Haha, that also came to mind, it's pretty poor. Paraphrasing: "Users on Metacritic saying it "ruined" the online mode - an indicator that they are very displeased. "

You don't say? 😄

This was suggested in another repost of this article. It does really have that vibe, yes. It's giving off this uncanny valley feeling of journalism. Lots of words, that... kinda say something?, but there's a lot of like, overlap? I'm having a hard time explaining it.

Now, the fans has taken over on Metacritic by starting a review bomb, the user score of Mario Kart World has dropped from 8.3 to 7.7 in just a few days and that is definitely big. We can see tons of negative reviews, and it truly looks like the players aren’t happy at all.

The message is clear, the new update has ruined the entire online gaming experience. We saw many reviews using the word “ruined” which clearly shows how upset these fans are.

Is it possible that this is ESL instead of LLM? Or maybe a mix of both? I'm getting way more ESL vibes from the first paragraph, but the generally meandering nature of the piece does point to an LLM too.

because the intermission tracks frankly suck for the most part, and are just straight-line roads.

It almost feels like Nintendo are punishing the old meta of high acceleration/very nimble but no speed, using drifting and boosts to keep up speed.

I swear to God Nintendo don't play test their games anymore. It's always something like this.

This explanation helps a lot. I was watching Maxamillion_Dood play online and it seemed like every other track they selected was random. And when it wasn't he clearly didn't know what lap they started on. Like the race would be over the first time they crossed the finish line. Everytime that happened Max was confused. Even to me as a viewer that seemed weird. I couldn't tell what was going on either. First time I ever watched a Mario Kart game and had a hard time telling what was going on.

Perfect explanation.

At least from my experience the 'random' choice now just chooses from one of the three available choices, rather than the full list.

"I'll bitch on the Internet about it but I'll still buy it."

Anyone who knows how Mario Kart World works well enough to be bothered by this change already gave Nintendo $500 for the game. What are they gonna do? Refund it to Walmart?

Yup. It's flat, boring as shit nothingness that just causes win more-ing for those in the lead and causes the tracks that have an ounce of design in them to be 1 lap.

The courses themselves are dull as hell compared to 8 but the traversal reduces it down to "I don't even want to play this game" territory; so I've already stopped playing the 1 new game for my new console lol

I think it’s a cool idea but the intermission tracks are just so boring to me.

Judging by the descriptions given by another user these "between track" drives are A. Part of the race and removing actual time on the actual tracks, and B. Not optional. Those things together make for some seriously bad game design.

From a gamedev perspective it wouldn't make sense to call what was happening "classic". It was unintended behavior.

What would make more sense would be to make a setting to allow or disable the intermission sections of the race (they'd need to think of another name for them though because they call the wait time between races intermissions in the settings already). Allow players to keep or remove the long stretches.

Agreed. I’m pretty much completely over World at this point and only play if my kid asks me to. I think it’s technically impressive and gorgeous to look at, but the tracks are so utterly boring I have little motivation to fire it up.

I’m still salty about the lack of local multiplayer free roam too, but that’s another issue entirely.

3 lap racing local co-op mode to unlock tracks and bonus content was the bread and butter for me. So few games have a co-op campaign. I also enjoyed local battle modes as well. They never updated battle mode once in MK8.

I have only played one grand prix (and that too locally), so I can't say if World or 8 is better, but DK Spaceport is probably one of the most interesting track I have played.

I have only played it once though, so am not sure if it was the nostalgia hit or if the track is actually good but its still pretty unique.

The whole part about no review bombing on Steam made no sense

Nintendo makes things for a very specific market and any spillover internationally is just a bonus. To be fair, that has worked out for them for decades now.

We knew it would be a shitshow

We who? And how did you know?