Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a great opportunity for Nintendo to rebalance the metagame for Mario Kart 8. While the metagame could have been a lot, lot worse, there were a few things Nintendo could have gotten a little better; things that created an air where the game eventually got a little bit stale because of its predictability in spite of an RNG handing us items.

Item Balance

This actually doesn’t need a huge improvement. Honestly, I’m only looking at one item in particular – the lightning bolt. There’s no reason anybody other than last place should ever get this guy. Fourth place getting a lightning bolt – no matter how reasonably far in front first place is – is just too imbalanced in my opinion.

Fire hopping // Balance between karts and bikes

I lumped these two together for a reason: fixing the first one will inherently fix the other, for the most part. I’m a bike user, through and through, but let’s face it: they’re inferior in this vision.

Eliminating fire hopping is probably the better go – I inherently don’t have a problem with fire hopping, per se, but due to the nature of inward drift, it would cause a potential swing too far in the favor of bikes. Eliminating it would swing the balance to a more favorably balanced part of the spectrum. On top of this, a few more inward drift bikes would be nice – a smaller, handling based one alone would be a good start.

And while I’m at it…

I’m actually hoping Nintendo does take a bit of time to rebalance these things. We’ve already seen a metagame tweak — two items have been introduced instead of just one. This is a huge metagame change for Mario Kart 8. It makes me hope these other tweaks aren’t just a pipe dream. We’re already getting a revamped battle mode. New characters. So yeah, while I’m at it, gimme some new regular courses and some new bikes, too! Don’t miss taking complete advantage of this opportunity, Nintendo, and tweak just a little more.