Is anyone worried that because Sonic Colours Ultimate might is a sign of what is to come?

[Rabbitearsblog]

1 hour ago, charmsb said:

How does this work? This doesn't make any sense at all. You need to tell them where they're failing so that they stop failing.

If I presented you with a video game that was a broken, glitchy mess, but you liked that one part in the middle or something, telling me that you "liked that one part" isn't going to make me aware that I need to fix the rest of the game.

Being negative shouldn't be seen as an automatically bad thing. Criticism is essential for growth, whether that be the individual or the company. Better yet, a company is not a person, and you can't hurt a company's feelings, so you can be as harsh as you so please.

Also, if it wasn't for the criticisms against Sonic Colors Ultimate, then we wouldn't be getting the patches in the first place.  Which goes to show that having constructive criticism for the franchise can help the franchise greatly.  It's how SEGA handles the criticism that's concerning.

[Kazhnuz]

Handling criticism about SCU is easy. Most of them are bugs (or unintented behaviour). Saying "bugs should be fixed" is easy criticism. Show screenshot/video of the unintended behavior, a reproducer and done. "Constructive criticism" about direction, game design, etc... is a whole other story (and most of time more noise than anything useful).

[McGroose]

On a more positive note, I'm actually REALLY surprised that Ultimate is still getting patches. I genuinely thought that they would stop after the first two patches, with the acid trip colors being their main priority. 

They still have a long way to go, but it at least shows they're haven't completely abandoned this golden turd of a remaster. 

If this is the direction Sega is going to go with Sonic, I at least have hope that they won't completely abandon Frontiers if it has problems and we'll hopefully see more than one patch that has more than just "bug fixes".

[Rabbitearsblog]

1 minute ago, McGroose said:

On a more positive note, I'm actually REALLY surprised that Ultimate is still getting patches. I genuinely thought that they would stop after the first two patches, with the acid trip colors being their main priority. 

They still have a long way to go, but it at least shows they're haven't completely abandoned this golden turd of a remaster. 

If this is the direction Sega is going to go with Sonic, I at least have hope that they won't completely abandon Frontiers if it has problems and we'll hopefully see more than one patch that has more than just "bug fixes".

I actually hope that SEGA actually looks into Sonic Frontiers and try to see if there are any bugs in the game, so that way, they don't repeat the same mistakes they made with Sonic Colors Ultimate.

[Shiny Gems]

You know, come to think of it, I am cautiously optimistic with games made by Sonic Team.

But with the exception of Mania, it may be the non-Sonic Team games I worry about, Colors Ultimate for example as well as Rise of Lyric. I do have my concerns about future developers other than Sonic Team being able to make good Sonic games, canon or not.

Just saying.

Again though, I don’t see Colors Ultimate affecting Frontiers.

[ZinogreVolt]

I don't think it's a sign for Frontiers specifically. Sonic Team themselves haven't made a game of such harrowingly unacceptable quality in a long, long while. That said, as far as ports/remasters go, Sonic's track record has always been on the spotty side, so Colors Ultimate is worrisome in that regard. I'm hopeful that Sonic Origins will tip the scales back in the series' favor, but as a big fan of the 3D games, Sega's general neglect towards those is irksome.

[Scar]

I would argue that the last 20 years of games is an ominous sign of what to come.

Colours Ultimate wasn't even made by Sonic Team

[Multikaris]

18 hours ago, Scar said:

I would argue that the last 20 years of games is an ominous sign of what to come.

Colours Ultimate wasn't even made by Sonic Team

Even:

 

* The Advance games

* The Rush games

* The boost trilogy

* ASR

 

& Mania?

[Scar]

2 hours ago, Snowikaris said:

Even:

 

* The Advance games

Not made by Sonic Team. Handheld games which are not relevant to main series Sonic Games. Good games, but flawed. You can see elements of DIMPS' forthcoming failures start appearing with Advanced 2 and 3 though

Quote

* The Rush games

Not made by Sonic Team. Handheld games which are not relevant to main series Sonic Games. Fun, but flawed. More of DIMPS' forthcoming failures becoming even more prevalent.

Quote

* The boost trilogy

Yes. Unleashed looked beautiful and had incredible production effort put in. But the framerate was appalling and at certain points unplayable, and one entire half of the game was mostly rubbish. Colours was fun, but limited. Lots of blocky platforming, the 3D sections were barely there. Generations was the best of the bunch, but still a flawed experience. It hit the limit of what was possible with the boost gameplay. Also the stupid forced missions you have to do before you can unlock the boss and move on was annoying. B+ at best.

Quote

* ASR

All Stars Racing? Not made by Sonic Team and not relevant to main-series Sonic Games.

Quote

& Mania?

Not made by Sonic Team.

 

Most recent games made by Sonic Team are Lost World and Forces. Lost World tried to be unique and interesting and succeeded in being completely anonymous. Forces was Generations but worse in every conceivable way.

So if we look at the last 12 Sonic games that have been made - I.e all the 3D ones:

• SA1 - C- game. Fun sometimes, less fun other times, but broken
• SA2 - C+ game. Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit (see: Treasure hunting)
• Sonic Heroes - C game. There is fun to be had to be sure, but the controls are ass and the later levels are terrible.
• Shadow the Hedgehog - lol (Fail)
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) - lolol (Fail)
• Sonic and the Secret Rings (2007) - lololol (Fail)
• Sonic Unleashed (2008) - C- game. Half good, half bad. High production values, but unplayable framerate.
• Sonic and the Black Knight (2009) - E- game. Secret Rings, but marginally better, with a better story. Still a dumbass game
• Sonic Colours (2010) - B- game. Fun, but very limited. Not in the same tier as any Mario game.
• Sonic Generations (2011) - B+ game. Improves on Colours and Unleashed. Introduces a fun gimmick in classic Sonic. But again limited due to the nature of what was on offer. Its a good game - I have a lot of love for it, but we should really be aspiring for better.
• Sonic Lost World (2013) - C+ game. Very...average. There's some fun to be had, but there were never any moments that made me smile.
• Sonic Forces (2017) - D- game. This game should have been aborted. Took everything that made Generations fun, made it worse. Why is Classic Sonic here again? Oh because Generations was popular, so I guess we just copy that. Then they slapped an OC generator to it.

So 12 games with an average of a D+ to a C-. The absolute pinnacle of this stretch was B+ game.....arguably an A- if you're generous. And not just that, the trend since Generations is distinctly downhill, after a very brief window of about 3 years we thought that maybe Sonic Team was finally on an upward trajectory. How wrong we were.

So yes, I'd say my thoughts are relatively accurate.

[Sonikko]

The thing is people aren't worried that Sonic Colours Ultimate will affect Frontiers directly in any way, two different teams and all that.

The thing is that... quality control is poor, SEGA keeps saying they care about the products they release, but the games have ranged from bad to average for 11 years now.

Ultimate being shoddy (if we're being generous, I personally think it's a complete disaster, considering it's a remaster and not a new game, so it shouldn't be *that* hard to develop, and it's not from some ancient console, it's the Wii we're talking about, most of the remasters from that console are perfectly fine nowadays, but, end of digression) just means that whoever is in charge of greenlighting releases and moving deadlines still thinks people will eat anything with the blue rat's face up regardless of quality, and it's ultimately true.

We don't have numbers but general consensus is that Ultimate sold okay, and people are *thanking* SEGA for releasing patches that:

• Made the music mono
• Fixed barely any glitches
• Did not fix the physics being tied to framerate issues (lower/higher jump)
• Did not fix the animations being tied to framerate issues (slow walking animations on map), and other animations issues (eyes uv animation for one, that starlight carnival opening animation)
• Did not fix the sound mixing (sounds still mostly come out of one channel and sound awful)
• Did not fix the lack of lightfields
• Did not fix the new ghost wisp which is awful and breaks the game more than anything else

The game, after 3 patches and what, 4 months, is in a state where I myself still do not think it was fit for public release.

Yeah you can appreciate the shows, the medias, the comics, whatever, that stuff is usually okay to great, but when it comes to the games, nobody at SEGA gives enough of a damn to actually put the work into it.

Kishimoto directing yet another game is proof enough for me that things won't change in the short term.

 

EDIT:
One thing I'd like to add is that, people usually only consider the English localization of a game cause that's the most played probably, but the UI looks very BAD and unprofessional in Italian.

Lots of text that goes over edges, it's just so unpolished and ridiculous when it was never an issue in the original to begin with.

[Kuzu]

They've been releasing subpar games since 2003, with a couple of exceptions. This ain't nothing new. 

[The Hedgehog.]

Probably not. 

All it shows me is how Blind Squirrel Studios is a horrible developer and I feel bad for everyone working there. 

SEGA seemed pretty hand-off with SCU's development, probably remembering what happened when they tried to interfere with game development. (SB: ROL; Sonic 06) 

 

[Multikaris]

On 1/2/2022 at 12:02 PM, Kuzu said:

They've been releasing subpar games since 2003, with a couple of exceptions. This ain't nothing new. 

Given that the level of badness games like 06 and RoL had once seemed exceptional, maybe it is new. Maybe not, though.

[TailsGotTrolled]

If youtube is to be believed remasters like colors ultimate are the way the entire game industry is going-creating new games is risky and expensive so they'll just try to sell the same game to the same consumers as many times as they can, often with new bugs/drm/political correctness (Apparently some twitter feminist is rewriting the original KOTOR, for example) and no major publisher is actually interested in preserving these games in their original form.

[sassytassie]

I'm still confused as to why they didn't touch the cutscenes lol.. would've been nice for those to have been remastered as well.

[Dummy Bear]

If poor remasters are a reason to worry about future releases, then we need to really be worried about GTA 6.

[TailsGotTrolled]

That's actually a thing this time? Guess not enough people were buying muh shark cards

[GX -The Spindash-]

There's definitely more than enough justification to be cynical about the future of Sonic as a franchise, though I'll try to be optimistic here and mention that it's possible, possible, that Frontiers may be a larger turning point for Sega and Sonic Team's release philosophy, which in the past seemed to be making the release date at the cost of quality control.

We know they've delayed Frontiers, and they've said part of that is for the game's quality. We also know that there hasn't been a Sonic Team developed platformer since 2017, which will have given it a five year dev cycle.

I don't want to imply that means it will be automatically good; making an open world game with so little experience is a HUGE challenge. But a willingness to give substantial development time is something we've yet to really see them publicly do in the past.

If the game comes out and it feels legitimately polished in ways recent entries haven't, gets positive critical and word-of-mouth impressions, and then also goes on to sell well, I think there's room to give them the benefit of the doubt. If Frontiers comes out and it's kind of empty or a bit of a mess or samey and repetitive, then we're probably looking at same-old-same-old Sega, with the delay existing purely to shove the project over the finish line.

I wouldn't consider every Sonic Team Sonic game to hold this turning point, but this is one of the circumstances where they're doing something at least a bit differently (as far as we're aware).

[light-gaia]

2 hours ago, GX Echidna said:

There's definitely more than enough justification to be cynical about the future of Sonic as a franchise, though I'll try to be optimistic here and mention that it's possible, possible, that Frontiers may be a larger turning point for Sega and Sonic Team's release philosophy, which in the past seemed to be making the release date at the cost of quality control.

We know they've delayed Frontiers, and they've said part of that is for the game's quality. We also know that there hasn't been a Sonic Team developed platformer since 2017, which will have given it a five year dev cycle.

I don't want to imply that means it will be automatically good; making an open world game with so little experience is a HUGE challenge. But a willingness to give substantial development time is something we've yet to really see them publicly do in the past.

If the game comes out and it feels legitimately polished in ways recent entries haven't, gets positive critical and word-of-mouth impressions, and then also goes on to sell well, I think there's room to give them the benefit of the doubt. If Frontiers comes out and it's kind of empty or a bit of a mess or samey and repetitive, then we're probably looking at same-old-same-old Sega, with the delay existing purely to shove the project over the finish line.

I wouldn't consider every Sonic Team Sonic game to hold this turning point, but this is one of the circumstances where they're doing something at least a bit differently (as far as we're aware).

It's possible, but it's also possible they screw everything up again. I'm cautiously optimistic about Frontiers, too. I like the new directions and the ambition, even though we don't know anything about the game yet.

However, I don't know any other company besides Sega and a franchise as big and as recognizable as Sonic that had so many incredible failures. Take Sonic Boom, for example. It was so obvious that the project wouldn't work. The problems started with the bad character design.

Sonic is in a very good place right now, being more popular than ever. It's more likely the new projects will succeed, but I can't underestimate the ability Sega has to screw every thing up pretty badly, even when we think it's impossible.

[GX -The Spindash-]

I'm not sure what I feel are their big failures align with what you feel they are, since I'm perfectly fine with the Sonic Boom character designs. They come from a design philosophy where the style of the character gives you an immediate sense of what their archetype is. Even the movie uses this to different ends, turning Knuckles into a much more imposing figure using thicker limbs and scowling expression (and Elba doesn't hurt either). The failure of Sonic Boom is complicated but pretty well documented: the thing was borderline doomed by a combination of early engine choice and Sega's Nintendo exclusivity agreement. Beyond that, most Sonic games aren't catastrophic failures financially or critically. They just sort of pass by, staying popular through targeting kids and having a die-hard fanbase. There's untapped potential, but untapped potential isn't an outright failure.

Colors Ultimate I'll chock up to them being historically bad at keeping tabs on their external partners (Aliens: Colonial Marines seems like an amazing case study of that)... and once again, engine choice (why in god's name would anyone make a console game with an engine that doesn't innately run on consoles?). But there are two different variables in the calculation this time around:

1. The movie was a huge, surprising success.

2. Sonic Mania was a huge surprising success, that, as the rumor goes, put Sonic Team's Japanese studio to shame.

Sega has a spotlight on Sonic brighter than they've had in a long, long time. And yes, they absolutely have room to eff it up completely. But it also means there's greater pressure right now to get it right, because it's not likely they'll get a chance to make an impression on people like this again.

I'm currently at the point where, I know as much as anyone Sonic Team's penchant for over-scoping, under-designing, and failing to perform a level of polish games these days demand, but I also know that team CAN make good games and HAVE made good games whenever things line up just right. Basically, I'm not ready to get optimistic or pessimistic about Frontiers. There's enough on either side to put me in a neutral wait and see position until we start getting actual information about it.