Nintendo opened their Switch 2 Direct with Mario Kart World, a wide-open racer that arrives some 11 years after the last mainline series entry. As the Switch 2’s premier launch title, it carries huge expectations. What can we learn about the game and its tech from what’s been revealed so far?
Before we get into Mario Kart World itself, I think a quick overview of Mario Kart 8 is necessary, because the prior game informs a lot of World’s rendering choices. Mario Kart 8 runs at 720p on Wii U and up to 1080p on Switch, both at high frame-rates, which required some key technical compromises.
Chief among them is the extensive use of baked lighting; most of the game’s direct and indirect lighting is pre-calculated and stored in lightmaps and ambient occlusion maps. This performance-saving measure allows MK8 to feature relatively sophisticated lighting, though its low resolution does stick out sometimes.
Environmental detail looks great when moving at fast speed, but the game isn’t necessarily throwing a ton of geometry around and it doesn’t have super-sophisticated materials either. Most surfaces appear pretty diffuse, with shiny and normal-mapped surfaces in the mix as needed. Specular detail in MK8 is also fairly simple. There’s no SSR here, given the game’s vintage, with shiny surfaces instead relying on rougher static cubemaps. Water surfaces generally look quite transparent even at steep angles too, likely for gameplay reasons.
When we move over to Mario Kart World, the key innovation is its open-world gameplay structure and larger 24 player races. Players seem free to roam just about anywhere on the map when not racing, and events have extensive off-circuit sections too. Perhaps as a result of this grander scope, some of the same rendering choices end up in World too.