There may be one online game sequence that can ceaselessly loom massive in my thoughts, and it’s SSX. With no new entry within the excessive snowboarding franchise since its 2012 installment, it looks like there’s little hope for it to ever make a comeback. Which makes it all of the extra miserable to listen to that we may have seen the sequence stay on within the type of a non secular successor. The revelation that such a recreation was within the works comes from a sweeping report by IGN in regards to the latest inflow of layoffs at high-profile firms within the business, and the way they’ve affected the flexibility of builders to make video games, whether or not resulting from being laid off, shedding funding, or working with fewer colleagues.
A former worker at studio SuperNatural instructed IGN that the corporate was engaged on a non secular successor to SSX that was to be printed by 2K, earlier than the writer pulled out. SuperNatural was based in 2020 by Steve Rechtschaffner and Larry LaPierre, best-known because the creators of the SSX sequence. So it feels like we nearly had precisely what followers have been dreaming of for over a decade. As somebody who has constantly performed a number of hours of SSX 3 each month for the previous…decade, I can hardly start to explain to you ways unhappy this makes me.
What made SSX so particular and has saved it caught within the minds of gamers like me for many years was the mix of sports activities motion and an arcadey trick system. Whereas there have been “typical” snowboarding occasions like downhill races and half-pipe trick competitions, the sequence’ vitality was fully over-the-top. Its characters all had a colourful 2000’s aesthetic and will pull off twisting tips that usually included fully eradicating their snowboard from their ft in mid-air. For a lot of, the franchise’s top got here within the type of its second recreation, 2001’s SSX Difficult.
Whereas video games like Ubisoft’s Steep try and maintain the torch alive, nothing has had the identical feeling as SSX. Recreating that distinctive high quality was precisely the plan for SuperNatural’s non secular successor, codenamed Undertaking Gravity. In 2021, Rechtschaffner instructed Laptop computer Magazine that the sport would give attention to the essence of what made the unique sequence nice by making an, “arcadey, amazing-feeling, very accessible, aggressive and enjoyable recreation.” Undertaking Gravity was additionally deliberate to be a live-service, free-to-play title, but it surely looks like Undertaking Gravity is not going to see the sunshine of day. Whereas this bit of reports is barely a small a part of the IGN report, it serves for instance of how the abysmal state of the business straight results in good video games by no means reaching the palms of avid gamers.
