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After what felt like a couple of centuries in the making, EA has finally revived its classic Skate franchise with a new, free-to-play entry in the series. It’s an early-access title right now, so it’s fairly barebones in terms of its presentation, and the live-service aspect has sparked quite a bit of, ah, discussion among longtime fans of the series. But there is one thing that folks seem to be in agreement on with the new Skate: They nailed the feel of skating just like the original games did.

Out of the box, however, it may not feel exactly the way you remember. But there’s a pretty easy solution to that problem in the game’s settings, where certain “assists” are activated by default that make skating a much more forgiving experience. In addition to those must-tweak settings, we have some recommendations for other options related to custom ramps that most players will want to consider, and and audio option related to the game’s narrator that could make your experience just a little less irritating in the long run. Let’s take a look.

Best settings to make new Skate make feel like the old Skate

Navigate into the settings menu, then choose Gameplay, and then tab over to the Assists menu. For the true, old-school Skate experience, turn everything in the difficulty options section down. I did, however, allow myself to keep Allow Fall Height at 1, the middle option, for the sake of sick jumps.

For the truly unforgiving old Skate experience, turn all these options all the way to the left.

But wait, there’s more! Below that you’ll also find On-Board Helpers, and it’s the same story here as it is above: turn them off. But if you’d like to ease yourself into it, you can leave on Prevent Low Air Spins, which makes it a little easier to maintain control at high speeds by preventing you from turning yourself when you’re bouncing slightly. But eventually you’ll want to turn that one off too.

These On-Board Helpers can make your skating time easier if that’s what you’re into.

There’s also an Off-Board Helpers section at the bottom of this menu, but you can do whatever with those since those settings make it easier to get around on foot. You can do far more on foot in this game, like climbing up the sides of buildings, than you could in the old ones, so we endorse anything that makes that go faster so we can get back to skating.

Congrats, you’ve turned the new Skate into the same sort of painful and unforgiving experience that the old games were. But there are a couple other very important settings you’ll also want to know about before too long.

Turn off other people’s quick-drop ramps

The new Skate brings back and improves upon one of Skate 3’s best features: the ability to place ramps and other objects anywhere you want in the world with a couple of button presses. The downside of this, however, is that this new Skate is an always-online game in which the world is constantly filled with other players, and they can also place ramps wherever they want, too. Knowing our fellow gamers the way we do, it’s not hard to imagine a number of different scenarios in which folks might be really irritating with their ramp powers.

Fortunately, this problem can be wrangled quickly in a way that you probably didn’t even know existed since you can’t access it from the normal settings menu. To find it, you’ll need to pull up the quick drop menu by pressing right on the d-pad, and then press the Options/Start button to open the quick drop settings menu. Scroll to the Multiplayer section at the bottom. Here you can govern whether you’ll be subject to ramps placed by other players–and, crucially, you can make it so other players can’t mess with the ramps that you place.

Free yourself from the tyranny of random people’s ramps.

Once you’re done with that, there’s still one more setting you may want to keep in mind, particularly in the early goings.

How to turn off the narrator

Throughout your time in Skate, a nice digital lady called Vee runs you through the tutorials and missions as you learn the game and progress through, similar to the cameraman role that Giovanni Reda played in the original three games. Unfortunately, Vee is not as much fun to listen to as Reda was, and she really talks way, way more than she should, often repeating the same message over and over every time you return to your session marker, which is maddening. Fortunately, you can disable her idle chatter completely by turning off Gameplay Vee Comments in the Audio settings menu.

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