Five Ways SSX Reinvents Itself

The latest entry in EA's snowboarding popular snowboarding series is available on February 28. We've compiled a small list of features to help get you caught up on just how different this SSX is from its predecessors.

RiderNet

As we've seen with Autolog and Battlelog before it, RiderNet is your way of connecting with friends, racing against them, and posting scores. It lets you go all out to prove that you're the best SSX player around. RiderNet will appeal to you in the number of ways you can compete against friends and earn rewards. The longer you are better than your friends, the more rewards you get. You don't even have to be playing, and if your friends can't beat your score, you still earn credits.

RiderNet will give you the option of selecting which of your friends to focus on and letting you race only in the races where they have better scores than you. On top of that, with recommendations, you'll get around a dozen course suggestions, so picking the next challenge to beat will never require you to do a lot of searching.

And just like Autolog, RiderNet will have an app that lets you not only track your friends' progress on the various courses, but also send them messages outside of the game to really rub in your greatness over them. Who doesn't love to intimidate while stuck in a boring meeting or on the bus?

Global Events

On top of racing and challenging friends, being able to compete in global events against hundreds of thousands of players around the world for snow supremacy should be quite a treat. In these events, you can go after the highest score on a particular peak, and if you think you can do better, you can try it as many times as you want before the event ends. Online is the focus in SSX, and the better you are, the more rewarding being that awesome is. Rewards for global events will be based on percentages. The top score, along with those within 3 percent of it, will get diamond status. But even if you're not good enough to diamond an event, you can settle for platinum, gold, silver, or bronze. The rewards will work dynamically based on the number of people who take part. You'll want a lot of people taking part, so when you win it, you have even more reason to gloat.

Deadly Descents

Want to experience the thrill of a squirrel suit? Perhaps you enjoy racing through areas filled with fallen trees and other debris. Well, the Survive It courses in SSX will have you riding through some extremely dangerous locations in the hopes of lasting as long as possible. A cool aspect of these courses is that even after you successfully reach the bottom, you get right back in the chopper, return to the peak of the mountain, and do it over again. Surviving a descent down a mountain once is nice, but doing it three times is super rewarding.

GeoTags

Apparently geocaching is a popular thing, and SSX will have its own version of it online. You can buy and place geotags on courses and have your friends try to collect them. The rewards work the same way as being the best on a course; the longer your geotag is in a spot without someone collecting it, the more you earn. It's up to you where you place them on a given mountain, so picking a spot you think others won't be able to get to will be a game in itself.

Customization

Customization isn't new to the SSX series, but customization goes further thanks to the number of race types, specifically the different Deadly Descents courses that you'll encounter. Character progression goes up to level 10, so you'll want to unlock the coolest gear to be successful down a mountain. You can unlock and purchase different snowsuits and boards, and items like armor, oxygen tanks, geotags, and other treats will help separate you from your competition. Leveling up a character won't take long, especially if you're a seasoned SSX player, so the only thing separating you from getting the coolest gear is the amount of free time you have available.