Trust me, it was a mess behind the scenes.
The game mode maker used to be far more awesome, it used to have the ability to make completely unique rules (such as making bizarre modes like last person to cross the finish line wins or everyone explodes after 2 minutes
).
The problem was it was full of bugs and very unstable. So they took out a lot and stripped it down to a very limited editor.
Probably the most infuriating racing game to play at first as well with the BS physics and collision detection. It actually got more fun after playing it a while simply because you learn where all the buggy bits of scenery are and how to avoid crashing out thanks to a tiny piece of debris.
Not to mention the irrelevant and waste of a time single player campaign with lazy cutscenes, un-inspiring soundtrack poor track designs....
What used to be nice in the old Motorstorms was that they featured tracks with different routes, so trucks and bikes could go their own unique routes. In Apocalypse there was none of this, so there is very little advantage from using a bike.
I will give it that it was fun game deep down. A competitive 16 player race in multiplayer was pretty fun.
But the game was riddled with problems throughout development and it suffered from quite lazy game design. A bit of a polish would have taken it a long way. I consider it a poor joke that this game is even thought of as "AAA".