Skate Suppressed
My real contention with this game is its complete suppression and systematic removal of culture and the sterilization of Skateboarding. You managed to molly-coddle one of the most raw and visceral forms of free and creative self-expression. You know the list, just go play any of the old games, you removed every aspect of the series. This is a Tony Hawk Sandbox rip-off at best. It is not skateboarding.
I have hours and hours in the skate series. I have a love for these games and for skateboarding. When I saw the community involvement, I was really excited, I thought this is how games need to be done as every triple A release has been worse than the last with horrible launches, completely unfinished products, and plain and simple lies in the place of marketing. I commented, I played many of the tests. As they kept coming however, a different game rose out of it. After literal years of playtesting, Skate has proven to be just another misleading, nostalgia-bait based lie of a game.
This is pretty sad work. This game and the mess that it has become is such a failure for EA. This game rips off BlackBox and the original devs, skaters, and PLAYERS who brought this game to life. EA You owe your customers for your success. There are so many shady and ethically awful tactics baked deep into every single asset this corporate shill job of a game. Start with the title. "The award-winning franchise is back!" (Still the tag-line under your official site's link.) Skate 4, your players have named it that, it is that, you purposely jerry-rigged this thing on the bones of the Skate trilogy. I know there is a love here of defacing reality here, but how can you name the fourth game of a series the exact same thing as the first entry and pretend it's something entirely new? This is pathetic.
Btw I noticed that if I view your forums without logging in though I was linking directly from being signed in in the game, the "top liked" comment is one with only 60 likes and its a dev message. After logging in it's an actual player with well over 200 likes. This kind of thing is awful, you are lying without any kind of care to everyone.
Even still you've released it, but it's impossible to criticize, cause "its not finished" but it is. You released Early Access Skate. (which will be out for an indefinite year before real launch?) It is filled to the brim with pathetic and predatory microtransactions. This is just as tantamount to child gambling as any loot box is. The price of your (brief and temporary license rental) should not be decided by the children that play it. They are children. After looking at your roadmap and seeing you are trying to make Skatesassin's Creed via seasonal dlc, I've realized there is no hope that you care about your customers. You hate them. Bitterly. They are just a potentially infinite source of money for you.
As far as the actual game, yeah, the skateboarding is playable, but not even marginally better than skate 3, and clipping issues make it pointless. I enjoyed skateboarding around for a few hours and then realized I had done it all and there was nothing to keep me there. On another note, why in the world did you make the few vapid characters pester the player with poser-like comments? It's very strange. It's also very strange that there is a setting to turn of the recurring comments. It's like you knew how bad it was? There are a few political messages that are obviously being pushed as well and it's made character-customization (one of the most fun aspects of games) very weird, very limited, and not based in reality.
My real contention with this game is it's complete and systematic removal of culture and the sterilization of Skateboarding. You know the list, just go play any of the old games, you removed every aspect of the series. This is a Tony Hawk Sandbox rip-off at best. It is not skateboarding.
