Riders Republic is a bike racing game. It's also a snowboard racing game and a ski racing game. Oh, and all those other sports? It's a trick battle game for the lot of them too. You can also fly above the clouds via jetpack, because why not? Riders is a lot of games in one, basically - after playing the beta, we sat down with Ubisoft content director Thomas Geoffroyd to ask how the team manages to balance so many ideas in one.
"We wanted to make different outdoor sports in the same world," Geoffroyd tells me. "For us, it was a great proposition for the players to be outside and do so many different sports. However, it introduced some complexity, because we need to have consistency - camera controls, level design, challenges, progression, and difficulty. That's a whole lot to do. So we had some different cells and different people working on different sports. We have five different careers, and we have dedicated people working on these and focusing each on consistencies, just to make sure that we can maintain the consistent experience throughout the sports."
Riders Republic isn't just a bunch of games in one, however - it's also an open-world game. While that's typically Ubisoft's bread and butter, Geoffroyd says there was no requirement to make it open world, but that the decision was instead born out of the game's heart - the great outdoors.
"We wanted to make an open world not because we needed an open world, but we wanted players to experience the great outdoors," Geoffroyd says. "Obviously, it's something really hard to do in a very narrow and level-designed kind of experience. So we immediately focused on those national parks and trying to provide a sports experience at a scale that has never been experienced before. The biggest challenge is how do we make a world that is sometimes fun, but sometimes boring in terms of gameplay and usability, and something that's consistent along the line? So we took the real metrics of the national parks that have been used in the games and tried to find the fun, and tweak some parameters of the world to make sure that anywhere you are, you can still get some fun. We have high fun density areas in the game, and others that are a little less exciting, but that's more opportunity for us in the future to keep on building and playing those metrics of fun and activities throughout the world.”
As for why the game puts so much stock in the appeal of the great outdoors, that's very straightforward for Geoffroyd. "I'm a huge outdoor fan myself," he says. "And I've never experienced the outdoors as well as when I'm with my friends. We live in a very hectic world, we're used to a lot of stimulus and nature sometimes is not going at the same pace. The idea for us was really to try and mix those so you can have fun, exciting moments experienced in the great outdoors with your friends. To us, experiencing the outdoors with your friends is basically the best way to do it."
As I note in my preview, the game clearly puts a lot of stock in the natural world as a selling point - arguably more than it does the actual sports themselves. I'm not sure how well that dedication to its vision will translate into sales, but it's certainly admirable to see a game know itself so well.
It's no surprise then that Geoffroyd sees the game as being inspired by 'shapers' - the people who build the tracks for snowboarders in real life. They're there to direct the 'boarders, and Riders Republic is essentially trying to do the same for players.
"The shapers are the ones digging and building the tracks for snowboards, and the jumps and the trucks for the bike rides," Geoffroyd says. "Those people are usually in the shadows doing the heavy lifting. This has been our inspiration. We considered ourselves shapers of our own world. So the idea was take a shovel, we have this world shaped up. We want to make some amazing tracks, so it was the same idea of 'Let's keep in the shadows, get the shovel, and make sure we can craft the best tracks we can for players'."
With such a focus on the outdoors, you might think that the pandemic played some part in the vision for Riders Republic. After all, the game is all about embracing nature, and that's something that hasn't really been possible for the past couple of years. While not specifically involved in the genesis of the game, the pandemic has proved to be something of a motivation for the team.
"Development of the game started well before the confinements and the difficulty we see these days," Geoffroyd says. "It's not stemming from this situation. However, we have to admit that in the past 18 months, we've all been suffering from what is happening in our world, and it became another level of motivation for us. We started to understand what we were trying to craft since the beginning, and it was another answer to this isolation we were living day in, day out. So I think what happened with COVID was it strengthened our ambition and our dedication to creating a social, fun, welcoming space for anyone to come in and just spend some time and be together."