Don't give them any ideas.

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well yes and no:
YES= because they can sometimes give me more oppertunities for tricks on some courses and can actually help you figure out the right line to take

NO= they can be a major pain in the ass especialy the blind death pits you can see because of a hill or something and they do tend to cause frustration when you continuously fall into them

so i'm pretty neutral towards death pits

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"OK, the only way to get you to shut up is to let you talk, so go ahead. Enlighten me Dr. Phil."

Amen.

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When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did, in his sleep -- not screaming, like the passengers in his car.

i think my best SSX memory was not with the original game, but when the demo drops. I couldn't believe my eyes. It felt like good ol' SSX but it had current-gen graphics. I had goose bumps and shit. All I could think was "Damn, they did it! My life is complete."

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⇧ This!

Then I got the game and I was severely underwhelmed by the plethora of terrible courses and lack of structure etc. and then I realised that the game was in fact not that great. Not great at all!

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I actually agree with this. It was "quantity over quality" this time around, and I think part of that was necessary, because there's a statement by Todd Batty that mentions they would have had to pare the originally proposed 25 tracks down to like 15, and that wasn't enough to get the game approved.

There is a casualty in that though, I could play SSX Tricky's 12 tracks endlessly. A lot of SSX 2012's tracks were one-and-done for me - they were so unpleasant to play that I avoided a large portion of them.

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Well, for me - a year down the line (nearly) - I'm still discovering new tracks to play. Tracks I hated at first are now becoming favourites.
Someone messaged me on PSN and said "how do you go so fast on Root Down?" ... I replied "I studied Root Down for 6 hours solid until I nailed a line". I realise that not everyone has the time or inclination to do that. Maybe I've got some kind of abnormal brain - but I like the challenge.
I hated Root Down at first - didn't get it.... now I love it. I'm not the greatest on it (00:58 no w/s 00:55 with w/s) .... but its fun to play.
Same with other tracks - Long Horn, Area Zero , Dreadnought, Corkscrew, Bear Claw, The Monster, Buckeye, Jack Knife.... and so many other great tracks that I hated at first. Once you get Jack Knife sorted its incredible .... and its really not that difficult.
My current favourite is Hush. That is one sweet sweet drop. I didn't like the darkness / pits combo at first I'll admit it - but the rails are so handy that once you suss it ..... again its just addictive (plus - its not pitch dark like Incoming or Snakebite.... you can actually see quite well with decent goggles and light).
I feel a bit sorry for ppl not digging this game... maybe having so many drops just confused ppl .... but each and every one is a real peach (except for Incoming - thats just evil ... uh yeah - and the reverse cameras - they're just WRONG).

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I don't think it's that it's confusing, it's just that there's no connection between the players and the tracks.
In SSX3 every single track was meaningful and important, because you earned them and experienced them in little bites. The 'confusion' of this game was that all the tracks were given at once, so playing them wasn't a reward and didn't feel as fun.
People didn't know what the tracks were like, and the difficulty of each.

For me, it doesn't matter how many tracks or how much progression the game has, because the tracks themselves are the issue. Don't get me wrong—they were well made, but I'm used to backcountry tracks making up 10-15% of the game, not all of it. Without man-made tracks, it felt like a large chunk of the game was missing. The tracks, as a whole, weren't as whimsical, ridiculous, or diverse as I would want in an SSX game (in fact, I could really extend that to the entire game). Africa was the only range even close to the level of craziness I'd expect. Like I said before, though, I understand why they were like that in this game. I just hope that we can have more than mountains the next time around.

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and who wants to learn 80 odd uninspiring tracks? I hope they revert to 10-15 mental courses with big air, pipe, race, slopestyle courses. I thought the slalom from blur was good too actually.

The tracks were so much more creative before, now, I am sorry whatever people say they are just so much more boring and frustrating. and about 70% are just one run, throwaway.

For me the game, no matter if they changed the store and added skiing removed the death pits etc. would still not have been very good as the whole concept sucked

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^ what yr basically saying is "I'm no good at it, so I hate it" ... at least - that's how its comin across. "The lady doth protest too much methinks"

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Exactly. The problem with saying the tracks suck is that once you're good at the tracks they become incredibly satisfying and fun. I remember all those tracks (it's been too long now I don't remember the specific peak) like Weirdsville and Salient...I stayed the fuck AWAY FROM at first. All those heavy duty wingsuit tracks. But after I had gotten a bit tired of the vanilla tracks I gave them a try and they're amazing.

So pretty much you have to put time into getting good at this game. It doesn't hold your hand down the mountain, it slaps you down it. That's the point.

Also, I'm not sure what you're expecting man...the PS4 was just announced and it's not like with all that extra power they're gonna go BACK to 10-15 tracks. They'd have to be like...10 minutes long each lol.

Most likely we're going to see something similar with large mountains split up into different tracks. And I welcome that over one SSX3 style mountain any day of the week.

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Ha no not at all man, I used to get gold/platinum in the global events every time anyway. And getting gold in the explore mode is not hard.

I just don't find it fun.

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It's not like I struggle with the game or anything, they are just not fun to ride. all backcountry is bad.

To be honest add me as a friend if you want to see my scores haha they are probably not as good as most of the people on here but they're ok.

When I say 10-15 tracks, I meant I'd prefer that to reams and reams of very boring very visually similar ones.

On the next Gen consoles you could have a huge mountain with huge variety, like a giant SSX3 mountain/on tour mountain. Or numerous mountains the same kind of scale of the ones on SSX 3.

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You're my hero chrome. I also had a similar experience in regards to hating certain tracks at first that later become some of my favorite.

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^ thanx

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That's what I meant

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It is a bit overwhelming I think.

For this release I really was hoping for more of the old classic amazing SSX style and vibe.

Also this one is too over the top in terms of the speed of tricks etc. it has lost all of its style like the stalls you could do on the older games and handplants butter spins, more tech rails tricks all that kind of thing

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You had to pay credits to unlock tracks in Explore? Everyone seems to forget that. If you jumped straight into the online side of things, then what did you expect?

Well they were all unlocked, and the credits you had to pay to ride on them were a negligible amount in comparison to how easy it was to earn them.

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How exactly were they 'all unlocked' if you had to pay credits to... unlock them?

How easy it is to unlock the drops is irrelevant. MarcusAnnex said



That is simply untrue. If you chose to unlock all of the tracks as quick as possible, then got confused by it all, then that is your own fault. There was nothing stopping anyone playing through the drops that came unlocked and slowly unlocking new ones over time.

You're right, but let me run through the problems with the system now:
We ignore the tracks we don't like, we have no connection to tracks since they're just one out of so many, and sometimes we dive into tracks we're just not ready for yet.

All three of those major problems would be fixed if the game had a bit more linearity where it starts you out with basic tracks, gives you tracks that introduce new skills slowly, raise the difficulty a bit, present new obstacles, etc.

This would have:
-forced you to play tracks that maybe you didn't like the first few runs
-given you a connection to each track because you earned them
-taught you skills in a gradual and progressive way

Not being able to play every track immediately would be kind of annoying, yes, but I think more than that it would make you anticipate and enjoy it more once you earn it.

And just to clarify, there are a few different ways that each of those problems could have been solved, I just think that this would be the best way.

^ right on. Nicely put.

To EARN each track would have made more sense. To open up a particular track in Trick It / Explore perhaps you would have to achieve a particular high score on a previous drop.
To open Race It / Explore then achieve a particular time.
Or
The amounts needed to open tracks could have been set much higher - say 50,000,000 or 100,000,000 whatever.
Or a combination of those.... but yeah - gradually learning the skills for ice, trees, w/s, avalanche .. etc would have been better.

However - that's all by-the-by. The game exists in its present state. To get the most out of it you have to spend a lot of time on it. Time that some ppl don't have. / don't want to spend.

The idea, upthread a-way, that the tracks are 'very visually similar' may be somewhat true in regard to each peak ... but play Bear Claw, Long Horn, Serenity, The Big Show followed by Off the Grid, Corkscrew, Burnout and Salient .... they are all completely different! If Long Horn doesn't get the adrenalin going then you don't like SSX fullstop.

Plus - the more you play each drop you realise how every bump in the track ... every rock .... every slope ... every rail ... has been strategically placed. To help or hinder. You have to work it out. That's the puzzle. Once you work it out .... that's when you get good.

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That would've made it more like World Tour, but I see what you are getting at. Perhaps you had to earn enough on each range to open up the next. I think the issue was everything was open, right away, people may have been confused where to start and concentrate on.

Church.

It took me almost a year to see past my hatred of the tougher tracks. EVERY map (except for Broken Tooth and The Dagger, they may have been designed by Michael J. Fox after a bender) has intimate details in them that makes you see the pure love and thought that went into every turn.

Yes. Yes, I am. 12 months, and nothing else has been in my Xbox. I loved it so much, I spent about 200 hours total away from the controller to bring you the best SSX statistics website the world has ever seen. Now, I have to get back to playing.

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WinonaNET is a RiderNet experiment with a Cross-Platform Scoreboard: http://ssx.ozmonet.com

Don't know if it's been dropped here as well, but found this link on the EA SSX forums: http://underthecode.com/2013/02/18/ssx-2012-postmortem/

I agree with most of what he says, with a few additions. One is game progression (I think that I've already ranted about this in another thread ), everything became available too quickly and easy that it didn't feel like it actually was my own effort driving me forward.

Another one is Allegra.

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