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As we approach the 12th anniversary of the last game in the Skate franchise - May 2010’s Skate 3 - it appears that the release of the sequel is almost upon us.
Publisher EA teased us that a fourth game was coming back in June 2020 with a tweet saying only, “Skate is back.” The tweet showed a short video from the developers saying that, while the project was in the very early stages, it was all the comments from fans over the years which sparked the comeback into existence. Then in July 2021, a teaser trailer dropped showing behind-the-scenes footage rather than actual gameplay. This left fans desperately eager for more.
See if you can spot talk of multiplayer, an open world, and throwbacks to Skate 2 in the Skate teaser trailer below.
The teaser still claimed it was really early days for the team, although the project was a year into development, and some of the footage had been shared with fans. While EA continues to be very quiet with its public announcements, behind closed doors it appears development is going swimmingly.
In EA’s 2022 Q3 earning call, CEO Andrew Wilson mentioned Skate, the official title of the fourth Skate game, when talking about its strategy with regards to user-generated content. He said, “it's at the very centre [of] the design of Skate which will be launching soon,” giving us just enough information to salivate over.
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Recently, as spotted by PlayStation Lifestyle, a couple of reliable insiders have claimed that Skate is deep into the quality assurance and playtesting phase. This means that if all goes well, we’ll see a release in the not so distant future. Possibly even before the end of 2022.
On Saturday (26 March) industry leaker Tom Henderson tweeted that playtesting had been going on “for months”. Another games journalist, Jeff Grubb, was contacted about Skate by Henderson on the podcast GameBeat Decides. In response to Henderson asking if Grubb had heard similar information, Grubb replied: “I feel like I got a similar update a week ago or something like that.” He went on to add: “I think we probably will hear something more about that game pretty soon.”
Two to three years seems about the right amount of time for this one to incubate, though with no gameplay to look at as of yet I will try to keep my expectations low for now.
Topics: EA