Sonic Dream Team could potentially be my final straw for Sonic Team as developers...

[SolidSurgeTT]

1 hour ago, Salamander said:

So it's probably worth prefacing my remarks here by saying that I have never played a 3D Sonic game.  (Actually, that's not true - I played Lost World 3DS, which had 3D gameplay sometimes.)  But my point is I can't personally attest to the poor game feel of 3D Sonic games... though my suspicion of it is exactly why I haven't played most of them.

Anyway, whilst I'm sympathetic to a lot of the arguments made in this thread and the criticism of Sonic Team... right now, it seems a little presumptuous.  The fact is, whilst Sonic Dream Team looks the part in a way games like Frontiers can only dream of... it's not out yet.  None of us have played Sonic Dream Team, we only have a general idea of how its gameplay works.  The fact is, it might be a disaster, or even simply boring.

And yes I know the premise of the thread is "potentially", but I really just think it's a bit too soon to be judging the gameplay like this.  The visuals, maybe.

This thread was made in response to the previews that compared the game to playing Sonic Adventure 2.

[Scritch the Cat]

22 hours ago, Salamander said:

So it's probably worth prefacing my remarks here by saying that I have never played a 3D Sonic game.  (Actually, that's not true - I played Lost World 3DS, which had 3D gameplay sometimes.)  But my point is I can't personally attest to the poor game feel of 3D Sonic games... though my suspicion of it is exactly why I haven't played most of them.

Anyway, whilst I'm sympathetic to a lot of the arguments made in this thread and the criticism of Sonic Team... right now, it seems a little presumptuous.  The fact is, whilst Sonic Dream Team looks the part in a way games like Frontiers can only dream of... it's not out yet.  None of us have played Sonic Dream Team, we only have a general idea of how its gameplay works.  The fact is, it might be a disaster, or even simply boring.

And yes I know the premise of the thread is "potentially", but I really just think it's a bit too soon to be judging the gameplay like this.  The visuals, maybe.

The thing about 3D Sonic is that while the very worst examples of its shortcomings are obviously technical--in other words, Sonic 06--the more persistent shortcomings are conceptual, and people are enthusiastic about Dream Team because its currently visible design evades those infamous pratfalls.

The blanket statement that "Sonic doesn't work in 3D" is presumptuous and easily debunked.  Naturally there are added challenges that come from making a game in 3D, but also perks, and if people can agree that the core gameplay philosophy of Sonic is "Platforming, but fast"--and they should--then one of the constant problems that came with doing that in 2D is that people can't do platforming as well when they're going fast.  They can't see all of what's coming when viewing things from the side, when going fast don't have as much time to react, and while they can use Sonic's speed to leap far, they're always leaps of faith at first.  The SEGA Genesis Sonic games mostly solved this issue by dividing the game into segments, which alternately gave you the rush of moving fast and the more boxy corridors that either forced you to slow down to be more careful and methodical, or encouraged you to slow down after getting there the first time and having an embarrassing accident.  The resulting gameplay is fun in itself but it does somewhat have to compromise and segregate its identity as a fast platformer.  Certainly you'll get much faster at the platforming sections as you get more experienced but you're still never going to be able to go as fast as you can in those segments that are just designed to let you maximize speed and flow through.  But in 3D, where the camera is behind Sonic and you can basically see what he could see, those concerns don't persist; in 3D the moments where Sonic is moving his fastest and the moments where Sonic is platforming can actually be one and the same.  In 3D, it is actually possible to make a Sonic game where you're almost always going fast.

The problem with Sonic Team is that they refuse to, and always have.  For whatever reason--the prevailing theory, based on an expose linked by a disgruntled employee shortly before Sonic Unleashed was unveiled, is that they want to pad out the games' length--ever since going 3D Sonic Team has always forced in peripheral gameplay gimmicks that are much slower than what most people are actually there for.  Early on, thanks mostly to Big the Cat, those gimmicks were mostly linked to other playable characters, so a lot of people demanded Sonic Team get rid of them; note, though, that Tails and Knuckles were not among the ones that got such a backlash.  But then come Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Team actually did get rid of them, but the moment people saw the Werehog, they realized that even if you were only playing as Sonic himself, Sonic Team would just go right to making Sonic himself slow for much of the game, without missing a beat.  So basically, we lost the ability to play as even the other characters we liked playing as, while in the process didn't actually gain what anyone hoped to gain by getting rid of the rest of the playable characters.  The worst of both worlds.

What makes people so much more positive towards Sonic Mania, Sonic Superstars and now Sonic Dream Team is that they give the best of both worlds.  They may not be flawless but they give back the ability to play as multiple characters without any of them interrupting the sort of gameplay most people actually want when playing a Sonic game--except when you're playing co-op, of course.  They have somewhat varied abilities, but all of them still move much faster than most platformer characters would.  Only the last of those may be 3D but it still looks so far like it will maintain that aspect of Sonic game design that worked in the 1990s and still works today.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Scritch the Cat