E3 2016 Preview: Steep

I crashed to what should have been certain death spiralling down mountains in the Alps at least 25 times during as many minutes playing Steep during E3 this week – fortunately for the burgeoning extreme sports enthusiast hidden inside me, Steep offers all of the thrills with none of the inevitable emergency room visits associated with such insanity.

Ubisoft saved a double surprise for the end of its E3 press conference in a year defined by pre-announcements and leaks. The first is Steep being announced at all – a game we hadn’t heard about – and the second is that we’ll be able to hit the slopes this year.

The forgotten snowboarding genre hasn’t been given an opportunity this generation, and Steep isn’t trying to do much about that, at least not directly. Don’t let the snowboards and ollies fool you; this isn’t a one trick pony obsessed with score multipliers.

Steep is an extreme sports open world, inspired by the lunatics who risk life and limb to make an exhilarating YouTube video with a GoPro. As well as snowboarding, you’ll take to Mont Blanc paragliding, skiing and wingsuiting.

The former is considerably more relaxing than anything else you’ll experience in Steep; but don’t let the tranquil lack of speed deceive you. Paragliding is a crucial element, as it’s how you’ll best explore the world and discover new areas. Using the Mountain View map, it’s easy to admire the Alps and track new events and locations that have been discovered, then fast travel at will. Once an event has been unlocked, it’s as simple as selecting it from the map to instantaneously get started; but you’ll have to find it first.

Explore the Alps through any activity, or on-foot, but paragliding gives you the best chance to locate areas of interest and land safely to search in detail. Once you’re onto something, a chime will sound to alert you to a new event nearby, which can be spotted and unlocked using binoculars.

Now the real fun begins.

From straight races to time trials, trick challenges, deadly obstacle courses and one jump dares, Steep has a range of events to intrigue everyone’s inner daredevil. Within seconds of being handed the controller, I passed through a challenge marker whilst descending from a frightening peak in a wingsuit. I had to remain as close to the ground as possible to increase my score, without crashing, to beat three times of other players and win a gold, silver or bronze medal.

A straight race to the finish line against ghost competitors saw me clinch a gold medal by less than a quarter of a second, in an example of Steep’s emphasis on social gameplay. I didn’t get to see any of the actual four-player multiplayer that will be available, but even in the solo experience, Steep is deeply entrenched in how your friends play. From ghosts populating the mountains, to user-generated challenges and, of course, the replay mode. With a GoPro-inspired first person view, which is frankly even more terrifying, and plenty of options to edit the footage, this is a game for players to show off – both when they do well and when it goes spectacularly wrong.

After my unexpected victory, a trick challenge rained on my parade. While I had started to gain confidence in avoiding trees and ill-placed rocks, introducing tricks left me bewildered. The controls demand precision timing, which is something I couldn’t muster in such a short timeframe. On a snowboard or skis, the left trigger is used to prepare and perform a jump, the left stick controls movement and some tricks, and the right stick handles flips as well, as hand placement on the board when grabbing it using both triggers. The finesse is definitely there, but it’s not something that will be easy to learn, let alone master; and that’s exactly how it should be.

Creative Director Igor Manceau told Stevivor Ubisoft Annecy collaborated with several extreme sports athletes, including motion capture, to make movement and human performance as realistic as possible. He explained how before the professionals even attempt a new trick on a new route, it needs to be perfectly executed at least 300 times on a trampoline. It’s not easy to perform in real life, and it won’t be in a virtual world.

As a total newbie, I found each element simple enough to comprehend on its own. But as soon as tricks were added to breakneck speed, a ghost challenger, an unforgiving time limit and tiny gaps to aim for between a dense cluster of trees, the panic led to mistakes. Like a deer stunned in headlights, when you have a split-second to dodge a tree to the left or right, it’s amazing how tunnel vision embarks you upon a crash course directly into the centre.

The Alps, in which Ubisoft Annecy is located, are more spiritually than accurately recreated. The iconic mountains have been remade to suit gameplay and an open world to explore. However, that isn’t to say Steep is disconnected from the extreme sports circuit. It will feature several real world Red Bull X-Alps events to tackle, and be joined by a cast of the sport’s biggest names.

It’s hard to gauge the size of the world, merely because it’s an unknown genre. Mountain View is unlike maps in other open world games, and while it’s not vehicle-based, we know wingsuiting and paragliding can cover a lot of territory very quickly. It looked massive, but with mountains at the forefront of the world, rather than as a scenic spectacle or barrier in the background, it will probably be harder to explore than any sandbox you’ve ever wandered.

Steep will be released in December 2016 for Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC.

Stevivor was flown to E3 2016 as a guest of Ubisoft to cover the entire event. This relationship does not prevent Stevivor from covering other publishers’ titles, nor does it impact the E3 2016 opinions of any of our authors.