Sonic Forces | PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC "The Next Generations"

[Wraith]

9 minutes ago, Kuzu the Boloedge said:

 

EDIT: Ya know, come to think of it. Why is it that every time this series attempts to be remotely complex, it fucking sucks? Is it a curse? Is every single writer who's worked on this series that incompetent? What the hell is it about this series that prevents it from having anything resembling good writing? It's actually somewhat vexing. I've never seen any other series suffer from this as badly as Sonic.

The writers just haven't been great. Sonic is a gameplay focused series first so they probably put more thought into that and leave the story as an after thought. Combine that with Sonic Team's tendency to rush things and I don't think you can get much out of the writers.

[Kuzu]

4 minutes ago, Josh said:

The writers just haven't been great. Sonic is a gameplay focused series first so they probably put more thought into that and leave the story as an after thought. Combine that with Sonic Team's tendency to rush things and I don't think you can get much out of the writers.

That's the thing though; How hard is it? "Blue hedgehog and his friends beat up mad scientist trying to conquer the world." How do you constantly fuck up such a simple premise, it's literally the plot of a standard children's adventure movie. It's not hard to make those remotely entertaining. It takes a special kind of suck to fuck up that premise, and by god Sonic Team sure the suck the most at it lol.

[Diogenes]

2 minutes ago, Josh said:

Sonic is a gameplay focused series first so they probably put more thought into that

Do they, though?

I feel like a big part of it is the series' lack of identity. That doesn't explain poor writing on the small scale, but it's why everything's so scattershot and disconnected on the large scale. There's nothing solid to ground a story in, it's like working from scratch every time but without the authority to determine what the fundamental nature of the work is supposed to be.

[Wraith]

7 minutes ago, Kuzu the Boloedge said:

That's the thing though; How hard is it? "Blue hedgehog and his friends beat up mad scientist trying to conquer the world." How do you constantly fuck up such a simple premise, it's literally the plot of a standard children's adventure movie. It's not hard to make those remotely entertaining. It takes a special kind of suck to fuck up that premise, and by god Sonic Team sure the suck the most at it lol.

I mean, they haven't straight up tried a simple premise in a while. When the writing gets going, it's always something more complex than "Sonic vs Eggman", and when it is simple they don't try to make it interesting. 

 

 

[Celestia]

31 minutes ago, Kuzu the Boloedge said:

That's the thing though; How hard is it?

It isn't, they just don't exactly get the best writers. Bad (or unfitting for that particular series) writers can mess up even the simplest of premises.

[Kuzu]

Just now, Celestia said:

It isn't, they just don't exactly get the best writers. Bad (or unfitting for that particular series) writers can mess up even the simplest of premises. There are countless examples of this outside of Sonic.

But are they consistently as bad as Sonic though? I can't think of a single franchise that's as continuously bad as Sonic tends to be on average.

[Celestia]

Just now, Kuzu the Boloedge said:

But are they consistently as bad as Sonic though? I can't think of a single franchise that's as continuously bad as Sonic tends to be on average.

God dammit I was too slow in editing that out

Uhhhhhhh I guess the main example I can think of is Pokemon. The premise is pretty simple but it's rare that the writing is actually, particularly good, even if we count adaptations. Tho' in fairness it mostly only stands out when they actually try to do something interesting and it falls flat...which is also true of Sonic (people aren't big fans of Colours or Generations, writing wise, but LW is when people really turned on the current writing team).

[Kuzu]

1 minute ago, Celestia said:

God dammit I was too slow in editing that out

Uhhhhhhh I guess the main example I can think of is Pokemon. The premise is pretty simple but it's rare that the writing is actually, particularly good, even if we count adaptations. Tho' in fairness it mostly only stands out when they actually try to do something interesting and it falls flat...which is also true of Sonic (people aren't big fans of Colours or Generations, writing wise, but LW is when people really turned on the current writing team).

That's true, but Pokemon doesn't usually try as often as Sonic d-nvm, everything past Gen II has attempted this shit, my bad. It's mostly forgettable in certain cases I feel, aside from egregious examples (Gen VI and VII arguably) 

But I feel like it's a different roller-coaster with Pokemon than Sonic; Pokemon started off simple and gradually got complex with time and age. While Sonic did the same thing first, but then went back to simple, and now back to complex again.

[Celestia]

In any case, my point is that it's really just an unfortunate coincidence. As tempting as it might be to think so, there's not some fundamental flaw with the series or anything that prevents it from having good writing, SEGA's just bad at hiring good / fitting writers, let alone caring enough to make sure things turn out well.

"Never attribute to bad luck that which is adequately explained by bad writing and SEGA not giving a damn," or something.

[Kuzu]

So what can be done to rectify this beyond simply "write good".

[The drunkard from space!]

All this topic has amounted too so far is Sonic Sucks Vs No He Doesn't!

Anyway, based off the small amount of gameplay footage I've seen, I'm so glad the boost formula is back as it's a formula I really like! I do hope they add a few more alternate routes and some exploration sections to harken back to the older games but I doubt so given that the developers have to sacrifice development time to work on two other gameplay styles rather than focus on one style and let it grow naturally.

[D.K.]

12 hours ago, Kuzu the Boloedge said:

So what can be done to rectify this beyond simply "write good".

Get a writer that actually knew what Sonic was before being offered the job.

People don't want Ian Flynn to write for Forces just because they wanna see the Freedom Fighters in it. They want Ian Flynn to write for Forces because he's the only person working on official Sonic stuff nowadays that understands how to write an unironically gripping story with Sonic and company.

Graff and Pontac could play every single Sonic game a hundred times over and they still wouldn't be able to write a story as well as Flynn.

[RictalRose0]

4 hours ago, Kuzu the Boloedge said:

EDIT: Ya know, come to think of it. Why is it that every time this series attempts to be remotely complex, it fucking sucks? Is it a curse? Is every single writer who's worked on this series that incompetent? What the hell is it about this series that prevents it from having anything resembling good writing? It's actually somewhat vexing. I've never seen any other series suffer

I consider the Adventure series to be fairly complex. Well, maybe Sonic Adventure 2 got a little contrived but the first one that has a simpler plot works just fine. There's an ancient evil, Sonic and Co. have to stop it. In the way fullfiling their own goals. 

Sonic Adventure 2 gets a little complicated with the writing but I consider it memorable for what it did.

The "Sonic Storybook" series also has some of the best writing of the series and that gets slighty complex too. 

Sonic Chronicles is also pretty good, some shady characterization of Sonic aside.

4 hours ago, Josh said:

I mean, they haven't straight up tried a simple premise in a while. When the writing gets going, it's always something more complex than "Sonic vs Eggman", and when it is simple they don't try to make it interesting. 

 

All the Pontaff games have been fairly simple and used that plot and people shit on them non-stop. Colors and Generations can attest to that. Lost World is the only time they actually tried something slighty more complex but that also sucked.

[TheLaw34]

Zeena was cute. and I suppose since it's common to make female monster characters more human she turned out to have the most appealing design out of the bunch. I remembered her being more annoying but that clips actually wasn't that bad. Sonic was written worse than she was to be honest.

Anyway, I stick to what I said before. All they have to do is write good and act good. Whether they are using old characters, new characters, Comedy or or edge, simple like colors or complicated like maybe 06 seems irrelevant to whether the story is enjoyable. Sonic is perfectly capable of having a good story no matter which direction it goes, as long as the writing isn't shit.

If they can't manage to have good writing, good acting and good animation the least they could do is go back to the genesis days and make it pretty much non existent.

Right now all I really want gameplay wise is sonic to have a proper kick. I don't like that he always has these strange feeling rough house kicks or awkward sliding dash. I'm not asking for a beat em up but if you are putting in a melee attack why not make it one that doesn't feel like shit.

On another random note since this post is already long if I were in control of this game I would put the jump and stomp button on the bumpers so you that you can utilize proper camera control.

[RictalRose0]

5 minutes ago, TheLaw34 said:

If they can't manage to have good writing, good acting and good animation the least they could do is go back to the genesis days and make it pretty much non existent.

The genesis games had more story that the Pontaff games tbh. 

[StaticMania]

6 minutes ago, TheLaw34 said:

Right now all I really want gameplay wise is sonic to have a proper kick. I don't like that he always has these strange feeling rough house kicks or awkward sliding dash. I'm not asking for a beat em up but if you are putting in a melee attack why not make it one that doesn't feel like shit.

Lost World already had a kick though...and Unleashed had a useless sweeping kick. They aren't that awkward to use, just unnecessary.

 

3 minutes ago, RictalRose0 said:

The genesis games had more story that the Pontaff games tbh. 

They had more...u-u-urgency...not necessarily more "story".

[RictalRose0]

Sonic 3 & Knuckles had a pretty well crafted story for a game of it's time. Sonic CD's story is also pretty good, simple, but good.

[TheLaw34]

16 minutes ago, StaticMania said:

Lost World already had a kick though...and Unleashed had a useless sweeping kick. They aren't that awkward to use, just unnecessary.

1

Lost world had something that was more of a modified homing attack. It was not just useless it was awkward and just felt bad to use. You can have a move in a game that is shitty but still feels good to use. 

[BlueFlare]

22 minutes ago, RictalRose0 said:

Sonic 3 & Knuckles had a pretty well crafted story for a game of it's time. Sonic CD's story is also pretty good, simple, but good.

Agree with you here and that's what I love in those two classic games. They let you envision part of the story yourself.  For a 3D Sonic game like Forces it would feel weird to go with a speechless approach since we're not really used to it.

[Darinian]

Well, I dunno if I missed this cause I might not go back 30 MORE pages to catch up, but I did notice how in the only two jumps in the 40 seconds I watched sonic actually traveled a bit farther than usual. Could be just some random afterthought by them but it could be the start of better momentum jumping.

[Ajavalo]

Well, another thing I got from that trailer is that boost energy seems to be scarcer than ever. Either that or the player didn't want to boost too much in order to better show the visuals and background events. But if they indeed want to take focus away from the boost, we could get more interesting level design.

Also, more focus on platforming was advertised at the panel (that wasn't the case for Generations, if I'm not mistaken), and we have a few media articles to back that up.

[Bowbowis]

I just thought of this, but do you guys realize that Forces is going to be the series' first 3D platformer since Unleashed (almost ten years ago!) where the setting is actually Sonic's Earth and not some other planet/dimension/universe?

[RictalRose0]

To be honest these last nine of so years have felt really empty and kinda dead. Sonic Boom was the biggest shake up in almost a decade, and it died just as soon as it rose. Well, least we got a pretty good TV show out of it.

 

[Spooky Mulder]

39 minutes ago, Bowbowis said:

I just thought of this, but do you guys realize that Forces is going to be the series' first 3D platformer since Unleashed (almost ten years ago!) where the setting is actually Sonic's Earth and not some other planet/dimension/universe?

Generations doesn't count?

[Wraith]

6 hours ago, BlueFlare said:

Agree with you here and that's what I love in those two classic games. They let you envision part of the story yourself.  For a 3D Sonic game like Forces it would feel weird to go with a speechless approach since we're not really used to it.

I feel like at their core Sonic 3 and Sonic CD are pretty focused as to what they want to be about. The way Sonic CD in particular works fleshing out it's world and conveying it's message into it's gameplay mechanics is pretty great, and Sonic 3 pretty much gives you every reason you can think of to want to beat down Knuckles and Eggman by the end, going as far as to have them set you back in the levels themselves or haphazardly destroy the environments altogether. I'd love to have THAT sonic team back.