Trackmania 2020 differs from its previous iterations because it does not have a single evergreen campaign. Campaigns change 4 times a year, bringing us 25 brand new tracks and 100 medals to conquer with each one. However, the recent Fall Campaign included more than just these additions.
Image Credit: Ubisoft
The game received a physics update, and that is quite big news, as something like that hasn’t happened in a long time. Ice and water physics were changed, as well as certain gameplay aspects that players were taking advantage of. Supposedly, this update will bring better balance to the game ahead of its launch on consoles early next year.
Controversy Leads to Physics Update
There were several controversies recently regarding adjustable steering on keyboards with action keys and analog keyboards. The analog keyboards provide a huge advantage to PC players, as they can limit their steering to whichever percentage players deem necessary. PC players started using them because gamepad players had an advantage on ice and water tracks due to their ability to move the gamepad stick to achieve any approximate steering value.
Regular keyboards can only go from 0% to 100%, and they have absolutely nothing in between. Nadeo tried to rectify that by implementing 10 action keys that were all set to specific values; 10%, 20%, and all the way to 100%. They had to remove the majority because it became overpowered, so now only a couple remain.
Analog keyboard users can set a specific limit, whether it’s 50%, 34%, or anything else imaginable. That makes particular turns much easier to speed through, albeit not so precise, as some turns require multiple values. Using a gamepad might ultimately be faster as you can adapt on the fly, but analog keyboards are so ridiculously consistent that it barely even matters.
Some players took it a step further and started playing with keyboards and gamepads at the same time, switching them depending on the upcoming turn. All of this reached a boiling point recently, and Nadeo decided to do something about it, hence the most recent update including changes to certain physics aspects.
New Tracks and Medals
As with each campaign update so far, Nadeo presented 25 new tracks for us to race and compete on. With these 25 tracks came 100 medals all players aspire to obtain by being as fast as humanly possible on each track.
You can get exactly 4 medals per track: bronze, silver, gold, and author. Author medals are the records that the creators of the tracks set themselves. They are, of course, by far the hardest to achieve.
As usual, the tracks are split into five levels of difficulty. From the easiest to the hardest, the tracks are split into White, Green, Blue, Red, and Black sections. Since there are 25 tracks in total, each difficulty level has five of them. In wanting to provide a balanced experience for players of all skills, all updates have included an equal amount of tracks across difficulty levels. There’s never been an occasion where, for instance, we got six White tracks and four Green tracks.
Further Additions
There is a new item called The Podium available, which can be accessed and used in the map editor. How it works is, you can place it wherever you want on your created track, but make sure it’s a cool looking place. That is because you get a special cutscene or render with it once the race finishes.
There are other new blocks as well, like the scary looking ice loops, which can already be used in-game. I already fell off of several newly added blocks and ended a not-so-glorious run.
The ranked 3v3 game mode has also changed, and it just might be for the better. Nadeo used to do soft resets every month for players that accumulated more than two thousand points. Well, that stops now, as they plan to extend it to three months, which is also how long the campaign lasts. Voice chat will also be available in its beta form in the near future.
If you want to provide any feedback on the current state of the game and anything surrounding it, head over to the Ubisoft forums. Community feedback is the reason why they have added gameplay and physics changes now, so don’t hesitate to reach out.
Last Campaign’s Winner
Shcr is the name, Trackmania is the game, Summer 2022 was the campaign. Shcr hails from France and is the ninth unique campaign winner, earning the incredibly rare Trophy 9. To put that into perspective, the only other players who have gotten Trophy 9 are the winners of the Trackmania Grand League and the Open Grand League. That is the most elite company to be in.
While the Fall Update is new, the tracks feel familiar, and if you have played Trackmania before, you know exactly what to expect. The newly added blocks add to the excitement, but the biggest change is surely the physics. People have already started hunting maps for medals and world records, so the competition is in full effect by now.
We hope to see your names spread across all leaderboards, and you just might see some of ours. Happy hunting!
