Sonic Forces sells an estimated 234,000 units worldwide in the first week at retail.

[GentlemanX]

Again, was never debating Forces' execution of its concepts, only the concepts themselves.

[Swing]

Forces is actually the perfect example that this series is really stuck in a dead end and has no clear direction were it should go from here. It is true, that Forces wanted to please everybody, but in the end they just made a big mess. You can not take all of those ideas and push them into one story. Classic, Adventure, Modern, all of this eras had different tone and writing. In the end, you can not please anyone with that.

Sega should just separate those series or just stick with one of them. Is this really so hard to understand? C'mon Sega, get your shit together! 

[Baconjack]

19 hours ago, Gabz Girl said:

Because Sonic Forces is not a very good game to begin with and good sales = more Sonic games of a similar quality. No thank you! 

Did you know that Heroes and Shadow, two crappy games, sold 3.5 million and 2 million respectively, while games like Colours and Generations sold less than that? So, going off your logic, wouldn't Sega make more games similar to Heroes and Shadow rather than Colours and Generations? No, of course not. They listened to the poor reviews of Heroes and Shadow and went about trying to fix them with '06, which ironically got worse reviews than both of these games. Lost World sold fairly well considering it was exclusive to a poorly selling platform. Did they continue with the 'experimental' gameplay mechanics they put in that game? No. No they haven't.

'06, despite its infamy still sold just under a million. Did you think that Sega decided to continue making games that were similar to '06? No, they did not.

The only things sales correlate to, from a business's point of view, is money and commercial success. It never guarantees that any future games will be of similar quality. Sega knows its bad, hence why they withdrew review copies of the game. Like what they did with Shadow, Unleashed and '06, they will order Sonic Team to fix the problems with Forces for the next game. And that will probably end up in them ditching the boosting mechanic, 2.5d classic sonic and a custom character creator. I've said this before, but I'll say it again - bad sales wouldn't even guarantee another Sonic game. 

[Jango]

@Swing

I disagree. It can be done. I know a lot of games with different types of gameplay that aren't a mess. Finding the "tone" that fits within each era isn't impossible either. Just keep in mind that something like torture and murder doesn't fit in ANY era of Sonic, nor never will. It's just ridiculous, this isn't the "darker tone of Sonic Adventure", this is a 10 years' old fan fic.

[Tarnish]

5 minutes ago, Sir Laptop said:

Did you know that Heroes and Shadow, two crappy games

I oppose, Heroes got more things right than it got wrong, IMHO of course. It'll forever be more of a Sonic game than Forces could ever hope to be in my eyes.

[Indigo Rush]

2 hours ago, Sir Laptop said:

Did you know that Heroes and Shadow, two crappy games, sold 3.5 million and 2 million respectively, while games like Colours and Generations sold less than that?

...there are so many things you'd need to consider why this is the case, let alone a different market and economy; but I'm not an analyst and I'm willing to bet you aren't one either, so let's keep it in the Sonic playground for now: while it's correct that neither Heroes or Shadow are especially good, I believe the disparity could, in partiality, be accounted for by understanding that most sensible people avoided Sonic games later down the road after being burned too many times.

[Meta77]

5 hours ago, Sir Laptop said:

Did you know that Heroes and Shadow, two crappy games, sold 3.5 million and 2 million respectively, while games like Colours and Generations sold less than that? So, going off your logic, wouldn't Sega make more games similar to the quality of Heroes and Shadow rather than Colours and Generations? No, of course not. They listened to the poor reviews of Heroes and Shadow and went about trying to fix them with '06, which ironically got worse reviews than both of these games. Lost World sold fairly well considering it was exclusive to a poorly selling platform. Did they continue with the 'experimental' gameplay mechanics they put in that game? No. No they haven't.

'06, despite its infamy still sold just under a million. Did you think that Sega decided to continue making games of a similar quality to '06? No, they did not.

The only things sales correlate to, from a business's point of view, is money and commercial success. It never guarantees that any future games will be of similar quality. Sega knows its bad, hence why they withdrew review copies of the game. Like what they did with Shadow, Unleashed and '06, they will order Sonic Team to fix the problems with Forces for the next game. I've said this before, but I'll say it again - bad sales wouldn't even guarantee another Sonic game. 

Seems Someone deleted the courage video i posted in  regard to the fandom. Well as you said if sega listened to the fandom there would be mixed messages and EVERYONE wants to be right. Everyone has a idea what would make a good sonic game and sega for whatever reason just does not know how to put it together in a Good way. They say players wanted sonic to use a gun, the made characters and a game that used them, people did not like the game so they scraped it and went with something else. people wanted a bigger story they tried 06 but head changes, rushing, a cut in half team lead to its downfall. And yet with each of these games and nearly every game outside boom to a .............extent i guess there are fans that like those games be it guilty pleasures or just super forgiving. I see 06 comments, heroes, shadow that praise the games and that they enjoyed them. while just as many other fans disliked those games with a passion unlike any sun.

[Tornado]

6 hours ago, Sir Laptop said:

Did you know that Heroes and Shadow, two crappy games, sold 3.5 million and 2 million respectively, while games like Colours and Generations sold less than that? So, going off your logic, wouldn't Sega make more games similar to the quality of Heroes and Shadow rather than Colours and Generations? No, of course not. They listened to the poor reviews of Heroes and Shadow and went about trying to fix them with '06, which ironically got worse reviews than both of these games. Lost World sold fairly well considering it was exclusive to a poorly selling platform. Did they continue with the 'experimental' gameplay mechanics they put in that game? No. No they haven't.

Other than "Sonic Team is continuously incompetent", I don't really know what point you think you're trying to make here. If you're trying to (once again) argue that Sonic Team keeps trying to make course corrections in response to critical reception, you should actually know what the reception of the games in question you're talking about were.

Quote

'06, despite its infamy still sold just under a million. Did you think that Sega decided to continue making games of a similar quality to '06? No, they did not.

...

 

They just released one a couple years ago.

6 hours ago, Sir Laptop said:

I've said this before, but I'll say it again - bad sales wouldn't even guarantee another Sonic game. 

When you said it last time it was considerably more accurate.

[BlueSky]

I dunno really. It seems like I'm the one always swimming towards the upstream in every thing anyway.

Well, if Forces flop, it flops. If this is the last Sonic game I can enjoy enough to care and I'm able to actually get through the gameplay then well, sucks. If the next game manages to be more coherent in a way I find interesting enough well that'll be cool. I dunno really.

I just dunno, people want better 3D Sonic and some keep referring the awesomeness of Mania.

I just don't think Mania would do the trick for me, I think I wouldn't find anything too amusing from it, since I'm more into playing games that have a point -in a form of story of some sorts- than into just tapping buttons endlessly for making some mass of pixels to move and jump. I'm a stupid person like that. I enjoy stories, they feed my imagination which is prolly the reason why I'm still a somewhat entertaining person to talk with in life.

I just dunno, when I started to play Forces question marks were touchable around me since I wondered "why I saw so much anger for it in the Internet", and I still wonder about it, were people setting their hopes up way too high or something? I know it's not perfect but I do like it, more than Colours, that just felt so... repulsive for me. It didn't have enough self respect as far as I see, it was feeling awkward about itself too much for me to get into it, it didn't feel like it even had any context for me, and I mean it. It felt like a pile of stuff, I didn't even get where to go next when it came to the stages, for crying out loud!

I like the fact stages are short, I don't have too much time on my hands as I have fragments of it thus it's appreciated the stages are somewhat quick to complete.

But yeah, really, I dunno. Maybe angry people feel it's at least worth their anger, they wouldn't prolly keep on cursing it to the deepest hole if they wpouldn't have any feelings towards it, so that's at least more than this game being "meh, who cares". But I dunno, I really have no everloving idea why my brain keep walking to the other way than others. I dunno.

[Kellan]

15 hours ago, Sir Laptop said:

Did you know that Heroes and Shadow, two crappy games, sold 3.5 million and 2 million respectively, while games like Colours and Generations sold less than that? So, going off your logic, wouldn't Sega make more games similar to Heroes and Shadow rather than Colours and Generations?

Yes? I would personally love for another game like Heroes.

15 hours ago, Jango said:

Just keep in mind that something like torture and murder doesn't fit in ANY era of Sonic, nor never will.

Never? That seems pretty limiting. Especially since we’ve had murders in the series before, and they’ve generally matched the tone of the media that they’re in.

[Blue Blood]

11 minutes ago, Kellan said:

Never? That seems pretty limiting. Especially since we’ve had murders in the series before, and they’ve generally matched the tone of the media that they’re in.

Gonna agree with Jango on this. Any time that the series tries to get serious with motifs such as murder, genocide and war (and that one scene where Elise attempts to jump to her death to escape Eggman) it comes off as unfitting at best, although it's often even worse because of poor story-telling and dialogue. They should never be a part of this series. This isn't the topic for discussing tone and direction (and frankly who isn't absolutely sick of that discussion already?), but I just want to say that calling "never" on certain angles isn't limiting when there are countless other ways to tell stories.

[Tarnish]

7 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

Gonna agree with Jango on this. Any time that the series tries to get serious with motifs such as murder, genocide and war (and that one scene where Elise attempts to jump to her death to escape Eggman) it comes off as unfitting at best, although it's often even worse because of poor story-telling and dialogue. They should never be a part of this series. This isn't the topic for discussing tone and direction (and frankly who isn't absolutely sick of that discussion already?), but I just want to say that calling "never" on certain angles isn't limiting when there are countless other ways to tell stories.

Well, didn't Adventure 1 and 2 had elements of war and murder (with Tikal's tribe being killed by Chaos as they wanted to conquer other lands, and the ARK scientists and Gerald Robotnik getting killed by GUN)? I think those stories handled those elements pretty well.

[Meta77]

Yes they did. Some just dont like sonic being serious. I enjoy it. It gives off more than just light and sunshine and a saturday morning I beat you again eggman at your silly attempt to build a park.

Sonic 3 had eggman fun a entire forest to the ground by fire bombing and destroying a entire zone just to get rid of you

Sonic and knuckles fires off the laser inside a volcano triggering a activation

Sonic Adventure: Tries to bomb a entire city for losing, and causes chaos to flood a entire city in logic should have killed thousands but its sega and all those happy people escaped

Shadaow. Death all around, nukes a city capital, again people escape, even those empty gun ships floating in the sky by themselves

Sonic 2, Holds a gun to amys head, tries to kill sonic in space via bomb in a capsule, maria is shot and her grandad is shot by firing squad, biolizard rams a station up his bum

06: sonic dies, there was blood in some scenes but it caused the rating to go up so they took it out. Elise dies when the ship crashes

Sega has always had dark elements in sonic games and they are OK. The issue is they have no idea how to tell a Great story with it. They always either get cold feet going all out or put it together the week before launch.

[KHCast]

3 hours ago, BlueSky said:

and I still wonder about it, were people setting their hopes up way too high or something

Personally I don’t get what’s hard to understand regarding people that don’t enjoy it. At least from a gameplay perspective. Modern and classic gameplay to many is extremely inferior to past titles and the avatar is average to play with at best. Modern once again is, like colors, mostly 2D and extremely linear with blocky platforming, uncreative level design, and short levels. Classic is a mess and doesn’t feel at all authentic especially after mania. Like even if you like the game, these should be understandable complaints to hear from others.

[BlueSky]

52 minutes ago, KHCast said:

Personally I don’t get what’s hard to understand regarding people that don’t enjoy it. At least from a gameplay perspective. Modern and classic gameplay to many is extremely inferior to past titles and the avatar is average to play with at best. Modern once again is, like colors, mostly 2D and extremely linear with blocky platforming, uncreative level design, and short levels. Classic is a mess and doesn’t feel at all authentic especially after mania. Like even if you like the game, these should be understandable complaints to hear from others.

Aaa, so at least for some it's about the gameplay issues, okay.

I have no idea about Mania, Classic feels solid alright for me as the gameplay is in Forces, I think I do see your point though.

So, is it about how repetitive/boring/unpolished the gameplay feels? I dunno about these gameplay things honestly, I just divide them mostly in two categories; ones I can play and those I can't wrap my head around how they work. Forces was more about the former than the latter for me. And like I said I actually like the fact levels arent that long.

Like I said, I do care for story elements more than the actual gameplay. That's why things like this aren't really that obvious for me, sorry.

And I do appreciate games that don't kill me because I panick and miss a platform by a millimeter, looking at you Generations 3DS version...

[superman43]

22 hours ago, Sir Laptop said:

Did you know that Heroes and Shadow, two crappy games, sold 3.5 million and 2 million respectively, while games like Colours and Generations sold less than that? So, going off your logic, wouldn't Sega make more games similar to Heroes and Shadow rather than Colours and Generations? No, of course not. They listened to the poor reviews of Heroes and Shadow and went about trying to fix them with '06, which ironically got worse reviews than both of these games. Lost World sold fairly well considering it was exclusive to a poorly selling platform. Did they continue with the 'experimental' gameplay mechanics they put in that game? No. No they haven't.

'06, despite its infamy still sold just under a million. Did you think that Sega decided to continue making games that were similar to '06? No, they did not. The only things sales correlate to, from a business's point of view, is money and commercial success. It never guarantees that any future games will be of similar quality. 

I don´t think that is what happened that time. My suggestion is that Heroes were launched in the (yeah, not that big, but still) heights of Adventure 1 and Adventure 2. Sonic Heroes isn´t a crappy game, but yeah, it´s still far from being great. Shadow was a crappy game mainly for guns and that tons of stories... Sonic Team should just stick with few, not a lot of them.

´06 broke the negative records of the series and that´s when the status quo turned around. Not only public but also many former Sonic fans looked at it and thought that SEGA will never do a good Sonic game again. That´s the true reason why Unleashed, Colors, Generations whilst being quite good never reached the Heroes´ or Shadow´s number of sold units. And it would take a long time to actually get back to it with truly good Sonic games, if it is even possible. 

[Multikaris]

13 hours ago, BlueSky said:

I dunno really. It seems like I'm the one always swimming towards the upstream in every thing anyway.

Well, if Forces flop, it flops. If this is the last Sonic game I can enjoy enough to care and I'm able to actually get through the gameplay then well, sucks. If the next game manages to be more coherent in a way I find interesting enough well that'll be cool. I dunno really.

I just dunno, people want better 3D Sonic and some keep referring the awesomeness of Mania.

I just don't think Mania would do the trick for me, I think I wouldn't find anything too amusing from it, since I'm more into playing games that have a point -in a form of story of some sorts- than into just tapping buttons endlessly for making some mass of pixels to move and jump. I'm a stupid person like that. I enjoy stories, they feed my imagination which is prolly the reason why I'm still a somewhat entertaining person to talk with in life.

I just dunno, when I started to play Forces question marks were touchable around me since I wondered "why I saw so much anger for it in the Internet", and I still wonder about it, were people setting their hopes up way too high or something? I know it's not perfect but I do like it, more than Colours, that just felt so... repulsive for me. It didn't have enough self respect as far as I see, it was feeling awkward about itself too much for me to get into it, it didn't feel like it even had any context for me, and I mean it. It felt like a pile of stuff, I didn't even get where to go next when it came to the stages, for crying out loud!

I like the fact stages are short, I don't have too much time on my hands as I have fragments of it thus it's appreciated the stages are somewhat quick to complete.

But yeah, really, I dunno. Maybe angry people feel it's at least worth their anger, they wouldn't prolly keep on cursing it to the deepest hole if they wpouldn't have any feelings towards it, so that's at least more than this game being "meh, who cares". But I dunno, I really have no everloving idea why my brain keep walking to the other way than others. I dunno.

To that end, I hope Mania 2 has an improved story akin to say, the Rush games.

[Swing]

Back than Sonic had actually a very good reputation. That is why people bought the games because back than Sonic was sill a very decent series with a bit of quality. Nowadays, after so many mediocre games Sonic is now like the games itself. Mediocre at best. 

[Almar]

Another issue is production costs. Back in the Genesis days, developing a game like Sonic the hedgehog was cheaper than now.

[molul]

Yes, but Sega is no small company. Many games cost a lot nowadays and that doesn't prevent them from being great. Also, if a Sonic game is so expensive to make, then why not waiting 8 years and gather all the money Sega can, to make a great Sonic game? 

The problem is only Sega's attitude and strategy.

[Badnik Mechanic]

18 minutes ago, molul said:

then why not waiting 8 years and gather all the money Sega can, to make a great Sonic game? 

The problem is only Sega's attitude and strategy.

Because it's not a matter of money. It's a matter of talent.

[KHCast]

Money cannot buy talent. It’s not what makes a game good.(hello indie games) It can however buy talented people to make something good. 

[Harkofthewaa]

6 hours ago, molul said:

Yes, but Sega is no small company. Many games cost a lot nowadays and that doesn't prevent them from being great. Also, if a Sonic game is so expensive to make, then why not waiting 8 years and gather all the money Sega can, to make a great Sonic game? 

The problem is only Sega's attitude and strategy.

They waited 4 years for Forces, is twice the time really going to help? Especially considering that Games with way more scope and actual EFFORT were turned around in less time. Now I know that all the 4 years between Lost World and Forces wasn't used for development, but that the thing: they could have used that time to slow cook something amazing, but instead chose to sit on their duffs and wait till they had no time left. Heck, lack of time isn't even a valid excuse for Forces, considering the likes of Adventure, 2, 3&K, and Generations were all rushed. And they turned out just fine, didn't they? Point is, time doesn't matter if you don't know how to utilize it properly, and it seems that SEGA and Sonic Team forgot how to do that.

[molul]

10 hours ago, Mayor D said:

Because it's not a matter of money. It's a matter of talent.

Then gather money and hire talented people. Anyway, I was just replying to the previous post who suggested it was amatter of money.

3 hours ago, Harkofthewaa said:

They waited 4 years for Forces, is twice the time really going to help? Especially considering that Games with way more scope and actual EFFORT were turned around in less time. Now I know that all the 4 years between Lost World and Forces wasn't used for development, but that the thing: they could have used that time to slow cook something amazing, but instead chose to sit on their duffs and wait till they had no time left. Heck, lack of time isn't even a valid excuse for Forces, considering the likes of Adventure, 2, 3&K, and Generations were all rushed. And they turned out just fine, didn't they? Point is, time doesn't matter if you don't know how to utilize it properly, and it seems that SEGA and Sonic Team forgot how to do that.

You said it yourself: if it had been 4 years dedicated to developing the game it could have been better. Well, maybe.

[Red Hot Jack]

Sonic Forces is still 27# in the top 50 overall in the UK. I'm really curious about how much it and Mania sold. The SXSW event description said both games had a great performance, or something like that.