When we discuss sports games, at least here in the US, we're often referring to Madden. Across the pond the focus seems to be on FIFA. But there are many other sports in the world, and just as many video games to go with them. Just ask Cyanide Studio, the team behind the Pro Cycling Manager series. For over a decade they've followed the literal ups and downs of the cycling scene, and released a yearly game to coincide with the Tour de France. Pro Cycling Manager 19's Lead Game Designer Clément Pinget recently spoke with TheGamer about how his team keeps PCM relevant, and what the future could hold.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Congratulations on Pro Cycling Manager 19 reaching the Steam top 20! How do you keep a series like this fresh after so many yearly installments?
Thanks! We’re lucky enough that this sport is really complex and deep. First, the 3D modeling part is huge, for the cyclists, for the landscapes, the roads.
The manager part is not as straightforward as a soccer championship, I mean, you have 30 riders who have different specialities, their goals are spread all over the year and not all the riders are at their best form at the same time of the season! Your riders are not together on the same race, for instance in March, some are training, other compete in race 1 in Belgium, others in race 2 in Italia. Some are good for very specific races and are only on the team later in the season.
The race part, with adding gameplay mechanics to the 3D models, and also all the AI parts are huge. I don’t know how it could be possible not to have more and more ideas with such challenges.
There's a lot of micromanagement in this game, a process that can be daunting for some. What do you think is the trick to making management fun?
Players want to experience an epic story, with a balance of realism and unique events.
So as weird as it may sound, one of the tricks is to make it realistic… but it would be too easy if you just had to consider that. Make it too realistic and strict, and the fun can be broken because your game mechanics become more and more complex and you will confuse the players. Accessibility is a key, players have to understand how the loop of the game works, what they can do and what they can’t. You have to find the right balance between accessibility and depth.
The evolution of the world also makes it fun, like you can see this 20 year old rider on your team evolve until he wins the Tour de France. Some teams will fall, some will become strong. Your game becomes unique because if you compare your hall of game with someone else's, especially after three seasons, there’s no way it will be the same! One of our goals in the future of PCM is to evolve on this axis, and add more life to the game.
One thing you did for PCM 19 was revamp Pro Cyclist mode to have a skill tree for each individual rider. What was the thought process behind that? Is that something players have been asking for?
We've had a “skill tree” idea for a few years, because we wanted to add something which gives more choices to the player to develop his rider in Pro Cyclist mode. For our new features we always balance them between requests from the community, what our editor wants, and what we, the developers, want for the game, to make sense with the mid-long-term view of the product. For the skill tree, it was between requests and our mid-term view of this mode.
What aspects of the real cycling world do you think you've captured really well in the game? What would you like to improve going forward?
I think the whole race part, what we call “AI” with the teams’ strategies, and specificity of the different terrains is a solid element of our game. We would like to improve the animations and models.
For the career part, last year we revamped the transfers and interactions between riders and its a topic we would like to develop in the future. It would open up lots of possibilities and, as said in a previous question, make it more fun.
This year's real life story between the Dutch star Tom Dumoulin and his Sunweb team was an interesting one. Since he’s a professional rider, he worked with the same team manager and structure, but there was more friction since last year, it grew and it became difficult to continue the collaboration. The team manager had to change his plans for the near future and rethink the whole team strategy. I think this is a great real example of where we would like to go with PCM.
PCM 19 has 200 races and 600 stages. That's a lot of content! What do you think is the plan going forward? Even more races, or do you want to go back and polish the ones already in the game?
Obviously, it'd be hard to make more races and keep the same quality. For several years, we raised our processes, our tools, to be more efficient for this part of the development but doing more would disturb the balance.
For now, the plan is more to keep the focus on quality for the major races (Tour de France, Paris-Nice, La Vuelta, the main classics…) and each year add new buildings so the players get more different and unique scenes!
Pro Cycling Manager 19 is currently available on Steam.