Multiple users have claimed that Mario Kart World has a dynamic difficulty system after performing some tests on the game.

According to user comments on various forums and social media, CPU players are extremely punishing in 150cc Knockout Tour races. Many who have played Knockout Tour in 150cc said that they were frontrunning (leading in first place) most of the time in Knockout Tour rallies, but the CPU players were very powerful as they could drive at faster speeds and often got powerful items such as triple red shells in second place.

Because of this, they were unable to recover back their spot after getting hit by a blue shell or multiple red shells. This is extremely problematic for Knockout Tour as players need to place first at every checkpoint (not just at the end of the rally) in order to get three stars for the rally.

A few users later found out that, anecdotally, the game has a dynamic difficulty system. It seems that the game adjusts the difficulty of the CPU players depending on how often the human player drifts. The more you drift, the faster the CPU players become and the better items they get.

NintendoSoup tested this hypothesis in several 150cc Knockout Tour rallies in Mario Kart World. We tried playing these rallies with drifting and without drifting. Generally speaking, the results align with what users have reported – it was much easier to get 3 stars without drifting than with drifting. We noticed that the CPU players weren’t using powerful items often when we didn’t drift at all.

We can also confirm that, anecdotally, CPU players in 150cc Knockout Tour are tougher than CPU players in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.