The launch of the Switch 2 was a strange phenomenon, but perhaps one that Nintendo has gotten used to at this point. As is often the case, when hardcore gamers complain about something Nintendo got wrong, it turns out that the loudest voices in the room didn’t really represent the vox populi. It was in this way that the Switch 2, which many called onto boycott, became the new standard for the best-selling launch of any video game console.
This also turned out to be the case for Nintendo’s first $ 80 title, Mario Kart World. This time, however, it is possible that Nintendo did something that the fans are right to be complaining about.
Nintendo just published the Ver. 1.1.2 patch for the game. We’ll share the complete notes below:
General
- Adjusted courses selected in “Random” when selecting next course in a wireless “VS Race.”
Fixed Issues
- Made readjustments to fix an issue where rate fluctuations were sometimes displayed incorrectly in “Online Play” and “Knockout Tour.”
- Fixed an issue where you sometimes can’t recover quickly after falling off the course in “Dino Dino Jungle”.
- Fixed an issue where you continually hit the wall near the finish line of “Boo Cinema” when transformed into Bullet Bill.
Seems fine, right? But the first note actually turned out to be an incredibly divisive decision. But to understand this, we have to explain how Standard Race works.
As is the case with previous online Mario Kart games, when you go online, you can vote on a race type with other players, with the hopes that you get the type you want. In Mario Kart World, you roll the dice on either getting a standard 3-lap race, or an intermission race.
What intermission races do is make you drive all the way to the start of the next track so that you can start the next race. In the previous standard 3-lap races, the game just loads you to the tracks automatically. So, the intermission race actually takes time away from racing, if you wanted to take the racing side more seriously.
The change didn’t really take away the 3-lap races entirely. However, the probability you’ll get the standard 3-lap race has dipped down considerably, so much so that most players can just expect to have to still have to drive to each track now.
As reported by The Gamer and Nintendo Life, a lot of players, at least the ones who are active online, are not happy with this change at all. Players are complaining that it makes them feel that practicing to race was wasted, and they are talking about the game being ruined.
This time, it seems gamers understood that you can’t really threaten a boycott, but a large number of gamers don’t seem to want to play anymore. Nintendo will notice if that happens, and if it does, then they may realize this was an actual mistake on their part.
Or, maybe not. Because Nintendo may have made this change, not to piss off gamers who dislike intermission races, but because their data shows there are actually more players who like them. But then, we do think this could be easily addressed if Nintendo gave players the option to just really play only the standard races, or make them go through intermission races too.
Obviously, making that change only requires another update, but whether Nintendo does may depend on not what the online sentiment is, but what their player data says.
