Nintendo's Mario Kart Mistake

The Nintendo Switch 2's flagship launch title has a few problems.

November 27, 2025

Like many Nintendo superfans, I played a lot of Mario Kart World when it launched alongside the Nintendo Switch 2 game system. Like many of this game’s players, I stopped playing online after some time.

Unlike most fans, I have a very different reason for having done so.

Software development is difficult. Game development is even more so. As a software developer, you are usually building a tool to solve certain problems that users might have. Merely solving problems isn’t enough, however. You need to design your application to be easy for the user to understand. When something goes wrong, you’ll need to answer to an angry user. The same goes for video games.

The problem with taking user feedback seriously is that it’s so often terrible. Instead of reporting issues, users will ask for new features which they (often wrongly) believe will solve their problems. This is why software developers often ask follow-up questions—because requests so often mask the actual underlying issues with software. The same is especially true with games, where experiences of fun are often subjective and where players seldom know why they’re having fun (or, not having fun).

Mario Kart World diverges substantially from its predecessors. Its open world structure is so defining that it was even made into this entry’s subtitle. Race tracks are connected to one another via highways or backroads, and in the game’s free-roam mode one can drive from anywhere to anywhere on the map completely seamlessly.

This world design also made its way into the game’s regular racing modes. Where in prior Mario Kart titles, a Grand Prix would have 12 drivers perform four three-lap races on a specific collection of race tracks, in World a Grand Prix starts with a whopping 24 drivers on a three-lap race on a starting course, then the next three subsequent races involve driving along a connecting route to the destination track where one full lap is played. Despite the world being seamless, the stage is still reset between races, so no one player can run away with a lead and no one player will find themselves running too far behind the pack.

Connecting routes tend to be less complex than actual race tracks, with longer straightaways and fewer tight turns. This creates a natural tension curve where the beginning of most races is simple, ramping up in complexity as players pick up power ups and fire them off before finally crescendoing into the a frenetic finish at the destination race track. Instead of always firing on all cylinders, World’s Grand Prix mode has a much more interesting pace that leads to a much more manageable gameplay experience. Another benefit of this race design is in capacity. Straightaway sections leading up the track are quite large. Because racers will have naturally put some distance between one another by the time they reach the course to do their final lap around it, 24 players never feels like too many despite the fact that the courses are roughly as large as in prior entries in the series. Mario Kart World’s clever design already mitigates what would have been a significant issue.

The game also introduces a new Knockout Rally mode where 24 racers race seamlessly from one point of the map to another, along one of 8 predetermined routes. At each of the 5 checkpoints in a rally, the last 4 players left in the race are knocked out. Where trailing behind might normally lead to getting better power ups as you race, it also bears a risk of simply being removed from contention if you fly too close to the sun. The moment-to-moment stakes are much higher, but given that rallies' routes are composed mainly of connecting roads, the actual gameplay is simpler. The mechanics mediate each others' tension quite nicely, which in my opinion explains why players are so fond of this new race mode.

VS Race is the last major racing mode, and it is the focus of a lot of controversy.

VS Race covers all possible races in the game, featuring every possible connection between two race tracks, as well as the standalone 3-lap versions of each track themselves. Online, players would be presented with three choices of tracks after each race, with the vote tally influencing the odds of which track is randomly chosen. The next race then encompasses the connecting road from the previous track to the one that was chosen, with one full lap on the destination track as in Grand Prix. As only a small portion of all possible connection races between tracks are available to race within Grand Prix and Knockout Rally combined, VS Race holds the majority of the game’s possible races.

On launch, players hated this new aspect of VS Race. It was also quickly discovered that selecting “Random” as a vote for the next track would always lead to a 3-lap course if selected, so players began doing that after every race. These players also campaigned on social media by telling other players to “always pick Random”. Other unaware players likely saw this behaviour within the game itself and perhaps assumed that there was a good reason to pick Random and so began to do so themselves. This culminated in screenshots of filled 24-player lobbies all picking nothing but Random in between races, which some used as evidence to suggest that nobody liked racing on connecting roads.

Nintendo eventually made changes to the game’s VS Race, first by patching the Random option so that it would select from the offered connection tracks 75% of the time, then by making it so that 3-lap courses would be offered as track selections much more often.

When I would fire up Mario Kart World, it would be because I wanted to play Mario Kart World, with its large interconnected World and incredible variety of potential race tracks—over 200! Because of player behaviour, this is not the experience I get from playing online. What I would get now is something closer to a version of Mario Kart 8 with far fewer tracks, and much more chaos.

I don’t want to play Mario Kart World online anymore.

The worst part of this series of events is that players don’t know what they actually want.

There are many stated reasons for disliking connecting courses.

Some players think that straightaways are boring, and prefer to always be drifting around tight corners—exactly what happens on 3-lap tracks. They want a game of skill in Mario Kart, a game series famous for having unfair races where unskilled players can win using power ups. They want to be able to race on the versions of the courses present in the game’s Time Trials mode, where players always start the race with the same power-up and where no other players can interfere with you. I’m not reading into that, by the way. That is an actual stated reason I often saw for preferring 3-lap courses without connections, as if Time Trials wouldn’t always be a fairer competition without players throwing turtle shells at one another.

Some players who disliked racing on connecting roads switched to playing Knockout Rally instead, where the only time players get to race on an entire section of an actual race track is at the end of a rally, where only 4 players are left remaining.

Some just went back to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

In case I haven’t made myself clear, I think the stated reasoning is nonsense. I don’t even think these players disliked the emphasis on connecting courses. I think what happened is that players found a way to make their online gameplay experience closer to what they were familiar with, and seized that opportunity instead of living with the discomfort of a new experience. When the opportunity was pulled back, they raged on social media. These players went on and on about “player choice” and how Nintendo should “deliver what customers paid for” (which apparently wasn’t Mario Kart World), all while denying players like me the opportunity to play the Mario Kart World we did pay for by making it nearly impossible to race on anything but 3-lap courses online.

In the midst of all this, some enterprising players decided to use social media and chatrooms to organize their own private competitive lobbies where all but conventional 3-lap courses would be banned. These players quickly found that 24 players led to races that were too frenetic and cramped, and began limiting their lobbies to 12 racers.

If only the game had some kind of feature that led to racers being more spread out along a race track, instead of bottlenecking one another. If such a feature exists, it seems the hardcore competitive players have yet to find it.

I think Nintendo lost control of the conversation for Mario Kart World. This is interesting, because they so rarely control the conversation when it comes to their games as they have no need to. Nintendo’s own offerings are usually of such a high quality that they can confidently release a product and know that the audience will react favourably. The problem in this specific case is that a new console launch tends to attract the hardcore fans, who are disproportionately more likely to be hardcore players with bad hardcore tastes. In my estimation, this is why so much of the conversation around Mario Kart World’s VS Mode was so vitriolic. This kind of player tends to expect gameplay experiences to cater to them, and will throw a fit if that doesn’t happen. Because an unusual proportion of this game’s players on launch were hardcore gamer types, the conversation steered away from fun and towards an “it’s bad because it’s different” attitude.

That said, I actually think it would have been possible to save the game’s online, had Nintendo not capitulated to players who don’t even like Mario Kart as it’s intended to be played. The first step would have been to completely patch out 3-lap courses from VS Mode. The game’s designers had many good reasons to prioritize connection-to-course tracks in VS Mode, and so any means to circumvent the game’s own design should rightly be considered a glitch. Then, Nintendo would have simply needed to wait as the shouty gamerbros sucked all the air out of the room. Mario Kart World’s online would die in the process, but that would’ve been fine. The game is eventually getting DLC—nothing announced yet, but it’s definitely coming—which always reinvigorates a game’s player base. Once given that necessary shock, players would eventually try the proper Mario Kart World VS Mode and—without the safety of familiarity to fall back on—would eventually give it a proper assessment, just like they did with the now fan-favourite Knockout Rally.

Alas, Nintendo listened to their customers instead of letting curiosity lead them to a real solution.