Sonic Forces | PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC "The Next Generations"

[T-Bird]

Had a feeling this piece of news was going to polarise the fan base quite drastically.

I've put my thoughts and feelings on this revelation and Forces in general in an article on the front page:

https://www.sonicstadium.org/2017/05/the-spin-balancing-forces/

T

[Marcello]

Heads up, Gamersyde has the trailers with a higher bitrate and the concept art in much higher quality: 

http://www.gamersyde.com/news_sonic_forces_reveals_custom_character_feature-19094_en.html

I don't get why SEGA keeps releasing the trailers only in 720p. The game is on PC and should definitely be able to reach 1080p.

[Badnik Mechanic]

1 hour ago, Blue Blood said:

Keep this crap out of future games. Relegate it to a spin-off that I can just ignore, please. 

You mean. You no want to buy the inevitable Buddy game that will get released in 2020?

[Blue Blood]

Just now, Mayor D said:

You mean. You no want to buy the inevitable Buddy game that will get released in 2020?

Me no want.

This should be that though. It should be all about Buddy and buddies, without Sonic. 

[Nepenthe]

3 hours ago, FFWF said:

So I stepped back.  I tried to look at this game from a perspective of trying to figure out the franchise's direction from here.  And then I saw it:

If the Custom Hero is a success, Sonic's friends will never be playable again.

It has literally been obvious since Colors that Sonic Team has been manufacturing reasons to keep the extended cast from being playable.

Set the games in space or on other planets to make it less likely for others to be there. Throw in the Wisps to unnecessarily compartmentalize different characters' abilities- including Sonic's- to make the game seem deeper than it is. In the case of Generations, contrive the White Space and freezing excuse. Don't ask why only Sonic was spared- just do it and have the cast as short-term rescue goals a la some Toads. Throw Classic Sonic in there to simultaneously satisfy alternate character fans on paper without pissing the nostalgia sect of the fandom and public off who associate anything disagreeable with Sonic 06 by dangling a mediocre version of classic gameplay in their faces like car keys. Now I admit, Classic Sonic was a passable gimmick due to Gens existing as an obvious celebration of the franchise's birthday. We weren't even all that concerned about the implications of the divide yet because ermergerd, Sky Sanctuary. But now he's fucking back in a new adventure altogether with no obvious thematic ties to the idea of nostalgia. Because it worked- they got a successful game with a new playable character in there that wasn't maligned, so by God they're gonna go hard on this no matter how contrived it looks now ("It's not Generations 2, believe me!"), because that's what people want, right?

Now Tails has been here the whole time, probably only as a necessity to give Sonic someone to bounce off of in the new writing direction. He can't talk to himself and the bosses forever. Naturally the question of why Tails not following Sonic or doing anything of note remains because- shit- there's a 19-year precedent of him doing that and astute fans and gamers are gonna ask questions, especially with a two-player mode tacked on again. So let's go all in on the child genius angle; have him in the background fixing various things or trying to figure the situation out so he can give exposition and mildly look like he's helping. Also, have him so sarcastically desensitized to Sonic and adverse to combat that he looks too good and/or too feeble to get his hands dirty again. It undermines the gameplay reason of him even having two tails at all now, but hey, Sonic doesn't really roll anymore so why stop now?

Now this. Buddy the Gadgeter is the one stepping up to the plate to help Sonic actually take back the world from a takeover. How about them apples- we're not preventing catastrophe this time, we're outright in a post-apocalyptic scenario. Where is the rest of the cast who have around 19 years of experience since Tails in Sonic 2 taking up the task to help Sonic and subsequently themselves to survive such a disaster because, at the very least, we can peg them as having a survival instinct? No one fucking knows. They're NPCs doing anything and everything except teaming up with a Sonic. But not Buddy. Buddy is there with his little grappling hook and modern Sonic sensibilities to save the day while satisfying the OC crowd. Tails literally got sidelined by a dA app with gameplay in which there's no reason with his aforementioned flanderization that he couldn't take part in. That's fucking pathetic.

I've been seeing this shit for years. They're trying to basically have their cake and eat it too, to try and satiate the crowd who wants to play as someone else without addressing the cast's bad reputation. They're running away from the problem and covering their trail with memes.

So in this sense, I sincerely hope the game isn't a success, and that people at least backlash hard as fuck against the OC creator while paying close attention to the fact that Sonic Mania's implementation is the basic solution. I also hope whoever's been in charge of this shit gets booted off or reigned in, whether that's Iizuka or Kishimoto. No excuses at this point, and at this point it's a no-buy from me.

[Tornado]

Buddy

 

Bubsy

Come on Sega. You're close.

 

7 minutes ago, Nepenthe said:

It has literally been obvious since Colors that Sonic Team has been manufacturing reasons to keep the extended cast from being playable.

I'd say Unleashed was the first time it was clear what they were doing.

[Nepenthe]

5 minutes ago, Tornado said:

I'd say Unleashed was the first time it was clear what they were doing.

Unleashed has a lot of the same issues I talk about; true. Only reason I don't mention it is because it was basically made as a direct experimental response to 06, and considering its middling reception and the loss of the director you couldn't tell what they would and wouldn't have kept aside from the boost. There was no reason to suspect that the extended cast wasn't there because that was basically a new permanent rule in the Bible now because Unleashed was literally the only big 3D installment from Sonic Team to try it at the time. But it became an eyebrow-raiser when they did it a second time.

[Kuzu]

3 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

Honestly, I believe this is a hook that's going to draw a lot of children in. I loathe the idea of a character creator, but they're pulling it off better than I had expected and the reception (outside of SSMB) isn't actually that negative.

Keep this crap out of future games. Relegate it to a spin-off that I can just ignore, please. 

You and I both know if this goes over, they're gonna milk the shit out of this

[Diogenes]

33 minutes ago, Nepenthe said:

It has literally been obvious since Colors that Sonic Team has been manufacturing reasons to keep the extended cast from being playable.

They're not "manufacturing excuses", they're just not making them playable. Colors being set in space didn't have any bearing on who was playable in it. If they had any intention of other characters being playable they could've been there, trivially, and everyone knows it. It's not any kind of justification, it's just the setting and story they chose. They don't need an excuse in the first place anyway.

[Nepenthe]

9 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

They're not "manufacturing excuses", they're just not making them playable. Colors being set in space didn't have any bearing on who was playable in it. If they had any intention of other characters being playable they could've been there, trivially, and everyone knows it. It's not any kind of justification, it's just the setting and story they chose. They don't need an excuse in the first place anyway.

They're making specific artistic decisions that either don't make sense given what we know of the characters prior or help supplement or explain away the nonsense, aka "manufacturing." I'm actually trying to give them the benefit of the doubt as professional artists that they're not making these kinds of weird and contradictory decisions because "they just feel like it," but rather to serve a particular vision- mandated or otherwise- of how the franchise should be going forward. Colors also wasn't the only game to take place in space; Lost World did for no particular reason other than the ones that help serve to define the meaning behind Colors' aesthetics and themes at all.

[Kuzu]

At this point, it's just safer to say they simply have no interest or incentive to use the supporting cast. I doubt it's some grand scheme to piss off their fans, but rather there is simply no demand to bring them back.

Yea, we all like to talk about how much we want them back here, but it's not like there's some overwhelming desire across the community. A lot of fans are content to just let them rot and never found them that appealing in the first place.

Additionally, Sega may just have a direction for the series that simply doesn't involve them. They've been rather adamant on steering the series towards a new direction to earn back public faith, and just focus on the what they feel Sonic should be. The supporting cast just aren't apart of that sadly.

 

I fucking hate this new direction tbh, but the kids like it and most of the fanbase find it inoffensive despite the vocal minority, so there's no incentive for them to stop and every incentive to continue.

 

So all I can do is be spiteful and hope it fails, because fuck this game and everything it represents lol.

[JezMM]

I don't feel there's any bigger conspiracy to other characters being unplayable other than "it's hard".  These characters work fine in 2D, but making huge sprawling levels that facilitate flying and climbing is much more difficult in 3D.

In Sonic Adventure, the levels were much emptier - our imaginations fill in the gaps due to old graphics, but essentially Sonic Adventure's levels are as surreal and disjointed and full of empty vistas as Lost World's.  Tails' gameplay made up for this by making it an intentional part of the design that you skip parts of the level by exploiting these empty spaces - and the only way to make that feel worthwhile was to set it up as a race against Sonic.  If they don't want to make big open empty spaces in their levels for the sake of spectacle, OR do the race thing again, they have to completely rethink how Tails operates.

In SA1 and SA2, Knuckles was placed into quite contained levels where the goal was to find things and explore rather than "get to the end" - slapping him in Sonic's levels would break them completely - alternately every stage could be setup like Speed Highway Act 3 in Sonic Adventure, but that was very quick and easy to get through as Sonic if you weren't intent on exploring, and like it or not, Sonic Team want to make levels like Unleashed for Sonic at the moment.  Again, they have to completely rethink how he operates.

And each game, they have made a decision that no, it isn't worth it, let's just make a tight experience as Sonic.  For this game, they came up with these mechanics for the hero character, and sure they could've just slapped on existing characters for that, but they probably decided it wouldn't be true to their abilities, their "branding" so to speak.  "Let's do them properly or not at all".

 

Of course, this isn't an excuse for Sonic Team, just how I see the situation.  Just like improving the boost gameplay or giving Classic Sonic proper physics-based gameplay, multiple playable characters in 3D would be a serious challenge - and they chose not to go that route.  Of course, the only frustrating thing is we have no idea whether that was due to playing it safe or because literally they tried it in prototyping and just couldn't get something that was fun and cost-effective to make.

 

 

Granted, no real excuse to not let Sonic-like characters such as Shadow, Blaze or Amy be playable buuut that would only please about half the people who want multiple characters again.  I assume 50% or more are distinctly asking for characters with unique platforming abilities that let them do things that Sonic can't.

[Indigo Rush]

I wonder how many people are going to make their custom character look like any of the pre-existing cast?

Purple wolves with hats galore.

[Meta77]

Most reaction on fb. YouTube have been very positive towards the character creator while some on ssmb act as if Satanstuck a nude eggman in their shower. This gives more potential for future games. Hell I'd enjoy a Mario maker sonic edition. I bitch when needed and see something messed up. A oc creator is not one of those moments

[Nepenthe]

I don't think it's a "conspiracy" and I'm miffed at that wording.

I think someone randomly decided other characters weren't wanted anymore and the team started making dumb decisions to facilitate it even though the franchise is in part defined by the cast, same reason why companies thought no one liked atmospheric horror games anymore just because and thus we got Resident Evil 6.

I only outlined what I felt those decisions were and how they fit into the greater goal of this new direction.

[Diogenes]

1 minute ago, Nepenthe said:

I think someone randomly decided other characters weren't wanted anymore

"Randomly", as opposed to "in response to widespread outcry and falling sales".

[JezMM]

3 minutes ago, Nepenthe said:

I don't think it's a "conspiracy" and I'm miffed at that wording.

I apologise, I didn't mean anything by it as if you were being paranoid or non-sensical, I was only casually using it as shorthand for like... "behind-the-scenes decisions and operations that we will likely never get to know for sure".

[Nepenthe]

1 minute ago, Diogenes said:

"Randomly", as opposed to "in response to widespread outcry and falling sales".

Things which are still happening lol. Kinda weird that throwing the cast down the drain didn't magically solve every issue, especially with the most hyped game in years actually having other playable characters. It's almost like they weren't the real issue. Imagine that.

[Kellan]

6 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

"Randomly", as opposed to "in response to widespread outcry and falling sales".

Seriously. I don't like it either, but if you Google "Sonic" right now, the third article that comes up is called "Sonic Forces lets you make your own character, you probably can’t do worse than the people paid to do it". Somehow, despite it being, like, almost a decade since anyone else was playable in any sort of capacity, this franchise still has the "Sonic's s*%#y friends" stereotype.

It sucks, and I really want the other characters to be playable again, but at this point I'm willing to take Buddy for now, just because he's not Sonic. I'm just hoping that the other characters are important in the story, and don't get Pontaffed again.

[Diogenes]

Just now, Nepenthe said:

Things which are still happening lol. Kinda weird that throwing the cast down the drain didn't magically solve every issue, especially with the most hyped game in years actually having other playable characters. It's almost like they weren't the real issue. Imagine that.

Nepenthe, honestly, this is the worst argument you've ever made, and I don't know why you keep trying to make it. No one ever thought that scaling back the cast in itself would solve every problem with the series. It's a shameless strawman. What is ridiculous is acting like the character bloat played no part in this series' problems simply because addressing it didn't solve everything. Cutting back on the cast meant more focused gameplay and more focused stories, rather than sprawling messes of poorly designed/polished gameplay and overwrought stories. Did it always work perfectly? Obviously not, Sonic Team can hardly do anything right even under the best circumstances. Would any of the post-'06 games actually be better if they had a bunch of other playable characters? Not unless you place the number of playable characters far above every other aspect of a game.

[HedgehogBR]

<sup>A little preview. 

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sonic-forces-preview/</sup>

 

Highs

• Darker tone
• Customizable character
• Inspired by series’ best games
• Pretty visuals

Lows

• Are three playable heroes too much?
• Sonic has let us down before

 

 

http://www.gamereactor.eu/previews/536083/Sonic Forces/

[Sonikko]

46 minutes ago, JezMM said:

"Let's do them properly or not at all".

Are we talking about the same Sonic Team? Their past 20 years of games were full of "not properly" developed mechanics and ideas. Even their last game, Lost World and its core mechanic was not developed properly.

[Nepenthe]

24 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Nepenthe, honestly, this is the worst argument you've ever made, and I don't know why you keep trying to make it. No one ever thought that scaling back the cast in itself would solve every problem with the series. It's a shameless strawman. What is ridiculous is acting like the character bloat played no part in this series' problems simply because addressing it didn't solve everything. Cutting back on the cast meant more focused gameplay and more focused stories, rather than sprawling messes of poorly designed/polished gameplay and overwrought stories. Did it always work perfectly? Obviously not, Sonic Team can hardly do anything right even under the best circumstances. Would any of the post-'06 games actually be better if they had a bunch of other playable characters? Not unless you place the number of playable characters far above every other aspect of a game.

I didn't actually make the argument here that cutting characters was the silver bullet, rather that your framing for why was weaksauce in light of the fact that Sonic even by your own sometimes melodramatic admission is not anywhere close to where he should be in terms of quality and hasn't been for at least a decade regardless of the roster size in any given game at any given time in history, meaning it is obvious by now in the Year of our Lord 2017 that the continued insistence that no member of the extended cast- even folks with good standing like Tails and Knuckles- can be playable anymore because they're anathema to sales and reputation is false to the arguable point of delusion.

Also notice that when Tornado made a correction to my post that Unleashed started many of these aesthetic trends that I admitted it with understanding that it was in reasonable response to Sonic 06- the poster child that people, including you, keep drudging up from the dead as an automatic shutdown towards anyone asking for other characters back- so clearly I'm not so dumb as to literally believe that the scale-back didn't initially have basis, but rather the basis at this point is not convincing or relevant anymore as an explanation for why certain trends continue to exist.

And also clearly my love of Unleashed (and noted dislike of Heroes and 06 which you should well be privy to by now) means I actually don't hinge my love of any given Sonic game on the size of the roster in direct proportion.

[gato]

Just for the record, Sonic Colors being on space had nothing to do with the lack of characters since they all show up on the park in the portable version of the game (I genuinely cannot remember which console it was on... the DS I think?).

[Kintor]

23 minutes ago, HedgehogBR said:

<sup>A little preview. 

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sonic-forces-preview/</sup>

 

Highs

• Darker tone
• Customizable character
• Inspired by series’ best games
• Pretty visuals

Lows

• Are three playable heroes too much?
• Sonic has let us down before

 

That's quite a positive preview, which is always good to see. The positive articles from smaller websites, outside the big names like IGN and Gamespot, will go a long way towards bringing more attention to Sonic Forces.

Overall, it seems that most the media is actually being largely positive about the character creator. No doubt other recent successes like Dragon Ball Xenoverse helped to pave the way. Still, the chance to create official OCs in a Sonic game has certainly generated a lot of excited chatter around the net.