Shootmania

During the recent Ubisoft Digital Day in London, Ubisoft’s marketing group manager for online gaming, Thomas Paincon talked about his company’s latest IP, the FPS game developed by Nadeo called Shootmania.  What? Not heard of Shootmania? Bet you’ve heard of Trackmania or Trackmania 2 (Canyon, Nadeo’s latest racing game) though. Trackmania is Nadeo’s famous online arcade racing game of course and along with Shootmania and Questmania are a trilogy of games that cover the racing, FPS and RPG genres.

Tying all these three games together will be a portal called ManiaPlanet.  ManiaPlanet will be to Nadeo’s online community what Steam is for Valve’s. That is, it’s both a social network and an economic one.

One of the great things about Trackmania was the ability for users to create their own race tracks through the use of a very simple editor. Server owners could quite easily create brand new, user-generated content. As soon as you mastered one track, users would come up with an even more challenging course. That user-content simply kept increasing as the game’s popularity increased as did the game’s playability. Apparently, Shootmania will also have a user-friendly map editor and thus allow its users to generate just as much content as they did in Trackmania.

A glimpse — a very short glimpse — of that map editor for Shootmania is shown here, along with a long intro of Canyon and ManiaPlanet.

Here is a ManiaPlanet trailer from a year ago:

But back to Digital Day and Ubisoft’s Paincon (…whose surname sounds like it should be a yearly convention for Aspirin salesmen), Gameindustry.biz is reporting that he gave a bit more insight into both Shootmania and the ManiaPlanet portal. Here is a summary of some of the more important bits he had to say, along with a few odds and sods that are already known about the game to round things out:

• Shootmania will release in 2012
• ManiaPlanet will allow users to create content and benefit from it. The example used during Digital Day was this: say you can create a track on Trackmania, you can earn in-game money from it …which you can then use to buy upgrades or even mapping elements for ShootMania. Presumably, Nadeo will expand this concept to QuestMania as well.
• Nadeo, only recently purchased by Ubisoft. Nadeo has 25 engineers and they have been working on Shootmania for about six years. These engineers shouldn’t be looked at as level designers, they want to build the tools so that the community builds the levels.
• Shootmania will not be free to play. For that, Ubisoft is hoping that Ghost Recon Online will provide the F2P content.
• Shootmania is going to be all about run’n'gun.
• There will be a limited number of weapons and the gameplay will reward skill but also focus on fun.

During the interview with GI, Paincon seemed to underscore one important concept:

• Ubisoft sees that online gaming has changed the gaming business. In the old model, the development team worked hard to create a game and then it was released it. Expansion packs aside, the day after the wrap party, that team started working on the next game. Support for the previous game ends effectively when new game development begins in earnest and stops dead when the new game ships. In the new model, an online game is allowed to live and breathe. It’s given constant care and tweaked and new content is continuously generated to keep it from getting stale. Support ends when the last player leaves.

Seems like Ubisoft has just figured out what has been Valve’s secret all these years.

Contrast Ubisoft’s online sustaining model with, my favorite whipping boy, Activision’s (ATVI). CoD, ATVI’s world-conquering shooter, has employed the “fire-and-forget” mentality ever since the UO days. Only recently has Activision’s model begun to change and it took a merger with Blizzard to do it. Blizzard showed Activision exactly how they could extract every last online penny from a player’s pocket. With one million subscribers to the premium service known as CoDElite, you can finally see how that influence has finally begun to bear fruit. Well, you would have been seen if it wasn’t for a few technical details that have prevented PC gamers from using it.

If Shootmania is anything like Trackmania, it will be an unapologetic, adrenaline pumping, arcade experience that won’t take itself too seriously and yet it will also put a lot of emphasis on skill. That sounds like what I have always wanted from FPS gaming: a fun game that rewards skill and can get my heart to race. I for one can’t wait to see what Nadeo comes up with.