Hello Planet #5

[Mandark]

It would be cool one day to see something like "TrackMania Re-United". A definitive TM game that binds the community all together back. It would include the classic tm environments (HD) and the TM turbo upgraded environments

[MrA]

At the end of the day, there will be more players playing Trackmania on both versions, that's cool no?

If they are playing on the moon, and I am on a different planet (ManiaPlanet), then do I really care if they are there on the moon or not? Will they leave the moon and join my planet? Or will I go to the moon?

I think, if the experience between the moon and the planet is broadly the same, other than how many players there are on each, then we will mostly all go to the where there is more players, which will be the moon, in order to all hang out in one place.

So the community will not be divided, they will be united, but on the moon!

[Cerovan]

At the end of the day, there will be more players playing Trackmania on both versions, that's cool no?

I think that's a bit short-sighted...
If MP has 15.000 active players and you improve that, you might get more MP players.
If you create a completely new game, you might have 10.000 MP players and 10.000 Turbo players.
In the end you have more TrackMania players, but less activity in either platform (which is bad, if you haven't noticed already).

And in the optimistic side, there could be 30 000 MP Players and 30 000 players thanks to the popularity of both games

If you use TM Turbo to attract the players to maniaplanet, then add Lagoon to maniaplanet, wouldn't TM Turbo just die?
Once Lagoon is on MP, what is going to be the difference between TM Turbo and having all the environments in Maniaplanet?

As i said, different experiences, Turbo is thinked to give a great experience in the living room like Hylis said in the Hello Planet. You'll understand more things as we reveal more information about Turbo in the coming months

[TheM]

*snip*
And in the optimistic side, there could be 30 000 MP Players and 30 000 players thanks to the popularity of both games

*snip*
As i said, different experiences, Turbo is thinked to give a great experience in the living room like Hylis said in the Hello Planet. You'll understand more things as we reveal more information about Turbo in the coming months

I think this perfectly displays the current problems you show: too opportunistic and having an idea in your heads, but not putting it properly into ours: give us a proper image of what's going to happen, every time again it's "we'll reveal more later" ...

[patrick3004]

This is gonna divide the community even more.

I dispise ManiaPlanet and haven't bought any TM² games so I'll definitely buy TMT but I understand other people feel ripped off.

The smart thing to do now is to kill ManiaPlanet and give TM² users a way to upgrade (for 10€ or max. 20€) to TMT and start a real community on TMT.

Also, if TMT is gonna divide teh community anyway: let PS4, XBox One and PC users play on the same servers. That's a no brainer for me ...

[Railag]

As i said, different experiences, Turbo is thinked to give a great experience in the living room like Hylis said in the Hello Planet. You'll understand more things as we reveal more information about Turbo in the coming months

Why do you need to split this poor community so badly, why couldn't you make a single game that suits people to play in the living room and for people to play tournaments
I can imagine there will be barely any different in the gameplay experience with those minor changes that we've seen, so what's the point?

[matsilagi_tmu]

This is gonna divide the community even more.

I dispise ManiaPlanet and haven't bought any TM² games so I'll definitely buy TMT but I understand other people feel ripped off.

The smart thing to do now is to kill ManiaPlanet and give TM² users a way to upgrade (for 10€ or max. 20€) to TMT and start a real community on TMT.

Also, if TMT is gonna divide teh community anyway: let PS4, XBox One and PC users play on the same servers. That's a no brainer for me ...

I would prefer a free upgrade (even tough im 100% sure i will pre-order Turbo because of the new car designs and the exclusive blocks) just like Forever, makes more sense. I already spent alot on the 3 separate titles.

[Hylis]

Only way i see this working in favor of maniaplanet is too give buyers of Turbo a free maniaplanet account.

One of the option I see is to offer one Maniaplanet free environment when you have bought Turbo. I don't say we will do this, but it's a good exemple you gave and option I think that could help. It would include also the console versions since we can use the uplay account to retrieve your free game. It's still to be discussed, but it's indeed a good option in my eyes.

fng_thatoneguy, I think we should wait to see how we can integrate it as best as possible. For the question of playing together, I think we should acknowledge that the capacities to mod on PC would require quite a specific work to be all available on a console like title. And insteand of spending time to work on double/triple interface/integration of such features, I expect some of the most engaged players to join the competitions or creative sections of Maniaplanet in the end. If the idea is that they would rather stick on console, I am ready to say that it's less likely that they would be able to involve as much anyway: PC offers a lot for communication, creation and sharing tool that are sometimes even made by players.

Rots, for Trackmania in Maniaplanet, the goal is to make it as best as possible at the release of Lagoon & Maniaplanet 4. This is why we have time to still work on it with many people at the studio. The 2015 year is not finished, even if we will have mostly finish Trackmania Turbo around September, for a release in November. And for this work, I would like to wait for the thing to be closer to release to reveal. It's a little like Trackmania Turbo, I think it's also good to see once it's done!

Toninus & acceleracer: When people get an environment in Maniaplanet (or historically with Nadeo) we often update. We will avoid to do this with TMT, also for the positive aspects of having a stabilized place, but Valley, Canyon and Stadium still has a lot to say in many ways in Maniaplanet. Maniaplanet itself, with more and more features, enables the environments to be used more and more.

Kidmaciek, you are right that United Forever made everybody united, and it was great for this, but you would need to tell me how to add one environment from here. If the solution was to either make all environments for free or never add ones, we still had a solution to find. United was an answer but people got to rebuy Orginal & Sunrise. Maniaplanet is an answer to help constant evolution. Trackmania Turbo is an answer in itself for consoles. And if we did it on PC, it's just because we think it's better than not. An in addition, on Forever, even if there is 7 environments, it's also important to look at the numbers of the other 6. Being united is good, but you can also be isolated in united places, and the questions are far more sophisticated than only one big solution. Our goal, with Title, is to give enough place for each sub communities, provide a place for everybody with Maniaplanet and still enable updates. This is why I think we should encourage players from each games & titles to know about the others and help the games & titles to be as efficient as they could be with their constraints.

To sum up a little this post, I would try to make a simple and short explanation:
1. Console is a good support for both number of players & visibility. (which many players seems to ask for Trackmania as a whole)
2. E3 2013 came in with the right specs for the machines (memory especially)
3. Can we do it quickly enough and still make use of some of the work for Maniaplanet? Yes (example: Lagoon, the API and some other things)
4. Do we prevent PC owners only to buy it? No.
5. Can we prevent them to think that they need to take Trackmania Turbo to play first with Lagoon, and then have Lagoon to buy in Maniaplanet? Let's offer them Lagoon if they buy TMT, for exemple (it's an exemple, we don't know yet)
5. Do we handicap Maniaplanet to support updates while maintaining Turbo at each updates? Too risky.

It's was a long post, less structured than Hello Planet and not necessarly with a lot more info. But I think it will take time to understand everything, the reasons and the questions raised by the options we had, and do I wished to help do this potentially. And I know I am bad at explaining things, sorry ^^

[tcq]

Actually, I'm really disapointed with this "year of trackmania". What do we have now? A monstrous GUI with ManiaPlanet that is, in nice words, user unfriendly, slow and unintuitive. A title pack system that clutters the whole GUI, divides the user numbers and makes it unreasonable to find nice servers where you can fight against other players for good times (which TM is actually all about).
Canyon started fine, but got a huge drop after stadium and valley got released. Valley dropped dead and everyone switched to stadium. That's why it looks now like this.

Online Players by Game:

TrackMania Stadium: 516
TrackMania Canyon: 103
TrackMania Valley: 25.

Then there came the notice, that 2015 will be the year of trackmania. After over half a year into 2015, we finally got some kind of news. It's a trailer promoting a game called Trackmania Turbo (TMT), featuring all of the previous TM2 environments plus a new one, a nice GUI and on top of it, it will be available for the current generation of consoles, namely PS4 and XBOX one. Sounds to good to be true? It is to good to be true. Because instead of bringing new players into ManiaPlanet, it will drain players from ManiaPlanetas TMT will be a standalone version for PC, which won't integrate at all with ManiaPlanet. Okay, so what? It looks better, more like the acarde style we were used to from TMU. And there would be potential for a huge amount of new players as there will be XBOX and PS4 and PC players able to play technically together.

For online, info will come later, but I doubt we will do cross-platform. For Uplay, I need to look more at it before giving answers: I have a meeting for this soon

But no, here comes the next let down, it isn't decided yet. This should have been decided at the beginning of development with a strategy to increase the player amount of either Trackmania (in this case TMT) or for the TM players in TM2 (namely ManiaPlanet). And what's up with Uplay? The way of buying the game worked well so far, even if not optimal. Why isn't TMT available over the normal online shops and as a title pack (even if I still dislike the title pack system due to obvious reasons) to allow PC users to simply integrate it into ManiaPlanet?

So, after this negativity came out, I will at least say that the trailer looks really promising and I would even think about buying it, if it would be easy to pay without "UPlay" or "Steam". Just as a stand alone. It works for ManiaPlanet, why not for TMT? But then I saw this comment here.

Why didn't you prioritize ManiaPlanet as your main project and finishing/polish it

I agree with Rots. Did your parents allow you to go outside and play before your finished your homework? Seriously, ManiaPlanet is so far away from a good and self-sustaining game, as Ignition from project cars.

Turbo will broaden the audience for the Trackmania brand and will help TM2 to get more people in it. It may have lower TM2 player population at the release of Turbo but we're confident that it'll not last (that's the effect to want to try something new and then return on the plateform where you have more options to have fun and where your friends/community are)

As it worked out brilliantly with porting Stadium to ManiaPlanet which drained all players from canyon and valley ... I see already how this will create two communities that will come into existence once the game is released and will never come back together. Then in 2016 (which actually should be the ShootMania and ManiaPlanet year inside of nadeo studio), we (means the TM2 players) will finally receive a TM lagoon version. This will split the small player base of ManiaPlanet once more and after the first week playing lagoon, everything will go back to normal, except that we have now two dead environments (valley and lagoon).
Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the huge amount of creative possibilities ManiaPlanet offers, but even if you are able to build a space ship that can fly to Mars, you won't be able to colonise it without people.

Hopefully you will be able to answer the following questions:
1. Will it be possible to open servers for TMT as with ManiaPlanet?
2. When will we see playable user numbers for valley?
3. When will we get a unified GUI and overall increased useabillity for ManiaPlanet?
4. When will we actually get an update for maniaplanet or the TM2 titles as this is the "year of trackmania"? What about all of the missing blocks for valley? What about official objects that will be available for the main titles (Valley, Canyon, Stadium)? Why not ask user who generated awesome objects to implement them in the official game? Or a star track campaign with objects?

[oliverde8]

I think I understand what Nadeo says, they say 2 + 2 = 3?

When I saw the trailer I was so happy. I actually thought "Woooow finally Nadeo is impressing me again", I haven't had that feeling since the release of Canyon. I thought like many to cross platform servers for at least the main maniaplanet titles.

But then hello planet #5,

I don't know what to think, do you really believe people that buys TM Turbo will buy Maniaplanet? which is still looking like a unfinished product. Even if they do they will very soon be disappointed by the menus a the content that will feel less refined. People want stuff they can just play. Some people like to mod their games etc, but those are a minority (The majority of the current community).

There is Shootmania in Maniaplanet you will say, but personally I think shootmania should never have happened, I don't say that because I don't like it I say it because Mp has become a jungle of half finished ideas. They are good ideas but none are finished.

Edit: Even if you give people a free title in MP, they will check the internet see that MP was released in 2010 and TMT 2015 and think this is a bloody ad, and throw it away. A while back some games used to do this, giveaway cheep games, or demos or older games. I usually just ignored it.

I have been looking for something in Mp since Canyon, since then my excitement for the game have been droping. I am not saying that to be negative, it is a fact. I have spent a lot of time in this game because I love this game and I don't want to be dispointed anymore. Before yesterdays video I had very low expectations, yesterdays video was great and I had a surge of hope, but that is gone again.

One , will current server tools be usefull in this new game? And if they are will the MP dedicatedServer & InGame script work the same way they will work on TMT? or are you going to make us double our efforts?

I know it is negative but that is the feeling I have, TMT my just work fine, and be a great sucess and very fun to play. I am going to buy it, but if it requires a lot of changes for existing tools, then I am probably become a casual gamer that don't contribute to the game. I have neither the time nor the energy to upkeep something on 2 platforms. know if am the only one that thinks that way.

To finish, what I would have wished for was a new TM environment, something different, but fun, like TMT in fact that looks awesome (Faut rendre à César ce qui est à César), I nice overhall of the menus, they are better but still are well ugly. They aren't immersive at all (I loved the TMUF's menus or TMSX).

I still love this game, and hope success to the team.