Welcome to the breathtaking world of Steep. Introduced at the E3 press conference, it is a new action sports game, taking players to the open world of the Alps and Alaska. The game offers a variety of sports, including skiing, wingsuiting, snowboarding and paragliding. The wild and massive mountain environment offers a wide range of activities and opportunities, allowing players to freely ride, compete, and pull off crazy stunts.
In Steep, players can meet up with riders from all over the world and share their experiences with their friends and the world.
Combining sports and the outdoors, the Annecy Studio which is only a few miles away from Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Europe were inspired by the people who go out there, pull off insane lines, share their experiences on social media, and become inspiring figures.
We are also convinced that we can bring something strong and unique to the sports game segment by making use of our past experiences at the studio. We’ve had the chance to work on numerous major titles over the past twenty years, including Tom Clancy’s The Division and the Assassin’s Creed series. Needless to say, we’ve already had some great opportunities to put our multiplayer experience to the test!
Our team, made up of passionate veterans of the industry, is a combination of mountain and outdoor sports enthusiasts and online/multiplayer game experts. In a nutshell, it’s a perfect recipe for creating Steep.
Players can enjoy four different adrenaline-fueled sports: skiing, wingsuiting, snowboarding and paragliding. Each of these sports offers a great variety of experiences. Multiple activities allow players the freedom to explore Steep’s open world in whichever way they choose.
All four sports are balanced, and players can choose whether they want to use one sport or mix all four while exploring the environment by easily switching from one sport to another.
With Steep, we wanted players to embrace the thrill of the mountain with a fresh action-sports experience across mountainous open world. Steep’s perfect playground contains a variety of environments, including forests, stony cliffs, glaciers, and lakes. For instance, you can fly over the icefields of Mont Blanc with your paraglide, ride the Matterhorn’s steepest face, pull off insane tricks in snowparks, or fly through the Aiguilles canyons in your wingsuit.
Steep’s world will also offer a dynamic environment. Changes in the time of day and weather conditions are carefully designed in order to create memorable settings and to give players the opportunity to experience the scenery in a variety of different ways. We want to focus on turning your moments in Steep into the rides of your life!
Sharing is central to the Steep experience, the game was built around players being able to share their best moments.
We want players to share their most memorable and thrilling rides, stunts and tricks. The Trail feature makes the most of all the broadcasting tools available in consoles and PCs and allows players to share their clips with friends and the community. The Trail feature saves players’ paths and actions as they ride through the open-world mountain environment. Players are able to watch a replay of their rides and edit the footage in different ways, including switching viewpoints and zooming in and out. Using this feature, players can also challenge their friends to do better on the same path using different metrics like performance and time.
While Steep can be enjoyed with other players, the game has a wide range of activities available for solo players, and sharing experience with other players enhances the game’s open-world premise. As shown during the Ubisoft E3 conference, Steep has a multiplayer gameplay in many different ways. People can try to come up with amazing tricks, like a wingsuit going through a paraglide while a skier is jumping over both of them.
We strongly believe in Steep’s potential to become a factory for creating crazy lines and jaw-dropping stunts. We’re convinced players will think of incredible combinations that we haven’t even imagined yet.
In Steep, you share the mountain playground with everyone on a single, worldwide server, so there are numerous players playing in the same area and at the same time. To ensure the best gameplay experience, the most relevant players chosen by factors like location and language will be displayed and suggested to you. You can then choose to match up and play together.
The vast open world, players will always find a great variety of challenges to keep them entertained and to test their skills. Specific challenges are available for each sport and players can compete against one another through, for example, leaderboards for races, tricks scoring, and cliff jumps.
The Trail feature also allows players to easily create their own challenges they can share with their friends and compete for the best performance.
Steep’s tricks are designed to be accessible to players of all skill levels. While anyone can easily perform tricks, players can get creative and take more risks to pull off even crazier tricks.
Tricks utilize the Left and Right stick axis. Combining both sticks’ axis during a jump will control the rotations you will perform. Players can make their tricks even more spectacular by experimenting with the different combinations and add style with grabs and tweaks to their poses.
We want the game to be fully immersive and appeal to all the senses. In action sports, risk taking and adrenaline frequently translate into an emphasis on breathing and heart beats. The music will also intensify as the rider continues to carry through with a successful performance. Finally, big mountain purity and beauty is a call to minimalist and contemplative sound design.
Moreover, we put a lot of focus in trying to offer the best feeling of sliding or gliding as possible. We think sliding is really the interaction between your board and the ground, or between your wings and the air. We decided to dedicate a large spectrum of our sound design to that interaction in order to really immerse the player in the experience.
Players will be able to choose their avatar from among a range of pre-defined characters, both male and female and of various ethnicities. They will then be able to customize their riders’ outfits and equipment. Outfits (including crazy and fun costumes), as well as equipment, can be changed to enable the player to be creative and make his/her avatar look unique and fun without impacting the gameplay or their performance. Additional touches, like visual gadgets, flares, flashlights, backpacks and more will be available.
The game will be available in December for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
