Where are we going from here?
So i played the pre-alpha as part of the skate.insider-team and i was stunned by how good it actually felt. I was amazed by the mechanics and how well the tricks look. I thought that if they give it more time in development it will be an awesome new sequel. However, EA decided to put the game out there for everyone as an early access-free2play-game and i have to say out of my opinion: That was the wrong move to do. Why?
- There is simply not enough content
If you‘ve done your challenges but still want to improve your RIP- or Store-Score you literally have to wait for the next shuffle which in my case is currently 6 hours. For the meantime there is nothing really to do than skating around the streets. Throwdowns doesn’t give you any reward which is making them obsolete. There is no S.K.A.T.E.-Mode as in previous games of this franchise, there are no campaign-challenges, no photo/video challenges, no deathrace-challenges. That’s a big bummer. Also the Map of San Van is pretty small. Of course due to parcour-mechanics there is potential for more areas BUT the city as it is right now is a joke compared to the sizes of the map of the previous skate-games.
- Where is the Story-Line?
While in skate1 you started as an amateur you had to do so much to become a pro. In skate2 you got in an accident and now you have to work your way back into the limelight. In skate3 you‘re building up your Board Company. In the current skate: Nothing. There you are in San Vansterdam and now go skate. Really?! That’s it?! If so, it’s boring as hell. What about maybe having to build the best skatepark in the workd? It’s not a big of an idea but at least better than having nothing.
- What kind of performance is this?!
As i was playing in pre-alpha i was cool with bugs and glitches such as getting ported underneath the map and have to restart the game, not being able to start a challenge because the game doesn’t give me the prompt for that, „go back to session marker“ wont leave my screen until i restart the game and things of that nature. Now since the game is in early access all those listed above are still a thing + playing multiplayer is terrible. I cannot count the amount of times me or my buddies had to restart the game because of a bug/glitch that prevented us from proceeding or the game just crashed/black screened on us. There is a lot of room for improvement on this front for sure.
- My Conclusion
In my opinion this game should’ve never been dragged to early access that early because of the state it’s in right now. There is a lot of things missing, in my opinion crucial things like story line & content to keep the game alive on the long run. „Now we have the salad“ as we say in germany and EA needs to step in & step up. This game deserves much more love and attention from its creators and i really hope that there is more content coming in the future AND i hope that the devs somehow are able to add a story line for making the game more interesting. If it‘s staying that way i don’t see a bright future for that game honestly. I‘d love to see this game becoming the game we as skate-community always wanted.
cheers.
