Half narrative pacing, half easier to optimize/dev than one full open world.
Right up until the last few weeks there were season subtitles in front of each area too - Spring for Suburbs, Summer for City, and Winter for Mountains. Originally we were going to have four, but we merged our "miami"-esque story beats and world into the left half of City.
We originally wanted to gate entry to each world with a powerup too (reverser for city, water for miami, jump for mountains), but that ended up falling by the wayside when the Ronaldo Race beat came together. We still have Jump to City in there, kinda, sorta!
(In my backlog of tasks never completed for Roundabout, there was a task to have freeroam be psuedo-open by having a repeating level connecting each map - think the Mario 64 staircase or Mass Effect's elevators - but the effort to get it in wasn't worth what we'd have to cut in other places to make time for it.)
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