It was a long wait from the moment that skate. was formally announced until its release yesterday, on September 16. A five-year wait, in fact, not counting the 15-year gap since the release of Skate 3 in 2010. And while many had hoped that its release would provide some relief when it came to the obvious lack of skateboarding games over the past decade or so, what they were greeted with was… constant error messages.
Throughout the day yesterday, several users complained of server issues when trying to launch skate. Some had even gotten as far as getting through the waiting queue when first launching, only to be greeted by an error message once they were finally granted access. The issue became so bad that at peak hours, the team at EA and Full Circle temporarily suspended gameplay for server maintenance.
Obviously, the release of skate. has been a massive deal for gamers for a while. Combine it with the fact that it is a free-to-play, always-online experience, and you can understand why there was such a massive bottleneck of players. I personally experienced this issue several times yesterday when attempting to play the game. To be charitable, once I was finally in the game, server crashes were far less frequent. However, they were still there.
The problem was so bad that the first article we published about skate. post-launch was about server issues and how players can cope with them. And on social media, connectivity issues have been one of the most talked-about aspects of the game.
Again, in an attempt to be charitable, this was pretty inevitable, considering the pre-launch anticipation of skate., and the team over at Full Circle has done their absolute best to mitigate the problem. However, it does lend credence to the argument that maybe, just maybe, the idea of an online-only, free-to-play skate title wasn’t exactly an awesome one. But that’s a story for another day (we’re currently working on a review for the game, and trust me, this will be brought up, so stay tuned for that).
If you’re one of the lucky ones to have avoided these server issues when playing skate., feel free to check out some of the guides we have going up! Already, we’ve published guides on perfecting your right-stick technique, as well as mastering grab tricks. And more should be going up soon, so keep it locked to the game hub for constant updates.
