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Awoo.

In light of this site's Frontiers review, here are some new thoughts on momentum, what fans really mean when they say it, and why the series may have dropped it.


Scritch the Cat

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If you haven't read that review yet, the section I am referring to is this:

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At this point, it is probably worth bringing up the concept of ‘momentum’, as the online discourse surrounding this recently has become warped to the point of nonsense. So let’s talk about whether Sonic Frontiers ‘has momentum’ for a second.

The short answer is ‘yes, of course it has momentum’ – just like every other decent video game on the planet, Sonic has a standard momentum that applies whenever he moves at speed across certain terrains. And it’s really very fun to play around with! But what this game lacks – and what fans actually mean when they talk about ‘momentum’ – is the implementation of mathematical pinball-style rolling physics, and environments that allow for such momentum-based traversal, in the same way you would see in a Mega Drive Sonic game.

Instead, in Frontiers, Sonic – much like he does in Forces and, well, most of his games over the last 20 years – relies on speed boosters, scripted dash panels and boost rings in order to artificially give the player enough speed and lift to carry them to higher areas.

 

Now this got me to thinking: How exactly did online discourse about this subject get so warped?  Undoubtedly, there's a lot of baggage attached to that one word that many fans seem to expect each other to know, but that is rather obtuse to anyone outside of that loop.  How did the conversations and complaints about newer Sonic games evolve into these specific points?  Well, as it happens, I was actually there to observe some of that evolution, so I am at least somewhat qualified to weigh in.

It's no secret to most people here that discussion about momentum in Sonic games has long been tied quite closely to Sonic fangames, and as I recall, the first fangame made and touted with such philosophy was BlitzSonic; originally called Mark The Echidna's Engine and eventually to be used to make Sonic World.  Likely people on Sonic Retro were pontificating on it before then, but I did not become aware of that community until people in places like this mentioned that its alumni made Sonic Mania.  So my first encounter with momentum being brought up in praise of a Sonic fangame was in this video and its description:

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This is what 3D Sonic should be playing like, honestly. Entirely momentum-based gameplay, none of this "forced down a linear path, bottomless pits on all sides, speed pads galore" business. Loops are there to prevent you from moving forward if you lack speed, not just eye candy to be pasted every few blocks or so, where the camera pans out to show you being forced around the loop by way of speed pads. Anywhere in the world is yours to get at, provided you have the patience and the right kind of momentum to make it up there. Just like the old Sonic games for the Genesis.

You will notice some distinction (though sadly not enough) between that commentary and how this site's reviewers described discussion of momentum now.  Back then, the Adventure games were the newer, worse-regarded Sonic games that these fan projects were trying to show up as the true 3D evolution of Sonic, with Unleashed only to come out later that year, and most of the complaints about the newer Sonic games not having enough momentum were essentially complaints about them not requiring momentum.  With dash pads and splines strewn about, things that used to require players to exploit gravity and hills to build up enough momentum to pass, no longer did, with the textbook case being loops. 

However, while that was all true, even if loops in 3D were not scripted and did not have those dash pads at the start, essentially making them the same test of speed that they were in the Classic games, the fact that in 3D you can steer left and right means there's no real reason to use them as such.  You can just detour around a loop in 3D, or through it in a way that does not require going very high on it.  Still, there are other things that utilize momentum.  So why did those things gradually replace loops as the cornerstones of this discussion?  I think there's a few reasons.

First, back then the Classic Sonic fans tended to be the older and more jaded sorts, who inevitably picked up on the Adventure Era games' shortcomings in comparison.  But the more time passed, and the more aspects of the Adventure Era got dropped in favor of the "Meta Era", the more the Adventure Era's fans started turning into jaded old nostalgic sticklers themselves.  Becoming united in their bitterness likely inspired them to dig deeper into all of the games from both of those departed eras, now focusing more on what they had in common than what separated them, and it was likely partially thanks to this that they started to discover just about every possible place that could be exploited to fling characters high into the air and thereby take shortcuts or reach distant hidden areas.

However, another reason many people seemed to come a lot more lately to value this aspect of momentum in Sonic games, is that it's by nature a lot more subtle, meant to be there for experts to play around with but often completely overlooked by casuals, and now that I think of it, that was already fairly true in the Classic Sonic games.  Loops in 2D were a genuine test of momentum, and one that every single Sonic player saw and had to pass, but as a result they were also ones that most of those players did pass, and then they didn't necessarily give them much more thought.  The possibility of going fast up walls and off ramps to get airborn was often present, but it was rarely either tutorialized or required to actually beat the games, and this brings us to a third reason that such mechanics have gone relatively unnoticed until recently, when they've come to dominate momentum discourse, and in turn, to another dead horse people keep beating about Classic Sonic design vs subsequent eras.

These games, as originally conceived, expected casuals to become experts, and Yuji Naka built the means of such transformation on an idea that was almost Eggman-like in how brilliant-but-twisted it was: Utilize people's own frustration and impatience to build up their skills.  Sonic was conceived of at a time when many platformers did not have save features, had limited lives, and had limited continues if any at all.  That meant failing them or even turning them off demanded you play them again in their entirety, and due to the rage this would inspire, people would attempt to rush back to where they were last time, in the process drawing on their experience to rush more gracefully.  This was combined witth a character who also was impatient and agile, and it played on the yin-yang of how much fun it was to go fast vs how much it sucked to have that speed interrupted by an enemy, obstacle, etc.  So while players were tempted to go fast, they also had to stay on their toes, learning where to jump and roll while going fast...and here is where the games started tutorializing more of the ways momentum affects them.  Rolling on some surfaces is faster than on others, while where you are and how fast you are going will affect the force and trajectory of your jump.  It was quite an effective way to teach the game's most advanced mechanics, but again, it was still largely optional.  This series was designed with the philosophy of "low skill floor, high skill ceiling"; there's only one button needed, the rings were there to let players keep enduring hits, missing a jump tended to mean falling to a lower and slower route rather than in a deadly pit, and most enemies could be defeated simply by jumping into them from any angle, so even fairly poor players could pick up and play Sonic games, with them only discovering the deeper mechanics later, when they replayed the levels faster.  But then a leak sprang in that plan: There stopped being a "later".

Sonic was conceived of to compete with Mario, and at the time Yuji Naka designed for that, the archtypical Mario game he had in mind was Super Mario Bros., which had no save feature and permanent Game Overs.  But not long into Sonic's existence, Super Mario World came out and dispensed with those old buzzkills, and SEGA suddenly found themselves competing with a new game whose features made their game look old-fashioned and obnoxious on the surface--and that was probably the last thing they wanted when they had originally marketed the Genesis and Sonic as being on the cutting edge of gaming.  While that didn't destroy Sonic's credibility at first, it was a hurdle that they needed to clear, and come Sonic 3, save features would become a part of Sonic as well.  People aware of my history on this board will know I consider a save feature and limitless continues to be absolute necessities for any game I play; I simply don't have enough time to waste on any game that doesn't when I have such a large backlog of other games I want to play, and I essentially hated Sonic 2 until I had the luxury of playing the mobile port; even going as far as saying I'd rather play Shadow the Hedgehog.  Still, I understand why the addition of these now-essential parts of gaming probably disrupted the way Sonic games were designed--at least over time.  There was now no real demand to replay the game; even trying for all the emeralds no longer required restarting as someone could now just reload the game to keep trying.  Certainly, there were plenty of people who still loved replaying and speed-running the games for their own sake, but now that had become more optional than ever before, as had learning its associated momentum nuances.

In time, of course, most fans did learn them; even those fans whose first Sonic games had save features and unlimited continues, and now, those members of the Sonic fandom who are old enough to articulate their opinions well online seem unanimous about how much they like using momentum and pinball physics.  And again, as this site's reviewers observed, by now the fandon's general fixation with momentum has moved away from how hard it is or is not to simply attain, and more towards what sort of amazing vertical feats you can pull off once you have attained momentum.  This has caused the Adventure games and even some of the Boost games to be reappraised as "games that have momentum".  Speaking just for myself right now, back in the day, even while I was big into the Adventure games, I had no idea they had much physical nuance and would have bet against it based on just how laughably fudged the loops were, so it was actually a real treat to watch nostalgic videos about them that revealed just how awesomely fast Sonic can tear through Twinkle Park if you can get the hang of inclined jumping.  Also, since I joined this forum and infamously bitched about them, I have actually beaten all of the Classic Sonic games, and then recently I played through Sonic Heroes again, and was thrilled at what a new experience the game felt like now that I was more able to read these stages and figure out how to take shortcuts and soar over obstacles and speed traps; I actually gained a new respect for its level designers for how much they thought ahead to reward players who could do that.

So with all of that in mind, it seems like this series actually has a fair amount of games in every era with the momentum/pinball mechanics the Sonic fans love, so maybe we aren't all that finicky, divided, and hard to please after all.   But if it's so obvious what we want and how attainable it should be, why is Sonic Team putting less and less emphasis on such mechanics?  I happened on a possible answer when watching a video about another series notably designed around the ethos of "low skill floor, high skill ceiling": Pokemon.  This video makes lots of points about the series' growing pains in general, so it may not be worth your time to watch it all the way through, but here are the relevant parts:

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We take it as a given since the series has made it part of their brand, but Pokemon is pretty much the only franchise around that attempts to carry over progress from previous games to such an extensive degree, namely in a monster-collecting RPG, resulting in a sizable amount of coding and planning being done for something only a small percentage of players would actively be using.

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And look; I get it: It's completely understandable that people like shiny hunters or those that have living 'dexes going all the way back to Gen 3 would be frustrated about this, considering the time they've spent cultivating all their work.  But let's be realistic.  If the developers are spending a decent amount of time rigging, animating and coding over 400 Pokemon that only a small fraction of players will ever see or use, that's frankly a ton of resources that could be better directed elsewhere.

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Looking at the various splits in the fanbase, the developers are constantly threading the needle of indulging the aging, existing fanbase, while not alienating their target demographic of children and casual fans, which is admittedly not an easy balance to keep. 

Now, before any fans point out to me something like "If fans have been doing this for free for over a decade--", I know that putting momentum and pinball physics into Sonic games is not a comparable ordeal to putting an ever-expanding zoo of playable monsters into every new Pokemon game, but the bit about demographic numbers is important.  As hard as it is to notice sometimes, it's likely that the vast majority of people who play Sonic games are not the sort of people who obsess about Sonic online.  The hardcore fans who have played through these games so many times that they've been able to figure out how to milk not only one game's physics to maximum potential, but many games', are very vocal and many are also very well-spoken, but I have a haunting feeling there aren't enough of them for SEGA to see them as the most important demographic.  Instead, Sonic games are probably targeted mostly at people who aren't necessarily all that into Sonic.  They'll play through a game if it's easy enough, but not necessarily keep playing it afterward to master it, and this likely influences what features that Sonic Team do or don't see as important.

I mentioned above that loops were an obvious test of momentum in 2D, while in 3D, they don't really work as such, but they were such an iconic fixture of Sonic back in its heyday that games can't stop using them as a formality.  With the more subtle and nuanced aspects of momentum gameplay that tend to deal more with jumping far and high to take shortcuts, I feel the opposite is true; this mechanic works just as well in 3D and may even be more applicable when you can see where you're going, but because it has been more tucked away and unseen by many players, especially when replaying the game was no longer required, Sonic Team does not see it as important to bring back.

It's easy for fans to get mad when this company constantly seems more interested in slapping more bells and whistles onto Sonic than in getting his core gameplay just right, and often that has indeed resulted in embarrassing lows.  Still, bare in mind that Sonic's core gameplay feels rather simplistic to people first approaching it; it's a quite limited moveset that usually offers little in the way of projectiles, inventory or unlockables.  When you get the hang of his speed and physics, Sonic can do a lot of things far beyond the likes of Mario, Mega Man and Kirby, but before you get there, you're still left with a character that can only do a few things, usually less than the competition.  If your main demographic is people who are playing a Sonic game for the first time, on at least some level it makes sense to make a game that feels wide rather than deep.  Depth is something that can only really be appreciated by someone who has already played a game, and is thus able to decide whether or not it is worth playing more. 

So while it's obnoxious to see how questionable Sonic's own platforming mechanics have gotten in Sonic Frontiers, they weren't pitching this game mostly at people who care about those things.  Their aim was to cast a wide net, so they made Sonic able to do a whole lot of different things that many other game characters can do; exactly how well Sonic actually does any of them is kind of an afterthought.

There is likely a way out of this, a way to implement momentum and pinball physics that actually wins over that target demographic.  Namely, I think games would have be more overt in explaining how to do such movement.  But I think Sonic Team might be afraid of scaring them off with what they might regard as ripping off the training wheels, and to be honest, at a time when so many of their games were still about Sonic charging down a narrow platform over a pit, I can see how that would be far too scary for many new players to risk.  It's just a shame that they didn't choose Frontiers as the game to embrace more emergent and experimental gameplay driven by the players' own play with the physics, because an open world potentially removes the hazards of pits from that equation.

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I think some of the ideas fans have for Sonic are interesting, but ultimately would lead the franchise to become even more niche than it already is. 

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Signalling @azooas he's going to be better at articulating the importance of momentum/inertia/physics whatever you want to call it than I could, but I'd say that it's not just about it being a Sonic staple as much as it just makes everything feel and flow better. Momentum is literally in Frontiers' code, but was blocked out. Fans have re-activated it so to speak and the game looks much more fluid to control.

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1 hour ago, Indigo Rush said:

Signalling @azooas he's going to be better at articulating the importance of momentum/inertia/physics whatever you want to call it than I could, but I'd say that it's not just about it being a Sonic staple as much as it just makes everything feel and flow better. Momentum is literally in Frontiers' code, but was blocked out. Fans have re-activated it so to speak and the game looks much more fluid to control.

Do you mean the part about jump force being capped?

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(please excuse the weird resolution this uploaded at)

Frontiers has code that lets you give Sonic momentum physics, but was dummied out. Physics mods such as this one do their best to revive it, with excellent (though slightly OP) results. It's likely they removed the ability in an attempt to better QoL for casual players (never having to worry about losing/gaining speed when exploring steep terrain) and/or to help reign in the level design (as it'd be much easier to sequence break).

Unfortunately for them, I don't think they noticed how much more fun it makes the game, nor how many more layers it adds to the experience. There's so many more options for how to interact with the terrain, now that you can build speed from going down them or ramp into the air from jumping off them. Even though it doesn't fix the vapid emptiness of the maps, it improves the game feel a hundredfold.

Not to say it's perfect, though. This mod may make Sonic a bit too fast and unruly for his own good, and may make later areas of the game incompletable. But this also isn't the be-all-end-all mod. If someone can make a version that doesn't completely remove Sonic's running and air speed caps then it'd probably be the best version of itself, and the best way to play Frontiers in general.

If the reasons I guessed are why they didn't use it, they really should've built the environments around it rather than dummying them out. That is, if that was the reason. Maybe some rogue programmer at Sonic Team was frustrated with the higher-up calls and worked it into the game while no one was looking. Or maybe it's leftovers from past Sonic games that have somehow found themselves still in the files three or four games later. We're not executives, after all, so there's no way for us to know.

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2 hours ago, azoo said:
(please excuse the weird resolution this uploaded at)

Frontiers has code that lets you give Sonic momentum physics, but was dummied out. Physics mods such as this one do their best to revive it, with excellent (though slightly OP) results. It's likely they removed the ability in an attempt to better QoL for casual players (never having to worry about losing/gaining speed when exploring steep terrain) and/or to help reign in the level design (as it'd be much easier to sequence break).

Unfortunately for them, I don't think they noticed how much more fun it makes the game, nor how many more layers it adds to the experience. There's so many more options for how to interact with the terrain, now that you can build speed from going down them or ramp into the air from jumping off them. Even though it doesn't fix the vapid emptiness of the maps, it improves the game feel a hundredfold.

Not to say it's perfect, though. This mod may make Sonic a bit too fast and unruly for his own good, and may make later areas of the game incompletable. But this also isn't the be-all-end-all mod. If someone can make a version that doesn't completely remove Sonic's running and air speed caps then it'd probably be the best version of itself, and the best way to play Frontiers in general.

If the reasons I guessed are why they didn't use it, they really should've built the environments around it rather than dummying them out. That is, if that was the reason. Maybe some rogue programmer at Sonic Team was frustrated with the higher-up calls and worked it into the game while no one was looking. Or maybe it's leftovers from past Sonic games that have somehow found themselves still in the files three or four games later. We're not executives, after all, so there's no way for us to know.

While we’re here, could modders please fix the quickstep and make drift usable everywhere?

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  • 3 months later...

Loops are not just an obstacle to overcome with momentum, but also can be a tool to gain momentum after you reach the highest point and start coming back down. Actually see this in GT, I think. That momentum could be used to reach higher/farther areas with speed jumps off angles in the terrain. And this is something that adds value to them in 2D but could also add value in 3D if it was actually attempted.

But yeah, even if that was the case, I also don't see much point in 3D. Mostly because I almost don't see value in them in 2D. They are just spectacle. And they don't present a challenge in themselves, for all you do is hold right. Instead, the challenge and engagement is in the portions of the level leading up to such momentum based obstacles, as you try to play in a way that allows you to maintain your built up momentum so as to make it through the momentum based obstacles without having to stop and fire up a spindash or something.

If you fail to do that, you fall back down and the feeling of the flow of momentum is killed, which I imagine just doesn't feel very good for those constantly subjected to it. Me personally, I'm more with the "try to reward good game play" crowd than the "seek to severely punish bad game play" crowd, and in this aspect the momentum based obstacles such as loops lay on the latter side of the spectrum.

I don't mind them in a game like TrackMania though. Even though they function the same way. I think because of how quickly you can restart the "level" and get back into trying to maintain the flow of momentum necessary to get better times. Despite being a racing game, TrackMania actually shows a lot of stuff that 3D Sonic can learn from, in my opinion.

But in any case, the only reason I care at all about loops at all in 2D is that, when running through them in a level that is not Casino Night Zone and after you reach the top of the loop, you can time a downward jump and cut out running through some of the loop, resulting in more speed. A miniature timing challenge with the reward being more momentum.

Pretty good honestly, but this is not an element that can work as well in 3D for obvious reasons.

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  • 3 months later...

This here is a very interesting thread, with many valid points. I thought I should necro it, because there isn't a discussion quite like it anywhere else.

What we call momentum -- or rather, the whole game syntax the classics used -- can be expressed as follows:

  • The player's ability to traverse a stage depends on how well they can use the environment's gimmicks and geometry, using a limited set of abilities and commands, to skip or overcome the obstacles presented by the very same gimmicks and geometries.

Which is very well exemplified by how a set of three badniks can either be a massive danger (if Sonic is standing still) or not only a breeze but also a propulsion to the next section (if Sonic can hit them in sequence, having reached these badniks curled up into a ball and with enough speed). What this means -- alongside the life system in which you'll have life points floating around you at all times -- is that the way you cruise through a Sonic stage is generally very context-dependent: it's hard to determine what the sections are, because the levels, and which challenges you'll see, aren't as neatly divided as most platformers. Entire sections can be skipped, beaten in a number of different ways depending on how the player came to it or what they even want from it. The speed you have at any given time, and how threatened you feel at any given time, basically determines how you're going to play any given part of a stage. I believe this is where our notion of "multiple paths" come from, more than the actual existence of multiple paths. The way you'll play is very heavily influenced by how you've been playing, a feature that is more or less captured by the bastardized, often-discussed concept of momentum, and that's not really normal for a platformer to do.

However, due to how Sonic levels work, they don't lend themselves very well to teach players how to play it, because they generally don't propose challenges the way most platformers do. You generally create your way out of the situations you're given, but it's hard for it to feel like the game taught you how to do it. It turns out, that's a syntax games outgrew.

I think this is an arcade, maybe a SEGA thing. Playing Phantasy Star IV, for example, feels like playing a game in the gaming equivalent of Galician for a native Portuguese speaker like me. You get it, but not quite. It's weird how the very systems you use to work your way through the game are there to be figured out and hide possibilities of 1-hit kill combos and rather deep challenges and ways to go through combat that are never clearly expressed. I think the whole "momentum"-based gameplay of classic Sonic is like that, too. It's a syntax lost to time, more or less.

As has been pointed out, Frontiers could have its language based around movement, and said movement being based around the interaction between the geometry and the player's limited abilities as Sonic. But it was a very conscious choice over the years not to do that, because the game design sensibilities and good practices have diverted away from how Sonic was made, I think. The focus "momentum" puts on the environment, not on the buttons you're pressing and the things you're doing isn't very welcome because it can feel unfair (for example) to be punished for things you didn't really choose to do -- whenever someone claims Sonic was never good, they tend to criticize how random the punishments feel, how you're constantly being punished at all, how the game is bad at foreshadowing threats to you.

Consider the Boost games and how you're constantly doing things in them. You're either boosting or harvesting the stage's relevant elements -- rings, enemies, tricks -- in order to keep boosting. In classic Sonic, you'll often just be launched to the air and there won't be much you need r even can do about it. Boost games give you control, and ask you to manage your resources. That, in turn, makes it so that challenges are much more clearly expressed -- it starts here and ends there, and this is what you have to do. It's a lot more palatable to how game design is perceived, because the player has more power over Sonic and the way you choose what to do feels more conscious, even if it's more trial and error. The whole syntax accommodates that better. "Momentum" takes away that kind of perception, o in the end it was 100% the right choice not to design games around the same philosophy as before.

Now why classic Sonic is mostly no longer viable as a game syntax, that's a different matter, and a much bigger one. Not one for today.

 

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On 6/11/2023 at 3:16 PM, Palas said:

This here is a very interesting thread, with many valid points. I thought I should necro it, because there isn't a discussion quite like it anywhere else.

What we call momentum -- or rather, the whole game syntax the classics used -- can be expressed as follows:

  • The player's ability to traverse a stage depends on how well they can use the environment's gimmicks and geometry, using a limited set of abilities and commands, to skip or overcome the obstacles presented by the very same gimmicks and geometries.

Which is very well exemplified by how a set of three badniks can either be a massive danger (if Sonic is standing still) or not only a breeze but also a propulsion to the next section (if Sonic can hit them in sequence, having reached these badniks curled up into a ball and with enough speed). What this means -- alongside the life system in which you'll have life points floating around you at all times -- is that the way you cruise through a Sonic stage is generally very context-dependent: it's hard to determine what the sections are, because the levels, and which challenges you'll see, aren't as neatly divided as most platformers. Entire sections can be skipped, beaten in a number of different ways depending on how the player came to it or what they even want from it. The speed you have at any given time, and how threatened you feel at any given time, basically determines how you're going to play any given part of a stage. I believe this is where our notion of "multiple paths" come from, more than the actual existence of multiple paths. The way you'll play is very heavily influenced by how you've been playing, a feature that is more or less captured by the bastardized, often-discussed concept of momentum, and that's not really normal for a platformer to do.

However, due to how Sonic levels work, they don't lend themselves very well to teach players how to play it, because they generally don't propose challenges the way most platformers do. You generally create your way out of the situations you're given, but it's hard for it to feel like the game taught you how to do it. It turns out, that's a syntax games outgrew.

I think this is an arcade, maybe a SEGA thing. Playing Phantasy Star IV, for example, feels like playing a game in the gaming equivalent of Galician for a native Portuguese speaker like me. You get it, but not quite. It's weird how the very systems you use to work your way through the game are there to be figured out and hide possibilities of 1-hit kill combos and rather deep challenges and ways to go through combat that are never clearly expressed. I think the whole "momentum"-based gameplay of classic Sonic is like that, too. It's a syntax lost to time, more or less.

As has been pointed out, Frontiers could have its language based around movement, and said movement being based around the interaction between the geometry and the player's limited abilities as Sonic. But it was a very conscious choice over the years not to do that, because the game design sensibilities and good practices have diverted away from how Sonic was made, I think. The focus "momentum" puts on the environment, not on the buttons you're pressing and the things you're doing isn't very welcome because it can feel unfair (for example) to be punished for things you didn't really choose to do -- whenever someone claims Sonic was never good, they tend to criticize how random the punishments feel, how you're constantly being punished at all, how the game is bad at foreshadowing threats to you.

Consider the Boost games and how you're constantly doing things in them. You're either boosting or harvesting the stage's relevant elements -- rings, enemies, tricks -- in order to keep boosting. In classic Sonic, you'll often just be launched to the air and there won't be much you need r even can do about it. Boost games give you control, and ask you to manage your resources. That, in turn, makes it so that challenges are much more clearly expressed -- it starts here and ends there, and this is what you have to do. It's a lot more palatable to how game design is perceived, because the player has more power over Sonic and the way you choose what to do feels more conscious, even if it's more trial and error. The whole syntax accommodates that better. "Momentum" takes away that kind of perception, o in the end it was 100% the right choice not to design games around the same philosophy as before.

Now why classic Sonic is mostly no longer viable as a game syntax, that's a different matter, and a much bigger one. Not one for today.

Thanks for reviving my thread, and you, too, make many great points.

However, if we assume that Sonic Team's big point with removing momentum physics was to make a game where it was much clearer what players had to do in order to play the game well, then something, or rather several things, clearly went wrong if Sonic Frontiers was the game that resulted from that decision.  I get that it can be frustrating to not be able to jump as far as you need to jump to reach an optional goody because the game never told you exactly where you needed to jump from or how much momentum you needed to build up or where you need to go and run down from to build up that momentum and probably several more variables I forgot, but if what we get instead is a game that asks you cross several huge chasms to reach absolutely mandatory objectives and the only way to do so is to utilize a few grind rails, homing chains, and forced 2D sections, and these diverge into outright mazes so you're not sure which exit you must take to reach your destination, well, what happened?  Bad draw distance is one of the things that happened, of course, but I can't shake the feeling that not all of the issues here are technical; some of this is down to their game design philosophy and I don't think clarity or accessibility were always their goals.

There's a disconcerting sense of gatekeeping to a lot of Frontiers' design, a sense that instead of wanting to make the game easier for beginners, they stuck in stuff that makes it harder, but in ways that don't feel very appropriate to Sonic.  The money-shot for all of that is undoubtedly that bit where Sonic needs to jump from one side of a drawbridge to another, so pretty much any new player is going to run up to the edge of the bridge and jump off it, assuming they'll be able to clear the gap because of how fast Sonic is...only to hit an invisible wall.  In moments like that, players don't need to have any major understanding of momentum or any other deep physics topic; all they need is to understand the most utterly obvious implications of playing as a fast character who can also jump; in fact that is so utterly obvious that it is exactly what Sonic ends up doing, but only in a cutscene, after you've done enough other sorts of gameplay farming enough items, and in that cutscene Sonic builds up such a powerful jump that he goes way too high because they also want to force you to play a slow-paced free-falling mini-game.

Sorry to beat another dead horse in a thread that's already about momentum, but I think the real problem here is that Sonic's speed-oriented gameplay, originally a product of the era when people were going to keep replaying games due to lack of save features and punishing game-overs, and developers expected gamers to be fine with that, has become a huge liability in the new era of one-and-done playthroughs.  When most people were going to keep replaying the games anyway, then how fast Sonic can go made those replays feel rewarding, but now that many gamers will only replay each game/stage once, how fast Sonic can go just makes that one time last a lot shorter than it would in many other game series.  So for well over two decades, a big part of SEGA's priority with Sonic games has been figuring out how to compensate for this by padding each game out with other stuff than just speed, and absurdities like that bridge segment are just the recent examples, further back that manifested in things like Big the Cat's Adventure story, mechs, the Werehog, etc.  When such things put in for padding got backlash, they were often taken out, as with Big, but they were always subsequently replaced by other sorts of padding.  @Kuzu said elsewhere--in the main Frontiers thread, I think--that Sonic Mania should have been SEGA's wakeup call to stop searching for that magical sort of padding that nobody hates; instead just give up on padding and accept that Sonic games being short is the lesser evil when it comes to being well-received.  But while he's probably right about them being better-received, I doubt they'd leave much of an impression if they did that.

Getting back on topic, though, I think @azoohit on something important; putting aside how long and hard is is or is not to get through the game's official objectives and how much momentum adds to or detracts from that, a feature SEGA seems to have ignored entirely is just how much more fun it is to simply move Sonic around Frontiers' environments when he has working momentum, which in this case just means lack of artificial stoppers to his speed whenever he jumps.  In most open-world games, how much fun you can have just goofing off and playing with the stuff they give you is part of the selling point, and at least theoretically, the thrill of being fast is part of Sonic's selling point, but somehow SEGA managed to miss what should have been a match made in heaven because they insisted on forcing players to play other sorts of gameplay...even if it was so easy for modders to put it back in. 

On that note, it's interesting to me how the designers of Sonic Frontiers and the designers of some fangames like Sonic GT and Sonic Encore are like blind men feeling an elephant in trying to figure out how to make a 3D Sonic game fun; both found part of it but they were different parts and neither found the whole.  Fangame developers got the physics down (or more accurately, chose to keep the physics working) but couldn't figure out how to make levels that reward such highly mobile characters, as players often become disoriented and get frustrated as fast characters move too far in the wrong direction while it is often unclear what the right direction is.  Frontiers happened on a great idea for level design by making it have multiple "goals" due to its objective-based nature and, let's face it, giving you a damned map, but its developers chose not to include physics that made it more fun.  Playing the Frontiers mod that puts momentum back in makes it feel like finally one can see the whole elephant for what it is; that's it, that combination of factors is how you make 3D Sonic the most fun.  It's not as fun as it could possibly get, and I can already think of plenty things I would change/improve, but in my opinion at least, it is the most fun 3D Sonic has ever been so far.

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21 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Thanks for reviving my thread, and you, too, make many great points.

However, if we assume that Sonic Team's big point with removing momentum physics was to make a game where it was much clearer what players had to do in order to play the game well, then something, or rather several things, clearly went wrong if Sonic Frontiers was the game that resulted from that decision.  I get that it can be frustrating to not be able to jump as far as you need to jump to reach an optional goody because the game never told you exactly where you needed to jump from or how much momentum you needed to build up or where you need to go and run down from to build up that momentum and probably several more variables I forgot, but if what we get instead is a game that asks you cross several huge chasms to reach absolutely mandatory objectives and the only way to do so is to utilize a few grind rails, homing chains, and forced 2D sections, and these diverge into outright mazes so you're not sure which exit you must take to reach your destination, well, what happened?  Bad draw distance is one of the things that happened, of course, but I can't shake the feeling that not all of the issues here are technical; some of this is down to their game design philosophy and I don't think clarity or accessibility were always their goals.

There's a disconcerting sense of gatekeeping to a lot of Frontiers' design, a sense that instead of wanting to make the game easier for beginners, they stuck in stuff that makes it harder, but in ways that don't feel very appropriate to Sonic.  The money-shot for all of that is undoubtedly that bit where Sonic needs to jump from one side of a drawbridge to another, so pretty much any new player is going to run up to the edge of the bridge and jump off it, assuming they'll be able to clear the gap because of how fast Sonic is...only to hit an invisible wall.  In moments like that, players don't need to have any major understanding of momentum or any other deep physics topic; all they need is to understand the most utterly obvious implications of playing as a fast character who can also jump; in fact that is so utterly obvious that it is exactly what Sonic ends up doing, but only in a cutscene, after you've done enough other sorts of gameplay farming enough items, and in that cutscene Sonic builds up such a powerful jump that he goes way too high because they also want to force you to play a slow-paced free-falling mini-game.

Sorry to beat another dead horse in a thread that's already about momentum, but I think the real problem here is that Sonic's speed-oriented gameplay, originally a product of the era when people were going to keep replaying games due to lack of save features and punishing game-overs, and developers expected gamers to be fine with that, has become a huge liability in the new era of one-and-done playthroughs.  When most people were going to keep replaying the games anyway, then how fast Sonic can go made those replays feel rewarding, but now that many gamers will only replay each game/stage once, how fast Sonic can go just makes that one time last a lot shorter than it would in many other game series.  So for well over two decades, a big part of SEGA's priority with Sonic games has been figuring out how to compensate for this by padding each game out with other stuff than just speed, and absurdities like that bridge segment are just the recent examples, further back that manifested in things like Big the Cat's Adventure story, mechs, the Werehog, etc.  When such things put in for padding got backlash, they were often taken out, as with Big, but they were always subsequently replaced by other sorts of padding.  @Kuzu said elsewhere--in the main Frontiers thread, I think--that Sonic Mania should have been SEGA's wakeup call to stop searching for that magical sort of padding that nobody hates; instead just give up on padding and accept that Sonic games being short is the lesser evil when it comes to being well-received.  But while he's probably right about them being better-received, I doubt they'd leave much of an impression if they did that.

Getting back on topic, though, I think @azoohit on something important; putting aside how long and hard is is or is not to get through the game's official objectives and how much momentum adds to or detracts from that, a feature SEGA seems to have ignored entirely is just how much more fun it is to simply move Sonic around Frontiers' environments when he has working momentum, which in this case just means lack of artificial stoppers to his speed whenever he jumps.  In most open-world games, how much fun you can have just goofing off and playing with the stuff they give you is part of the selling point, and at least theoretically, the thrill of being fast is part of Sonic's selling point, but somehow SEGA managed to miss what should have been a match made in heaven because they insisted on forcing players to play other sorts of gameplay...even if it was so easy for modders to put it back in. 

On that note, it's interesting to me how the designers of Sonic Frontiers and the designers of some fangames like Sonic GT and Sonic Encore are like blind men feeling an elephant in trying to figure out how to make a 3D Sonic game fun; both found part of it but they were different parts and neither found the whole.  Fangame developers got the physics down (or more accurately, chose to keep the physics working) but couldn't figure out how to make levels that reward such highly mobile characters, as players often become disoriented and get frustrated as fast characters move too far in the wrong direction while it is often unclear what the right direction is.  Frontiers happened on a great idea for level design by making it have multiple "goals" due to its objective-based nature and, let's face it, giving you a damned map, but its developers chose not to include physics that made it more fun.  Playing the Frontiers mod that puts momentum back in makes it feel like finally one can see the whole elephant for what it is; that's it, that combination of factors is how you make 3D Sonic the most fun.  It's not as fun as it could possibly get, and I can already think of plenty things I would change/improve, but in my opinion at least, it is the most fun 3D Sonic has ever been so far.

While I didn't mean Sonic Frontiers was the one game that was made because of this shift in game design paradigms, I understand Frontiers doesn't do that that well either. Probably because open world games tend not to do that as well as A-to-B games. But again, I'm not sure if this is something developers themselves realize, much less formulate. It's possible, in Frontiers' case, there was a binary choice at some point, which two builds being made to compare how the gameplay would feel like, and either a producer or an exec shut it down on the grounds that it would worsen the game's FTUE. I'm conjecturing, of course, but I do believe this mentality started to seep in so many years ago (give the player control, communicate your challenges clearly, make a game loop based on teaching and testing, etc.) it's now standard, and it's even hard to think Sonic in any other way. So how much fun momentum could be would even sort of be out of the question.

That said, I think you're right on the money about save systems turning Sonic's gameplay into a liability. I believe what it killed wasn't Sonic's motion play exactly, but rather its life system. Again, I see the original Sonic games as something like Arcade games with infinite credits, and I'm inclined to believe SEGA thought of them as such too, not the least because of how:

  • Supplement material was welcome for their games, as well as the relationship their games had with paratext and even help lines during the Mega Drive era;
  • They are still an arcade powerhouse;

The thing with arcade games is how failure is built in the game loop, and I think ring were a very clever way to navigate around that. It smoothened Sonic's fail states so that you'd build up skill while also being able to explore levels, try to go some other way about the thing that just made you lose rings, go further than you'd been before etc. while still maintaining lives and game overs intact, so that if you made several bad plays in a row, you'd still die and start over. And, more importantly, this navigation (not necessarily exploration, but also that) is necessarily done with momentum. So, like you said in the OP, it's a very clever way they found to turn newbies into experts at the game. Save systems make that much harder to pull off, and rings sort of became unimportant as time passed. So they had to find other uses like in-game currency. It's not a coincidence that they used to be somewhat scarce, whereas Casino Forest in Forces has more rings in its final section than probably Sonic 1 has in the entirety of Spring Yard. I do think the "death" of Sonic's life system and the skill-building loop that has failure at its center, in turn, helped killing "momentum" as a viable logic around which to build a game though.

Which is why I agree with your point about official vs fangames. Physics make motion play fun, but Sonic is not just motion play. It's as if the community spends like years debating abut one single aspect of Classic Sonic gameplay each time and figures it out, then has to move on to the next, I guess. "Pinball physics", "multiple paths", we've been through everything -- but it doesn't really mean any of that would remedy the fact that Sonic's core gameplay no longer makes sense as an industry standard, yet SEGA had to use Sonic as floaties at some point, making multiplatform games every year to keep it going. So they had to figure other things out. I do agree that Frontiers mod is the most fun 3D Sonic has ever been, but I think level design based on it to make the most out of it would be a whole new level of challenge that might not pay off. The problem of orientation has never been completely figured out for Sonic, although really, a map helps a ton.

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I do believe that while very core players probably would be able to adapt if real kinetic preservation was kept, building a game acknowledging/masting mastering that aspect would make it much less approachable. People in general are bad at the concept (and in games in general).

A simple and concrete example is jumping on several fast moving and spinning platforms. If they adhered to real physics, most people would likely miss their jumps and attribute that to lack of control.

Gaming is very much a business, and Sega has decided to sell the game to a more general and young audience. These people are generally not looking for a challenge; Just a good time. I've noticed that the flashy moves they're able to do with ease playing Sonic is one of the major draw.

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56 minutes ago, FlameStream said:

I do believe that while very core players probably would be able to adapt if real kinetic preservation was kept, building a game acknowledging/masting mastering that aspect would make it much less approachable. People in general are bad at the concept (and in games in general).

A simple and concrete example is jumping on several fast moving and spinning platforms. If they adhered to real physics, most people would likely miss their jumps and attribute that to lack of control.

Gaming is very much a business, and Sega has decided to sell the game to a more general and young audience. These people are generally not looking for a challenge; Just a good time. I've noticed that the flashy moves they're able to do with ease playing Sonic is one of the major draw.

That’s true but it seems like a game actually could have momentum/pinball physics in it without being overly demanding to players about using them.  It’s not really hard to do them; the code is available for all who look, as we’ve established such physics exist in the code of Frontiers and were merely commented out, and this seems to have been done not to make the game easier but to restrict progress to grinding for upgrades and jumping onto their prepackaged rails, honing chains, dash pads, springs, etc.

Perhaps we shouldn’t expect this series to shoot for high difficulty anymore and I don’t particularly even want it to, but if Frontiers is any indication of how they think, the key problem with the deeper sorts of physics mechanics in older games isn’t so much that the games were harder up front, as that if players were skilled enough, there were many chances to cheese the environments, skipping huge parts of the levels for fast runtimes.  That didn’t matter in older games as much because they always assumed players would keep replaying the games anyway, but it matters more now in an era when that is less common.  So a big part of the design rationale of Frontiers seems to be to ensure that no matter how good you are, you can’t get through it very quickly.

As easy as that is to resent, though, the irony is that Frontiers also gave us a glimpse of a sort of Sonic design that could encourage learning of a landscape and Sonic’s physics without a recourse to excessive penalties.  Because of the zones’ structure, you are going to be revisiting the same locations a bunch of times anyway, and inevitably you’ll get better at moving through them faster.

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This interview by Iizuka shows just how deliberate the option not to recreate Classic Sonic physics is. Or at least has been for the past few years.

image.png.da216a986b3c9a3342eaece6eefe8093.png

They've known for a while, I guess, that momentum is not what they wanted to go for and I'd like to believe the reason is what Scritch mentioned:

1 hour ago, Scritch the Cat said:

That’s true but it seems like a game actually could have momentum/pinball physics in it without being overly demanding to players about using them.  It’s not really hard to do them; the code is available for all who look, as we’ve established such physics exist in the code of Frontiers and were merely commented out, and this seems to have been done not to make the game easier but to restrict progress to grinding for upgrades and jumping onto their prepackaged rails, honing chains, dash pads, springs, etc.

Exactly. It's not a question of how hard the stunts are to execute, exactly, but rather how streamlined the game can be. And also, there's an aesthetic as well as syntactic reason (that's more or less connected to this). Back when Sonic Adventure 2 was released, here's what Iizuka said about it:

sa2.thumb.png.083eb7f36bf2d034434ab5d47504d534.png

My interpretation is that they didn't want Sonic to do few actions with multiple possible interactions each, which is what Classic Sonic motion play provides with its momentum-based gameplay, but to give him many possible actions with few possible interactions each, which entails a bigger moveset and a more established order of necessary actions, hence the "tempo".

And that might be arbitrary -- they wanted Sonic to look cooler and fr every player to see Sonic looking col like that regardless of their skill level, maybe. I wouldn't know. But it's also a philosophy that restricts progress to whatever elements and set pieces the levels offer. So, control.

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23 hours ago, Palas said:


sa2.thumb.png.083eb7f36bf2d034434ab5d47504d534.png

My interpretation is that they didn't want Sonic to do few actions with multiple possible interactions each, which is what Classic Sonic motion play provides with its momentum-based gameplay, but to give him many possible actions with few possible interactions each, which entails a bigger moveset and a more established order of necessary actions, hence the "tempo".

And that might be arbitrary -- they wanted Sonic to look cooler and fr every player to see Sonic looking col like that regardless of their skill level, maybe. I wouldn't know. But it's also a philosophy that restricts progress to whatever elements and set pieces the levels offer. So, control.

Let's be fair, here; there really are flaws to this series' original gameplay philosophy of using Sonic's physics to speedrun levels.  Rewarding people who can play the games well by letting them play less of them feels rather backwards compared to most games of this sort, and that's kind of inevitable in Sonic levels because multiple paths are part of their philosophy, so sometimes designers have been tempted to make levels where getting good was less about being able to nimbly dodge obstacles and make tricky jumps than it was about knowing when and where to jump onto the high path where there were less obstacles and tricky jumps.  Also in some games like Sonic 2 and Sonic Heroes it feels like they play into that theme further by making the lower paths intentionally rather obnoxious to do.  While this sort of game design is certainly...clever in that it's very effective in making people good at playing the games, it also leans on the assumption that what people are good at doing and what they enjoy doing are the same things.  They aren't always, and even with those players for whom they are, they come back around to that problem where being good at doing what they also enjoy doing grants them the counterintuitive "reward" of doing less of what they enjoy doing.

However, I think this problem was reasonably well addressed in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, as those games added a lot of stuff to find in their levels and switched special stage entries to be about finding things rather than ring retention, so now players would see more of the game and have more challenges to unlock if they learned the physics and the levels, and the Adventure games essentially followed suit with that already, so I'm not sure why they felt a need to throw in moments where Sonic wasn't going fast.  Possibly part of the reason is those games also moved gathering the Chaos Emeralds to unlock Super Sonic from something that was more-or-less optional to do and rather superfluous to the plot but playable throughout the game, to something baked into the story and main challenges and only but also inevitably available at the end.  This meant they needed to come up with other stuff to search for in levels and other optional stuff to entice completionists to find it, mostly in the form of the Chao Garden, which has many fans but is by no means guaranteed to appeal to all of the sort of people who like Sonic's core gameplay.

I feel we've taken some steps in the right direction since, but the series still needs to be a bit better at making unlockables that more people would actually want to unlock.  My personal preference would be more playable characters, ala the Sonic mobile games, but this does need to avoid the minefield of problems that have come with having more playable characters in the past.

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26 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Let's be fair, here; there really are flaws to this series' original gameplay philosophy of using Sonic's physics to speedrun levels.  Rewarding people who can play the games well by letting them play less of them feels rather backwards compared to most games of this sort, and that's kind of inevitable in Sonic levels because multiple paths are part of their philosophy, so sometimes designers have been tempted to make levels where getting good was less about being able to nimbly dodge obstacles and make tricky jumps than it was about knowing when and where to jump onto the high path where there were less obstacles and tricky jumps.  Also in some games like Sonic 2 and Sonic Heroes it feels like they play into that theme further by making the lower paths intentionally rather obnoxious to do.  While this sort of game design is certainly...clever in that it's very effective in making people good at playing the games, it also leans on the assumption that what people are good at doing and what they enjoy doing are the same things.  They aren't always, and even those players for whom they are, they come back around to that problem where being good at doing what they also enjoy doing grants them the counterintuitive "reward" of doing less of what they enjoy doing.

However, I think this problem was reasonably well addressed in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, as those games added a lot of stuff to find in their levels and switched special stage entries to be about finding things rather than ring retention, so now players would see more of the game and have more challenges to unlock if they learned the physics and the levels, and the Adventure games essentially followed suit with that already, so I'm not sure why they felt a need to throw in moments where Sonic wasn't going fast.  Possibly part of the reason is those games also moved gathering the Chaos Emeralds to unlock Super Sonic from something that was more-or-less optional to do and rather superfluous to the plot but playable throughout the game, to something baked into the story and main challenges and only but also inevitably available at the end.  This meant they needed to come up with other stuff to search for in levels and other optional stuff to entice completionists to find it, mostly in the form of the Chao Garden, which has many fans but is by no means guaranteed to appeal to those people who like Sonic's core gameplay.

I feel we've taken some steps in the right direction since, but the series still needs to be a bit better at making unlockables that more people would actually want to unlock.  My personal preference would be more playable characters, ala the Sonic mobile games, but this does need to avoid the minefield of problems that have come with having more playable characters in the past.

Yeah, it really is a unique quirk of Sonic's syntax how the game gets objectively easier the better you are at it. It's as if RPG enemies had less HP the more leveled you were, on top of the improved stats. I don't really think of that as a flaw, especially when the games explore that -- which is why Sonic CD is my favorite Sonic game --, but it is one hell of a nuisance if you're trying to build any semblance of an "average experience".

Player mileage varies wildly in Sonic, especially with ring retention methods of performance evaluation, like you said. Ring retention can happen in any number of ways across a single stage, and a player can do it by learning how to completely avoid danger in the upper paths or learning how to brute force their way through lower, more dangerous paths, or anything in-between; and the game doesn't really acknowledge any of that. Treasures, unlockables and secrets scattered over a stage are much simpler in that regard, which also helps because of how huge and segmented S3&K level are. "Evaluating" how much a player was able to survive by counting rings at the end of a stage can be particularly unfair if a stage is as big and segmented as the ones in S3&K were, so yeah, the direction they went alleviated this whole issue of how Classic Sonic has a natural, "built-in" learning curve that's also completely wacky depending on where you're coming from.

Personally, I'm all for extra characters too, but I guess branching progressions could be cool too. Since Sonic's original "negative" approach t replay value and factors i no longer feasible, I guess anything goes, really -- as long as it isn't extra challenges or stuff like that. I hate it when games reward me with harder versions of the challenges I just did.

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5 hours ago, Palas said:

Personally, I'm all for extra characters too, but I guess branching progressions could be cool too.

It really is a shame that the first game they tried that in was Shadow the Hedgehog, which ensured it was also the last. 

Mind you, its use there was not merely tarred by association with all of the cringeworthy stuff in that game; the branching narrative was quite badly implemented in that game.  Tying it to the game's faction system did not work well, in part because the games faction system did not work well, the sequence of cutscenes you would get often made no coherent sense depending on the path you took through the stage, and they were forced to make so many stages they half-assed a lot of the objectives and didn't have time to fine-tune them.

However, I think maybe in a game where there is less story to worry about, no clutter of a faction system, and more attention paid to making every objective you complete in every level feel like Sonic gameplay, branching pathways could work well.  I'm thinking maybe do something like they did in the remake of Sonic 2, putting Hidden Palace Zone down a pit in Mystic Cave Zone, except instead of it just being a short little distraction you go right back to the original game after, you'd go through a whole sequence of different levels.

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12 hours ago, Scritch the Cat said:

It really is a shame that the first game they tried that in was Shadow the Hedgehog, which ensured it was also the last. 

Mind you, its use there was not merely tarred by association with all of the cringeworthy stuff in that game; the branching narrative was quite badly implemented in that game.  Tying it to the game's faction system did not work well, in part because the games faction system did not work well, the sequence of cutscenes you would get often made no coherent sense depending on the path you took through the stage, and they were forced to make so many stages they half-assed a lot of the objectives and didn't have time to fine-tune them.

However, I think maybe in a game where there is less story to worry about, no clutter of a faction system, and more attention paid to making every objective you complete in every level feel like Sonic gameplay, branching pathways could work well.  I'm thinking maybe do something like they did in the remake of Sonic 2, putting Hidden Palace Zone down a pit in Mystic Cave Zone, except instead of it just being a short little distraction you go right back to the original game after, you'd go through a whole sequence of different levels.

Oh, absolutely -- that's the kind of non-linear progression I had in mind when I mentioned it. If they can be reached by using character-specific abilities, then, all the better. I think the possibilities are all there, and Superstars seems to understand that "momentum" is simply not enough. The elephant, to quote the expression you used before, is too big to be introduced in the room just like that.

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