Skate. Will Still See A 2025 Early Access, But No, You Won't Have Any Offline Options

You'd be forgiven if you've forgotten about EA's upcoming F2P sports game Skate. It's been quite some time since we last heard any public updates. That changed a bit thanks to a post on the official site that appears to be kicking off a new dev blog series called "The Grind." Behind the scenes, over 200K players have been involved with testing things in San Vansterdam (the fictional location of your skating endeavors.)

Those testers have combined to post over 30K posts on the testing forums and over 20K feedback survey responses leading to improvements.

The post confirms that the team is still planning to open up early access sometime this year. No dates yet, but hey, it's still this year. That's the good news. What may not be received as good news, though, is a confirmation that there will be no ability to play Skate. offline. According to the team, "The game and city are designed to be a living, breathing massively multiplayer skateboarding sandbox that is always online and always evolving. You’ll see bigger things evolve, like changes to the city over time, as well as smaller things, like live events and other in-game activities. In order to deliver on our vision of a skateboarding world, the game will always require a live connection."

Hopefully we don't end up in another situation like The Crew disappearing.

Finishing up the post, a few other small details are dropped like cross-platform play being supported even in testing, a reminder that any money spent by testers will be credited to their account at launch, and a reaffirmation of the team's commitment to not include P2W features or lock skating locations behind paywalls.

It's a nice start on the "hype" train and I'm eager to play the game later this year.