Skate Story and the PS5 Pro
This week Skate Story was released. This is a game I've been looking forward to since I first heard about it. A large part of this was down to the inclusion of music from the New York band Blood Cultures. Admittedly it was via the first trailer for Skate Story that introduced me to them, but I was hooked instantly.
I was ready to buy the game upon release and was leaning towards getting it for the PS5, but was tempted to get it on Steam where I played the demo for it. However, I was pleased to discover that the game had been added to the PS Plus Extra catalogue, essentially making it "free" to play. I had an idea of how the game felt to play from the demo, which ran well enough on my (non-gaming) laptop, except I was confused as to why the frame rate was so jittery on the PS5 Pro, jumping between 40 and 60. I knew that the Pro had issues with some UE5 games and seemingly so too does games made in Unity.
This isn't strictly a "console problem" as the Switch 2 version is fine and crucially the PS5 (non pro versions) runs absolutely fine, sticking to around 60. What is really interesting is that currently for Pro owners, if you have PS Plus Premium, it is actually better to stream the game than to play it locally! This is because the streamed version is running off a base PS5. I'm hoping a patch will come soon to stabilise the frame rate, but for now this is a surprisingly workable solution. It's also the first time I used streaming for PS5 games, previously only done so for PS3 games.
Skate Story is primarily the work of solo developer Sam Eng, along with music by Blood Cultures and John Fio. I'm not going to even consider "blaming" him for this oversight. I watched an interview with Eng and he was working on a Mac (a MacBook was predominantly shown) as he developed in Unity. The game launched on Steam, PSN, and Nintendo eShop all on the same day, but crucially, this was also when Steam started a sports themed event. So the release was seemingly designed to coincide with this event for added visibility on Steam. Add to this the demo that was only on Steam it seems clear what the target platform was and that consoles were a secondary consideration.
With this in mind, publisher Devolver Digital should have pushed the console releases back. The issue with the frame rate is not just annoying, for many players it is downright nauseating. This should have been caught immediately in testing. Devolver might also be on the smaller side, but they are old hat now at publishing. Hopefully this can be addressed soon.
Update: the game has now been patched! Read my updated thoughts here.
I was ready to buy the game upon release and was leaning towards getting it for the PS5, but was tempted to get it on Steam where I played the demo for it. However, I was pleased to discover that the game had been added to the PS Plus Extra catalogue, essentially making it "free" to play. I had an idea of how the game felt to play from the demo, which ran well enough on my (non-gaming) laptop, except I was confused as to why the frame rate was so jittery on the PS5 Pro, jumping between 40 and 60. I knew that the Pro had issues with some UE5 games and seemingly so too does games made in Unity.
This isn't strictly a "console problem" as the Switch 2 version is fine and crucially the PS5 (non pro versions) runs absolutely fine, sticking to around 60. What is really interesting is that currently for Pro owners, if you have PS Plus Premium, it is actually better to stream the game than to play it locally! This is because the streamed version is running off a base PS5. I'm hoping a patch will come soon to stabilise the frame rate, but for now this is a surprisingly workable solution. It's also the first time I used streaming for PS5 games, previously only done so for PS3 games.
Skate Story is primarily the work of solo developer Sam Eng, along with music by Blood Cultures and John Fio. I'm not going to even consider "blaming" him for this oversight. I watched an interview with Eng and he was working on a Mac (a MacBook was predominantly shown) as he developed in Unity. The game launched on Steam, PSN, and Nintendo eShop all on the same day, but crucially, this was also when Steam started a sports themed event. So the release was seemingly designed to coincide with this event for added visibility on Steam. Add to this the demo that was only on Steam it seems clear what the target platform was and that consoles were a secondary consideration.
With this in mind, publisher Devolver Digital should have pushed the console releases back. The issue with the frame rate is not just annoying, for many players it is downright nauseating. This should have been caught immediately in testing. Devolver might also be on the smaller side, but they are old hat now at publishing. Hopefully this can be addressed soon.
Update: the game has now been patched! Read my updated thoughts here.