‘Skate 4’ Gameplay Leaked, Here’s What We Know

There’s news for one of the most anticipated revivals in recent memory. Gameplay footage of EA’s Skate 4 has leaked – and it’s causing fans of the beloved series to go crazy.

Skate was one the most popular series of the 2000s. Due to the physics, realisticness and controls of the game, skateboarding game fans could not get enough of the Electronic Arts title. The last game, Skate 3, was released in 2010 with very favorable reviews. However, EA then shut down the game’s primary development studio Black Box, in 2013 leaving many to speculate about the future of the beloved series. Skate 3‘s servers were then shut down in 2016 all but confirming the death of the franchise.

There was life breathed into Skate 3 fans though when prior to the Electronic Arts Expo in 2019, EA once again activated the servers, and then in the weeks leading up to E-3 in 2020, EA announced that Skate would continue on. The next game, which is colloquially referred to as Skate 4, though many prefer the skater, edgier, Sk4te, has not been promoted in any way other than the leak of gameplay that emerged in April. The footage was pulled, then officially released by the company in June hoping to encourage players to sign up for technical tests. The official footage was extremely raw, allegedly in the “pre-pre-pre alpha” phase.

Despite that, the newest leaks make any previous footage seem like chopped liver. This week an anonymous Reddit user uploaded four videos that seem to be footage from a recent Skate 4 playtest. The footage revealed a lot of features that many would be happy to know are included. These include the physics of the off-board traversal and the player itself, as the new systems seem to have a better grasp on how a human body is supposed to move. Then the addition of a new control scheme, one being classic and one being simple, which will no doubt cause an uproar in the community due to the “easiness” of the simplified controls.

Those hoping for a new landscape and city will be disappointed as Skate 4 will take place in a California-like city setting that looks very familiar to the Port Caverton city in Skate 3. There also seems to be a vast emphasis on the multiplayer aspect, something no Skate game had tried to do before. A lot of the gameplay is rawer than what was shown in EA’s official trailer, but the attention to detail in the pre-alpha version means that the 12-year hiatus on the game was not in vain.

EA has not released a statement verifying the footage.