When Skate It drops to early access on September 16, it will not look like previous games in the iconic EA skateboard series. He returns as a free live service set in a squeaking open world. At first glance, it may look completely different, but you will probably feel as if you came back at the end of 2000 after raising the controller. This is because Skate resurrect the heart of the series: Flick-Im.
Instead of copying Tony Hawk’s notes, he included playing tricks in a unique control scheme, moving the appropriate joystick in different directions. It was as if you were drawing tricks. This created a more fluid skating system that distinguishes ice skates from peers. By creating a modern game from the series, senior imaginative director Deran Chung knew that Flick-Im had to come back. There was only one problem: it would be a huge pain in the asshole to break away.
“The old skate engine was crazy. There was Frankenstein of all these crazy things. There was no way to resurrect,” Chung said in a video interview SkateIssue.
For the first time, some of these tricks were made at our stages of Mocap.
It’s a bit surprising, because the system itself seems so intuitive on the part of the player. The attractive skate series is that you don’t really have to think about it. There are no long buttons to learn. You just have to quit the stick and there will be some magic. When Chung now talks about the system, he makes it from an intellectual point of view, telling me how it outlines the itching of self -determination theory. But at that time the band just sailed with the flow.
“We weren’t so academic!” Chung said. “It was more similar, we are skateboarding and it is suitable for us. I do not think that people would make an analogue to skateboard and self -determination at that time. If they had, I was known to us.
As natural as the mechanic for the team, he presented project challenges that were contrary to all reasonable skating instincts. According to Chung, the system has more or less invented new tricks in which skaters brought to help in the ban on the movement of stunning.
“For the first time, some of these tricks were made at our stages of the mock,” said Chung. “Nobody has ever done Ollie 360 Inner heel or Ollie 360 Hard Flip. Why should someone do this? It makes no sense, right? But as we were wondering: this is a circle, and we have a tipper, and we have a heel flap, and we have 360 flip -flops and we have bulky flip flops. But whether we do it 360 years. The quadrant is Ollie 360 Hard Flip.
“We went to Mocap and we say:” So who can we ask to try these things? “And so we chose the best guys in the world, some of our professionals from previous games, and you said:” Have you ever wondered about trying Nollie 360 internal flip? ” And they are: “Old, what are you talking about?”
It is thanks to this anecdote that you can start seeing how complicated it would be to just move to a completely modern engine-and it would have to do the band if it had a completely modern part. The original skate trilogy was not built on the characteristic EA frostbite engine, which was first used to power Battlefield: Bad Company In 2008. The modern game would have to jump this gap in one way or another, requiring ground reconstruction.
This was the most significant for both Chung and the main technique of Jon Lawler, which were transferred to other teams in EA Skate 3Activation. While none of them had any direct plans to return to the series, wondering how they can revive Flick-it’s a bit of a sidebar. Because Lawler worked regularly in Frostbite, he began to try to compile Flick-Im and the senior code base again. Both Chung and Lawler over the years, waiting for the moment when it seemed that Frostbite could fully support Flick-Im.
This moment finally came when other key waves hit the shore. Fans began to ask for requests Skate 4 In the memie and skateboard, it became more and more popular thanks to social media and their inclusion in the Summer Olympic Games in 2020. Like the idea of a modern skate game, it has become an knowledgeable business for EA, it has become a real technical reality for Chung and Lawler.
But simply the recreation of a 15-year 1: 1 system was not enough. The team wanted to exploit the improvisation nature of the mechanics even more. To achieve this, the band gradually began to collect modern ideas around the senior code database. This unlocked the potential of techniques such as variable speed, which according to Chung, which he could never do before.
“We already had late flip -flops, late kickflips and late heels. Now we were basically late,” said Chung. “So you can Ollie in the air and make a overdue 360 flap. You can make a overdue internal flap or anything else, but you can also do a sluggish version of each of these things. You can do a sluggish version of each of these things.
It was not only Flick-IT that has been strengthened. Chung notes that the changes go hand in hand with a modern approach to animation. Previous games combined animations, which results in sequences of tricks that were cobbled from various sequences of grabbing. The modern game uses minimal mixing, using uninterrupted shots to capture more idiosyncratic nuances in tricks.
Physics also plays the main role in all this, because this system has noted its own reconstruction. Because many people who worked on the physics of original games, they still flowed around EA, Chung and Lawler were able to connect to them again and build their work to support even greater artificial potential.
“We have much better ways to predict what is now in front of a skater than ever,” said Chung. “So with a system like Walies, which is basically Ollie, in which you get into the object in front of you: we can predict that there is an object. Instead of forcing the character to Ollie and over it unnaturally or forcing the impact in which you are too late, you are now able to get off it.”
This level of depth explains how Full Circle is able to add more tricks to play after launching. Both Darkslides and impossible to skate in later seasons, which Chung excited the modern live game. Some games add modern cosmetics and events in seasonal updates; Flick-IT is theoretically forceful enough to add completely modern tricks.
Of course, most free players probably do not receive these technical nuances. This is a gift and curse Flick-IT: it’s natural to such an extent that you don’t really think about it. Everything that will ultimately matter for long -time fans is whether it seems right. (And is based on our initiative impressions.) It may sound straight, but nails are the hell of the battle.
