The first game we officially saw running on a Switch 2 was Mario Kart World. The open-world racing game will be launching alongside the new console next month, but that wasn’t always the plan. Mario Kart World was going to be a Switch 1 game, until the devs realized the aging console couldn’t handle it. So instead the team made some more DLC for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and waited for the Switch 2.
In a new series of “Ask the Developer” interviews on Nintendo’s website, the people behind Mario’s first new racing game in 11 years shared a ton of info on the upcoming kart-racing sequel. According to them, the plan was always to set this game a big, open world with connected tracks. And it was never going to be called Mario Kart 9, as this time around they wanted to “take the series to the next level.”
“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,” said Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki. “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. That’s why, this time, we wanted the gameplay to involve players driving around a large world, and we began creating a world map like this.”
At the time, the devs were developing this bigger, more open Mario Kart game for the OG Switch console. As the Nintendo devs explained, their process is to first design a game and what they want it to do, and then make it work on the hardware. However, to get 24-player races and the open world working on Switch was challenging, and involved a lot of compromises.
“When we were developing for the Nintendo Switch system, it was difficult for us to incorporate everything we wanted, so we were always conscious of what we were giving up in return,” said programming director Kenta Sato. “We discussed things like toning down the visuals, lowering the resolution, and we even considered dropping the frame rate to 30 FPS in some cases. It was a tough situation.”
According to Sato, Nintendo considers it very important that Mario Kart games run at 60 FPS, likely because this provides players with a solid sense of speed and makes the game feel more fluid and responsive. So instead of halving the framerate, they just...waited for a new console.
“We worked on [Mario Kart World] while kicking the can down the road in terms of deciding what to give up on, so at some point, we knew it was going to get messy,” said Yabuki. “But as we’d decided to release Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — Booster Course Pass, we thought that would give us a bit more time to continue development. That’s when the conversation of moving it to the Nintendo Switch 2 system came up, and this suddenly opened up a bunch of possibilities on what we could do. It was truly a ray of hope.”
It’s very interesting to see Nintendo so openly discuss framerates and how important they can be in high-speed games like Mario Kart. And yeah, they made the right call. Mario Kart at 30 FPS sounds depressing.
Mario Kart World and the Switch 2 are set to launch in United States on June 5. GameStop says it will have some Switch 2 consoles available in stock for fans who weren’t able to get a pre-order. The $450 console will likely be hard to get this year, and might go up in price in the future due to tariffs.