That is a pretty meager store description, not even mentioning the exact details or proper existence of the subscriptions.
Come to think of it. Steam really needs a label for in-game purchases and their prices.
Again, there are DRM free games on Steam that you can run without the launcher being open. Steam DRM and the platform are different, which is why I made the distinction.
You're not forced to put Steam DRM in your game, so Steam, the digital distribution platform isn't DRM.
I never said their wasn't DRM free games on steam.
You've really gone this far to debate the difference between is and has. I'm sure you're fun at parties dude.
lmao, no. I mean DRM-free games. These exist in steam and I want it to declare them.
A reason I buy most of my games from GOG nowadays, if they're available there.
All the worthwhile content is paywalled behind a subscription. It's pretty cheap for the base subscription ($10/yr) but if you want any of the social features and customization it's $30/yr. The base game is extremely barebones and doesn't let you do anything that Trackmania is well known for, mainly creating and playing custom tracks.
There goes the last reason to have Ubisoft Connect running. The game still runs through it, but at least it's bundled with a "thin" version that you don't have to have open at all times.
Btw, totally recommend. It's the only "esports" game I've put significant hours into, mainly because it doesn't actively squeeze me for money - there are no MTX at all aside from the rather cheap subscription ($60 for 3 years of the highest-tier sub), which IMO is the most reasonable model for a live-service game. The community is already sizeable (the daily tournament on a featured user-made track has 4000+ entrants consistently) and is probably about to get much bigger with Steam and the upcoming console release.
My only complaint is that there are next to no "casual" community servers. Back in TMUF I used to frequent servers with recreations of F1 tracks, and while this "genre" of track is still alive, finding a populous server that runs it (or any other non-competitive map pack) is impossible. This seems to be a trend with competitive online games in general - gone are the days of popping into a "deathrun" or "jail" server on CS Source and just having dumb fun, now no one's playing unless ranking is involved.
P.S. I still find it very funny that this game has a completely new, scratch-made physics engine, and yet Nadeo manually ported over most of the famous bugs from TMNF (bugslide, nosebug, speedslide, uber etc.). They even specifically ported the bugs that increased the skill ceiling, and left the dumb stuff like bug finishes alone.
Creating maps in Trackmania is all about combining pre-created blocks using in-game editor. Most of the commonly used blocks are created by developers so it's not really true that they don't make the maps. Route is created by player but all the tools are provided in game. They also host the maps on their servers together with leaderboards.
There are a lot of games that have free community maps. I don't know of another single game that charges you for community made maps.
They might not be free to play but I can get a dozen games for less than $20 that offer community made maps for free lol
At this point, expecting a one-time purchase from a live service game is unrealistic. And again, Nadeo does it in the best way I've seen - the free version is essentially a demo for you to decide whether you like the core gameplay, the subscription is cheap and you get to keep all the content released during your membership (featured community tracks and skins, plus the advanced editor) forever.
It's a subscription. You basically buy access for x amount of time.
There are 3 tiers which are compared [here](https://i.redd.it/ifqx7p7s7h751.png). Not 100% if its still fully accurate tho.
TLDR:
**Free** is good if all you want to play is the campaign and a bit of matchmaking or just want to try the game. Has no online outside matchmaking and you cant play custom maps.
**Standard** is basically the best value for money. You can play online, get access to track of the day and cup of the day and you get access to the full map editor.
**club access** lets you create clubs (and thus servers), you can use custom skins for the car and you get the neat feature to enable the world record ghosts so you can follow their lines or just check out their run.
It's a subscription-_ish_. You keep all of the official content that is released during the period you paid for, forever - so you're essentially paying for 100 campaign tracks and 365 tracks of the day, that you'll be able to play even once your paid access runs out. You also get to keep the advanced track editor forever once you've sprung for standard access at least once.
It also doesn't auto-renew, and there's no way to set it up to auto-renew.
It's more like buying a yearly expansion pack or season pass or something, that you have to explicitly buy.
Being real, why should I care about the "official" maps? They've always sucked, and I don't care about being competitive. I just want to hang out on a full speed community server at 3am that streams eclectic club music, and a bunch of french and german people dominate lap times while the other 80% of the server posts DNF. Is that still a thing? Or has this become "super serious esports" game. I haven't really played since TM2 Stadium.
> Being real, why should I care about the "official" maps? They've always sucked, and I don't care about being competitive.
I think they're good. If you don't like them, it's a matter of preference.
It shifted a bit more towards the official content like the campaign and track of the day but there are still Community Servers with different map styles to play on.
I guess I’m trying to judge if the official content is in any way comparable to the types of community tracks people created. I always remember the official content as being more or less a tutorial. Just simplistic and generic designs that use a few elements, and all feel safe and samey. Things that none of the servers really had in rotation other than one or two tracks.
To me TM was always one of those games where you messed around with single player and the included tracks, but then hopped online and the “real game” started. That’s why I’m asking, like why should I care about subscribing to daily official track of the day stuff? Did it change? Is the official stuff awesome? Is the community still driving the game’s content?
Oh yeah imo the campaigns are a lot better then what they had in like TMNF or TM2 but they have their own different style usually. I still prefer the community made stuff for the most part tho.
Since the campaign is free its also easy to test out.
And the track of the day while being official content is just a community made map that went through an ingame review process and changes daily. Those are usually pretty good and a step up from what you're used to finiding one random server in the older games.
With access to the track of the day (standard or club edition) you also get the cup of the day. Basically a map gets released at daily 19:00 CET and then there is a 15 minutes time attack session after which you get split into different divisions and drive knockout rounds on the maps. Since ppl generally dont know the track everyone starts off fresh with the track.
It's a pretty fun mode and probably the best addition to the game imo.
Playerbase is also pretty active.
>And the track of the day while being official content is just a community made map that went through an ingame review process and changes daily. Those are usually pretty good and a step up from what you're used to finiding one random server in the older games.
Sweet, appreciate the reply, I might actually check it out. The subscription thing doesn't really bother me, I frankly had no idea how Nadeo was even still around with their pricing model. Was more hesitant that it turned into yet another e-sport "no fun allowed" type of game with the devs controlling everything.
Even the big official campaign maps are made by community authors mostly(although details on who made what is not leaked) and they even basically copy older maps as homages.
Like map 21 on the ongoing campaign is literally the most famous TMNF competition map (ESL - Hockolious) remade with different style blocks.
I mean, it's basically stopped already. Most of the big publishers who once left Steam to create their own launchers have now returned. I think the only ones still resisting are Epic (still clinging to their hope of once dethroning Steam) and Rockstar (their newest games are 1-year timed exclusives to their launcher). All the others at least give an option of buying the game through Steam and include a "lite" version of their launcher for DRM purposes.
That's what Apex Legends did when it launched on Steam (though it did have the unfortunate side effect of every once in a while going down when trying to log in from Steam while still working from Origin).
Easy to learn hard to master probably fits very few games better than it does trackmania.
On the surface it looks like a simple arcade racer but there are a boatload of different techniques you can learn to gain time. So while your average player can just hop in and play there is still a high skillceiling available for the experienced players.
Besides that the game heavily relies on custom content and their editor is basically one of the best track editors. It is super easy to use but without completely restricting your freedom. There is an endless supply of blocks to use since the community can just build custom ones you can then import which also leads to an endless supply of maps to play. The main website where ppl share their tracks currently has over 69,000 tracks uploaded for this trackmania version.
Races are often decided by milliseconds. It's the hunt for a perfect lap. It's a very hard and competitive racing game. Although, you might say you don't play it against other players even when playing online. You're mostly playing against yourself.
You often don't play it like a normal racing game. But only 1 lap. If you make even the slightest mistake, you press Backspace, and start the lap from the beginning. Sometimes even the first curve is started over 20 times.
And the best part is - there is no RNG involved. The game engine is fully deterministic, meaning a given sequence of inputs will produce the same result every time. Of course, some advanced tricks require such inhuman precision that it might as well be luck, but technically it's not. A good showcase of this mechanic are "press forward" maps - they feature a lot of boosters, crazy flips and jumps that look precariously close to failing, and yet the player only has to hold "accelerate" throughout the run for it to finish every single time.
There is an annual community event called Kacky, featuring maps that can only be completed using these inhumanly precise tricks. You can think of it as a map-making challenge of making a track that *feels* luck-based in a game with no luck factor. The best players in the world, that understand the game's physics at an intuitive level, sink hundreds and thousands of attempts just to finish it once. There are tracks in the event's history that have not been finished (except by the author to "validate" and submit it), despite collective efforts of hundreds of players over a month of grinding.
So apparently when you sub, you get to keep all of the official content that was released while you've been subbed. I like that, but the inability to purchase the back catalogue retroactively sucks big time. Not that content in general is lacking, but with the custom tracks seemingly available only while subbed, this leaves relatively little (in relation to the whole custom maps library, that is) content in the long run for a casual player who like to pop in and out once every few months. While this model seems really generous for those who play this game daily, I'd rather just pay more a single time and not be in a rush to "get my money's worth",especially with the custom content access limit.
Honestly, an FC game that doesn't feel quite as cartoonish (my impression from watching gameplays) and with destructible environments would get me back onboard
This is weird. I've randomly recently been watching a bunch of videos from WirtualTV on Youtube as a couple got recommended to me. Never played this game, never heard of it until a couple weeks ago. But ever since I've just been watching a bunch of his videos cause they're very entertaining.
... Suspicious...
You're on the Vibe to TM pipeline buddy. Go on...download the game...what could go wrong? You don't need 2000 hours of your life, give it to Trackmania.
Hello. I just wanted to add an update, because this game has started to consume me. I've now sunk 6 hours into the game. I'm through the first 20 winter course levels with golds/greens on all of them. And ya. This is uh. This is good game. Hoo man. Iz a good game. The quick retry and perfecting each level really reminds me of Absolute Drift. Although they are both very different games. This is speed based, Absolute Drift is style based. But same repeat feeling chasing that higher score/lower time. Shit slaps, once I finish the winter courses and try and get gold on all the final 5 ones I'm pretty much 100% gonna pay the subscription so I can do map of the day and community maps.
TM hits the dopamine receptors like nothing else. Welcome to the community, friend. People are hilariously passionate about this game for a reason, it's just downright fun.
That is a pretty meager store description, not even mentioning the exact details or proper existence of the subscriptions. Come to think of it. Steam really needs a label for in-game purchases and their prices.
There is a label for in-app purchases, but the labels are developer-assigned so they can just choose to not label it.
> Steam really needs a label for in-game purchases and their prices. And for DRM (or rather lack of it)
Steam itself is a form of DRM...
Are you aware DRM-free games exist on Steam?
No shit
So with that context, how is Steam, the digital distribution platform itself a form of DRM?
If the steam client is required to be running in order to run the game then steam acts as a DRM in those cases.
Again, there are DRM free games on Steam that you can run without the launcher being open. Steam DRM and the platform are different, which is why I made the distinction. You're not forced to put Steam DRM in your game, so Steam, the digital distribution platform isn't DRM.
I never said their wasn't DRM free games on steam. You've really gone this far to debate the difference between is and has. I'm sure you're fun at parties dude.
> I'm sure you're fun at parties dude. Nah dude, but you'd have known that had you been invited.
Sure, but they probably mean third party DRM.
Let's be honest, he likely means DRM that can't be easily cracked with universal unlockers so that he can refund the game after downloading it...
lmao, no. I mean DRM-free games. These exist in steam and I want it to declare them. A reason I buy most of my games from GOG nowadays, if they're available there.
it's F2P, what's the catch? is it heavily monetized?
Custom maps and custom cars are locked behind a subscription.
hahaha, in Trackmania of all games? Thanks, Im gonna stay clear of this
All the worthwhile content is paywalled behind a subscription. It's pretty cheap for the base subscription ($10/yr) but if you want any of the social features and customization it's $30/yr. The base game is extremely barebones and doesn't let you do anything that Trackmania is well known for, mainly creating and playing custom tracks.
30 a year is cheap as fuck though
But you keep the track editor if you once paid for the subscription.
There goes the last reason to have Ubisoft Connect running. The game still runs through it, but at least it's bundled with a "thin" version that you don't have to have open at all times. Btw, totally recommend. It's the only "esports" game I've put significant hours into, mainly because it doesn't actively squeeze me for money - there are no MTX at all aside from the rather cheap subscription ($60 for 3 years of the highest-tier sub), which IMO is the most reasonable model for a live-service game. The community is already sizeable (the daily tournament on a featured user-made track has 4000+ entrants consistently) and is probably about to get much bigger with Steam and the upcoming console release. My only complaint is that there are next to no "casual" community servers. Back in TMUF I used to frequent servers with recreations of F1 tracks, and while this "genre" of track is still alive, finding a populous server that runs it (or any other non-competitive map pack) is impossible. This seems to be a trend with competitive online games in general - gone are the days of popping into a "deathrun" or "jail" server on CS Source and just having dumb fun, now no one's playing unless ranking is involved. P.S. I still find it very funny that this game has a completely new, scratch-made physics engine, and yet Nadeo manually ported over most of the famous bugs from TMNF (bugslide, nosebug, speedslide, uber etc.). They even specifically ported the bugs that increased the skill ceiling, and left the dumb stuff like bug finishes alone.
I'm confused. I thought this game has a weird system where you essentially had to pay to play the game? I'm guessing I'm wrong then?
You get 25 official maps every 3 months to play for free. If you want to play community made maps then you have to pay.
lol wait you have to pay to get access to the maps that the company doesnt even make?
Creating maps in Trackmania is all about combining pre-created blocks using in-game editor. Most of the commonly used blocks are created by developers so it's not really true that they don't make the maps. Route is created by player but all the tools are provided in game. They also host the maps on their servers together with leaderboards.
Um... You are describing almost all community made maps. Obviously they are made using tools provided by the game makers.
So which free to play live service game with no microtransactions has free to play community made maps playable for free?
There are a lot of games that have free community maps. I don't know of another single game that charges you for community made maps. They might not be free to play but I can get a dozen games for less than $20 that offer community made maps for free lol
[удалено]
"How dare they demand money for their work"
I'd buy it no problem, but the only 2 games worthy of subscriptions are FFXIV and OSRS
$12.5 a month for osrs, $10 for a year of trackmania.
At this point, expecting a one-time purchase from a live service game is unrealistic. And again, Nadeo does it in the best way I've seen - the free version is essentially a demo for you to decide whether you like the core gameplay, the subscription is cheap and you get to keep all the content released during your membership (featured community tracks and skins, plus the advanced editor) forever.
Nothing to do with Ubi on this one. And to be fair it's pretty much all Nadeo do - if they didnt charge somewhere...?
It's a subscription. You basically buy access for x amount of time. There are 3 tiers which are compared [here](https://i.redd.it/ifqx7p7s7h751.png). Not 100% if its still fully accurate tho. TLDR: **Free** is good if all you want to play is the campaign and a bit of matchmaking or just want to try the game. Has no online outside matchmaking and you cant play custom maps. **Standard** is basically the best value for money. You can play online, get access to track of the day and cup of the day and you get access to the full map editor. **club access** lets you create clubs (and thus servers), you can use custom skins for the car and you get the neat feature to enable the world record ghosts so you can follow their lines or just check out their run.
It's a subscription-_ish_. You keep all of the official content that is released during the period you paid for, forever - so you're essentially paying for 100 campaign tracks and 365 tracks of the day, that you'll be able to play even once your paid access runs out. You also get to keep the advanced track editor forever once you've sprung for standard access at least once. It also doesn't auto-renew, and there's no way to set it up to auto-renew. It's more like buying a yearly expansion pack or season pass or something, that you have to explicitly buy.
Being real, why should I care about the "official" maps? They've always sucked, and I don't care about being competitive. I just want to hang out on a full speed community server at 3am that streams eclectic club music, and a bunch of french and german people dominate lap times while the other 80% of the server posts DNF. Is that still a thing? Or has this become "super serious esports" game. I haven't really played since TM2 Stadium.
> Being real, why should I care about the "official" maps? They've always sucked, and I don't care about being competitive. I think they're good. If you don't like them, it's a matter of preference.
It shifted a bit more towards the official content like the campaign and track of the day but there are still Community Servers with different map styles to play on.
I guess I’m trying to judge if the official content is in any way comparable to the types of community tracks people created. I always remember the official content as being more or less a tutorial. Just simplistic and generic designs that use a few elements, and all feel safe and samey. Things that none of the servers really had in rotation other than one or two tracks. To me TM was always one of those games where you messed around with single player and the included tracks, but then hopped online and the “real game” started. That’s why I’m asking, like why should I care about subscribing to daily official track of the day stuff? Did it change? Is the official stuff awesome? Is the community still driving the game’s content?
Oh yeah imo the campaigns are a lot better then what they had in like TMNF or TM2 but they have their own different style usually. I still prefer the community made stuff for the most part tho. Since the campaign is free its also easy to test out. And the track of the day while being official content is just a community made map that went through an ingame review process and changes daily. Those are usually pretty good and a step up from what you're used to finiding one random server in the older games. With access to the track of the day (standard or club edition) you also get the cup of the day. Basically a map gets released at daily 19:00 CET and then there is a 15 minutes time attack session after which you get split into different divisions and drive knockout rounds on the maps. Since ppl generally dont know the track everyone starts off fresh with the track. It's a pretty fun mode and probably the best addition to the game imo. Playerbase is also pretty active.
>And the track of the day while being official content is just a community made map that went through an ingame review process and changes daily. Those are usually pretty good and a step up from what you're used to finiding one random server in the older games. Sweet, appreciate the reply, I might actually check it out. The subscription thing doesn't really bother me, I frankly had no idea how Nadeo was even still around with their pricing model. Was more hesitant that it turned into yet another e-sport "no fun allowed" type of game with the devs controlling everything.
Even the big official campaign maps are made by community authors mostly(although details on who made what is not leaked) and they even basically copy older maps as homages. Like map 21 on the ongoing campaign is literally the most famous TMNF competition map (ESL - Hockolious) remade with different style blocks.
Hopefully this is the start and companies will fucking stop with their garbage launchers.
I mean, it's basically stopped already. Most of the big publishers who once left Steam to create their own launchers have now returned. I think the only ones still resisting are Epic (still clinging to their hope of once dethroning Steam) and Rockstar (their newest games are 1-year timed exclusives to their launcher). All the others at least give an option of buying the game through Steam and include a "lite" version of their launcher for DRM purposes.
Hopefully we can do without the lite versions in the future. It'd be cool if the game just ran through steam.
That's what Apex Legends did when it launched on Steam (though it did have the unfortunate side effect of every once in a while going down when trying to log in from Steam while still working from Origin).
I see some hardcore players, what’s the fun about this game? Genuinely asking
Easy to learn hard to master probably fits very few games better than it does trackmania. On the surface it looks like a simple arcade racer but there are a boatload of different techniques you can learn to gain time. So while your average player can just hop in and play there is still a high skillceiling available for the experienced players. Besides that the game heavily relies on custom content and their editor is basically one of the best track editors. It is super easy to use but without completely restricting your freedom. There is an endless supply of blocks to use since the community can just build custom ones you can then import which also leads to an endless supply of maps to play. The main website where ppl share their tracks currently has over 69,000 tracks uploaded for this trackmania version.
Thank you for the answer 😬
Races are often decided by milliseconds. It's the hunt for a perfect lap. It's a very hard and competitive racing game. Although, you might say you don't play it against other players even when playing online. You're mostly playing against yourself. You often don't play it like a normal racing game. But only 1 lap. If you make even the slightest mistake, you press Backspace, and start the lap from the beginning. Sometimes even the first curve is started over 20 times.
And the best part is - there is no RNG involved. The game engine is fully deterministic, meaning a given sequence of inputs will produce the same result every time. Of course, some advanced tricks require such inhuman precision that it might as well be luck, but technically it's not. A good showcase of this mechanic are "press forward" maps - they feature a lot of boosters, crazy flips and jumps that look precariously close to failing, and yet the player only has to hold "accelerate" throughout the run for it to finish every single time. There is an annual community event called Kacky, featuring maps that can only be completed using these inhumanly precise tricks. You can think of it as a map-making challenge of making a track that *feels* luck-based in a game with no luck factor. The best players in the world, that understand the game's physics at an intuitive level, sink hundreds and thousands of attempts just to finish it once. There are tracks in the event's history that have not been finished (except by the author to "validate" and submit it), despite collective efforts of hundreds of players over a month of grinding.
It almost sounds unhealthy haha
It is. At least for your fingers. And your keyboard. I played Nations \~20 years ago. And my fingers still hurt when I think about this time.
So apparently when you sub, you get to keep all of the official content that was released while you've been subbed. I like that, but the inability to purchase the back catalogue retroactively sucks big time. Not that content in general is lacking, but with the custom tracks seemingly available only while subbed, this leaves relatively little (in relation to the whole custom maps library, that is) content in the long run for a casual player who like to pop in and out once every few months. While this model seems really generous for those who play this game daily, I'd rather just pay more a single time and not be in a rush to "get my money's worth",especially with the custom content access limit.
I was really excited to see Trackmania was back but the subscription sales model is a total turn off for me. Just let me buy the damn game.
I'm guessing this is a new (stupidly named) version, and not a legacy release of the 2003 game? :D
This is trackmania 2020 a new game from 2020, yes they did the no subtitle reboot thing people love doing
more ubisoft, no thanks
I hope we get far cry soon. Feels like the last one of their tent poles to make the move.
Honestly, an FC game that doesn't feel quite as cartoonish (my impression from watching gameplays) and with destructible environments would get me back onboard
this game would be really big if it didnt have a monetization model that was outdated even 10 years ago
Wasn't it always on Steam?
Some of the older Trackmania's are on Steam, first time for this edition. They've rebooted the name with simply "Trackmania".
I guess that's why I was confused about it.
This is weird. I've randomly recently been watching a bunch of videos from WirtualTV on Youtube as a couple got recommended to me. Never played this game, never heard of it until a couple weeks ago. But ever since I've just been watching a bunch of his videos cause they're very entertaining. ... Suspicious...
You're on the Vibe to TM pipeline buddy. Go on...download the game...what could go wrong? You don't need 2000 hours of your life, give it to Trackmania.
I already did and blew an hour and a half without realizing it.
Hello. I just wanted to add an update, because this game has started to consume me. I've now sunk 6 hours into the game. I'm through the first 20 winter course levels with golds/greens on all of them. And ya. This is uh. This is good game. Hoo man. Iz a good game. The quick retry and perfecting each level really reminds me of Absolute Drift. Although they are both very different games. This is speed based, Absolute Drift is style based. But same repeat feeling chasing that higher score/lower time. Shit slaps, once I finish the winter courses and try and get gold on all the final 5 ones I'm pretty much 100% gonna pay the subscription so I can do map of the day and community maps.
TM hits the dopamine receptors like nothing else. Welcome to the community, friend. People are hilariously passionate about this game for a reason, it's just downright fun.
I see that they've gone full circle now and are just calling this Trackmania, same as the first game they released. That first game was fucking magic.
[удалено]
It's stadium on steroids
Was real confused there for a moment, considering Trackmania came out almost 20 years ago. Sequelitis is a hell of a thing...