Skate 3 was really the last video game I had the time and interest to sink a lot of time into 'til now. Dang, this game is hard but satisfying when you actually land stuff. The controls and animations are great, and the game looks very good overall, but I'm kind of shocked by how incomplete and unpolished it all is overall. I'm sure I'll spend 99% of my time just skating around and sessioning a ledge, so it's a minor complaint in some ways. I used to be a game developer, so I may just be more critical of that kind of stuff than most of their intended audience.
Its essentially an indie game, they only really had a more complete dev team near the last year of development from my understanding. They started out as 2-3 people using only funding from like government art grants, and some Unreal Engine grant.
The issue is games have gotten so complicated these days. Especially a physics-based game like this. Its that much harder to make a game like this polished when you're working with such a small team, and can't necessarily afford hiring whoever you want.
Their original scope for the game was MUCH smaller than this, but of course feature-creep, a wildly successful Kickstarter, and the never-ending optimism of a passion-project... all lead to it becoming something akin to Skate in scale, when they never initially planned something this ambitious.
At a certain point they had to just decide "Okay this is the 1.0 release" and put a stake in it. They are going to keep working on it. They are actually actively hiring more developers right now.
I'm curious! What games have you worked on? And what made you get out of game development?