Why does SEGA keep learning the wrong lessons from the criticisms?

[Rabbitearsblog]

So it appears that every time there's criticism on a Sonic the Hedgehog game (whether it be from the critics or from the fans), SEGA always seems to do the opposite of what the critics or the fans are saying.  Like for example, you have the critics complaining about how the werehog's movements from Sonic Unleashed were too slow and frustrating to control.  What does SEGA do?  Why, they take out the werehog mechanics in the next Sonic game and just focus on the boost section.  While it's great that SEGA focused on an aspect of a Sonic game that most fans and critics liked, they also have a bad tendency to get rid of a past mechanic that didn't work for the game.  Or in the worse case scenario, they end up making things worse for the next Sonic game by not improving on a mechanic that was messy in the previous game and instead, continues to use said sloppy mechanic in the next game, despite the fact that they have more than enough time to improve on the messy mechanic.  So, how come SEGA always seem to do the opposite of what the fans and the critics are asking for?

[Scritch the Cat]

I wouldn't go as far as to say that Sonic Team/SEGA does the outright opposite of what critical people want, but a case has certainly been made for them learning the wrong lessons at least at some points in the past.

As I can recall, it was the Werehog that first earned them that reputation.  Leading up to Sonic Unleashed, there were a number of things that the fans disagreed on, but nothing was more contentious than the other playable characters.  There was a fairly notable split between fans who hated the other playable characters due to them bogging down and diluting the series' gameplay, and fans who loved them because they added personality and mythology to the series.  It was likely impossible to side fully with one of those factions without alienating the other, but Sonic Team unbelievably managed to alienate both of them; the ones who loved the other characters were mad because they were no longer playable and their roles in the plot were downplayed, while the ones who hated the other characters were mad because the game was still bogged down by a slower alternate gameplay style that had nothing to do with Sonic's core gameplay.  Also, the Werehog poisoned the game on a narrative level; particular because it was one of the very first things revealed about the game.  While Sonic Unleashed has become something of a cult classic more recently, and some people even have a soft spot for the Werehog, at the time all anyone could see it as was the latest idiotic brain-fart from the studio that brought you Shadow cussing and using guns and Sonic getting a human girlfriend.  So to answer your question of why they did something so outlandish, well, I think a few things were going on.

 First, while it would have been pretty easy to learn that most of the hate for the other characters was due to their un-Sonic-like gameplay, and thus that taking them out wouldn't really solve the problem if said gameplay remained, Sonic Team had been gutted during the development of 06 due to Yuji Naka and many of his friends fleeing the company at the time.  While simply tearing out what isn't fully working rather than trying to fix it would often qualify as a cowardly and counterproductive solution , with the company's labor pool slashed they probably felt they needed to downsize a bit, so we got them acting like the characters themselves were the problem because that allowed them to say they were improving things simply by taking them out.

Second, and as to the Werehog coming in to shove their contentious gameplay gimmicks onto Sonic himself, this was actually explained in a document whose author claimed to be an employee leaking company secrets.  Titled something like "Why Sonic games do non-Sonic things" (maybe you can still find it online), it alleged that the company felt a need to do so because of just how short games would be if they relied on a fast-moving character alone. 

This has always been an inefficient series to make given how much bigger the levels have to be made in order to accommodate such speed, and in retrospect, it has always been a bit guilty of doing things to pad Sonic games out, but in the Genesis era, they bet quite a bit more on people replaying the games to master their skills, in order to last them longer.  It worked for a while, but with more and more video games being made and vying for people's attention, that replay model probably could not have endured, and it didn't.  Many people always want to keep playing the hottest new games, meaning they can't be arsed to replay a game they already have completed if it gets in the way of that.  Also, with save features and level selects becoming cultural expectations--and with them, expectation for all people of all skill levels to complete games at their own pace--many gamers also were no longer going to tolerate things like the purposefully unfair special stage entry systems, which some would argue were there as extra incentives to play the whole game over again. 

So every subsequent game has relied on increased padding.  Sometimes that padding has taken the form of forcing replay again, as with Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog, but it was generally disliked in those games.  Unfortunately, when Sonic Team chose to make Boost the cornerstone of Sonic's reinvention, they probably only increased their need to rely on peripheral gameplay styles to pad things out.

Now, if you think you have more recent examples that prove Sonic Team doesn't seem to listen much to criticisms, and are wondering why, I think it's due to the cultural, geographic and linguistic divides.  The people who have the most insightful critiques of Sonic games are self-proclaimed Sonic fans, but their critiques are relatively quiet compared to the reach of game critics who may or may not be Sonic fans, and also of intentionally negative video reviewers like the Game Grumps.  So a lot of the feedback Sonic Team gets isn't so much from fans as it is from people with less stake in their series, and as a result, overhauls to the series were arguably less meant to please fans than to shut up their loudest detractors.  Often, that meant more worrying about what not to do than what to do, and that led to the series being what many fans considered creatively bankrupt.

[Marcello]

3 hours ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

Like for example, you have the critics complaining about how the werehog's movements from Sonic Unleashed were too slow and frustrating to control.  What does SEGA do?  Why, they take out the werehog mechanics in the next Sonic game and just focus on the boost section. 

That's not really true. One of the most common things said about Unleashed was how good it would be if it was just Daytime stages and hoped the next Sonic would be that. 

SEGA gave us that in Colors. 

 

They do listen, but sometimes their solution shows they didn't fully understand the problem. The problem with Sonic’s friends for example for many were the different gameplay styles, so in  Unleashed we still had that problem, just this time we still played Sonic in those sections. 

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Ironically enough, there's an upside to Sega/Sonic Team learning the wrong lessons.

For example, when people blamed the other character's mere existence for the problem in games like Sonic 06, only for Sonic Team to take them out and do the same exact thing but with just Sonic alone, people started to realize that the other characters weren't the problem.

As an extra benefit, it became easier to call out people taking the piss to complain about the other character for the crime of simply appearing in Generations when all they did was just stand around as part of the background for most of the game. "Yeah, Generations is okay, but Cream the Rabbit is in it, and that's bad. Therefore, this game isn't really that good." Such smoothed-brained logic.

[Rabbitearsblog]

1 hour ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Now, if you think you have more recent examples of why Sonic Team doesn't seem to listen much to criticisms, and are wondering why, I think it's due to the cultural, geographic and linguistic divides.  The people who have the most insightful critiques of Sonic games are self-proclaimed Sonic fans, but their critiques are relatively quiet compared to the reach of game critics who may or may not be Sonic fans, and also of intentionally negative video reviewers like the Game Grumps.  So a lot of the feedback Sonic Team gets isn't so much from fans as it is from people with less stake in their series, and as a result, overhauls to the series were arguably less meant to please fans than to shut up their loudest detractors.  Often, that meant more worrying about what not to do than what to do, and that led to the series being what many fans considered creatively bankrupt.

This makes a lot of sense.  I think that SEGA let the detractors really get to them and it caused them to make some really controversial decisions regarding the franchise.  SEGA should understand that sometimes you just can't please all the detractors.  If they hated the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise in the first place, then they probably will never be interested in the franchise, no matter how many changes you try to make to the franchise to please them. 

[Scritch the Cat]

 

1 hour ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

This makes a lot of sense.  I think that SEGA let the detractors really get to them and it caused them to make some really controversial decisions regarding the franchise.  SEGA should understand that sometimes you just can't please all the detractors.  If they hated the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise in the first place, then they probably will never be interested in the franchise, no matter how many changes you try to make to the franchise to please them. 

I also get the feeling this series got steered in a sillier, more juvenile direction because SEGA gave up on these characters as vehicles for meaningful, sometimes serious stories, who could and did sometimes go through development from one game to the next.  Even the games that do this  better are probably going to look disconcertingly weird to people not familiar with the series, and with two games in a row that do it mostly terribly, everyone who wasn’t on board with it felt vindicated.

Things like Sonic Colors, Sonic Lost World, and Sonic Boom put the characters where most adults feel cartoon animals belong, in lighthearted stories where scamper around and say goofy things.  It’s easy for critics to turn up their noses at a series starring anthro animals deciding to include a plot point about a corrupt military murdering a little girl in cold blood.  But if Sonic feels like just another children’s cartoon like ones starring Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse, adults don’t have much to sneer at; they accept that those sorts of funny-animal stories are fine to exist even if they’re not their own cup of tea.  Most adults don’t watch Sesame Street but not many of them actively hate it.  When you can pass something off as being for children, even people who don’t appreciate anything about it will see criticizing it as pointless, punching down, beneath their dignity, etc.

[Rabbitearsblog]

7 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

I also get the feeling this series got steered in a sillier, more juvenile direction because SEGA gave up on these characters as vehicles for meaningful, sometimes serious stories, who could and did sometimes go through development from one game to the next.  Even the games that do this  better are probably going to look disconcertingly weird to people not familiar with the series, and with two games in a row that do it mostly terribly, everyone who wasn’t on board with it felt vindicated.

Things like Sonic Colors, Sonic Lost World, and Sonic Boom put the characters where most adults feel cartoon animals belong, in lighthearted stories where scamper around and say goofy things.  It’s easy for critics to turn up their noses at a series starring anthro animals deciding to include a plot point about a corrupt military murdering a little girl in cold blood.  But if Sonic feels like just another children’s cartoon like ones starring Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse, adults don’t have much to sneer at; they accept that those sorts of funny-animal stories are fine to exist even if they’re not their own cup of tea.  Most adults don’t watch Sesame Street but not many of them actively hate it.  When you can pass something off as being for children, even people who don’t appreciate anything about it will see criticizing it as pointless, punching down, beneath their dignity, etc.

It seems like they are turning things around in terms of favoring more serious storytelling with Sonic Frontiers.  Honestly, I don't think it would have been a bad idea for the Sonic franchise to be more comedy driven, if they were written better.  That was the problem with games like Sonic Colors and Sonic Lost World was that the writing for those games weren't that great and therefore, they couldn't justify the need to make the series more comedy driven.

[Kuzu]

Because they lack the ability to properly parse information. 

[Rabbitearsblog]

25 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Because they lack the ability to properly parse information. 

Yeah.  It seems that even when they are getting criticisms for the games, they seem to have a hard time separating what would work for the games vs what would hurt the games and sometimes, there are times where some critics are just bashing the franchise for no reason and SEGA has a hard time seeing what criticisms are legit and what criticisms are not legit (although it would be hard for anyone to figure out what criticisms are legit and which ones are not).

[Scritch the Cat]

2 hours ago, Kuzu said:

Because they lack the ability to properly parse information. 

 

2 hours ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

Yeah.  It seems that even when they are getting criticisms for the games, they seem to have a hard time separating what would work for the games vs what would hurt the games and sometimes, there are times where some critics are just bashing the franchise for no reason and SEGA has a hard time seeing what criticisms are legit and what criticisms are not legit (although it would be hard for anyone to figure out what criticisms are legit and which ones are not).

Again, I get the feeling this is due to the language barrier.  If you don't speak the languages that most people are going to be talking about Sonic in, then even with the help of translators, properly parsing information is a hard thing to do.  It's fairly easy to translate "I like Classic Sonic"; it's harder to translate "I like Classic Sonic because of those cool moments when you can build up speed, jump off a ramp and have the jump retain your momentum so you can soar really high/far", so instead of good physics, their overture to Classic Sonic fans is Classic Sonic, the character, and Green Hill Zone motifs ad-nausea. 

The same could be going on regarding other playable characters.  It's easier to translate that people have turned against other playable characters in Sonic games and comparatively more difficult to translate why.  When the majority of the other playable characters garnered such a hatedom that critics and meme makers thought they could make blanket statements about "Sonic's stupid friends" and get patted on the back, it became less clear whether or not Tails and Knuckles fell under that blanket. 

On that note, even when it had become fashionable to resent playing as other characters, I hardly ever encountered any fans who were against playing as Tails and Knuckles on principle.  Most felt that they should just be one-to-one translations of how they played in 2D, so SA1 wasn't too far off from what they wanted.  In retrospect, more scrutiny has been poured on just how practical that is, with some arguing that such excessive vertical abilities would inevitably either make levels too short and easy like Tails' stages, or more substantive only because they'd been arbitrarily lengthened by fetch-quests like Knuckles' stages, but at the time when we had things like Big the Cat or the mechs to compare that too, it seemed like nobody really cared; they wanted to play as Tails and Knuckles the way they had in Classic Sonic games, because they were fun to play as and reasonably fast.  It's only after the characters stopped being playable and people making retrospective comments started speculating on whether it was worth the effort to put them back in the game, that I noticed complaints arising about how broken Tails and Knuckles were in 3D.  Which maybe they were, but now, in an era when Sonic himself is also so much more fast and powerful than he was in the Genesis era, I'm not sure how much that really matters.

Moving on, though, I think another big problem with this company noticing the nuance of criticisms is that they're too fixated on the ephemeral notion of being "cool".  Sonic at its advent was billed as a cutting edge franchise on a cutting edge system, so to resemble anything dated and hated would have been a deadly sin for it.  But what's considered cool in itself tends to become dated, and often hated, so that's informed most of their retools.  Sonic in the early 1990s was meant to cater to people who liked things like Ninja Turtles, Hot Wheels and Extreme Sports, Sonic in the late 1990s and early 2000s was meant to cater to people who liked anime, while Sonic in the late 2000s and most of the 2010s was meant to cater to people who liked...mocking Sonic.  That meant most of people's favorite punching bags got taken out of the series while the rest of them, most notably Sonic himself, got retooled into forms that could harness the mockery.  Whether any of this actually played well was often a lesser priority.  Even in the Genesis era, they didn't always have a clear and unanimously well-received approach to how to build a viable game out of the concept of going fast.  It's an inherently exciting concept, but also an inherently slippery one.

[Rabbitearsblog]

29 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Moving on, though, I think another big problem with this company noticing the nuance of criticisms is that they're too fixated on the ephemeral notion of being "cool".  Sonic at its advent was billed as a cutting edge franchise on a cutting edge system, so to resemble anything dated and hated would have been a deadly sin for it.  But what's considered cool in itself tends to become dated, and often hated, so that's informed most of their retools.  Sonic in the early 1990s was meant to cater to people who liked things like Ninja Turtles, Hot Wheels and Extreme Sports, Sonic in the late 1990s and early 2000s was meant to cater to people who liked anime, while Sonic in the late 2000s and most of the 2010s was meant to cater to people who liked...mocking Sonic.  That meant most of people's favorite punching bags got taken out of the series while the rest of them, most notably Sonic himself, got retooled into forms that could harness the mockery.  Whether any of this actually played well was often a lesser priority.  Even in the Genesis era, they didn't always have a clear and unanimously well-received approach to how to build a viable game out of the concept of going fast.  It's an inherently exciting concept, but also an inherently slippery one.

That is true. There has been lots of mistranslations regarding the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and I will admit that it's not easy trying to translate one language to another.  Even if you have the best translators on your team, there's still going to be some mistranslating on the nature of the situation.  I also agree that maybe SEGA should stop focusing on making Sonic "cool" and just focus on what stories and game mechanics work best for Sonic.

[Rabbitearsblog]

Also, I've been wondering: how come SEGA keeps having so many problems trying to keep this franchise together while other gaming companies like Nintendo are able to get their franchises together?

[MetalSkulkBane]

2 hours ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

Also, I've been wondering: how come SEGA keeps having so many problems trying to keep this franchise together while other gaming companies like Nintendo are able to get their franchises together?

Most games work on refinements: make a game, see what didn't work, and tweak the sequel until it works. Simple. Might lead to stagnation, but like it stopped Call of Duty or Mario.

Then 3D happened and so many franchises had to start from the ground up. Sonic did Adventure 1 & 2. It worked enough. All it takes is too keep refining the formula.

Or you can experiment with Heroes. Then Shadow Game did stupid things. 06 was rushed AND did stupid things. Sega decided to throw baby with the bathwater. No refinement, more experimentation.

Boost Formula. Unleashed okay, Colors is better, and Generations great. Experimentation time! Lost World, Boom games. But Chaos knows what happened to Forces, you would think they nailed it by now.

 

Of course, that's all we see. Why Sega can't stick to their guns? Why do they keep rushing most important games? Why Shadow or Forces play worst than their predecessors? That's something I can't really explain.

[batson]

19 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Sonic in the early 1990s was meant to cater to people who liked things like Ninja Turtles, Hot Wheels and Extreme Sports, Sonic in the late 1990s and early 2000s was meant to cater to people who liked anime, while Sonic in the late 2000s and most of the 2010s was meant to cater to people who liked...mocking Sonic. 

Damn, that's an excellent way to put it. And I think you're absolutley right. Sonic of the 90's and 00's was riding trends that existed separately from the Sonic brand, while Sonic of the 10's more or less attempted to ride a trend directly tied to the Sonic brand itself; namely Sonic's existance as something ridiculed. Most of the aura that the Sonic brand gave of during that time felt like a product of either trying to change itself according to it's mockery, or by trying to go along with the mockey in a "We're in on the joke too! That's cool of us, right"? way.  I guess the only thing that remains consistant with the Sonic franchise is that it sucks up the curent pop cultural zeitgesit like a sponge. Maybe that's the true essence of the franchise. And maybe now with Frontiers and it's self important continuity-peppered ultra-fanboy writing (which I like by the way, but I'm still gonna call a spade a spade), in another couple of years from now we might look back at that game as the starting point of the era where the Sonic brand jumped on yet another pop cultural bandwagon and joined franchises like Star Wars, Ghostbusters and countless others in becoming super-self-referential and super particular in it's callbacks to itself in a way that is only feasible in this internet age of ours, and would not have been a few decades ago, when easily 99% of consumers just wanted to play a good game / watch a good movie ect and didn't care about callbacks and continuity, while now a large enough portion of the franchise's consumers consists of obsessive super-nerds that places importance on the franchise that they're obsessed with in the exact same way that a christian places importance on the Bible.

[Rabbitearsblog]

7 hours ago, MetalSkulkBane said:

Most games work on refinements: make a game, see what didn't work, and tweak the sequel until it works. Simple. Might lead to stagnation, but like it stopped Call of Duty or Mario.

Then 3D happened and so many franchises had to start from the ground up. Sonic did Adventure 1 & 2. It worked enough. All it takes is too keep refining the formula.

Or you can experiment with Heroes. Then Shadow Game did stupid things. 06 was rushed AND did stupid things. Sega decided to throw baby with the bathwater. No refinement, more experimentation.

Boost Formula. Unleashed okay, Colors is better, and Generations great. Experimentation time! Lost World, Boom games. But Chaos knows what happened to Forces, you would think they nailed it by now.

Of course, that's all we see. Why Sega can't stick to their guns? Why do they keep rushing most important games? Why Shadow or Forces play worst than their predecessors? That's something I can't really explain.

I agree with this.  I think the problem with SEGA is that they want to experiment with this franchise too many times instead of just sticking to one formula and improving on it.  Why SEGA wants to continually experiment with this franchise and not stick to one formula when it would benefit them the most is beyond me.

[Starnik]

On 11/12/2022 at 1:57 PM, Rabbitearsblog said:

I agree with this.  I think the problem with SEGA is that they want to experiment with this franchise too many times instead of just sticking to one formula and improving on it.  Why SEGA wants to continually experiment with this franchise and not stick to one formula when it would benefit them the most is beyond me.

Sonic 06 poisoned the well.

[Rabbitearsblog]

2 hours ago, Starnik said:

Sonic 06 poisoned the well.

Like what aspect of the gameplay in Sonic 06 does SEGA refuse to improve on?

[Starnik]

36 minutes ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

Like what aspect of the gameplay in Sonic 06 does SEGA refuse to improve on?

Sonic 06 forced Sega to change course. The game made Sonic a laughing stock and they had to move as far away from it as possible.