Let's Talk About Car Handling

[Filipe1020]

I wanted to open this topic to discuss the most important aspect of the series, no it's not the tracks or the creation side, but the car handling itself, yes, the handling.

What makes a game enjoyable and keep the players interested to play? Is it the graphics? The crazy tracks? The musics? No, it's the very first thing you do, controlling the car, the vehicle is the player, and every movement he does on the controller goes to the car, in Trackmania, the first thing you have to master aren't the tracks you play on, but the car itself, and be able to react quickly with it's perfomance on different surfaces, and discovering the pros and cons of the vehicle, if it can drift or not, if it's good on acceleration, if it's turning is too sharp or not, you must discover your car before you go out there and set up that nice lap record.

Why I'm saying all of this? It's because there is one thing that I've been bothered about for a while with the recent titles of Trackmania, why is that it's so difficult for Nadeo to make an enjoyable and satisfying handling model for an environment? Take a look at Stadium for example, it still is the most played environment yet, even on TM2 and TM Turbo, is it because it's Nations Forever version is free? No, it's because the car is actually enjoyable to drive.

You can make nice smooth turns, powerslides, it handles great on loops and wallrides, and players still love to play on that environment because of that, the handling model is great and it's nice to drive, it doesn't attack the player with sudden changes of traction, throwing you on the next wall (Lagoon) or get really sensitive on dirt (Valley) it handles nicely, Canyon is also nice too, it's a bit wobbly on the tight roads, but the drifting is satisfying and fun.

What worries me is that, we all know TM2 Lagoon will come up sometime, but the problem with it, is how the car handles in Turbo, the car is incredibly frustrating to drive, the biggest problem about Lagoon is that it's not the track that punishes you, it's mainly the car, it feels like the car does everything to stress you out, it snaps out when you go back to tarmac, it's hard to turn anywhere else, you need a lot of fast reflex on the rollercoaster sections to avoid crashing on the borders, if you release TM2 Lagoon with the exact same handling model, you can expect a lot of refunds and bad reviews, the proof of that is Lagoon is almost abandoned on the online lobbies, most of the populated servers doesn't have any Lagoon tracks there, there are other BIG issues to be solved but this topic is mainly about the handling.

NADEO please, look at the Bad reviews your games had received, learn with your mistakes, and try your best to fix them, we point that out everytime for years, but there will be a time that your playerbase will be tired of being treated like this and just leave, and about TM2 Lagoon, rethink the car handling for it, just do.

[745]

I agree that Lagoon gameplay is horrible. I can barely control with keyboard. Will be likely the first TM release I won't buy. I think Nadeo should be less conservative with the TM universe rules. I don't care about this spirit of things, and I'm a hardcore Tm player, people outside the community may care even less. So, go ahead and make a total reworking, there's nothing to lose.

[Dommy]

Everything is better with CanyonCar and StadiumCar - mix of these on Lagoon will feel awesome (already did that in Turbo). Lagoon is not a tragedy if you play on gamepad though.

[Hylis]

Lagoon gameplay will stay as it is, so let's avoid these bad ending discussions here. Thanks