One of the big selling points of the upcoming Mario Kart World for Nintendo Switch 2 is its massive world for players to freely explore. This led many fans to assume that the anticipated racing title was going open-world but according to Nintendo, that’s not really the case. Instead, Mario Kart World’s region will be an interconnected world but the zones players can explore will still be quite vast.
Mario Kart series producer Kosuke Yabuki recently spoke to The Washington Post about Mario Kart World. Yabuki explained that the phrase ‘open-world’ was never actually used by the development team during the game’s development. He stated that the term was “just a little bit too ambiguously defined” for what Nintendo wanted to achieve with Mario Kart World, confirming that it still takes place in a “vast interconnected world” instead.
While it’s not going to be a traditional open-world racer by Nintendo’s standards (or anything quite like the Forza Horizon series, for example), players will still be given an unparalleled amount of freedom to roam the various zones and explore with friends while dashing from one race track to the next. We’ll have to wait for the game’s launch tomorrow to see what unique and interesting world activities we can stumble across between the big races.
Mario Kart World is shaping up to be a massive title in the long-running racing franchise. According to Nintendo, the game was originally being developed for the original Switch before the decision was made to shift it over as a Switch 2 launch title, mainly due to the game’s ambitious open-ended design that made developing it for the first Switch a bit difficult. Now that we know it won’t be a traditional “open-world”, we can probably still expect quite large interconnected zones and areas.
Mario Kart World launches on 5 June 2025 exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2.
Source: The Washington Post
