Gaming technology channel Digital Foundry has taken a look at the available courses in the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass and their implementation into Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The new courses do look dramatically different to the base-game tracks with flatter textures and less detail. The courses play differently too as they are more simple and less dynamic in comparison to the courses found in the base-game. Here’s what Digital Foundry had to say about the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass tracks.
“The Booster Course tracks have flat, low-detail textures in general, particularly on trackside geometry and foliage. The new tracks have a clay-like appearance as a result, with minimal surface detail in most areas. If you get close to certain materials, you’ll notice some grime and roughness has been blended in with overlaid detail textures – textures that contain repeated high-frequency detail. Depending on the lighting conditions, this can look okay, though it doesn’t match the look of the original tracks at all. Most of the time however, objects look almost flat-shaded, which is particularly jarring on grass and other foliage elements. Some of those simpler textures also appear to exhibit some compression artifacts.”
“The Booster Course tracks are less dynamic than the base tracks in Mario Kart 8 – there are fewer boost pads, no underwater sections and limited glider sections. The track layouts are simpler, with fewer corners, wider roads, and shorter circuit lengths. The best MK8 tracks combine challenging sets of fast corners with extended anti-gravity sections, multiple viable routes, and track hazards. Most of the new tracks are sedate in comparison, with laid-back layouts, less interesting track features, and little in the way of vehicle transformations. Simply porting mobile tracks over without major modifications means they don’t match the gameplay concepts in Mario Kart 8 especially well. “
“Don’t get me wrong – Mario Kart Tour is a decent mobile game and I can understand its appeal. Tour wraps popular characters and colourful, basic graphics around a simplified variant of Mario Kart, something that works perfectly well on mobile – but its tracks simply don’t mesh well with the Switch originals. As it stands, players are left with courses that largely don’t play like Mario Kart 8 tracks, don’t look like Mario Kart 8 tracks, and don’t feel like Mario Kart 8 tracks.”
It is disappointing.
It was another lazy cash grab by nintendo.
Nintendo has gotten extremely lazy with their game development over the switch lifespan, they rely too much on Mario rehashed and new expansions for older games from the wiiu Era, doesn’t help matters when steamdeck is making the switch look bad as well.
They need to fire whoever is in charge at Nintendo asap.
The guys at DF need a life. They’re always bitching about Nintendo games. From frame rate to DLC, they can’t be happy.
Stop licking Nintendo’s boots, it’s pathetic.
well Digital Foundry sometimes praise Nintendo(Super Mario Odyssey, Luigi Mansion 3, Metroid Dread, Animal Crossing New Horizons,Super Smash Bros Ultimate).
I personally didn’t mind them. I liked their console adaptations they have nice visuals and details. The only one that felt a bit janky the Candy one and it’s many jumping platforms.
Isn’t this what everyone’s been saying since they first showed off the tracks for wave 1? I completely agree that the Tour tracks aren’t a good fit, but I’d go a step further and say they ruined the new 64 tracks as well for a lot of the same reasons. The tracks were made bigger (wider and slower) than their originals and it doesn’t fit well with the physics of MK8, which has very different turning/drifting mechanics than 64. While on the subject, I don’t know why but Nintendo has this problem where they make things bigger when ported from an older game. Even in Smash Ultimate, the old Yoshi’s Story stage feels gigantic compared to what it was like in Melee (I’d say a lot of the stages in SmUsh feel bigger than they should be, but I digress).
When you need to make it accesible for a 9 or 8 player melee event you gotta be willing to sacrifice a bit.
also is not the main development team responsible for the mainline Mario Kart games, that is working on the DLC, is the Mario Tour team that is working on the DLC, that why the DLC have considedly grafics compared to the the game.
I think they should have left out the Tour tracks so that they could maintain quality. Only a few of them look good, such as Sydney Sprint, but still nowhere near as good as the base MK8D tracks. Plus, there wouldn’t be tracks based on real world cities in the Mario Kart world to contemplate.