Development of the game started in 2017, and the development team expanded to include members from other Ubisoft's studios in Montpellier, Belgrade, Pune, Berlin, Kyiv, and Odesa. The game is currently being developed by Ubisoft Annecy using Ubisoft's proprietary game engine Ubisoft Anvil, from the team that created Steep, also an extreme sports game, in 2016. As players progress in the career mode, they will unlock new gears, outfits and cosmetic items. In this event, players can switch between the sport activities at will. The final objective is to participate in "Riders Ridge Invitational", described as "a never seen before multi-sport competition featuring all sports in one single event". Gradually, players would reach important milestones, such as being invited to join competitions like UCI Mountain Bike World Cup, Red Bull Rampage, Red Bull Joyride and the X Games, and signing with real-world sports sponsors. Each of them has its own progression path. The game features a career mode, in which players engage in six different disciplines (Bike Freestyle, Bike Racing, Snowboard/Ski Freestyle, Snowboard/Ski Racing, Wingsuit, Rocket Wingsuit).
The game features social hubs in which players can meet and interact with each other. The game is set in an open world which meshes seven distinct national parks in the Western United States, namely Bryce Canyon, Yosemite Valley, Sequoia Park, Zion, Canyonlands, Mammoth Mountain, and Grand Teton, into one enormous single map. The team which has the highest score would win the match. In this mode, each team competes in an arena and needs to perform as many tricks as possible in order to score Trick points. In addition, players can also play a 6v6 competitive multiplayer mode named "Tricks Battle Arena".
The PS4 and Xbox One versions only support about 20 players. Ubisoft described the game as a " massively multiplayer sports game", as up to 64 players can compete against each other in Mass Races competitions. This helps Riders Republic achieve a player-based difficulty curve, thus skirting around the video game difficulty argument.The four main activities available in the game include mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, and wingsuit flying. These caches also affect the game's difficulty because Riders Republic has set ranges for performance, meaning that the players with faster times become ghosts for higher difficulties. By storing this data and replaying their performance in other races, it essentially allows the player to compete with a real person rather than a bot, albeit asynchronously.
Instead, Riders Republic fills its world with player ghosts, which are basically recordings of other players created by caching their race data.
Yet even as AI gets better and better at creating capable and challenging NPCs, it's hard to beat the skill and ingenuity of a real person, and Riders Republic decided to avoid this route altogether. Sometimes, like in Back 4 Blood, bots are better than players. One of the common ways that multiplayer games fill out their worlds is by using "bots." Simply put, bots are AI driven NPC's that fill empty player space.