Nadeo may have been right, but Ubisoft not. The game got published too early, it's not fun. Not fun enough. We want our custom blocks and real maniascript. What's there right now is nothing close to something useful or fun. And we want more environments.
Don't blame Ubisoft.
- It wasn't them who decided we needed another Island as a standalone game for €20.
- It wasn't them who threw out everything that made Stadium popular - competitive, precise driving and many freeform blocks - in favour of Need for Speed Underground.
- It wasn't them who implemented all those narrow blocks even though we told them since beta that we don't want them.
- It wasn't them who almost went live without platform loops because the beta testers had to tell them we actually want loops in a TM game.
- It wasn't them who realised the game wasn't compatible with the digital distribution platform everyone uses and rather than fixing it so the game can actually be sold to people who want to buy it, ditched Steam and cost themselves a large number of players.
There was a revealing Nadeo quote where they basically said the environment is meant to be a lot more realistic and less "crazy". Because that's why we play Trackmania and why the extremely realistic Stadium is so successful, right?
Anyone with business sense would tell Nadeo the obvious choice would be to create an environment that incorporates the best features of Stadium and has a lot more blocks. More of everything and less of nothing so as to warrant the price tag, not a zero sum tradeoff. Instead, they decided to remake one environment from TMS, remove stunt and platform and sell it for €20.
But then TM2 is no longer their #1 priority. It's now all about Shootmania, or rather Maniaplanet - the thing pushed as the next revolution for players, even though it does exactly nothing right now and won't do anything useful at any time unless you are looking forward to a social network in your video games and then you might as well play Starcraft 2. It only benefits
Nadeo themselves because they can essentially create a Trackmania mod called Shootmania and sell it. Without the need to create a new engine or anything else other than a different control scheme and a new environment, even if the game is as "successful" as TM2 the production costs will be so low that it's like printing money. Repeat for Questmania, and then six more times for all the different environments which go for full price although the marginal development cost for each iteration is slightly above zero.
No wonder Hylis is happy.
Ps. Despite this, Questmania deserves more development attention than the other two titles together because this could well be a
runaway success. Neverwinter Nights and the sequel were super popular and left a huge void for an RPG with a story editor. If Nadeo do exactly this, they'll hit paydirt.
My God is a vengeful God.
