TrackMania: Canyon brought a whole new kind of life to the online racing genre with the ability to create and customize your very own racing experience like no other game on the market. Nadeo’s tools to maximize the racing experience is a nice alternative to other games out there and now Ubisoft wants to take that same kind of concept and translate that into a first-person shooter experience.
In an interview with GameIndustry.biz, Ubisoft’s marketing group manager, Thomas Paincon, revealed that Ubisoft is working to expand the ManiaPlanet Portal to include more than just TrackMania: Canyon. The company will be exploring the gaming community’s creativity with ShootMania in 2012 and QuestMania to follow thereafter. Paincon stated that...
“It will give the freedom to the FPS community to build their own games, to build their own modes”… "It has to be seen as an environment. Yes, it takes more time than other titles, Like Ghost Recon Online or Settlers, but its really a mid-term or long-term vision."
One highlight out of all of this is that Ubisoft did the right thing by using top-notch engineers instead of an actual art or game design team to simply design tools and workflow assets convenient enough for gamers to pick up and use. More to the point, instead of having 100 people and $100 million being poured into the project Ubisoft only had 25 people from Nadeo design TrackMania: Canyon.
I think ShootMania really arrives at the perfect time in gaming, especially for PC gamers, because hardware has finally dropped down to a point where anyone can pick up a decent enough rig to run the latest games in all their glory without spending an arm or a leg to do so. This definitely gives ShootMania a nice point of leverage to not only offer gamers a lot of creative freedom but it can also look good while doing so.
Paincon went on to say that…
"And because its not free-to-play there will not be any ‘I buy this weapon so I'm more powerful.’ It's a concept, it's a gamble, because its new, but this is the strength of Ubisoft - we have a different mindset,"… "We have Ghost Recon Online at the other end, which is more realistic, team-play, strategy, free-to-play. It's our strength to be able to test the different business models."
If PC gamers were offended by I Am Alive’s creative director Stanislas Mettra crass comments about why the game isn’t coming to PC at least Ubisoft as a whole sees that the PC market isn’t completely composed of pirates and thieves and have some good stuff in the pipeline for 2012.
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