“skate.”
I’ve been following the Discord for EA’s new “Skate” game (allegedly “Skate 4”, later rebranded to “skate.”) for quite a few years now, after the unfortunate “Make America Skate Again” campaign which will age about as well as the swastikas on my great grandparents’ wedding cake. I had registered my interest in the beta, but signing up to be included in the rounds involved more invasive stuff than I actually wanted to.
Anyway, it released to “early access” yesterday, and I downloaded it… pleasantly, it was only about 9GB - minuscule by today’s standards. Less pleasant: it’s a live service game, with an anti-cheat that is not supported on Linux or Steam Deck (but “maybe” in the future?).
In typical EA fashion, it does seem like it’s designed by committee, and they did not see fit to include anyone who understands what made Skate 3 and earlier fun. Complaints:
- many of the animations are janky and robotic, but at least they didn’t commit the cardinal sin some mouth-breather “gamers” accused the Horizon devs of, of re-using the previous game’s animations, I guess? Fuck’s sake.
- Loads of tricks missing, like darkslides for instance. Apparently these are coming, and it is “early access” so we’ll see I guess.
- Pumping on vert basically doesn’t work. You might pump out of a small quarter at a shallow angle and hit max speed, you might come out of a large quarter and barely make it up the other side of a small quarter. Who knows? There are numerous threads on Reddit et al discussing this offering various fixes, none of which reliably work.
- You’ll be in the middle of something, and a flashy box will pop-up interrupting what you’re doing to tell you about something you did.
- The replays have a habit of picking the absolute dogshit you did at the end of a run instead of the really cool bit where you actually cleared the thing.
- Some of the randomly-generated goals are nonsensical and thus very difficult to accomplish without putting down your own droppable objects - maybe this is intentional?
- The voice acting, oh god the voice acting. We were joking around about it but it actually started to dawn on me that it was probably accurate: we think they trained an LLM on the top 100,000 tik-tok videos and then had it write the dialogue, and then some of the voice actors are quite good but some of them are just clearly not into it and feel like a gorilla in a tuxedo. Turning the voice overs off completely makes the game significantly less annoying.
- By far my biggest complaint: viewing a heatmap of where people spent the most time in the Skate 3 map would have shown that the huge hills you can carve down were wildly popular, but almost all the verticality in “skate.” comes about from climbing buildings. There’s one nice drainage thing on the tutorial island you can carve down, but as far as I can tell you can never go back there - everything else is tiny and unsatisfying (or there’s a couple of spirals which are not as fun).
That said, I’ve spent about 20 hours in it at the time of writing (well after the date on the entry), and it’s fun. It’s fun by accident though. The type of fun that they would probably fix because it’s not the game operating as intended. You can ping off some random furniture and get sent hundreds of feet further than you should have. Duncan started playing it, and showed me one where you can reliably make your character just teleport sometimes kilometers into the sky by doing an emote while in a T-pose. I genuinely hope they leave this stuff in as they fix other issues.
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