Megathread Sonic Origins | MT | General Discussion

[FReaK]

18 hours ago, Jango said:

I think Iizuka's kids suck at Sonic, because where else he's taking that kind of feedback from? Sonic Colors was already one of the easiest modern Sonic games, now you're going to make even the classics easier lol We beat that shit at the age of 7. 

lol, I was 4 when I beat Sonic 2.

seriously, I hope that easy mode stuff is optional, I'm already mad at them for making colors easy as fck. this whole "let's make all the games easy" mentality they have right now makes me a little bit nervous about rangers, too.

[Silvereyes]

If we're talking about what we're expecting from this collection, I'd be astonished if we don't at least get the 12 Game Gear games. Even if those games are just done through basic emulation or what have you, the Game Gear games are pretty perfect in helping round out any collection. I doubt anyone outside of the fandom cares about any of those games that they'd justify any other kind of special or hyped up release, besides just being dumped on digital stores as cheap standalones like on the Wii U eshop. Just seems like a nature inclusion which acts as a selling point really. Likewise for Mean Bean Machine, Spinball, and 3D Blast all off the Mega Drive.

[BadBehavior]

Sonic Team making this collection? Ooof, the last time the team was split making 2 different games didn't turn out too well. Doesnt instill confidence in either this or Rangers.

[Wraith]

The reveal made it sound like it's just going to be the original series + CD again so I wouldn't get my hopes up.

I'm not hurting for the game gear games but I'd like to see them, along with the other bells and whistles the old collections on gamecube used to have like american comics and japanese promo art. It feels like I've been waiting on a definitive compilation of the classic Era on par with Sonic Mega Collection/Sonic Gems Collection my whole life.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

On 7/21/2021 at 9:12 PM, Jango said:

I think Iizuka's kids suck at Sonic, because where else he's taking that kind of feedback from? Sonic Colors was already one of the easiest modern Sonic games, now you're going to make even the classics easier lol We beat that shit at the age of 7. 

As a kid, I had trouble with the classic games due to the lives system, the game over system, and starting from scratch if I lost all lives/continues. Origins putting in optional modes to make the game much more accessible (likely by removing the lives system and/or continues), and letting people choose whichever mode they prefer (original or easy) is a good thing. Making these games optionally more accessible to other people who might not be as good with the series - especially the Classic games, which were designed around lives and continues is one of the best things for introducing the games to new players.

[StaticMania]

On 7/21/2021 at 3:39 PM, Indigo Rush said:

....putting Sonic in normally Knuckles-only areas, that sort of thing. I think it'd be neat.

Uh-uh

This wouldn't work at all, there are too many walls.

[BubbleButt TV]

I'm fine with them introducing easier modes in Sonic Origins as long as the original experience also remains in-tact

After the movie, this just seems like the smartest thing to do to introduce new players to the franchise.

[Indigo Rush]

15 hours ago, StaticMania said:

Uh-uh

This wouldn't work at all, there are too many walls.

*With the necessary added level design pieces and alterations to make it possible. Be creative. 

[Johnster4]

On 7/21/2021 at 8:33 PM, TheOcelot said:

While faithfully reproducing the original, I would like to think about elements that make it easier for game beginners to play, such as "Sonic Colours Ultimate".

Can we get anything that respects gamer's intelligence under Iizuka for once?  I wish he would stop dumbing down games, even with older titles aren't safe under Iizuka. It's shit like this that makes me worried about Sonic Rangers and believe that leadership under Iizuka isn't working.

[Kazhnuz]

The interview is pretty interesting. In the port part, I still think that it have high chances to use Taxman/Stealth versions as a base, as porting ASM code to modern plateform is basically remaking the whole game as you can't make something as low-level for multiplateform.

 

We think about new players when we say "making the game more accessible", but to be fair, I've seen several people that are fan of Sonic since >10Y (but that simply didn't grow up with these game) thinking these game are too hard, especially Sonic 2. So I think that some accessibility options would be quite good, especially if it's just some tweaks à la Colors Ultimate, and not removing half the game like with some game in Sonic Jam.

About the actual change that could be done, removing lives and saving the game each act could be simple and effective (especially as it doesn't really change the difficulty of the game, as lives are mostly "fake difficulty" as they don't make the actual challenge higher). I suppose that they'll do some changes for the level design, but I suppose mostly for the "big issues" (making more obvious what you have to do for the barrel, or removing the death pit of Mystic Cave Zone - which is already done if it's Taxman/Stealth version). Maybe removing the time limit too (or making it optional).

If they remove lives not just as an option, they'll have to find something to reward ring collecting and/or exploration, and to replace the 1-up.

[LegoFedora]

44 minutes ago, Kazhnuz said:

If they remove lives not just as an option, they'll have to find something to reward ring collecting and/or exploration, and to replace the 1-up.

Just tossing out an odd ball idea here, what if that was how Game Gear games/general unlockables were unlocked? Have the game count how many rings you have at the end of an Act (maybe include rings gathered in bonus stages as well) and adds it to a "collection total" that can be viewed within some shop on the collection's home screen, or give each game it's own specialized shop. What if each Game Gear game was like, 700-1k rings. Maybe characters (for games that didn't have them natively, so think knuckles in Sonic 1/2) were 500 each, so on so forth. 1-up monitors could just be a guaranteed 100 rings.

Still gives a reason for ring collecting as well as encouraging the player to take the safest routes (therefore helping the player naturally get more used to stages they may have had trouble in previously) in order to actually keep those rings until the end, but with the removal of lives for accessibility reasons. Obviously, they'd have to make a way for the game to detect the use of debug mode and not count those rings, like how achievements in the recent Megaman X collections are automatically deemed unobtainable if you turn on Rookie Hunter mode.

[Johnster4]

1 hour ago, Kazhnuz said:

About the actual change that could be done, removing lives and saving the game each act could be simple and effective (especially as it doesn't really change the difficulty of the game, as lives are mostly "fake difficulty" as they don't make the actual challenge higher). I suppose that they'll do some changes for the level design,

Removing live would be fine if they replaced it with challenging content that tests long time players skill, but with Sonic Team they just remove lives and make and game easy anyway with nothing for long term players.

 

1 hour ago, Kazhnuz said:

If they remove lives not just as an option, they'll have to find something to reward ring collecting and/or exploration, and to replace the 1-up.

Forces did that and that just made getting S ranks trivial beyond belief with 3 sets of collectable and a daily score multiplier.

[CertifiedNobody]

On 7/22/2021 at 3:28 PM, BadBehavior said:

Sonic Team making this collection? Ooof, the last time the team was split making 2 different games didn't turn out too well. Doesnt instill confidence in either this or Rangers.

Rangers is already mostly done, and last time they were developing an entirely new game with massive development crunch, not a port of classic games. Besides, since those leaks about Sonic Studios were true, the team is likely bigger now than it was before, and they don't have the same pressure to get Rangers out by a specific time like they did with 06.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

52 minutes ago, CertifiedNobody said:

Rangers is already mostly done,

We don't know this.

We have reason to suspect the game has been in development for a while, longer than some Sonic games have got, but a game is only finished when it's finished, not when it's taken a while.

[Tenko]

On 7/23/2021 at 8:12 AM, Wraith said:

It feels like I've been waiting on a definitive compilation of the classic Era on par with Sonic Mega Collection/Sonic Gems Collection my whole life.

I mean we had Sonic Jam. That had far more extras and bonus content than Mega Collection and Gems Collection. While it's not "definitive" in as much as it only collects the four main Mega Drive titles at the time it was released, it did have an "Easy" mode for each title, time-attack, and that weird "Chaos Emerald" mode, not to mention that amazing Sonic World with all its extras. I've been waiting for them to top that since 1997.

An updated art, history, music, movies and character profile area in Origins would be so amazing, what with how much the series has grown since Sonic Jam's release.

Also who wouldn't want the long awaited conclusion to "Man of the Year", especially if it was animated by Tyson Hesse!

[Soniman]

I expect if they did have a comic section it'd be strictly IDW only as Archie section would be quite brief with post reboot and nearly everything before being off limits (which gives me anxiety of this decades spanning comic falling into obscurity and inaccessiblity because of that prick)., guess they can always acknowledge Sonic the Comic finally 

[Kazhnuz]

To be fair, I don't think that Sonic Origins is done by people that would work on Sonic Rangers. Both games are really different and use the kind of skills that don't 100% overlap (for dev AND for artists). For instance, I don't think that there is any HE specialist on Sonic Origins. It's certainly even be made by a different team (from SEGA or outside SEGA), under supervision from the Sonic Team or Sonic Studio/Pillar, and not by SEGA CS2 as Rangers.

TBH, there is nearly no chance that they have "divided" the people working on Rangers to make Origins.

16 hours ago, LegoFedora said:

Just tossing out an odd ball idea here, what if that was how Game Gear games/general unlockables were unlocked?

That would be quite awesome (even if for some games I wonder if it would really be a reward xD).

[CertifiedNobody]

20 hours ago, Shaddy Zaphod said:

We don't know this.

We have reason to suspect the game has been in development for a while, longer than some Sonic games have got, but a game is only finished when it's finished, not when it's taken a while.

Of course we don't KNOW this, but based on the leaks, by mid-2020, the game had much of the open world, tons of enemies and bosses, presumably all the special stages, and multiple moves for sonic to use. Sounds mostly done to me.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

We also don't know most of that. We know they had an open world and some of the enemies, bosses and special stages. There's no telling how much it's supposed to have, or even really how much the alleged leakers have seen.

[Tenko]

Origins will be out before Rangers, Iizuka was in a recent interview with 4Gamer and had this to say : “We haven’t announced a brand new action game for the Sonic series since Sonic Forces, and that caused fans to worry,” said Iizuka. “While it was a bit premature, I wanted to at least take the occasion of the 30th anniversary to announce that a brand new title was in development.”

If the announcement was "premature" then it makes me think late 2022 seems more likely for its release window.

Thinking on the number of titles Origins has still confuses me.. I realize it's all in the interest to make as much money as they can from "retro" releases with minimal effort and development cost, but it urks me no end with the storage available these days that companies release small collections for iconic IP. Especially when they don't follow them up with the next volume and start all over again once the next console generation releases.

There is no reason they can't release the entire pre-'98 catalogue in one set. Make it a big deal like the Sonic Generations Collector's Edition and it would sell out guaranteed.

[LegoFedora]

2 hours ago, Tenko said:

Thinking on the number of titles Origins has still confuses me.. I realize it's all in the interest to make as much money as they can from "retro" releases with minimal effort and development cost, but it urks me no end with the storage available these days that companies release small collections for iconic IP. Especially when they don't follow them up with the next volume and start all over again once the next console generation releases.

It's worse when half the games in this collection are already available on modern systems (or all the games if you want to consider steam releases). Adding the game gear games, or even previously unreleased games like Knuckles' Chaotix would really help sell the collection. As it stands right now, there is not a whole lot of incentive to buy the collection since most of the games are already widescreen (mobile ports and/or with mods) and are already super easy to get.

My biggest fear is that this collection sells poorly and SEGA doesn't make any more because "there wasn't much demand for the first one". Like yeah of course there wasn't that much interest/demand, you keep porting games that everyone most likely has multiple copies of by this point. You need a lot more than just widescreen (which again, is already very easy to get/mod in) to sell something like this.

Capcom is the perfect example of how rerelease collections should be, rereleasing older games that until now did not have easy ways to play them without jumping back to older consoles (ps2 for classic especially or the dust-collector that is the Wii U) as well as finally giving us proper rereleases of X7/X8 that fix some problems of those games, and learning from those collections to give us an amazing zero/zx collection. Sega needs to take a page out of what Capcom is doing if they want these collections to sell well.

[VO.SUPER]

Judging by Takashi Izuka's statements in the recent interview, I don't know how possible even emulations of the Game Gear games are for this collection. It straight up sounds like the project only got off the group very recently. Goodness knows who they have involved on this project as far as staff goes, but it sounds like they have even less time than the Colors team did to make their remaster.

While I'd love to be proven wrong I'm just a bit pessimistic on that angle.

I do at least hope the special features are good.

[pppp]

SEGA's knack for Sonic re-releases went to complete crap after Sonic Adventure 2 HD. Yeah remember how that was revealed? Allow me to remind you:

 

Holy shit! A re-release people were actually asking for at the time happens and everyone is happy! Imagine that.

11 years later the nº1 demand is an Unleashed remaster and what do we get? A divisive Colors port and a collection that apparently only has the same 4 games that everyone has already played a million times.

Also love this Iizuka quote: “We haven’t announced a brand new action game for the Sonic series since Sonic Forces, and that caused fans to worry”

No you imbecile, the reason fans worried is because you always go radio silent on us inbetween games and do nothing in the meantime even remotely in tune with your audience as what you did in 2012 in that video right there.

[Indigo Rush]

I'm not complaining, honestly. While I'd love to see the other Genesis games and all the Game Gear games on there for good measure, I get the appeal of having just the core platformers remastered in one dedicated collection. Those games are all built on the same essential gameplay foundation and are going to be the definitive versions of themselves. We also know there will be bonus content of some form, so it's not going to be a lazy ROM dump like every other Genesis best-of compilations. The fact that these are in fact built from the ground up means that we have the opportunity to get something more in line with Sonic Jam: easy modes, challenges, time attack and extra characters.

I also think it's a mistake to overlook this just because Sonic 1 and 2 have been re-released a billion times already (and CD is on every modern console sans anything Nintendo); I'd like to recall to everyone here how much of a stink the fanbase gave about not getting a Taxman-headed Sonic 3 & Knuckles remaster for consoles or PC, even going so far as to willingly opt out of participating in the movement to get it ported to mobile devices because it wasn't for consoles or PC. Reminder: this will be the definitive package for the main Classic series. 

And look, again... I would love nothing more than to get the rest of the classic era games on there. You know how much I love Mean Bean Machine. Sonic Spinball is a quirky spin-off that deserves a spot, too. It also might be time to include Knuckles Chaotix in a collection. I'd also love to see the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast worked into the public's conscience as well, though the Genesis version is fine. And all 12 Master System/Game Gear games would collectively take up 0.01% of the available cartridge/disc space and could run on the most basic emulator possible. I did the math, if we include all of those games, we'd round out to a nice 20 games on there...

...but if the goal is to have a consistent presentation of those 2D games that control the same and showcase what Classic Sonic at it's core actually is, then I totally get their perspective of not including anything else. The Game Gear games aren't exactly great. Chaotix is definitely not great. Most people aren't going to like Spinball or 3D Blast, and Mean Bean is a completely different genre entirely. Keeping it to Sonic 1,2,CD,3&K with some bonus content makes sense. Less time working out the emulators and more time making new modes and fun ways to play these games. 

And at the end of the day, it's the Tax/Stealth remakes of Sonic 1, 2, CD, 3&Knuckles on consoles and PC. All in one. I'm already sold. 

[Jango]

A hub-world similar to Sonic Jam (lots of rooms with extras, some challenges and easter eggs) would seal the deal for me, as of now, I'm probably only getting this when it's on sale, even with Sonic 3&K's long due inclusion. It's too little too late for this collection in my opinion =\