Another big change for Mario Kart World is that races support up to 24 players on a course, the most ever for the series.

Yabuki said it was decided “fairly early on” that Mario Kart World would support up to 24 players.

“By creating long routes in a vast world, you could end up with players spread out in various places, which could diminish the sense that they’re racing against each other,” he said. “So, we figured that by increasing the number of racers, you’d be sure to see some competitive action here and there. Maybe that’s a bit simplistic. (Laughs)”

Sato added that Nintendo’s programmers first had to determine if supporting 24 players was even possible. “In game development, you first finish making all the different elements and then optimize them to run on the system. But when trying to accommodate 24 players, we had to make all kinds of processing optimizations right from the start as we were making it,” Sato explained.

Sato went on to say that working with the original Switch was “difficult” in some ways because the console’s power didn’t allow the developers to incorporate “everything we wanted.”

“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 30fps in some cases. It was a tough situation,” Sato said.

Yabuki mentioned that Nintendo’s developers worked on these problems while “kicking the can down the road” in terms of deciding what to prioritize in development of Mario Kart World.

It was at this time that the Mario Kart team decided to release the Booster Course Pass for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe because it would “give us a bit more time” to continue working on the challenges with Mario Kart World.

“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,” Yabuki said.