At a Glance: SSX 2012

The Air Up There

High

Higher than the sun
You shoot me from a gun
I need you to elevate me here
At the corner of your lips
At the orbit of your hips

Eclipse

You elevate my soul
I've got no self control
Been living like a mole now
Going down

Excavation

I and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can fly
So high

Elevation - U2, Elevation



Fresh Powder
It's been five very, very long years since players were able to cut snow down the mountainside with fan favorites Mac, Elise, Kaori, Zoe, Psymon and Moby (just to name a few) from EA Sports' SSX franchise. But fans need not to worry for much longer, because they're gearing up to end that dry spell very soon.

"It’s one of those weird things. It’s really popular within the company," says EA Canada's Game Producer Sean Smillie, "....but development is a weird thing, it takes a long time to get some guys together, pitch it, get this meeting, get that meeting. We saw a couple of things happening [in the meantime]; technology started going a certain way with the PS3 and stuff and we were like ‘Oh, there’s something we could do with SSX’. We got the right people together, got some interest generated within the company. It just kind of took a long time. Nothing was going on for a while and then it just sparked and basically it was like a perfect storm, everything just kind of came together, it got a lot of momentum and everyone started jumping on board."

Smillie is also aware that the landscape was a little iffy for a while when it came to extreme-style sports titles, due in no small part to the tepid and outright hostile market created by games under the Tony Hawk banner. "I kind of think it hit its time there for a while and then got a bit diluted and a bit [overdone]," he says. "But I don’t really look at [SSX] as an extreme sports game; it’s more fantastical when you’re doing 150 ft. jumps, it’s a little bit more make-believe. Personally I haven’t seen any good extreme sports games in a while....I mean, I do like Trials HD, that was a lot of fun but.....We’ve been making [SSX games] for some time and...there’s nothing really anything else quite like them out there."

Smillie, himself an avid snowboarder, made use of his experience by doing some hands-on 'boarding of his own for the game's various sound effects based on different types of snow (and yes there are different types beyond white and cold). "I actually went up to one of the mountains and mic’ed up a snowboard and myself and rode down...so we could get a recording of the board on snow," Smillie says with a grin and twinkle in his eye, a tell-tale sign that business and pleasure can sometime come together. "[I tried] it on powder, on ice, on packed. Because we’re going to take that and the sound effects and manipulate them and SSX’ify them. But you go up there....you have to explain to people all the different things about snow, and we’ve got to do it visually too. Powder does a certain thing, ice does a certain thing [and so on]."



Going Out of Bounds (Is A Good Thing)
One of the big features of the new title is the sense of being more open world, with more of a "sandbox mountain" feel to the overall environments. "It’s open world in a sense you get out the chopper and you go ‘Okay, I’ve got to get down this huge face of the mountain’," Smillie says. "It’s open world in a sense that, in normal SSXs it’s kind of a spline, that goes down and you can follow and go underground and you’re set. What we tried to do is craft it so it’s the whole area, so you can go down and you’ll see the chevrons and flares in the snow and you’ll know that that’s track. But if you cut way, way, way, way left and start riding then you can still ride there."

But, as with all things off the beaten path, use caution; the mountain may not like you going where you're not supposed to. In other words, don't make the mountain angry; you won't like it when the mountain gets angry. To help explain what that entails, SSX’s Lead Designer Todd Batty steps up to the plate. "We built the whole game around the idea of freedom....[so] when you look at open world game design the best thing about it is when they design systems that are very sandbox in nature. So we looked at it with our avalanche [system]. They’re a perfect microcosm for what we we’re trying to do with this freedom. We wanted to have avalanches in the game. It’s not as simple as have the player activate an invisible trigger volume and then have the avalanche come. It’s not just about timing and cinematic cameras. The problem with all that is even though it would be epic; it would only be fun once.

"Every time I play that level again I’d know exactly when that avalanche is going to come. The thrill and immersion is removed......The way our avalanche system works is that the computer does a stability analysis of every part of our game and it creates what looks like a heat map, but it’s a stability map. It looks for things like overhanging crevices or icy and rocky ledges and then anytime you’re riding on any piece of terrain, we just monitor the forces you’re exerting on the terrain like turning really sharply at 200 miles an hour or landing on a 500 foot cliff. These exert a huge force. Every time your force exceeds a stability rating on the terrain, we just send some snow loose, bound completely by physics and just let it roll down the mountain. It’s 100% organic. It won't happen in the same place twice. That was the goal for avalanches and everything else in the game."

As far as motion and Kinect support goes, don't hold your breath. "[We're] getting asked that a lot," Batty says with a chuckle. "Motion controls have a great place in gaming and I fully believe that as a designer, if you are going to support motion features in your game, you have to build and guide your game around [that device]. We even got that advice from Microsoft. I got to see Kinect before it was announced and they said to us that they just didn’t want us to simply throw Kinect onto our games. If you’re going to make a game on Kinect then they wanted us to consciously decide to build the game around it. At that point we were already well into development and we had already had a ton of risk embedded into our product so we were happy to stick with just the basics."

Also, don't expect any split-screen hijinks to make an appearance either. "That was a tough call to make," Batty admits. "We’re putting so much of our time into online now and to be honest with you, local split-screen is a super expensive feature to build. Not only would you have to make the whole world incredible, but you’d have to make it look incredible……twice. We looked at two player and when we weighed it up against some of the things we wanted to do with online we decided that we would go ahead and push multiplayer for the connected generation. Losing two player was a sad day for me."



Climb E'ry Mountain, Conquer E'ry Slope
Expect to explore just about every famous mountain range on the planet thanks to some creative use of NASA satellite imaging, which is something that SSX's Art Director Jeff Coates is exceptionally proud of. "We really wanted to give you the ability in the game to explore the world. There are nine different regions, 27 different peaks and over 100 different runs. They go from Antarctica to Africa to Alaska to the Himalayas to Siberia and on and on," he says. "The team started with topographical data that they got from a NASA site and that became the foundation for our tracks. So we take that topographical data and run it through a proprietary software we have called Mountain Man, which gets the data into our game engine and we build onto that the over-the-top SSX experience. Obviously we exaggerate some of the actual landscapes quite a bit so that it's more fun to play, but the topographical data is the basis for everything. And every region has its own feel and look that is very specific to what that region actually looks like."

Making its debut in the series is the virtually untouched mountains of New Zealand, something that caught the eye of Coates after seeing those sweeping visual shots during the Lord of the Rings trilogy. "New Zealand definitely features in the game. It’s an amazing region with breathtaking natural environment. It has quite possibly the largest set piece created in SSX, a massive concrete dam spillway that sits right at the center of the mountain. You can go into the dam where you can ride through the pipes or air over top of it presenting you with an amazing view. New Zealand is also home to the white-out deadly descent where you have to navigate down the mountain when you literally can’t see more than a few feet in front of you," he says.

Continuing the popular trend of catchy musical scores, expect the same bee-bop goodness you'd expect to come along on an SSX title. "It's a wonderful way to get exposure," Batty says. "If you get a song in a million selling video game [title], you'll get a lot of people listening to your music. SSX is one of those games that has a strong heritage of having awesome soundtracks. If you look at the SSX 3 soundtrack (including Felix Da Housecat, Queens of the Stone Age, N.E.R.D, etc.)...we would [Really] have had to pay for those artists today....... There's a lot of really great bands in there that became really huge. We knew we had some big shoes to fill, we're lucky, our audio producer Freddie Ouano, who came over from Fight Night, super talented guy and has his finger on the pulse of music. We even have some custom composed music for this game. Amon Tobin composed some songs for our game. That's a pretty cool thing, and I think music is part of the experience."

With all this coming to a head soon, one has to worry if SSX will maintain its easy going learning curve or opt out for a more sophisticated design? Well, according to Coates, yes and no. "You don't have to be a snowboarder to really enjoy it," he admits. "It's a fun, across-the-board type of an experience that I think anyone can enjoy. And the difficulty of it is layered. I'm not the best player on the development team by any stretch, but I can pick it up and pretty quickly start doing some of those crazy tricks. But then I can watch someone else play.....and [they do] all sorts of tricks that I haven't even seen before. That layer of complexity is actually really cool."

Todd Batty agrees, noting that the fantasy and the reality of snowboarding are two completely different things for him as well. "There's some days I [can] play the game for hours on end, and I'm driving home, and I come over a little hill, I can picture myself jumping off of it...[but]...I think if I [did that] right now, I’d probably kill myself," he jokes.

SSX is set to hit the slopes February 28, 2012.