sadzealot wrote:I've yet to find one customer that agrees with you guys on that part..
If this does not sound like you were working for a competitor of Nadeo or Ubisoft...? I'm just curious
For every game there will be more or less good tentatives to modify them.
The original approach of TrackMania, Virtual Skipper and ShootMania, to have a built-in editor with default and easily placeable elements, is the key element of those games, and it is largely sufficient for the majority of the players, especially for the younger ones.
For TrackMania there are certainly a huge lot more maps than for any other game around.
Perhaps only Portal could reach this count.
And this is due to the simple useability of the editors.
How many players really need or want to use ultracomplex editors for modding and building maps?
How many players are really good level and item designers? I'm pretty sure, not so many.
Most players try, but also fail.
Only few very talented release really awesome stuff, most will release stuff that is ok, and still a considerable amount of crappy things will also be there.
And knowing various other game editors, from the old C-64 game Stunts, over QRadiant with Q3Map to e.g. Train simulator, TrackMania respectively has the most attractive and most easily useable editor that was ever conceived.
By the later addition of more and more stuff to ManiaPlanet, the editor became more heavy, and also a bit more complex to use, still it is very simple to use. What is so wrong with it?
Take another extreme as contrary example: Minecraft had no own map editor, you can "edit" the map directly in game, this is its principle. TrackMania editor reduced to using little cubes only that have different properties and textures, but on unlimited space. Cubism at its perfection
The additional tools like importer Nadeo only released because of the demand of the community, and because the community could not wait until they have the tools really ready (e.g. a importer with a nice GUI, or even a built-in importer).
Opening the game with tools is great for the creatives, but it is a risk for everyone.
And that's exactly what is (or was?) probably not the intention of Nadeo: to have potentially a improvement for the worse.
Already the nearly endless discussion of the blockmixing (in older times hex modding) of TrackMania maps showed it.
Blockmixed maps can be great if done carefully, but often they are really ugly and you don't find at all your way through it.
Now with the gradual opening towards custom blocks and items, the gap between ultracool stuff and incredibly ugly rubbish (please excuse the extreme wording) gets larger with every tool release and with every creation done.
And then it gets more and more difficult to find and to pick the great stuff.
I fear that it is mostly negative for pure players who don't want o don't have the time to create anything themselves, and who expect a readymade game without glitter, bells & doodads.
Although they can't do it better themselves, unhappy players (who are not mapping and not modding) will start blaming server hosters, mappers, and Nadeo at the end, if there is too much bad stuff around.
Perhaps they did only not find the good stuff? Question of good advertising of the creators?
It is obvious that many things are not ready and not 100% perfectly usable for the creative community.
And also more (for SM) or less (for TM) things are not perfect in terms of gaming,
but this is hopefully getting better and better with the years - if we all do not give up.
sadzealot wrote: You heard about the next Unreal Tournament? You heard what they're gonna do? I bet you one thing, it will become 100x bigger than SM within it's first week in terms of players wether or not the gameplay is better or not. That should make you wonder.
Certainly
not.
You simply can't compare the attention and the player count of a game that is known by nearly every FPS player (many of my age have seen the begining of the FPS with the ugly pixellised MCGA games like Descent, Doom, Castle Wolfenstein, Dark Forces, Unreal, Quake and others more than 20 years ago!) to a game that has roughly one and a half year age only, and which is still under heavy development.
That the success of SM is somehow missing, is not necessarily entirely and only the fault of Nadeo.
You'r accusing them they don't respond to the community.
But you totally forget that SM was delayed exactly because of the response to a communty that asked for much more features and changes than Nadeo had been thinking of.
If they really would not respond to the community as you say, the game would not have been released in April last year, but perhaps only later this year. And Nadeo would say "that's it, take it or leave it" and certainly not improve anything, since it would be ready in their eyes...
That they apparently do not respond to a few individues... guess whom and why...
If Nadeo would release a new TrackMania title, it would also have a big attention, and also much bigger than SM from the current point of view, since TM series is also much more famous and known much longer than SM.
Still TM would not get the same attention as for a new UT for sure.
I guess Nadeo can live with that, especially with their long-term strategy.
Admittedly it is bad for the new players who are arriving right now, they find somehow underpopulated servers, many things in the middle of change, so they quit perhaps disappointed and never come back.
But do we really need such volatile gamers which are only jumping between the different platforms without really wanting a home base?
We could observe this well during the last year's demo phase: many were playing on the official servers only because it's free and as long as it makes fun. But more engagement, especially minimum financial, no way... although they could have access to much nicer maps and custom skins etc. for a relatively small price.
Of course everyone has to decide on his own to purchase or not the game.
The current sale could be a good opportunity.
)
