There have been a lot of moments when OlliOlli World has made me want to throw a controller across the room, but none quite so much as the time I had to race a lazy cartoon bear down a river. You barrel down a forested hill decked out with skatepark accouterments, while the bear floats idly on some speedy downhill rapids in a relaxing inner tube. First one to the bottom wins. There is no indication that the bear is aware a race is taking place.
After at least an hour of attempts on the approximately two-minute level, I completed it, besting the bear without smashing into any rocks or sailing off a ledge and into the water below. My reward was a random cosmetic item and a checkmark on OlliOlli World’s rundown of the biome’s challenges–as well as, I like to think, a little extra button-smashing mastery of the game’s mechanics.
What’s important to understand about the bear race, however, is that I didn’t need to complete it. This was a side level, off the critical path, that offered a heightened degree of intensity and a greater challenge. I beat my head against it for an hour for, more or less, no reason–except that it existed and I wanted to beat it.
That’s a balance OlliOlli World developer Roll7 has worked hard to maintain, and this became very apparent in my latest hands-on preview of the game, in which I played through three of the game’s five biomes and tried out its asynchronous online multiplayer features. OlliOlli World is definitely the most approachable game in the side-scrolling skateboarding series; while it maintains the games’ mechanics, like executing tricks with intricate flicks of the analog stick and landing them with a button press timed with your impact, it loosens the requirements to stay on your board. But while OlliOlli World is, on the whole, a little easier to play than its predecessors, it still needed to maintain the hardcore difficulty that endeared the series to its most diehard fans.
“One of our goals in going into OlliOlli World was, mostly, we’d like more people to finish it or to be able to get through the whole game,” said creative director John Ribbins in an interview with GameSpot. “Probably the biggest design philosophy was to make a more welcoming OlliOlli.”
Part of that approach was to make the mechanics a little less punishing than they’d been in past games, Ribbins said, but another part was building the game so that players could chase tougher challenges, but weren’t forced to face them if they didn’t want to.
“With the first two games, we wanted to create this experience that lent itself to skateboarding, in terms of, [skateboarding] is quite difficult,” Roll7 co-studio head Tom Hagerty explained. “The first two games were very hardcore and there was a skill wall. We essentially got to the point with the player where we said, ‘Right, unless you can master, X, Y, and Z, then you can’t play this game anymore.’ I think at the time, we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re being indie and making something really difficult.’
“On reflection, it was actually quite sad because we had a lot of people that would come to us and say, ‘I got to a certain point and I couldn’t move on,'” he said. “Obviously on the flip side, we had people like, ‘I completed the game, 100% of it, got the trophies, it’s amazing.’ We were kind of at this crossroads of sort of, which path do we go down? Because we want to make it more welcoming, but also, we have this incredible, enthusiastic fan base that we also want to create something for.”
The result in OlliOlli World sees Roll7 essentially upping the game’s complexity by a huge factor in order to accommodate both kinds of players. Most of the 2.5D levels have multiple paths, with “Gnarly” routes accessible by hitting the right grinding rail or slipping into a different lane in the background for extra challenge–and a higher score. The game brims with options that allow you to challenge yourself, from high-difficulty tricks and methods of racking up massive multipliers (at the risk of losing it all if you fall), to side quests and secret levels.
“I think it’s really interesting, your example around the bear race. That’s not a critical path. That is a side quest,” Hagerty said after I mentioned my particular obsession with defeating my aquatic ursine nemesis. “Hopefully you were doing that because you wanted to do it, whereas in the previous games, that was probably level seven, and if you wanted to play level eight, you had to beat it. We’ve been able to provide the more difficult areas where there’s a high skill ceiling for mastery.”
Making OlliOlli more welcoming paired perfectly with a breakthrough Roll7 had when it was still prototyping OlliOlli World, said co-studio head Simon Bennett. While the developers were working on another take on the OlliOlli core–the sort of “flow state” feeling on a side-scrolling, fast level–they created a skate park prototype that was more akin to competitions one might see in the Olympics or the X-Games, with skaters going back and forth over an area.
The idea of going from right to left, Bennett and Ribbins joked, was groundbreaking for a team that had made two whole skateboarding games about going from left to right across courses. But seeing the possibilities of doubling back over a course, or changing lanes to find new routes through the background, shook up Roll7’s thinking about what the game could be.
“We’d already decided it was going to be called OlliOlli World, but this is really what made OlliOlli World a world,” Bennett said.
Adding those extra paths started as a means to create something new, but Hagerty said the team soon discovered that expanding OlliOlli World’s levels played into the idea of making a more welcoming game. The extra routes gave developers the opportunity to make some paths more difficult than others, which meant that players could run the ones that worked for them.
Creating new paths also allowed the team to offer new experiences and challenges in the game that hadn’t been part of the conversation earlier in the series. Tricks and high scores are integral to the OlliOlli formula, but in OlliOlli World, exploration is also an essential part of the game, as well as a new way for players to push themselves that’s a little different from the mechanical mastery the series has relied on in the past.
“There are definitely levels in the later game where there are routes you can take and places you can go that are going to take you a long time and a lot of practice and planning to figure out,” Ribbins said. “You could get lost in it. ‘How do I get over there?’ Figuring that out is a new kind of hardcore challenge that we have in this that I don’t think we had in OlliOlli 1.”
An essential part of infusing the game with exploration is making tracks that are visually engaging and worth exploring, and finding a new art style for OlliOlli World was an element Roll7 was thinking about from the game’s inception, Ribbins said. Early on, the developers knew they wanted a sort of illustrated look for OlliOlli World, but they said the actual art direction went through a lot of iterations.
Eventually, though, the team landed on a cartoonish, rounded style–one that matched the idea of a more welcoming skate experience, Ribbins said. The narrative of OlliOlli World also followed suit. The game is about players training to become the new “skate wizard” of OlliOlli World’s skateboarding-centric setting, Radlandia. The skate wizard’s job, more or less, is to maintain the balance of the skateboarding world: to encourage other skaters, to land cool tricks, and to vibe with the world through speed and motion.
Ribbins said the team felt like there were plenty of other games about the journey of going from amateur skater to pro, and it didn’t want to tell the same story. Instead, OlliOlli World’s narrative is not about attaining ludicrous high scores or racking up endorsements, but just about learning the game’s mechanic, doing rad stunts, and hanging out with the game’s enthusiastic characters. The developers wanted to tap into other elements of the skateboarding world, and the people it comprises, beyond just the quest to become a pro.
“That’s a big part of skateboarding culture, isn’t it?” Hagerty said. “Not the wizard stuff. The stuff about hanging out with your friends. It’s a load of people going down to the skate park.”
“Yeah,” Ribbins agreed. “And even the difference between what skateboarding was when we made OlliOlli 1 and 2 through to what skateboarding is now. When we made OlliOlli 1 and 2, women’s skateboarding was almost a novelty, whereas women’s skateboarding now at the Olympics is insane. Even just that element of it, it’s more gender diverse. I think Instagram has meant that there is a lot more visibility for a lot more different kinds of people who skateboard. There wasn’t really a platform for people who were 50 and skated curbs. Whereas, there are people who skate curbs with hundreds of thousands of followers now, and that still is inspiring and interesting. I think it’s opened up what skateboarding can be.
“That was something we wanted to represent in this as well–partly because we are getting closer and closer to being those 50-year-old men that skate curbs,” he continued, bringing up OlliOlli World’s side characters, skate wizard Chiffon, hype man Mike, and the safety-obsessed pal who drives everyone in his van and just goes by the nickname ‘Dad.’ “It’s just having a bit more breadth in who a skateboarder can be. Mike has a prosthetic leg. We’ve got Chiffon who’s been around since the ’70s. Dad still wears all the safety gear. There’s having that breadth of characters instead of just a whole bunch of people who are pro skaters. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a pro skater. That must be awesome getting paid to skateboard, but we’re just trying to show a bit more that there’s loads of different kinds of people that skate.”
It’s a fascinating combination that OlliOlli World creates, as Roll7 works to create somewhere to skate for all kinds of players through the game’s art style, its story, and its level design. At this point, I’ve spent hours with OlliOlli World for this preview, having ripped through three-fifths of the game and then returned to those early levels to explore every crevice and maximize my runs to beat my journalist rivals (something that’s essential before the wider world of players joins the game and blows out all our scores). The game is full of fun, chill routes to explore, while also providing no lack of opportunities to get caught up in mastery and competition.These include completing each level’s challenges, such as hitting specific score thresholds and finding different elements hiding in the background to interact with or do tricks over, as well as an asynchronous multiplayer element that finds you “rivals” with scores close to yours. These scores are tossed on-screen as you make your way through a run, providing you a target to try to defeat every time you get into a level.
You don’t have to get hardcore about OlliOlli World, but there are a whole lot of avenues to do so, from mastering every single type of trick in the game, to skating in an asynchronous multiplayer “league” that pits you and nine other players against each other on one procedurally generated course per day, with the goal of getting the highest score you can to beat everyone else. There’s also the Portal mode, where you can generate a new level based on some menu settings, including what biome you want to play, the length of the course you want, and how complex or difficult you want it to be. With the level generated, you can share it with other players using its “post code,” so you can all compete against one another.
In my time with OlliOlli World, I’ve been surprised at how well it all works; how the game can chill me out as I just mess around, exploring its levels and enjoying its art, and how deeply it can burrow into my head as I try to eek out a few more points and best one more rival. What’s cool about Roll7’s approach, in trying to balance catering to two kinds of players, is that it also allows you to be both kinds at once. OlliOlli World feeds both kinds of skaters in each of us–the one seeking the flow state of popping a few tricks and uncovering the secrets in each of the game’s expansive levels, and the one white-knuckling a controller until a cartoon bear on an inner tube understands the depths of its impending humiliation. It’s all about the balance between them.
Source: Gamespot
