Jump to content
Awoo.

Sonic 30th predictions


UpCDownCLeftCRightC

Recommended Posts

On 6/8/2020 at 8:06 PM, Drisaac said:

I'm honestly speechless for the fact that SEGA didn't immediately greenlight a sonic mania 2, and instead let the mania team run away and create their own game company rising sun

No seriously, what the fuck is wrong with SEGA ? Sonic mania was received by both critics and fans as an immense success, and brought in a shit ton of cash despite the game having a low budget, the only thing SEGA needed to do was to simply let the mania team work on a sequel on their own without the need of supervision, but no, they just grabbed the money and called it a day, i knew SEGA was stupid but i cannot believe they are THIS STUPID to not propose a mania 2. I just have no words really.

You mean Evening Star, the studio who's name is a reference to Knuckles Chaotix. Rising Sun is something completely different. Evening Star is a studio founded on the back of Mania, who are using Whitehead's propietary Star Engine (an evolution of the Retro engine used for Mania) as one of their main technologies. Most of Evening Star is made up of Pagoda West Games staff (and correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think PWG exist anymore) and of course Christian Whitehead himself. Nobody on the core Mania development team was part of SEGA. 

So, the thing about a theoretical Mania 2 is that it's not just down to SEGA greenlighting the project. The team themselves have to want to create another game. They're a team of budding developers with their own interests. Much as I'd love to see Mania 2, I also don't think that these guys want to known solely as the guys who make 2D Sonic. They'll have their own creative endeavours to pursue. Simon Thomley is still with his own company Head Cannon, and they recently tried to kickstart their own game (which sadly failed).

I can't stress enough how much I want Mania 2 (or any other Sonic game from the same team, essentially), but they might not want to make one. I find that more likely than SEGA not being interested in working with them again, after Mania was a roaring critical success and got lots of love from SEGA after release.

  • Thumbs Up 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Assuming there is no new game announcement until 2021, which is likely, what do you think is the news that they were announcing in March? It could be something to keep us waiting. Not sure what exactly.

  • Thumbs Up 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Sonic the Hedgehog
@sonic_hedgehog

Mar 6
We're sad to see SXSW cancel, but we respect the call and we're working hard to bring our Sonic Panel content to you all in a new format this April!


Sonic the Hedgehog
@sonic_hedgehog

Apr 15
Hi everyone - we know delays are way past not cool. But with the world in its current state, and to keep our teams safe, we need to wait to show you our SXSW content until things have settled.

Thanks for your patience, and we'll let you know as soon as we have a date to share!

It reads like there is a lot to eventually be shared.  The format has often been to reveal something about a 2d game, have a teaser trailer for a 3d game, and reveal an animated feature!

This time around it probably would have been just a tease of something 2d and 3d, and, according to rumors on this board, possibly the reveal of a new televised animation!

Theoretically a new 2d game will almost certainly be the long-awaited true continuation of the Genesis timeline.  It could still be close to a Mania 2 by including plenty of creative callbacks throughout!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On the one hand, Evening Star and the Mania team more widely are in no way obliged to make another Sonic game or even to want to, and if they would prefer to go and do their own thing then I can only support that.

On the other hand, it is completely plausible to me that Sega aren't interested in pursuing their success with Mania.  I have absolutely no trust in them at all to know a good thing when they see it, the company's management of the Sonic brand is beyond incompetent.  I seem to recall it was this sort of situation with Sumo Digital after Racing Transformed - excellent product, willing team, and Sega mishandled them all the way and dropped them afterwards (until it was too late).

  • Thumbs Up 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have no reason to believe they would not cash in on Mania, they already did with Plus and Adventures, the remixes, merch, etc. 

They keep mentioning "Sonic Mania" in almost every interview as a success, which it was, they are aware of the desire for more 2D Sonic games, I really doubt it's on them, maybe Evening Star folks just want to do their thing? I'm not sure on this, but SEGA is not that dumb to pass on this opportunity.

As for the announcement we are getting this year (/month?), they definitely have something... might not be a game, might be something else, but there was content to unveil in March as we said, plus the "Sonic 2020" announcements. Games and stuff are probably delayed due to virus, but announcements I assume were ready or almost. It's really a matter of what exactly  we're getting this year.

  • Thumbs Up 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, FFWF said:

On the one hand, Evening Star and the Mania team more widely are in no way obliged to make another Sonic game or even to want to, and if they would prefer to go and do their own thing then I can only support that.

On the other hand, it is completely plausible to me that Sega aren't interested in pursuing their success with Mania.  I have absolutely no trust in them at all to know a good thing when they see it, the company's management of the Sonic brand is beyond incompetent.  I seem to recall it was this sort of situation with Sumo Digital after Racing Transformed - excellent product, willing team, and Sega mishandled them all the way and dropped them afterwards (until it was too late).

While it's true to form for SEGA to always make the worst decisions when it comes to Sonic games, I think we've seen a lot of support for Mania from them. Half a year after the game  was announced for PS4, XB1 and PC, SEGA opted to bring on-board Tantalus Media to point the game to Switch. New platform, new developer, all before the release of either the game or said new platform. That's a pretty big deal that seems to get forgotten. Then the game ended up getting a several-month delay so that the game was able to reach its full potential. Post release, SEGA went on to launch the first paid DLC pack that a Sonic game has seen since Unleashed. And more importantly still, they finally released a full retain version of the game in a deluxe package with special packaging and a mini artbook. Then came the Mania Adventure episodes, Tee Lopes working with SEGA both on TSR and digital albums, furuther re-prints of Mania in double-packs or non-deluxe editions... SEGA have banked on Mania's legacy quite a lot.

Considering all their, I can't imagine that SEGA wouldn't be interested in pursuing what that game started. Either with the same people or an entirely different bunch, SEGA will almost certainly be interested in getting more out of it.

So we know that Thomley is working on his own endeavours right now. That's cool. And I'm not really sure we know much of anything about Evening Star. I find it to be plausible that they don't want to work on another Sonic game right now. Look at Whitehead; he's fantastically talented as a developer and his published works are Sonic games; 3 three of which are remakes, 2 are mobile exclusive remakes and 1 of which is a remake-new game hybrid. That's to say nothing of anyone else on the teams. And maybe they do want to work on another game and SEGA is interested, but they haven't been able to work out a tennable deal.

  • Thumbs Up 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

New Interview with Iizuka... sounds like they want to try to please every fan at all costs, AGAIN.

Uhm... depends on how they do it, if it's everything at once like in Forces, no thanks, obviously. But at the same time, besides taking their time on games now, they seem to want to stick to 2D Classic and 3D Modern having their own games for now... Classic Sonic will return, I just hope it's in a new 2D game rather than in the main one. Also, more Chao talk.

Either they are having a giant game with everything in it, or 2 games, the latter would make sense, to have them released in different years this time. 

  • Thumbs Up 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Jack at Home said:

New Interview with Iizuka... sounds like they want to try to please every fan at all costs, AGAIN.

I mean, it's not like they'd say otherwise.

Talk is easy, games are hard, we're not going to know what they're really up to until we see something concrete.

  • Thumbs Up 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The special event should be that the game is releasing at all, and that it should be quality. To keep setting this arbitrary date to celebrate just takes away from the specialty of it. I'd rather it be a happy coincidence that the game lands on an anniversary, like what happened with Skyward Sword.

And I'd say it just cheapens the series past the more and more we do this stuff. It's like the only thing worth celebrating for Sonic now seems to be that he was born, rather than him evolving.

  • Thumbs Up 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

OTAQUEST: There are basically 2 different approaches to Sonic as a character which are defined by Classic Sonic (2D) and Modern Sonic (3D), and the release of Sonic Mania showed that there is a lot of demand for the 2D gameplay among fans. Has this impacted the way Sonic Team approaches handling the franchise at all? Do you feel like there’s a pressure to balance between the 2 different styles?

Takashi Iizuka: Not much time has passed since the distinction between “classic” and “modern” was made, in fact, it was since 2011’s “Sonic Generations” title. Even before that, in addition to the main 3D series, there was a high demand for the 2D action games such as the Sonic Advance series, so we revived the old Sonic as Classic Sonic for the 20th-anniversary title, Sonic Generations. We initially thought that it would be a 20th Anniversary project only, however after that we had a strong demand for a new classic Sonic standalone title, that became 2017’s Sonic Mania. We would like to take good care of these two very popular iterations of Sonic’s in the future.

This seems very positive!!

I do seem to remember (please correct if this is wrong), news of Sonic Mania's existence never leaked beforehand, so, if Evening Star and SEGA have been creating the next 2D Sonic, we wouldn't know anything about it yet!

  • Thumbs Up 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Jack at Home said:

New Interview with Iizuka... sounds like they want to try to please every fan at all costs, AGAIN.

Uhm... depends on how they do it, if it's everything at once like in Forces, no thanks, obviously. But at the same time, besides taking their time on games now, they seem to want to stick to 2D Classic and 3D Modern having their own games for now... Classic Sonic will return, I just hope it's in a new 2D game rather than in the main one. Also, more Chao talk.

Either they are having a giant game with everything in it, or 2 games, the latter would make sense, to have them released in different years this time. 

There's evidence of Iizuka NOT being to blame, as seen with Rise of Lyric turning out somehow EVEN WORSE than his affairs, and his attempts to give Shadow more limelight when SoA wants to keep him as an edgy antagonist figure to fight. So I'm not sure what to make of this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/10/2020 at 4:23 PM, Chili Dawg said:

I for one, am feeling a bit frustrated at the fact that it seems every Sonic game from now till the end of the time is going to be a big anniversary blowout, every five years...

Now if Sonic games are gonna take longer to make, that's fine, I'm not asking them to rush them out sooner than they should, that's the last thing I want.

But if Sonic game releases are only ever going to fall on/around "important" milestone years... please stop caring about anniversaries.

In the last decade we had, depending on how one categorizes Mania, 3 or 4 mainline Sonic games.

One of those games is not based around revisiting old content from  the franchise's storied past.

I want the franchise to continue building a storied future, not celebrate Green Hill again and again every five years.

 

Thankfully SEGA have already broken that pattern as there was no mainline 3D game released on the 25th Anniversary. I know there was a meager attempt to tie Forces in with it, but the 25th Anniversary was 2016, and Forces released late 2017. By that logic they could release a game in late 2022 and call it a 30th Anniversary Game. Not that the next game releasing then is an issue, but the claim that it’s an “anniversary game” might feel a little hollow to some. But in a way that's good, I do agree that SEGA shouldn’t feel compelled to have (and we shouldn’t expect) a new mainline game to perfectly sync up with a significant anniversary year, or have every new mainline release correspond with some historical significance. It would be a very mechanical cycle, both from the context of SEGA’s development plans, and from the fans’ perspective, automatically expecting “The 35th Anniversary game”, “The 40th Anniversary game” every five years etc. They haven’t always stuck to this pattern though. Unleashed, which I suspect is the most expensive Sonic game ever made, released in the franchise’s 17th year. Sonic Adventure was on the 7th/8th year of the franchise, depending on the region etc.

That said, I can see a significant anniversary year as giving them a natural and potentially powerful marketing strategy for any games that release then, an opportune way to try and maximize the sales of any new games plus promote the brand as a whole. Plus, given that SEGA have certainly slowed down over the last few years with the frequency of console Sonic games, and their claims of each game having longer development cycles, it’s possible a situation of rigidly timed mainline releases that only correspond with an “anniversary” may end up coming to pass if the franchise continues producing mainline releases beyond whatever is to come next.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If they continue in this direction, I hope  Classic Sonic gets renamed to something that doesn’t pin him to the 90s. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

At this point I just hope I can live long enough for this era of Morio Kishimoto blocky/straight line/mixture of both level design and gameplay to end and hopefully something better follows (I honestly cant picture it getting much worse).

Anyways, I'm hoping they'll finally announce something on Sonic's birthday. I dont really care if its a year and a half away from release, I just want to know if itll be something to look forward to or if I have to go back to sonic hibernation till the game after.

  • Thumbs Up 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

It would be a huge relief to see good-looking gameplay. That alone would wash out the taste of Forces. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/10/2020 at 4:38 AM, FFWF said:

On the one hand, Evening Star and the Mania team more widely are in no way obliged to make another Sonic game or even to want to, and if they would prefer to go and do their own thing then I can only support that.

On the other hand, it is completely plausible to me that Sega aren't interested in pursuing their success with Mania.  I have absolutely no trust in them at all to know a good thing when they see it, the company's management of the Sonic brand is beyond incompetent.  I seem to recall it was this sort of situation with Sumo Digital after Racing Transformed - excellent product, willing team, and Sega mishandled them all the way and dropped them afterwards (until it was too late).

I think thing 2 might be the case. On multiple fronts it seems like sega has been blindsided by what people like and why in regards to sonic.

Them not getting it tracks

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While I understand Evening Star may not have Sonic Mania 2 at the very top of their wishlist of things to work on...money talks. SEGA should be making them an offer too good to refuse. If they haven't, that's a shame.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm expecting a good sonic game, I'm expecting the fans to calm down, I'm expecting everything to go back to the way it was without all this derision and failure the fans constantly bring up and mention. I want peace. I seen the EGPX livestream, and people FREAKED OUT, and I mean it:

I've seen comments like, "SEGA is ruined" "Sonic is dead" "Switch to Mario/Mario is better" "I Hate SEGA now" and much, much more, and it's all unnecessarily negative and everything. THIS NEEDS TO STOP! yeah, I'll admit, I too am upset that sonic isn't in the livestream, but I can look past it, because remember: this is just the 29th anniversary, we have one more shot to get things right. Sonic isn't just going to immediately show up and be out instantly, that not what we wanted right? that's how sonic "died" with 06 right?  then again, taking his time also "killed" him in Forces, but that's only due to the fact that SEGA was Full of inexperienced developers, now that that fiasco is over, SEGA will probably bring fresh new blood, who are experience and in love with sonic as much as everyone else. fans like taxman whitehead got in, so why can't other inspiring fans who are in love and concerned for this franchise and after that, sonic will be back on his feet. I haven't gave up, neither should you guys.

also, to SEGA. I know you don't wanna rush your game, but could you at least show a teaser to what game you're making? we all wanna know how it's doing and how much you improved. just a peak at the gameplay, or story or something. all we need, so we can decide for ourselves.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, iambitter21 said:

I've seen comments like, "SEGA is ruined" "Sonic is dead" "Switch to Mario/Mario is better" "I Hate SEGA now" and much, much more, and it's all unnecessarily negative and everything. THIS NEEDS TO STOP! 

Eh, honestly this is just your typical internet overreaction in the heat of the moment. Happens everywhere all the time and it's really not something to get caught up about. The franchise literally had the highest box office for a video game based movie OF ALL TIME, just 3 MONTHS AGO. Thus I highly doubt even the most aggravated of commenters actually believe themselves when they post something like "Sonic is dead" (unless they're just reaaaaally not very bright). 

If whenever SEGA reveals the next game and it actually looks promising, then these sort of comments will disappear just as quickly as they appeared without any need to interfere.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, iambitter21 said:

then again, taking his time also "killed" him in Forces, but that's only due to the fact that SEGA was Full of inexperienced developers, now that that fiasco is over, SEGA will probably bring fresh new blood, who are experience and in love with sonic as much as everyone else

Uh... Forces itself only had a year of development. The thing that they apparently took their time doing was getting the Hedgehog Engine 2 ready. Unfortunately, thanks to the lackluster efforts put into Forces itself, we really don't get a good idea of how much HE2 improves over the original. Many say Unleashed looks better than Forces. I just hope we'll actually get a game worth waiting for. I don't care how long the wait itself is.

  • Thumbs Up 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Shade Vortex said:

Unfortunately, thanks to the lackluster efforts put into Forces itself, we really don't get a good idea of how much HE2 improves over the original. Many say Unleashed looks better than Forces.

I feel like it mainly comes down to art direction. Forces engine is definitely above Unleashed's in many technical aspects, but your right that it can be difficult to tell visually since sadly the actual assets used per level don't measure up. Unleashed had well designed pixar like meshes with high detailed textures and well thought out global illumination making much of the game stand up today if not for the poor framerate. Forces meshwork on the other hand is on the level of minecraft. I'm not blaming the modellers for that at all- it's the direction each stage took in general where even something as vibrant, detailed and slopey as Green Hill looks like it was created in a voxel model building tool. Take Generations Green Hill as comparison.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, iambitter21 said:

then again, taking his time also "killed" him in Forces, but that's only due to the fact that SEGA was Full of inexperienced developers, now that that fiasco is over, SEGA will probably bring fresh new blood, who are experience and in love with sonic as much as everyone else. fans like taxman whitehead got in, so why can't other inspiring fans who are in love and concerned for this franchise and after that, sonic will be back on his feet.

Do you have any evidence of this actually being in the works for Sonic? Nobody really knows if Sega's even considering making changes in the staff responsible for making Sonic games.

And I'm pretty sure a case can be made that Sega has more than a few development teams outside the Sonic Team group that have been doing fine. The Yakuza team in particular has been renowned for their namesake games as well as Judgement. I'm sure @Tracker_TD could probably elaborate further if he wanted.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Milo said:

Do you have any evidence of this actually being in the works for Sonic? Nobody really knows if Sega's even considering making changes in the staff responsible for making Sonic games.

We know they moved development to America already, and we know that most of Sonic Team proper worked on Sakura Wars instead of going overseas. 

  • Thumbs Up 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 hours ago, With Me said:

We know they moved development to America already

Do we know that though? I think we’re getting tangible active game development mixed up with working on the Sonic franchise in general.

We know IIzuka and others involved with Sonic moved to the U.S to become part of the Sonic Pillar team (more recently referred to as Sonic Studios), those that oversaw the direction of the Sonic brand as a whole, referred to as a “development hub” for the franchise. But I do believe we currently know nothing about what team/s or where is working on a future game. Something could be happening in the States, and no doubt the Sonic Pillar are involved from some kind of supervisory standpoint, but I don’t believe we know where exactly active game development is happening. Surely we would have heard about the existence of a new stateside game development team at SEGA by now though?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

You must read and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to continue using this website. We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.