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“We want this spectator-friendly, e-sport-friendly and competition friendly,” says Castelnérac. “Because today, Counter-Strike is ten years old. I won’t say they have problems, but there are obvious elements to consider in games now – showing terrorism and counter-terrorism, shooting people and so forth. For sponsors and TV broadcasts, these things are damaging the good spirit of sport. So we’re trying to bring out a game that’s compatible with this environment.”
Watching him cycle through the maps he’s been toying with, you realise very quickly how much baggage the FPS has carried over the years, and what wonders can be achieved by just shrugging it all off. There’s no hardware in ShootMania, no stupid pretexts to killing, no fan service and no gadgets. What you get instead are the building blocks (smaller than TrackMania’s, to suit the genre and its environments) of the FPS itself: the stuff of maps and modes.
First out of the forge, introduced with a chuckle, is The Butcher Place – a CTF map in which the teams’ bases are just eight metres apart, meaning utter carnage when someone returns with the flag. Trapped Up is a kind of tower defence map in which the defenders respawn more slowly with time, ensuring an eventual win for their enemy. Another map guarantees “a massacre” as players rush along a precarious ledge towards respawn checkpoints, while under constant pulverising fire from central gun emplacements. Castelnérac builds another basic map (including flags, terrain, routes, spawn points and so on) in just a couple of minutes.
“The question is: can I express myself and make something fun?” he says, as he flicks instantly between content browser, editor and realtime play. If these maps turn out to be utter pap, or as enduring as a job at Activision, then it doesn’t matter; all they have to be is fun, witty, charming, comically bad, inventive, disastrously overambitious, gleefully offensive… Whatever you’d expect of a five minute trip to YouTube. Nadeo have built more than 100 maps so far. Would anyone like to bet against there being over 100,000 before the decade’s done? No, didn’t think so.
This really is just the tip of the iceberg. Nadeo’s vision for e-sports requires there to be maps made of competition quality, and the phenomenal success of TrackMania in that regard suggests nothing less will do. But get this: because every ManiaPlanet title is as modular as the other, there’s little to stop the most ingenious of players from building, say, AI behaviours, singleplayer components, scenery prefabs, weapon types, characters, scripts, rule sets or even interactive tutorials, and selling them all (virtually, of course) on the ManiaPlanet marketplace.
Simple racing on the PC, free from AI and complications.
Moreover, thanks to Castelnérac’s newfound obsession with the history of id Software, the whole ManiaPlanet suite now has a pack editor. So, if someone makes an FPS about woodwind instruments owning the brass section, in maps that imagine MC Escher’s take on the movies of Steven Seagal, everything that entails can be safely bundled (thank God) into a single download. One click downloads and installs it as a separate title on the ShootMania front-end, and ensures that none of its changes affect the rest of your experience. Its leaderboards and game browser will be unique on the ManiaPlanet servers.
This isn’t modding, and it’s too organic to be fairly branded as usergenerated content. Like TrackMania before it, ShootMania promises to be nothing short of primordial FPS soup. When you consider that what started as a game about time trials in silly cars has spawned action movies, singleplayer RPGs, casino games, TV adverts and a world of supporting websites and services, none of them created by Nadeo, the potential speaks for itself.
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