skate. Playtest Info Update
hey skate. fam, as mentioned in The Grind: Vol 4 , the last RSVP wave is July 22 and then we start our daily waves. everyone who signed up prior to June 27 will get an invite before the end of July, so make sure you check your emails. to prepare for this moment, we’ve added online access entitlements to every signed up playtester account – which gives you access to the forums. console players: if you have access to the forums but haven’t gotten your code yet, don’t stress. your code is coming in the coming waves through the end of July. pc players: if you have forum access, check your EA app😉 we’re stoked to see you jump in with us as we continue on the road to Early Access. see you in San Vansterdam, the skate. teamThe Grind: Vol 3
Welcome back to The Grind! We’ve got Volume 3 comin’ in hot with a lot of info - especially about the upcoming Playtest update 0.27.0 dropping early July. Thanks to everyone for reading last month’s The Grind: Vol 2 and for submitting questions to the dev team via Discord. Don’t forget to join the official Discord to get your questions into the next edition! We’ve got a big one today, so buckle up. Coming July 2, 2025, we’ll be dropping our BIGGEST playtest update. First things first, as mentioned in The Grind: Vol 1, we will be sending out invites for 0.27 in waves starting soon to everyone who has signed up as a skate. Insider. However, we are closing skate. Insider registration on June 27, 2025. If you are signed up as an Insider before June 27 you will be invited in waves to the next playtest! If you haven’t signed up, do it now! Don’t forget to ensure that your gaming account is the one you sign up with so you get the skate. Insider Rewards when we launch Early Access, and if you need help linking your console, check this FAQ. WISHLISTS ARE LIVE! We’re also excited to announce that you can now wishlist skate. on various platforms, including PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and the Epic Game Store, right here. So if you want to throw a little support at skate.’s launch and get a reminder when Early Access goes live – head over and Wishlist skate. today! Update 0.27.0 With update 0.27.0, we’re stoked to bring some major improvements to the playtest, much of which is based on your playtesting feedback. Find out more info below and we can’t wait for you to jump in. But first, let’s just take a look at what 0.27 will look like. We think you’re going to notice a big difference. We stole this collection of clips from our team playing an early build of .27 so you could get a sneak peek of what’s to come. This is pre-release, but enjoy! What’s happening with the skate. Insider Playtest? Update 0.27 is packed with upgrades, changes, fixes, and performance improvements that you’ve been highlighting in feedback and asking for in forums. We’re stoked to give you a preview of what’s coming (we’ll have full patch notes for our playtesters before the update drops). Thanks again to everyone in the community who has helped shape this updated build! You Said: When are the visuals being updated? In Update 0.27, we have improved the visuals and you’ll notice the difference immediately (see the video above to get a sneak peek!) The city is more alive than it’s ever been! You’ll find a ton more detail, like environmental content, signage, foliage, and graffiti as well as increased pedestrian and traffic activity, with more than 3X the number of pedestrians and around 5X the number of vehicles. On the technical side, there is improved lighting and shadows, updated textures and effects, and other fine detail throughout San Vansterdam. The UI has presentation improvements throughout the game, including visual updates with animations, video effects, and sound effects. Also, the Map has been improved to show other players. We’ve also upped the max number of players in a server to 150 while improving performance across platforms. And we’re going to keep on working on this through live service. You Said: We want more to do —give us more Missions and Challenges! More Missions, more Challenges. There is more to do in San Vansterdam, and we’ve also unlocked the Market Mile neighborhood! We’ve streamlined and improved the opening/tutorial for the game to get you to San Vansterdam where we’ve added content, more than tripling the number of missions available in the game! You said you wanted even more Challenges, and now there are more than 140 Challenges for you to conquer. You Said: Improve the feel of Progression & Rewards: This captures a lot of your feedback, but to put it simply, we’ve overhauled progression and rewards. As we mentioned above, the early tutorial experience has been streamlined to get into San Van much sooner. Based on your feedback, we’ve also revamped how you progress by removing Collection Score as a gate for Challenge progression. And when you move up, you want to really feel it, and that should be fun. So we now have bigger and better celebrations when you earn a reward, and we’ve revamped the earnable in-game Product Boxes - more boxes with better rewards. Let us know what you think when you get into 0.27. You Said: We love our characters - give us more customization: skate. is all about you, an individual skateboarder finding and developing your own style, discovering your own spots, and expressing yourself, just like IRL. You’re not playing as anyone but who you want to be in the game. So we heard this loud and clear, and we agreed. In Update 0.27, we’ve made big changes, and you’ll find new and improved character options, including more options for your character’s overall appearance, as well as additional hairstyles, gestures, and emotes, with even more to come down the line. We’ve made a lot more changes in Update 0.27, including updates to music and sound, the Replay Editor, general Quality of Life improvements, haptics and more. None of this would be possible without all of our playtesters telling us what you love, what you want more of, and what you'd like improved. The entire team is listening, and we will continue to work with you to grow, evolve, and improve skate. when we launch Early Access later this year and throughout the Early Access period. Check out these two side-by-side pics of the Canal and Financial Districts. With Update 0.27, we've improved lighting, added more textures, and there's more to come! Let’s dive in to your questions. Keep them coming! Your Q’s, our A’s. When is skate. launching in Early Access? Early Access is coming at the end of summer 2025 (Northern Hemisphere!). Yes, just months away now. And as a reminder, everyone who signs up as a skate. Insider by June 27 will get invited to playtest before Early Access launch. What kind of visual updates and improvements can we expect for skate. for Early Access? We talked in detail above, but you'll notice visual improvements across a wide range of areas in Update (0.27) on July 2. But know that San Van is always changing and skate. will never stop improving—its appearance will continuously evolve, unveiling new skateboarding spots and interesting details to discover. Early Access launch is just the beginning, and the city will keep evolving. Will skate. support KBM (keyboard and mouse) controls? Flick-It has always been the Skate franchise’s core control system: a reactive, dynamic, and immersive experience that has made Skate games feel amazing and unique. For now, we’re sticking with the controls that you have loved for decades, and honestly, KBM simply doesn’t create the same tangible skateboarding feeling. So for now, you’ll need to use a controller on PC. We’re not entirely writing off KBM – we’re always listening to feedback. So let us know your thoughts on our controller-only approach. If I unlock something on my PC account, will I be able to use it on my Xbox/PS? Absolutely! As long as your console account is linked to the PC account you play with, any cosmetics or SVB you purchase on one platform will be available on every platform linked to that account. What modes will be available? S.K.A.T.E., Death Races, Hall of Meat, OTS? We'll continue to expand our gameplay modes and tricks as Early Access progresses (and beyond), and we’ll share more details about this when we have them. Are there achievements/trophies in-game to earn? Yes, with update 0.27 we’ve added 1st party Achievements/Trophies support. Is there fast travel in San Vansterdam? Getting to where you want to throw down quickly is key, so we have the San Van Transit system (it’s a bus). You can take the bus to various locations in the city, but you’ll have to level up your neighborhoods to unlock all the stops. You can also teleport to friends or other skaters you want to spectate. Don’t forget to drop your questions in the Q &A channel in The Grind category of the Discord, and we’ll pull some to answer for our next volume of The Grind. Join the community at https://discord.gg/skateEA. See you in San Vansterdam, The skate. TeamThe Grind: Vol 1
Welcome to The Grind! What is The Grind? This is our platform to talk directly to you, the community. We will share details about skate., answering your questions directly, and talk about where we’re at in development (from playtesting onward). We want The Grind to tell you everything you need to know about skate. before we open up San Vansterdam in Early Access later this year. The Grind is about you, our players, and for it to work, we need your questions. We are opening a new question submission form in the official Discord and we’ll pull questions from there for our next volume of The Grind, coming in May. Start adding your questions for the development team in the new #questions . And please – don’t hold back. Ask the questions that you really want answers to. Let’s get Vol 1 of The Grind rolling! What’s happening with the skate. Insider Playtest? In Sept 2024, we began our Always-On Playtest. This new phase tests the game in a permanent live environment, with servers running around the clock. We began with PC and mobile testing and rolled out a small wave of console test invites. In March, we invited our biggest wave of testers to date, launched the 0.26.0 playtest update, and turned on virtual currency testing for PS and PC testers. We’ve updated the city, added more challenges, updated visuals, fixed bugs from 0.25.0, and much more. As skate. Insiders share their feedback and issues, the Full Circle team is working to address these reports and continually improve the gameplay and the feel of skating in San Vansterdam. We're building this game in collaboration with the community, and that’s why these playtests and the sharing of bugs, issues, and feedback is so important. To date, we’ve invited more than 200K players into the playtest, and that massive amount of feedback (over 30K posts on the playtest forums and over 20K survey responses) has helped steer the direction of skate. and improve the gameplay and performance. So thank you, testers, for all that you’ve done so far and continue to do. And if you’re reading this and still waiting for an invite, don’t worry, we’re planning on sending out another large wave of invites in June. Just for fun, we asked our data team to share some of the things you’ve all been doing in the playtest. Check out some of the highlights of your accomplishments in San Vansterdam: More than 16 million kickflips* More than 4.8 million 50-50 Grinds landed - nothin’ but bolts! The Longest Grind (so far) – more than 200 meters! That’s about 15 school buses! More than 40 million Total Wipeouts – Ouch! More than 6.5 million Challenges completed includes varial and nollie kickflips * Now, let’s answer some of those questions you’ve asked us that need answers! Your Q’s, our A’s. Is skate. still launching in 2025? Yes! We are still planning on launching in Early Access later this year. We have an ambitious vision for skate.: an ever-growing, ever-evolving skateboarding sandbox that expands over time with the feedback of the players living in San Vansterdam. Our Early Access launch will only be Day One of that experience, a starting point from which new features, improvements, and content will be added over time. We don’t consider the Early Access launch the “finished version” of skate., and neither should you. But the skateboarding experience will be great, and you’ll have tons to do with your friends in San Vansterdam. We can’t wait to share more details about what we have planned, both for day one of Early Access and in the months that follow. We’ll be updating you regularly over the next few months so keep an eye out right here and on our official social channels to stay up to date. Will skate. have an offline mode? The simple answer: No. 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. That is probably not much of a surprise if you’ve been in our playtest. How did you come up with the name San Vansterdam? We TOTALLY conducted extensive scientific, data-driven research and didn’t just spitball names until we found something everyone didn't hate. We promise. Is cross-play/cross-progression in the playtest? Absolutely! When you load in, you can see if someone is on a console or PC with cross-play on by default. And with cross-progression, if you have access to more than one platform for playtesting, you can literally log out of one platform, and launch the playtest on the other platform, and you’ll start exactly where you logged out. Hey, I signed up but never got in. What gives? It’s nothing personal, we promise! To make our testing most effective and to ensure stability, we are providing access to testers in waves. But rest assured, before we launch into Early Access, everyone who has registered as skate. Insiders will get an invite to come playtest the game. Why are microtransactions active in the playtest? San Vansterdam will be a living skating world, and we want to effectively support ongoing development while also offering a system that feels fair and fun for all of our players. To get there, we’re running extensive testing across PC and PS (Xbox testing will be rolling out later) to catch any issues or pain points, and to ensure that the content represents a fair value for our players. We know that using real money during a playtest is a little unusual, but we think it’s the best way to properly assess and adjust the system before launch. If you see prices or other things changing over time, please understand that this is normal. And of course, you will receive the amount you spent during playtesting in San Van Bucks (SVB) when we reset for Early Access launch. What happens with any money I spend during the Playtest? Like we said, if you choose to participate in this test and spend real money, whatever you spend will be returned to you in SVB when the game launches for Early Access. If you buy $20 of SVB, you will enter Early Access with $20 worth of SVB waiting for you on the same EA account. While it’s important to us for testing, we understand some of you may feel uncomfortable spending real money in a test-phase game. So if you don’t want to spend your money right now, we totally get it, and your feedback is always important to us. Is everything “cool” going to be locked behind a paywall? We are still adjusting the in-game rewards system, including the items available with San Van Bucks and the earnable Rip Chips currency, which will allow you to grab items from Product Boxes by completing Challenges and ranking up the districts of San Vansterdam. As mentioned in The Board Room Ep 3, skate. will not have paid lootboxes. The bottom line – there will be “cool” things for you to earn and customize your character without having to spend real cash. Will there be locations on the map that will cost money? The city of San Vansterdam will grow and evolve, with new areas opening up over its lifetime. As we said in one of our first Board Room videos, we will not lock new gameplay areas behind a paywall. If a new area is added to the game world, you can access it for free. Will I have to pay to level up the stats of my character? skate. isn’t a pay-to-win game, so there will be no paying to increase your skater’s skills (there also are no skill stats to increase for your skater anyway). Your stats are in your fingers - how good you Flick-it is how good you are in San Vansterdam. Practice makes pro, not a list of numbers in a stat sheet. Thanks for joining us for the first volume of The Grind. We hope you enjoyed hearing a bit from us and having us answer your questions directly. We’ll be doing these monthly over the next few months so be sure to join the official Discord (https://discord.gg/skateEA) and fill out the question submission form to get your hot questions in for next time. And, as always, stay tuned in to our social channels for the latest info and answers to your questions. See you in San Vansterdam, The skate. Team Stay in the loop by following skate. on Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and Facebook and read all the latest news and updates from our team via the skate. newsroom. Join the conversation in our official Discord server and our community-run Reddit.
