Skate 4 is Probably Gonna Suck.

EA wants its proprietary game development and rendering engine to be known as a jack of all trades. The engine is a disaster for devs and gamers alike, while being a master of nothing.

I have a lot of opinions about the next installment of the skateboarding mega-hit franchise, Skate. My opinions bring along many assumptions. I’ll be assuming a lot about Electronic Arts, the publisher funding the development of the next Skate game. I’ll be assuming a lot about which studio might end up developing this game. It’s all just hearsay because that’s all we have.

I know this seems like quite a shaky start to an article. Like, why would anyone immediately discredit themselves in the first paragraph by admitting they don’t know anything substantive about the subject of their writing? Let me refute your skepticism by assuring you that I’ve been a lifelong Electronic Arts consumer. I’ve played many of EA’s published titles since I was a young child starting with one of the longest running racing game franchises in history, Need for Speed. My earliest memory to this day is a loop of the Need for Speed 3 in-race pause screen. The blue transparent interface displayed a simple list of options while the camera circled around the exterior of a red C5 Chevrolet Corvette. The headlights were popped up, the brake lights were on, and police cars were just a few yards behind the sports car.

From there, I was raised on Need for Speed. The seventh installment in the franchise, Underground, opened my eyes to a form of car culture I never saw before. All of a sudden, I was introduced to Japanese import vehicles that I’d never seen before. I lived in a pretty small industrial town, so it was all trucks and sedans. I’d never seen a car that looked like a Miata before. From there, the series only got better. Underground 2 improved on its predecessor, introducing an open-world map for the first time to the franchise. NFS: Most Wanted brought police cars back into the picture, but kept that aggressive import tuner culture. Carbon innovated even further by adding Autosculpt into the picture, allowing players to create unique body kits for themselves.

Now, in 2020, Need for Speed is absolutely dead to me. An old installment I can’t even remember got re-released this year and I couldn’t care less. I’m bored of it all. Need for Speed is at this point derivative, a complete 180 from the industry innovator it used to be. There are many reasons these latest entries don’t interest me, from the boring storytelling to the gameplay just being more of the same. However, just one thing really sticks out as the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Frostbite.

Interesting that DICE went with the Shattered Hand logo since their games make me feel like my hands have permanent nerve damage. Thanks input lag!

I’ve written a few Medium articles about my disdain for this game engine in the past. Every game utilizing this engine made my controller feel like pudding. Input lag is a severe issue that still hasn’t been fixed since the engine came out in 2008, with the release of Battlefield: Bad Company. The latency between inputs and on-screen reaction wasn’t a problem at the time because Bad Company was a single-player game, but the next release was Battlefield 1943. That was a multiplayer game, and many players complained of the same input latency. The players on top of the scoreboards might as well have been fortune tellers, considering how far into the future they had to not only predict where their opponents would be after they shot their weapons, but when their gun actually fucking fired the bullet in the first place.

In a shooting game on a console, input lag isn’t a severe issue. Lives often last a few minutes at a time, and if you ended up dying you could just respawn seconds later and get right back into the gameplay. When the Frostbite engine moved into racing game territory, the drawbacks of the engine were laid bare.

Need for Speed: The Run was the first installment in the franchise that utilized this engine. It had multiplayer scenarios in it, but the selling point was its story. EA marketed the game as if it was an interactive, playable Hollywood movie. They even brought Michael Bay into their marketing house to create a trailer for the game.

It drove like shit, the frame rate was terrible, and the game didn’t really look all that amazing.

A few more installments of the NFS franchise came and went, and I never played any of them. They all looked boring, and the Frostbite engine felt like molasses to play in. Eventually, EA decided to give a new development team a crack at a Frostbite Need for Speed installment, and gave them two years to develop the new game. This was a break away from the game-every-year cycle EA had been putting its developers through on its biggest titles. I thought it was promising; I figured the devs were gonna be working to make sure the gameplay actually felt good in the engine. Then NFS 2015 was released.

It was the first Need for Speed game in my entire life where I picked up the controller, played for ten minutes, and fucking uninstalled the game.

So now, it’s 2020. Need for Speed: Heat has been out for a while, and it was decent. It was better than the franchise has been, and input lag isn’t so bad it makes me pull my hair out. Even so, the developer that seemed to finally have a grasp on Frostbite ended up getting diced up and dispersed within the company. Criterion is now developing the NFS franchise, and they began with a remaster of an older NFS title. It’s just the same pile of shit with a new coat of paint.

Look, Need for Speed has Puma’s now, and we learned how to use dramatic lighting! Trust us, this game isn’t incredibly underwhelming!

So what does this have to do with Skate 4? Well, let’s think about it:

1. Skate is a beloved franchise that grew massively popular after its second installemnt, just like Need for Speed.
2. Skate wasn’t necessarily the nicest looking game on the market but the gameplay was incredibly solid, just like Need for Speed.
3. Skate derives all of its gameplay solely from the physics engine, just like Need for Speed did.

Need for Speed started playing like shit as soon as the franchise moved into Frostbite because the engine’s own physics are playing a tug-of-war against the player. The cars can’t go too fast or else the engine won’t be able to render 3D geometry or textures fast enough, and those polygons and textures looked dated in NFS: Heat anyways. The cars are fastest when they’re drifting, which is completely opposite of what real life racing is like. When was the last time you saw a Formula 1 car smoking the tires around every corner on the circuit and end up with the fastest lap time? On top of all of this, Electronic Arts is trying to market their proprietary engine as the one true jack of all trades — a claim Unity and Unreal have already truthfully made themselves.

Here’s what I think will happen with Skate 4:

1. EA wants to add another notch on their belt to prove their engine is capable of creating any video game concept;
2. They will force Skate 4 developers to use the Frostbite engine, especially if the source code for Skate 3 wasn’t archived;
3. Skate 4 will be in development hell, much like Cyberpunk 2077 has been. It’ll eventually be released after multiple delays while the dev team struggles with literally the worst game engine for physics simulation;
4. The first screenshots of the game released to the public will look great;
5. The trailers leading up to the release of the game will not show true gameplay but also look great;
6. When it’s released, there will be a Day One Patch around 10 gigabytes in size;
7. It will not have the incredibly popular customization features many players remember from Skate 3;
8. Custom skatepark creation and prop placement will either be severely limited or non-existent;
9. Skate 4 will either feature today’s best skateboarders like Nyjah Huston and Yuto Horigome, or even skating legends who by some will of the gods have never been in a video game like Brian Anderson or Alexis Sablone, or it’ll be incredibly fucking boring;
10. The game will perform like absolute dogshit on mid-tier PC’s and feature frame drops in busy parts of the map on the Xbox.

Most of all, the control scheme we all know and love will be the most unresponsive pile of junk in the entire franchise. No developer currently working with Frostbite has been able to fix the input lag without severely compromising on the graphics. Frostbite is a terrible platform to force any franchise into, but EA will do it anyways just to try selling their fucking awful engine.

I’m not a game developer, nor an industry insider. All I know about game development comes from my experience tinkering with Unity, but I know Unity is capable of creating truly fantastic games. Firewatch, Ori and the Blind Forest, Subnautica, Cuphead, Hearthstone, Escape from Tarkov and Risk of Rain were all developed in Unity. They run well and look awesome. Unity, an engine with a reputation for aiding the creation of Asset Flip video games, is capable of creating truly incredibly gaming experiences.

Frostbite has had more than ten years to improve, but it’s still just as bad as it was when it was first shown to the public. No innovation, no optimization.

Just like EA these past couple decades too, huh?

If Skate 4 had Golf Wang or Odd Future shit in it I’d buy it day one though, for real.