They think the mountains are so wide open that you'll never run across your friends beyond the starting point and from the videos I've seen, that seems to be true. Still would like the option though.
Yet they're as open as SSX Tricky/3. I have yet to see those huge, open mountains they talked about. There's no open mountain, there's tracks. Untracked was a huge, huge, wide track, at one point it divided into three and each one was as wide as a regular SSX course. I have yet to see anything as open as that. And then there's the couldn't-possibly-be-more-linear trees DD, and the most linear and narrow track in SSX history, that run in the Alps that's very difficult. If all tracks were super wide open, but only a few of them are. That Himalayas run is a regular SSX track, a few paths, shortcuts, the usual deal. Garibaldi on SSX Tricky has literally 2 paths almost the entire run. From what I've seen, I don't believe we'll see anything that's substantially wider or bigger than some of the courses we got earlier.
They seem to forget 2 things:
1. People might never see each other after the start, but that's not a reason to exclude real racing. Who are they to decide that's a reason to not include it? We still want racing no matter what. We never had a proper racing mode before. We had one on one's in SSX3 (PS2 only). Really?
2. People will find the best lines and stick to them with minor variations. HELLO!! This is pretty obvious. People will get better and find out the good lines in each track and stick to them. That means we'd be having tight, close racing some time after the game came out... If they included racing. Specially this being SSX, specially with them knowing VERY well how the community is. They even say they're all over Merqury City, they should know better the fansite WILL find the best lines, WILL post videos showing them and WILL attract lots of players that will see them. In return, online, people will then be applying what they saw and race the same lines over and over again. Specially when the community thins down and only the hardcore are left. Left with no proper racing mind you.
Also, I posted this idea at MC, I thought they'd do something like this because DDs are such a great part of the game:
They're also missing a VERY good opportunity to make an amazing online mode, Survival Race. It'd be like Eliminator. You can have players run the course 2 times (gets harder the second time). People get eliminated once they fail, once you get to the bottom you go up immediately and start going down for the 2nd and last time. Wins the last player that gets to the bottom alive after 2 'laps'. If 2 or more players get to the bottom alive, wins the fastest. It'd easily be the most thrilling events online. You need to be fast but you can't risk too much or you risk getting eliminated because there are no rewinds. You can see people falling to their death in front of you and you see the list of players getting shrunk each second and every minute there's more and more 'Eliminated' messages on the player list.
But no...