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Mario Kart World is a big departure for the series in one crucial way - this time, it's open-world. Each track seamlessly connects to the next, and all of them can be found in the game's new Free Roam mode, but the big pivot was only drummed up because the game's lead felt the series had already peaked after spending 25 years refining the same track-based formula. If you can't top Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, you might as well try something totally different, I guess.
Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki said as much in a recent Ask The Developer blog, where he revealed the upcoming Switch 2 game began prototyping in March 2017 - the same month that the OG Switch came out, and a couple of months before Mario Kart 8 Deluxe drifted onto store shelves.
"We were thinking about what to do for the next Mario Kart game even during the development of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and we began prototyping in March 2017," he says. "It was at the end of that year when we officially started work on it as a project. I felt that in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, we were able to perfect the formula that we'd been following in the series up to that point, where players race on individual courses." Hence, the decision to create "a world map like this."
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and its tight, near-sublime tracks might have encouraged Nintendo to pursue a different style of racing, but what's going on with that eight-year gap between games? Mario Kart World was in development for essentially the OG Switch's entire life cycle, after all.
Well, Mario Kart World was actually going to be a base Switch game at first. However, developers "often worried" about whether they'd be able to stuff everything they wanted into the game's "vast world" and still have it run at a stable 60 fps, according to Kenta Sato, so the team simply decided to turn it into a Switch 2 launch game once they had a better understanding of what the console was capable of.
"Once we decided to release this game on Switch 2, we expected our worries to evaporate all at once," Sato added.
