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Sonic Rangers Predictions...


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48 minutes ago, Whatever the WhoCares said:

The thing about the boost formula is… how are they going to implement it in an open world? I mean, Sonic has to be a little slower and more maneuverable for an open world to even work. Then again, they’re presenting Colors Ultimate as an entry game for newcomers, so maybe they’ll use the boost anyway. 

The leaks said the Boost-style would be in specific stages. If there's exploration, button-mashing combat, and puzzles in the open world, it'd have to be something slower. But maybe instead of something like Adventure, it'd more akin to the last time they tried to make Sonic more maneuverable.. Sonic Lost World.

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I also don't think that they'll use an exactly "Boost-style gameplay" if it's an open-world, and I don't think it'll be an "Adventure-style gameplay" either. For me there is a big chance that it'll be something kinda different than what we know, as they certainly don't make their game with the kind of distinction we tend to make, and that we tend to think about the possibilities by looking at previous games (which is normal, as it's our corpus of what is a Sonic game).

But I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of boost was there in Rangers (if the leaks are true and that it's an overworld), because it could be kinda useful when we want to travel far distance. I'll take my crystal ball and say that I would be even less surprised too if the stomp (or maybe a bounce attack à la SA2 or Lost World) was back too : it's a useful skill for platforming and useful too to discover secrets by destroying some grounds. So in an openworld with some platform/puzzle, it seems a good skill to use.

The Spin Circle is interesting too, as it's a bit like the homing attack in a way : the homing attack exists because it's not easy to jump on an enemy on a 3D Sonic (it require a bit too much precision for the gameplay), and the Spin Circle also can have this characteristic as it allow us to attack enemy without having to touch them precisely.

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What makes speculation so difficult is that Iizuka and co. don’t really seem to compartmentalize any of the 3D Sonic gameplay styles. Instead, they tend to stress that they want to deliver “high-speed action,” which leaves us constantly wondering what they’re actually doing next time to achieve that. Would a hypothetical Adventure remake incorporate boost? We dunno! High-speed action is the goal, so whatever Sonic Team thinks serves that best is what we’ll get. 

And you might think, “oh, well boost is the best way to deliver that, so obviously that’s what we’ll get.” But here’s the catch: “action.” It’s obvious at this point that Iizuka likes exploding robots every bit as much as super speed, and if the leaks are to be believed, we’re leaning further in that direction. So does that leave room for boost to stick around? Well shit, we’re back to square one. 

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Before this gets out of hand, this "leak" was posted today of AkhT from Jun Senoue's band S.A.M.E.

Spoiler



 

However, this video actually comes from an earlier tweet from April 2020 where he was just posting him drumming. So it could have something to do with Rangers or not. But before this gets out of hand, better to set the record straight.

Spoiler

 

 

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55 minutes ago, VisionaryofSUPER said:

Before this gets out of hand, this "leak" was posted today of AkhT from Jun Senoue's band S.A.M.E.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

 

However, this video actually comes from an earlier tweet from April 2020 where he was just posting him drumming. So it could have something to do with Rangers or not. But before this gets out of hand, better to set the record straight.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Nope, it is not from Rangers, it is his personal work

 

 

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25 minutes ago, Shadow Chaos Control said:

Go Go Sonic Rangers! 

F7AE9C80-B321-4ADE-AE3C-6F5868D779C7.jpeg.0a3e16cd6c0b4cabc898e9c01433f72a.jpeg

Whoops wrong rangers. :D 

That'd be really cool.
But yeah, probably wrong rangers.
They say the game's all about Sonic running around in the woods, so this is probably a better prediciton of Sonic Ranger:
 

SonicRanger.png

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38 minutes ago, Shadow Chaos Control said:

I was hoping for Dunedain like Rangers myself: 

-snip-

OBVIOUSLY this is actually a storybook game, and they're going to make Rob'o the Hedge there canon :p.

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2 minutes ago, antinomicTune said:

OBVIOUSLY this is actually a storybook game, and they're going to make Rob'o the Hedge there canon :p.

One can dream. :D 

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This might be more wish-list than prediction... but, rolling?

Like, I really can't see moving around in a giant open world as Sonic be engaging without the ability to roll down hills. Going fast is great, but running around in a bunch of grass isn't gonna be very fun or engaging if I'm not feeling a change in momentum. It's kind of a no-brainer to let the player build speed over vast hills and other landscapes. So I think there's a chance.

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I hope the tone strays away from the meta crap we’ve dealt with for the last 11 years. Go back to the earnestness of Black Knight and before, please. Imagine how great that could be with the benefit of modern presentation. 

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18 minutes ago, Whatever the WhoCares said:

I hope the tone strays away from the meta crap we’ve dealt with for the last 11 years. Go back to the earnestness of Black Knight and before, please. Imagine how great that could be with the benefit of modern presentation. 

The continued descriptor of modern Sonic writing as "meta" honestly confuses me. Are the present-day Sonic games really "meta" in any meaningful way? They've got jokes and goofy banter, but those jokes aren't generally self-aware pokes at the fourth wall (as would be implied by the "meta" name), are they?

My gripe with Sonic jokes isn't that they're "meta" really; it's that they hang on them for way too long. They'll say a mildly amusing line, and then rather than drop it and move on, they'll just linger there and draw the joke out, draining whatever might've been funny about it initially. The jokes themselves often work conceptually and just get botched in the drawn-out execution, so if they could learn to reel it in a little, I think it'd be fine.

I also want to say that "Black Knight and before" is a pretty broad span of time. That covers everything from the Genesis classics to the Adventure games to Shadow the Hedgehog. I think at least some of that - particularly the awkward grittiness of the mid-00s - should be left in the past.

Ideally, I feel like a nice blend of comedy and drama works best for this series. You need at least some levity so that whenever a big heavy emotional moment does happen, it always feels fresh. A little comic relief here and there keeps the game from feeling too dour, and I think it prevents the player from getting desensitized to the intended emotional moments. That's the kind of earnestness I can get behind.

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New Interview:

https://www.techradar.com/news/how-takahashi-iizuka-made-sonic-feel-like-the-fastest-creature-on-the-planet

A telling quote imo:

"It is not much of an overstatement to say that this current generation of hardware has almost eliminated that limitation, so we will probably push Sonic to run faster over a wider gameplay field in the future, " Iizuka says. 

"However, there are still limitations to how quick humans can think and react with our brains, so game designers will still need to be thinking of both speed and fun to continue making interesting and compelling game experiences that maximize both elements."

Open world seems like likely

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2 hours ago, Dr. Mechano said:

The continued descriptor of modern Sonic writing as "meta" honestly confuses me. Are the present-day Sonic games really "meta" in any meaningful way? They've got jokes and goofy banter, but those jokes aren't generally self-aware pokes at the fourth wall (as would be implied by the "meta" name), are they?

My gripe with Sonic jokes isn't that they're "meta" really; it's that they hang on them for way too long. They'll say a mildly amusing line, and then rather than drop it and move on, they'll just linger there and draw the joke out, draining whatever might've been funny about it initially. The jokes themselves often work conceptually and just get botched in the drawn-out execution, so if they could learn to reel it in a little, I think it'd be fine.

 

The term "meta" doesn't refer strictly to comedy. It's broadly defined as a work being self referential to itself or the conventions of it's genre. That can manifest in a variety of ways.  Even just referencing a past work can be considered meta if you define it broadly enough. Sonic, through the games, the social media channels and shows like boom, have done enough indulgence in this angle for it to not be the worst descriptor. It's not the best descriptor either, but neither was The Dreamcast/Adventure era to refer to the games released from 1998-2008 when the Adventure series ended in 2001.

At any rate, it's just a shorthand. Odds are you know exactly what they mean when they mention it, so there's not much of a point in getting caught up on it unless you have a better alternative.
 

Quote

I also want to say that "Black Knight and before" is a pretty broad span of time. That covers everything from the Genesis classics to the Adventure games to Shadow the Hedgehog. I think at least some of that - particularly the awkward grittiness of the mid-00s - should be left in the past.

Ideally, I feel like a nice blend of comedy and drama works best for this series. You need at least some levity so that whenever a big heavy emotional moment does happen, it always feels fresh. A little comic relief here and there keeps the game from feeling too dour, and I think it prevents the player from getting desensitized to the intended emotional moments. That's the kind of earnestness I can get behind.

I agree, and so did Sonic Team, which is why the old games also had jokes in them. Some of them were even funnier than the new stuff! How about that.


Sonic had maybe a two year period of taking itself too seriously sandwiched inbetween being one of the most bright eyed, earnest, optimistic series out there. Any foray into darker themes was always bookended by damn near blinding levels of saccharine sweetness with humor being common through out the entire thing. It was entirely consistent with this tone from Sonic 1 to Black Knight, and a few missteps aren't enough to throw off that descriptor.

 

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1 hour ago, Roger_van_der_weide said:

 "Sonic and Tails go on a 10 minute comedy routine about how cliché and stupid a thrilling climax is before the thrilling climax begins" smug.

Again, I think the issue here isn't the concept - it's how drawn-out it is.

SA2 has some pretty similar one-liners. Sonic shrugs off being arrested with "Talk about low budget flights, no food or movies!" and makes a crack about Knuckles' bad driving being more dangerous than Eggman in the climax. These both make light of a serious situation, and Sonic is a little smug in these instances.

But I think that's the difference. These are one-liners while Colors has ten-liners. If some of Pontaff's jokes were trimmed down a bit I think they'd work fine.

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1 hour ago, Dr. Mechano said:

Again, I think the issue here isn't the concept - it's how drawn-out it is.

SA2 has some pretty similar one-liners. Sonic shrugs off being arrested with "Talk about low budget flights, no food or movies!" and makes a crack about Knuckles' bad driving being more dangerous than Eggman in the climax. These both make light of a serious situation, and Sonic is a little smug in these instances.

But I think that's the difference. These are one-liners while Colors has ten-liners. If some of Pontaff's jokes were trimmed down a bit I think they'd work fine.

Adding to this however, the jokes and one-liners in Pontac and Graff's scripts are so lacking in other substance. It felt like they were trying to make the audience laugh with every line, at least when Sonic himself spoke. Regular conversation and plot development was almost missing as a result. The cutscene following the Planet Wisp boss fight, where Tails catches Sonic gloating, will always make me chuckle. Sonic is pretty unlikeable when he's only cracking jokes and fails to take situations seriously though. It's less of a problem in Colours and more of an issue in Forces and Lost World. Colours was such a welcome change of pace for me and several others when it was new. Like several other aspects of the game though, I look on it less favourably in hindsight because of how the series just seemed to do away with all sense of continuity and plot development after it. And Orbot and Cubot... holy fuck just stop existing please. I adored SA-55 in Unleashed, but not these guys.

I think the thing about Pontac and Graff is that they clearly approach the Sonic series as though it's very much just a young children's comedy series about friendship and nothing more than that. They didn't know the stories and characters from past games and that's pretty much exactly the way that SEGA wanted it to be. You can see SEGA starting on this trajectory with Unleashed's dramatic change in tone being the first time that the series has ever tried comedy in earnest, and they doubled down on this effort with Colours. Remember how in 2010, S4 was sold as the game for older fans whilst Colours was a game for children and younger fans. Colours did well, so SEGA continued down that path for years. It started to wear thin pretty fast with fans of the 2000s games, and became a real problem when they tried to use this kind of writing in a game as serious and dark as Forces. 

Sonic games for a period got way too dark and moody, and that came to a head in the middle of the 2000s with Shadow and '06. The pendulum swung too hard in the opposite direction somewhere in the 2010s. It's not that Sonic can't do humour and lighthearedness or can't do serious and dark. It's all about finding a balance, and making the balance feel natural by letting the characters express actual emotions and bounce off each others personalities and dialogue.

I sincerely hope that Pontac and Graff aren't working on the script for Rangers. They clearly don't know the series' history and SEGA have been happy to push that angle. If Rangers is an open world adventure, then it's especially important that I care about that world about its characters. And if Rangers follows in the footsteps of every game post-Colours, then I'll feel ambivalence at best and loathing at worst.

Also going to echo @Dr. Mechano's request for towns and NPCs. I want to get stuck into Sonic's world again, the same way that I was  in SA1, SA2, Battle, Unleashed and even '06 and Shadow to some extent. World building and a relevant plot have been absent for so long, despite being a big part of the series' very inception. I fucking hated the "Sonic doesn't need a story" rubbish that critics and Alex Day spouted in the past. Sonic doesn't need a bad story like 06 and Shadow, but a story absolutely enriches the games and characters therein.

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Anyway, an interview with TechRadar is kinda curious. Sega has taken a liking for certain websites. Sonic fansites like this one, it's obvious. But since Mania & Forces they have been often interviewed by Game Informer. It wasn't a one off thing. It happened freuqently.

If TechRadar will continue to get interviews, maybe Rangers/2022 will have some technical advancements that are worth talking about, similar to Unleashed. I would welcome that.

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Hard to believe that when they're making a Switch port which will just ham string the other versions into not being to much more powerful like with Forces 

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14 minutes ago, Soniman said:

Hard to believe that when they're making a Switch port which will just ham string the other versions into not being to much more powerful like with Forces 

I agree. Forces on Switch looked alright sometimes in on the Switch version, but most of the time it looked pretty bad. It always appeared way inferior to the other platforms, smh the other platforms never managed to look particularly good. Forces felt like a game built with the weaker Switch hardware in mind, and that did it no favours in the technical department. Even with those considerations, Forces on Switch managed to run at only 30fps whilst it lacked ton is effects and the textures looked like stretched out JPEGs from 2002. Switch games and Switch ports of modern games will always be technically inferior to their contemporaries on other platforms, but it is possible to develop good ports. Forces didn't leave a good impression though.

Considering that development of this game would have started around 2017/18, chances are that Rangers is being built with the PS4 Pro and XB1X as the native platforms, with the next-gen versions receiving enhancements and the Switch version being total arse. And if Sonic Team do in fact try to push the next-gen versions harder, the Switch version will end up being even more arse. I can't see this game going well on the Switch hardware any which way, honestly.

Unlike a lot of multiplatform franchises, Sonic can't afford to skip Nintendo platforms entirely. That's why we got Unleashed Wii, Colours, Generations 3DS and even the Sonic Wii Uexclusivity. I don't have any numbers, but I think that Nintendo platforms still account for the largest prospective audience. It kinda sucks for the series. 

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I would actually not at all mind if the Switch version had an entirely different art style. Cel shading or something. 

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5 minutes ago, Whatever the WhoCares said:

I would actually not at all mind if the Switch version had an entirely different art style. Cel shading or something. 

Me either, but Sonic team certainly would. Creating enough assets for one version of an open world is already bound to be an issue.

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