It’s fitting that the impenetrable clique of competitive gaming should be breached by a first-person shooter, a genre that has long formed one of the key pillars of eSport. All too often, new titles added to this elite pantheon grant dominion to those with a prescient understanding of the established order. Rarely has a game deemed complex enough to promote the required high-level play and sufficiently balanced to prove entertaining to watch been so welcoming to a host of potential new champions.
Thanks to ShootMania Storm’s customisation options you can become very good at it on your own terms, without the hard slog associated with having to play as cannon fodder for several hours. If you don’t like the game’s default maps or modes you can turn to the community’s offerings or simply create your own. So, while the rigors of Call of Duty’s multiplayer demand that you pay for your stripes with the blood of countless deaths, ShootMania offers a gentler, more considered and altogether more fun way of becoming a skilful player.
“When we started building Shootmania we had an eye on what we’d done with Trackmania Nations, which was also intended to be an eSport title from the ground up,” explains Edouard Beauchemin, Nadeo’s international product manager.
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When we started building Shootmania we had an eye on what we’d done with Trackmania Nations, which was also intended to be an eSport title from the ground up.
“So, when we devised Shootmania Storm we also wanted that to be part of the mix and the very first thing that we worked really hard to achieve was to make sure that it’s appealing to watch. It has to be a great show: the game modes, the timing of the rounds, the spectator tools and providing many different stats in-game to allow shoutcasters to do their job.”
Of course, the fact that Shootmania is a FPS makes it instantly more decipherable than other common eSport genres, such as fighters and MOBAs. The majority of game players are familiar with the concepts, mechanics and language that form the basis of the most popular genre in video games. However, the biggest contributing factor that will allow new teams of eSport contenders to rise through the ranks of ShootMania is that it provides a gradual learning curve facilitated by an intelligent selection of game modes, which are, crucially, fun to play.
Shootmania Storm has already been signed up by IPL (IGN Pro League) thanks, in part, to its Elite mode. This part of the game is stable, balanced and eminently playable despite ShootMania as a whole being in the first of three planned beta phases.
Elite mode also attracted a lot of attention at Ubisoft’s recent digital day in Paris, drawing players and onlookers alike with its fast-pace and easy to fathom rule set. Beauchemin attributes this to the mode’s concentrated distillation of a key element of spectator sports: excitement.
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The best moments in FPS eSports are when you’re near the end of a round and maybe there’s just one guy standing and everyone knows he’s going to have to pull off an amazing feat to win.
“The best moments in FPS eSports are when you’re near the end of a round and maybe there’s just one guy standing and everyone knows he’s going to have to pull off an amazing feat to win,” Beauchemin enthuses. “We’ve boiled that down to one single game mode where it comes down to the last minute of the round: there’s one guy with a powerful gun and three armour points versus three guys with one armour point each who are working as a team.
“It’s really exciting to play and to watch because you can focus on just one person and see his choices and super-moves, whereas with 5 Vs 5, for example, it can get really messy and hard for spectators to keep track of everything that’s going on.”
Elite still supports six players in total, as each player on both teams takes turns to be the “hero” and tries to annihilate the opposing team or score a point by capturing the single base. This offers two distinct ways of winning and means intelligent traversal of the environment can see the round won without a single shot being fired, though this is the exception rather than the norm.
Nadeo intends that ShootMania’s status as an eSport not be restricted to major international events. Unsurprisingly, ShootMania’s highly customisable nature is called upon again as players are given the tools to create and host their own tournaments, which they can then publicise through use of in-game currency.
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With 5 Vs 5 it can get really messy and hard for spectators to keep track of everything that’s going on.
ShootMania’s adaptable nature means its official tag as an eSports title needn’t make it the exclusive domain of members of a digital Mount Olympus. Its persistent, intuitive controls and non-convoluted depth means it remains accessible, while offering the opportunity to its players to participate in competitive tournament play, even if they’ve never previously considered themselves eSports calibre.
“Ultimately, our games are powered by players,” Beauchemin concludes. “Some want to run competitions, some design levels and others simply take part by playing, all of which are essential to the community structure of our games.”
To apply for the ShootMania Storm beta program, visit the game’s website.
Stace Harman is a freelance contributor to IGN and is convinced that zombies will one day inherit the Earth. You can follow him on Twitter.
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