Sonic Forces SPOILER Thread

[Wraith]

2 minutes ago, The Deleter said:

How long are we going to keep this up, though? Didn't we say the same thing back when Lost World released?

Yes, which is why I don't think there's something else. This was the "something else" for years for many.

[Scar]

27 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Maybe we're in the death spiral now.

Series struggles, staff gets fired or moves on, next game is worse because of it, leading to more staff leaving, leading to worse games, etc.

That saddens me. Would make sense though. They just need some fresh and creative minds to take over. The Hedgehog Engine 2 ^TM is now done, maybe get a smaller more focused team to make a lower budget game (like Mania, but 3D), but one that's fully of life and energy. Heck, get Whitehead and Headcannon collaborating too if you must.

There needs to be a paradigm shift, and I'm not sure a mahoosive clusterfuck like Forces is where its gonna come from.

[Gabz Girl]

No, there’s no way another Sonic game is in development. That’s too good to be true. Besides, if that were the case wouldn’t we have known about another game? We knew about Sonic 06 a whole year before it was released and Sonic “Wildfire” more than half a year (I think?) before release. 

Not to mention the fact that this game has all those things that fans wanted to see again; a serious plot, edgy villain, create-a-custom character and more Generations style gameplay. Of course all of this fell flat on its face, but..this is what it was hyped up to be! A Sonic game with Generations gameplay and SA2’s story. 

This was it. This must’ve been the only Sonic game in active development. 

[RedFox99]

That is thoroughly surprising to hear. 3 level designers? Things are now making sense.

[DiamondX]

1 minute ago, RedFox99 said:

That is thoroughly surprising to hear. 3 level designers? Things are now making sense.

It's not just the number.

It's the fact that 2 of them never worled on the franchise at all.

[RedFox99]

Just now, Limit Breaker Diamond said:

It's not just the number.

It's the fact that 2 of them never worled on the franchise at all.

Yeah, that wasn't a wise decision. Kind of feel bad for those guys. 

[azoo]

Uhh.. is Sonic Team gonna be okay?

I know the series will, but is the company behind them doing alright? Because I honestly don't know where the staff behind Unleashed - Generations are at. Are they working on other Sega games? Are they even still at the company?

Wowee.

[KHCast]

Hopefully I'm not being a backseat mod, but looks like there's now a topic for this discussion!

 

[Celestia]

21 minutes ago, Gabz Girl said:

No, there’s no way another Sonic game is in development. That’s too good to be true. Besides, if that were the case wouldn’t we have known about another game? We knew about Sonic 06 a whole year before it was released and Sonic “Wildfire” more than half a year (I think?) before release.

I'm honestly not sure what to expect myself, but to be fair with Colours and Lost World didn't we not hear about 'em until the year they came out? I think Generations was the only one that (IIRC) we got rumours / leaks the year before. Oh, and Boom I guess.

16 minutes ago, Limit Breaker Diamond said:

It's not just the number.

It's the fact that 2 of them never worled on the franchise at all.

Eh, I don't think that really means as much as the smaller number of designers. We know boost levels take a lot of time and effort just to make one, putting a smaller number of people on that team makes no sense, regardless of how much experience the people you do put on there have.

The levels being so short even in the late game makes a lot more sense now, huh.

EDIT: And while I'd put this on the people in charge as well, this also explains stuff like how you literally never need to use the slide. I watched the entire game (or at least the main campaign) through streams but this didn't even hit me until I saw one of the Mission achievement things was "Use the slide as Modern Sonic!"...and it was unchecked. In the post-game. It's like the level designers didn't even know about one of your moves.

[Meta77]

When i found out infinite is killed off :c

 

[Balding Spider]

23 minutes ago, MudHunter said:

A reply

So 3 nooby level designers,?

A director with only one good game to his credit, a hack writer and three inexperienced programers? If you ever needed proof that Sonic team are incapable of learning this is it.

[Razule]

20 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Maybe we're in the death spiral now.

Series struggles, staff gets fired or moves on, next game is worse because of it, leading to more staff leaving, leading to worse games, etc.

Huh.. then we might be wrong after all. Even cockroaches can't always pop back up.

[RedFox99]

3 minutes ago, Night on Balding Mountain said:

A director with only one good game to his credit, a hack writer and three inexperienced programers? If you ever needed proof that Sonic team are incapable of learning this is it.

I don't known how to feel about this.

[DiamondX]

So much for "hire new people".

[Johnny Boy]

So I guess there’s no hope for Sonic team at this point?

[Multikaris]

26 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Maybe we're in the death spiral now.

Series struggles, staff gets fired or moves on, next game is worse because of it, leading to more staff leaving, leading to worse games, etc.

And Sonic Team’s tightened control means all the other options are the Comics, the film, and a possible Mania 2.

[GuyWithThePie]

6 hours ago, Blue Blood said:

I want to play Forces, because as someone who's so deeply interested in Sonic games and how they work it's something that I can't pass up. How would I talk about Forces and what it does for the series for years to come without actually passing the whole game myself? Especially when it's such a prime example of everything wrong with the series at the moment. I need to pay the game to fully understand it. I simply won't pay full price for it though. I'll just get it pre-owned, because I do not want to support such a product.

I'm a bit conflicted here. I don't want to buy a used copy of Forces physical because I don't think it deserves to take up the cartridge slot in my Switch over far better physical games in my collection, like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. But at the same time, I don't want to buy it digital because that would be directly supporting them.

[The Deleter]

In other news, I just realized that the moon medals aren't the first time silver rings and red rings have been used alongside each other in the series:

Secret Rings was the one that introduced them, though they were Silver Star rings, and Fire Soul rings in that case.

[Multikaris]

2 minutes ago, GuyWithThePie said:

I'm a bit conflicted here. I don't want to buy a used copy of Forces physical because I don't think it deserves to take up the cartridge slot in my Switch over far better physical games in my collection, like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. But at the same time, I don't want to buy it digital because that would be directly supporting them.

So are you going to rent it? Wait for the ROM dump? 

[antyep]

I know I’m gonna rent it hopefully at redbox

[Spooky Mulder]

Maybe this could end up being a good thing. A complete restructuring of Sonic Team would probably be the best case scenario for the franchise. I don’t know how likely that is at this point

[Scar]

21 minutes ago, azoo said:

Uhh.. is Sonic Team gonna be okay?

I know the series will, but is the company behind them doing alright? Because I honestly don't know where the staff behind Unleashed - Generations are at. Are they working on other Sega games? Are they even still at the company?

Wowee.

Well I mean its been implied there have been development problems with this game.

I remember some shit from Retro, where Endri said there was a prototype game that resembled neither the boost formula or LW, existed. It is entirely possible that project is still alive, or it was canned around Forces' inception and members of that Team moved on to a different project or indeed, just left.

[GuyWithThePie]

9 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

So are you going to rent it? Wait for the ROM dump? 

Something tells me that a rental won't be enough to truly experience this game, and I've never really pirated anything before. So I guess I'll just have to choose between used physical or discounted digital.

[Razule]

20 minutes ago, Limit Breaker Diamond said:

So much for "hire new people".

How about "hire the not-wrong people"?

[Indigo Rush]

I'm going to try to present this as concisely as I can. But first, please look at this tiny banana:

Awesome. Feel the stress and prejudice leaving you? Wonderful! Great.

Here's why the lot of us have problems with Sonic Forces.

It does not look fun.

That's it, really. It doesn't look compelling. But why. Why are people, Sonic 'fans' in particular, shying away from this? Why are the lot of us so skeptical? What is it about Sonic Forces that makes it look 'not fun' and such?

I've played video games for many years. I'm over a quarter of a century old, and the lot of my experience comes in the form of Sonic games, 2D, 3D, and everything in between. I've been a member of these particular forums for over a decade, even. I reluctantly cannot deny that I have a strong attachment to these games. Sonic as a series has stuck with me very strongly and I've dug my way through just about every game released, new, old, good, bad, obscure, you name it, I've owned it, and if not owned it, I've probably played it, and if not that, I've at least researched it in depth. I'm a series veteran. I've seen what Sonic is capable of being and becoming. We've discussed the series' potential to extreme lengths on these forums. I'm also a member on Retro and the Sega Forums, but I digress. Point is, I've been around for a while. I've seen things I've heard things and I know things.

The problem with Sonic Forces, the reason it is making long time and seasoned fans such as myself turn away from it instinctively is because we've done this song and dance before, and we can determine based on series precedent what will happen. We understand the people who are working on the game. It's the same reason almost none of us doubted Sonic Mania's inevitable praise the moment we saw Christian Whitehead's logo pop up on the debut trailer. No one who is working on Sonic Forces is new. Setting aside the fact that a glut of us don't care for the boost gameplay style to begin with, we know who the level designer and director are. We know who's writing the script. We know what they've done before, and using our God-given eyes and intellect, we're able to deduce from the plentiful footage we've seen leading up to the release leak of this game what the rest of it would be like. The designers behind Forces are not interested in intricate and replayable level layouts, they don't care much for creating dynamic systems or physics that could result in the player's input resulting in an outcome that may not necessarily follow their scripting; which, funnily enough, is how folk like Diogenes have determined how the designers plan out these stages: in the form of a movie storyboard. See, unlike the original sidescrollers, the lot of 3D Sonic games are intended to be played as a sequence of interactive setpieces and cinematics; there's no depth beyond how quickly you can move from one scene to the next, or if you can track down a stray collectible along the way. What this is lacking in is meaningful agency for the player; it relieves the burden of navigation in lieu of pathing that elicits a sense of claustrophobia. This is where the hallway comments come from.

When you compare to other truly 3D platformers in any era (the good ones, at least), one of the key important design aspects is their intent on letting the player experiment and explore the control scheme; the joy of movement and the flow of level design work in tandem to present an experience where the player has the choice, the freedom, to interact with the world at a pace that's comfortable to them. In a successful instance, this should feel rewarding, it should allow the player, who is a human being, to feel a sense of satisfaction from discovering the world and solving challenges by the wit the good Lord has blessed them with.

Now, you may want to shrug this all off as non-applicable to Sonic. Sonic's a bloke who dashes through roller coaster worlds at high speeds, who has time to navigate the world when you're running at the speed of sound, after all? The thing is while that seems like it's the ideal  choice for a character who runs at high speed, it results in a series of levels that end up being one-note and repetitive. If you think about it, what is the fundamental difference between any of the Modern Sonic stages in Sonic Forces beyond their aesthetic? The obstacles and paths may become a little more complex as you progress throughout the story, but as far as the rest is concerned, you're doing very little other than holding the boost button when in a 3D space while jumping every so often. In 2D areas, you're not even going fast much of the time, instead relegated to navigating a series of blocks and basic platforms to progress to the next sequence. The seams in this design are very apparent, and having played and studied these Modern Sonic games for the past near decade, it's becoming very stale. Not only is there little differentiating the gameplay between stages, but these design philosophies are bleeding between each game, and all the while failing to iterate in a meaningful fashion.

The only thing that changes between them is the hook, the "gimmick" as it were, which is usually just another gameplay style or a story setup that might interest you. You know them: The Werehog, The Wisps, Classic Sonic, Classic Sonic again and also a custom character. There are also serious issues with Classic Sonic's gameplay making a reappearance; namely that the controls and mechanics fail to translate from their origin. On a surface level, it's reasonable to understand why they may not be able to get this exactly right, but especially after Sonic Generations has come and gone, it feels like a foolish decision to take a one-trick pony and ask it to impress the second go round, and considering Sonic Mania delivered the best 2D Sonic experience in decades, it feels even worse by comparison.

All that said, the issue isn't just that both of these interpretations of Sonic gameplay have become stale, it's also tantamount that they're failing to capitalize on their inherent strengths in any fashion: this is a result of the designers talent and intent in making these games. If you haven't noticed, even fans of the Boost games are crying foul at Sonic Forces' level design. On one hand, it's reasonable to concede some of these choices may be wise ones: the lack of full 3D exploration in Modern Sonic is likely a result of the designers understanding that his controls in 3D are especially cumbersome, so holding back on those areas in the Modern levels seems like a wise choice: focusing on the gameplay style's strengths. In contrast, however, not much has been done to buff these strengths, if anything they feel like they've become weaker. There's little in the way of branching paths in these levels, and nary a curve or slope in sight on a 2D plane. Classic Sonic faces this issue as well, as there's little in the way of dynamic surfaces to play with; at best we've seen some complex platforming challenges in later stages, however very few of them incorporate Sonic's momentum physics. In short, this is the source of the "blocky platforming" complaint you may be hearing.

It comes down to that. The player has little freedom to explore, because the design prohibits it. Going off the beaten path will scarcely reward you. Your goal is to make your way from setpiece to setpiece as fast as you can, and you're cursed to try anything else. In video games, fun often comes from being able to say "I figured this out," or "I accomplished this task by myself." A sense of accomplishment and reward is inherently appealing to the human mind. There's nothing to figure out in Sonic Forces, only quick reaction time and twitch gameplay... broken apart by the occasional clunky jumping challenge in 2D.

Sonic Forces is likely drawing people in with it's premise. Eggman's taken over the world, there's a new villain with a mysterious power, there's a new maguffin to learn about, there's a link between this game and Mania before it, you can create your own character, each level is like an explosive, action-packed movie sequence, it's designed to appeal to someone looking for a spectacle, if not an interactive story. Otherwise, it's use of recognizable and fan-favorite characters is the draw for die-hard fans who are not going to miss out on the biggest release in the past 5 years. Sega is, and always has been, incredibly talented at drawing a crowd, subverting your expectations on a surface level and hooking you in to trying out the next Sonic game. The thing is... as fans get older, we start seeing the pattern. It's not quite the memetic Sonic Cycle, but there's absolutely a sequence of events that take place almost every time.

In summation, it doesn't look fun because it's providing little else between each visual spectacle besides one-note gameplay and repetitive challenges. We have noticed the patterns, we know who's developing the game down to their names, and it's failing to hook many of us because we've wised up to Sonic Team's playbook. Sonic Forces is going to be a blast for many of you to play through the first, maybe even the second and third time. But once you slog through every EX platforming challenge and collect everything you can, once you've watched the cutscenes enough times to burn them into your conscious like the Adventure games had for us older folk, I can't guarantee you're going to want to replay those levels once the charm has worn off.

Meanwhile... I, and many others have played through those old Genesis games time and time again. Not simply because it's what I grew up with as a youngster, but because I still discover new things even 20 years later. I find new ways to use Sonic's momentum physics to improve my skill. Each playthrough becomes different and my experience is never the exact same. The designers don't ask me to play the game the exact way they want me too, their hand is not felt strongly, they give me the freedom to take this other path, they want me to go back as a different character and go off the beaten path in multiple ways to find new ways to beat the level. I'm not being guided by a story, I'm not rushing to the end so I can skip the next cutscene to play the next level, I'm taking in the world and experiencing the dynamic gameplay in a way I could never do with the gameplay seen in games like Sonic Forces.

 

Sonic Colors was seen as the best Sonic game in a decade.

 

When was the last time you've played it?