2025 Preview: Skate’s goodwill will wear thin if EA keeps kickflipping the can down the road

2 days ago 162

“We’re still working on it!” That was the refrain from the team behind the forthcoming Skate reboot the last time it was mentioned.

And the time before that. And the time before that, too. In fact, we’ve been talking about the forthcoming Skate reboot for longer than the total time it took Skate, Skate 2 and Skate 3 to be released. We now know – unless things change – that in 2025 the series will finally return, launching in early access.

From the outset, the Skate reboot has been built hand-in-hand with the community that demanded its return. As such, there’s been a huge amount of goodwill given to Full Circle, the team behind Skate. But, at some point, the funny trailers need to stop, and a wider group of players need to get their hands on the game.

The question is, what does Skate even look like in 2025? The Skate series was so popular because it felt like the antidote to the aging Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise. In Skate, an incredible trick was a well-timed double kick-flip down some stairs. In Tony Hawk, you were pulling entire pizza boxes out and taking a bite.

Skate became the franchise for people who actually loved to skate. At least, that was the case for the first two entries. When people think about the Skate franchise, they either think about those first two, which took the sport seriously, or the third game, which divides the community to this day.

Skate 3 was far more focused on placing objects around the world and creating monstrosities, which were supposed to be skated on but largely became fodder for glitch videos hosted by screaming Scandinavians.

For us, the first two Skate games were excellent because they gave you tight controls and a well laid out adventure playground of a city to explore. While some spots were obvious the joy of Skate, much like the real sport, was finding an area and seeing what you could pull off cleanly.

That’s all the Skate reboot really needs to do. It doesn’t need to get bogged down in the fun but shallow Hall Of Meat stuff, it doesn’t have to focus on us getting off our board and putting together a semi-detached house out of garbage cans – just make the skating feel excellent.

Which path the reboot will follow isn’t clear, but it’s a needle it will have to thread if it’s going to please the players who have been waiting for a decade. While a bespoke, story-driven Skate sequel would have been lovely, EA is still EA, so a live service game appears to be the order of the day.

As long as the mechanics feel tight, and there’s a huge amount of rolling content, including new areas to skate, and new missions to grind (ahem) away at, we can just about stomach the thought of being charged real money for a pair of in-game Vans.

While 2025 will be the kickoff to Skate’s second life, it’ll likely be a while before we really get a sense of what road Skate plans to follow. EA has assembled the best possible team it can. They are saying all the right things. The marketing is absolutely nailing the tone.

The other questions, such as how the game actually feels to play, and what the plan is for expanding the playable content rather than just the wearable baubles, will only be answered when we finally get to lace up our SB’s and stick on some CKY.