The ‘Mario Kart World’ Direct Wasn’t Throwing Out Anything New if You Already Know the Game, but There Were Still Some Interesting Parts

The Mario Kart World Direct is over, and it was cool. I mean, if you’re a Mario Kart vet. This was an instruction manual with a few new items. If you’re a newbie, you probably got more out of it than the rest of us. Still, there were some things to talk about. Let’s get into it.

‘Mario Kart world’ courses

Courses in the game are inspired by their region. There are courses from past games reimagined for the open world. I’m interested in just how many there are, and if they’re hidden throughout the world or just part of the overall experience. Being able to drive across the entire map and stumble on a new course would be pretty awesome. Interestingly enough, “Rainbow Road” appears to be an unlockable course after completing all the Grand Prix Cups.

OPEN WORLD

The Direct gets into Dash Food, where you can change outfits via food power-ups. Once you unlock them, you can choose them in the character select screen. And I believe I saw Mario dressed like someone relaxing at a spa. Hopefully, we get some references to other games in there. I feel like this is the perfect game to get ridiculously self-referential.

‘Mario KART WORLD’ Free roam/multiplayer

This is still the most interesting feature of this game to me. Turning Mario Kart open world is wild, and apparently, you can go pretty much anywhere and activate P-Switches for extra blue coin gathering missions. There seems to be a significant amount of exploration and collecting you’re able to do. In the Direct, the narrator mentions being able to go to the edge of the map. So, maybe there’s way more hidden content they just won’t be revealing.

In multiplayer, you can free roam while waiting for friends, check their location, and travel to them. So, the crew will be getting some miles in together before making an effort to ruin our friendship in some races. I can’t wait. All in all, the Direct was pretty standard, but we got some more solid looks at gameplay. And the game does look beautiful in motion.

Charge Jump is going to change a lot in multiplayer, and Rewind is insane. Your opponents still move forward like normal. That’s right, you rewind, but no one else. Use that intelligently because that has real potential to put you in hell. I wonder if that function exists in multiplayer or just single player.

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room

Hey, Nintendo, you saw that, right? The entire chat was filled with “DROP THE PRICE” comments once again. I think people aren’t really paying attention to what you’re doing. They seem to want something else. Look, the $80 price point is jarring. But realistically, how much longer did anyone think that $70 was going to stay the norm? Quite honestly, I’ve been more annoyed with Nintendo’s stubborn refusal to put their older games on any type of real sale. That is the more egregious issue to me.

I believe we can ride this $70 thing out a little longer — and that a good number of companies are going to be punching way out of their weight class trying to convince people to pay that. But on the other hand, I see y’all out there still paying them wild prices for Collector’s Editions of games, though. So, you know, probably should chill on that, too.