Rare:Banjo 3 is 80% vehicle.

[Grey Acumen]

I have no issues with the game concept. The issues I have is that it's NOT Banjo Kazooie anymore. I had teh same issues with Mario 64 going to Mario Sunshine, Star fox 64 going to starfox armada(whatever the heck the gamecube version was), and Zelda when the shifted to Zelda 2(and heck, they technically hadn't even established what the franchise was at that point)
This could have been an entirely new franchise with new characters if they thought it was such a great concept for a game, or at the very least a spinoff from the series instead of a sequel.


I actually have a couple of ideas why Rare went this way with the series:

They had so many different abilities for you to learn in the first game, and then you learned even more in the second game, they didn't have anywhere to go in the third game. The didn't want to take away any of your abilities from the first two games, but they couldn't come up with enough to add to the game, so they decided to shift the entire paradigm of the game instead. You don't lose any of your old moves, but you would still need to be taught how they apply to the new circumstances and learn new moves that are specifically geared to the new gameplay.

The other possibility that I see as likely is that Rare is trying to simplify the artistic demands on their workforce. It's a lot easier to design building blocks for cars in which the pieces always stay the same shape as they move. It's a lot more difficult to animate a bird being squashed and stretched.
From what I've seen so far in the actual previews of the game, the object models are all spectacularly rendered in great detail, but there is very little that actually changes shape at any point in the game. Which means that the game animations are much less demanding than they might have been otherwise.