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What could have Sonic '06 been like if it were finished?

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Dr. Felix, Mar 19, 2012.

Your take on '06 if it were finished?

  1. Could've been a great game.

    31 vote(s)
    22.0%
  2. Decent.

    39 vote(s)
    27.7%
  3. Still would turn out bad.

    64 vote(s)
    45.4%
  4. Unsure.

    7 vote(s)
    5.0%
  1. LockOnRommy11

    LockOnRommy11

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    I... really agree with that.

    On that particular note, I would also imagine that a game such as Sonic Generations would not have come to fruition, as it depended heavily on the change that the Unleashed style brought (which in turn seemed to be greatly inspired by the path Sonic & The Secret Rings took, with that game being the alternative after SEGA realised porting 2006 to the Wii would have been a pointless endeavour) contrasted to the classic 2D style formula. If 2006 had not flopped, where would we be now?? I would imagine that we may have seen some elements of Unleashed's style, but would the change have been that drastic? How much did 2006 really affect SEGA? It seems that the game on the surface did give them a kick up the arse, but it sold quite well, nearly garnering a million copies from what I can gather. That's a lot of games, even for something so shit and widely panned. It may actually be quite difficult to tell how much they were really affected, and how much of Unleashed they had planned (if any at all) in 2006 at the time of the games release.
     
  2. Beltway

    Beltway

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    It still would had been bad (but not as bad, you have to at least admit that) from what I've gathered from here. Story, level design, and most of the game's additional game's content would still bring the game down. At best it would had been mediocre.

    Honestly, I think whatever potential of being a good Sonic game 06 had was taken away by Naka when he bailed out and founded Prope during development with the majority of the original Sonic Team. Unless several controversial things like the interspecies romance and other unnecessary plot details were already set in stone by the original Sonic Team; then even at that point of development nothing from the game would salvagable. Like other people have been saying; it would have to be a completely different game in order to even be at worst decent.
     
  3. minichapman

    minichapman

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    I'm really getting annoyed with these 'What if' topics.

    The sad and simple truth is, The game was finished. Think of it like this. A child who's finished writing an essay. Everybody says it is terrible but he still finished it.

    Sure this game has lots of bugs, stupid loading times and a very retarded plot with dumb voice acting (or writing).
    BUT remove the bugs and what do you have? A crap game with stupid loading times and a very retarded plot with dumb voice acting/writing.

    The game was released, It sucks. It was rushed and quite possibly scarred a franchise. There is/was nothing any of us can/could do to change that. And even if it was any good. We'd have still found things to complain about it. It's like if Sonic Xtreme or even Sonic Extreme (The boarding game) were released, I'd bet that the majority of fans like us would dislike them.
     
  4. Shade Vortex

    Shade Vortex

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    Actually, the ONLY reason the loading times are so long IS because the game was rushed. When loading, all the assets are reloaded from scratch, as during development they had no need to care about loading efficiency until the end. However, since they were forced to complete the game on time for the holiday season, instead of giving it the much-needed time to fine-tune things, the development (inefficient) method of loading assets was left unchanged.

    At the very least, if 06 were properly finished, there wouldn't be as long loading times. That's a fact.
     
  5. Vaiyt

    Vaiyt

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    It would still be a mediocre game, with the same goddamn flaws of every game Sonic Team shat out since 1999, and the same atrocious story.
     
  6. TheInvisibleSun

    TheInvisibleSun

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    ^ The same conclusion most of us pretty much come up with every single time this same thread is made...
     
  7. Director's cut plz. The voice acting wasn't the worst. Sa and Sa2 were. Then again Sonic fans are a group of people who complain about the colour, and tint of colour something is. As well as how someone pronounced a single word in an entire game. I'm personally hoping to see a 3D game like Sonic 06 again. It had so many ideas, much of which are being used in current Sonic titles.
     
  8. Candescence

    Candescence

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    Sonic 06, even if it weren't rushed to release, would've still been shit, mostly due to terrible design decisions and atrocious story. To make Sonic 06 not shit, one would have to completely overhaul it.

    And, yes, quite frankly, it's pointless to speculate on 'what could have been', but who gives a shit.

    Personally, what I'd do, if I were in charge of redoing that game...

    - Design the general gameplay around a more physics-based gameplay similar to Sonic GDK.
    - Make other characters optional, and be able to choose who you want to play as at the beginning of a stage, rather than force character changes mid-stage.
    - Improve the hub areas, make it much easier to know where you need to go next and what to do. What I liked about a couple of the areas were the sheer expanse, but that made them tedious to traverse, so make your character able to speed up, and make the hub areas less barren and more visually interesting.
    - If it can be helped, remove Blaze from the whole equation, or failing that, don't associate her with Silver in any way.
    - Give Knuckles an actual reason to be around. Have Eggman steal the Master Emerald again or something. Otherwise, don't include him.
    - Have the art style in the vein of Unleashed - semi-realistic environments with unrealistic characters. Though, in this case, it might be better to use a more 'anime' art style rather than Unleashed's 'Pixar' style for the Soleanna residents. It would at least remove the uncanny valley while allowing for realistic proportions on human characters, and Elise would look much better.
    - Speaking of Elise, make her a 'Mobian', or give her a human love interest, rather than Sonic.
    - Expanding on the latter above, my idea for a human co-protagonist would be a young man in the royal guard who has been charged with protecting Elise during the festival, whose father died trying to protect her and the Duke ten years prior. After he and Sonic fail to stop Eggman from kidnapping the Princess, Sonic, being the genre-savvy mammal he is, encourages the young man to go after Eggman to rescue the Princess. Of course, knowing Sonic's reputation, the young man assumes he's going to be playing second-fiddle the entire game, but he's the one who keeps going after Elise out of duty and to atone for what he perceives as his father's failure. He doesn't have any special powers on his own, instead using his own skill and special weapons and equipment to traverse environments and fight enemies. Better than pre-season 3 Chris, at least.
    - Possibly keep Elise's multiple kidnappings, but play it for laughs as a running gag (similar to Zola's repeated kidnappings in Girl Genius). If the aforementioned young man is part of the story, this may be accompanied by increasingly exasperated reactions on his part, and takes his anger out on Silver (who will inevitably get in his way), and Eggman.
    - Honestly, the whole idea of Solaris being evil in the first place kinda made no sense without any real explanation, despite the implications that the Duke and his scientists messing with it, well, pissed it off. Instead, it would be more interesting if Mephiles had no prior relationship with Solaris, and instead the Duke made a deal with him to help him harness Solaris' power, but instead, Mephiles manipulated everything to his advantage so he could become Solaris, and, well, become an all-powerful god of time, though his plan is initially foiled by Shadow and Silver, travelling back in time.
    - Give Omega more varied speech patterns. Christ. The poor sod sounded like a generic monotone robot in that game. And give him more weapon variety, too, playing as Omega sucked hard.
    - Give some plausible explanation for why Mephiles can't simply merge with Iblis in the future rather than the present, eg, Mephiles can only perform the fusion process when Iblis is being released in a 'stable' way and while Iblis' physical form is pure energy - and that Elise being killed rather than her crying is an unstable release, causing Iblis to immediately assume his physical form and start destroying everything, which Mephiles can't work with, which results in him recruiting Silver to kill the one person whose death would cause Elise to cry.
    - Get rid of Shadow's vehicles, he really does not need them. It's ridiculous that Shadow can't run faster than a damn motorbike in that game.
    - De-nerf Shadow's powers. ESPECIALLY Chaos Blast, which is virtually useless in 06.

    There's plenty of other things that would be changed, but I'd rather not take all night, and, well, the point has been made anyway. A fan-made re-do of Sonic 06 with a decent plotline and good gameplay would be an interesting thing to see, if anyone actually bothers to do it.
     
  9. BlazeHedgehog

    BlazeHedgehog

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    Sonic 2006 seemed to be beset by development problems pretty early on (like, within weeks of being officially announced). A great deal of the game is broken beyond simply having awful controls or shitty collision detection - it's fundamentally broken on a design level. The entire game would need to be deconstructed and rebuilt from the ground up to the point where it would only vaguely resemble the Sonic 2006 we have today.

    Asking "What if it wasn't broken?" is basically asking, "What if Sonic 2006 was a completely different game?" - and there's been at least five completely different Sonic games since 2006 so that answers that question pretty handily. Sonic Generations in particular seems to take some of the ideas Sonic 2006 was aiming to include and does them up properly (the Y button equip system, unlockable music, a tribute to the Sonic franchise as a whole, etc.) so it's not too much of a stretch to say that Generations is what Sonic 2006 would be like if it were finished.

    Yeah, this guy is totally crazy and refuses to let the subject die. He keeps trying to find new ways to harass me and tell me how wrong I am even though I have made it clear I no longer want to engage him in conversation.

    Somebody left a comment on my Youtube channel recently claiming there was some press event in 2007 where a "Microsoft employee" (unspecified rank or name) admitted to rushing Sega, but the guy conveniently couldn't remember where he read it, only that it was "out there on the internet". As per what has become standard for me, he got really cagey when I tried to press him for more details.

    There seem to exist a lot of people out there who are willing to believe any bullshit as long as it deflects the blame as to why Sonic 2006 is a trainwreck, and are trying to perpetuate this information beyond all logic in what seems to be some misguided attempt to make people stop trashing on the game so much.
     
  10. JP Nameless

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    I agree with this. Let's say that a directors cut version was made and the all the glitches were ironed out and the gameplay was improved. Would it be a better game? Yes. However it would still have its awful story, large hub worlds, and the "mach speed" sections, which would basically mean that while it wouldn't make "worst games of all time" lists anymore, it would probably still be decent at best.
     
  11. I think you may have confused the meaning of the word 'decent' here. Half-decent might be a more appropriate term, for while I don't hold a grudge against Sonic 06, it'd take a complete ground-up rebuilding to be a 'decent' game.
     
  12. Aesculapius Piranha

    Aesculapius Piranha

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    By the way, asking "What if?" with a finished product isn't exactly foolish. Hell, the Sonic prototype community that spawned this place is arguably based on people doing exactly that. ;)
     
  13. BetaTwizzler

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    Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world that liked Sonic 06. Jeez, lol. Not only did it like it, but I STILL PLAY IT TO THIS DAY :P I always see people losing their shit about bugs and glitches and what not, but I never really encountered any of that stuff. Off the top of my head the only bugs I think ever encountered were missing the ramp at the end of Wave Ocean's speed section, flying off a loop in Flame Core, and a few other things I vaguely remember. As for glitches, the only glitches that I've ever actually came across were things I did with the Gems, which I can't and am not complaining about because I DID THEM.

    My main problems with this game were that the characters were slow, and the towns were empty. The loading screens were very annoying, but it's not like you had to wait 10 minutes to start a level or mission.

    Had this game been finished I think it would have been 10x better, and I'm sure most of the bugs the guys and gals here at Retro rage about would have been fixed. There was nothing wrong with the story. Yeah, it was different and created some plot-holes, but traveling around and collecting magical emeralds to stop a crazed, fat, inventor from building a theme park/taking over the world is soooo normal.

    The stories of Unleased and Generations make as much sense as Sonic 06's story. In Sonic 06 you have to defeat Solaris, a sun god, who eventually turns into some giant time/space controlling thing. In Unleashed you fight Dark Gia, the essence of darkness and evil, who is wreaking havoc on the planet after it was released from the center of it. In Generations you fight the Time Eater, an all powerful time controlling being, somehow being controlled by Eggman. My point is, no one plays Sonic for the story, because it's almost always the same story with a few twists. If Sonic 06 was built on the Hedgehog Engine, and played like Generations, we'd all be creaming over it. Despite the models, story, and whatever else people are upset about.

    Back to the topic, if 06 had been finished I think Sonic(and friends) would be faster, there'd be less bugs/glitches, Kuckles would finish a stage without a glitch, you could play as Super Sonic.
     
  14. Lilly

    Lilly

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    I dunno, I think I'd buy it if the physics bugs and load times were fixed, but that doesn't mean it would be my most loved game in the stack either. (The creepy SonicxElise stuff near the end is a huge deal breaker for me, mostly, besides the plot holes.) Heck, when I can buy a used PS3, I'll probably get it digitally off the PSN as-is anyway, and avoid the embarrassment of purchasing it at a store. =P

    I only want it out of curiosity, however, just to see how bad it really was; at least that way I could agree with some of you guys from having actually played it. Well that, and I really want to play as Blaze in a full 3D game. Seriously, why didn't they make downloadable character skins for Generations that you could play as in Time Attack mode? I'd buy a good five of them in a heart beat!

    I second this. Exactly why this very topic isn't entirely pointless! ^^
     
  15. Sonic Warrior TJ

    Sonic Warrior TJ

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    To me it feels like they made the game in reverse. Like the team listed off some level tropes, made some landscapes with loops and stick-to-everything collision, decided, "oh hey we should make Sonic and pals able to walk around and jump in this environment before we move on to, what's next, sound effects? Sure, whatever" and tried to recreate Adventure...ish gameplay by watching old, low quality videos. "Oh in those games Sonic could Homing Attack so we'd better do something like it here, but man, it's really fast, let's slow it down and give it a huge fucking delay in between strikes because YEEEAAAHHHH GAME DESIGN." I mean, it's pretty clear nobody within SEGA with a valid opinion played the game during it's development, because seriously, the way SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, the titular character, controls should've been the first thing anybody playing the game noticed. Then they spent forever on a lighting system they didn't use and Naka started makin' games for penguins.

    What do I want out of a Director's Cut? Pfft, like it'll happen this late in the game, but let's see...
    -Let's just get rid of the Town Stages right from the get go. Sonic Adventure 2 flowed well enough without Adventure Fields, and it was keeping up with three to six characters at once. The ones here are huge, empty, boring, and you can't pull up a real map to find anything, so you're pretty much lost if you haven't played it before.
    -Drop the missions. Make up some bullshit extra missions for the main Acts instead (finish with X amount of rings/time/etc.).
    -Goodbye shop system. Give Sonic and pals their abilities from the get-go, or toss 'em into the Acts somewhere. Maybe unlock Gems via Emblems or whatever, but they should work as originally intended.
    -Super characters in stages (even if they're just invincible and faster, it's something).
    -Different characters in different stages (I don't see why not, they all seem based on Sonic and can walk on any surface).
    -Rewrite parts of the Sonic object's movement (top speed, falling speed, H.A. cool down, jump ATTACK, etc.), and adjust other characters where necessary (at least speed up everyone else and fix the Knuckles/Rouge wall-jump glitch).
    -NOW LOADING
    -Cell shading filter so SonicXHuman doesn't look as awkward. And/or...
    -Just cut the 'kiss' out of the Last Story with some clever editing, so Elise says her spiel about learning so much from Sonic so he has to come back like totally for sure, and then BAM Super Sonic. You know, that kiss that everybody overreacted to. I mean...seriously? Humans and animals have been courting one another in cartoons for decades now, and this is the one instance where everyone screams "BESTIALITY" and grabs their pitchforks? Come on. Sonic plays aloof the whole time too (he has "no special reason" for saving her, and says her smile is the only thanks he needs; sort of makes sense for a character with a strong sense of justice and a known dislike for tears), saving her because it's the right thing to do and simply shrugging off what most nerds would call "advances", and Elise seems to be learning life lessons or whatever from his heroic example, rather than displaying some huge, affectionate romance. She cried when Sonic was killed, but wouldn't you if the hero that's just saved your ass several times is effortlessly shot down by an unusual purple shadow monster? She kissed him at the end to revive him, like reverse Sleeping Beauty, and everyone goes on with their shitty adventure. It's not some dirty R-rated make-out scene, like the Internet made it out to be when it came to light. Yes, the story blows, but I never thought they were trying to force a forbidden romance down my throat. I'm not saying I'm a hedgehog-fucker or anything, but come on. It's a cartoon, no matter how photo-realistic they tried to make some of the game's textures look. You might as well say Tex Avery cartoons were full of bestiality, as was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Seth MacFarlane's Sunday night cartoon triad.

    But you know what?

    "I heard this or that about how development got cut short and that's why this game blows" is all it comes down to, every time. Nobody's going to fix it. Not SEGA, not your parents, and not other fans. It began development as a piece of shit, left development as an even worse piece of shit, and trying to rebuild it from the ground up in a fan engine is a gross pipe dream I want to see buried in a landfill with whatever copies of the game are somehow still on store shelves. It took almost four goddamn years to release a two-level demo of Sonic 2HD, a game that's supposed to recreate an existing game to a T, but with sharper graphics, so does anybody really think Sonic '06 will be revived as some glorious fan project destined to go down in the annals of Sonic Retro history? Please. The game was cursed from the beginning of it's development, which was what, EIGHT years ago? It'll fall apart before anyone decides which existing model of Sonic to use and they eventually go with a custom model everyone nips and tucks until it's just not Sonic anymore. Like I'm guessing SEGA did for the noodle-hog we got in the 'final' product.