Electronic Arts has squashed fears that the new SSX title wouldn’t be sticking to its roots and take a completely new direction. In addition to detailing the title’s gameplay elements (showing that the current-generation SSX game will indeed be sticking to its core gameplay mechanics that it became so popular for), the publisher has announced they’ve made a change to the game’s name. Formerly SSX: Deadly Descents, EA has now announced that the game will simply be known as SSX.

SSX’s Creative director Todd Batty recently explained some of the game’s details to GameInformer. Batty said:

SSX is a franchise that fans have been calling out for, for years and years now. I can’t think of a press announcement where EA has talked about announcing a new game that doesn’t have hundreds of posts under it going, “OMG, I hope it’s SSX.” We’ve always thought that the series had a fanbase out there that still had affinity with the franchise and we’ve always thought that it was a really strong, wholly owned IP by EA Sports. There have been attempts to revive SSX over the years; different teams have put together different pitches for what a new SSX could be, but it just never felt like any of these proposals knew how to reboot SSX and make it relevant to today’s market.

He continued to talk about SSX’s gameplay:

Our core statement from day one has been, “survive it, race it, trick it.” And in that, we have designed three major types of gameplay. One being Deadly Descent, which is all about survival gameplay. It’s a new addition to the franchise. But I’ve always thought racing was the core of SSX, and we didn’t want to go away from that, so we’re going to have Speed Descent events, and of course we’ll have tricks in our Tricky Descent events. We wanted to make sure we hit the over-the-top arcadey gameplay in all of these different gameplay modes. We decided to lead with the new Deadly Descent gameplay in that trailer, but all of the classic SSX style will be there, too.

SSX is on course for a release during the opening stages of 2012.

Anyone used to play the previous installments in the SSX series? Are you looking forward to how the game shapes up eventually? Share your thoughts via the comment section below.