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Reviews Digital Foundry || Mario Kart 8 “Deluxe” Booster Pass Course Analysis

Oliver is a great addition to the DF crew. He's got a fantastic voice and his videos are excellently structured.

I agree with his analysis. I was kinda surprised that the tracks have had more work done to them between Tour and Deluxe than I expected.

They try to go for a different art style in the BCP with the much brighter lighting, and although they might increase the detail level in future waves I don't expect them to approach the less saturated, semi-realistic MK8 style. Both styles have their charms, but looking at all these tracks together it's kinda jarring at times. That difference in tone to me is a bigger point of criticism than the lower detail levels.
 
I don't really understand the tangent the video goes about the tracks not feeling like Mario Kart 8 tracks. Several tracks in the base game are super wide and less interactive, it feels weird to compare like Toad Circuit to Dragon Driftway.

I do agree with pretty much everything he said about the visuals though, there's a big visual mismatch between old tracks and booster pack ones. The foliage is the thing that bothers me the most, it looks so ugly in the new tracks...
 
I kinda just see these tracks as a massive bonus. $25 for 48 tracks is amazing value and they might even have been made by junior developers at Nintendo to give them some experience.
 
YolkFolk said:
I kinda just see these tracks as a massive bonus. $25 for 48 tracks is amazing value and they might even have been made by junior developers at Nintendo to give them some experience.
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1000%, and the inclusion with NSO.

it's a relief to me that (hopefully) this pass won't derail a development of a new game (even non-MK) too heavily. Perhaps this is significantly outsourced too.
 
Liked the visual analysis, less the part where he straight up says the tracks don't fit the game with cherry picked comparisons.
 
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jnWake said:
I don't really understand the tangent the video goes about the tracks not feeling like Mario Kart 8 tracks. Several tracks in the base game are super wide and less interactive, it feels weird to compare like Toad Circuit to Dragon Driftway.
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yeah, this part was straight up goofy

just complaining about the lack of transformations would be valid, but people have been complaining about the wide ass mario kart 8 tracks since 2014
 
At this point, it's a tired analysis for me. Two waves in, we know what these courses are and aren't going to be about visually for the most part.

I'm just happy we're getting MORE tracks.
 
If someone traveled back in time to 2012 with screens from the booster pass and the base game almost everybody would assume the former is the real mario kart 8
 
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Seems like people who knee jerked lazy port of Tour courses were wrong about it and as speculated/sussed out from wave 1 course comparisons by various other channels and outlets, we already knew the courses were upgraded for the Switch.

For the amount of content, it's an extremely good deal and there isn't the lazy port argument anymore. I wish people would move on from their bad takes instead of doubling down. They aren't charging you $60 for these.
 
I‘m ok with the track design and the changing routes stuff is a great addition. But yeah I fully agree expect for maybe Mushroom Gorge and Ninja Hideway visually they are all not good looking, in a way that it is super visible when even driving. I‘ve not even a problem with the low poly nature, just that some tracks are very distracting with the little to no texture work and the low quality cubemaps.
 
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At 7:04 he complains about the lack of boost pads, showing the small hills of Choco Mountains. But... these hills can be used to gain a boost by performing a trick.

I wonder if the game would have been better received had it been sold as a stand-alone title -- same price, same waves, but stand-alone, perhaps under the Mario Kart Tour moniker (Mario Kart Tour - Switch Edition?). Because for all the intent and purposes, the Booster Pass is its own thing. Kinda like Bowser's Fury or Octo Expansion -- they are officially part of 3D World or Splatoon 2, but they are their own thing.
 
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Ketwick9844 said:
Forgive me I don't know how to upload a source and the Mario Wiki unfortunately isn't specifically clear on this anyway, but I remember when it was first announced that Furakawa said that the while most of the main Mario Kart 8 team(Kosuke's group) is working on the next iteration, Bandai Namco Studios(main developers behind Tour) and a very small part of Kosuke's team is remastering the tracks.
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This must have been lost into context or something because Furukawa never talks about this in detail or Nintendo in general. And I think I have big knowlege an read all of the interviews.
 
Yeah, not a lot to disagree with here. The BCP tracks don't look great and clearly show their mobile heritage, but they're pretty cheap, so it's hard to complain too much.

Hopefully they at least fix some of the gross artifacting like that shadow thing in Kalimari Desert that the video pointed out. It's really distracting when playing that track.
 
I really enjoy the "new" tracks, but won't disagree on them definitely being/looking less high quality than the base game's, that is visually simpler and somewhat... flat all around. The track design in and of itself is still pretty good in my eyes, though!
 
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Glad to see him call out the Waluigi Pinball reflections, those were easily the worst thing I saw in the Booster pass so far since it's such a clear downgrade from even the 3DS. It stuck out to me on my first ride and I even posted here about it lol.

Great video, really fair conclusion about the scale of the DLC being worth the concessions.
 
totofogo said:
Glad to see him call out the Waluigi Pinball reflections, those were easily the worst thing I saw in the Booster pass so far since it's such a clear downgrade from even the 3DS. It stuck out to me on my first ride and I even posted here about it lol.

Great video, really fair conclusion about the scale of the DLC being worth the concessions.
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Does he mean the neon lights or just the shadows?
 
totofogo said:
Great video, really fair conclusion about the scale of the DLC being worth the concessions.
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this is the important thing. I'd rather have cheap crap priced cheaply than have EPD pour time and money into more retro tracks for a ten year old game
 
Gingerbread Man said:
At 7:04 he complains about the lack of boost pads, showing the small hills of Choco Mountains. But... these hills can be used to gain a boost by performing a trick.

I wonder if the game would have been better received had it been sold as a stand-alone title -- same price, same waves, but stand-alone, perhaps under the Mario Kart Tour moniker (Mario Kart Tour - Switch Edition?). Because for all the intent and purposes, the Booster Pass is its own thing. Kinda like Bowser's Fury or Octo Expansion -- they are officially part of 3D World or Splatoon 2, but they are their own thing.
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Nah, that would cannibalise sales of MK8DX. This way it only helps increase sales.
 
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The only track that actively bothers me by how it looks is Sky Garden. The colors are garish and don't match, and that animated cloud texture is awful. It also doesn't resemblance the original track at all, nor is it special enough to stand as a reimagining.

All the other tracks look fine to amazing. Waluigi Pinball could be in the base game easily.
 
Raccoon said:
this is the important thing. I'd rather have cheap crap priced cheaply than have EPD pour time and money into more retro tracks for a ten year old game
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Then I've got some bad news for you, this is probably the only epd9 project we're getting until maybe 2024.
 
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Ketwick9844 said:
Forgive me I don't know how to upload a source and the Mario Wiki unfortunately isn't specifically clear on this anyway, but I remember when it was first announced that Furakawa said that the while most of the main Mario Kart 8 team(Kosuke's group) is working on the next iteration, Bandai Namco Studios(main developers behind Tour) and a very small part of Kosuke's team is remastering the tracks.
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You must have watched a different direct from the rest of us, because none of that ever happened. Bandai Namco aren't the lead developers on Tour either; you can see that for yourself on their own website. Tour doesn't have in-game credits but through certain other sources we do know Yabuki was in the director seat, and all of the other known lead staff is from EPD.

It'd sure be nice to imagine that the "main Mario Kart 8 team" has been working on the big new Mario Kart while Tour and the Booster Course Pass are just silly little side projects by a seperate team, but it just isn't true; Mario Wiki can't provide sources for fan fiction. Only person i've seen claim to know the DLC is a side-project by Bandai Namco starts with a Z and ends in ippo; so you know it's all bull.
 
I won’t deny the BCP tracks are a little less jaw-dropping than the base game’s tracks, but I still like them a lot.
 
Gingerbread Man said:
At 7:04 he complains about the lack of boost pads, showing the small hills of Choco Mountains. But... these hills can be used to gain a boost by performing a trick.

I wonder if the game would have been better received had it been sold as a stand-alone title -- same price, same waves, but stand-alone, perhaps under the Mario Kart Tour moniker (Mario Kart Tour - Switch Edition?). Because for all the intent and purposes, the Booster Pass is its own thing. Kinda like Bowser's Fury or Octo Expansion -- they are officially part of 3D World or Splatoon 2, but they are their own thing.
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There's no escaping that these are refurbished Mario Kart Tour tracks. The narrative if it was sold as a standalone would be Nintendo charging for Mario Kart Tour on Switch or some variation of that. Further they run into the issue of having two separate Mario Kart games on the same platform, one of which looks worse but came out later.

Making them as an add on content for their best selling title makes the most sense.
 
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Kartina said:
Then I've got some bad news for you, this is probably the only epd9 project we're getting until maybe 2024.
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That's not bad news though, is it? I can only imagine that things would be worse if they got full attention. Or perhaps said resources are going into Tour? In any case, I don't think this DLC was worth higher quality production
 
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I haven't dipped as much into the BCP tracks as much as I would've liked to at this point but they're fine. The graphical details don't really matter that much when you're in the game, but it's kinda jaw-dropping to see how differently the two sets of tracks are built.

I do think the video would've been stronger if they had put their conclusion at the end in the intro as well. Because it really comes off as a video picking a lot of nits but then concludes "but it's all good, it doubles the size of Mario Kart and you can't say no to that", which just felt like a weird cop-out.

EDIT: I'm also wondering if they'll continue to rework the visuals on existing tracks with each drop. So maybe some of these things will be moot by the end of 2023?
 
I think there were some highs that they didn't mention tho...
While the reflections in Waluigi Pinball really looks awful, I think the asphalt lighting effects and textures of New York Minute are very impressive. Tbh that track and Sydney Sprint look way closer to the MK8 visual identity, if not looking better.
 
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Skipper93653 said:
Whether people like it or not, all EPD 9 has been doing post-ARMS is Mario Kart Tour and recently, the Booster Course Pass.
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I think ARMS 2 can still happen, just with that being the side project and Tour/BCP being the main and not the other way around.
 
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