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Awoo.

Big Red Button finally break their silence


Badnik Mechanic

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Three years? Three years my ass. RoL lacks so much polish I reckon it was rushed in a year and a few months tops. Probably because of the sudden switch to Wii U exclusive?

Of course we're never going to hear more about how disastrous this game's development must've been unless we get some anonymous person from BRB to spill the beans cos it's obviously not coming from the main heads. If you ask me, they don't seem very competent if they thought the finished product wouldn't get destroyed by critics and fans a like. Shame too, this had a lot of potential.

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I really feel sorry for BRB. I don't believe that Boom could have been a great game, but at least it could have possibly been good or average. As much as I dislike the Boom redesigns, I didn't want the game to be as disastrous as it was. This was their chance to prove themselves, but it all went to shambles. It's really upsetting to read about the developer's anxiety and stress over the game's progression... or regression, depending on what the history of this game's unfortunate development was.

But being surprised at the game's negative response? I'm surprised at them being surprised.

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I do feel bad for BRB wasting away three years of their first game. 

I wish them luck for the future though. As I said a couple of years ago, they have potential. I don't think they're outright terrible and lazy. 

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I'm not going to defend the game at all, because we all know the game is bad so there's no need beating a dead horse.  I think it's deplorable, however, that they receive so much hate mail on the matter.  Like come on, guys.  It's a video game.  So as much as I dislike the game, I really empathize with the developers and hope that one day we can forget all this, so that the developers can just move on 

On that same note, I don't think it's unreasonable that they were surprised at the game's poor reception.  I mean, I don't think they were surprised that it wasn't crowned best Sonic game ever.  As stated in the article, they expected a fair amount of anti-Sonic resentment, and I do think they knew a lot of their changes were controversial.  But I don't think they expected to make a game that was deemed comparable, if not worse, than '06.  Putting the deviations from typical Sonic affair aside, I admit that a lot of the game-breaking glitches probably should have been noticed, but from a developer's point of view (as in, someone who knows the game in and out and can thus manage the flaws a little easier) it's a little bit harder to know what aspects were more problematic from the point of view of a consumer.  This is essentially why we have playtesters, but we have no word as far as I'm aware on their side of the story. (I believe RoL's credits do list some playtesters, so we know it didn't go completely untested before launch)

There are some points in this article that I'd obviously take with a grain of salt.  I really don't think they had Sonic's speed in mind when making the game, let alone made it a priority.  But I do think that their overambitiousness (which I think in the context of this article is honestly just a polite way of saying "having absolutely no sense of direction") and their attempts to shove as many different game mechanics in the game, regardless of actual quality or usefulness, is pretty evident in the final release by way of the Treasure Scope knockoff and the powerup stones that don't really add any noticeable benefit.  As Hogfather mentions, a company isn't going to just out and say "Yes, it's because we were incompetent and suck at making games."  So we're not going to get a fully honest answer, but the fact that they did give us something of an answer at all and have discussed a clear strategy for moving on is pretty noble in its own right.

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After reading the article and a comment made by one of the people who formerly worked at BRB I can say that I do come out of this feeling more sorry for the man then mad. I'm not going to overstep my bounds by claiming he's an incompetent director when I wasn't there and don't know the specifics behind their three years in development hell and I'm not going to insult the man with nonsense like "You ruined my childhood" which is I find to actually be pretty gross when I think about it.

Even the part about not expecting the negative feedback was phrased a bit differently then expected. Saying he wasn't "prepared" for the "kind" of hate that was being poured out gives off a much different feel then accusing the man of not knowing there was going to be some headed his way, which he did admit to knowing there'd be some of. This comes off more like an endurance test that ended with a lot of hard work going nowhere that left the people who were hired to finish it disillusioned with what they were even trying to do to the point where the only thing that mattered eventually was making sure it got sent out on the deadline at all.

That said, it doesn't rid him or anyone there of the blame for what took place. SEGA, of course, should take a nice hefty chunk of that blame as well. This was the absolute last thing we needed to have happen after the seeds sowed by Unleashed through Lost World were starting to bear some positive fruit. Even if some of the explored ideas like the new angle Lost World took or the direction of the story telling in Generations weren't being met with the absolute most praise it still felt like there was something of a steady build back to competency for the series. Even realizing that Rise of Lyric is a spin-off does nothing to shield Sonic from his reputation taking another blow as that's not something the general public cares about. I wish even saying "Shattered Crystal wasn't AS bad" could help but not many people care about the handhelds when discussing the state of the series. If they did, the nonsense about his recent outings being utter shit before any certain 3D game of recent years being released would be a lot easier to avoid. 

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I can understand if Rafei feels bad because he did his best to make this game, and then got a lot of negative feedback, but we must admit that Sonic Boom is really out of the queue. Maybe it could be a 'good' game in itself, but it's not good as a Sonic game. They wanted to change too much, and it's not surprising if he gets mails saying he ruined the Sonic fans' childhood. Boom is just too different from Sonic. It's not Sonic. It made Sonic a stupid cartoon on TV.

But I don't blame Rafei; I feel like he's someone who just wanted to make a game, and it's just an accident it turned out this way.

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I'll be honest, I'd love Sonic to also cater to a group that wants a bit more narratives in their games. The pace and genre definitely felt like it was trying to do that.

Mario can have its platformers and RPG games, which are very different and caters to different groups. It would be nice if Sonic can also have that duality.

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When you put so much time and effort into something, you become consumed by it, and because you know the difficulties you can appreciate your progress and the end result. Unfortunately at the game's release, no one had any idea of the hardships and "hell" (as Rafei put it) that he had to go through as well as SEGA putting extra demands on them to have it run only on Wii U, and so their first instinct of people is to voice their gripes (Plus, as soon as the comparison to 06 was made, people would just shit on the game without even playing or trying it out). It's harsh, and now that we know about the development process, you can appreciate what they did finish a lot more than what they were missing.

Personally though, I wish they had more time to just increase the speed in the code for the 4 characters, and maybe shortened the hub world to make it less barren by comparison (removing stuff's easier than adding, right?). I just remember it being scarce with next to no characters, and they'd all just shrug you off and not talk to you.

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If I was Sega and was thinking about asking another company to develop a Sonic game, I'd go to Retro Studios, Nintendo, Epic Games, Valve... Recognized good companies that one can trust. No offense to Big Red Button but... this project was really big for them.

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But you'd also have to consider how much you'd have to pay any of those companies to actually work on a game for you.

Let's face it, Sega's kind of stingy when it comes to money (though arguably reasonably so) and BRB was cheaper for them to get.

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1 hour ago, molul said:

If I was Sega and was thinking about asking another company to develop a Sonic game, I'd go to Retro Studios, Nintendo, Epic Games, Valve... Recognized good companies that one can trust. No offense to Big Red Button but... this project was really big for them.

I disagree. Big Red Button had potential to make a good Sonic game, it's all SEGA's fault for forcing them to port the game and whole Cry Engine 3 to Wii U in a short amount of time.

Okay, probably RoL wouldn't be that good if it wasn't rushed and released for Wii U, but at least it wouldn't be horrible like this.

Also Retro Studios, Nintendo, Epic Games and Valve? I can't imagine seeing these companies make a Sonic spinoff game. 

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21 hours ago, PSI Wind said:

Crytek had a version of Crysis 3 fully running on Wii U. It could've easily been released but EA has a say in the platforms it releases on.

This isn't out of the realm of reason, but that doesn't really change that Cryengine 3 still isn't officially supported on the Wii U. Big Red Button most likely have had to do most of the grunt work themselves trying to port the engine to the Wii U, and I somehow doubt that they have Crytek's resource knowledge and technical finesse to do so. Especially if what we've heard from various sources were true, and they had a very limited time spam to do so.

Honestly, hardware wise the Wii U isn't really that unusual from what little I've read. The CPU is a tri-core PowerPC affair that's similar in performance to the Xbox 360, and the graphics is a die-shrunk HD 4650. The only exotic thing about it, is the rather large EDRAM caches on both of them. The real thing is, is no matter how you shake it, it's just incredibly weak. Having a tri-core processor isn't impressive when it's only pushing 1.6ghz, and the HD 4650 was a low-end GPU from 2008 (which is why I'm baffled that it ended up in a console released in 2012). It really amounts to the Wii U being barely more powerful than an Xbox 360.

And consider that when the console has to render for two different screens, and you really have to wonder, "What the hell was Nintendo thinking when designing this thing"?

So, when you add everything up that you have a small game studio with very limited technical resources, porting an engine to unsupported hardware, which that hardware is not very powerful at all and has to render for two screens, and they have a very limited time span to do so....

I think it's a miracle that Rise of Lyric is even running at all, even if it manages to barely do so.

I mean, it's definitely possible that Rise of Lyric could've been made to run better, I mean Crytek HAS ported Crysis 3 to the Xbox 360 and it looks impressive for something running on hardware from 2005. But in the scenario that was given, that just isn't something that would happen.

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16 hours ago, Mors said:

I disagree. Big Red Button had potential to make a good Sonic game, it's all SEGA's fault for forcing them to port the game and whole Cry Engine 3 to Wii U in a short amount of time.

Okay, probably RoL wouldn't be that good if it wasn't rushed and released for Wii U, but at least it wouldn't be horrible like this.

Also Retro Studios, Nintendo, Epic Games and Valve? I can't imagine seeing these companies make a Sonic spinoff game. 

What great games have Big Red Button made? I see no games even in their webpage: http://brbent.com/ If you're thinking about Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, or Uncharted: Drake's fortune, well, those are Naughty Dog games.

My point is Big Red Button (apparently) have no games that prove they would make a great Sonic game. Having people that worked in big companies doesn't make you a big company. It was Sega's fault asking them to make this game.

As many people has said, if you make a bad game and you don't understand why everyone sees the game bad, maybe you're not as talented as you think you are. One thing is making a really weird and complex game that most people think it's too weird to play it (and then you could think "Oh, people didn't understand it, but it was very cool!") and the other is not being able to see that what you're doing, most people won't like it. If making great games was easy, everyone would do it.

About the last line, me neither. Just throwing examples of people I'd ask to make a Sonic game because I'd be sure they'd make a great game. On the other hand, if Nintendo bought Sega at some point, it might happen...

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Christ, you have no idea how much I would be against Nintendo buying SEGA or Sonic. Nevermind that I'm exclusively a PC gamer nowadays, I just think that Sonic fundamentally just does not gel with Nintendo's game design philosophy.

If someone were to have their hands on the series, I would want it to be a game studio that actually GETS Sonic. Galaxy Trail and LakeFeperd come to mind. Freedom Planet and Sonic Before/After the Sequel are nowhere near what I would call perfect games, but I think they nail down what I think should be Sonic as an experience.

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8 hours ago, molul said:

What great games have Big Red Button made? I see no games even in their webpage: http://brbent.com/ If you're thinking about Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, or Uncharted: Drake's fortune, well, those are Naughty Dog games.

While those are Naughty Dog games, people at BRB are who made these games. They are still the same people, the only difference is number of employees and the name, I think.

Okay, I admit, I really don't know how much of BRB is former Naughty Dog developers tbh. But I assume most of them are, and I think this makes them experienced enough.

I also don't think you need to be a big company to be able to make good games.

EDIT: I need to add this, while I think choosing BRB wasn't a stupid idea, I don't think it was the best one. It was their first game as BRB, and there was a risk of fucking it up. But it was a much better choice than choosing some new or obscure company that is known for porting games to other systems. 

8 hours ago, molul said:

As many people has said, if you make a bad game and you don't understand why everyone sees the game bad, maybe you're not as talented as you think you are. One thing is making a really weird and complex game that most people think it's too weird to play it (and then you could think "Oh, people didn't understand it, but it was very cool!") and the other is not being able to see that what you're doing, most people won't like it. If making great games was easy, everyone would do it.

I don't think it's possible to think RoL is a good game, even for them.

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I don't think people are so much expecting bob to break NDAs as it's more... don't try to sell this slop, etc etc. If by NDA you can't say "the game was shit because of this and that", then don't talk at all. Going "actually we never thought it was shit! etc etc" just draws more attention to it, it becomes an elephant in the room

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2 hours ago, shdowhunt60 said:

Christ, you have no idea how much I would be against Nintendo buying SEGA or Sonic. Nevermind that I'm exclusively a PC gamer nowadays, I just think that Sonic fundamentally just does not gel with Nintendo's game design philosophy.

If someone were to have their hands on the series, I would want it to be a game studio that actually GETS Sonic. Galaxy Trail and LakeFeperd come to mind. Freedom Planet and Sonic Before/After the Sequel are nowhere near what I would call perfect games, but I think they nail down what I think should be Sonic as an experience.

Agree HEAVY on the first part, disagree HEAVY on the second. Galaxy Trail or LakeFeperd SHOULD NOT, EVEN OWN 2% OF SONIC. If Sonic was an only 2D series I would consider it, but IT'S NOT.

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14 hours ago, WakanoBaka said:

Agree HEAVY on the first part, disagree HEAVY on the second. Galaxy Trail or LakeFeperd SHOULD NOT, EVEN OWN 2% OF SONIC. If Sonic was an only 2D series I would consider it, but IT'S NOT.

Good thing he didn't say that they should own the franchise then.

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Kind of to be expected, shipping time over quality that is.

But it does surprise me hearing that, on top of rushing to ship it, they dropped quality in favor of quantity along the way. They were already rushing the game then dropped quality altogether on top of that.

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Everyone crowing  'he said it was about Speed, but the game is slow, get wrecked' is missing that he was talking about what he wanted the game to be, and what it was in early prototyping.

Quote

According to Rafei, the problem with Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was the team being overly ambitious.

"First and foremost, we wanted to make sure it was a strong platformer, that we were true to Sonic’s sense of speed," Rafei says about early ideas for the game. "We had an amazing early start to the project. We had a very strong prototype. Everything was looking very good."

 

Reading this, I'm really quite sympathetic to the guy. Not to say RoL isn't total garbage, but even this piece can't hide that it had a truly shitty development. We know what screws SEGA put on the studio, with the Wii U exclusivity and all. And this is this guys future on the line, trying to balance the books on a small studio. He seems really upset by the criticism too, and I would also be upset if the only reason Polygon did a feature on my company was that I put out a shit game. He invested his future in this company, and SEGA fucked him and the company over. He can't be feeling good about the next ten years of his life.

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I don't understand people's desire for creators to admit they suck at something. Is this something you would ever admit if you were in this position?

And no, saying that you suck as an artist who draws fan art for fun doesn't count

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Personally, I don't really need them to admit it. But if they say they don't understand why their game sucks, I just say either they're lying or they are not talented developers.

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Tying into the "3 years" thing, it could be similar to how 3D Realms was "working on" Duke Nukem Forever for 13 years before Gearbox took it over and quickly cleaned it up to release, but the actual game that released had only actually been in development since 2003 before collapsing when Take 2 said they wanted PS360 ports. BRB obviously can't say if such a thing happened, so for all we know they were working on the game and plugging along fine; and then when Sega decided to go forward with a franchise reboot like Boom was obviously intended to be, they had to change what they had to match what Sega wanted from then on.

 

2 hours ago, molul said:

Personally, I don't really need them to admit it. But if they say they don't understand why their game sucks, I just say either they're lying or they are not talented developers.

Or they were just shielded from outside contact about it until it hit them at release. Sega has handled this entire Sonic Boom thing, as well as the franchise in general since the Nintendo exclusivity deal, in an extremely peculiar way; and based on the specific wording used as well as some of the background to Boom in general it wouldn't surprise me if Sega had them working on a Sonic game but never actually got involved with it beyond paying the bills and forcing restrictions. For example, if Sega was the one maintaining the E3 presence it had in 2014, it's possible BRB never got any of the direct feedback the game got. They just threw together a demo and Sega took it and set it up. Going from that, the game still looked like shit at that year's E3, but it also still won some awards anyway. How is a rookie developer supposed to take something like this and realize that it was going to lead to this?

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He’s proud of certain things about Rise of Lyric, such as the game’s art style — adopted by the Cartoon Network television tie-in

I've always been under the impression this was the other way around.

All I can say about ROL is that Sonic Team's history with biting off more than they can chew should have been insightful for the project. But the scope of the game was the least of its problems. It was an unpolished, buggy mess laden with issues that were left behind two console generations ago. Plus ROL looks boring as hell to play, particularly during combat sequences. This isn't a case of a game being bogged down by a couple of flaws. It's fundamentally bad. I hope BRB learns from its mistakes. 

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No, the cartoon very clearly adopted the art style from the game, they made this clear very soon. It's why I kept insisting with people the game wasn't just a tie-in, it was actually pivotal to the whole brand. It's probably why the few elements the cartoon used from the old games that weren't in Boom, namely orbot and cubot, look the same- since they weren't in RoL, Rafei didn't redesign them.

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