Sonic @ SXSW 2019

[Red Hot Jack]

Honestly I don't blame those who are unhappy with the panel, TSR may be good but it's still a filler title, people expected something new as main game already, well it takes time, let's pray it's good (likely not), but in the meantime I'm gonna enjoy this spin-off, it was also about time they showed more of the game, so I'm not complaining. Just… give us an hands on now, for proper gameplay, and from the brand new tracks. Even though it's a filler title, I respect Sumo and SEGA's effort as does everyone, because I can see how hard they worked, but I'm waiting to play it myself to judge it better. I'm not gonna say "yeah it looks good" yet, it's only fair I'm not positive until I play it, but it does look promising.

[Roger_van_der_weide]

Perhaps it's better they delay anouncing the new game.
Forces and Team Sonic racing show how awkward it is to keep fans excited for more then a year of development time if there's little content to tease on a regular basis.

Not to mention I suppose we should be grateful they straight said there's a new game coming, unlike last time where even a simple anouncement as that was stretched over several twitter hints. Nothing says "this game has barely any content" then when the marketing team has to stretch out anouncing it merely existing  and its name over several updates.

And far as I'm concerned, they completely blew their load with Sonic Forces seemingly promising everything I wanted out of a Sonic game and then completely botching it, there's no way a mere trailer or proof of concept is going to give me anything more then sceptism and low expectations. They've gotta show something substantial to get me excited for the new game. Because at this point I cynically expect anything remotely interesting they promise to be wasted potential at best and mental manipulation at worst.
 

[JezMM]

Really don't understand the entitlement to a new Sonic game like... development takes time, they're working on it but it's not ready to show yet.  Expressing disappointment that they didn't announce the next mainline game "properly" is kind of like expressing disappointment that they aren't working faster than what they are (of which we have no idea how development of the next title is operating).  And if not then you're expressing disappointment that... time has not passed?  Things take time. They have a lot of catching up to do on TSR promo anyway, so announcing what's coming after would be handicapping that even more.

 

But anyway, on a positive note, TSR still looks like a decent little spin-off, the soundtrack having 130 songs was a big surprise considering there's only 20 tracks confirmed for the game... even if there's like 10 menu songs and 20 cut-scene songs or whatever, where's that all coming from?  Maybe the story mode has a bunch of bespoke music for particular missions, which'd be kind of neat.  They really went all out.

Highlight was definietly TSR Overdrive though, which was thoroughly enjoyable on all fronts.  The character animation wasn't QUITE to SMA's standards (but they were very high standards, to be clear), but that was presumebly partially due to the length and all the extra stuff like vehicle animation making things complicated.  Luckily the goofs more than picked up the slack, I'd actually say it made me laugh more often and harder than SMA did.  Really great stuff.

[Rowl]

9 hours ago, Meta77 said:

They are now acting like they need this game to sale.

But why suddenly now? There was a big gap between the first announced and real marketing. The trailer they showed us yesterday is technically the first real trailer that showed us only gameplay. No cinematic cutscenes or music.

[Badnik Mechanic]

Sorry but... Why on earth did anyone think that there would be some earth shattering announcements from this event?

 

They were never going to show the movie at this event, we knew who the panellists where weeks ago and there was nobody from Paramount on the panel, movie content is very rarely live streamed at events due to international laws regarding ratings on trailer footage. So the concept of even showing a still from the movie was extremely unlikely, let alone a trailer.

They have a game coming out very soon, TSR, yeah it might not be your cup of tea, but they're certainly not going to over shadow the launch of that by suddenly announcing another huge game before it. They didn't even show much of Forces until after Mania came out.

This isn't a full on press conference, it's a panel, the Mania Plus announcement was a huge exception compared to the trend of these things, normally they're very low key to mid tier announcements, Comic book news, merchandise news, new trailer for pre-existing game. 

The animation reveal, again it was very predictable that this would be shown, granted I got it wrong in that I was sure it would be Mania Adventure's season 2. But again, the panellist was the woman who was the producer on the show, whose entire CV is around TV material... Of course they were going to talk about animation, at the most you should be anticipating a new animation announcement. 

Jun was there, so of course there was going to be some music discussion and news... sure enough there was. 

 

But... Look at who wasn't on it...

 

There were no game producers.

There was nobody who was synonymous with just pure game development (other than Iizuka). 

There was nobody from a specific game development team who is known for specific work.

 

Some people are going to say 'What about Iizuka?' Yeah Iizuka works a lot at SOA now since it's becoming the main hub for Sonic. Why would he not be at the panel if he's going to be in the US at that time? He likes to go to these things if he's around.

 

Sega didn't promote the event itself too much outside of a few tweet replies all of which hinted that it would be TSR news. The only time they made a big announcement about it was a few hours before hand, and it doesn't even suggest 'future of Sonic' or anything along those lines.

 

Literally the only people who hyped this up beyond what it was going to be were a few internet personalities looking for clicks, and a handful of fans.

 

If you went into this putting emotion aside and not buying into the fan clickbait... The panel was GOOD. It might even have been a very good panel. 

They talked and gave a lot of details about the previous year, they showed new footage and info about TSR which by jingle has now got @Tracker_TD somewhat interested into the game! It was actually pretty good footage and the customisation is far deeper than anyone expected. We saw some pretty good tracks, especially compared to what's been shown since.

We got confirmation of a new animation which is a made in the same spirit of Mania Adventures which has been universally well received. They showed not just a small clip, but pretty much an entire episode.

New merch available worldwide (mostly), which was immediately able to buy, again so far it looks like it's been very well received.

New music tracks shown, not my cup of tea, but a lot of people even critics of the track choices agreed that the music was better than they were expecting.

 

But based on who was at this panel... People who found it disappointing... what did you honestly think they would say?

[Red Hot Jack]

1 hour ago, Rowl said:

But why suddenly now? There was a big gap between the first announced and real marketing. The trailer they showed us yesterday is technically the first real trailer that showed us only gameplay. No cinematic cutscenes or music.

Wrong, they showed that team gameplay spotlight at gamescom last year that went unnoticed. That was full gameplay but only 2 tracks. The team aspect is really underrated IMO, I get that it may not work for single player but they had a lot of time to improve it, so I honestly want to expect something good out of this, if it's not I'm gonna be disappointed.

About the track amount, screw what I said, I'm expecting 16 brand new tracks like any regular game, even like MK8 without DLC, sans Crash obviously which is a remaster with some new tracks. I'm okay with that.

Content is okay for a 35 bucks game. I just want it to be enjoyable honestly.

[Wraith]

I didn't want to buy team sonic racing and now I kinda want to buy it  so I think they did alright. That was really all I wanted and we got the short on top of it

If anything I feel like they should focus a little more on having something special for people in attendance since I havent felt like I've missed much watching live yet  I'm sure the meet n greet part is fun, though. 

[Dr. Detective]

I was already gonna buy TSR, despite my bitching about the roster and the track selection. I never said the game looked bad at any point. I only complain because I care. Some would say, I care a little too much. I won't buy a game I seriously thought looked like trash or wasn't something I felt was going to be a substantial enough experience.

As for the panel, I kind of figured they were making a new game anyway so it being announced that they were obviously wouldn't do too much for me. I understand that this technically wasn't an official game announcement so there was no real need to show anything. I'm not bothered by it.

At the same time, I can't say I've been anticipating their latest game after Forces turned my cynical meter up to 11. Sonic Forces was a game that had the plot I wanted out of a Sonic game for over 10 years and it utterly wasted it. Had that game been made in the 2000s, they would have gone all out with it and people would have hated that (because that's what was happening at the time) but whether it was written well or played competently or not, I feel its almost a guarantee that I would have gotten more out of it there. 

If I'm curious about anything, it's what possibly could follow up something like Forces for them? Once you pop the cap off the "Eggman finally took over the world" bottle and let it fizzle out, how do you one-up that? I'm guessing you don't. Perhaps it'll just be another Sonic Colors thing where they go on some random comedy tour again. 

Who knows? I'm mostly just itching to see just how out of ideas they truly are. I can think of plenty to do and I'm sure a lot of talented people out there can as well but this corporate machine seems to be running dry on a lot of things, especially ideas. What could it possibly be at this point? 

[Marco9966]

The next game will have Modern and Classic Sonic as playable characters. Infinite will return for revenge. Tails used the last phantom ruby he had to bring Classic Sonic back to help Modern Sonic beat Infinite. The two go on an a big adventure in zones like Angel Island, Emerald Coast and Seaside Hills. It's likely that Classic Sonic will be in Modern Sonic's world for at least 3-4 modern games before returning to his dimension and be playable in Mania 2.

Spoiler

Who thinks SEGA is likely to do this?

 

[PublicEnemy1]

3 hours ago, Marco9966 said:

Who thinks SEGA is likely to do this?

I don't think they are going to use Infinite again in any major capacity. Ian said that he's not even allowed to use Infinite, which leads me to two reasons:
1. They are saving Infinite up for a later title.

2. Infinite is dead.
My cynical side says it's 2, since SEGA disposes almost all of their game-centric villains that are not Eggman or the Zeti (Mephiles, Black Doom, etc.). It's like they expected Infinite to catch on but he didn't and now they don't want to reference him again.

Because SEGA's logic is "If something fails once, why bother to fix it? Let's torch it and pretend it never happened."

[Multikaris]

16 minutes ago, PublicEnemy1 said:

I don't think they are going to use Infinite again in any major capacity. Ian said that he's not even allowed to use Infinite, which leads me to two reasons:
1. They are saving Infinite up for a later title.

2. Infinite is dead.
My cynical side says it's 2, since SEGA disposes almost all of their game-centric villains that are not Eggman or the Zeti (Mephiles, Black Doom, etc.). It's like they expected Infinite to catch on but he didn't and now they don't want to reference him again.

Because SEGA's logic is "If something fails once, why bother to fix it? Let's torch it and pretend it never happened."

The Zeti failed too, and one of them’s still used as party fodder.

[Meta77]

Most likely this game will play out like past games for me in the racing series. Though its still not on par to transformed for me. I will play the game. Beat it. get all the achievments within a month or two. Play online for a few times. Get first place and then put it on my shelf after around 3 months to only touch it during holidays . Unless they have strong STRONG dlc