Fuse Games explains why Star Wars: Galactic Racer lacks an open world

The developers believe that an open world offers a little too much of everything, making it harder to really immerse yourself in the details.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was a near-perfect kart game with an incredible amount of content that was also consistently well-made, topped off with superb gameplay. This has made it the fifth best-selling game of all-time, with sales of nearly 80 million copies.

It was, of course, no easy task to follow up on this, and true to form, Nintendo wanted to offer something new and opted for an open world in Mario Kart World. A game that is definitely also good, but the consensus seems to be that it cannot quite measure up to its predecessor.

Creating a racing title in an open world has many advantages and possibilities, but also several challenges. When Fuse Games (founded by veterans from British racing specialist studio Criterion) decided to invest in a Star Wars-themed racing game, they chose to forego the open world in favour of defined tracks instead.

In an interview with IGN, creative director Kieran Crimmins explains why they chose this path, saying that open game worlds offer too much freedom and too many options, which makes it difficult to really immerse yourself in the tracks and game systems at an expert level:

"The reason we're a track-based racer is because we wanted to have that replayability loop that expands over time. All those benefits people learn in the tracks, the more they play, learning the handling, that familiarity getting them better rather than just a massive smorgasbord of a thing, which is a slightly different kind of 'play with the toys' experience."

Crimmins believes that it is thanks to the dedicated tracks to race through, where it is your ability to carefully learn them and master the technique, that makes the game feel as tight as it does:

"This is high consequence, high action, high replayability and something that creates player stories that you wouldn't have seen in other games. And I don't think we could do that if we would go in and say, okay, we're also going to do this open world thing. That's a whole set of different challenges."

Star Wars: Galactic Racer will be released later this year on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S/X, with the exact date yet to be confirmed. Last week, a proper gameplay trailer for the game was released, and if you missed it then or just want to refresh your memory, you can check it out below.