8ther

If Scalebound is indicative of anything, it's that MS doesn't have a lot of fortune trying to tell eastern studios what to do. I can't see them trying it.

Well…he tried.

People hated them due to Fallout 76 (among other things). People still bought Fallout 76 in droves.

And Bethesda controlled a lot more than Fallout.

It’s more about the precedent it has the potential to set going forward to me more than Bethesda itself(tho still fuck Bethesda with their Elder Scrolls Blades and Fallout 76 shit) . Either Microsoft continuing to buy companies, or Sony trying to retaliate are I think real possibilities, neither of which will be helpful to the customer. Also yeah, Bethesda control more than Fallout and ES. Doom and Wolfeinstein also being MS exclusives now is big 

@Tornado “People still bought Fallout 76 in droves.”

Didnt the game like get 3 price drops within like under 3 months?

Bethesda controls 

Fallout

Elder scrolls

DOOM 

Wolfenstein 

These are some of the biggest ips in gaming, not even getting into smaller stuff like dishonored and Prey

Fallout 76 =\= "Sold out in droves".

That's like if someone bought Sega and someone went "Is that really a big deal? Forces sucked"

You can't just ignore... everything else.

I don't mind it much personally because I really don't see them locking Bethesda franchises to only Xbox consoles. I can understand people being concerned with the fact that Microsoft is buying all these companies though, and I'm not too into that myself, but I'm not concerned really about Bethesda titles no longer coming to other platforms at the moment. I guess it's more about the bigger picture, but there's nothing I can really do so I'm just going to hope they don't purchase anybody else. 

“People still bought Fallout 76 in droves.”

Didnt the game like get 3 price drops within like under 3 months?

It cleared a million sales retail in its first month, and supposedly cleared another million and a half digitally. Sales collapsed after that when bad word of mouth began to spread and it didn't sell as well as Fallout 4 did (though it certainly couldn't have cost anywhere near as much to make), but I stand by what I said.

 

Which incidentally:

Fallout 76 =\= "Sold out in droves".

Wasn't this.

Well, I never said you said that. I'm more so referring to the idea that it sold in droves, when overall it's considered a financial failure.

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That's like if someone bought Sega and someone went "Is that really a big deal? Forces sucked"

You can't just ignore... everything else.

This absolutely rings true. Despite whatever tomfoolery Bethesda have been up to, mucking up their own franchises,  they do still own said franchises with which a company could do plenty.

Which, at 2.4 million sales in the first month, it did. People didn't care how awful it looked. People didn't care how badly it reviewed. They went out and bought millions of copies of it because it was the next Fallout game, and then the "secret" got out that it was awful and it became a meme.

But Bethesda still got the money despite the bad reviews and the bad pre-release press, so the franchise is clearly a pretty big deal. As pointed out above, that's just like asking if it was a big deal if Microsoft had bought Sega because Forces sucked.

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when overall it's considered a financial failure.

By who? Regardless, that's a completely different statement which relates to Bethesda's expectations (which as far as I know we don't actually know) and not it's actual popularity. 

As the classic example, The Amazing Spiderman 2 made 710 million dollars on 300 million dollar budget. It made Sony 70 million in straight profit, and was one of the most profitable movies of the year. Clearly it was a popular thing that a lot of people went to see. It was also such a miserable failure for Sony vs their expectations that they canceled everything that was supposed to be a follow-up to it and went crawling hat in hand to Marvel. 

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By who?

By loads of people, given the rate at which it allegedly sold 2.4 million copies against a budget of $100 million. And obviously,  Bethesda aren't going to be open about considering it a financial failure, and that's not even factoring in the refunds.

Regardless of Fallout's recent failings, that doesn't mean that franchise brand can't attract players if wielded better. Probably what Microsoft has in mind.

Bethesda kept quiet about their expectations for 76 specifically which is a surefire sign that the game failed to meet them. This is a seperate discussion from whether the game was a profit(it was) or what the overall strength of the Fallout IP is(unmatched, even in a post 76 world.). 

These IPs have entire decades long histories beyond what your favorite reactionary YouTubers said about them last month. If you're not interested in playing, at least read up about them. 

Now, if there's some misunderstanding where someone thinks I'm claiming that the brands of Bethesda won't sell or weren't worth purchasing,  that's certainly not the case by me.

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By loads of people

"Loads of people" thought Sonic Forces was a miserable failure. They did this despite not knowing how well it sold, how well Sega expected it to sell or even how much it cost to make/

Sega was perfectly happy with how well it sold and talked about how great it performed in numerous financial documents.

People still insist Sonic Forces was a miserable failure anyway.

What "loads of people" think is irrelevant if they don't have any idea what they are talking about. A game not selling as well as the previous game in a franchise doesn't mean it's a failure. It doesn't mean it didn't make money. It doesn't mean it didn't meet the expectations for it. It certainly doesn't mean that it lost money.

That's all true for publicly traded game companies. It's certainly true for privately held ones.

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against a budget of $100 million

And where did that number come from?

We know '76 sold much worse than 4. We don't know how much it cost to make. We can reasonably infer whatever that number was was almost certainly significantly less than 4 since so much of the things in 4 were reused and the game is much more "shallow" otherwise. We don't know whether Bethesda expected it to sell as well as 4. We can maybe infer that they did not, since they deliberately made a very different game knowing it would alienate much of the established player base. We don't know whether it met Bethesda's targets; and cannot infer anything regarding that since we have no way of knowing what they were. We don't know  how profitable it was. The extent we can infer from that is that it did well enough that Bethesda didn't immediately abandon it; so at the very least we can reasonably assume that it didn't lose them money. To know whether those things are true, we need to know more than just how well it sold; and how well it sold was the only thing I was (vaguely, at that) referring to in the first place.

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against a budget of $100 million

And where did that number come from?

I got that from a source, that upon closer inspection,  unfortunately doesn't have a clear citation to such.

My mistake, I'm afraid.

It's been 15 years. All the "We have to get Sonic's gameplay right first" talk led to absolutely nothing. I dunno if it's the large majority, but people absolutely want to play as other characters again. You might as well at this point.

The murr-murr gets louder with every game they are left out. 

Got a bone tossed to them w/ Shadow in the last game, but I would be surprised if the majority of the fandom wouldn't get behind more characters. People went nutz over their inclusion in Mania. 

I'd like an option that isn't another Sonic or "fuck it, make your own," personally.

It's a sign of respect, it's bringing you a trophy and telling you're worth of it. Be proud.

My old cat did this all the time, except some times she would bring them back alive. Her favorite things to bring back were moles, we'd often rescue one from her and try to set it free far from our house...only for her to track down the exact same mole and bring it back hours later.

My Dad told me once she brought back a possum still alive(Keep in mind this possum was as big as her), my Dad set it free like normal and of course our cat tracked it down and brought it back...only this time she let it loose in the house and we couldn't find it for days. Later laundry is being done and inside the clothes basket...is the possum. It hissed and ran into the hole the dryer vent was connected to. My Dad believes the possum safely escaped since the hole led directly outside.

We never saw that possum again.

And Bioware got them wrong all throughout Sonic Chronicles...

depends, which continuity is this sonic from?

His name would imply otherwise.

Assuming SEGA's continuity is still consistent (lol) Super Sonic is his fastest form and is described as being only slightly slower than the speed of light. 

no but he's faster than heavy

Base-form Sonic doesn't have an official cap besides "faster than sound" so there's no telling. Sonic Mania's Special stage implies Mach 3, even though he's clearly not travelling that fast during gameplay.

So yeah, I dunno.

yeah, his max speed is pretty inconsistent through-out all of his games. even the movie was theorized that sonic can reach a whopping Mach 1,877! I heard that from a theory on sonics speed in the movie.

Tikal claims the Light Speed Shoes from Sonic Adventure "let's you race toward rings at light speed" but doesn't mention anything about exceeding it.

If you want to start looking at non-canon material that Sonic Team was directly involved with, then near the end of the Sonic X episode "Fast Friends/Speed Match! Sonic Vs. Sam" shows Sonic moving at speeds unnoticeable to the human eye. (18:43 - 19:43)

Okay 2 things 

1. what about Hyper Sonic

2. What about that moment in smash ultimate where he gets hit by Galeems light ray of doom (tho then again he tried to save Pikachu, not sure if him slowing down to do that costed him in a way)

1. Hyper Sonic is technically non canon, and we dont know if they had internally settled on Super Sonic's top speed at that point. If Hyper Sonic became canon and is faster than Super Sonic, then be prepared for some terrifying universe warping consequences.

 2. Sonic was slowing down for Pikachu so he wasn't able to go max speed.

Rolling physics

Air control.

Its written for Shonen fans instead of babies, it had characters other than Sonic playable, gave it's characters other than Sonic and Eggman a real role, it's levels are more than just a straight line, the average playthrough is longer than all the post-Colors put together, actually resembles a platformer instead of a racer, good new characters (this was when they still had the spine to make new characters mind you), majority of content is not rehashes, larger replayability courtesy of Chao Garden among many others, and multiplayer. Good grief all the wasted potential not doing multiplayer races.

In short, from what a Flicky told me

being divisive.

Compelling story arcs.

Anyone else wanna continue the chain? I agree with everything said so far.

Shadow being a main playable character? I enjoyed his bonus stages in Forces but

Gameplay. Physics. Character selection. Story. Level design.

I think the bigger question is, is there anything the Adventure games didn't do better?

Being less reliant on nostalgia

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I think the bigger question is, is there anything the Adventure games didn't do better?

The technical part of these games suffers quite a bit compared to post-Colors games, even for its time. They're at least somewhat more competent programmers now.

didn't do better? well, I guess if animation is on there sa1 is the biggest culprit.

Literally everything

Music that added to the experience of the adventure and lyrics in stage music. Everyone else covered the other points

(Inb4 forces character had lyrics in stage music)

Do you want a list?

The only thing Colors had is being a more technically sound game. 

The past 5 Ratchet games have been so bland and forgettable, the remake was the worse offender

Yes but not actually. They were basically merged with a few other Sega studios under the title of CS2 or something.

So while we probably won't see the name and logo again, the team is still very much a thing as far as we know (for as much of a "team" as it ever was considering devs basically switched out with every game...).

Not dissolved, but merged with other SEGA departments.

In some form, they still exist. But now Sonic Team works with everyone else, and everyone else works with Sonic Team.

...actually, that sounds great, how have i never realised that sonic team just got a wider talent pool

I wasn't even aware of any of this lol

I could see them retaining "Sonic Team" as a banner for Sonic games even if the actual group is basically merged into some larger now.

Wait...what?

When was this announced?

Sonic Team diluting the talent pool all across Sega unfortunately

I assume because it features Shadow who hadn't had a playable appearance in a mainline game in years

In general Forces seemed like a basic appeal to Adventure fans but with no understanding of why people liked those games.

Also, White Jungle and Supporting Me remixes

Because it stars Shadow, who is more or less the face of that era, so the assumption was likely that his inclusion would satisfy Adventure fans. Which is a very corporate and phoned in reasoning when you think about it. 

She's so bad and out of touch that she's definitely going to be removed from the series.

She's chaotic neutral

Hide your jewels

The only characters in the games who are bad are Sticks and the Deadly Six.

Deadly Sticks

she's not my type

there just should not be sexy sonic characters

rouge started covid-19

@A Match in Oil Ocean Zone are you forgetting about Hunk of Meat?

@Blue Blood Hunk's appeal is deeper than sex.....it transcends the very nature of sexuality

Sonic GT is the closest we've gotten to a full product as far as 3D goes. So I guess we start with NotSoGreedy.

As far as rebuilding a game from the ground up, replicating everything as accurately as possible while fixing and updating other stuff?

ChaosX with his P-06 remake

can't be a 3d taxman because there's no good 3d sonic to replicate

sonic team junior

We're not even close to getting the hang of 3D games (neither is SEGA, but I digress) as much as we got the hang of 2d games. So the thought of one who "perfects" the 3D formula is implausible at the moment. Also, need I remind you Taxman got his start with Sonic Team by letting him use his custom made engine to run remasters of the old games. For all I know, Sonic Team have no business doing the same with the 3D games; that's all whole 'nother ballpark to deal with.

I'd personally cast my vote for Sonic Team Junior, but that would be cheating, as SRB2 is a Doom mod versus games made in actual 3D from the ground up

Absolutely nobody right now. There's been attempts, some better than others, but nothing on Taxman's level. And that's putting aside industry contacts and factors such as that.

I suppose if anything I would say P-06 due its frightening accuracy to 06 and the considerable improvements it makes... but also it's Sonic 06 so that's not exactly helpful. I'm interested in the SA-styled stuff SonicFreak's been doing on Melpontro's challenge but time will tell on that front.

sonic's in it

Mad Space

You play as the "Bad guys".

It threw away the Classic level design of the first game in favor of a stupid speed focused design, whos gameplay ended up becoming the origins of what led to the awful boost gameplay formula.

It also introduced a dumb character made only to appeal to little girls

Like under a third of the game is enjoyable. Tails and Eggman mech missions outside maybe 1 or 2 are boring and unfun, knuckles and Rouge’s missions are ass and drag on thanks to the required emerald shard mechanic vs just finding any of them at any time, and Sonic and Shadow’s missions while the best, aren’t as interesting as SA1’s Sonic gameplay due to their fixation on speed and linearity over platforming

Also the plot is a mess

The Tails/Rouge car missions where you have to avoid touching walls.

That's all I can think of that extraordinarily bothers me tho'.

A bad game =/= a very flawed game necessarily. The base game is good, quite good in fact, it just had a lot of crap holding it back from being a terrific game.

I will never play SA2 without the fixed radar mod that turns it back to the SA1 radar. Its shit like that that can nearly ruin a gaming experience, you spending several minutes being lost in a large world like mad space only to get frustrated. That's just one example of how a small flaw can translate into me not wanting to play the game at all sometimes.

SA2 is definetely a game that benefits a lot from muscle memory, but only in regards really towards remembering which parts the game buttfucked you the most in both level design, glitches and screwy controls. 

I also disagree with people who think that the mech parts are the worst part of the game. In terms of just overall enjoyability, I really like them. They dont fit the sonic motif at all, but it's fun nonetheless. The treasure hunting levels however are abysmal half the time. Cool atmosphere can only make up for so much there. 

I'd say more serious than Colors and Generations combined, but less serious than the Adventure games.

More serious than in Colors or Gens. Less serious than the Adventure games.

Though, the problem is that it still has the general flow and writing of Colors/Gens which didn't work there and certainly doesn't here.

I'd say it's around the same as Sonic Adventure 2, it's only really Infinite's embarrassing tryhard bad guyness that tips it towards Shadow/2006 territory.

It TRIES to be serious, but fails miserably.

hedgehogcore

Awesome

Not inherently.

Though if SEGA doesn't give him a good premise, there's not much he can work with.

Ian would be an ideal writer. The issue would be regarding how much room Sega and ST actually give him.

Only if SEGA would put even greater restrictions on Only if SEGA would put even greater restrictions on him than they had already from writing anything close to competent, or be stuck with translating an already poor script by the main writing staff. But he realistically could still run circles around all who came before him.

Having him be the primary writer with reasonable creative control is, en contraire, among the best possible things to happen in Sonic stories.

I've no idea what the general consensus is in this as I steer away from discussion of the comics as much as I humanly can. But I like his work on the series, and nothing could be worse than Pontac and Graff. Even if SEGA have him crap to work with, he could at least produce a script that's not awful even if the story/premise is beyond reproach.

I think if anything he'd write much better dialogue for the localized scripts. I dunno if he'd get to write a full story but I think he could pull it off if set with the proper limitations.

He’d actually be the best bet, if he were given control of the story.

Otherwise, he’d risk his reputation being received the same way as Pontac and Graff.

So as much as I’d want Ian to write for the games, he should stay far away from that if Sega are gonna be so restrictive—we already see them doing that much for the comics, and that doesn’t always go well.

werewolves

not sonic team

If I like it.

Saxaphones

Think about it

Sugar, Spice, and everything nice.

a good sonic game, of course.

If we knew that, the series wouldn't be in the state that it's in. 

The dragon balls at this point.

a big red butt(on entertainment)

The team from 20 years ago.

If I were a bad Sonic game I wouldn't be sitting here discussing it with ya now would I?

unfortunately there are none so i can't tell

i wouldn't describe it as having "battle elements", but there are fights sometimes.

I hope so. Halo 5 on it's own is a great game, but feels so far removed from what a Halo game should be.

343i have shown they're willing to take steps in the right direction by trying to bring as much about the classic Halo trilogy into the new game as they can. I have faith that they can do right by the franchise.

God, that's the dream.

I don't know... I'm so hot and cold on 343i atm. Like, you can clearly see they're trying and a lot of Halo 5's initial problems did really come down to poor marketing. Other than that, most of the decisions they've made that have been criticized seems to come from a place of misguidance rather than malice or incompetence. They wanted the series to cater to everyone in the fps-sphere while putting their own spin on it. Some of it worked, some of it didn't.

Also, digging through Bungie's duct-taped code and porting the games to PC... I will forever be grateful to them for that.

That being said though, they have made a lot of mistakes and I am getting tired of seeing the general opinion around the series getting so muddled. Halo literally defined an entire platform, redefined a genre, and are generally just fun as hell games. Though, now you'll often find discussions around it mimicking ones of a certain blue rat we all know. Halo 4 and 5 were by no means bad games but they certainly didn't hit the same chord the others did and, for that, the series has suffered. And while I say a lot of their problems weren't really done in bad faith by 343i (or even their fault in some cases), a fair amount of them could've easily been avoided by simply not trying to change what worked at every corner which is what's really frustrating.

I want Halo Infinite to nail it. Not just for 343i and/or Microsoft's sake, but because I want another Halo game that I can lose literal days on. Thing is, we simply don't know a lot about it yet and 343i has shown, time and time again, that problems can pop up even in the most stable of conditions.

Like real talk, I am incredibly nervous for Thursday.

yeah i'm pretty sure infinite's gonna be good. i have faith in 343, especially after the great job they've done fixing up the MCC. hell, even the problems with halo's 4 and 5 can be mainly chalked up to inexperience: halo 4 was the literally the company's first game and then a lot of the people who worked on halo 4's campaign left the company after that game released (watch Raycevick's videos on 343's halos to really learn about it). i just hope the story of infinite feels like a good conclusion to this trilogy and doesn't hand wave certain things because of halo 5's reception

I'm really not sure about Infinite myself tbh. I hope 343i learned, but after seeing some hemmoraghing of talent over there, the fact that they were looking for someone who's experienced at "Games as a Service" model (with rumors being that the multiplayer portion is gonna become a platform, potentially going f2p) as well as not seeing a game for what feels like years makes my alarm bells tingle pretty hard. 

I will admit I haven't played 4 or 5 and only recently played through the rest of the series thanks to MCC on PC, so I can't comment on the quality of 343i games, but even their remasters/ports range from "quite great" (Halo 3) to "what the hell" (Halo Reach). So yeah, not the best experience I had with them. Hope they're delivering a good product this time.