Hello!

So I got Trials HD pretty close to it's release, loved the game. Loved the learning curve, loved the atmosphere, humour and challenge. Not much more to say on this.

I thought Evolution was a perfect step forward. Never got stale, with lots of tracks, lots of DLC, multiplayer and track central. I convinced a friend to get it and we must have grinded solid days into both the standard and community tracks. What kept us playing was the competition and challenge. For this reason, we never really played supercross that much together. It was a feature I appreciated, but only from a casual perspective. It was all about getting better and being able to do progressively more difficult tracks. We never struggled to find tracks for months on end, to that we owe a huge thanks to all the developers obviously but equally, all the community creators, we wouldn't have continued playing without this.

Along comes Fusion. First impressions reveal a completely different aesthetic. I was excited and disappointed; It looked great in it's own right, but I did love the HD/Evo aesthetic and soundtrack. Regardless, as mentioned, I was excited to play it.
I then hear about the whole trick mechanics and alarm bells start to ring. Since this goes completely against why we would play it.
We then hear that there would be no multiplayer at launch, with the devs particularly highlighting that their statistics showed that I was in the minority. I.E. they wouldn't be including the single lane ghost multiplayer due to lack of interest. This was actually quite surprising to me. In fact, I still refuse to believe that there are more people who play split screen supercross than the single lane. Or at least, proportionate to the effort that it would take to create such a mode.
This didn't really factor into our buying decision though. We wanted to play new tracks, and at £25 inc season pass, it's hardly a decision.
After platinuming all but a couple of the extremes, we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of content already on track central.
With the lack of single lane, here's how we would do things; one of us would find a track, call out the creator or name for the other person to search, then we'd just countdown to start. Not necessarily to race, but we are at the same level and progress at the same rate usually. We can do Ninja1 tracks and some Ninja2s in the time limit. The lack of a ghost and party system was very annoying for us though.
When tracks got scarce, we typically started to look at the 'download:rate' ratio, as an indicator of whether the track would challenge us. However, as pointed out by a previous thread not long before this. These just stopped being made. So we stopped playing.

Months go by, not a hint of that single lane goodness. We hear about more Ubisoft F ups, and a multiplayer beta that seems to be supercross. Confidence in the game starts to fall. I'm still confused by this, I must be missing some information because I swear I remember seeing gameplay of this weeks before launch. Either way, no mention of single lane still, and with loads of other great games that come out over last fall, it's safe to say that we won't be touching this game again.

For the devs sake, I hope I am wrong, but I reckon they've just spent months creating a multiplayer that nobody will play. I'd love to see a player counter...

As they seem to suggest by their 'metrics', me and my friend are in the minority. But I can say with absolute certainty, the lack of single lane ghost multiplayer, and the lack of tracks on track central killed this game for me. You took away a means to play the tracks on track central. With all the other great games out now, the lack of a 'complete product', months after release just ensures I'll never play it again.