so far, even if the reviews for Mario Kart World were better overall.

However, right as Sega has released its competitor, Nintendo has returned to Mario Kart World with a new patch, and having a look at the lengthy patch notes on the Nintendo website, it looks like a really good update. Thankfully, Nintendo has "further increased the frequency of lap-type courses appearing" after the devs previously rolled out an update doing the exact opposite thing, hopefully meaning that intermission tracks will now be less of a problem online.

However, the best update has to be the ability to "transform into the character pulled into the UFO." This now means it's actually possible to unlock every character in the game without resorting to what is basically random chance with the Kamek item. Now when piloting the UFO in free roam (which now has a higher chance of appearing on the map too, with this update) you can use the beam to pick up NPC characters around the map, and when your UFO runs out, you'll be racing as them.

Basically you can use the ufo to unlock npc characters instead of relying on kamek pic.twitter.com/atmJ14DEEVSeptember 24, 2025

This change in particular has been very well received, with a Twitter thread about it inspiring comments like "WHY WAS THIS NOT ON LAUNCH," "THAT'S SO COOL HOLY SHIT," and "Oh boy the people who spent hours of their lives just to get all the npc characters from kamel are gonna be so pissed when they see this lol." But as someone who was lazy and thought "man that ain't worth it," needless to say, I had the last laugh.

Sonic Racing CrossWorlds' portals are better than Mario Kart World's road trips, and some of y'all aren't ready to hear that.