EA has announced that its upcoming Skate reboot won’t let you play offline so that the developers can “deliver on [their] vision of a skateboarding world”.
In the first of a new series of news posts entitled “The Grind”, EA says Skate (stylized as skate.) is “designed to be a living, breathing massively multiplayer skateboarding sandbox that is always online and always evolving”, as is the game’s city.
As such, in order to implement “changes to the city over time, as well as smaller things, like live events and other in-game activities”, EA says it needs Skate to be an always-online prospect and to “always require a live connection”.
EA doesn’t say whether it’s interested in bringing an offline mode to Skate later down the line, but it’s likely that we’ll have to wait until the game is out for the studio to even consider talking about doing so.
Elsewhere in the post, EA says that the plan is still to release Skate in Early Access sometime this year, although there’s no release date yet. The studio says it will “share more details” about its plans “both for day one of Early Access and in the months that follow” soon.
As for the Early Access launch itself, it represents “a starting point from which new features, improvements, and content will be added over time”, and it won’t represent the “finished version” of Skate, according to EA. Sounds like pretty boilerplate Early Access stuff to me.
If you’re looking for more Skate news, EA says it will release The Grind posts “monthly”, so make sure to keep your eyes open for the next installment of the series sometime in May.
We may not have a Skate release date yet, but when the game does arrive, it’s launching in Early Access for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.
