Will sonic forces keep us busy for months or weeks

[Meta77]

How long do you think the game will be and how long will it's life be. Will Sega support it a long time....they have a history. Because while i love mania. Outside mods. Aka miku and some speed runners nearly no one in my friends list plays the game since beating it

 I go back every now and again for the music myself

That said will the same thing happen to forces?

 

[superman43]

3 minutes ago, Meta77 said:

How long do you think the game will be and how long will it's life be. Will Sega support it a long time....they have a history. Because while i love mania. Outside mods. Aka miku and some speed runners nearly no one in my friends list plays the game since beating it

 I go back every now and again for the music myself

That said will the same thing happen to forces?

 

I think that after some time in this case (Mania vs. Forces) Mania would be preferred option to play.

[Meta77]

I'm not saying a mania vs forces in saying lengthy wise and lifespan. The classic gsmes are fun but without mods the long term play is super short. It's fun to go back every now and again but a 2 weeks after release and I was done with all medals. Though it's fun to go back to on slow days.  but will force do the same

[The Deleter]

I'm expecting the game to be at least two times longer than a normal Sonic game with all the characters and stories to complete, so 8 hours or more on that front. And with the CaC, many of the red rings will be locked off unless they have a specific wispon on them, requiring multiple playthroughs. So... Probably a 12 hour game to 100% complete, all around.

The levels themselves have barely any replay value outside of that, though. I can't see time trials making a return with how simple the stages are, and there's barely any alternate routes to explore in the long run. It depends on how much you like the game, I guess, but since ranking is easy as sin all over again, I see this as one of the "beat it, forget it" Sonic games.

[Meta77]

Do you think Sega will give it dlc or move on to the next 3d game after launch

[PC the Hedgehog]

I really, really hope Sonic Team goes out of their way to increase the length of the game compared to Colors and Generations. We need a Sonic game with some real meat on its bones again. If they don't, I barely see myself playing the game for half a month.

[Badnik Mechanic]

4 hours.

Day 1 launch patch.

*Month 2 fix patch.

DLC will be on par with Unleashed.

 

*Depends on the severity of the launch bugs.

[Meta77]

8 minutes ago, Mayor D said:

4 hours.

Day 1 launch patch.

*Month 2 fix patch.

DLC will be on par with Unleashed.

 

*Depends on the severity of the launch bugs.

Unleashed had dlc....

.was it just that day stage in china?

[Flame Lance]

You would think with four years of work that it could easily be as long as Unleashed, if not longer since it has twice as many play styles. But every game since Unleashed has been about 4-5 hours with very little to do in the post game. Heaven help us all if it is as barren as Colors and Generations. I doubt it will be that puny, but with the lack of hubs and the abundance of two minute stages, I have my doubts that it will rival Unleashed or the Adventure games in content. I'm just worried  the effort  put into the replay value was mainly for the avatar but I hope I am proven wrong. I am hopeful it will keep me coming back for months and that it will get good DLC support.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

Unleashed was only long because of the padding with the werehog. It'd be similar in length to Colors and Generations otherwise.

 

When I look at Forces I see a lot of very compact stages, and that makes me think there's probably going to be a large amount of them (a very portable mindset, in a way). I can see this having more main levels than Colors or Generations, and with each of them having at least four acts (judging by the amount of gameplay mechanics) and mission mode ontop of that, it seems it'll be somewhat meaty. After all, if it had as many acts as Generations at this length and size you could complete the game in like an hour.

[Diogenes]

Most Sonic games are fairly short, modern ones no exception. Even putting my judgement of its quality aside, nothing we've seen of Forces speaks to it being particularly long. Classic and Modern Sonics are about the same as they were in Generations, and the Avatar and tag team styles are similar enough that I don't expect that they're much more efficient to make. As far as extra/postgame stuff we've got red rings again and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some extra missions but anything beyond that is pure speculation.

[Dannymax440]

40 minutes ago, Meta77 said:

Unleashed had dlc....

.was it just that day stage in china?

It's basically hard mode of all stages with a severe spike fetish. 

[JezMM]

Nakamura claimed it isn't a short game, but that could mean anything really.  I'd say above 6 hours is "not short".  I certainly hope we get something on Unleashed's level again here.

50 minutes ago, Meta77 said:

Unleashed had dlc....

.was it just that day stage in china?

Unleashed had a DLC pack for every country.  They always featured a "hard mode" version of the regular act 1 day stage, plus 1 or 2 additional brand new acts for day and night and 1 or 2 "remixed" acts, using the same base geometry as an existing stage but using props and platforms to completely change how the stage plays (sometimes adding additional "laps" to looping stages, changing the objective entirely, or even changing the route you travel around the stage).

Some of the "brand new" acts consist of content that was cut from the base game - either areas that were originally intended to be part of the main Act 1 night stage but those stages were presumebly deemed too long, or areas/maps that were seen pre-release (or even in Sound Test menu icons) but not in the final game.

Anyway point is the DLC was pretty substantial.  If you just played through every level once in Unleashed, the DLC would add a good 1-2 hours to your playtime.  I'd really love to see DLC like it again, hell I would have accepted DLC like this for Generations, even though I'm sure it'd be disappointing to just get more acts for the 9 zones already in the game rather than additional revisits.

[Wraith]

I expect it to be lengthy only if it's padded out. I personally don't think a long modern/boost game is feasible without a decent chunk of it being padding, and we already know what the padding will be: The easier to produce classic stages and the slower paced, clunky custom character stages. 

They could always prove me wrong and make boost gameplay the star of the show with the other stuff being on the side, but I doubt the other styles would exist if Boost had a healthy amount of content on it's own.

[Multikaris]

15 minutes ago, Josh said:

I expect it to be lengthy only if it's padded out. I personally don't think a long modern/boost game is feasible without a decent chunk of it being padding, and we already know what the padding will be: The easier to produce classic stages and the slower paced, clunky custom character stages. 

They could always prove me wrong and make boost gameplay the star of the show with the other stuff being on the side, but I doubt the other styles would exist if Boost had a healthy amount of content on it's own.

 

And of course it seems the cutscenes will provide a substantial amount. On a more negative account, how would stuff like collectibles and missions factor in? 

[Meta77]

15 minutes ago, Miru the Living Planet said:

 

And of course it seems the cutscenes will provide a substantial amount. On a more negative account, how would stuff like collectibles and missions factor in? 

I got bored of generations extras fast. I would not mind a big museum showing scrapped ideas like masons or games few know of like Sonics arcade game

[Chili Dawg]

Best case answer: days.

Worst: Hours.

Actually, I suppose worst is minutes or seconds, but I can't imagine it'll be so bad we can't make it through a level or two.

[Blue Blood]

Forces had me disappointed but still very intrigued for 8 months.

It then saw me plainly disappointed for a little while.

And for the following three and a half months up until now it's kept me amused, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

If I ever buy the game, it'll probably keep me busy for a day at best.

 

Content-wise, I'm sure that Forces main campaign will be incredibly short. Unleashed, Colours and Generations all suffer from it being over in a flash. Unleashed maybe less-so than the others, but that's only due to the excess padding that plagued the game. Forces has no hub worlds, but it does have extra missions. The track-record tells me that these will mainly be focused on re-tooled versions of existing acts, incredibly heavy on gimmicks or indeed both. They probably won't be much fun to play through once, yet alone repeatedly. When I go back to Colours and Generations, I stick exclusively to the main acts of those games and avoid the filler entirely. 

Where Forces will arguably get some legs is with the Custom Hero stages. With the variety of Wispons, players will be able to try out the same levels with different setups. Personally, I think that the Wispons look fairly shoddy all with variations of "press X here to do action" rather than anything more meaningful that could be afforded by varying abilities. But the point stands that it's something for players to explore. And if they do-so enjoy making custom characters, then presumably there'll be outfits and the like to unlock.

Best case scenario: It's as short as, or slightly longer than, Generations with extra filler content (honestly the Custom Hero already kind of looks like this). A first play through might take you up to a few days, but subsequent ones will see you ignoring almost anything that isn't a regular stage.

Worst case scenario: It's as short as Generations.

DLC... We'll have to wait and see. 

[Radiant Hero Ike]

Mania burned me out after a week or so, Forces might keep me busy for a little longer than that. And I'll probably come back to play it like Unleashed and Generations.

[Ayliffe]

Probably a day (or two if they really pad it out) for the main campaign, and around a week or so for 100% completion I'd guess? 

[James Cloud]

Yes easily especially multiple new playthroughs with new Avatars to make and different species to try out, Nakamura already confirmed not short so it makes doing multiple playthroughs worth a lot and the missions hopefully more than generations for every playstyle and potential DLC packs like Unleashed down the line maybe even new.

[Meta77]

Another thing that is being passed around slightly is the DLC and if Sega will support it. I do not know what it is with sega and supporting games but hopefully they will with forces. Granted many of their games fail or drop off cause of lack of support *im looking at you anarchy reigns**could have been amazing if sega  actually cared to try and support that game* to more dlc. Many games today are just built around a short campain and then dlc. Though the only company i dispise with their dlc plan is doa5.

[blueblur98]

we don't really have a definitive stage count for forces, but i'll try to estimate with zone totals in the boost games. unleashed had 7, colors had 6 (full zones), 9 in generations. so we can probably round this out to about 8 zones with 4 acts each. that's pretty decent. not to mention we have the inevitable mission mode and we have red rings too. looks like it'll be pretty average-decent length. then again, nakamura said it wouldn't be a short game, so my estimates could be totally wrong

[Sega DogTagz]

Well if you want to get into the meat of the issue, we've already seen three green hill zone levels, so there is nothing to suggest that Modern Sonic won't also visit the place either. I think its a fair bet to say that each "level" will feature at least four full acts, and the rest can be filled in with missions and mini-stages.

If it sticks to a formula like this, where each of the four playstyles has equal representation, than the end tally for full stages should put each of the other games in the boost era to shame. Sonic games arn't the kind of games that most people buy to play weeks at a time, its just not that kind of game. But as far as Sonic games go I'd be surprised if there wasn't more content than anything we've seen since unleashed.

[Dizcrybe]

From all the complaining we'll be doing about it I'd say it'll keep us busy well into the 2020s