"First of its kind" online for Shaun White

By Johnny Minkley Published 18 July, 2008

Ubi hypes multiplayer antics on the slopes.

Ubisoft's first serious crack at extreme sports will boast online play that's "the first of its kind as far as snowboarding games go" - that's according to Shaun White Snowboarding art director Scott Mitchell, who's been bigging up his title to Eurogamer.

Built on the Assassin's Creed engine, Shaun White promises to deliver mountain environments of unprecedented scale, where everywhere you can see, you can ride. But faced with the challenge of usurping genre heavyweights like SSX, Amped and 1080, Ubi reckons online multiplayer is the ace up its thermal sleeve.

"There's never been massive online multiplayer like this in a snowboarding game before," Mitchell told us. When hooked up to an Internet connection, the game world will be permanently populated by real human player, whether you're playing in single- or multiplayer.

"We really wanted to get across the idea of the community as it's really important in snowboarding," he added. "Everybody snowboards with their crew; you'll have a group of friends that you always go out with. It's essentially a large lobby, being able to bring all of your friends where you are, participate in a competition, film one another going down the hill and upload the videos to the website. It's important to have it seamless."

Sadly, we didn't get to see this feature in action during our recent trip to Ubisoft Montreal. We did, however, get to play the game on both 360 and Wii, which you can read all about on Eurogamer today.

Shaun White Snowboarding is due out on 360, PS3, PC and Wii this Christmas.

Picture of Johnny.

About Johnny Minkley

Eurogamer TV's Johnny Minkley is a veteran journalist with a lifelong passion for games and the games industry. He uses Twitter more than most people use air.

Read more articles from Johnny by visiting the Johnny Minkley archive page.

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Comments (9) Latest comment 4 years ago

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  • mazzl #1 4 years ago

    so other single player, players populate you're game :o)
    that sounds realy nice

  • kangarootoo #2 4 years ago

    Sounds promising, but all snowboarding games line or die by their control system (in my book anyway) so if that isn't nailed, nothing else matters. Hopefully it will be ace, as there is a real hole in the market for a decent snowboarding game right now.

  • MrXBob #3 4 years ago

    This is exactly what I was hoping Amped 2 was going to have back when Live was still in its relative infancy.

    I wish Amped 3 had done it, because I'm not buying this Shaun White game. Everything I've seen of it looks ugly, clunky and extremely empty and dull in comparison to Amped.

  • Doctor_What #4 4 years ago

    I'm interested, but I suspect that's mostly because I still haven't heard current-gen SSX news yet. Still, I'm definitely keeping an open mind about this one. If the controls feel nice then they could really be onto something.

  • Eraysor #5 4 years ago

    All I want to know is where the hell is SSX4?

  • agparrot #6 4 years ago

    It will of course depend what it plays like, but the idea of hanging out on the slopes with buddies, and them being populated with real other boarders sounds pretty interesting - SSX3's lush mountain would have seemed that little bit more authentic with other dudes and dudetess chilling out around the place.

    Gnarly.

  • NBAoz #7 4 years ago

    @kangarootoo

    Totally agree with you. I loved the control system/gameplay in Amped 2 which they improved over Amped by adding style, so it didn't matter how many rotations you did, but rewarded you for managing to slowly fit in 1 or 2 spins in one fluid motion which forced you to try and judge the speed of the rotation to fit it in before you hit the ground. If you managed to have the spin end just before you landed with no deviation in rotational speed you would get a "Stomped it!" visual appear on the screen which meant you earned mega points for the trick you just landed :-) Amped and Amped 2 were not easy, but they were so rewarding once you mastered them. They totally stuffed this up in Amped 3 though by making it far too easy and lenient with landings making it almost impossible to stack... :-(

    I'm very glad that this game wasn't canceled though as I hadn't heard anything about it in ages and there is a real hole in the market as you pointed out for a snowboarding game. I sure hope this is the snowboarding genres equivalent of EA's "skate".

  • RedSparrows #8 4 years ago

    I want SSX Tricky 2....too. Tricky on my GC was played to death. Maxing out scores on each run was joy. I got some insane score on the first course, it took me ages to master but in the end I just hit everything right. It was fun.

    Larger open world might be cool (I liked Amped 3, which had that sort of, + the style was brilliant), but I also like rigidly defined and crafted gameworlds, if they're good. OW does not necessarily = genius.

  • secondxbox #9 4 years ago

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