I am glad that Mario Kart World does not add non-Mario characters

Fortnite has a lot to answer. I am a big fan of the Battle Royale genre as it pressed to stratospheric heights, but the game also popularized the Battle Pass method to make money on live service games and quickly became a large melting pot for each IP under the sun.

We have written about revenue generation many times here at Thegamer, so today I will focus on the big pot with IP soup that is labeled Fortnite and is drip-fed to you for a few hundred V-bucks per month. Specifically, I will discuss why I am glad that Mario Kart World has forgiven the opportunity to become Nintendo Kart and what this may mean for the game's future.

What is Fortnitification and why is it bad?

Fortnite is not in itself bad. However, I would claim that the industry's benefit. The term I have just coined – you are welcome – is the phenomenon of games that become IP ports, nothing but the spaces for known faces to emerge instead of original characters. All games that make you point to the screen and shout, “OMG It's Glup Sh*tto!” has been fortnitified.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is the latest victim. The game is solid and the mechanics are fun – especially knife knitting your friends to revive them – but Lore, the world building, everything that developer FROMSTWARE is known for? It has been abandoned. Worse than that, it has been bastard. Why is the morning in the same world appear as the unnamed king?

Not everything needs deep lore, I give you. A weak multiverse explanation would have sucked as much as no explanation as well. But FROMSoftware has been based on these deep stories, these intricate worlds, which is why Nightreign feels like an abandonment of that core identity. The Elden Ring has been Fortnitified, and the experience is much worse for it.

However, the game that inspired this article is Sonic Racing: Crossworlds. As my colleague Jade King wrote about earlier this week, our eponymous hedgehog will be combined with a varied role of characters in this excursion, including Spongebob Squarepants and Minecraft Steve. In Sonic's case, this seems to be a transparent way of trying to sell paid DLC, but I see fort nitification in action. It suggests a lack of confidence in the base game, it is desperate to catch attention in this world where games are so easy and so quickly forgotten. It feels like a step down for Sonic, a character that should sunbathe in the limelight in the wake of three gigantic hit films.

If there is a company that never lacks confidence, it is Nintendo.

How Mario Kart World escaped Fortnitification

Mario Kart World was launched with an impressive list of 50 playable characters. And how did Nintendo reach this half a century by high -speed drivers? Not by collaborating with Minecraft or Roblox, not by breaking the depth of Nintendo's huge gaming directory. By showing some love for the previously overlooked the stars from previous Mario games.

Everyone is obsessed with KO, and I have to admit that I am also a little obsessed. But I mostly look at Penguin. The poor Fella, whom we all threw so sloppy from a cliff in Super Mario 64, finally has a chance to shine. The redemption arch is one for the ages.

I liked to play as a link in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Hyrule Castle Track is one of my favorites because I'm a big Zelda fan. Do this Mario Kart 8 make a worse game than it would have been without these additions? No. Does it make me a hypocrite? Perhaps. Watering this supplement the impact the game has? Definitely.

There is no Lore to Mario Kart. No reason why Mario and Bowser are suddenly in the same team, or why Peach and Daisy suddenly hate each other. It doesn't matter. But by ensuring that the game contains only Mario characters, it keeps things clean. There is no cross contamination. You can interrupt your distrust to imagine that all these Mario characters have agreed to solve their differences on racetrack rather than in a page rolling struggle to death. For me, at least it makes it a better game than if it tried the shoe in Ganondorf or Mr. Krabs.

I'm sure some tweens will tell me that Bananaman and Mr. Fish are cornerstones in the ongoing Fortnite history, but I'm here to say that Fortnite has no Lore. Without IP to trust, however, Epic Games develops borrowing characters from other franchise services if it wanted to go to BR. Do you want to fight to death like Darth Jar Jar or John Cena? Fortnite is the only place you can.

It works for Fortnite because the game itself is an empty cloth. But for a Mario Kart game, a Souls game, even a sonic game, it is the universe with established characters and stories. Crossover section does not work in video games.

What is the future for Mario Kart World?

Mario Kart 8 also started with a role consisting solely of Mario characters, but it could not help immerse itself in Nintendo's huge pockets for some crossover characters to fill the DLC spots. However, I do not think that Mario Kart World will follow the same racing line.

This is due to its open world. Where Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has added traces of tracks, everything in the world itself is linked by the world. Each DLC must fold future tracks into this. I could see a new island that appears on the horizon that we can travel to, but the chance that the island happens to contain Hyrule Castle seems narrow.

I do not know if Mario Kart World will completely avoid continuation. The more DLC arrives, the greater the chance there is a transition with another Nintendo property. But one thing is certain: Nintendo does not release Samus Aran as a playable character just to market Metroid Prime 4. It is something to be celebrated, even if the developer cleans an impossibly low bar.

At the moment, I am glad that Mario Kart World has launched in a completely unpleasant state. Whatever happens next, we can enjoy the fact that it is a Mario game right now. When Waluigi can turn into a vampire, what else can you ever need?