Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (Wii U)

[Gabz Girl]

What an utter disaster this game was, and everyone was at fault too. I just can't believe Sega pulled off another Aliens:CM and lied to us with bullshots and false promises. BRB even still has that hub world picture on their website, like wtf.

 

Pretty sure we'll find out more about what went so horribly wrong with Boom's development over the next few years. Some former BRB employees need to spill the beans!

[Daisy-Fan]

It suck to say, but i find the Sonic franchise become a lot more mediocre, more likely the fact decline at some point. But i do have the right to blame however on Sega for been mediocre lately on modern games.

but you know i did my part and didn't supporting the bad thing. again it does suck for not supporting a franchise in good way. but again giving games like RoL a full price retail with the content state if has. its a nono and no games have a freepass with this for me.

[Failinhearts]

It suck to say, but i find the Sonic franchise become a lot more mediocre, more likely the fact decline at some point. But i do have the right to blame however on Sega for been mediocre lately on modern games.

but you know i did my part and didn't supporting the bad thing. again it does suck for not supporting a franchise in good way. but again giving games like RoL a full price retail with the content state if has. its a nono and no games have a freepass with this for me.

 

Well hey, not buying a BAD game will just make a company want to make a good game so people will buy them.

 

But then again, it's Sega, they'll probably keep making bad games with no regard.

[Detective Shadzter]

2 new concept videos:

http://www.markmyrigs.com/professional-work

[Badnik Mechanic]

Can someone make youtube copies of those... as well as gifs of the Eggman? And Knuckles flexing.

[goku262002]

Can someback back all this up actually, arts videos and all? start from where Andrea left off.

Were losing concept art by the day, Shadz just told me the recent one with the models like that creepy Shadow has been locked away so now thats unretrievable.

[Badnik Mechanic]

I'm tempted to reply with why don't you do it. 

 

Though if someone provides me with a list of the since discovered stuff and the original discoveries I may consider it.

[Graystripe2000]

What an utter disaster this game was, and everyone was at fault too. I just can't believe Sega pulled off another Aliens:CM and lied to us with bullshots and false promises. BRB even still has that hub world picture on their website, like wtf.

Pretty sure we'll find out more about what went so horribly wrong with Boom's development over the next few years. Some former BRB employees need to spill the beans!

You're kinda left in the dark. A:CM was GEARBOX'S fault. These should clear everything up.

http://www.tssznews.com/2013/02/13/a-lot-of-you-are-rightfully-upset-at-aliens-cm-says-alleged-insider/

http://www.destructoid.com/developer-gearbox-lied-to-sega-2k-over-colonial-marines-245986.phtml

[goku262002]

I'm tempted to reply with why don't you do it. 

 

Though if someone provides me with a list of the since discovered stuff and the original discoveries I may consider it.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Since it was wiped by the forum wipe, here's my review of Rise of Lyric.

 

So I finally finished Rise of Lyric. My thoughts?

 

Let's start with the gameplay. It's bad. Really bad. It's isn't Sonic gameplay in any way shape or form. It's combat and it's terrible combat. It takes up a massive chunk of the gameplay and you know what the problem is? You wanna know what the problem is? It's too goddamn basic for a massive gameplay feature. There's no combo system, there's a combo counter sure, but there isn't a true system, you can't mix attacks and you can't unlock new attacks. All you get is a maximum of 3 attacks per character and that's it! Nothing else. You know what's even worst? When you start the game off, it isn't that bad, you think ''Ok, it's average I guess, not as bad as what I expected'' but then it just keeps going and going and going until you are freaking bored out of your mind and you keep hoping that maybe it'll give you more speed that combat only for it to never come.

 

On top of that, the game manages to have a mix of cheap and easy, something I didn't think was possible but they did it. Oh boy did they do it. You see, in the later part of the game, there are larger enemies who are able to create a force field around them that protects for a while. But they can activate this, right when you are in the middle of a combo, which means, more often than not, you'll be in your combo and unable to move and the robot will use it's attack on you. But it's easy because no matter what, if you die, you'll just respawn right then and right there where you died and you can move on.

 

The countless robots are such a pain. Not because they are hard but because every single time you see them coming, you groan knowing you have to go through another repetitive boring combat section, and even then, the robots always take a large amount of attacks to destroy, and when you see a boat load of them on screen, you groan knowing you have to take about 5 minutes just to keep pressing the same button over and over again.

 

Then the speed sections? Don't even get me started. The short of it? Take Sonic Dash, take away all the fun things about it, I.E, always flowing through the speed section, destroying robots without losing speed, and not having to stop for anything. Then add crappy framerate which makes it annoying when to jump over certain things. Then there's the enerbeam sections which basically take even more control away apart from moving left and right for rings. It's boring and what should at least look like cool animations is completely let down by bad framerate, and even certain animations not working right. I know throughout the entire game, bounce pads showed the effect at least 2 seconds before Sonic hits it and it's so damn noticeable.

 

Then the platforming is more or less bare bones and has nothing of real interest, you have to switch between two characters and take a specific path but none of these elements ever change. It's always the same thing. Balance poles? Amy, Red Rocks? Knuckles, Fans? Tails, Ramps? Sonic. There's no variation on this and it's always the same thing everytime, just usually more stretched out as the game goes on.

 

Then we move onto the music which so damn dull and forgettable. I honestly don't think I could remember any theme from this game, apart from maybe the title screen and even then, that's because of it being used for the 3DS Sonic Boom theme. This is a complete and utter disgrace for Sonic. Sonic is known as having some of the most brilliant video game music ever. Even something as terrible as 06 had His World, Dreams of an Absolution, Wave Ocean and so much more. This game's soundtrack is complete forgettable and generic.

 

The graphics, oh we all know what they look like, we've all made our jokes about it, but you know what? I'll mention it, it looks like a freaking PS2 game in HD. There's bland textures, there's no good looking areas, there's no nothing. This is completely and utter laziness and I don't give two shits if they couldn't get CryEngine to work right on Wii U. When I see games like Mario 3D World, Wind Waker HD or hell, even SONIC LOST WORLD. I expect far far far much better from the Wii U. The only good thing graphics wise in this game is the characters and that's it. The characters has some nice animations and that's more or less the end of it.

 

Then we get to the glitches well, Was this thing even play tested?! I can't believe I actually tried to defend this piece of shit 2 weeks ago when the first glitch was shown on Youtube. ''Oh it's just one glitch, I'm sure it's a one time thing''. I was so wrong. This game is a complete and utter mess in terms of glitches. I ran into a freaking game breaking glitch, 25 minutes into the game during Knuckles' section of Lyric's tomb, and unlike that glitch where Sonic fell into a blue void and it was user caused, this one wasn't. I jumped onto a platform which had a pillar coming down because of a bad jump and I clipped right into the pillar. 

 

That doesn't include the many glitches someone like DarkspineSonic has managed to find. I mean, Knuckles' infinite jump, Sonic's Super Speed Dash, and so many more, I seriously wonder if this game was playtested because all of these glitches are extremely simple to pull off or fall into to.

 

Then there's the performance of the game and it is awful, especially for a Wii U game in 2014. This game has shit graphics, horrible textures and not even that many things that happen at once, but yet it still chugs along and it gets really bad. Especially when in one of the hub worlds, entering walkways with no one else in sight, caused the game to slow down. It's even worse in Speed Sections because instead of giving us nice flowing animation, we get choppy animations.

 

Then there's the story which is disjointed and littered with Plot Holes. What the hell was Lyric's plan? Get crystals and activate robots which for the record, we don't even find out until the last boss fight. If time travel was so important, than why not just send Sonic back to before Lyric was nearly killed and prevent it? What the hell was Shadow's purpose? How the hell did Shadow get back from the future? Why did Lyric make such a big deal of reclaiming the map only to say ''Oh, My plan was to have you collect the crystals all along'' The story is all over the place and even worse, it basically turns into ''Go here, pick up crystal, go to next area, pick up next crystal''

 

Then there's the fact that it was clearly altered and changed and rewritten at the last minute. Sticks is only a NPC and one who serves no importance whatsoever, There's no mention of this ''new world'' the gang were meant to travel to, there's no explanation about the massive Hedgehog and Echidna statues all over the place, there's very clearly massive missing elements with even hints that Perci was to be playable or at least, a ally at one point.

 

There's only one big positive I can think of for this game and it's the character interaction and voice acting. I do think the cutscenes with the characters talking to each other, and joking around with each other was well written and really gave Sonic, Amy, Knuckles, Tails, and Eggman a good deal of personality and I'm at least happy they didn't screw that up considering how good the character interaction is. Although off the top of my head, the only good NPCs I could think of is Perci and Cliff. That's about it and those are the only two I hope make a appearance in the series.

 

But then we get the bad characters. Shadow is downright awful here. He appears out of nowhere, has no purpose whatsoever and acts like a complete and utter asshole anytime he's on screen and he does it for no reason whatsoever. We don't know why he believes any of the stuff he's saying, we don't know why he seems to not trust friends, we don't know anything about him. He appears out of no where and acts like an asshole and that's it.

 

Then there's Lyric who is a generic villain who is bland and has no clear character traits other than power hungry evil snake who controls robots. This is especially worse when you see Eggman and you see how he just steals the show and yet he has to play second fiddle to this bland and boring villain.

 

Overall, this game is bad. It's really bad. I still don't consider it worse than 06 or Free Riders but it's another game that has to be chalked up as a bad Sonic game. This is actually worse than a normal bad Sonic game because this game had potential to be an interesting new take on the Sonic series. We were finally getting a story which seemed to have a decent bit of mystery behind it, we were getting Tails, Amy and Knux back as playable characters and yet, Big Red Button completely wasted it. They wasted all the potential this game had. At best, It's average, at worse, it's a repetitive, boring platformer with no memorable elements whatsoever, which has bad performance issues and a unbelievable amount of glitches.

 

Sega. Please, just please bring back the boost gameplay because it's the best thing we've had in years. Sonic was finally making his big comeback and was starting to be seen as a big player in the game industry again with a series of good games and ever since Lost World, you've screwed it up big time. Please just bring back the well refined gameplay of the Boost trilogy. Either that or bring back the Adventure gameplay.    

[Graystripe2000]

Finished the game this morning. Needs some work in areas, but not bad overall. I give it a 7.5/10.

[Graystripe2000]

A guy on TSSZ wrote an interesting article on the game that suggests that the info in Tamaki's video might not be entirely accurate.

http://www.tssznews.com/2015/06/04/vertical-slice-the-fact-and-fiction-of-sonic-boom/

[Badnik Mechanic]

A guy on TSSZ wrote an interesting article on the game that suggests that the info in Tamaki's video might not be entirely accurate.

http://www.tssznews.com/2015/06/04/vertical-slice-the-fact-and-fiction-of-sonic-boom/

 

Actually... I think TSSZ are wrong here, or at least Michael Westgarth's belief is.

 

His original article doesn't actually offer anything to explain why ROL was a bad game or why it ended up the way it did, there's just a conspiracy theory about how Sega of Japan is deliberately mishandling the western branch of the business and provides a VERY selective list of games as evidence of why... yet conveniently leaves off major success stories like ASR, ASRT, Alien Isolation, Castle of illusion, Football Manager and that Alien DS game to name but a few.

 

Even this follow up article. 

 

There is nothing in it at all related to ROL, it's just 'I think this video is wrong', even the one point he does bring up which is lets see...

 

Considering Tamaki’s statement that “most of the work was already done” on Rise of Lyric when porting began, this speculative six month window, while small, should have been enough for Big Red Button, a team of industry veterans, to finish the port to a satisfactory level.

 

Sorry... but that's not quite true/accurate. 

 

Whilst I strongly suspect that the 'we were nearly done' is a BIG exaggeration. As I've already argued (mainly with Autosaver), you can't just transform one game made for one system, to another and not perform either some radical changes, or some major sacrifices unless you fully intend to extend your development time. 

 

Which as we know, ROL couldn't possibly have had a delay due to the fact it was a multi-media product, it had to come out when it did.

 

In terms of actual development, when Boom was announced to when it was released, thinking to a QA standpoint, I would assume that they would have been playing with builds which may have been 'complete' in terms of 'we have the full game here, however parts of it don't work correctly.'

 

E.g. We have this section where the player is chased by enemies, this sequence is in multiple points of the game... however it does't work on this one stage due to the design of the level map.

 

Or...

 

"We have this level which works fine, however it has these doors which open and close when the player gets close to them... but at the moment they're opening randomly and the animation doesn't play correctly."

 

Or...

 

"We have this moment in the game where enemies constantly spawn and try to attack the player as they attempt to destroy a larger more powerful enemy... however the spawned enemies don't actually do anything"

 

Stuff like that... as well as accessing parts of the game via a command line interface, not via a menu selection screen, also textures and other effects would not be present. 

 

When Boom was announced, that is where I would have imagined that kind of game should have been at.

 

Now, at this point, depending on your studio, the development would be using the rest of the development time to refine the game, optimise it, and fix these little problems. 

 

But we know that they couldn't be at that stage, they were much further back, most likely due to the Wii U exclusive news, instead of pushing forward, they had to stop, redesign, rebuild and then perform all their work again in order to ensure it would run.

 

The time between booms announcement and release that should have been spent refining and optimising the game, was instead given to frantically building and adapting for another piece of hardware. 

 

We've even seen evidence of this. Those behind the scenes videos that came out, we saw in the background and sometimes up close BRB staff working on the PC teir version of the game, now why would they be working on that standard/quality of the game if they knew back in 2013 that they had to make it for the Wii U? And even in the Wii U demos at E3 and Gamescom, we can see in the title screen evidence of the PC tier build running in the background. 

 

 In the discovered art assets which suggest the game had a purge, heck after Boom was announced they still had in their office posters/images of Sonic Synergy, why would you still have that up and around if back in 2013 you knew you were a Wii U exclusive? Even in the final game itself, there's so much left over assets (mainly voice files) to support this.

 

Also the CryEngine 3 thing again. 

 

I'm just going to ask the obvious...

 

If the CryEngine 3 runs beautifully on the Wii U... ... .. .. Where are all the games for it? 

 

There are 2, Rise of Lyric and that random indi game which is stuck in development hell (big surprise), oh and that demo which Crytek were working on... 

 

And the rest? 

 

If this engine works so amazingly well and can produce some amazing looking titles on the Wii U? Why is nobody touching it? 

[Graystripe2000]

Now to finally express my final thoughts on this game.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OhqT3F4vZ-8

[Dejimon11]

So I was recording this game for my commentary channel and I encountered this. Keep in mind this is post patch 

 

[Milo]

Nice to see BRB remembered Amy's invisibility move from Sonic 06.

[Detective Shadzter]

Found more dev footage:

https://vimeo.com/116143177

[Jason Berry]

Found more dev footage:

https://vimeo.com/116143177

This train never stops.

Also, epic Knuckles pose is epic.

[Detective Shadzter]

Rise of Lyric never happened.

https://m.facebook.com/WiiU.co.uk/photos/a.361015913973149.81185.351440504930690/869189766489092/?type=1&source=48

[Graystripe2000]

Rise of Lyric never happened.

https://m.facebook.com/WiiU.co.uk/photos/a.361015913973149.81185.351440504930690/869189766489092/?type=1&source=48

This appears to be some of the exclusives but not all of them.

[Komodin]

Rise of Lyric never happened.

https://m.facebook.com/WiiU.co.uk/photos/a.361015913973149.81185.351440504930690/869189766489092/?type=1&source=48

With the recognition of Sonic Lost World, I am perfectly okay with this being my head canon.

[Dejimon11]

With the recognition of Sonic Lost World, I am perfectly okay with this being my head canon.

Im not I spent $60 on this pile of junk.

[Jason Berry]

Here's someone trying to find thew positives in Sonic Boom.

[Your Vest Friend]

*Glitches are a positive*

Poor guy got desperate. 

[NoirSuede]

 Believe it or not, there's someone out there who loves Rise of Lyric unironically :

Edited September 3, 2015 by NoirSuede