Steep (Ubisoft) - How It Works

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Steep Developer: Ubisoft Annecy Release Date: December 2nd, 2016 Cost: ~$59.99 USD Online: Yes - Buy To Play

So today I bring you Steep by Ubisoft out of Annecy France. I had seen this game at E3 some time ago, and completely forgot about it after signing up for beta testing.

Well that day has come and gone, and I received my email invitation. I immediately thought this was going to be a great game, but tried not to get my hopes up. I will attempt to describe what I found out from playing the game, on game mechanics, that you cannot find by reading the forums.

Hopefully this will help you decide if the game is for you or not.

* Update November 18th, 2016 *
Open Beta Weekend Nov. 18th - 21st! See You All In-Game!

• No Signs of more mountain unlocks yet. Just a bigger test of the existing beta (however the files are changed enough that mine is patching 14gb)
• Level Cap Still 8

Table of Contents

• Character Customization
• Controls
• Leveling
• Events and Interactions
• Custom Content
• Social Interaction In-Game
• Cost vs. Fun Factor

Character Customization

Image:

I saw a guy with (what I know now as) a Yeti suit on, and I thought... how awesome would that be. Well it is awesome, and fairly attainable in the game. The clown helmet from the video is fairly cheap as well (easy to obtain), and the Pink Yeti Suit is 36,000 Credits. The White one is given to you when you complete a particular mountain story.

All items are obtainable from what I can tell. There is no sign of a micro transaction screen anywhere, and you earn money in the game, and spend it on gear and modifications to your characters looks. That's great news!

Only down side is, and i'm sure this will change, is the inventory to choose from is fairly limited. The toques for example, there are many of them, but no style. I would prefer it if you could buy a toque, then dye it a certain color for credits each time. Make style a of toque and charge 3,600 for basic colors each time, for example.

You can also put Walkies on your character, ice climbing picks, harnesses and other things associated with winter sports. It is kind of neat, though the color on accessories is fixed, and you get what you see.

Controls

With a lot of winter event games, the controls make or break the game. Which is why I will say this. It may be out for PC, but for the love of all that is holy, do not try to play it with a mouse and keyboard. It doesn't work well and you will find yourself hating yourself after trying to do tricks. The mouse has nothing to do with the game other than menu selection and map manipulation.

In other words, you can use the mouse to move around on the screen, and rotate/zoom etc, and then when you start to play the actual game, you use the keyboard WASD/LAlt/Space/J/L for everything else.

Now unless you have an analog modified keyboard (Which would be awesome btw), you will find yourself playing with a fairly unresponsive control scheme. I tried it for a while, then plugged in the gamepad for an hour. After trying the keyboard again, I can tell you that there is no other way to play the actual game, than with a gamepad of some sort. However, for navigation, while the gamepad can be used. I highly recommend using the keyboard for zooming and moving, or rotating when doing replay's. It will only be as smooth as your hand is steady when rotating the camera, but I personally like the mouse more. For those who are used to using a gamepad, experiences may vary.

Jumping in the game takes a little getting used to. It's not like SSX or other Winter Sports games where, you press jump and your character jumps. You actually hold the button down and then release it right as you near the end of the target jump spot. This leads you to need good FPS and low latency, so you can time it to get the best jump.

You also don't have to keep holding the forward button or left analog up when holding jump down. You can just hold jump and use left/right to steer. Sometimes if you hold the left analog forward when you jump, your character will auto-start to flip in an odd left/right/forward motion.

Air control is almost non-existent. It's not like Tony Hawk Pro Skater games, you can 'kind of add things' to the jump and air trick, but in the end, you are at the mercy of animation/game engine decisions on what you are trying to tell it to do. As an example, If you jump and press both Left and Right Analog sticks to the left quickly and just let the game do its thing, it will usually do a 360 and land you on your feet. If you release the jump and then press it again while doing left, you will do some sort of grab/tuck 360 as long as you hold the jump button down. If you let go of the jump button (even though you are not holding the analog sticks anymore), you will continue to turn but no longer be grab/tucking. This can lead to a reduction in points scored for tricks.

Leveling


I tried to look up how to level in this game. I had assumed it was mission based for sure, but they touted the game as looking like a free roaming game. So I had just assumed that you can pick a drop point, then go roam the mountain side, doing sick tricks and such... Then you get XP. You cannot.

The only way that you can gain XP for your player apart from the Hill Story missions and events, is to do what I will talk about shortly, and that is Custom Content.

As far as interactions with the game, I will relate the gamepad vs. mouse. If you are trying to see if there is a challenge event somewhere on the map, and it is near a drop zone you can run into a problem. Unless you are super accurate with zooming in with the gamepad, you will auto target the drop zone 99% of the time, and you will have to zoom in close enough for the drop zone marker to separate itself a fair distance from the event, or it will snap back to the drop zone location.

With the mouse, it is far faster / more accurate to do this since you can just use the scroll wheel while holding the right mouse button down to rotate and WASD to position the map. I find turning the map so that he Drop Zone is on the left, and the Event is on the right separates them enough to do it fairly quickly without wasting your time. Just make them horizontally even as close as possible.

Events and Interactions


When I wanted to learn about how missions worked, I thought about it myself. And I was not far off. You basically pick a drop point (as in the videos from E3) and you can attempt a run at an event, or go off on your own at that point. Whatever you want to do, you can do it, you just may not get XP for it if you don't a) Complete the mission successfully or b) create your own custom event when you go off the rails for that sick jump.

There are Mountain Story missions, where a particular mountain range might have a series of locations you have to discover. At each discovery point of the range, you see events that are opened for you to take on. All progress goes towards the global completion counter, and there is an individual mountain completion tracker.

I will say the next part as a "style of gameplay" since it is all on the same screen. As you play the game, your play style gives you XP in a certain areas such as Freerider or Extreme riding. They unlock by performing feats within the world during events or challenges that relate to the particular style.

Custom Content

This was the part that intrigued me the most when watching the E3 Demos. Lets say you pick a drop zone at the top of a long mountain ridge. You go from the start to stopping just at the end of the drop off. You can then look at your mountain view, and then select the starting point of the run and choose "Actions" from the menu option (X on Gamepad or Right Click with Mouse).

When this is done, you can make it a certain number of challenges by you, for anyone else in the game. While it is interesting, you have to remember that it will pick the end of the challenge, as the end point of your run (when you stopped your character completely). I wish you could pick a start/end point manually, but you can't, so best to remember this so you can stop your character and make your map before continuing.

On the plus sign, when you do a sick jump/line through the side of a mountain, you can stop your character, select the start point and make a challenge in whatever style you want. Then you can "start over" and redo it to give it a shot, while having your original done. You can even sit there trying to beat it and it will go on the records for top scores.

Social Interaction In-Game

This is quite possibly one of the more annoying features of the game.

First of all, if you are a loner like me, you don't have many friends. And if you play a Ubisoft game, you probably don't have many friends on Uplay (But that's for another discussion).

So lets just ignore that part, and go onto in-game friends or in-game grouping.

First lets discuss the regions of the map/world. There are the big mountain ranges yes, but inside of the on-the-map visible barriers between the zones, there are invisible server load dividers. I am not sure how it works, but I noticed around 4,000Km away, it gets iffy on whether or not you will see the person anymore. I haven't seen a person in a group with me go that far out yet, so I don't know if it auto-removes you (I will have to test it out).

I regularly see people just randomly disappear. I assume they select new drop zones, or logout. Sometimes they just appear near my challenge and that's awesome. When they are near you their name has an (x) beside it. Pressing the X button you can auto-invite them to group. I did this immediately. Then I waited... and waited...

I thought maybe, he hated me already for making such an impossible challenge. But alas, when I was sent an invite randomly, I figured out why.

You have no way to accept invites.

I repeat, you cannot accept an invite in-game that a player sends you in this manner.

The only way I have found, is to locate them on your screen and press X on the gamepad. Downside to this, if that person is with 1 or two other people, and they are not closest to you (or perhaps some other random way it selects who to target), you will only get the invite option for the selected person. Once you send the invite, it forms the group I guess, as that is the only way I have gotten it to work.

When you send the invite, it does not show up in your "Social Tab" Which on the stats picture in the leveling section, is the second option on the left (bottom of the screen). Pressing Esc will bring up the menu (Or Start on the Gamepad), and you can switch to it for group options. These options include, downloading the persons shared run, saved run, leaving group yourself, and such things. I have not seen a "Add to friends list" option, so it seems you have to add it with the Uplay client itself.

It was sludgy at best, and I hope they improve it for the sake of random group generations and competitions while playing the game.

--- So that is after day one, and everything that I can think of putting in here for now. I will update it after the end of the Beta. We have this one as invite only that runs to the 14th I believe. The next one is open to everyone and is the following week. Game comes out December 2nd, so hopefully they fix this stuff in two weeks (ya right). Until then, if you have questions about the game, any functions, let me know and I'll see what happens and/or how it works in the game

*Update* Day 2:

Cost vs. Fun Factor And More!

So today I was spending a lot of time trying to find groups of people. At this point I am unsure whether or not it's the difficulty of finding people, or if its the confusing group making system (no accept invite option) that is preventing me from finding groups. Most people appear to be afk sitting in front of a Snow Park jump race. However, I managed to get into a couple of them.

A really REALLY *and I mean seriously f'ing hilarious* thing is that when you join a group, if you do not have your microphone muted, it is always ON!

So you invite people, and most probably won't realize it. Last night I was in the group with someone who met me on the side of a mountain, we parachuted around for a bit, all the time a baby crying in the background and he was talking to someone in the background.

Then there was someone named nokid5 who was a pure and simple mouth-breather. Was quite funny. I kept talking to them and I don't think they thought I was talking to them... I don't know, maybe it's not working for me... *unsure* I have never had an actual conversation over mic with anyone.

There also is no chat system on PC. Console I can see why, but they should totally patch in a console chat for PC users. We have a keyboard.

I will continue my search to find out 100% how the shared maps work. Right now the current theory is this:

1. Create a run
2. Share it
3. Invite players near you
4. They download your shares from the social menu

I am unable to 100% confirm that shared lines/runs on the map are GLOBAL. Meaning, anyone can see them at an time. Unless no one is making runs, I cannot see anyone else's anywhere on the map.

The other possibility, is that you have to be 'in the area' or within the same server zone for that particular area of the map. Otherwise it won't load the data about custom areas. This option would suck completely. We have smart phones. We can get twitter on the top of a mountain. I am pretty sure that you can get alerts to new runs in some custom App the Ski Hills have created for their customers.

The game itself is rather fun for a casual game. I don't see it becoming an eSport any time soon, though I wouldn't be surprised to see small tournaments set-up.

You could do something like this:

• Organizer has setup a tournament of 9 players, 3 teams of 3 player.
• Organizer has all player line up in a row before the starting area for invites. (There is now the organizer + 3 players in a group).
• The players take turns on command through organizer doing a run with no restarts. They get 3 chances to get the highest Score.
• All players drop group, and organizer repeats for other two teams.
• The two highest scores are added up for the team, and the leader wins. In the case of a tie, the two highest score players have 3 runs to beat each other for tie breaker.

But anyways, as far as cost for the fun factor, I would take a few things into consideration. On launch, there are a lot of problems with it (not like No Man's Sky level but...) however, the main foundation of the game is there. So you probably have a good solid month of grinding missions and attempting the bronze/silver/gold placements for the outfit unlocks. After that point, they better have something cool in, or some fixes with tournaments or something of the sorts. Right now, I would personally wait for it to go on sale, but when you look at the fact there is no micro-transactions, then it's kind of not too bad of a deal. Still a bit on the high side, but if they don't charge for extra content like tournament systems etc, then it may be worth the $60 outright in the beginning. In the end it's up to your wallet.

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Update 3: Ending of Day 3

I think I am done. I can't find any more areas to scout out, nor any more mountain story lines in the beta as it stands.

I think I have found all of the points, and it would just be a matter of getting gold in the 40 odd runs I managed to get Bronze and Silver in. So I post my stats page here for Day 3 finale.



So right now, it is already getting kind of boring. I managed to get into a few groups, but no one talks, there's no in-game chat so it's kind of pointless if no one turns their mic on or adjusts the volume settings to make it work.

You have to have it set to 200% just to make it work properly (I hope they fix this).

We will see how it goes in the next open beta testing. I will leave it installed, log in to see if it's wiped or not. Hopefully they open the other mountains (or a few more anyway), would love to try the mountain story for the White Yeti costume. Have the Pink Yeti costume already.

o/

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Final Day November 20th, 2016

I don't think I will have time on Monday to play much at all, so I thought that I would post how far I got in the last day.



On top of this, I did find something interesting. There is a line in the game where all you have to do a massive XP trick in one jump. Cool thing is, you are all but guaranteed 2000xp by doing one thing the whole way down so long as you launch off in the correct spot/angle to not hit the rocks.

This awards you XP every time you land, even if you don't beat the Gold Medal amount.

So on launch, this is the one that I will be farming for XP over and over and over. At Level 8 you need 4500xp to level up. Don't know what the next one is, but The runs are super fast and easy to do.

Should be a good time on launch