thing is they shouldn't have released it as finished for full price, but stayed in early access some more. but they clearly wanted to stick to the schedule. there's literally nothing in the full release that couldn't be modded in before on pc. it looks slightly nicer in terms of shaders and runs a bit better but that's pretty much it. and you still have to mod the really cool stuff in. for double the price now you get two three glitchy new levels with one having a few famous spots but they are totally lifeless still, one other being a megaramp. animations have changed only subtly and you can choose a few famous skaters as skins for your character or choose clothes and decks that mostly look horrible with a few exceptions. most of the shoes suck, too. so you have to mod it in unless you're on console where this isn't possible.
what is still like beta/ea is basically everything else. basically the same as day one, except you can grab your board, but only if your wheels leave the ground. and you can sort of powerslide which doesn't really work if you want to control your speed. and the skater faces where he goes instead of looking like going fakie when going switch and you have this weird video editor that acts like a ghost, not a real filmer. a lot of stuff in the full release was actually done by modders that are now part of the team. i'm not trying to dunk on the devs. but this game has only seen incremental progress in almost two years.
i still hope it will eventually bloom into a really good game, but i feel like i am having fun because i skate and i make the game work, if i wouldn't skate i probably wouldn't bother with this game because probably wouldn't know what to do and compared to a game of skate it's all a little bit more random control wise, as if you are at the mercy of the level designer to let you grind. as dumb as it is that thps has a grind button, the level designers would at least make sure you could grind what you wanted to grind. in skater xl(and session) there's a lot of spots that look like you are supposed to do a grind but the coding is botched and you can't really do it because you fall through the obstacle or can't lock in or get stuck on texture seams. even if i get the controls down to an artform, the coding in both these games is so shoddy that some spots are almost unskatable, although the level designers clearly put them there to be skated and not just as scenery.
some curbs in skater xl will make you fling full speed ahead at landing after doing a fairly slow grind. or how many grinds look like you actually roll on the curb or how it is hard to just fifty fifty because if your front truck hits the ledge first your character will do a pretend nosegrind or go straight into willy. which is all managable if you try to be more precise, but are things i wished they would have already patched out for the full release. just tons of little annoyances that add up to the game feeling more like it barely makes the sum of its parts but hasn't really made the connection yet.
alright i'm done ranting long ass posts, still hope everyone has fun. this game could be so much more though and my guess is feature creep and then money issues held back development. now they have to sell it for full price so they can work one or two years on making it better because ea pricing won't pay the bills. i actually hope it pays out.