MK World - Wario
Image: Nintendo

Nintendo has released a new Mario Kart World for the Switch 2, delving into all sorts of delicious details about the game's development.

Crucially, World was actually originally planned for the OG Switch – not the Switch 2. Gasp! Yes, according to interviewees Kosuke Yabuki, Kenta Sato, Masaaki Ishikawa, Shintaro Jikumaru, and Atsuko Asahi, development had only really shifted over to the Switch 2 when the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was being released.

Development seemed to be going okay-ish for the original Switch, but when the team wanted to incorporate 24 players into the races, it ran into a few limitations. "We were analysing from a calm and collected programming perspective whether it would be possible to accommodate 24 players", said Sato. "In game development, you first finish making all the different elements and then optimise them to run on the system. But when trying to accommodate 24 players, we had to make all kinds of processing optimisations right from the start as we were making it".

He then followed up and said that the team even considered taking the performance down to 30fps - yeesh!

"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. 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."

In the end, the team decided that they simply couldn't compromise on anything, and described the release of the Switch 2 as a "ray of hope". Here's what Yabuki had to say:

"We worked on it while kicking the can down the road in of deciding what to give up on, so at some point, we knew it was going to get messy. But as we'd decided to release Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — Booster Course , 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."

Conversations around moving development to the Switch 2 ultimately began in 2020. The team had a basic idea of what the specs were at this point, but it wasn't until later that they'd actually receive development kits. "Once we decided to release this game on Switch 2, we expected our worries to evaporate all at once", said Sato. "I being overjoyed when I discovered we could express even more than we'd originally set out to."

Now, we're just about two weeks away from the launch of the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World on 5th June. Frankly, we're kind of relieved that Nintendo decided to move development over to the new console; can you imagine 30fps Mario Kart in this day and age?!

What do you make of this? Would you have preferred to see Mario Kart World on the original Switch, or are you happy to see it on Switch 2? Let us know.

[source nintendo.com]