Of course we were all hoping for #skate4 but seeing what seems like Skate. fans’ only hope of a new skateboarding game on one of the biggest stages at E3 was pretty cool. I haven’t followed the kickstarter too closely so if anyone has any info on how the project is developing feel free to share!
I thought the trailer looked promising. I really dug the handheld camera aesthetic; it looks like the videos my friends and I made as teens skating around the city (only we weren’t frontside flipping over giant hubbas and stuff). The animations look okay, some of the transitions between grinds and flip tricks looked like they don’t quite blend together smoothly but I’m okay with that since I assume they don’t have access to MoCap and all that fancy stuff.
The thing I’m most worried about are the controls. I played a tech demo that they put out a while ago (maybe 1.5 years ago?) and couldn’t wrap my head around them. It seemed like they took the Skate. controls and made them more complicated/unwieldy. Again, if any kickstarter backers can shed more light on the current state of the game that would be much appreciated.
But overall I think the game has a great look and from what I’ve read the team is passionate and their vision of skateboarding aligns with mine. Now that it has gotten more exposure on a big stage I look forward to seeing how the project progresses.
Of course I would have loved a Skate 4, but the trailer for Session looks pretty cool, and I think theirtake on controls is interesting. A bit disappointed it’s only Xbox One and PC though (although they did say on their Kickstarter page that they’re not against additional consoles in the future).
I’m looking forward to it - Tony Hawk was always such a thing when I was younger, and Skate helped scratch that itch, like Steep managed to reduce the swelling SSX left behind… okay, metaphor taken too far.
I have watched a few videos of the Sessions demo builds they’ve sent out to backers and outside of the jankiness it seems like everything I loved about the Skate games. Fuck the scores, fuck the competitions, just roll around and take pics/videos of dope spots and tricks.
Skate 3 was an incredibly meditative game for me, in that it allowed you to get completely invested the simplest fucking lines and tricks but you could still get that endorphine rush from nailing it just right. Session seems to scratch that exact same itch.
I’m a bit scared that it’ll be a bit too buggy, but that’s all based on their demo builds which obviously shouldn’t reflect too much on the finished product.
Put it this way. I am thinking very hard about picking up a second hand Xbox One and that’s something I never would’ve thought to do before.
I played about five or six hours of their Kickstarter demo a few months ago and loved the concept, but while KS demos are supposed to be taken with a grain of salt, some of the execution, especially with regards to how it controls feels very frustrating. The two sticks being mapped to the feet (So one flicks to do the Ollie while another to influence the spin of the board) I really enjoyed but pivots was where Session lost me.
Turning with triggers is really unintuitive, and a lot of grinds (Which are essential to lines I’m creating) require you to ollie at a very, very precise time and angle, otherwise you get that janky ragdoll and have to reset. It’s easy to try and justify that this is the game being realistic with the left and right triggers representing the weight you put on each side of the trucks, but it is just not fun and I didn’t feel like I was learning anything to correct what I was doing wrong.
I think at this point I hope the team provides more options with control and difficulty with the final game because I love a lot of what Session wants to do, but how it actually does it falls a bit flat, and there has not been a good 3D skateboarding game since Skate 3 and we could do with a good skateboarding game.
Really excited for Session. Skating games are really relaxing for me and I would love a new one in the vein of Skate, so unless the developers Milkshake Duck us I’m pretty much 100% in.
Yeah, Skate was great because it moved out of the Tony Hawk realm of spamming the ollie button, but I haven’t seen anybody recommend the controls for Session so far at all.
There’s a set of people that dig it and pull off some impressive lines, but were a little dismissive when a few people on Reddit said that it’s not fun to use. The defense was always that it’s realistic, which again, sure, but realism doesn’t equal fun in games most of the time.
At this point I’m just hoping that Crea-ture either provides an option for windows during grinds to be more forgiving (The timing windows felt very inconsistent, but again, early in development) or there’s a separate control scheme that lets you use LS to turn, but disables it when you get set to do ollies and have to use the foot to pull off tricks. They have a golden opportunity to turn out a good skateboarding game on consoles a lot of people have been looking for after the last one (Pro Skater 5) ended in disaster.