Thoughts on the new skate game
I have about 30 or so hours in the new free to play Skate game because I'm an insane person and I want to get the platinum trophy in it. I'm having a lot of fun with it but also the game really sucks shit so I have a lot of conflicted emotions about it.
Skateboarding (and just extreme sports games in general) are Cocomelon to guys in their thirties like me and I've been craving a new one. I put a ton of time into OlliOlli World a few years ago, attempted to play Session but gave up because the controls were just not my vibe, and got the new Tony Hawk 3+4 from the library over the summer and put some time in that. I was in the Skate closed alpha test and kind of forgot the game existed until this summer when EA was like oh yeah we're gonna release in early access. I played a bit of Skate 3 and the demos for 1 and 2 on Xbox back in the day but I was always more of a THPS guy so Skate is kind of new territory for me.
And the "finished" product? It's fine, I guess. I think it's more emblematic of the issues facing modern AAA game development if we're being honest, but I'll get to that.
Before I air my grievances with Skate let me acknowledge what it does right. When the physics work, the game feels great. It's mechanically very solid. Skating around and doing tricks is genuinely really fun. Occasionally you have to fight the controls but it's whatever. A lot of the challenges around the map are well designed and fun. Climbing is a nice addition and if you're the type to fuck around the map putting objects down and doing crazy stunts it goes hand in hand with that. It being an online cross-platform cross-progression get in a lobby and find your friends and do whatever type of game makes a lot of sense for Skate. The soundtrack has some bangers in it and there's a built in replay editor. The halloween event they recently ran was also a lot of fun.
The biggest issue with Skate is that it feels lifeless, both aesthetically and in design.
Talking aesthetics first - Skate is easily the most sanitized extreme sports game I've ever played, to the point where it doesn't feel authentic. The city you skate in is too clean, too well designed, and doesn't feel realistic. The whole map is a Tony Hawk level. There's a lot to explore sure, but every nook and cranny has already been found by the dev team and they left a few half pipes and rails. There's no sense of discovery because of this. The 4 neighborhoods have no defining traits and they all just blend together. Besides other players skating around, there's really bland looking npcs that just kind of follow walking patterns and cars that you can't interact with. It feels empty.
What people have been complaining about the most is the supporting characters and the dialogue. A few characters return from previous Skate games as non moving jpeg images with text boxes. You're followed by an extremely annoying "AI" companion named Vee that does not stop talking. All the dialogue in this game is probably fake skater lingo that feels like it was written by an advertising agency. It's so dire!
There's even a plot device in the game that explains why your character can jump off buildings and have horrible skateboard accidents and walk away unscathed - tldr some big megacorporation in the city gave everyone pills or something that makes them invincible. It's laughable. I get why a lot of more modern skating games have shied away from depicting injuries (when the Tony Hawk 1+2 Remake released a few years ago, Tony himself said in an interview that him and the other pro skaters in the game wanted to change the way that bailing was rendered because they're all old and fucked up now and don't want to glorify it as much) but they chose the stupidest way possible of explaining it.
As mentioned previously, Skate is now a free-to-play slop game with just not enough to do to keep you occupied and it seems at odds with its own design. The main progression system at the time of writing is doing the missions (glorified tutorials and the closest thing this game has to an actual storyline) and completing challenges around the map. Challenges are either one and done or repeatable, and the repeatable ones rotate once a day and change up the objectives a bit. That's it. Completing challenges earns you currency which you can use to play dress up. If you're not into that, there's nothing to progress toward. The "story" missions you can finish in a couple hours where most of the progress is gated between completing challenges in specific neighborhoods to rank them up.
To me, it also felt like it wasn't sure if it wanted to be a real skateboarding game or if the designers watched too many Instagram reels of people playing Skate 3 and doing epic funny memes and wanted to make a game based on that. The physics engine tries to accommodate both and frequently can't do either. The game is riddled with glitches, wonky physics and general technical issues. It makes for an extremely frustrating time when you're trying to do a harder skate challenge and the physics throws you off your board randomly or objectives glitch and won't mark as cleared. The scoring system, particularly what the game registers as a "sequence" also just feels off.
Oh and there's a battle pass because of course there is. It's whatever. It's all dress up stuff and emotes as expected. The fashion you can get for free in game is just as good as what you can get in the battle pass honestly so there's no need to buy unless you really like customizing your character. It's just the battle pass takes insanely long to complete as the currency is drip fed to you SO slowly and they don't give you enough ways to earn it, plus many of the items in the pass require very high amounts of it. Conversely, the first seasonal event they did THREW seasonal currency at you. I got everything and still had 5000 to spare. I have to assume they will balance it next season but it doesn't feel good to be so gated.
As I mentioned earlier, Skate is so emblematic of why AAA games are so bad these days. The online open world is fine as is and makes sense for a chill skate with your friends game, but having to build progression around battle passes just sucks when there's nothing else to do or play for! That coupled with how sanitized it is makes for a shitty time.
It's crazy that it took EA over half a decade to put out this game and this is what we got. It's kind of obvious that they have zero faith in it because extreme sports games are a niche these days. There's also some irony in the sense that the designers felt like they had to sand down the edges so much for this game when EA's other big release this fall, Battlefield 6, is an M rated shooter. Sucks that we just don't get anything actually fun anymore in the AAA space because it won't make a trillion dollars off of DLC.
I don't think Skate is going to last more than a couple years. There's tons of people playing it still (it being free and able to be run on anything, even the PS4 and Xbox One helps) but I think people are going to drop off and won't come back even if the problems are fixed. I personally think it needs a complete aesthetic overhaul which will never happen. But I can dream. Maybe they'll turn it around! I think I'm good with it for a while after I get the last couple trophies. Until then, I guess I'm waiting for indie studios to keep the extreme sports genre alive.