The uniqueness of trackmania and the nature of speedrunning
This is a video about how there is nothing else like trackmania, what makes it different than speedrunning & other games, and how that sucks because nadeo is bad. The differences from speedrunning may need a bit more fleshing out, any help with the script in general is appreciated.
{as usual anything in curly brackets are notes not part of the script}
Trackmania is a racing game. That’s about the simplest and most obvious thing you can say about it. I think it is also a terrible description that entirely misses the point of the game and what makes it unique and different from anything else. As far as I can tell the majority of trackmania’s core playerbase doesn’t even care about other racing games.
Every once in a while someone who has never seen trackmania will stumble into a live stream of it and ask the same question: why are you driving the same race over and over? The answer is that trackmania is almost entirely based on solo time trials. There is almost never any external or random factor that affects your runs, any given map is always the same with no other drivers. Every input counts for saving just a little bit more time. It is a game about setting the fastest time you can on individual, short, fast paced maps, and then going just a little bit faster. Trackmania is a speedrunning game.
The stadium car isn’t how trackmania started. The series actually had a number of games with a slew of different cars before eventually introducing the stadium environment in Nations ESWC, which became extremely popular with the release of the free trackmania nations forever in 2008. The stadium car was never meant to be driven the way players ended up driving it, apparently even drifting wasn’t intended. Like other surprisingly competitive games, it turned out there was an absurd amount of optimizations and tricks that pushed the skill ceiling and mechanical depth into the stratosphere.
Now most players do not say they are speedrunning maps, we use a different word, hunting, which just means grinding or running an individual level. That said, while Trackmania does utilize what is essentially the speedrunning gameplay loop, it is not exactly the same overall experience, and there really is nothing else like trackmania.
Because of the focus on individual, relatively straightforward levels using universal mechanics, trackmania ends up being much more about getting comfortable with and understanding the intricacies of the car’s physics than learning a route and executing on it. One of the benefits of this is making trackmania a shining example of an easy to learn and hard to master game, if you enjoy the game’s premise, it’s fun right from the beginning. This is in stark contrast to how most speedruns operate. When I went to speedrun Celeste, I had to learn a route through the entire game. To speedrun most games, this process of studying and learning the currently known optimal path, or an easier version of it, is pretty much required. In trackmania when you open up a new map, you’ll quickly learn the path, and then use your skill and game knowledge to drive the best time you can. Speedrunning is generally speaking a much more communal activity, where all players are working to push the limits of a single run. New players will need to try to internalize the accumulated knowledge of the route when they start. The only time where that really occurs in trackmania is when there is the occasional shortcut, and in that case it’s just one thing that you are informed of and know.
This may seem a bit odd to you if the only thing you’ve heard or know in trackmania is the tmnf campaign. However, what you need to understand is that the majority of the core playerbase has always had its focus elsewhere than the official campaigns, on something else, user created maps.
Trackmania features an incredibly powerful map editor, and mappers have been pushing the boundaries of the game ever since, focusing mainly on creativity, defined map styles, and flow.
Nobody builds maps the way Nadeo, the developer of trackmania, did. Nadeo’s levels mostly seemed to focus on playing into the overall aesthetic the game was going for, using unusual elements not found in most other racing games and trying to seem like they could be interesting to play. Meanwhile, players converged on a few distinct styles of maps that were found to work well to hunt and compete on such as tech and fullspeed. Tech is focused on technical drifts around sharp corners, while fullspeed is all about maintaining and snowballing momentum throughout an entire map. Of course not all player made maps fit into defined styles. Plenty of mappers have experimented and created incredible levels by going outside of them. Styles have evolved and many more have become popular in the last 15 years, but almost all maps that are built to be hunted or played in competitions focus on flow based level design.
This means minimizing downtime and ensuring that the player is always doing something to go faster. A map that flows will have every turn and element connect, or rather flow seamlessly into one other. You can ask 50 trackmania players and get 30 different answers for what flow means, not because anyone agrees but because 20 of them don’t actually have an answer even though the word is thrown around constantly when discussing mapping. I’m not trying to say that this is THE meaning of how we use the word, but it is a meaning that I think is important and useful. If you are designing a level for speedrunning in any game flow should probably be your number one priority. Time spent not executing inputs will be boring and annoying when you’re attempting the same level hundreds or thousands of times to get the perfect run, and elements not spaced out properly or too close together will feel awkward to play.
The map editor fills an important role even for trackmania players who do not use it themselves. It provides an endless supply of new and interesting user made maps, often designed specifically to be enjoyable to hunt. With this the focus further shifts from endlessly optimizing a single run to instead playing and competing on a myriad of player made ones.
However, without a single definitive leaderboard, trackmania players needed another way to compete to be the best at the game. Enter: TMX Classic, rounds modes, and other live competitions.
Trackmania Exchange, aka tmx, has always been the main map sharing website for trackmania. In the absence of developer support for sharing maps, this community run website became the epicenter of trackmania mapping, hosting forums, mapping contests, and importantly, TMX Classic. Classic was a collection of notable maps, classics, if you will, that was updated over time and featured an overall leaderboard for players to compete on. This combined the best of both worlds, taking advantage of, featuring, and preserving the best of the constant stream of maps created by thousands of mappers, while also giving players a reason to drive them and an eternal leaderboard to compete on. Trackmania Exchange and player hosted servers kept tmnf alive and active for years even without much in the way of updates for the game itself.
However, hunting a track is not the only way players compete against each other in Trackmania. Most competitions are played in some form of a rounds mode, where in players compete in rounds driving times on a map or series of maps until someone is the winner. It’s a series of many short speedrun races to determine who is the best and is much more exciting for something like a world championship. Rounds based modes, such as the ever-popular cup mode also test players for consistency far more than time attack does, as you will gain points by finishing every round. Most trackmania players just engage with the normal speedrunning gameplay loop as the primary mode, but live competitions fill an important role for players who want to directly compete with others in a match setting.
There are solo competitions, team competitions, trained and untrained competitions, knockout competitions, even just normal time trial gameplay with a limited window to set the best time you can, and more, all on a variety of map styles, although, of course, some formats are more popular than others.
Map design for rounds modes differs a bit from designing for hunting because players must be able to drive the map consistently. The current trackmania game, tm2020, has a daily knockout and hunting cup on featured player made maps, the track of the day. {add some information on screen about the format and clarify that both are on the same map}. This is one of if not the most popular parts of the game among players who log in regularly, with thousands of competitors participating every single day. It is honestly an amazing mode.
The thing is the track/cup of the day is the only place that really features players’ maps, at least officially. If your map isn’t in it or a player run tournament it’ll be hard to get people to play or even notice it.
Trackmania Exchange is still the main website for sharing maps, however, it is now almost exclusively used by mappers {maybe throw some reasons for this up on screen}, limiting it’s reach as a potential avenue for map discoverability.
The poor discoverability of maps outside of track of the day limits experimentation, reducing the variety of and homogenizing maps. Any track made for track of the day needs to work well in both normal time trial gameplay and a knockout competition that gives players just 15 minutes to learn the map. It’s also played by everyone from mapping enthusiasts who happen to be fairly good at the game to the best players in the world to people who are brand new to trackmania. It’s not that it isn’t possible to make a great map for this context that will be enjoyed by players of all skill levels, it’s that the range of maps that will fit here is far smaller than the range of possible maps that can be built and enjoyed by some amount of the playerbase. Suppose you’re extrinsically motivated by beating other people and would also like to play maps that don’t appeal to the lowest common denominator or work in a cup format, tough luck. Because they’re not in an official context or player run tournament, the records on a huge range of maps are unlikely to be particularly competitive. {Unless I hunted the map, then good luck nerd.}
Even if a map does make it into track of the day, there’s a 99% chance that it will be almost entirely forgotten the day afterward, hardly played ever again. TMX classic hasn’t been carried over into tm2020 and nothing has taken its place as a leaderboard and eternal set of maps for players to grind. Even if someone tried to make a replacement, it would have to compete with nadeo’s official offerings while existing only outside of the game, which would be extremely difficult. It is depressing as a mapper to realize that unless you create a massive project that happens to be popular among streamers, it is incredibly unlikely that anyone will care to play your map even just a few weeks after you release it.
{my personal dings} I love Trackmania and especially the map editor. I’ve built tons of maps, and it’s so much fun to see what everyone else comes up with as well. The combination of car physics, time trials, and the highly customizable map editor make Trackmania unique not just among racing games but all speedrunning games. Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword due to Nadeo’s subsequent game design decisions hampering the experience and preventing it from reaching what it could be.
Nadeo has made no attempt to improve the map discoverability, longevity, or variety problems, despite myself and countless others giving suggestions for how. The system for selecting maps for track of the day is widely hated for numerous reasons and requires mappers to spend as much time grinding the map review server for ratings as they did making the track to have any hope of it getting accepted. The game went over two years without a major content update until they released one in November. This update happened to break a large amount of maps created before it, due to the update adding a new wood texture and blocks. This was initially assumed by players to be a bug that would be quickly patched. However, nadeo instead doubled down on it citing that having two wood surfaces with different physics would be confusing, never mind the countless other surfaces in the game using the same real world material and different textures & physics. This led to a days long argument between the trackmania community and nadeo, ending with nadeo deciding that for some reason having the same blocks and textures behave differently on old maps than new ones would be less confusing than just having two different sets of wood blocks with different physics, which is simply baffling. {on screen mention how it also had unique blocks that will now just be made as items} Trackmania 2020 a subscription game, which isn’t inherently bad, oh wait {echo 2 years without content update}. There are always bugs being introduced and the game being made deliberately worse in small ways. Nadeo moved the settings menu from the top bar to the escape menu. Because of this, we haven’t been able to open the settings menu from the map editor for months. There doesn’t seem to be any sign that nadeo is going to fix this. Nadeo is constantly making decisions that don’t make any logical sense and seem to only further management’s strange vision for what they want the game to be, upsetting players.
Ranked matches are played on the seasonal campaign, which itself is seemingly made with the aesthetic focused design sensibilities of Nadeo’s 20 year old tmnf campaign despite the playerbase having long moved on from them long ago. I know some people enjoy this type of mapping still, and perhaps it is good that Nadeo supplies it since players generally don’t, however, when it starts to infect the competitive ranked mode it becomes a legitimate problem.
It’s not just the typical situation highly skilled players demanding a game be designed specifically to benefit them. Although in this case that may be reasonable to some extent considering Nadeo seems to hold every inch of the game sacred for new players, leaving no mode with more experienced ones as the higher priority. The competitive ranked mode has never been in the same format as the esports side of things. Even when Nadeo told us they would fix this, they instead didn’t do or say anything for the following half a year, at which point Nadeo announced they were leaving it as is for the benefit of new console players, with no further explanation for what that meant, leaving players to speculate as to what the underlying reason could be. Nadeo’s communication has been notoriously awful for the past two decades.
Whenever players give feedback on any part of the game, Nadeo often claims new players are the reason things are the way they are. You wouldn’t be able to tell from analyzing the game though. If they are trying to focus heavily on new players they’re doing a horrible job at it. The game lacks even a tutorial unless you count the sad “training” campaign that is nothing more than a collection of simple maps that weren’t representative of the rest of the game’s tracks on launch and haven’t been updated to include any of the new surfaces or blocks added to the game since then.
After a particularly hated seasonal campaign was released, the CEO of Nadeo made an apology post, however, he completely missed the point of players’ criticisms. {zoom in on sorry experts} When players gave him some example instances of map design in the campaign that were horrible for both new players and experts, his response wasn’t to engage with the points made or admit that he was wrong, but rather to dismiss everything by saying that he made the stadium physics 20 years ago.
{point out that my reply was the most liked reply & that he contradicts himself by having his entire argument if you can call it that based on him knowing everything due to making the stadium physics 20 years ago but also saying that he has a lot to learn.}
And you know what, for all its faults, trackmania does have some damn good stadium car physics.
The main reason why I bring up Nadeo wasting the potential of trackmania is that the unfortunate thing is nobody else is using the full potential of the concept either.
Games like neon white exist, with the same speedrun based gameplay loop as trackmania, but neon white doesn’t have a level editor. Celeste’s modding tools include a map editor, however, the lack of an in-game leaderboard and celeste’s general focus on difficulty of completion rather than speed means the focus seems to always be elsewhere.
I’ve had a lot of fun with the modded celeste map editor recently and while I enjoy the precision platforming gameplay in small amounts, I just can’t connect to it in the same way I have time trials. I lack the patience to die and reset so many times to try to finish a level, even though that’s basically the same thing you do in a speedrun. What’s the difference? I’m honestly not sure, perhaps it’s just nice to feel good at a level as you try it over, and over, and over, and over…
To me, the trackmania car is a wonderful vehicle for the time trial gameplay and level editor. While the stadium physics are nothing short of a miracle, there are plenty of other games with great mechanics and physics, but there is no other game with the same combination of player made maps and a speedrun gameplay loop, and I wish there was.
Thanks for watching.