Mario Kart 8 Deluxe DLC tracks: quantity over quality?

Nintendo added new tracks to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe last week. There will be 48 new routes by the end of 2023, these have been divided into 6 waves. And as said, the first 8 tracks came out last Friday for the Switch version. 48 routes for only 25 euros, that sounds like a really fair deal. With over 40 million units sold, this will also be very lucrative for Nintendo.

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The quality of the new routes is worse

One thing fans have noticed over the weekend, however, is that the quality of the new tracks doesn’t quite match that of the main game and the first DLC (which was released for the Wii U). A lot of details are missing:

The textures are less detailed, there are no new drivers or karts, and the tracks show that less time has been invested in them. The video below shows some good examples of the old and new Mario Kart tracks in the game:

In the last few days, I’ve also got an impression of the first 8 sticks on the Nintendo Switch and I noticed it straight away. My first impression was that Nintendo preferred quantity to quality when it came to the DLC.

If you play the new tracks as a cup, then it’s not so tragic, but as soon as old and new tracks are mixed, it has a negative impact in my opinion. Some of the new routes seem a bit unloving to me.

With the first DLC, Nintendo submitted fewer tracks back then, but they brought the same quality as the original. There were also new drivers. I like this way better. Sure, 48 tracks sound great and the selection will be huge (almost twice as big) by the end of 2023, but was this the right way to go about it?

Focus already on Mario Kart 9?

I suspect that Nintendo simply gave these routes to an external studio who have to implement them quickly. And a new character would be a lot more work than a new track, especially if it has a lot of details.

Nintendo can now use this extra time and invest in Mario Kart 9, the A team will certainly work on that. We will probably no longer get the new title for a switch console, but for a whole new console.

While I would have preferred the path of the first DLC for the Wii U back then, I don’t want to complain too much. After all, after 8 years there are finally new routes and I actually like a few of the new routes quite a lot.

But the expectations of Mario Kart grow from year to year, especially when you’ve known it all for so long. The new routes of the DLC are also only remakes. But I’m afraid that there will be at least a decade between Mario Kart 8 and Mario Kart 9 and you have to put up with that. After all, I think the price for the DLC is very fair at 25 euros.

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