Shaun White Snowboarding

"Everything that's come out in the past has been close to snowboarding or gone completely arcade, and we're looking for something that sits nicely in the middle and appeals to both crowds," Mitchell explains.

The free and open nature of the environments is reflected in the team's relaxed approach to progression. From the very start of the game, whatever your skill level, every area is ridable - just as it would be in real life.

"Anyone can pick up the controller, relax and just ride," says Mitchell. "Everything is open, everything is unlocked - you don't have to unlock a mountain to get to the next one. If you want to go ride a peak of the mountain, you can go there right away."

Players can therefore pick and choose routes and challenges across the vast expanses of the game's four mountains as they go. So Ubisoft has come up with a novel wheeze to reflect your improving skills and achievements over time.

"You start the game as an amateur and your arms move around a lot more,your riding is less stylised," Mitchell states. "As you get hold of the controls and get the hang of it, you start landing properly and learning more advanced tricks like axis rotations and that sort of thing.

"Then eventually as you start to win competitions, you win new sets of animations - you're going to see a visual progression as you move on." Unsurprisingly, your ultimate goal is develop the exact technique of ol' Whitey himself.

On the evidence of the E3 build we see, the team is playing it safe with the trick system and just making sure it gets the basics nailed so it can concentrate of ensnaring gamers with its more adventurous elements.

We'll get onto those in a second, but first let's give you an outline of the control scheme: on 360 (the version we play), left stick is for body control; right stick for feet (enabling manual slides and shifts); right trigger is knee control. In mid-air the right stick is used to move the board around, with all the various tricks and grabs accessed in combination with the left trigger. Jumping off your board and going for a stroll requires noting more than a press of Y - and while Ubi is tight-lipped on the details, there will be rewards for the indefatigable off-piste explorer.

So far, so straightforward. So what happened to all that thinking big? Well, connect a console up the Internet and Ubisoft claims the standard extreme sports experience will be transformed into a persistently populated game world where the traditional distinction between single- and multiplayer melts away.

Whichever mountain you're riding, and regardless whether you're playing solo through the career mode, or challenging chums, spare spots on the slopes will be filled by other human players doing their own thing, just like you.

"We really wanted to get across the idea of the community as it's really important in snowboarding," says Mitchell. "Everybody snowboards with their crew; you'll have a group of friends that you always go out with. It's essentially a large lobby, being able to bring all of your friends where you are, participate in a competition, film one another going down the hill and upload the videos to the website. It's important to have it seamless."

Recording and sharing videos online has proved a tremendous boon in other extreme sports titles, so should cater well to the show-offs assuming the interface is slick enough. If you're offline, AI riders will take over, but we admit to be rather taken with the idea of capering around a mountain, checking out the crazy skills of the best real boarders, while sneering at the shambling calamities of amateurs. As we would on real slopes, in fact.

Sadly, this is not something the team is currently showing off. Instead we get to grips with a single mountain in offline single-player. Heli-lifted to the summit, we can either follow our fellow AI boarder's descent, or just do as we please. The scale and the draw distance, as we've said, are superb.