Team Sonic Racing - E3 Demo Footage/Impressions

[Marco9966]

12 minutes ago, Jack the Maniac said:

I don't think the graphics look anywhere near as bad as people are saying, it's definitely NOT like Lost World at all, it looks more of a compromise like Forces looked, which is not as detailed as Generations, but still pretty to be honest. 

Gameplay also looks solid, the team mechanic could be fun... even though I'm not a fan of teamwork, previews seem excited so I'm really not worried, and it's made by Sumo, people shouldn't try too much to find things to complain about, even though I can understand some concerns.

And for me it has already a better roster already than any SEGA crossover, c'mon, it has been done 3 times before, we haven't had a proper Sonic spin-off in a long time, if they did the SEGA treatment it would be basically the same roster as ASR, I just want to play as my favorites again, since they are getting a lame treatment in main games and crossover spin-offs. 

It looks it's gonna be good honestly. Fingers crossed, but so far the previews are positive.

100% agree

[Detective Kaito]

Sonic Forces in general is a lot better when it comes to its artstyle compared to Forces, but you can still see a lot of Lost World influence.

[Marco9966]

Just now, Detective Kaito said:

Sonic Forces in general is a lot better when it comes to its artstyle compared to Forces, but you can still see a lot of Lost World influence.

Lost World was awful! Worst graphics ever. But at least we're moving away from that style, even in Team Sonic Racing  it's not that bad, it looks not over detailed, but not over simplistic and flat as Lost World.

[Blue Blood]

While Forces and TSR are nowhere near as simplistic as Lost World, all three games emphasise bold colours with minimal texture detail and a soft look. The artstyle isn't 100% identical between the games, but to say that they're nothing alike is a blatant lie.

[Jango]

Not feeling this. Doesn't look bad, but doesn't look great either. Graphicaly speaking, it's a step down from Transformed, the Sonic Lost World-esque art style doesn't help either... unless the demo gameplay is from, say, the Switch version, I think even Transformed on the PS3 looked better. Musicaly speaking, sounds like a very short loop track, granted you can barely hear all that well with the constant blabling... Which is pretty bad. The blabling is fine in racing games like these, but these lines are just... Awful.

The fact that I've called exactly what two team mechanics are (according to the previews) is kinda concerning, as they're not all that "new" or creative IMO. Switching itens with your teammates and a double boost system is all so... Predictable. I even called that the Rocket Wisp was going to work as a homing missile, and looking at the gameplay, it is just that.

Speaking of which, gameplay looks slow... Maybe it's running on easy, but who knows. 

Back to the team mechanics, forcing you into teams is annoying as hell, developers gotta understand that this isn't freaking Overwatch or Call of Duty, there won't be all that many people playing this game online for long... Also this: even if you finish first, you can't win if your team sucks and get in 6th or 7th place apparently? Is this for real? So if I'm playing single player, I'll have to babysit the AI? Jesus Christ. I hope there's a traditional racing mode where I'm not forced into this bullshit. This smells like Sonic Team.

And finally, the lack of SEGA characters is annoying, but that's beating a dead horse...

[Marco9966]

13 minutes ago, Jango said:

Back to the team mechanics, forcing you into teams is annoying as hell, developers gotta understand that this isn't freaking Overwatch or Call of Duty, there won't be all that many people playing this game online for long... Also this: even if you finish first, you can't win if your team sucks and get in 6th or 7th place apparently? Is this for real? So if I'm playing single player, I'll have to babysit the AI? Jesus Christ. I hope there's a traditional racing mode where I'm not forced into this bullshit. This smells like Sonic Team.

And finally, the lack of SEGA characters is annoying, but that's beating a dead horse... 

They don't have to be so slow the other teammates, I'm gonna wait till the game releases before I can make a judgement on this gameplay.

If it's good, I hope it's successful online.

[Jango]

22 hours ago, Josh said:

Simply put, you can't win as an individual by just being the best racer; if the team doesn't do well, then nobody does.

Except you don't have to wait untill the game is out, the previews says exactly that, @Marco9966

[Detective Kaito]

Yeah I hope there's a regular racing mode too.

No one has specified if you only need to reach the end in 1st place to win or your teammates need to be 2nd/3rd place, cause if it's the former, why would I bother giving items to my teammates if I can just use it for myself to stay in 1st place? And if it's the latter, then the AI is gonna suck.

[cakito123]

3 hours ago, Bobnik said:

Upon watching several times, I found another thing I don't like - I understand why cars looks glossy, but why the hell does Sonic look so plastic-y when under sunlight? He looks more like a live toy than anything, and it's annoying me a bit. Heck, it's even noticable on Shadow in the screnshot above. I hope that won't be the case in the full game, but for now characters look like plastic toys than live characters

I mean, people were saying the franchise has gone too edgy...

...get it? no? ok, I'll see myself out

I noticed that too and I totally agree

Another thing I didn't like is how the cars are enourmous, they steal completely our attention from the characters itself -  all you can see from Tails when he is driving for example is his tails flying around. and with Shadow, his car has the same color pallete from him - he is basically invisible in all of that machinery and glossyness. 

[Meta77]

The focus should be on the car itself more than the characters entire body. It helps on drifts to know the size and corners cutting

The focus should be on the car itself more than the characters entire body. It helps on drifts to know the size and corners cutting

[Marco9966]

You guys make it sound like it's impossible to play this game as team.

Back in the day I thought Sonic Heroes would be impossible to play due to the fact that we control 3 characters, but it turned out simpler than that.

For Sonic Riders I thought it'd be impossible to play too because how am I gonna accurately go to the air turbulence and do tricks? But it turned out simpler than that.

 

[Jango]

5 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

You guys make it sound like it's impossible to play this game as team.

Back in the day I thought Sonic Heroes would be impossible to play due to the fact that we control 3 characters, but it turned out simpler than that.

For Sonic Riders I thought it'd be impossible to play too because how am I gonna accurately go to the air turbulence and do tricks? But it turned out simpler than that.

 

One gameplay has nothing to do with the other, especially in Heroes' case :V

 

[Marco9966]

3 minutes ago, Jango said:

One gameplay has nothing to do with the other, especially in Heroes' case :V

 

No I mean in general, when I heard "you play 3 characters at same time" I thought it's impossible and hard, when I heard "you go to the air turbulence and do different tricks" I thought it's impossible.

So when we hear about this game's gameplay of course it sounds hard, but let's wait till the game releases and try it.

[Tracker_TD]

After watching all the footage and stuff, my thoughts are as follows:

+ Wisp Circuit splitting into three at the start is a pretty neat idea

+ It's Sumo so it's probably going to play pretty dang nicely at least

+ I appreciate the Rad Mobile reference greatly

+ Visually it's grown on me somewhat since the first footage dropped. Buuut...

- ...aesthetically it feels somewhat generic. Not even just based on the more Lost World-y style, I just think it looks bland. It's got a bit of a plastic look to it, I guess? "Generic" also goes for the track design - I guess it could be because it's an opening track, but after Forces we all know that's no guarantee and even Mario Kart 8's first track had more going on.

- Items killing all of your momentum dead looks clunky. I suppose other games technically do this, but here it feels really blatant - and I'm fairly sure ASRT didn't do it quite as harshly as this, either. 

- The sense of speed really isn't there. I get that they could've been playing on a 50cc of sorts, but that's a very odd first impression to want to make. I would've at least released some B-Roll footage of a higher speed class to put those concerns to bed a tad. 

+ / - The team element sounds iffy. I'm not completely gonna write it off yet, because I want to see more of how it could be utilised, but at the moment it just sounds somewhat oddly thought out and as someone who plays a lot of solo, I don't like the idea of being punished for the AI doing poorly. 

+ / - I'm glad the characters have some fresh new voice lines, but fucking Christ do they ever shut up? I understand there'll probably be a means of muting them in the full game, but I don't even necessarily want that - I'm fine with banter during races, but as it stands there's just way too much. 

+ / - The music doesn't sound particularly memorable, but I wouldn't say it sounds bad either. I could see it growing on me once we get a clean listen.

+ / - Items as Wisps are a cool idea, but the sight of bulky Blue Cubes everywhere looks kind of ugly. I suppose this ties into my aesthetic complaints.

- Goddamn it the lack of SEGA characters/stages still stings. With Iizuka even saying in a French interview he wanted more SEGA IPs in the ASR games than Sonic, I'm just baffled why they've axed one of the things that helped Sonic's kart racer stand out. Now it just feels kind of sterilised. 

So yeah, I'm iffy on this. I'm sure it'll play fine, but for these kinds of games I feel like it needs more than that. Additionally I somewhat miss the variety the transformations offered, controversial as they were. It's something I can see myself buying more readily than Forces (especially since according to Amazon, this is once again a budget title) but it'll be somewhat begrudgingly. I think I can be swayed on this though, and hopefully this is just a first impression gone a bit dodgy. 

[Jango]

34 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

No I mean in general, when I heard "you play 3 characters at same time" I thought it's impossible and hard, when I heard "you go to the air turbulence and do different tricks" I thought it's impossible.

So when we hear about this game's gameplay of course it sounds hard, but let's wait till the game releases and try it.

Nobody is saying it sounds hard, but forced and too gimmicky.

[Bobnik]

43 minutes ago, Tracker_TD said:

- Items killing all of your momentum dead looks clunky. I suppose other games technically do this, but here it feels really blatant - and I'm fairly sure ASRT didn't do it quite as harshly as this, either. 

In ASRT some items did punish you somewhat hard, but you could avoid most of the stuff, and even if you got hit, you were able to recover with some sort of speedboost, either on a track or using an item. In TSR though, for some reason you can't recover from a hit - in Shadow's gameplay portion he got hit pretty much at the boost pad, yet when he got hit, he didn't recover and just stopped dead. That I found more iffy and I hope this gets fixed

Also I hope you're able to actually dodge items, like in ASRT.

[Natie]

8 hours ago, Detective Kaito said:

you can be more detailed like Generations and have stylization/good color design/readability at the same time.

You've been sayin that, but the issue is I don't see how the Planet Wisp in this game isn't that exact compromise...? The simplification is fairly slight and its still detailed and pretty and fits on a current gen system. I'd like to see you to go into detail on what you think looks bad on it cuz I can only really assume it just comes from a "realism = better" standpoint (which is a stigma that I could live without). Havin a little bit cartoonier mountains hardly takes away from the HD look.

[Detective Kaito]

8 minutes ago, Natie said:

You've been sayin that, but the issue is I don't see how the Planet Wisp in this game isn't that exact compromise...? The simplification is fairly slight and its still detailed and pretty and fits on a current gen system. I'd like to see you to go into detail on what you think looks bad on it cuz I can only really assume it just comes from a "realism = better" standpoint (which is a stigma that I could live without). Havin a little bit cartoonier mountains hardly takes away from the HD look.

It's just kind of a preference thing, I find it really hard to explain. To me, Planet Wisp in TSR looks like a downgrade, but I totally understand why you think it might look fine or even better than Generations.

[Plasme]

I'm actually really excited for this and I'm surprised by the general negativity in the fanbase. While I understand that Transformed was an excellent game, I do think it had some issues. While transforming was a really cool idea, I don't think the boat and plane gameplay were as fun in practice and well developed as the karts. The boat was frustrating to drift with because of how far you had to drift in the sea, the drifting wasn't really designed with boating in mind. And fuck me if you could drift with the plane, that seemed impossible to me. Tricks were cool while flying (and flying generally is cool), but I always thought my control and skill was taken away when flying because of how baffling the air drifting was. It's that classic problem where you split development time between multiple unrelated gameplay styles, and no style is fully fleshed out. In fact, I think the kart racing was more polished and fun in Sega All Stars Racing than in Transformed. 

And in regards to the art style, I'm aware that this is very subjective, but I personally like Lost World's style. And I think Team Sonic Racing's style is far more interesting than Forces and Lost World. The game is really vibrant while still being able to interpret and doesn't rely on a small number of primary colours as rigidly as Lost World did. The lighting is also really striking and beautiful. Again, this is very much a matter of opinion, but I think Team Sonic Racing is far more interesting than Forces' art style, where I didn't see people complain as much (well, not to the same degree).

Ripped low quality from the video, but I think this illustrates what I'm saying above somewhat.

And in terms of the teamwork angle, I think that could be irritating if it isn't handled well, but from what I've seen, the game seems to be put together really well. I think it's interesting and sets the game apart from Mario Kart though. And honestly, if they wanted to make a good teamwork focused game, I'd prefer them to dedicate the whole game to it. I always find it too much of vision meeting practicality halfway when developers try to make team modes in an otherwise solo designed experience. It will also massively complement online play, since team multiplayer experiences are typically more popular than solo ones. And I would love to have a solid online Sonic experience (and the focus on this IP could definitely handle it better than the All Stars games, especially if the game is designed with online as a primary focus).

Honestly, the only aspect of the game which has let me down so far has been the audio. I don't like the music very much and the sound quips sound awful. But then SUMO Digital has always been poor at the audio side of things.

 

 

 

[Marco9966]

-Racing? check

-Sonic only characters? check

-Multiple Sonic characters playable again in a main game? check

-Story? check

-Online gameplay? check

-Graphics better than Lost Worlds but not overrealistic at the same time? check

-Rock music? check

-No classic Sonic? check

I have little or no negativity towards this game, quite the contrary I'm hyped.

[Muscles Maximum]

18 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

-Racing? check

-Sonic only characters? check

-Multiple Sonic characters playable again in a main game? check

-Story? check

-Online gameplay? check

-Graphics better than Lost Worlds but not overrealistic at the same time? check

-Rock music? check

-No classic Sonic? check

I have little or no negativity towards this game, quite the contrary I'm hyped.

This is not a main game

[Marco9966]

3 minutes ago, Strong Guy said:

This is not a main game

For me it is. From the moment it has a story and is set in familiar places it is. (for me)

[Muscles Maximum]

Just because it fits your arbitrary definition of main game (for you), doesn’t mean it’s actually a main series game. 

[Marco9966]

1 hour ago, Strong Guy said:

Just because it fits your arbitrary definition of main game (for you), doesn’t mean it’s actually a main series game. 

I just said "for me"

[Dejimon11]

Pros

-Wisp being used as items is a good idea and it's better than the generic ones that they had in the previous racing games

-Omega is basically the car

-The transformation gimmick is gone. I know A lot of people really liked it but it personally it really made the game feel unfocused.

-The game has a story mode

-Jun's back

Cons

-The characters never shut up. I hope that you can turn off the voices

-The roster. The lack of the non SEGA characters not being there I already made peace with that a while ago. It's the fact that there's only 15 characters which is small for a racing game and there's a lot of sonic characters that they can add so limiting it to that number is baffling.  It doesn't help that Sumo's previous games don't allow 2 people to play as the same character when racing online

-The team mechanic