Mario Kart World just received a fairly large patch that adds several quality of life improvements on top of addressing one of the biggest complaints about the game: The lack of 3 lap races in online play. Did they do enough? Let's dive in and find out.

Mario Kart World has released update 1.2.0, which introduces a variety of quality of life improvements and addresses some player concerns. Notable changes include the ability to remove CPU racers and restrict items to only mushrooms in versus mode, as well as a more convenient replay feature for time trials. 

Online play receives minor adjustments, such as new spectating options and a progress bar while waiting for matches to finish. Other updates include weaker CPU opponents outside of battle mode, changes to item probabilities, and several small interface tweaks. While some changes are substantial, others are barely noticeable in gameplay.

Mario Kart World: Does version 1.1.2 fix online play?

Mario Kart World just got a huge update that adds several quality of life updates and seemingly addresses one of the biggest issues that people have had with the game ever since launch. Let's cover all of them in this quick patch notes video. I'm going to go through each of these notes individually and label them either as being a substantial change, noticeable, which basically means that you'll definitely feel the difference even if it doesn't change a whole bunch, and barely noticeable, for changes that are either inconsequential or just not that much different from how it was before. Let's actually start at the bottom of this list because this is kind of the big one. Increase the frequency of lap type courses appearing in the selection when choosing the next course in versus race and wireless races. Now this is weird because they don't specify online play here while they do in other parts of the patch notes which would lead you to believe that this only affects offline versus mode races and local wireless play. But that doesn't really make sense because in those modes you can freely choose your track instead of having a choice of 3 and a random select like you do in online play. That said they did this with patch 1.1.0 as well so I'm just going to assume that this affects online as well. In any case, in my testing of this I'm regrettably going to have to label this as barely noticeable. In 10 matches I got the option to choose a 3 lap race once and in one other match a 3 lap race popped up in random select again. I don't doubt that there is an increase but whatever it is it seems to be an incredibly small change. Next up we have two quality of life additions to versus race which is that you can now make it so that there are no CPU erasers and you can also set it so that only mushrooms will show up as items. This is a substantial change and something that I think is very welcome. It allows a sort of alternative competitive mode that eliminates the randomness that is typically inherent in Mario Kart and is the closest thing that you can get to just turning items off altogether like you could in Smash Bros. Now you can also choose view replay after downloading ghost data in time trials which is a super nice and convenient quality of life update that I'd say is a noticeable change. Before you'd have to download the ghost back out of the menu and then go to another menu just to be able to play the replay. Now you can just do it all from the same screen. A handful of noticeable changes in online include the ability to choose who you want to watch while spectating a knockout tour and balloon battle once you're eliminated. And you can now see a progress bar at the bottom of the screen when you're waiting for a match to finish in online mode. Another change was that they made the CPU weaker in everything other than battle. To test this I did Grand Prix on 150cc on the one cup that for one reason or another I hadn't gotten a gold on. Now I don't consider myself a great Mario Kart player but this felt like an overcorrection. I barely had to try to get first place on all four races and get gold. So this is a noticeable change even though I don't think it's a very good one. They also made the homing of the boomerang weaker. For me this is a noticeable but not substantial change. I have seen people online who are fairly stoked for this though so your mileage may vary. They decreased the probability of getting a triple dash mushroom in the low position whenever the item rolls are anything other than frantic. I personally found this to be barely noticeable as I was still getting triple mushrooms pretty frequently. What was noticeable to me was the increased probability of getting a question block. I felt like I barely got this item before and while it's still rare it felt a little more common than before. Then we have a handful of fairly small, barely noticeable changes. The game will remember the camera cursor position and size when using camera play until the player closes the game. Once you gather all the p-switches, question panels, and peach medallions the colors of various numbers will change and there's now a wheel spinning animation if the player presses the A button too soon at the start of a race. Finally there are a whole list of bug fixes, none of which I ever experienced but you can check them out for yourself to see if anything you were affected by has been fixed. And that's our breakdown of Mario Kart World Update 1.2.0. What do you think? Did Nintendo do enough? Are there still things you want to see changed? Let us know in the comments and for everything else, keep it here on IGN.

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