So...Who's getting the Preorder Beta Thing?

[simon.si]

I would love to but there is no paysafe option so im pretty much

[osen]

I must really have a completely different perception of the value of money I guess. 20 bucks is even less then peanuts. For me, a small two hours work. For the avarage smoker about 3 days worth of smoking. A paperboy could earn that in a week.... About 4 weeks saving avarage allowens? Doing the dishes for your parrents? Wash your uncle's car? C'mon guys, get over it!

Well, you could reason like that over anything. What if a bottle of soda was 10 bucks? Would you pay that? Anyway, €20 is about $30, and if there would be 7 environments like in TM1 for €20 each, that would be over 200 US dollars. What's a normal game in the US, about $60? That's quite the difference. Anyway, I'll shut up now

I see your point, and I have no desire to dredge up old arguments again, but I feel the need to say you seem to be missing a point, here. Ths point in question is that Maniaplanet is not "one game, broken up into 9 (or 15, if Hylis' dream is to be realized) smaller titles, but 9 (or 15) complete games. That all can interact with each other together, or separately. You can purchase Canyon, and then not purchase Valley. That's like buying Island, but not Coast (cuz you don't like it or whatever). And yes, while on mix-map servers, the players that don't have Valley, again as an example, will be kicked, I'm quite sure there will be dedicated one-envi only servers. And two envi servers (Canyon/Storm). Or something like that. The community (and Nadeo) always find a way to make things work out for the players.

Then I feel the need to ask something How can you call it a complete game? In my book, it isn't, far from, but no matter what you call it, the fact is that you get ONE car, ONE environment and an editor. There is NO variation, the only variation is user created tracks. That's not even close to a full racing game by my standards. It's one part of it, like Nations is a part of Trackmania 1. But no matter what I think. My real question was:

How can they interact with each other? Lets say I buy two environments for the price of a fully fledged normal game. And my friend buys two different ones that he likes, also for the price of a fully fledged normal game. What can we do that would be any fun? Look at each others ranking? No offence, but you sound like a fanboy, not that it's anything wrong with that. I can't see how we can interact in any way worthwhile. I would love to be proven wrong though.

[Trackmaniack]

I am a fanboy. Now that we've got that out of the way, I can also be a rational human being, too. They aren't mutually exclusive. Now, to rebut your comments, you say we only get one car, one environment, and an editor. Well, you say yourself that you're not counting the user-made tracks, which, when coupled with good MT work, maybe even mods, or even just the vanilla game, with enough variation, can -feel- like completely different environments because of the different playstyles necessary for each track.

And yes, there is only one chassis. One handling-set. But that's hardly one car. Do you see how many different 2D skins are available already for the CanyonCar? Just check my thread. 7. Soon to be 8. But that's not even counting the 3D models that will surface. Just take a look at Trackmania-carpark. (Almost) each of those vehicles are playable on all seven environments. Not to mention the fact that with the Forever update, they "carmixed" the 7 existing cars already so you could play with a BayCar on Coast, for example. And, admittedly, for the example that you posed, for you and your friend purchasing two completely unrelated environments, yes, the PvP interation would be minimized. However, I'm going to assume just for odds' sake that those cases will be rare. Because I know several people on here that are just going to go out and buy all the environments. And usually, the forum is a pretty good (albeit more vocal) subset of the gaming community as a whole.

So you can bet that most people will buy more than one environment. Quite possibly, more than two. And so, even if you and your next-door neighbor can't play against each other (well you can with split-sceren, but that's another point ) You will find someone to race against. And again, back to my original point about cost: Nadeo's not releasing all 9 environments at once. They're staggering them, both to finish the work and to address the point you just made. So nothing gets stale, and people aren't freaking out at the pricetag of 180 bucks for TM2, SM, and QM combined. However, to writ: I have several series games, purchased upon release. To name a few--the Battlefield series, the Jedi Knight series, several NASCAR Series (which goes to my earlier point about having only one environment and one car--they are subject to both and yet games continue to sell well), and others. And, all told, I'm pretty sure I've spent obver 100 bucks on a game series to buy the whole series--but due to the fact that the games weren't all released in concert, and some games were gifted to me, etc, I was able to afford them all.