Will Sonic Team learn from Sonic Dream Team? If they do, what will they improve in games

[Maple Syrup]

It's a small question I thought about today and I want to see what everyone else's responses to it!  For me, it's pretty likely Sonic Team will still try to follow Mario but in case they will decide to be like Dream Team, there will be a few changes in games. First, we will get a variety of playable characters to choose from. AND...Second, we will get introduced to newer zones which are whimsical and unique. But sadly I can't think of any more. What do you think?

Edited November 22, 2023 by Maple Syrup

[Technically Inept]

I mean, we don’t really know that much about Dream Team. And the only thing that has left any impression on me is the art style.

 

Nevertheless, I do enjoy the art style and hope they adapt it one day.

[castell-neath]

The only thing they can learn at this point is whether more games should be apple exclusives in future or not. Until the game drops and they get feedback, who knows??

[Scritch the Cat]

Possibly, but a lot of the things you could argue were examples of them "learning from Sonic Dream Team" could also be argued to be things the series was just going to do anyway.

The multiple playable characters thing, I anticipated was coming as soon as it became obvious what sort of game Frontiers was.  Part of that was that multiple playable characters were reported by some anon who claimed to have played an early build of the game, but more logically, the design of Frontiers just sounded the death-knell of the mindset of "We're going to strip Sonic down and return it to its roots" that had gotten louder and louder throughout the 2000s, which was the mindset that originally drove them to remove the other playable characters.  Of course, in hindsight it's clear to many that a permanently stripped down Sonic was never really Sonic Team's plan; they were willing to take unpopular gimmicks out but they'd always put more in their place, and after players had wised up to that, the only choices that really left them with were to actually start doing what they had just been pretending to be doing, or just stop pretending to be doing it, and they chose the latter.  Now that it's clear to everyone that they're going to keep experimenting with peripheral gameplay gimmicks no matter how many characters are or are not playable, there's no real reason to resent multiple characters being playable.  And even before Dream Team was revealed, it was pretty clear that the whole brand is going all-in on multiple characters as a cornerstone.  It probably isn't back in the 1990s/early 2000s mindset of "just add more characters every game" but it seems to be eager to choose a handful characters that already exis and make those characters permanently important.

As for borrowing from Mario games like 64 and Sunshine, I think there, too, even if we hadn't factored in Dream Team, that would be unsurprising in light of Frontiers, as it signals they definitely want Sonic to be a collectathon of sorts, so why not borrow from the series that invented it?  This bit is a matter of convenience.  Collectathons were invented to compensate for the relative lack of storage capacity needed to put a lot of huge environments in a cartridge-based game, and while technology has advanced to the point that lack of storage capacity is far less of an issue, building a lot of huge environments is still a problem, so it's not surprising to see games resort to reusing environments to cut corners.  In fact, this isn't new to the Sonic brand and even as early as the Adventure series took that approach in the Treasure Hunting levels.  Their gameplay was more directly lifted from Spyro the Dragon, but that game was designed to be Sony's answer to Super Mario 64-like platformers.  The Mario 64 influence is even more obvious in the extra missions the Adventure games gave players, with the one thing making it less obvious being that those were optional.  Still, it's kind of surprising Sonic hasn't gone in deeper to the collectathon mindset sooner, because it's a useful way to compensate for the inherent problem of brevity caused by characters moving a lot faster than most platformer characters.  And because forcing them to slow down has proved pretty consistently unpopular with fans, giving them reasons to retread the same stretches of terrain multiple times seems the better option.  It was done badly in Shadow the Hedgehog and not great in Sonic Heroes, but so many other series have done it well that it's worth another shot.

Edited November 26, 2023 by Scritch the Cat