Megathread Sonic Frontiers (2022) | MT | General Discussion (DO NOT discuss leaks here please)

[Scritch the Cat]

36 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

If people are going to complain no matter what, I fail to see why that should be a deterrent. 

In the form stated it would be a lot of extra programming, AI and scripting for a feature likely to be divisive.  You can never please everyone but if you’re going to put in that much effort you’d likely be better off putting it towards elements that will have more people who like it, like more levels, as opposed to a split between people who hate it and people who just don’t care.

[Kuzu]

13 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

In the form stated it would be a lot of extra programming, AI and scripting for a feature likely to be divisive.  You can never please everyone but if you’re going to put in that much effort you’d likely be better off putting it towards elements that will have more people who like it, like more levels, as opposed to a split between people who hate it and people who just don’t care.

So you agree that the other characters aren't worth the effort ans should just be cut altogether huh

[Zoomzeta]

45 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

In the form stated it would be a lot of extra programming, AI and scripting for a feature likely to be divisive.  You can never please everyone but if you’re going to put in that much effort you’d likely be better off putting it towards elements that will have more people who like it, like more levels, as opposed to a split between people who hate it and people who just don’t care.

Define levels in an open world game? Cause in this game's context, they would be more akin to dungeons. 

[Scritch the Cat]

1 hour ago, Kuzu said:

So you agree that the other characters aren't worth the effort ans should just be cut altogether huh

Don't go twisting my words, you troublemaker, and I'm pretty sure you know that's not what I meant.

For what it's worth, when it comes to Sonic Team as it has existed for over a decade, I'm not sure if anything is worth the effort.  I don't expect them to put in the requisite effort to make anything truly impressive; even if some in their employ want to I wouldn't expect them to allot the time and money needed.  Everything they've done since 06 is simply too underwhelming for my tastes.  Boost fundamentally contradicts how I feel Sonic himself should play in 3D, though ironically enough I really like the other moves he's gained in the Boost era, so when even Sonic himself plays wrong, why even care one way or the other about anyone else?  Of course, that is only considering gameplay.

Considering narrative, well, I have a simple rule of thumb for how I judge game narratives: A narrative's quality has to scale with its presence.  An extremely simple plot is usually fine for video games because it's usually not shoving that simple plot in my face or devoting any vacuous dialogue to it.  So to give an example, "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle" is not "good" dialogue by any metric, but the fact that it isn't a huge, slowly-crawling wall of text devoted to that premise means there's nothing to resent about it.  On the other hand, I actively dislike most of the dialogue in most Pokemon games.  Too much it is about nothing else besides Pokemon, too much of it is about tournaments, and in the instances it gets into ostensibly meaningful moral and philosophical implications, it's often just the same few shallow ones on loop.  Pokemon is a series I feel truly does not work well for many serious narratives, and I actually wish its Internet presence and writing got a bit more like meta-era Sonic's as a result. 

So now that we're back to Sonic, opinions will certainly vary on this but for me, Sonic Adventure 2 falls on the right side of a narrative's entertainment value being to scale with its presence; however, Sonic Adventure 1...not even close.  It's the sort of thing I thought was somewhat interesting at first but the fact that even after the game constantly putting itself on hold to tell the story, I still had to look up a synopsis online to understand it, is pretty hard to excuse.  And while again, opinions will vary on these things, I don't think anyone here is going to defend how cutscenes in the original are unskippable or the unrealistically long pauses between some lines.

As pertains to characters, the truth I accept about just about every story, Sonic or otherwise, video game or otherwise, is that the more you have in a story, the harder it is to write all of them well. However, it shouldn't hard to write characters who aren't outright obnoxious.  Though note, merely being uninteresting turns into being obnoxious when I'm made to sit through lots of it.  Pokemon, most specifically Pokemon Masters, is again a big punching bag for me here.  I definitely would rather not have a Sonic game try to give every character a huge role in a narrative, but nothing really annoys me about the characters being there as living exposition signs.  Nothing about them annoys me in Sonic Generations, and while them being Sonic's cheerleader squad is pretty lame in a vacuum, it makes sense for a game about Sonic having a birthday party.

The problem I have with SEGADogTagz's suggestion in particular, beyond that I often don't like seeing those characters as villains, is that I personally tend not to like "nuisance" characters.  Villains are fine, of course; you practically need villains for adventure stories, but the sort of character who just gets in the way of the good vs evil struggle I signed up for tends to earn my ire.  I'm not necessarily alone on this; a lot of people hate the rabbit and the monkey in Super Mario 64, while none of them really hate Bowser.

In the Sonic series as it currently exists, all of the above is functionally irrelevant, because the writing of almost every character is tedious-to-obnoxious anyway.  Sonic himself, with how energetic and expressive he is, can easily become one of the most obnoxious characters in his own series if writers aren't careful, and Pontaff are not careful; they are by their own admission not Sonic fans so they don't worry much about whether their version of Sonic is entertaining or punchable.  The one character they consistently write well is Eggman, and I think that's mostly because they can make him their mouthpiece for their own mean-spirited sense of humor, but this series can't just be trimmed down until Eggman is the only character. 

Of course, Flynn is now the game writer apparently, so my opinion might change.  But then you still have to consider SEGA's utterly idiotic mandates placed on all creators; some of which are directly contradicted by their own games.  Frankly I don't trust Sonic Team not to botch other characters, but again, when I also don't trust them not to botch Sonic himself, what is that even worth?  If that video posted recently is anything to go by, what we thought of as Sonic Team is dead anyway, so why expect anything good from them?  If whoever passes for Sonic Team now doesn't want to make Sonic games, I also don't want them to make Sonic games.  Let that be done by people who are still enthusiastic about the series, like Taxman/Stealth.

31 minutes ago, Zoomzeta said:

Define levels in an open world game? Cause in this game's context, they would be more akin to dungeons. 

Levels are a more general suggestion.  But adjusting to the genre's mores, I think you can get my point.

[ComeAsYouAre]

Eggman is hard to fuck up because of how perfect he is for the series and his contrast with Sonic. He can be comic relief and a serious threat in the same scene. 

 

Everyone else on the other hand are easy to mess up, even with Ian flynn on board, let's not forget that even he couldn't fix the King Shadow arc

[Kuzu]

4 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Don't go twisting my words, you troublemaker, and I'm pretty sure you know that's not what I meant.

For what it's worth, when it comes to Sonic Team as it has existed for over a decade, I'm not sure if anything is worth the effort.  I don't expect them to put in the requisite effort to make anything truly impressive; even if some in their employ want to I wouldn't expect them to allot the time and money needed.  Everything they've done since 06 is simply too underwhelming for my tastes.  Boost fundamentally contradicts how I feel Sonic himself should play in 3D, though ironically enough I really like the other moves he's gained in the Boost era, so when even Sonic himself plays wrong, why even care one way or the other about anyone else?  Of course, that is only considering gameplay.

Considering narrative, well, I have a simple rule of thumb for how I judge game narratives: A narrative's quality has to scale with its presence.  An extremely simple plot is usually fine for video games because it's usually not shoving that simple plot in my face or devoting any vacuous dialogue to it.  So to give an example, "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle" is not "good" dialogue by any metric, but the fact that it isn't a huge, slowly-crawling wall of text devoted to that premise means there's nothing to resent about it.  On the other hand, I actively dislike most of the dialogue in most Pokemon games.  Too much it is about nothing else besides Pokemon, too much of it is about tournaments, and in the instances it gets into ostensibly meaningful moral and philosophical implications, it's often just the same few shallow ones on loop.  Pokemon is a series I feel truly does not work well for many serious narratives, and I actually wish its Internet presence and writing got a bit more like meta-era Sonic's as a result. 

So now that we're back to Sonic, opinions will certainly vary on this but for me, Sonic Adventure 2 falls on the right side of a narrative's entertainment value being to scale with its presence; however, Sonic Adventure 1...not even close.  It's the sort of thing I thought was somewhat interesting at first but the fact that even after the game constantly putting itself on hold to tell the story, I still had to look up a synopsis online to understand it, is pretty hard to excuse.  And while again, opinions will vary on these things, I don't think anyone here is going to defend how cutscenes in the original are unskippable or the unrealistically long pauses between some lines.

As pertains to characters, the truth I accept about just about every story, Sonic or otherwise, video game or otherwise, is that the more you have in a story, the harder it is to write all of them well. However, it shouldn't hard to write characters who aren't outright obnoxious.  Though note, merely being uninteresting turns into being obnoxious when I'm made to sit through lots of it.  Pokemon, most specifically Pokemon Masters, is again a big punching bag for me here.  I definitely would rather not have a Sonic game try to give every character a huge role in a narrative, but nothing really annoys me about the characters being there as living exposition signs.  Nothing about them annoys me in Sonic Generations, and while them being Sonic's cheerleader squad is pretty lame in a vacuum, it makes sense for a game about Sonic having a birthday party.

The problem I have with SEGADogTagz's suggestion in particular, beyond that I often don't like seeing those characters as villains, is that I personally tend not to like "nuisance" characters.  Villains are fine, of course; you practically need villains for adventure stories, but the sort of character who just gets in the way of the good vs evil struggle I signed up for tends to earn my ire.  I'm not necessarily alone on this; a lot of people hate the rabbit and the monkey in Super Mario 64, while none of them really hate Bowser.

In the Sonic series as it currently exists, all of the above is functionally irrelevant, because the writing of almost every character is tedious-to-obnoxious anyway.  Sonic himself, with how energetic and expressive he is, can easily become one of the most obnoxious characters in his own series if writers aren't careful, and Pontaff are not careful; they are by their own admission not Sonic fans so they don't worry much about whether their version of Sonic is entertaining or punchable.  The one character they consistently write well is Eggman, and I think that's mostly because they can make him their mouthpiece for their own mean-spirited sense of humor, but this series can't just be trimmed down until Eggman is the only character. 

Of course, Flynn is now the game writer apparently, so my opinion might change.  But then you still have to consider SEGA's utterly idiotic mandates placed on all creators; some of which are directly contradicted by their own games.  Frankly I don't trust Sonic Team not to botch other characters, but again, when I also don't trust them not to botch Sonic himself, what is that even worth?  If that video posted recently is anything to go by, what we thought of as Sonic Team is dead anyway, so why expect anything good from them?  If whoever passes for Sonic Team now doesn't want to make Sonic games, I also don't want them to make Sonic games.  Let that be done by people who are still enthusiastic about the series, like Taxman/Stealth.

If this is the type of attitude you have, just torch the entire franchise and be done with it. If everything sucks and nobody can do anything good, then it's better to just let it all die.

[Scritch the Cat]

7 hours ago, ComeAsYouAre said:

Eggman is hard to fuck up because of how perfect he is for the series and his contrast with Sonic. He can be comic relief and a serious threat in the same scene. 

 

Everyone else on the other hand are easy to mess up, even with Ian flynn on board, let's not forget that even he couldn't fix the King Shadow arc

Ian Flynn or anyone else is going to “fuck up” on some things if they’re saddled with stupid mandates like “Team Dark aren’t friends”.  Modern Shadow being depicted as a stuck-up asshole because the Internet can’t stop laughing at “Where’s that damn fourth Chaos Emerald” and “This is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me” may not drastically worsen the Sonic series, but it DOES make it harder to do anything with the character that ISN’T asshole comedy.
 

What’s so weird about this era of Sonic is that the people running the show aren’t running away from their most hated moments the way they did right after 06; rather they like calling back to them in goofy ways because they seem to want to feel like the whole world is laughing WITH the Sonic series and not AT it.  This is an era where Big the Cat has gone from the textbook case of a bad peripheral character to one of the characters people both in SEGA and following the series celebrate the most, simply because meme-fuel is such a key thing the series runs on.

So of course, the version of Shadow they gravitate towards now isn’t the one that was written by his actual creator; it’s the foul-mouthed prick from his widely despised self-titled game.

[Zadent]

2 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

So of course, the version of Shadow they gravitate towards now isn’t the one that was written by his actual creator; it’s the foul-mouthed prick from his widely despised self-titled game.

This always makes me laugh, because….he’s not like his self-titled game. He didn’t “dislike friendship” or just constantly try to be superior to Sonic outside of one ending (plus, iirc the game only seems out-of-the-norm because the localizations of the other games don’t normally have cursing, but the Japanese has had it?).

like..his self-titled game..actually ends with him moving forward and not being edgy, and points him to ‘06. People just like to cherry pick the chaos emerald line, guns, cursing in general, and “this is like taking candy from a baby” (which was a stinkin’ common metaphor for something just being easy?). They just wanted Shadow to be a rival for rival reasons and him being stronger being the only goal he has.

[Coz483]

14 hours ago, Kuzu said:

Video Games are functionally different mediums from Comics or Movies. Games need to be designed around the Gameplay AND the story, whereas Comics and Movies do not have to work around the former period, only the story matters in a comic or film. A comic or film can focus on any other set of characters and not really suffer too much for it depending on the genre. A video game cannot do that. 

What you're talking about would ONLY work under the assumption that gameplay matters less in a Video game than the story, and I hope I don't need to tell you why that isn't true. The main places where having a large cast of characters in a video game works are RPG's, Musou Games, and Multiplayer games like Fighting or Racing games. Sonic is a platforming series where historically, those games almost have always centered on one singular character. The Mario series revolves around Mario, Mega Mega revolves around Mega Man, and Sonic revolves around Sonic. Sure each of those franchises have had additional playable characters, but none of them to the levels of having over 10.  The most playable characters that have been in a main Mario game was four. 

Expecting Sonic to cycle through 15 recurring characters as the main focus, is shortsighted. It's not an excuse. If anything, it makes me think you don't really understand how game design works in the slightest. 

I think a big problem with having an interesting story with more characters who do stuff in a Sonic game is that these are platformers that are only 2-8 hours long, so you can only have cutscenes BB e so long. Another thing is how a lot of character interactions and moments will be limited by the short runtime, but judging on how some characters get praised in specific games even though they barely have any screentime maybe people won't care as much.

8 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Don't go twisting my words, you troublemaker, and I'm pretty sure you know that's not what I meant.

For what it's worth, when it comes to Sonic Team as it has existed for over a decade, I'm not sure if anything is worth the effort.  I don't expect them to put in the requisite effort to make anything truly impressive; even if some in their employ want to I wouldn't expect them to allot the time and money needed.  Everything they've done since 06 is simply too underwhelming for my tastes.  Boost fundamentally contradicts how I feel Sonic himself should play in 3D, though ironically enough I really like the other moves he's gained in the Boost era, so when even Sonic himself plays wrong, why even care one way or the other about anyone else?  Of course, that is only considering gameplay.

Considering narrative, well, I have a simple rule of thumb for how I judge game narratives: A narrative's quality has to scale with its presence.  An extremely simple plot is usually fine for video games because it's usually not shoving that simple plot in my face or devoting any vacuous dialogue to it.  So to give an example, "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle" is not "good" dialogue by any metric, but the fact that it isn't a huge, slowly-crawling wall of text devoted to that premise means there's nothing to resent about it.  On the other hand, I actively dislike most of the dialogue in most Pokemon games.  Too much it is about nothing else besides Pokemon, too much of it is about tournaments, and in the instances it gets into ostensibly meaningful moral and philosophical implications, it's often just the same few shallow ones on loop.  Pokemon is a series I feel truly does not work well for many serious narratives, and I actually wish its Internet presence and writing got a bit more like meta-era Sonic's as a result. 

So now that we're back to Sonic, opinions will certainly vary on this but for me, Sonic Adventure 2 falls on the right side of a narrative's entertainment value being to scale with its presence; however, Sonic Adventure 1...not even close.  It's the sort of thing I thought was somewhat interesting at first but the fact that even after the game constantly putting itself on hold to tell the story, I still had to look up a synopsis online to understand it, is pretty hard to excuse.  And while again, opinions will vary on these things, I don't think anyone here is going to defend how cutscenes in the original are unskippable or the unrealistically long pauses between some lines.

As pertains to characters, the truth I accept about just about every story, Sonic or otherwise, video game or otherwise, is that the more you have in a story, the harder it is to write all of them well. However, it shouldn't hard to write characters who aren't outright obnoxious.  Though note, merely being uninteresting turns into being obnoxious when I'm made to sit through lots of it.  Pokemon, most specifically Pokemon Masters, is again a big punching bag for me here.  I definitely would rather not have a Sonic game try to give every character a huge role in a narrative, but nothing really annoys me about the characters being there as living exposition signs.  Nothing about them annoys me in Sonic Generations, and while them being Sonic's cheerleader squad is pretty lame in a vacuum, it makes sense for a game about Sonic having a birthday party.

The problem I have with SEGADogTagz's suggestion in particular, beyond that I often don't like seeing those characters as villains, is that I personally tend not to like "nuisance" characters.  Villains are fine, of course; you practically need villains for adventure stories, but the sort of character who just gets in the way of the good vs evil struggle I signed up for tends to earn my ire.  I'm not necessarily alone on this; a lot of people hate the rabbit and the monkey in Super Mario 64, while none of them really hate Bowser.

In the Sonic series as it currently exists, all of the above is functionally irrelevant, because the writing of almost every character is tedious-to-obnoxious anyway.  Sonic himself, with how energetic and expressive he is, can easily become one of the most obnoxious characters in his own series if writers aren't careful, and Pontaff are not careful; they are by their own admission not Sonic fans so they don't worry much about whether their version of Sonic is entertaining or punchable.  The one character they consistently write well is Eggman, and I think that's mostly because they can make him their mouthpiece for their own mean-spirited sense of humor, but this series can't just be trimmed down until Eggman is the only character. 

Of course, Flynn is now the game writer apparently, so my opinion might change.  But then you still have to consider SEGA's utterly idiotic mandates placed on all creators; some of which are directly contradicted by their own games.  Frankly I don't trust Sonic Team not to botch other characters, but again, when I also don't trust them not to botch Sonic himself, what is that even worth?  If that video posted recently is anything to go by, what we thought of as Sonic Team is dead anyway, so why expect anything good from them?  If whoever passes for Sonic Team now doesn't want to make Sonic games, I also don't want them to make Sonic games.  Let that be done by people who are still enthusiastic about the series, like Taxman/Stealth.

Levels are a more general suggestion.  But adjusting to the genre's mores, I think you can get my point.

"Trouble maker" we are not in cartoon. You shouldn't go around saying goofy stuff like that if you want people to listen to you.

3 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Ian Flynn is anyone else is going to “fuck up” on some things if they’re saddled with stupid mandates like “Team Dark aren’t friends”.  Modern Shadow being depicted as a stuck-up asshole because the Internet can’t stop laughing at “Where’s that damn fourth Chaos Emerald” and “This is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me” may not drastically worsen the Sonic series, but it DOES make it harder to do anything with the character that ISN’T asshole comedy.
 

What’s so weird about this era of Sonic is that the people running the show aren’t running away from their most hated moments the way they did right after 06; rather they like calling back to them in goofy ways because they seem to want to feel like the whole world is laughing WITH the Sonic series and not AT it.  This is an era where Big the Cat has gone from the textbook case of a bad peripheral character to one of the characters people both in SEGA and following the series celebrate the most, simply because meme-fuel is such a key thing the series runs on.

So of course, the version of Shadow they gravitate towards now isn’t the one that was written by his actual creator; it’s the foul-mouthed prick from his widely despised self-titled game.

I watched the Forces cutscenes with Shadow, and aside from the loser comment he was handled pretty well, just didn't get to do much in a lackluster story. Also in Forces Team Dark are still friends so I'm wondering if the mandates are just for the comics and spinoffs but I dunno.

[Zoomzeta]

4 hours ago, Coz483 said:

I think a big problem with having an interesting story with more characters who do stuff in a Sonic game is that these are platformers that are only 2-8 hours long, so you can only have cutscenes BB e so long. Another thing is how a lot of character interactions and moments will be limited by the short runtime, but judging on how some characters get praised in specific games even though they barely have any screentime maybe people won't care as much.

"Trouble maker" we are not in cartoon. You shouldn't go around saying goofy stuff like that if you want people to listen to you.

I watched the Forces cutscenes with Shadow, and aside from the loser comment he was handled pretty well, just didn't get to do much in a lackluster story. Also in Forces Team Dark are still friends so I'm wondering if the mandates are just for the comics and spinoffs but I dunno.

I think they don't pay much attention to their own mandates at times. 

Anyhow, to that first post, I say the direction to this new game definitely allows for a more tangible and lengthy story to be forged. But we'll have to see how this goes.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

15 hours ago, Kuzu said:

So you agree that the other characters aren't worth the effort ans should just be cut altogether huh

Why not just make them optional instead?

[Scritch the Cat]

17 minutes ago, CrownSlayer’s Shadow said:

Why not just make them optional instead?

Pragmatically, that’s viable if they play similarly enough.  But if they don’t, then even though being optional keeps them from ruining anyone’s fun, it does require the developer to spend more time developing them.  Though I personally would far rather they spend a lot of time doing that than just spending the bulk of a game’s development time on a new lighting engine that doesn’t make it look all that much better than its predecessors.

[Scritch the Cat]

20 hours ago, Kuzu said:

If this is the type of attitude you have, just torch the entire franchise and be done with it. If everything sucks and nobody can do anything good, then it's better to just let it all die.

Snipping as usual, I see.  I didn't say everything sucks and nobody can do anything good. It's hard to judge whether the people currently at Sonic Team are as talented as people there in the past, but there's no reason to believe they're beneath the industry standard.  However, the problem has never been primarily about the developers' talent; rather it's a matter of ethics.  As awful a trainwreck as Sonic 06 was, if it had been the last time a momentous release was botched technically, then I think people would have moved on by now.  They may or may not be fond of the series' conceptual direction, but if there had been no more disasters like that then I and many others would have a lot more faith whenever we hear they're experimenting with a new idea, because we'd expect them to give it the time and resources it needs by the time it's released, and if they couldn't, just not release it on time.  But this is not how history has gone; we've been cockslapped again by Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, and I'm strongly tempted to also include Sonic Colors Ultimate here, because even if it's not as glitchy, it seems less acceptable to botch something that is already a completed game...that, and while 06 and SBRoL may have more glitches, last I checked none of them can give you seizures.

So while most of what's happening with Sonic now doesn't fill me with rage, it's very hard to be optimistic because everything about the series I would want to love, I'd just expect to be ruined by the people running the show, after which they'd blame the idea and throw that out, in their usual fashion.  So I say again, as depressingly underwhelming as Sonic Forces and Team Sonic Racing were, I almost think it's better for this brand's reputation if the games don't aim any higher than that, because I'm still able to enjoy peripheral media like the Paramount movies, Tyson Hess's cartoons and the IDW books.  Chances are good enough that I'll also enjoy Sonic Prime and whatever they call the Knuckles series, and the best I expect from SEGA itself is managing not to ruin Sonic's reputation again and poison that well.

16 hours ago, Coz483 said:

"Trouble maker" we are not in cartoon. You shouldn't go around saying goofy stuff like that if you want people to listen to you.

I'm not calling Kuzu that because I believe in resorting name-calling, and if I did I know many worse names.  I'm calling him that because for several days he's been attempting to bait me into accepting that my preferences for the series are a regrettable fluke that shouldn't exist, and selectively ignoring anything that shows me as more rational than he wants to let on that I am.  And since I'm getting cherrypicked anyway, why shouldn't I call a troublemaker a troublemaker?

[Scritch the Cat]

Now, regarding Kuzu's declaration that these debates are happening at all because SEGA was obsessed with looking cool and chasing dollars, and kept overhauling their series as what "cool" is changed, well, I do agree with that one; in fact I made a thread about it.  But it shouldn't be my responsibility to renounce what I like just because it wasn't what Sonic was originally conceived as, especially not when what it has become since also isn't what Sonic was originally conceived as; it should be Sonic Team's burden to get out of the factionalized mess they made, and when it seems they don't learn from these mistakes and only keep making the factionalized mess bigger, well, add that to the reasons I have no faith in the series.

[Cosmos Rogue]

10 hours ago, CrownSlayer’s Shadow said:

Why not just make them optional instead?

Adding characters to games takes a lot of work hours. You have to design the character, model the character, animate the character, design and balance their moveset, cast an actor for them, write and record dialogue (even if it's just the things they say when they complete a level in response to getting different ranks), actually program all of this into the game, and probably a bunch of other work I don't know about. Any time spent adding something to a game is time not spent working on something else. Sonic has always been a series that places a priority on high replay value, and I think having multiple playable characters should be a part of that again, but going back to the days of 6+ playable characters is probably a suboptimal use of resources, especially if many players will never engage with many of them because they're optional.

[Scritch the Cat]

On 5/15/2022 at 1:20 PM, Kuzu said:

One of the biggest reasons I think they didn't do that was because many of the old guard from the Classic days were gone or on their way out, so I guess they just felt it was easier to march forward with their own thing. 

The funny thing about it is that Nintendo, for a while, we're doing exactly that; you had main Mario games, Paper Mario if you wanted more focus on characterization, and Mario & Luigi if you wanted more world-building. Then the latter two kind of died out, and in the case of  Paper Mario, actively started to dry up in terms of creativity. If you look at a lot of the complaints about Paper Mario, they mirror a lot of the complaints about Sonic.

I've heard somewhere that Shigeru Miyamoto bullied the Paper Mario team into downplaying plot, causing Sticker Star to be worse as a result, and that sort of killed the enthusiasm from there.  But there's still a lot more subsets of the Mario series than the Sonic series.  Mario Kart never goes away, nor do the main Super Mario games, nor do the Yoshi games, and while it's been a while since last New Super Mario Bros game, there's no good reason not to expect it back.

Sonic hasn't really done as much in that regard, but with how much SEGA is whoring him out to do collaborations with other franchises, I often wonder why not.  With LEGO, Minecraft and Roblox Sonic actually being closer to what many fans would prefer Sonic be in 3D--that is, less restrictive--it feels like there's a gold mine that's been open for years but SEGA has only barely touched it.  For that matter, I'm pretty surprised that after Sonic Mania was this brand's biggest success in over a decade, it has taken this long to get another Classic Sonic game, and even then, it's not even a new one.  There is a reasonable chance that if they kept releasing more such games, eventually people would get as nonchalant towards them as they got towards the New Super Mario Bros games, but I think there was room for at least one more Classic Sonic game that had all new levels, and knowing that Sonic Mania was supposed to be all new levels before Iizuka forced the retreading makes that sting all the more. 

There are indeed some times where doing something many fans want, like playing as Tails in 3D, is too tricky for Sonic Team to consider worth the risk, but there are also many times when it would be easy to give fans more than they have.

[Scritch the Cat]

On 5/15/2022 at 1:56 PM, Dr. Detective Mike said:

Cause it's true. If SA2: B and Heroes didn't happen I wouldn't be a Sonic fan. I wouldn't have met all of you. I wouldn't have taught myself how to draw. I probably wouldn't be as obsessed with narrative and creative looking worlds and environments either. The trajectory of my life had those games no enchanted me is impossible to fathom. Yet, at the same time, those games that gave my fandom life probably alienated a lot of people from the same fanbase.

You know what I find interesting about Sonic Adventure 2 , in retrospect?  It's usually the primary game that era's fans cite as an example of what they love most about it, and of what we lost when SEGA decided strip the series down, but it's also the first example of them stripping the series down to improve it.  While it technically had the same amount of playable characters (in story mode) as the first Sonic Adventure, it removed half of the gameplay styles from that game and refined what was left; plus it lumped them into three-person teams so it could cut the narrative down into just two separate stories and a group finale, and most notably, cut out the Adventure fields in favor of a more Classic-like stage progression.  More controversially, some would also consider that game the first time they retooled Sonic's 3D levels to be more linear.  But at the time, it all seemed to work!

However, I'd still argue there's a big difference between what was done in Sonic Adventure 2 and what was done post-06, and as interpret it, that difference stems from pretty different attitudes.  The cuts and tweaks made to SA2 had gameplay in mind, and they did seek to improve upon the first Sonic Adventure but it never felt like they were disowning that first game.  They pretty clearly decided not to even try to make traditional flying Tails work in 3D the second time around, but there was no hatred of Tails as a character; you still got to play as him in some form and his development in Sonic Adventure was kept very much in mind in the game's plot.  Big the Cat was cut as a playable character because he simply wasn't fun to play as, but they maintained the humor of the character by having him do random stuff from the sidelines.  Amy was playable again in Multiplayer, while Tikal and Chaos 0 were playable for the first time there.  Because at the time they had no fundamental opposition to playing as Amy or Big, in any form, we got to play as them again in the singleplayer mode of Sonic Heroes; just retooled so their gameplay flaws in Sonic Adventure no longer applied.  But after 06, it feels like instead of starting with a vision for better gameplay and deciding what to cut out and what to keep and refine based on that vision, they threw out the rest of the characters as priority one and then tried to figure out how to make gameplay with that new paradigm in mind.  People who know more about Sonic Unleashed are welcome to correct me on this if they know better, but back then, almost immediately after seeing the Werehog, one of my first thoughts was "This could just be Knuckles."

13 hours ago, Cosmos Rogue said:

Sonic has always been a series that places a priority on high replay value, and I think having multiple playable characters should be a part of that again, but going back to the days of 6+ playable characters is probably a suboptimal use of resources, especially if many players will never engage with many of them because they're optional.

I definitely don't think they should shoot for that many the next time they decide to have more characters playable.  For what this is worth, we've already crossed the threshold of other playable characters being playable and not being optional, in the form of Classic Sonic and the Rookie, and it's kind of hard to judge how well the majority of players took that when the overall reception to Sonic Forces was so lukewarm.  But with the second Sonic movie being so widely beloved and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars, and a big part of what people love about it being the addition of Tails and Knuckles, it seems like it's high time to stop assuming their being playable in a game would repel more people than it attracts, meaning the only reason to avoid doing so would be that it's hard to design levels their abilities don't break.

Also, even if you had to nerf their abilities to make them viable, I'd wager that for the scores of newcomers whom the movie attracted in, that wouldn't matter much at all. 

[Diogenes]

4 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

People who know more about Sonic Unleashed are welcome to correct me on this if they know better, but back then, almost immediately after seeing the Werehog, one of my first thoughts was "This could just be Knuckles."

Knuckles doesn't stretch and the werehog doesn't glide. A lot of people have tried to equate the two but I don't think it amounts to anything more than "the werehog's a fighty guy, Knuckles is a fighty guy, so they're the same".

Even if they were more similar I'm not big on framing it as if they must use an existing character if they can, as if a game about Sonic dealing with a curse is invalid just because they could've shoved Knuckles in there instead.

[StaticMania]

This is why story doesn't matter.

[BadBehavior]

On 5/15/2022 at 4:15 PM, Kuzu said:

You have no idea how much I appreciate this video for actually pointing all of the problems these games were facing and why exactly they weren't perfect. No rose tinted glasses, just putting the truth out. It's the most honest analysis of the 1999-2005 era I've seen.

 

Hoping we get some kind of video like this for the Forces years. No way in the 7 hells did that game have a normal development.

[Zoomzeta]

Just now, BadBehavior said:

Hoping we get some kind of video like this for the Forces years. No way in the 7 hells did that game have a normal development.

You mean the years post 2006?

[Cosmos Rogue]

34 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Knuckles doesn't stretch and the werehog doesn't glide. A lot of people have tried to equate the two but I don't think it amounts to anything more than "the werehog's a fighty guy, Knuckles is a fighty guy, so they're the same".

Even if they were more similar I'm not big on framing it as if they must use an existing character if they can, as if a game about Sonic dealing with a curse is invalid just because they could've shoved Knuckles in there instead.

Yep. While the Werehog was a bad idea on its own merits, it does demonstrate how treating the preexisting cast as a checklist of features that ought to be included in each game would have limited the gameplay and narrative possibilities of Unleashed.

[BadBehavior]

Just now, Zoomzeta said:

You mean the years post 2006?

Well basically after Generations. The stories of the 2nd Dark Age are there, they just need deciphering and investigating with an eye at the Sega-wide context, much like that video did with Sonic's struggles in the 2000s.

[Cosmos Rogue]

1 hour ago, Scritch the Cat said:

I definitely don't think they should shoot for that many the next time they decide to have more characters playable.  For what this is worth, we've already crossed the threshold of other playable characters being playable and not being optional, in the form of Classic Sonic and the Rookie, and it's kind of hard to judge how well the majority of players took that when the overall reception to Sonic Forces was so lukewarm.  But with the second Sonic movie being so widely beloved and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars, and a big part of what people love about it being the addition of Tails and Knuckles, it seems like it's high time to stop assuming their being playable in a game would repel more people than it attracts, meaning the only reason to avoid doing so would be that it's hard to design levels their abilities don't break.

Also, even if you had to nerf their abilities to make them viable, I'd wager that for the scores of newcomers whom the movie attracted in, that wouldn't matter much at all. 

So we're restricting ourselves to no more than six playable characters per game. We want the most popular characters in the series to be playable: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, presumably Shadow, and maybe Amy. We'd also probably like to add new characters from time to time. How much space does that leave for the expanded cast?

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

14 hours ago, Cosmos Rogue said:

Adding characters to games takes a lot of work hours.

Then make them a planned DLC. We’re not in 2006 anymore.