A new beta update is available now for Skate XL, bringing in quite a few community requested features. The addition of powerslide and revert mechanics open a new layer of style and expression to gameplay, in addition to allowing players to better control speed. New mocaped animations, remastered sound effects, the addition of replay clip length editing and camera speed refinement, and numerous gameplay improvements and bug fixes round out this massive update.
Read some of the details below, but check out the official Steam page for more.
Powerslides
- These allow you to control speed as well as create new combinations and add style to your tricks like never before. Powerslides have been implemented in a way that maximizes responsiveness and control to the player, with the possibilities being limited only by your level of skill and creativity.
- To utilize powerslides: push either both sticks towards each other or both away from each other and hold it. Letting go will realign you with the direction you are going. If you let go of a powerslide and the board is rotated more than halfway you will revert to the opposite stance.
- You can also do powerslides on the nose and tail by pushing more up or down on the sticks when powersliding, and like in everything else, you can rotate the entire skater with the triggers during powerslides.
Reverts
- You can now add reverts during manuals, land tricks and revert them around, do two-wheel powerslides and create combinations that have never before been possible.
- Manuals reverting into fakie manuals and other manual / revert combinations are possible with some practice and a lot of precision.
- To execute reverts: Use the same above instructions to trigger a powerslide, just make sure the board is more than halfway rotated and quickly let go.
New Animations
- Completely new character animations are now included and bring new life to the gameplay, making everything look and feel much more fluid and natural. The process has included several motion capture sessions with pro skaters Walker Ryan and Alexis Ramirez, along with many hours spent hand-animating movements to mirror real skateboarding.
- A big challenge along the way has been the fact that Skater XL is the first ever skateboarding game to be entirely physics-based. The player is in control of the board at all times and can spin, flip and tweak tricks any way they like, so unlike with skateboarding games of the past, there is no single ‘canned’ character animation that could represent a given trick.
- The team had to develop a novel real-time animation system which can move and respond to player input moment-to-moment. This involved hand cleaning, slicing and editing countless fragments of mocap animation to specific requirements which are then stitched, blended and spliced together by the animation system in real-time, to respond instantly to player input and give the character realistic looking movement. The outcome of this system is a much more polished and realistic representation of skateboarding movement.
Other New Features
- The team has also remastered and updated sound effects to the game to reflect rolling and grinding on different surfaces, executing powerslides, character foley, body impacts with the ground, and more.
- The speeds with which the replay camera moves and rotates have been adjusted to more convenient speeds.
- You can now trim the length of the replays with the left bumper plus left / right trigger to trim the beginning / end of the clip.
- You can now slide up a rail until stopping and then gravity will make you slide back down again without bailing. All grindables will now have some level of friction. Grindables in mod levels which have not been assigned a specific value by the artist will be assigned a default value adding realistic friction to all previous mod maps.
There are plenty of other details in the patch that can be read on the official Steam page, including how to access the Skater XL beta. The game is available via Steam Early Access and is currently on sale for $15.99, through February 10.
