Steep allows you to progress, even if you keep crashing into trees

We all have games that we love even despite ourselves. One of those games for me was SSX. I can’t ski or snowboard at all in real life, but I absolutely adored playing SSX Tricky, sending my character down precarious slopes and pulling off insane tricks. I wasn’t always great at it, though, often doing things to my avatar that would leave a human body horribly mangled on the mountain side. While not ideal, it’s known to happen in extreme sports games, and Ubisoft has actually factored that into the leveling system in Steep.

In Ubisoft’s action sport game, there are four announced play styles that can feed into your progression. They are explained so nicely on the UbiBlog:

Explorer
To progress along the Explorer path, you’ll need to discover new challenges and points of interest. When you begin Steep, you’ll have access to a handful of base camps that give you quick access to different parts of the mountain, and which are associated with different play styles. From there, you can discover new drop zones, which are attached to challenges and other points of interest.

Freestyler
This one’s the most straightforward. No matter where you are in the game world or what you’re doing, every trick you successfully land feeds into your Freestyler score. Were you able to execute a triple somersault off a cliff and land upright? Your score just went up a bit.

Bone Collector
Do you love putting yourself into mortal danger? Is your favorite snowboard trick the 360 Headfirst Crash Into Snowbank? Then you can expect to go far with the Bone Collector style, which rewards you for pulling off crazy stunts and, yes, crashing into things.

Freerider
Freerider may be the most complex of the play styles, because it takes the most into account. Focusing on the overall quality of your line, it pays attention to your use of the environment, keeping track of whether you use cool environmental features – cliffs, ridges, and so on – to your full advantage to pull off tricks or near-misses.

I really like this approach. It caters to a range of play styles. So if all you want to do is wander around the mountain, exploring and doing tricks as you go, you’ll still level up. And, if you’re like me and want to do loads of tricks but often end up face planting instead, you can still level up, just differently. Now to just find out what those progression systems actually do…

Last Updated: June 23, 2016