This week, the first season pass arrived for the recently-reborn Skate in an update that—as a quick glance at the Skate subreddit will tell you—isn't being received very well, with players complaining that a spattering of superficial challenge additions are being used to justify a pile of new microtransactions.
The most reviled among Skate's new monetization vectors is the Isaac Clarke bundle, which offers players the opportunity to roll around San Vansterdam as a cardboard-and-duct-tape knockoff of the Dead Space protagonist for the price of 3350 San Van Bucks, which shakes out to around $35 USD.
If that price alone didn't feel contemptuous enough for you, the bundle's got all the usual grimy monetization trappings: It's a limited time offering. It's got stickers and emotes crammed in to rationalize the price. And it costs just enough SVB to force you to buy more premium currency than you need if the bundle's all you're interested in.
That all felt grimy enough to me already, especially when players have noted that Skate 3 had an Isaac Clarke skin that only cost the amount of time it took to enter a cheat code—and that one wasn't cardboard. But it became particularly egregious when I fired up Skate myself and ran into repeated crashes for 40 minutes before I could check the in-game store.
After making my character—I was starting a new account—the initial load into the tutorial took an unsettling amount of time. After a solid two minutes of watching the kickflipping load screen graphic, I was finally dropped into the world, where I proved myself worthy of an initial skateboard with some basic movement and climbing.
The Issac Clarke skin was FREE in Skate 3 and looked better. from r/SkateEA
I approached the glowing purple circle to trigger the cutscene where I'd be granted my fated implement for inevitable grinds and flips… and then the game locked up for forty seconds and crashed out with a memory error.
I relaunched. Another lengthy tutorial load. Another run through the basic movement lesson. Another attempt to claim my god-given right to skate, and another crash for my efforts. I tried validating installed files through Steam; crashed. I tried deleting EA anti-cheat files so they could be redownloaded on game startup, a fix I'd used elsewhere; still crashed.
The solution I found after browsing the many threads from users experiencing similar issues was—inexplicably—disabling crossplay. If you're wondering why that would produce memory errors during cutscene transitions, your guess is as good as mine.
Monetization is the devil's bargain we suffer in exchange for free-to-play games; all of us understand that. But I think we can all agree that if you're going to use your game as a trough for cosmetic slurry, you should at least wait until it's deep enough into early access that its default settings don't leave the game unplayable.
Then again, if EA's going to be looking down the barrel of $20 billion in leveraged buyout debt, we probably shouldn't expect anything else.
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