The new SSX's snowboard customisation system was partly inspired by random gun generation in Gearbox RPG-shooter Borderlands, EA Canada's creative director Todd Batty has revealed.
"We wanted gear to be a really important part of this game - what Borderlands did for guns, we wanted to do for snowboards," he commented in an interview you'll read in OXM 80. "We realised we could use procedurally generated stats to create a huge amount of variations, and then got our community involved to create enough art to have thousands of unique snowboards.
As a franchise, SSX already has something in common with Borderlands: a poppy, high-colour aesthetic. When the new game - originally subtitled "Deadly Descents" - was revealed in a thunder of grit, fans feared EA had reinvented SSX as a po-faced sim.
The publisher subsequently dropped the subtitle, insisting that the trailer was designed to spotlight a new mode of the same name, rather than showcase the game's direction as a whole.
"When we started development, we looked at SSX and thought: "it's a great racing game and a great tricks game - but what else can we add that might be relevant today?" Batty explained. "We looked at action adventure games and thought to ourselves: "how about making it a challenge to get down the bottom of the mountain alive?"
In Deadly Descents, players can trigger spontaneous avalanches. It's not always the best idea.
"Our game design has always focused equally on the three parts of the game - race it, trick it, survive it," Batty went on. "The fact that our original trailer decided to highlight the survival aspect - right or wrong - gave us a huge amount of buzz and internal momentum."
For more on the new SSX, pick up a copy of OXM 80 today - it's cheap as chips on iTunes.
Here's our most recent SSX preview.
3 comments so far...
CPT Random 82 on 2 Dec '11 said:
I'm sure it'll be fun but I prefer the Tony Hawks series myself, even though they are a little over the top of recent.
Thos. on 2 Dec '11 said:
I slightly annoyed with the angle OXM are taking on this. A dark, realistic snowboard sim would be have been fantastic.
I played one of the early SSX games ages ago on a mate's PS2. It was more like a flying game. Absolutely horrible. It may as well be based on jetskiing or rollerblading or some parachute-based xXxtreme! Danger! Sport! The only connection with snowboarding is that the land is white. Actually that wasn't even true - it was mostly covered in purple and green lights.
OXM ETboy on 2 Dec '11 said:
I see what you're saying, Thos, but every other bloody blockbuster game is "dark" and "realistic" nowadays. I like that SSX has a sense of fun about it (not least because I can't snowboard to save my life).