Segregation & Trackmania 2

Trackmania 2 Canyon is now on Steam and along with it comes Trackmania 2 Stadium, setting in motion the dream of linking these games together and being able to play the two together, having a race on Canyon and having the next course be a Stadium one, giving the game even more variety and craziness in track design.

The only problem I have is that THAT’S NOT HOW THE GOD DAMN THING WORKS AT ALL!

If I want to play Stadium, I have to back all the way to the front end of Canyon and hit the Stadium button, which in turn will launch a separate executable (Internal Muse: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!?!) and I can join servers there, who are exclusively playing Stadium maps. Way to live the dream Nadeo....

Now this is problematic enough but that’s still not enough of a farce over in France, not by a long shot. Stadium isn’t an expansion, it’s a stand-alone title that doesn’t require Canyon to play.

The problem is, Stadium is half the price of Canyon....

Whilst that doesn’t sound so bad at first, what it’s essentially doing is killing Canyon. The only competitor on the market to Trackmania 2 Stadium is Trackmania 2 Canyon, so Ubisoft/Nadeo/Whoever the hell makes the decisions have priced themselves out the market; subjecting Trackmania 2 to the same fate that the original suffered.

People are only going to play Stadium because why would you pay double for essentially the same thing?

It’s bizarre to me that Stadium isn’t just a $5 expansion. Having it as a stand-alone sounds great on paper and may be a feel good move but all it’s done is split the community and sealed the fate for Canyon and whoever is stupid enough to buy it.

@Jeff sums up everything perfectly with these few tweets:

All the ManiaPlanet stuff on Steam is actually _worse_ than the old setup. Same basic idea, but now it has to relaunch to change games?

If that's how they're going to do it, then why even show the multigame launcher to begin with? It's crazy. Crazy!

Frustrated by that weirdo front-end, but the part where it's TrackMania is still pretty rad.

What are your guys thoughts on all this?

Is there anything in Canyon that isn't in Stadium? Is it like the first game where the different environments have different cars and therefore have different handling profiles?

Its still a beta, I have a feeling they could still make them connect together. But the problem with that is a few of those servers would have both tracks circulating it and people who get stadium but not canyon (as stated before its cheaper) will either not be able to enter that server or get kicked/wait till canyon/stadium is over and the next mapstyle they have is loaded on (similar to battlefield 3 and its expansions except you just cant enter those servers). Having this just puts many people off and the split is a better way to keep people playing within a server/on a server. You could then say that "Stadium last time was free, why cant it be free this time?" with the obvious answer of they need to make money on what they built. Maybe as its on steam, canyon will get some price drops and they can put mapmerging in at a later date.

EDIT: not to mention canyon was going at an ok rate with the amount of users when we were getting those TNTs of TM2 but a few weeks later and it seemed the playerbase all at once just quit leaving 1-4 servers to host all the players. If they have stipulations on servers being accessible within a paid game, users may just not even bother staying with it.

Honestly, Stadium might still end up being free, but with paying to unlock stuff like the singleplayer maps. I mean, the game is the exact (exact) same as TM Nations which is already free, and you can already play it for free in the open beta, so I don't see them suddenly turning around and saying 'Nope, now you have to pay for this free game ported to a only superficially different engine!'

Or maybe I'm expecting too sensible a decision from Nadeo. Though, I didn't even have to retype my login details when I swapped over to the Steam version of Trackmania. This, since it was a vaguely sensible and user-friendly design solution, was one of the most shocking things I have seen in my entire time with Trackmania. Probably second only to that one time when I found that a server requiring 50k ladder points to join (i.e. a server with a pretty significant 'you must be this good to join' restriction, so a serious server for serious trackmaniacs) was running that incredibly stupid Giant Bomb track I made.

@stalefishies: This would just cause huge upset for whoever has paid for Stadium though. There is no winning scenario here, it's all just poor decision after poor decision.

Stadium will have a free version. They have already confirmed this. The free version will have a demo campaign and access to time trial multiplayer only, similar to TM1. The paid $10 version will have other multiplayer modes and all the single player content included. I do agree that they are killing their own product just like the first game though. It kind of sucks for those of us that bought Canyon.

This is why I haven't bought Trackmania 2. Why should I reward them with my money for being so incompetent? It was bad enough they boycotting Steam for as long as they did, now I get to know they've only regressed in menu/ui design.

It's so weird that the same company responsible for a beloved (if niche) game like Trackmania can be so incompetent in getting their game to their customers in a way that doesn't absolutely suck.

I don't think Nadeo care, remember when they had already sold ShootMania to a bunch of people and then announced that they were making Royal and Elite free to play? When most people bought the damn thing to get into the beta early, and found those were the best modes and the ones likely to be picked up by E-Sports? I'm not sure if they're still following through on that because it seems like ShootMania is never coming out, but I sure as hell know people were pissed. And I'm certainly not buying ShootMania cause the only mode I would play is Elite, and it might be free anyway...

Not really, they are French. And wtf you can't quote people in an edit anymore without copy pasting after a refresh. Stupid new Giantbomb.

yup. the whole thing's a mess.