Developer Full Circle has published a new development update for Skate, discussing the content coming to the game with Season 3, as well as future plans. Along with this, the studio has also offered a look back at the updates made to Skate since its Early Access release in September, which included additions like key frames, tilt and roll, and field of view adjustments to the replay editor.
“We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: we’re building Skate with a long-term vision in mind,” wrote the studio. “This Early Access period is a huge part of that. It gives us the space to listen, learn, tweak and test – over and over – until we get things just right.”
The biggest addition to Skate with Season 3 will be the return of the Isle of Grom. While players might remember the island as being the tutorial area, its newer version will be larger, and better designed for free-form exploration. The newer parts of Grom will include massive gaps, and spillway action inspired by Skate 2 and 3. While the map will be released to all players on May 5th, skate.Pass Premium owners will be able to get to it much earlier – on March 10th. April 14th will see the map being available as part of a limited-time multi-week event before ultimately being opened up for everyone.
To access Grom from May 5th onwards, players will need to get their hands on an Isle of Grom Water Taxi day pass by spending 500 of their Rip Chips, which can be earned by just playing the game. These day passes will be valid for 24 hours from when you buy it, and can be used an unlimited number of times for that time frame before it expires. skate.Pass Premium owners, however, can skip the process and jump right into the island.
For character customization, Season 3 will also bring with it more branded items in the skate.Pass, including apparel by companies like Adidas. Players who prefer buying items Ă la carte will find more than 200 wardrobe items through the shop. While this catalog might see changes every now and then, the core idea behind it is to keep it growing over time.
It is worth noting that EA and Full Circle had previously noted that new additions to Skate’s map would be available to all players through game updates. Since then, the statement has been changed, as spotted by a ResetEra user, to remove mentions of new areas being available to everyone.
More details on content coming to Skate with Season 3 will be revealed in the coming days.
Skate was released across PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox series X/S in September, and while initial player numbers were quite impressive, the free-to-play game has seen quite a drop-off in concurrent player counts on Steam. It garnered “Mixed” reviews on launch, and player opinion doesn’t seem to have changed much since then. At the time of publishing, the title saw a 24-hour peak of 2,646 concurrent players (via SteamDB), with 1,466 playing right now. For comparison’s sake, it saw an all-time peak of 134,901 players five months ago.
Since its release, Full Circle and publisher EA also released a cosmetics set based on Dead Space protagonist Isaac Clarke to the in-game store. It was priced at just over $40, and saw quite a bit of criticism due to looking quite shoddy.
