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Wrekless is superpowered skateboarding for the social media generation
J
Jordan Oloman
An 11th-hour funding pull for a tech giant’s new gaming platform scuppered a second coming for Wrekless, but the opportunity to make it for a third time eventually reared its head. “By then, we had a pretty good idea of the things we wanted to do,” said Mike Uy, Creative Director at Free Range Games. “We had a lot of ideas about third-person platforming and third-person action in multiplayer, and we were like: well, we can do all those things in skating. It’s a medium, really, if anything.”
Far from your typical skateboarding game, Wrekless allows up to 50 players to shred together at once, laying down lines across a browsable universe of developer and player-built parks. “We haven't really made just a skateboarding game,” Uy said. “We've made an action-exploration-social game that at its heart is a platformer, which happens to primarily use skating for locomotion. So if you want to build a level that's just a platformer, and you're getting from one corner of the map to the other to do a bunch of stunts, you can do that. And you can call it a race or a scavenger hunt, and you can make it work either way.”
When Wrekless launches, there’ll be a spine of developer-built play-spaces that form a core progression path, as well as a glut of parks the developers have been making as users on the side. “Almost every famous skate park you can think of, any cool skate spot—just to make the point—like, you can rebuild everything from real life in here,” Uy said. “Or from other games, you know, you can recreate levels from your favorite skate games of the past. Do you want to skate this park from Holland, this park from China? It's probably in [the game] already, at least a version of it. You're not going to have to go buy that map.”
Of course, one of the most contentious issues in skateboarding games is the control scheme. With Wrekless, Free Range Games has taken a hybridized approach. You use the left stick to move, with the right stick acting as a flickable trick stick, which requires a certain level of intentionality. In this sense, Wrekless feels more like EA’s Skate games than Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but Uy stressed that the control scheme is forgiving, with an assist button available that can pull you towards a rail if you’re veering into a bail.
“You can do a hardflip right away—it’s just not easy,” Uy said. “Because it's social, I would rather it be as sticky as possible upfront, so if you see a thing, you can do it and ask the person how to do it, and they'll tell you how to do it, and hopefully you can figure out how to do it. And then all of the 'FOMO' that you have to grind for, it's really just prestige, right? How do I look? What kind of park can I build? How pretty is it?”
As a player, you earn progress by skating in a park or taking part in opt-in communal minigames. You can also advance by sharing completed lines for other players to try, enabled by a recording buffer that is always on, filming the last 20 seconds of your gameplay. But as a builder, you earn progression passively (like rent) when others play in your parks. This creates an incentive for the user-generated aspect of Wrekless, one where you’re rewarded for carving out your own architectural oeuvre. Players start out with a park the size of a city block and basic building materials like concrete, wood, and metal.
“You can make any kind of rail, twist it around like spaghetti and make it as long or windy however you want,” Uy notes. A putty system helps to connect your hare-brained creations, filling in the weird little gaps with virtual caulk. Free Range Games considered implementing 3D sculpting tools at one point during development.
“A lot of our artists and designers have laughed and said, ‘Are you just gonna rebuild an entire game engine inside your game?'” Uy said. “And I’m like, ‘if you give me enough time…’”
As players get deeper into the game, they’ll be able to create a park the size of 25 city blocks and implement quirkier tiles like lava, ice, and velocity-reflecting bounce pads. “They could make a pinball game with skaters as the ball… if they wanted to,” Uy adds. This anything-goes approach evokes comparisons to Trackmania, where user-generated content tools allow players to build obstacle courses and RPGs in a game that is centered around point-to-point racing. But unlike Trackmania, Wrekless features simultaneous real-time building, so friends can collaborate Minecraft-style on a massive compound, their very own skate heaven. Ostensibly, this also means they can grief each other if the desire arises by moving a ramp beneath a pal when they’re spinning in the air, or simply dropping a bus ahead of their line.
“When we got the builder up and running, everyone on the team started cranking out levels that no one had imagined,” Uy said. “And then we started skating them and seeing what the limits of the skating were, and then you just iterate on that because as the skating opens up, you can build different things, and as you build different things, you see more need for new things on the skating side.” This led to the implementation of activatable superpowers, like a friction-fighting speed boost and a jump boost that doubles as a glider on the way down, allowing players to string together impossible lines. Similar modifiers can also be placed in a park by its builder, with Uy mentioning boost pads as well as elevators, cannons, and portals that allow skaters to maintain their combo and momentum if operated correctly.
Enabling such chaotic interplay is one thing, but having 50 players engage with it in one park is ambitious from a networking perspective. Thankfully, Uy tells me, it's “so far, so good.” Crucially, Wrekless won’t feature player collision, so skaters can’t clatter into each other on the same rail and don’t have to wait their turn to attempt a line. And they’ll be distinguished, too, thanks to the game’s cel-shaded art style, exemplified in the reveal trailer, where skaters tote Kigurumi onesies and leave behind multicolored trails.
“We wanted to have a lower minimum spec, and that required us to keep things performant and not super high-poly realism,” Uy said. “We also wanted to emphasize that we're not making your standard beige-and-brown-and-shadows skate sim that’s trying to be like ‘we’re gritty and in the streets.’ That's great, and all, but being real, you know, that does primarily attract males from 13 to 30, and we wanted it to be for everyone: age, gender, whatever.” Regardless, Uy was keen to point out that players can build a grungy park that looks like the underside of an overpass if they so wish. But they can also conjure absurd floor-is-lava theme parks fit for action figures and ride around with CRTs on their heads.
Wrekless is coming soon, and at first, it will launch into early access on PC, allowing the team at Free Range Games to respond quickly to the playerbase with new features that complement emerging trends in gameplay. Uy and his small team have been trying to conjure example parks and get ahead of what players could make with the toolset, but ultimately, with a small team, they know they can’t cover all the bases. “I remember when Fortnite launched, it was a co-op PvE in which you fought zombies to defend your house,” Uy said. “That is not where we are now. The long-term plan is to just create a community with the players and keep giving them what they want.”
Wrekless will launch into early access on the Epic Games Store in Q1 of 2025.