Early Gameplay For EA Skating Game Looks Sick

If you liked the official images (seen here), you’ll love the unfiltered images. Screenshot: EA/Kotaku

There’s so much Skate 4 pre-release footage out in the wild right now you’d think this was my kitchen sink! Yes, gameplay clips for the next entry in EA’s skateboarding series, which has no release window, seem to have leaked yet again. The game so far looks amazing – like “Oh no, this is going to eat up all my time” amazing.

In the late 2000s, Skate was dominating the skateboard gaming scene with its commitment to realistic tricks, controls, and physics. For a decade, the series lay dormant, with its main development studio, Black Box, shut down by EA a few years after the release of Skate 3 in 2010. Then, during non-E3 2020, EA has announced a revival of the series.

In officially announcing the next Skate game – which is colloquially called Skate 4 but better be titled Sk4te or my colleague Jeremy Winslow and I will cry real tears – EA didn’t reveal any footage or details. Earlier this year, however, a 30-second clip from extremely raw footage made the rounds. EA tried to stop the buzz in its tracks, so obviously it did some more laps. (Side note: Who here has heard of Barbara Streisand?) EA has finally, officially this time, released a few minutes of “pre-pre-pre-alpha” gameplay footage last month, intended to entice players to sign up for Sk4te’s upcoming tech tests.

All that pales in comparison to this week’s leaks. Yesterday, an anonymous individual uploaded four videos to Google Drive (via Reddit). They appear to show gameplay footage from an earlier version of the game, rougher than the moments shown in EA’s official trailer. It’s also important to keep in mind that these images have not been officially verified, so everything is subject to change. EA representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

But as a die-hard fan of the show for hundreds of hours, this new footage is extremely exciting. Here are some takeaways:

The first video shows a fictional metropolis, clearly inspired by California, called “Fun City”. (I bet they have great policies for outdoor dining and pedestrians.) However, EA’s official trailer mentions “San Amsterdam”, so the name of the setting might have changed over the course of of development. Either way, Sk4te seems to be set in a different California cityscape. While all assets are still booked, it clearly looks like the sunny Port Carverton setting in Skate 3. Sk4te won’t be alone. The massively multiplayer component seen in the official trailer definitely looks like a mainstay in development; in several leaked clips you can see large crowds of action sports athletes, all shredded and crashing together – not quite the numbers of Riders Republic, but certainly more than any previous skate game . Skate 3 controls. You can slide, for example, and tumble endlessly. In general, it seems like you’re actually controlling a human avatar who listens to you, rather than a jumble of members who register inputs five seconds after you deliver them. The player in the clip doesn’t seem to have that great grip on the controls (sorry!), but the tricks definitely seem harder to pull off than in the more casual Skate 2 and Skate 3. term for perfectly crushing a round. They fell. There are two control schemes. “Classic” is the traditional control scheme, which requires you to press the right thumbstick to perform ollies, flip tricks, etc. “Simplified” lets you do ollies with just the press of a face button, a la THPS. If this feature makes it to full release, prepare for some community unrest!

In all of the new leaked footage, one thing is unmistakable: this version of Skate seems to truly understand what makes the series work. It’s been 12 long years. If that means developers staying happy and being treated fairly, I’m happy to expect 12 more. But from what I’ve seen this week, I don’t think I need it.